City Council and Authorities Concurrent - Regular Meeting

Hello, welcome everyone. I know we don't have a lot of time, so we're going to get started. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

There is a confirmation of a quorum for the Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Advisory Committee, as well as the City Council. Okay, so welcome.

This is a... We've had in a long time with We're going to start by going around the room. All right, Lisa Gilmore, mayor.

City council member and I. Hi, Vern Shure, BPAC. about 15 months ago, I guess. And I'm also a representative on the Station Area Task Force.

Yeah, my name's Ken Kratz. I've been on the BPAC a few times over the last 15 years or so. And I was here at the formation of the BPAC too. Let's see, I'm also on the, I also participate in the Vision Zero program. I was the representative of the BPAC for Vision Zero. And I'm also on the wayfinding subcommittee of the BPAC.

Betsy Magus. I'm currently the chair of the City of Santa Clara Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. I'm a 20 plus year resident of the City of Santa Clara, having grown up going to Santa Clara schools. So I've ridden some of these streets many decades ago, and also currently the chair of the VTA, Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, and the liaison for the two, which is also the County Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. So County Roads comes to us also.

Good evening. My name is George Harrow. First year on the committee, on any committee, and it's been fascinating working with the BPAC committee. Thank you.

Hi, good evening. Glenn Guggins, professional city attorney and amateur bike rider.

Hi, Javon Grogan, city manager, amateur cyclist, having done a century about 10 years ago and wanting to get back on it.

Good evening, Araceli Azevedo, Assistant City Manager.

Good evening, everybody. Craig Mobeck, Director of Public Works.

And then Mike Liu, Assistant Director of Public Works.

Good evening, I'm Ralph Garcia with the Traffic Engineering Division and Staff Liaison to the BPAC.

Carol Sherriot, Transportation Manager and also Staff Liaison to the BPAC.

Raja health customer this to and bicyclist with the scouts Scott master.

So. I want to.

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Actually, the chair is going to present the comments. All right.

I have more than two minutes to talk about bicycling. This must be why we've been putting it off. Let's see if this thing works. It looks like what we just did. all right um so we have had a we have only five meetings per year but they've been action-packed the big one which some of you will remember if you were there at 3 a.m that day was that we We put together, we participated a great deal as a committee in the Vision Zero Plan, which the Council passed at about 3 in the morning one day in March. We have a lot more work to do to implement that plan. We've formed two BPAC subcommittees, which are Wayfinding and Data Collection. Ken here would like to talk more about Wayfinding when we give him the chance. and data collection. The city's Safe Routes to School program is a city run program that actually goes into the schools to teach bicycle safety. We've done a complete street reviews of the proposed bicycle improvements as a part of the city's annual pavement rehabilitation project. completed the Lafayette Street Class 4 bikeway project. I have ridden that bikeway. It's looking pretty good these days. The fresh pavement helped. We've supported a whole bunch of grant applications. This was one of the, every four years, there's a, I'm gonna get this wrong, the OBAG is the, is a four-year cycle for regional grant funding for active transportation projects, and most of those go through a complete streets checklist process that is the BPAC's opportunity to chime in and make sure that they are both getting what we want and packed to travel and in good shape for being competitive when the application gets to the scoring committees. We've helped put together Bike to Wear Everyday events. Maybe Ken Kratz's job here to talk about that a little bit more. And we've also participated in the station area specific plan process, which is we are Someday going to get BART, they tell us. It'll be important to have good pedestrian and bike access to that station when that comes. I think that brings us to the work plan. Am I presenting this too? All right. So Complete Streets Reviews. We do these for various different grants and grant cycles. The staff here is pretty quiet about it these days, but we've been involved with something around $30 million worth of grant applications. And the grants are stuff that you folks don't have to come up with out of the general fund, except for sometimes some matching funds or some supporting work. There's a plan in the works, Santa Clara, Caltrain, and BART station multimodal crossing feasibility. So you used to be able to cross from Benton Street on the south side of the tracks, kind of southeast side of the tracks, southwest rather, through to Brokaw Street. And that crossing got closed for safety. eventual crossing reconnection. Right now it's open for bicycles and pedestrians. There's an under crossing as of 2016. The proposal is to see if we can get it a little more connected again. North Santa Clara Transit Station Access and Circulation Study. We haven't done this yet, so I don't know a lot about it. I know that there was at one point a discussion of a city north plan, and that didn't go far, so I'm eager to see this come. I work in the north end of Santa Clara and I see all of these new developments going in and we have little pockets of bike and walkability surrounded by big streets full of fast moving traffic and I think it's going to be important to get that sorted out a little bit better. The Creek Trail Master Plan has been in the works for many years now. We had a series of meetings about it, I guess, last summer. The Creek Trail that we have currently goes from Homestead all the way north to the Bay Trail. There are several more trails in the plan, including the Hetch Hetchy right of way, the Calabasas Creek corridor, and the Saratoga Creek corridor. And that would make a nice little network for getting around the city without having to spend as much time on big, busy streets. Various BPAC work plan topics. Every year we put together a list of wish list items and we vote on it and we pick out sort of a top 10 maybe to tackle one or two per meeting as we go. Transportation grant support, similar sort of thing. We participate in both the plans that go into the grant applications and, again, the Complete Streets checklists for some of the local grants, and also for... We come up with community support letters and things like that. And then we do have subcommittees on wayfinding and data evaluation of bicycle and pedestrian projects. Data is a tough one. It's often a The part that is hard for me is calling it data when people are dying on our streets in traffic. It becomes data, but individually, it's still a tragedy. And I believe that's the entire slideshow. Is that the end of the slideshow? All right. So I think this can be maybe more of an informal discussion, and I'll leave these on the screen for questions.

Questions on how you go along, or do you want to make sure you have enough time to get all the information out?

So Member Kratz here is just about jumping out of his seat, ready to talk about wayfinding and data. So go ahead.

Yeah, this is Ken Kratz. I think that's a good idea to fill in a little more detail. This is a good overview, but I can give you some more specifics because I'm kind of active at the subcommittee level. But I'll mention Bike to Work Day, which has been an ongoing event in the city. and it's supported by a lot of local businesses. It's an event that's Bay Area wide and I've been participating. I go, you have to get up pretty early to get there, but I get up at like five in the morning and I take a whole bike repair station to assist the cyclists that are going that may need minor repairs. So that's in addition to the Energizer Station that the staff provides. And we do that at Agnew on the trail. And I also, at that event, I have a bicycle jeopardy game that includes questions about history of cycling, infrastructure, advocates, manufacturing and technology, and famous cyclists. And that's always very popular. A lot of people stop and want to play the game. And talk about the data evaluation subcommittee. I'm on that with... who happens to not be in today. But we have met a couple of times and we have developed a list of, composed a list of directions that we wanna take. And we've requested staff provide more information on how the crash data is compiled. Is it countywide, city, are the two lists mixed? And we wanna have that clarified so that we can proceed to make recommendations. Okay, now I'll talk about the other subcommittee I'm on is the wayfinding subcommittee. And I wanna go over the wayfinding progress. This is a lot more detailed. We've got a lot farther along on that. And I want to thank Jonathan Marinero. He's not here today, but he's moved on to the Planning Commission. Anyway, he and George Harrell is present, and I have met several times to develop a wayfinding system for the city. And we've kept the BPAC informed of our progress to develop this wayfinding system to help cyclists navigate the city. The subcommittee has accomplished the following. We propose destinations throughout the city and we did it in this order. So we got looked at the whole city and we've got pages, maybe 12, 15 pages of destinations. Then we proposed routes throughout the city near proposed destinations that utilize existing bike lanes and trails, as well as connect to routes in nearby cities. The third item, we've proposed route numbers that conform with county requirements. They have the system. So Sunnyvale has gotten the big jump on us. They already have the numbering system. So we have to follow suit.

Online, Ken?

Yes. Yeah, this, it was a lot of, well, it's really hard to find this stuff. It's like finding a needle in the haystack. But I want to thank Jonathan in particular for doing the research to find some of these standards. So... Okay, where were we? Oh, okay. So we got the route numbers to conform with the county requirements. And then we had to select sign types from state standards. And the sign selected includes the city seal, the route number, the end destination, and destinations along the route with mileage and arrows. There's a lot of different signs you can select. There's not just one. So we had to pin that down. Then, well, that's a good point. I thought about that just recently. In fact, I'll make a note.

That's probably a good idea that we could add that to the sign so you could use your cell phone.

Right, right. And the last thing, after the locations along the route, we selected sign types from the state standards. And then number five, we selected locations for signs along one of the routes. There's many routes, we don't have a photo of it, but there's several east to west, and of course, the major north-south is the trail, the Santa Masaquina Creek Trail. So all the east-west do cross the trail, if I remember, yeah, they do, so. Anyway, okay, so we got the, we selected locations for the signs along one of the routes, one of the east to west, And then we, number six, we started prioritizing destinations along that one route. Prioritization is needed due to the space limitations on the sign. So we only usually put four on the sign. Cupertino has about that number and it's a little hard to see if you're moving. So anyway, there's much work left to do. Subcommittee will complete the selection of locations for signs along the other routes, along with selection of destinations for those signs. So we've gotten quite a bit farther along on this, or further along, I should say. Let's see, what else have I got? Yeah, I just make a couple of comments In my neighborhood, I've lived in the city for 50 years. Yeah, 50 years. And I have noticed an increase in my neighborhood of cycling and pedestrians, but not in the rest of the city. And I live next to a bike. An increase in cycling and pedestrian activity in my neighborhood. But I live next to the trail and there's three schools. So I don't see that around the rest of the city. So we have a long way to go to increase pedestrian cycling activity in the city, which is the goal of the BPAC. I believe increasing these activities will also help the city reach its goals in its climate plan and Vision Zero. There has been interest by the public, and I do attend other functions by myself, cycling functions, going to CRC, you know, bike to work day, all that. And I like a sounding board. I listen to them. There has been an interest by the public in improving, in providing protected bike lanes. And you know what those are, have a barrier of some sort, either painted or poles or use the parked cars. So you'd have your sidewalk, curb and gutter, bike lane, car, and then the center line of the street.

Yeah, correct. So one of the projects mentioned was Lafayette, so we have protected bike lanes there. There's a couple of the corridors where we're working on.

Our primarily improvements to date has been to reduce lane widths in order to provide bike lanes, which is a good step. And I want to tell you, I've been a cyclist since college, and there's a handful of books that I just want to mention to you that informed my recommendations to the BPAC. And the most important that I've mentioned at many BPACs that everyone should read, and if you've studied planning at all, you would come across this book in college, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. It's an old book, but it shows you the relationship between zoning and the street. and it advocates for eyes on the street which means more public involvement with the street but the primary physical aspects in the book which are important is and this is important to our city as we develop is short blocks So instead of having long blocks, you want short blocks that allows more retail frontage at the lower floors and easier to walk to destinations. So that's the big takeaway from this book that was written back in the 60s that I studied in college. And then the next one, an update on all those things, this book, Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay, comes after this. This was written about 15, 20 years ago. And it goes into more detail on current planning practices and how to develop streets in relationship to zoning as well. And it has all kinds of environmental issues in it and the cost of owning a motor vehicle compared to using public transit. So this is an updated version of this. The next book brings us up to date. This was written only a few years ago. And this lady is in charge of New York City as a commissioner for bicycling and pedestrian activity. They actually have a commissioner. And she reports to the mayor and the council. But anyway, she has increased cycling in that city tremendously and they've reduced lane numbers on many streets. This is a very good read, explains how to do it. It's a how-to book. and how you have to interact with all the political people and the cycling groups. It's an excellent read. And then one of the last ones, yeah, Regional City. This tells you how to plan. This is Regional City by Peter Calthorpe. And this book tells you how to create a, in a suburban situation like we have here, how to tie all the infrastructure for transportation. It has motor vehicles, but it tells you how to do a light rail, how to connect different suburbs. This is very applicable to us. And real quick, bicycling science, basically the whole book tells you, this is written by engineers and scientists, you're more energy efficient riding a bicycle than walking. You burn less calories riding your bicycle to get places. And I got this from a fellow colleague here on the BPAC, fighting traffic. This tells you the whole history of transportation and the development of the road system in the United States from the 1800s to date. And it's a sad history. So anyway, those are the books I recommend. I read them all and that's what I use when I come to every meeting.

Thank you. Well, I'll take a photo of those so I can get the titles later. Yeah. I do want to call out the wayfinding. Navigating on a bicycle is not like navigating in a car. Probably, if you haven't biked, you haven't gotten to Sunnyvale by going on Agate Drive because there's a pedestrian bridge and you can't drive that way. But it's a really good way to bike because you can't drive that way. Navigating on the trails is different from navigating in a car and the big busy streets are exactly where you don't want to be on a bicycle most of the time. We have a lot of work to do to make those big busy streets able to be biked on because a lot of times the destinations are on those streets. But in terms of just getting around, side streets are often a good option. So one of the most cost effective ways that we can help more people get around on bikes is to make it clear how to do that and where to go. Sunnyvale has some good bicycle way of funding. Cupertino has some good bicycle way of funding. You know, the stuff that those of us who bike already know tends to be a well-kept secret.

What do these signs look like?

Not necessarily shorter. They're often a little bit smaller. But bikes can go, you know, even pedal bikes can go 15, 20 miles an hour if you've got a little bit of a wind behind you. So they aren't... They aren't a whole lot different than car signs. You can see some of them around the stadium detour today. There's green and white signs that just indicate where to turn if you're detouring around the stadium on an event day. And so I expect that they'll look something like that. Sunnyvale actually has numbered bike routes. And I haven't ever quite decoded the number, but they do kind of tell you, you know, if you're following 393, you know, you keep following the signs that say that number and you get out the other side somewhere.

I can fill you in on the numbering system real quick.

Later. Okay. I guess I will open it up to questions if there are anything that anybody...

Yeah, I wouldn't mind if we could go back to the previous slide. I wouldn't mind spending a little bit more time on 2526. So this is a list of accomplishments that the BPAC put together. We had a meeting where we solicited ideas from each member and asked them, you know, what are you most proud of for 2526? This is a compilation of everything kind of distilled into bullet format. You know, I think what's important to note in addition to this, there's, you know, five BPAC meetings every year. There's all the events, each BPAC meeting goes fairly long, right? We typically start at four, can go to nine, 10, in terms of just the topics, you know, we can. Not always longer, but we get into it, right? There's a lot of discussion amongst the membership in terms of particular topics of interest, questions for staff, response, all that. So pretty in depth, you know, as mentioned by Betsy, We do a process every year where we set up the work plan. So there's their standard items that come every meeting, which is, you know, staff has an update. In general, we have a verbal update. The PD, police department attends as well, which is great because they talk about, you know, any bicycle or pedestrian related collisions. So that's always very eye opening. And then, but we do have the process where the membership can, the BPEC members can, you know, suggest a topic. So they, we have the once a year process. They suggest a topic. They eventually vote on it, and then we pick, you know, the top, roughly the top 10 to squeeze into the, and so we go through those items, and we have to program it throughout the year. Most recently, we've been asking the BPAC. They've been kind enough to help us, support us on some of the questions that they have. So, like, someone's interested in wayfinding, we may ask them in advance, hey, give us a little bit more information on what you know about wayfinding. We'll share ours, put it in the report together, so that way it's a conversation versus just one-sided. But we do have some pretty long meetings at times, but we've accomplished a lot in my mind. You have the things on the list here, but for each of these projects, especially all the bike studies, several bike studies we've done over the last five years, it's a tremendous amount of work in terms of the BPAC sitting there choosing alternatives, weighing in, asking questions, attending meetings, and things like that. So I didn't want this to be Represent everything because it doesn't it represents kind of the highlights, but there's a tremendous amount of work that the committee and staff put into trying to make those meetings productive.

From a hardy.

decade, but I miss you all and it's not as fun to read the minutes. I was just taking some notes. I was noticing there's a state law in the works. It's based on, because there's a lot of questions about e-bikes and scooters and things like that, especially on trails. And what it looks like is the state is looking at horsepower. as far as where they're going to make those determinations, whether you need a license, whether it needs to be registered. So that's still in the works, but I wanted to make you all aware of that, that I did see that. I was going to ask staff, where are we at with Caltrans as far as the bike lane on El Camino, because we know many years ago we had them re-stripe that. that there was also the concern of our businesses that did not have enough parking. And then as we don't get the minutes sometimes as timely as possible, but I was hoping to know the next dates for the bike to shop and the bike to work wherever now instead of bike to shop and the bike to work if we

That's in May, so I'm not sure if it's even been announced yet. But it's typically, Bike to Wherever is typically the first or second Thursday in May.

So both of those will be in the spring. Because I've had some fun with that. And even when I couldn't make it, I made certain you all got cookies at the end and worked off the calories, I hope, by keeping me from biking. So I'm excited to see it. We have something on our agenda. Which was accepted by the council quite a while ago, and it's now working towards the funding. And to have both Benton and Monroe appropriate for students. Did you want to answer?

Do you have a question? Yeah, thank you for the question. So with regards to El Camino Real, Sunnyvale, San Jose, that's separated into three segments. So the first segment is from Sunnyvale to, I believe, Pomeroy is where that's the first city project. We're about to start design. And ultimately, the bike facility is going to look probably different than Lafayette. If one has traveled to the recent Caltrans bike Aving project in Mountain View and Palo Alto. It's a pretty significant protection. It almost looks like you're getting off a freeway. And that's due to their concerns related to vehicle speeds and whatnot. So we're anticipating needing to do that. Caltrans actually has a project for the second segment, which is Pomeroy to Lincoln. They're advancing that. So that's going to trail ours. And then the last segment from Lincoln Street.

away to San Jose that part remains unfunded at this point so we're working our way from Sunnyvale towards San Jose it was very important to BPAC that we connect both with our neighbors that we didn't have furs of bike lanes that went away are left to I will tell you at the Safe Railroad event, I guess you would say, I talked with the bicycle people who were from San Jose. And we had a long discussion about having bike trails right up next to the curb and then have the parking . regularly or swapping that and it was interesting because he made the point I had been more worried about our streets are not flat and especially when you will have it's banked and how dangerous that could be down for that part of the road that wasn't there he made the point also that even though we call it protected, it works well when there's no over 101. But when you have that bicyclist and the parking and the traffic, it is safer, but not for the cyclist because traffic. I've always personally felt much better about being, having that option in the lane. If there's no parking, that there's space and there's also locked off. Had a lot of discussion. Locked, especially next to the bicyclist. So it was interesting that I was given even more ammunition for liking Are keen.

Thank you for your achievements for your and looking forward to. Have a comments regarding vision zero working group. know most of the european cities have done tremendous job on vision zero if you want to promote bicycle and indian ways that is the number one thing in a city like oslo with almost a probably million population was a zero death for last couple That's what we want, basically. We can encourage safety and we can make our intersections or trails much safer. I think we can raise more bicyclists on the roads, basically. Develop a culture of avoiding cars, not using cars. And from that perspective, My question is, I know you participated in Vision Zero working group. So one question to staff is, where are we on the Vision Zero plans, basically? When are we going to implement our recommendations so that our BPAC people are much more safer to be riding bikes in the city? What is your collaboration? And I also noted data collection. One of the topic was data collection by. That can very well fit into vision zero plans, if we have a good data collection that can improve our vision zero plan, if we can improve this thing this can all help the city to be on the roadmap of. Using bikes. i'll follow up with you have a.

yeah i can try to address that so uh so last year the council approved their vision zero plan as but as uh chair magus mentioned we were it was a late night um march yeah it was we're very happy to have that that uh you know all that that worked it's not an all bike night didn't we have like a right yeah it was a heavy transportation night for santa clara um but now very proud of the work that staff did and of course the You know Ken and I remember Kratz and you know the working group, you know they met constantly to put together the plan, which is you know highly based on data and you know we established the network. So we're very happy that that was approved. Since then you know we've been applying for grants. So there's quite a few large grants right now at play that we're very interested in. So staff's been spending a ton of time either working on our own or with some consultants that support us to basically leverage as much grant opportunity as we can. I don't think we've heard back yet, and that's really where the bulk of the money is. We do have the priority list of all the corridors. If we have projects along those corridors just outside of the grants, we will implement as much as we can. So we're not just waiting for grants, but a good amount of the funding is at least from what we're having at this point is grant fund is grant dependent so that is where we um are resting at this point um you know the i think the goal in the long term is to keep the working group moving on as well so it's not as if the working group ends we haven't really started it back up yet we're trying to bring some staff on board to support that effort uh provision zero but you know it remains a priority for us and really the grant grant opportunities is what we're trying to focus on at this point

Thank you, my follow up in on one more aspect like I know VT was trying to net multiple cities, the new will send. San Jose all the way into San Jose, where are we on those plans to have a bike lanes connecting multiple cities east to west basically.

So there's a couple corridors that are focusing on a really Santa Clara is involved in. The first is Stevens Creek. So I think, you know, Council Member Cox is on their Stevens Creek Steering Committee. We recently were able to get a, with obviously with San Jose, as well as the BTA in the county, Measure B funding for basically a grant, another grant to study. Hubertino was involved and then at the end, they basically said, you know, they were, they're gonna pause their time with the effort. That being said, we're still moving forward in their absence. So we did just recently get a grant to basically study bike and ped and some safety improvements along Stevens Creek. That effort's gonna start fairly soon, I think, BTA is actually doing all the contracting for the actual consultant, and we'll participate in that. That's really another study, right, because the vision study we did was high-level. What are we looking at for the corridor? You know, it hasn't been talked about since Stevens Creek was built. So that effort was great because it finally got all the cities and the agencies to have one kind of solidified vision. Granted, Cupertino has changed, has kind of separated themselves from the vision, but, you know, we hope that. with the work we do that they're gonna rejoin at some point. The second corridor is El Camino. So if you, the council recalls the VTA as part of their cross county bicycle efforts, they call it the bike super highway. They focus on several corridors. Eventually they landed with what's called the central bikeway project that is gonna come down El Camino Real in our city. And that would connect us to San Jose to basically Santa Clara. That has a pretty ambitious plans for El Camino beyond just your regular bike lane. They're looking at something more substantial in terms of actual construction. My understanding is they did get some state funding to start on the environmental portion of that. We're trying to coordinate that with our bike project, but the VTA's project for the central bikeway along El Camino is Years and it's going to be years in the making right that's several million dollars versus our bike project which we're trying to get off the ground now is really kind of more in the near term so. wanted to add those things and then the last piece real quick is tasman so there was a tasman complete treat study done years ago that you know connects several jurisdictions sunnyvale. Santa Clara San Jose. And, you know, through some settlement monies from the city of San Jose, we got, you know, a good chunk of change for us to do some complete treats work on there. So that's programming in our CIP to start design and we'll finalize scoping and start design this fiscal year.

Could I add something since I'm on the Vision Zero rep? Just to step back a little bit. The Vision Zero includes motorists, and that is the heavy problem. That's where the most crashes are. As a BPAC member, our data collection, we're gonna be looking at pedestrian and cyclists. So we're not, I mean, we're certainly concerned with the motorists too and how the interplay between all these different transportation systems. But our focus is gonna be on what we need to do for cyclists and pedestrians. It's just too big. And the second thing I wanna say, if you have a chance, just look through the Vision Zero, get a feel for what's in it. It's very comprehensive, as Mr. Liu was saying, high level, but it also has very specific things for our streets, meaning individual streets. It tells you what to do. So there isn't a lot of design work needed to do at this point. The point is, what are we going to prioritize and how are we going to fund it? So that's what I see. There really isn't, you know, we had professionals come in to make all these recommendations, you know, outside the city they came in, these consultants. So they looked at the whole city. There's a lot of crash data in it. And the data collection, that was a little bit before the Vision Zero program came in. But we have the crash data that was provided by the police department. And we're trying to investigate how comprehensive that is, because there's multiple jurisdictions of police coverage. You know, if it's county, we wanted to find out who, where's the comprehensive list, and then take a look and verify a lot of the stuff that's in Vision Zero and make recommendations, so, and prioritize what we want to do. So I just want to give you a little bigger picture. Vision Zero covers the biggest problem, which is the crash from a motor vehicle. Statistically, though, if you get in a crash and you're a pedestrian or a cyclist, you're worse off, obviously. But anyway, I just want to let you know it's very comprehensive.

Question for staff. We have this big Vision Zero. We've got all the money in the world. Could we complete a big portion, a large amount of money? What percentage, roughly, of projects could the grant?

I'd say maybe 25% with the grants we're receiving.

Roughly 25% of them, because the Couple things to note, right? With Vision Zero, it was citywide. So ultimately it's studied citywide and then it's settled on a high priority network.

I think that's the term.

that really takes that's not every street that's certain corridors right and then you take those and then you break that down into your top 10 so there's the top 10 is really what we're focused on in the short term because you know there's there's grant money out there but there's not million like hundreds of millions available so and then on top of that you need to be able to apply for at least we would we we need to be able to apply for ones we're competitive for so you have to have certain data you have to be in certain you know parts of the city things like that and so You know, we're very hopeful and optimistic that we're going to get the funding we need to move forward on Vision Zero.

Are the grants citywide grants or maybe for corridors or specific?

At this point, we're focused on the, they're very specific to corridors because you do have to provide specific data for that corridor. And as mentioned earlier, depending upon where you're at in the city some corridors may rank higher in terms of getting points and you know so ultimately it is very much corridor specific thank you any other council members manager 6 30 would be ideal but we can end at 6 40. okay thank you

I'll follow up with Councilmember Hardy's question and more towards you guys because you're active on the streets. I serve on the Legislative Action Committee for the Cities Association, and it's interesting to me that almost all cities are talking about the need for e-bike legislation right now. But Santa Clara didn't have a lot of data providing e-bike accidents or things going on here. I even communicated with our police to see what they would recommend, and they said largely we haven't seen the need to put this in. So I'm wondering for you guys who are out there all the time, if you're seeing something different and where does your responsibility in terms of the bike and ped committee overlap with motorized bicycles? I also wanted to talk about the Stevens Creek corridor. So I'm thankful that Director Liu brought that up. Yeah, we did get the $500,000 from the VTA grant. this largely is for the design and implementation of it but i'm wondering how your group because i didn't see it on the 26 27 work plan but i know you've been active on it before so what will the overlap be with looking at how stevens creek becomes a more um transit friendly corridor for bikes and then you know just i don't i don't know necessarily what your group does i know complete streets for me when i talk to my residents is always a really really touchy subject and so i'm wondering you know how you guys advocate for a future when the levels that we're hoping for in in bicycle ridership doesn't occur yet today but we're planning for generations out what do you actively do to help the community start understanding that we're looking at our children and our grandchildren's generation being writers and not necessarily what we're seeing on the streets today to justify the changes we're making now.

Can I speak to the e-bike thing? That was actually the number one reason I wanted to get involved in this is because I ride Santa Ma's Trail. all the time. I'm working hard to get my thousand miles in this year. I'm not sure I'm gonna make it because I started a new job. And I just see a lot of behavior of, I think the challenge is the people, it's the people, it's not the bike, right? It's the behavior around a lot of people in e-bikes aren't really cyclists you know and they're not wearing a helmet and they're going way too fast on the trail and it is something we're going to discuss in an upcoming meeting as a matter of fact that was something that i was very passionate about putting on the the agenda because i see stuff happen every day that um it just scares me i saw a young man not even of age, on the ground. He was on a scooter, no helmet, on San Tomas Trail. And I guess they called the police and they had the EMTs come out. I mean, it scares me because they're so much more massive, but they're also moving so much faster, right? The speed limit is 15 miles an hour on that trail. And yeah, you might get some cyclists going faster than that, but in the e-bikes, there are people doing up to 40. I'm not kidding you. So it's a big concern.

There are already standards for what is a legal e-bike, and there are a lot of bikes that far exceed those speeds and ratings being sold. There's work going on at the state level not only to clarify those laws, but also to stop Amazon and the like from selling them into the California market at all and to get things labeled better. The legal e-bikes, which unfortunately are not quite as popular, I think, as some of these electric basically electric motorcycles that should be being regulated as such. Those ones, I don't remember the class numbers, but the top rated one goes up to 28 miles per hour, which is a speed I've been up to on my pedal bike under my own power. So e-bikes are not the problem. The illegal e-motos that are getting handed to probably kids who are too young to handle them are the problem. So that's one thing I would say about that. You had two other questions and I've already...

I can fill that. The other question was Complete Streets and how do we advocate for the future? You want me to give it a little shot and you can add something?

Well, let me take a swipe at it. You can say what you were going to say. Complete Streets, the part of it is that we have become so used to having cars everywhere. and using cars for everything. And that is partly because we've been building for cars for the past 75 years. If you ask people why they don't bike, you get a variety of reasons, but the number one thing is they don't feel safe. And the The thing to do about that is to build bike lanes, build bike lanes that are actually safe. In some places, just reserving the space and putting down a painted line will start to do that. In some places, I've picked on our folks at County Roads about Central Expressway, which they're going to be repaving a little bit of. Does a six inch painted white line make you feel comfortable biking on Central Expressway? Right. So that's part of it. Part of it is providing the facilities in the first place. Part of it is keeping them clear. Everything ends up in the bike lane. Debris, dumping, parked cars that shouldn't be there, construction, everything ends up in the bike lane. So just keep clear of the bike lanes that we have. Part of it is helping people find the bike lanes, the high quality bike routes that are already there, even if they're not, you know, they don't all, not a lot of good choices to go east and west in our city just yet. And honestly, if you want to see more people on bikes, leave the gas prices this high for another few years and see what happens. Ken, did you want to?

Yeah, I'll jump in. Thank you. That's really good. Betsy, I agree with Betsy. The main thing is get out there and ride. They see more adults riding, that's good. But the big thing for the future is the safe routes to school. That's our avenue into that. Safe Routes to School, they actually teach, they do this on the playground. They set up a typical street intersections and the kids get to ride their bikes around it and learn where they're supposed to stop and all that. And that's a good start. Although, even though I'm surrounded with all these schools, I've got, I'm near Santa Clara High, I'm near Pomeroy Elementary and the Stratford. I don't see a lot of kids riding their bikes to school. I see a lot of kids walking, or young adults, I should say, from the high school, they're walking. And I see a few bikes, but the infrastructure is not there. So you need to get the infrastructure. I would concentrate on the schools. As you know, anybody in town, a resident here, I've been a resident for like 50 years, The biggest cycling population is our students. If you go to the schools and see the racks all full. We need to make sure that there's bike lanes to get there and we need to try to figure out how to make them protected if we can. So that's our future right there is teaching them at school that this is a welcome way to get to school. And I will mention the person that got this all started about kids riding and walking to school was a very famous advocate here in California, known nationwide for creating the first bicycle boulevard. But her first thing was getting kids to get on bikes and walk to school. And that was Ellen Fletcher in the city of Palo Alto. She is a world national famous and actually met her. She's actually been in this room advocating for some cycling improvements in Santa Clara. She's passed on. But anyway, if you Google her, You'll find out she was the beginning, and this is way back in the early 60s, if I remember correctly. And she was on the school board, and she got things done. So if you want to find a path, start with her. Let's see if I got anything else. Yeah.

The other thing was the Stevens Creek, and then I'm going to ask the council for a final comment. About five minutes.

Okay.

So the Stevens Creek plan was accepted by at least four of the five agencies. Cupertino has some politics to get through before they hopefully rejoin the effort. But Cupertino is actually ahead of us as far as bike safety. And Cupertino is already going ahead with, if you've seen the dividers, the sort of concrete dividers in the bike lane, they are going ahead with a project to extend those. And I believe the consensus from the vision plan was really to extend that quality of a bike lane into the rest of the corridor. I think that's a good first step. I will say about the Stevens Creek corridor, the traffic light at Wolf Miller and Stevens Creek has a protected phase for anybody who's walking or biking across that street. There's a no right turn on red arrow that lights up. So that's a good thing to look at for ideas. And there was some grant application that was put in for the Stevens Creek corridor. Does staff want to... I haven't heard from...

correct yeah it's a while about where that's mentioned before right so for stevens creek we had we did that we did the vision study all the jurisdictions that was coordinated through the bpac so now we just got as a council member cox mentioned we just got a vta grant to move forward with you know studying bike and and ped improvements and some safety improvements along the corridor One important note for our city, unlike the situation in Cupertino, I'm sorry, in Cupertino is that we have parking. We have parking all along Stevens Creek. We have an existing five foot bike lane. So this plan is going to look at the whole cross section and see what we can do. If there's parking removal, there's going to be parking studies. It's going to be a tough one. I don't want to mince words with that, but ultimately that was part of the vision is to look at it. coordinate with the businesses and try to come up with something. But, you know, we were, that's what this additional study is going to take and that will be coordinated through the BPAC. It wasn't on the work plan because we didn't have the grant funding when we set up the work plan, but it will definitely be part of coordination through the BPAC, probably likely through several meetings.

Thank you. I'm going to ask for final comments from the City Council and then final remarks.

yeah i think ken is absolutely right when it comes to getting kids on board with safe routes to school i mean i have my daughter and my goal is by the time she gets to high school i want her to be able to take a bike comfortably um teaching them that by teaching her the dangers right now i mean i walk i walk and i bike with my daughter on on routine paths. I want her to know some of these paths by heart. There are two of her friends. There are two people that we know. There are two safe spots that we know. And we just go through them every week. We just bicycle there. And usually, I want her ahead of me because I want to see her. I want to make sure that she's safe. And if she's behind me, she can't hear me when I tell her things. And what I notice is, like, she has to memorize the roots because she doesn't have to think about it because she has so many other things to think about, which is she can bike, but she is not an expert biker. And if something is in her way, she has to actively think about it. I know that in Korea, we don't have signs. We put them on the ground. We have painted routes and just follow the routes. And we have those for some of the bicycle lanes where the green and white, you see the green paths. And I think that having those would be very good, especially for Safe Routes, because the younger riders are not looking at signs and they can't even tell which signs are there. It would be better just follow the path. I take her to places where we can park once and go everywhere. I call it park once, go everywhere. San Jose is really good at this. There are protected lanes. People say, well, when the lanes are there, the parked cars, the doors open up. No, if you've been to San Jose, you'll know that there is enough space between the bicycle lane next to the sidewalk and the parked cars that there is no danger of a parked car opening up into a cyclist. I heard some of the concerns, but I have none of those concerns in San Jose. The only time I have a concern is when we get to a stoplight, when we get to a light, when we get to an intersection, because that's the only time we have trouble. But that's a great place to bike, where you can get acclimated to traffic. Another place is Cupertino. We go to the Cupertino Library quite a bit, and the entire area around the Cupertino Library is amazing to bike on. And these are the things that I want her just to be familiar with this, but there aren't a lot of places within Santa Clara that I can do this. I noted that the air quality district projects that were approved from various BPACs through the city, most of them, in fact, every single one of them was a bicycle project. I feel that we need more pedestrian projects as well. I mean, I've always said that pedestrian projects actually help bicyclists, but not all bicycle projects helped pedestrians. And I think that we need to start focusing on this. We have a lot of places where I would like overpasses. I don't even want bicycles and pedestrians sharing. For the same reason that we don't want bicyclists and cars sharing lanes, the same difference in mass, the same difference in speeds exists with pedestrians, especially when you've got a bicyclist encountering a stroller. It's a very bad situation. When I was first using my electric scooter back in 2019 all the way up to 2022, they were limited to under 15 miles per hour. I mean, you could not go over 15 miles per hour. There was a speed mode, but you never turned it on if you were trying to do things. We had a lot of rules for you cannot ride your scooter on the sidewalks. There were lots of rules that we don't seem to have a very good understanding of here. And people understand 15 miles per hour, 12 miles per hour seems really slow, but I passed up most cyclists at that speed. And for scooters going 20 miles per hour or more, that seems kind of crazy for me. But I'm really happy with the things that we have. I would ask that we have more pedestrian projects going from Lafayette to Santa Mas. We don't even have sidewalks there. And I think that this is where I think I talked to Ken a little bit about the wayfinding, but we don't even have sidewalks in those areas. So, you know, one person asked me a question. I said, well, just take this street. Oh, then take the street north of that. And the answer that came back less than a week later was, there are no sidewalks there either. So we really need to look at building out the plans that we already have. And I think that having safe routes, making them as safe as possible. I mean, ridiculously safe. Put signs, put painted routes, put everything. Make them ridiculously safe. And then we'll see what we can do, what we can implement in other parts of the city.

I want to say thank you to our bicycle. advisory committee and all the great work that you've done. Thank our staff for all the great work you've done together. It looks like you're a really busy committee. Thank you for your passion and dedication to making it safe for our bicyclists, especially our children, pedestrians in Santa Clara. So with that, I'm going to give you the last word. Any other final comments you'd like to make to us?

Simply that all of these plans are only as good as the implementation. The plan on the website does not keep anybody safer by itself. Let's keep up the efforts and keep finding money to actually implement both bike lanes and sidewalks. Sidewalks are harder in a lot of cases because they're changing the right of way, whereas bike lanes are kind of just rearranging what's already there. But we need it built. We need it more than just a plan on the website. And thank you, everybody, for coming tonight.

coming and joining us for dinner as well. We have to go to the other meeting. So we're going to turn this room over. Thank you all. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Santa Clara City Council Stadium Authority Concurrent Meeting. Could you please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and remain standing for our statement of values? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

as we gather we humbly seek blessings upon this meeting may we act with strength courage and will to perform our obligations and duties to our people with justice to all let us seek wisdom so that we may act in the best interest of our people our neighbors and our country all this we ask so we may serve our community with fairness and respect putting their needs before all thank you please be seated roll call assistant city clerk

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Council Member, Board Member Schahal. Council Member, Board Member Hardy. Present. Council Member, Board Member Jane. And I'd like to note for the record that he is absent this evening. Council Member, Board Member Park.

Here.

Council Member, Board Member Cox. Here. Vice Mayor, Vice Chair Gonzales. Present. Mayor and Chair Gilmour.

Chair, is there a motion to excuse Council Member Jane?

So moved.

Second. I tried. OK. Motion by Vice Mayor Gonzales, second by who? Who was it? Council Member Chihal to excuse Council Member Jane. Please register your vote. Can we register our votes today? No, no roll call? Correct. And that passes unanimously of those present. Thank you. Okay, City Clerk.

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

Thank you. Good evening everyone and welcome. For today's meeting the Council is back in person and is conducting its meeting in a hybrid manner. The public is welcome to attend in person and the City continues to use a Zoom feature to allow participation from your home or office. Members of the public can still join via the link and or call into the Zoom meeting phone number shown on the screen now. If you would like to speak on an agenda item or during public presentations, please raise your hand on the Zoom application or press star nine on your phone. Please only raise your hand while the item you're seeking to speak on is presented. Staff will enter your name or the last four digits of your phone number, and I will call on you to speak. As a friendly reminder, members of the public have two minutes to speak on an agenda item and three minutes on public presentations, and those are reserved for topics that are not on the agenda. Prior to each agenda item, staff will lower your hand to ensure that members of the public are seeking to speak on the appropriate agenda item. So we'll now move on to the council agenda. All right. Next we have continuances, exceptions and reconsiderations. And I have one request, City Manager and Council, to continue item, it's a public hearing item number 5, which is consideration of historic resource designation from The Tibercio Vasquez gravesite located in Santa Clara Mission Cemetery. This was also deferred from August 25th. The family was here, but the meeting went on too late. They had to leave. All of the family members who want to attend this for this item are not able to come. So they would like it to be heard sometime in October and if our staff could Coordinate with the family on that. So I would need a motion for that.

So we have councilmember Hardy I'll make a motion, too I don't know if we need a date certain but to continue item number five consideration of historic resource designation for two big coral Vasquez grave site So we have a motion a second to defer that I

Is there anybody in the audience that would like to speak on that continuance? All right, city clerk, when you're ready. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Any other continuances, exceptions, reconsiderations from the council or anyone in the public? All right, seeing none, we are going to move forward with our first Special Order of Business. For our first, oh wait, let's see, it said final. Kind of out of order. For our first Special Order of Business, we recognize September 2026 as National Preparedness Month. On the theme, Santa Clara Ready, aims to increase public awareness of the importance of emergency preparedness. National Preparedness Month was launched in 2004 as part of FEMA's Ready Campaign. September was chosen to commemorate the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and as a reminder that our community needs to be prepared for all types of emergencies. Having most recently coordinated two major events, well it felt like seven major events, it was six plus one, but we'll call them two. And with the National Weather Service forecasting the potential for a strong, and they're calling it super El Nino, winter weather season, the city recognizes the importance of maintaining a high level of preparedness for emergencies of all types. Our experience in responding to COVID-19 pandemic, extreme drought conditions, severe weather events, and other emergencies have reinforced the need for continued planning, coordination, and readiness. In honor of National Preparedness Month, the City Council us, we will present a proclamation to the City of Santa Clara City Manager's Office of Emergency Management. So I'd like now invite our City Manager, Javon Grogan, to make a few comments. Javon.

Sure. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. But I'm going to invite David Flam, our Emergency Services Manager, to the podium who will provide a presentation.

Thank you. Welcome.

Thank you very much. Specifically thank you, Mayor and Council, for emphasizing the importance of preparedness, especially with all the events you've listed that are coming our way and have recently come to pass. I also want to thank our city manager Javon and his executive team and the leadership team here in the city For the support they provided in all of the preparedness efforts in leading up to our recent events as well just in all the trainings exercises plan development participation and the logistics support of helping us make sure that our infrastructure is ready for these large events that we've had and Anticipate coming our way in the future I also want to acknowledge the support of my fellow department heads, those that are here and those that aren't, for lending their staff their time and their efforts and making sure that our mission is Participated in by their offices and by their absolute necessary staff and expertise and making sure that they're represented in the Emergency Operations Center and lending all the forces to bear of the city and making sure that we're ready to respond and coordinate emergencies on behalf of the of the city and I also want to acknowledge the extremely hard and never-ending work of Jennifer Guzman, who's on my team sitting here in the back, who I'm constantly thankful for and wouldn't be able to do my job if she wasn't there helping me every day. I also want to make just a quick comment on the fact that October is National Earthquake Preparedness Month and a great shakeout. And earthquake is one of our many major natural hazard concerns. And as mentioned, we've got a El Nino, Super El Nino headed our way. And we do have flood concerns here in the city and areas that are troublesome in flooding areas. So I would just ask that this be a reminder well in advance that our public just begin that preparation process now and the educational process about knowing where your flood zones are at, what your materials are, your preparedness materials, and having a plan with your family and with your coworkers. Lastly, I just want to close by saying that when I first came here to the podium a couple years ago, I had mentioned that that year had been all about building out our foundational documents and updating our emergency operations plan, our disaster council ordinance, our hazard mitigation plan, and other major planning products. The following year was all about training our city staff and EOC staff and exercising those members, making sure that our EOC infrastructure and city infrastructure was ready for the events to come, developing the specific plans for those large events, and then executing them, which I'm very happy to say we did quite well, thanks to all the partners here in the city. This next year and the coming years will be about capacity building. We're going to be looking at how we can increase our capability in the partnerships with our citizen core, in leveraging the resources we have within the infrastructure of our Emergency Operations Center, improving our plans, improving our partnerships that are already existing with our neighboring jurisdictions and our private sector and NGO partners, and looking at ways we can continue to be more resilient and more prepared as a city. I look forward to reporting back on that in a year when we're here again to celebrate or recognize National Preparedness Month. With that, I thank you all very much.

I want to thank you because I guess your message to our residents is be aware, be diligent, and be prepared, especially for natural disasters that nobody ever seems to be prepared for. But we want to put it on everyone's radar. But I also want to compliment you and all of our staff who are involved with these major events because we were prepared. We were well prepared, and I'm so proud of our city and how we responded to, for a city of our size to be able to respond to these massive global events all within a few months of each other is something for us to really be proud of. So thank you so much. And I'd like to invite you and your team up for a photo opportunity, whoever you would like up here.

It should be the whole city, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And council, you want to go down? Thank you.

Let's do one more.

Ready?

In three, two, one.

The city manager. Where is he? Where did you go? Okay. All right, for our next special order of business, the City of Santa Clara recognizes September as World Alzheimer's Awareness Month. Alzheimer's is a progressive disease and is a form of dementia that affects memory, thinking, and behavior. An estimated 6.7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease. More than 719,000 people in California are living with Alzheimer's. The impact of Alzheimer's affects many of our friends and families who may be experiencing the devastation of dementia. The 2026 theme is the earlier you know, the more you can do. A dementia diagnosis matters. The theme encourages timely medical evaluations and early detection, reducing the social stigma and discrimination surrounding dementia and highlighting how early diagnosis unlocks treatments, care planning and support networks. This evening, we're honored to have Michael Gafka from the Alzheimer's Association of Northern California and Northern Nevada Chapter. The Alzheimer's Association is an organization which leads the charge in Alzheimer's care, support, research, and advocacy. But before we invite Michael to the podium, our city manager and current Alzheimer's Association board member Jovan Grogan would like to say a few words. City manager?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. Thank you, members of the public. In front of you and on the back table is a document with some stats on Alzheimer's. I'll provide a few more. More than seven million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease. One in three adults dies with dementia or another form of Alzheimer's. The growing prevalence of the disease is striking. Between 2000 and 2024, deaths from heart disease declined by 3.8%. However, during the same period, deaths attributed to Alzheimer's increased by more than 134%. Alzheimer's and other dementia also have a profound impact on families, caregivers, and communities. Nearly 13 million Americans provide unpaid care for a person living with Alzheimer's or another dementia. Those caregivers are our family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and undoubtedly people in this room and those throughout the community. As the mayor mentioned, I'm speaking here tonight not only as your city manager, but also as a member of the board of directors for the Alzheimer's Association of Northern California and Nevada. Alzheimer's took the life of my mother far too soon. I honor her life and her journey with my service on the board. Tonight, we are also joined by Michael Gafka, a volunteer for the Alzheimer's Association of Northern California. Michael will share information about the Alzheimer's disease and resources available to community members and their loved ones. Thank you, Michael, for being here and helping to ensure that no one in our community has to navigate this journey alone. Michael.

Thank you, city manager. Welcome. Thanks very much.

Wow. It's an honor. I brought a picture. So this is my fourth year as the event committee chairperson for the Walk to End Alzheimer's. And my mom also passed away five years ago from the disease. That's how I got involved. It's really an honor to be here. I have a prepared statement. We also have the team here. So we have Louise and Rita and Ed. These are all members of the whole team that helped put this event on, which is coming up in October. I have a prepared statement. Um, so dear mayor Gilmore and esteemed council members on behalf of the Alzheimer's association, I want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your recognition of September as world Alzheimer's month. This acknowledgement is vital in raising awareness about Alzheimer's disease and other dimensions, which affect millions of families. In Santa Clara County alone, about 12% of the 65 plus population is living with Alzheimer's disease. Your involvement does more than shine a light on the difficulties of living with dementia. It helps create a community grounded in compassion, understanding, and above all, reducing the risk. By taking part in this important conversation, you help dismantle stigma, encourage early detection, which paves the way for better outcomes for individuals and the families who support them. The support is as hard as the people that support the very people that have it as well. It's devastating to everybody. Recent years have brought real momentum to Alzheimer's and dementia research. FDA approved treatments marked the first drugs which have been shown to directly target the underlying disease process rather than just the symptoms themselves. So we're now making progress in actually targeting the disease process. This is slowing, which slows down the cognitive decline in people with early stage Alzheimer's and we're also advancing with next generation therapies already now in later stage trials. There are blood-based biomarker tests also that are transforming diagnosis. which help family doctors identify the disease with accuracy that approaches specialists. So there'll be the vision that people will go to their family doctor and get tested for Alzheimer's just like cholesterol or high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. That's kind of the vision. These developments are shifting the field from reacting to symptoms towards earlier detection, more personalized care, and one-day prevention. Because of the awareness you raise, these important advances are impacting so many of our Santa Clara residents The Alzheimer's free programs and supports exists thanks to awareness opportunities like this. Whether constituents take an education program, attend a support program, or call our helpline, they have access to the constellation of services offered, not just through us, but so many providers in the county. Thank you for your leadership and commitment to this cause. On October 10th, we will once again join together at Lake Cunningham Park in San Jose for our annual Walk to End Alzheimer's. 2,500 people, over $2 million, the largest walk in the entire country for Alzheimer's. We invite the city of Santa Clara to join the fight Together we can continue to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those impacted by Alzheimer's and all other dementia and ensure that no one faces the journey alone.

Thank you so much, Michael. Thank you and the Alzheimer's associations, all of your tremendous work you do to support not only our Santa Clara community, but the greater community as well. We appreciate that. So I'd now like to invite you and members of your association to come forward. City manager, if you'd like to come forward to council, we can take a photo with the proclamation. Thank you.

Yeah?

okay and for our final special order of business this evening in 2026 santa clara experienced this year santa clara experienced an extraordinary year as the city welcomed the world for super bowl 60 and six fifa world cup matches at levi stadium In anticipation of the historic year, the Triton Museum commissioned an art exhibit, The Art of the Game, to celebrate the upcoming FIFA World Cup football matches in Santa Clara and hosted a special exhibit combining football and art from May 16th, 2026 through August 2nd, 2026. The group exhibit and fundraiser featured one of a kind art pieces from a talented group of 30 diverse Bay Area artists. The Triton Museum provided each artist with a soccer ball and asked them to turn them into a work of art, and they did. The soccer balls could be painted, sculpted, repurposed, or used as inspiration for their art. All the works were available for purchase beginning with the opening reception on May 16th and continuing throughout the remainder of the exhibition. All proceeds from the sale of the artwork directly benefited the Triton Museum of Art. This evening, the Triton Museum will present to the City of Santa Clara the art piece titled Echoes of the Pitch by artist Francisco Pancho Jimenez in honor of Santa Clara's outstanding achievements in hosting the FIFA World Cup 2026. The artist Francisco Pancho Jimenez has deep roots in Santa Clara and the Bay Area. Born in New York City and raised in Santa Clara, Jimenez discovered his passion for the art at a young age and went on to earn degrees from Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University. Since 1999, he has taught ceramics at Santa Clara University and has held other teaching appointments throughout the Bay Area. In Echoes of the Pitch, Francisco transforms the familiar soccer ball into a ceramic sculpture infused with memory and movement the three-piece series features soccer ball forms surrounded by sculpted suggestions of laces cleats and the energy of the game with each piece finished in a distinctive glaze the city of santa clara will see receive one of the three works the turquoise blue green sculpture presented on a matching ceramic base created nearly two decades before Santa Clara hosted the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The piece offers a meaningful connection between Jimenez's Santa Clara roots, the memories that inspire his art, and the moment when football brought the world to the city of Santa Clara. At this time, I would like to invite Preston Metcalf, Executive Director of the Trite Museum of Art, and artist Francisco Pancho Jimenez to the podium for the presentation. Welcome. And that is heavy and I know how heavy that is. Welcome.

Madam Mayor, council members, city staff, citizenry, You missed one important part of this whole story with the World Cup. About 18 months before the events, a committee was called asking members of the citizenry to join this committee to help plan activities and events surrounding the World Cup. I was privileged to be asked as one of the representatives of a nonprofit, there were other private citizens, all of whom got together on a monthly, sometimes bimonthly basis, and we made plans. We executed actions. A lot of the activities were absolutely wonderful. They provided so much joy for the citizens of Santa Clara. but what also wasn't mentioned was how much joy it brought to those that participated. We got something that we very rarely get to see. We got to see the back workings of how the city operates. We watched city manager's office, we watched city staff, we watched elected officials all get together and do more work to make more activities than I ever thought possible. We present this football by Pancho Jimenez, who, by the way, you gave some of his bona fides. I've known Pancho for going on 30 years. He is one of the finest ceramic sculptors I have ever met, and I will go further, one of the finest ceramic sculptors in this nation. And I'm proud to have this to help present. There's a label that goes with it. Francisco Pancho Jimenez, Echoes of the Pitch, 2026 Ceramic. Presented by the Triton Museum of Art to the City of Santa Clara staff and elected officials for their outstanding achievements in hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2026. And thank you.

That's it.

You presented this to us prematurely at our Economic Development and Marketing Committee, which is the committee you were talking about, and thank you for serving on that. I almost took that home, I have to say, and then you snatched it from me. I'm glad it's back here in the city.

I was hoping that by presenting it twice, we would get twice the credit. We're going to take it back and put it in the box for transport, and Paulina assures me it's going to look great in her office.

Is that right? I think we're going to be fighting over this, and nobody try to kick this ball.

Nobody. Don't try to kick.

Could we have you come up here for a photo? We'll be so honored with you, Preston, and the artist. This is amazing. Thank you.

Cut.

What a lovely gift. Somebody had their light on. Council Member Park, is that for this or something else?

Oh, no, this is for this. I mean, I have known, I am part of the Triton Museum. I'm the Triton Museum liaison, not actually part of the board, other than to see what the board needs from the city and to see what the city can do for the board. And I'm so happy that Executive Director Metcalf, Preston is here. And thank you very much for Poncho. Poncho is not just the artist he's actually one of the most active members of the board And I think that to to see to treat him as just an artist is is enough But I think that we need to recognize all the work that the board does Preston at the usually at the head and poncho Again, very active member. I don't think there's a single meeting that goes by without a recommendation or You know a comment from from me and certainly from from poncho.

Thank you Thanks again Okay. Next item on the agenda, we have our consent calendar. All items are approved with one motion unless an item is pulled for discussion. Vice Mayor Gonzales?

I was going to make a motion to accept the consent calendar.

Second. We have a motion by Vice Mayor Gonzales, second by Council Member Chihal. Is there any member of the public that would like to speak on or pull a consent calendar item? Seeing none, any staff? Members? No? Okay. Councilmember Park?

Yes. I would like to pull item 3L, which is action to waive second reading and adopt ordinance number 2088, adopting the zoning code cleanup ordinance in the form presented.

That was 3L?

That's correct.

Okay.

Thank you. All right. We have a motion and a second. With that exception, Councilmember Hardy?

I will just say that from the audit committee for the stadium, we had a perfect clean audit and that reflects really well on our staff, especially our financial staff. So I had to, even our new auditors were impressed. So thank you to the staff.

All right. We have a motion by Vice Mayor Gonzales and a second by Council Member Chihal. To approve the balance of the consent calendar minus 3L. And this includes the stadium as well. That includes the stadium in 30 minutes. Or items, there's more than just minutes. Okay, please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. All right, next we have public presentations. City Clerk. Do we have any public presentations?

Yes. We have some speaker cards. The first one is Austin Zeng.

Austin? Austin, you said? Yes. Austin, please come forward. Welcome.

The mic is on, okay. Thank you for taking the time to listen, and I'm just gonna talk about a little bit about my concerns about the safety of me walking home from school. I frequently walk home from Wilcox High School to and from, and I see, as well as just running and cross-country, but I think the main issue is about motorbikes, especially concerning minors, especially middle school and high schoolers. So while I'm running and while I'm walking home from school, I frequently see kids with like middle schools and high schoolers without helmets you know going on these motorbikes which go around 15 to 20 miles per hour it's not only necessarily just dangerous for me but also for them as you know helmets are a required thing for people under the age of 18 so I'm just wondering I hope that we act something about this because going at such high speeds, you know, I sometimes concern myself seeing that, oh, yeah, this is a problem that I'm very fearful about while walking to and from school. And then just, I guess, because of this, I hope there's a little bit more restriction on this accessibility. of having these motorbikes and going around, because it is pretty frequent that I see people without helmets using these motorbikes when people are around from school. And this is not just, again, emphasizing this is not just about my danger, but also their danger as well. Yeah, so I know I'm just a high schooler here, but I'm just hoping that you'll take this into account to help kids' livelihood, safety, and future. And thank you for your time.

austin thank you for coming this evening we can't take any action on it but we can refer this in your comments to our staff and also our police department um interestingly enough we had a bicycle and pedestrian uh committee meeting prior to our council meetings tonight tonight and that was exactly one of the topics we talked about so thank you for bringing it to our attention um it's on our radar now so we'll pass on your comments our city manager heard them and we'll also pass them on to our police department in terms of enforcement. Thank you again for coming this evening. We appreciate it. All right. Next. Next speaker is Akos. Akos, please come forward. Welcome. Thank you.

In 1987, I came before you to stop the police harassment of me and others for bicycling in bike lanes. Highway staff from the county came to the meeting and stated that they opposed repeal because they want to convert all expressways into freeways. They told the truth and lost the vote. I talked to many people walking in bike lanes of expressways. Most are transit patrons. They walk at the road edge, even safer than bicycling. It's also legal under state law if there is no sidewalk. but they fear police due to your pedestrian's prohibited signs. After victory for bicyclists in all cities, I fought to repeal this pedestrian prohibition. Highway staff and city staff changed tactics. Instead of stating that they want freeways through neighborhoods, they use scare tactics, lies, and years of stonewalling to prevent City Council from voting on repeal. In 2006, I requested repeal and highway staff wrote City Council a letter shown with my rebuttal in color. And it's also uploaded, please read it. It lied that sidewalks are dangerous by citing fake data. City staff omitted this crash data from the agenda packet so I couldn't rebut it. Weeks later, Ms. Sparacino provided the data. It was motorist fatalities on interstate freeways, not pedestrian fatalities. Vision Zero San Jose proves that the 23 miles of expressways in San Jose had zero pedestrian fatalities on sidewalks, paths, bike lanes, and bus stops, but many are killed crossing expressways with the widest arterials. Staff asked Council to postpone the repeal vote to after the 2008 Expressway Plan, claiming this plan would support prohibitions. However, the BOS rejected all prohibitions and instead required sidewalks shown. At last November's meeting, highway staff contradicted himself by stating one, this BOS vote never occurred, and two, the BOS supports the city's prohibition, which is true. In fact, both are lies. The vote did occur and the highway staff lost the vote. The result is a sidewalk maps for each expressway shown here and in my links. Last November, city staff prevented my rebuttal. Only after public comment, they brought highway staff to the podium to tell more lies, not during presentation. Please let me show video clips of more lies and prove the truth. Thank you.

Thank you. All we can do again is refer it to staff since we're not allowed to take action under public presentations. But we'll again refer it. Thank you. City Manager, did you want to say something on that?

I believe there is an item at your next upcoming council meeting.

I thought it was coming up.

You did refer to staff. Staff has been working on it and it is coming up. I can potentially find additional information. If I do, I'll let you know.

Possibly the next meeting or the meeting after? When the next couple of meetings?

October. It will be on the October 6th.

The first meeting in October, we'll be talking about that. Thank you. All right, anybody else, city clerk? Brian Darby. O'Brien, please come forward.

Friday, 25 years. It almost slipped my mind. I was sort of ashamed of myself on that, but the Kennedy Center closed today. in the news because somebody wanted to put their name on it. And that's not going to change. It will get worse. I hate to say this, but the first time seeing somebody come down the Golden Escalator didn't surprise me at all, and it still doesn't surprise me. And actually, the gentleman actually does have some good ideas. And I don't blame people, fellow Americans, for voting for him, because that's the way our democracy works. And he is my president, but I don't have to like everything the person does. This country has a lot of wounds. And with the internet and with social media, it comes out and out and out, and there's more and more, there's more racism, there's more anger, there's more hatred. What was a balance for that, a bulwark against it, was our national institutions. The flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance. And sad to say, in some ways, it's all been turned into a caricature, like watching WWE or something. And that's just not real world. What we're doing now is the real world. Oftentimes, it takes a long time to do it. Oftentimes, it's messy. Oftentimes, it's frustrating. Oftentimes, we think the other side is out to get us and yada yada. But now we have Americans and people who have power, who control power, who think the world is flat, who think the sun goes around the earth, who denies the most basic of physics about the age of the earth and the origin of people. And this is not an attack on religion or faith. We landed on the moon. Some of the greatest things this country's ever done, some of the greatest things it's ever done is being forgotten, our institutions. I know like the science of biological evolution. If you go see a doctor, if you get a vaccine, if you take antibiotics, any of that, if you have a blood test, that's evolution, the theory of evolution in action. And I know it's hard because I'm a person of faith. And it's devastating to see this in your faith orientation. But also, the reason I come now to bring it up, without those institutions, those bulwarks, bless you, the wounds of this nation will get deeper. And there are people who calculate on that. And it is purposeful. And I'm fairly old now, not as old as some people. Even in the 60s, I have never seen it this bad.

Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Anyone else for public presentations? Please come forward.

Welcome.

Hello. Good evening, mayor and council members, city staff. My name is Kimberly Williams. And today, as you're probably all aware, is National Voter Registration Day. It's a day devoted to expanding civic participation and ensuring that every eligible resident can make their voice heard. And so in the spirit of that, tonight I'm asking the council to prioritize language accessibility at our public meetings. Inclusivity, transparency, and meaningful public participation begin with language access. And we owe our residents more than an invitation to attend these meetings. We owe them a genuine opportunity to understand the decisions that are being made and to participate in shaping their city. So critically, that opportunity should not depend on being fluent in English or having to plan ahead to request an interpreter in advance. But here's the good news. Neighboring cities have already shown us a practical path forward, and Sunnyvale and Gilroy have successfully used the technology Wordly to provide real-time translation since 2024. Palo Alto also uses Wordly available for their city council meetings, and Mountain View just announced that they are piloting the technology about a week ago. And as I was reminded two weeks ago when I was presenting there, our own Santa Clara Unified School District provides live Spanish interpretation at school board meetings on Zoom, which I believe that they have been doing since at least 2020. Santa Clara should not be falling behind our neighbors on something that's so fundamental to representative government. The technology has already been tested, it's been successfully piloted, and it's been put into practice by several of our nearby cities, so we don't need to start from scratch. So I'm asking the council to direct staff to bring back a plan and a timeline for implementing a wordly pilot at city council meetings, and the service should be available both in person and online, advertised in multiple languages, and easy to access without an advance request. And I recognize that there is a cost to this technology service and that the city should evaluate it for accuracy, privacy, resident use, and still make sure that if the situation requires a qualified human interpreter that that still be necessary situationally. But registering to vote is one important aspect of civic engagement. But democracy also requires people to remain informed and involved even after election day. So if we truly value every resident's voice, we must ensure that they both can understand and be understood in this chamber. And I hope you agree that Santa Clara residents deserve this level of access, and it is time for the city to provide it. Thank you.

Thank you, Kimberly. Staff, you heard that? So, all right, thank you. Thank you. Do we have anyone else?

We have online phone number ending in 0183. 0183, go ahead, please.

Go ahead. My name is James Rowland. I was looking forward to Mr. Becker's continual documentary about all the conspiracies and lies that have occurred. No doubt it involves also the one on man and perhaps the people behind the Lindbergh kidnapping. But We all know that Mr. Becker, a convicted felon and perjurer, has continuously accused members of the state legislature of dealing in drugs, former ethics consultants, and dealing in meth. And it becomes almost as if Santa Clara citizens have to use the old drive-in lingo. Let's go to the lobby. Let's go to the lobby. Let's go to the lobby and come back in July. Well, perhaps not. We can only see and only hope. All I know is that the city of Santa Clara is a great place. Everyone that works for the city of Santa Clara deserves great praise, and the city council, they all do. And I wish that one of the things we know is in any language, the truth is universal. Perhaps something for Mr. Becker to understand. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments for public presentations? OK, seeing none, we're going to move on to consent items pulled for discussion. Council Member Park, you pulled 3L, was it? Item number 3L, action to waive second reading and adopt ordinance number 2088, adopting the zone code cleanup ordinance in the form presented.

Yes. So I know that we've talked about this. We talked about this at the previous meeting. We had a number of inputs about parking, parallel parking, things like this. And my question was a more general question, which is we waive the second reading to adopt ordinances often. I think this is for expediency, perhaps for efficiency. When I look at what the codes are for, you know, after the first reading of the title, adopting ordinance of the title should be adopted thereby, and the title of the secondary court's codes therein adopt by reference, legislative body should schedule a public hearing thereon. When I read the reasons for why we have the first and second hearings, it is for public input. I understand that not many people come to these hearings, and I think that's a different problem. I think that people not coming to speak at an opportunity to speak is a very different problem from denying the public an additional time to speak by waiving a second hearing and simply adopting. uh i actually went to a gilroy council meeting last night and i saw sentio i saw the translation services in um like i was in gilroy chambers and they had an app that you could use and they had the screen and on the screen you could actually see the translations but more importantly you could see a um transcript of what people were saying. This was all very interesting stuff, which would be helpful, and you can download the transcript. But that's my point. My point is I spoke on the ability of people to speak at a public meeting, which is they have a rule in which after the third speaker there are no people. I don't actually want to say the rule because it may give us ideas, and I don't want us to do that. But the idea is Public meetings are for public input. If people come or don't come, that's a different problem. If we'd like more people to come, I think that we should find more ways to make the meetings accessible and to make more people come. But, and I've said this many times, public input is often the first and only chance that many public members have to talk about an issue that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And instead of giving them fewer chances, I think that we should give them as many chances as they deserve, as we are required, and not artificially. I'll wait until your discussions are done so you can hear my comment. But we should not artificially reduce the number of times that people have a chance to hear or participate, even if most of the times they choose not to come. And that is, I guess, my general concern and that is my comment. For this one, it was in particular, I actually talked to the city manager about this when we had our one-on-ones, but I would like to see us not simply waive the readings and adopt the ordinances, but I would like to have those. If it takes one more meeting of putting this on an agenda and having nobody come, that's fine. But I think that we should at least go through the actions of keeping the items open for the second reading so that people have the opportunity to interact to do so. Thank you.

Do you want to comment?

Madam Mayor, I've got a comment clarifying nomenclature, then I think the city manager wanted to comment as well.

Thank you. Then I'll go to the public and ask for a motion. Thank you.

Very good. Just to be clear on terminology, when the council is asked to waive the first reading when the item is first presented and to waive the second reading when it's presented again for adoption, That refers to a waiver of the full reading of the ordinance. And that's frequently done because a lot of the ordinances that you do are very, very, very long. And while they're described in the staff report, and while they're attached to your agenda materials, the idea of reading the entire ordinance is usually impractical. And so the concept of waiving first reading or second reading relates to that, not to any desire or interest to preclude public input or comment. I think the practice here at this council and in a lot of places, but it doesn't need to be, is put the second reading and adoption on the consent agenda with the idea that the substantive presentation of the item occurs at the outset, then council in effect says hey we're okay with this bring it back for final adoption so it's a extra process when you're adopting an ordinance to give two opportunities for input it's put on consent the second time again because the idea is that the substantive conversation has already happened but member parker any of you could pull it if you've got an issue or concern with it on the second reading The only challenge then would be that if there's any substantive changes made at the second reading, it would have to be approved again on first reading and then come back again to you because that's how the process is set up. So I just wanted to describe that it's fair for you to say, hey, we should have more discussions, more times about things. It's the waiver of the reading relates to the full reading of the document, not any notion of precluding public input on the item. And I think you may have had conversations with city manager on other items, so I'll defer to him.

And if I can, city attorney, you said that well. I will just note, I think the principal point the council member was making is that by placing it on consent, we are not allowing the public to comment on the item. I want to say that that's not totally accurate. In fact, on all of your agendas under right before consent calendar, it notes and I'll read, there will be no separate discussion on items on the consent calendar, important, unless discussion is requested by a member of the council, staff, or public. The public does have a way to request discussion on this matter. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there any member of the public that would like to speak on this issue? Please come forward.

please don't well i agree with what the gentleman said what the council member said but um giving people a chance san jose you only get one minute to talk that goes for public presentation too um they're a bigger city i get that and as far as being able to pull an item good luck this is one of the only cities that let you do that and so i want to appreciate you stating that it's something that because we're used to it here other places they look at you like you have something on your shoulder because you just it's just not something you allow and that partly because of our size but it's also because there's a so i do agree that we should allow more public presentation and it it is also true if people don't come it's on us you know we can't shake our fingers at everybody else it's on us so anyway thank you thank you brian anyone else like to speak on this issue all right councilmember park

Yeah, again, I do understand, and we had a little bit of talk about this, and I do know that, like, I pulled it on consent because we have that ability, but my point was we shouldn't have to, the public should not have to go through an extra step to pull an item to have discussion on the item. I feel that if there is no discussion, if public members aren't here, then that item should go very quickly. And I would rather that we had the option to do that rather than have to go through the, you know, require that the public go through the process of having to pull the item itself before they have to talk about it again. And it's standard practice. I think putting it on consent and waiving the reading is not standard practice. It is a common practice, but it's not the standard practice. And I would like to go with the practice that gives the public the easiest way to give input on items. I'm willing to make the motion to approve this item, but I would like that noted for a future you know, items that are put on consent. We are here not to save time. It's funny that I'm the person to say this, but democracy is not meant to be efficient. It's supposed to be representative. And at some point, if we're not going to be representative, we're not going to let the people talk at a public meeting, which is intended for public input, then we just want efficiency. Then democracy is not. We need to be very clear. Democracy is not what we're trying to do here. We're just trying to get through items. Thank you. I have a motion to approve item 3L.

We have a motion to approve item 3L by Council Member Park, second by Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Mayor, make a quick point.

The Council Member made a motion to approve item 3L, but he also stated that he would like for in the future us not to waive the second reading and place it on consent. It wasn't a part of the motion.

It was a comment, but it wasn't part of the motion.

It was a comment, right, and I just wanted to make that clear. It's a comment, but not direction to staff.

Correct.

Thank you.

Thank you for that clarification. City Clerk? Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Thank you. All right. We deferred item 5 to possibly next month. We didn't put a date. Item number six, a public hearing approval of the 2025-26 Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report, known as CAPER, for submission to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD. So this is a public hearing and it's open. City Manager.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. Mayor, as you mentioned, this CAPER, the Consolidated Annual Performance Evaluation Report, documents our progress under the city's 2025 to 2030 consolidated plan for the use of what we commonly refer to as CDBG, Community Development Block Grants, and home funds that come from the federal government. Tonight's report covers the first year of our five-year cycle, and the presentation will be provided by Adam Marcus, the city's housing and community services manager.

Thank you. Welcome.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council. And thank you, Javon. Good evening, everyone. In my presentation this evening, I will provide a brief overview of the Federal Community Development Block Grant and Home Programs, review some of the unique challenges that we've faced this year, go over expenditures and progress towards our five-year consolidated plan goals, and I'll end with a success story. The CDBG, or Community Development Block Grant for short, is an entitlement. This means that the city gets these funds every year based on a formula that takes into account population and other demographics. In fiscal year 25-26, the city was awarded just over a million dollars. These funds must be used primarily to benefit low and moderate income residents below 80% of area median income. Up to 15% of these funds each year can be used for public services. The rest must be used for capital projects. And up to 20% of this amount can be used for administration. For the home investment program, the city received approximately $741,000 in 25-26 fiscal year. These funds also must serve low-income residents and be used to create or preserve affordable housing or be used for rental assistance. And up to 10% of these funds can be used for administration. As you may recall, the CDBG and HOME programs operate in a five-year cycle. The high-level goals were set in the 2025-2030 HUD Consolidated Plan, which was adopted by the City Council on May 13th of this year. Sorry, of 2025. Each year, the City approves an action plan. to allocate program income, prior year funding, and new entitlement funding for these programs. The annual action plan also allocates general fund dollars for additional services. The city typically issues a notice of funding availability at the beginning of the cycle and again after the third year. The next regular NOFA process is scheduled for late 2027, which would apply for the fiscal year 28-29. At the end of the fiscal year, the city is required to prepare the CAPER, or the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report. which reports on CDBG and home and related local spending. Tonight we're focusing on the first caper of this five-year cycle. As Javon mentioned, or may have mentioned, this program year has been especially challenging because new federal grant conditions and executive orders implemented in 2025 created legal risk for CDBG home and home ARP grant recipients. Implementation of several programs and projects was delayed this year due to this legal risk. Ultimately, the city council decided to join a lawsuit with other state and local governments seeking injunctive relief. Courts issued a preliminary injunction in April of 2026, but due to the uncertainty leading up to that point, the city did not move forward with HUD 25-26 funding agreements with the federal government, which left insufficient time to execute agreements with public service agencies. In addition, new NCIP home rehab projects were also paused. Despite these challenges, we did manage to spend nearly $1.8 million during this fiscal year. This pie chart summarizes spending for CDBG, home, and home ARP. The fair housing funds here shown for services rendered in the prior year, 24-25. They were just paid in this year, and that's why we need to show them in this report. But there were no fair housing services provided this fiscal year. For public facilities improvements, we have entered a zero here in this chart and in the draft that was put out for public comment, but we do anticipate a final draw of 139,000 that will be made this week and will be included in the report that goes to HUD. Support for domestic violence services was limited to $26,515 using home ARP funds. There was no CDBG public service spending this fiscal year. And in terms of affordable housing, which was the bulk of the spending, that was spread across three programs, tenant-based rental assistance, NCIP home rehab, and several affordable housing capital projects. As you may recall, the CAPER reports progress on these goals. These are the goals that are in the city's five-year consolidated plan. We've gone over them before, but I'm showing them here again. And those goals help us organize how we report out on progress in this CAPER report. The following slides show the goal in the first column, the indicator, the actuals, the actual metrics for the year, and progress towards our five-year goal listed in the final column to the right as a percentage. Since we're in the first year of the cycle, anything under 20% indicates that we're trailing behind, and anything over 20% indicates that we're exceeding our goals, that we're on track to. As a result of the funding freeze, homeowner rehab, fair housing, public facilities goals are now trailing in terms of progress as you can see by the percentages here that are below 20%. To catch up, The Community Development Department is coordinating with Public Works to identify a small public facility project or other capital project that is eligible for CDBG funding. As I mentioned, public services, there were no expenditures in this year. But we did spend some local funds as the council directed in our annual action plan on the following three programs, Project Sentinel, Catholic Charities, Senior Ombudsman Program, and the United Way 211 Hotline serving nearly 1,000 people. And last but not least, I wanted to end with a positive story in terms of the impacts of the city's tenant-based rental assistance program. And this comes to us from Abode Services, We had a client that had been, or I should say Abode had a client that had been living in their car outside of the community center for an extended period of time. They had a long-term substance use disorder and needed support getting back on their feet. The client was enrolled in the tenant-based rental assistance program in early 2024 and successfully housed in March of that same year. The client completed electrician schooling and enrolled in English classes during their time in the tenant-based rental assistance program. This particular client plans to relocate to Sacramento where they have secured housing and will begin working with a family member, providing an opportunity to use those skills that they've learned during the program and to work towards greater self-sufficiency. abode services is preparing to exit this client from the plan from the program within the next few weeks and we'll ensure that they have a plan to maintain housing stability happy to answer any questions thank you for your time uh thank you so now is the time for council questions councilmember hardy

Thank you. As I read through this report, it was obviously frustrating to see the zeros and I know it wasn't on staff. You kind of mentioned catching up. Is there a way to do that? Thank you.

That's it for the questions. Okay.

Yeah, so to answer your question council member Hardy The public service dollars have to be used as public service dollars in that same year So if they're not used in that year, they become capital dollars in the next year so the plan for using those funds involves identifying other capital project, but in terms of catching up on our goals that relate to some of those the goals that are addressed through our public services. Unfortunately, there's a cap, so we can only spend so much of our CDBG dollars each year. We can see what we can do with our subrecipients to see if there's a way to potentially increase their impact or their efficiency, but we can't give them more CDBG dollars to compensate for last year, unfortunately.

Council Member Park.

Yeah. Thank you very much for that. So you're saying that if we don't spend the service dollars, public service dollars, then they'll become capital dollars and we'll have to find capital projects. And if we had a lack of funding for the service dollars, it would seem that we would have no trouble finding ways to spend our public service dollars. I mean, I think that's correct, meaning that if we have a lot of public service projects, then it should be easy to allocate public service dollars to those projects.

Well, if I understand your question, so we have to do a competitive process, and so organizations have to apply for the CDBG public service dollars, and we do that in the first year and at the end of the third year. And so once they've applied and once we have verified that they're eligible for the funding, at that point, The annual action plan is prepared, and the city council votes on that. And that's how the funds are awarded to each individual organization. And what happened last year is that that had already happened. So the city council had awarded those funds, but we couldn't use them because of these risks that had arisen. And so we couldn't enter into contracts, and we couldn't start work with these agencies because of the legal challenges. So it wasn't for lack of having agencies willing to do the work. All of our agencies were wanting to do the work. It was that, it was the other issue with the legal risk that the city had identified.

Understood, okay. Because I'm just noting that we don't, we have of these projects, when we looked at the six goals that we had listed, but when we talked to, we just had the Clara Gardens project, I talked to a number of people, and I'm just noting that we don't have Programs we don't have voucher programs. We don't have things like that And I'm noting that most of the programs for affordable housing most of the programs are not city-led and this was my concern at some point when are we going out to people to say this is these are the kinds of projects that we want or Are we just allowing people come? I mean, I actually kind of know that answer but My concern is we should find a way to make sure that public service dollars are used for public services because, well, it seems easier to convert those to capital dollars, but the public services, we need to make sure that public services are there and they exist. Thank you.

Okay. This is a public hearing, so I'm going to the public now. Does any member of the public, would anyone like to speak on this issue? If so, please come forward. Do we have anyone on line? City Clerk? No one on line? No one wants to speak in the audience? Vice Mayor Gonzales?

Just a motion to close public hearing.

Second.

All right. We have a motion to close public hearing by Vice Mayor Gonzales, second by Council Member Chihal. City Clerk? Assistant City Clerk? Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Councilmember Hardy.

I'd like to make a motion to approve the recommendation from staff about the consolidated annual performance and evaluation report and the comments to capture all that and I'd like to personally thank staff. They've done a really good job on this given a tough year. And then also part of the recommendation is to authorize the city manager to execute the updated caliper.

Second.

So we have a motion for staff recommendation by Councilmember Hardy, second by Councilmember Chauhal. We're moving too fast for you, Nora, tonight. I'm not used to this. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Thank you very much, Adam. Thank you so much, and staff, for all of that. All right, our next item is item number seven, action on the Santa Clara Stadium Authority Financial Status Report for quarter ending March 31st, 2026 and approve related budget amendments. Executive Director.

Sure. Thank you, board chair, members of the board. The item before you is a summary of activity for the closeout of fiscal year 2526. Earlier tonight, you had a consent calendar item for financial statements that were prepared by the stadium authority and heard by the audit committee. That report highlighted some activity and financial reports over the year. It is also important to note that the reports before you were prior to the FIFA World Cup events, which would be reported as part of the fiscal year 2026-27 first quarter and second quarter reports. However, also important to note that even with some of the preparations that the stadium underwent to prepare for FIFA World Cup that impacted the 25-26 fiscal year, the stadium ended with a strong financial performance. Some important highlights to note are the eight ticketed and 43 non-ticketed NFL events. They generated more than $8.1 million in non-NFL event revenue. Also, we were able to pay all of the public safety costs over the threshold that was generated from the recently renegotiated additional ticket surcharge. We were able to pay down long-term debt by $9.9 million of principal, and total revenue to the general fund totaled approximately $10.5 million. Acting Assistant City Manager and Chief Financial Officer Ken Lee will provide the presentation tonight, highlighting additional financial performance for the Stadium Authority over the prior fiscal year 25-26. Thank you. Welcome, Ken.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor and Chair Gilmore, members of the Stadium Authority Board, Ken Lee, Acting Assistant, City Manager, Chief Financial Officer. So appreciate the opportunity to talk about another fiscal year close. As the Executive Director mentioned, just by practice, both on the stadium side and on the city side, we do bring back to you both the financial statements once they've been heard by the Audit Committee. Thank you, Board Member Hardy, for the kind remarks towards staff. We do have a small, but very detailed and dedicated staff for the Stadium Authority. And so tonight's item, what I would like to go through is a run-through of the financial status of the Stadium Authority for fiscal year 25-26, a summary of some of the NFL, non-NFL events. You see in the sub bullets under operating budget on this agenda, there's a handful of topics. This is not comprehensive, but very select. A lot of times members of the public or board or questions or inquiries touch on these sub bullets. So I will talk about and hone in on these topics. Talk about debt. That is an important area as the stadium was built on a large debt issuance and status of paying that down. Impact to our city's general fund and then actions recommended in this report, which include budget adjustments around fund balances and capital projects. That is a common budgetary kind of action for both city and stadium authority that we bring forward at the end of the year. So as far as the financial status highlight, the executive director mentioned some of them. I want to focus and hone in on several others. In terms of revenues from ticket surcharges, so these are applied both to NFL and non-NFL events, over $20 million collected to the stadium authority to pay for various operations, operational activities. 16.1 from NFL, 4.4 from non-NFL events. That does include a portion that was included to pay for public safety costs over the threshold. Net revenues from non-NFL events, $8.1 million. This is before, as you may recall, some credits are applied in accordance to the lease agreement, and I'll walk through and talk through ultimately what comes to the general fund in terms of performance rent. based on gross revenues of almost $25 million and expenses of $16.6 million. Debt service payments total $20.6 million, 9.9 is principal, so we continue to make progress on paying down that long-term debt. And then capital improvement program expenditures stadium authorities share ten point eight million dollars I know that's been a topic in the past will continue to be a topic in the future wanted to provide some summary highlights in terms of capital for 2526 With regards to NFL and non-NFL events, 10 NFL games, two preseason, eight regular season, that's on par for a typical NFL season at Levi's Stadium. There were eight large ticketed non-NFL events held in 25-26, 43 non-ticketed special events, those are the private corporate events. miscellaneous kind of events that are booked at the stadium. And so this was a strong year for the stadium authority in the midst of preparing for FIFA World Cup. When it comes to NFL and non-NFL events, one of the topics typically talked about is our share of or the cost of providing public safety to NFL games. And so this highlights that. spread over the 10 games and working very closely with our police department as the lead agency and the deployment model based on their risk assessment for each game. And so 71% of those costs are city staff, 18% outside agency, and et cetera on the far right. And so these costs We're 100% paid by the stadium manager and a portion of that is reimbursed through the stadium authority dollars. When it comes to a breakdown of that non-NFL event revenue, this table shows that the eight larger ticketed events generated about $7.5 million of net revenue. The 43 special events here generated about $1.1 million. We do receive other income, primarily interest income on ticket sales. And so with the accounting there, the net of 8.1 over 51 events. The bottom row there, that performance rent, $3.5 million transferred to the city's general fund. I'll talk about that in a couple slides, just the math around that. That is on par for the last several years after the COVID pandemic. As far as the operating budget, operating revenue of $74.1 million of the budget, so our revenues did exceed the budget, 102% of the budget. On the expense side, when you take a look at expenses and transfers out, different accounting classification there, $61.8 million, or 93% of the annual budget, so on the expense side, we're under budget. transfers out to the various reserves highlighted here, discretionary fund, public safety cost reserves, operating reserves, demolition funds. So we do continue to build up our city reserves, pay down our liabilities of $4.8 million to that 2024 public safety cost, outstanding balance, and then excess revenue to the city's general fund. I've talked about in our budget sessions this concept of a waterfall. As the money flows at the end of the year, what happens to the excess dollars? Filling up our reserve buckets and paying down our liabilities. And then later in the report, you know, I mentioned that with the budget closeout, we do bring forward based on actual activity adjustments to our fund balances in our current year based on that performance. With regards to performance rent, that $8.1 million of non-NFL event revenue here, there are various credits that are in the lease. The one credit that does apply every year and is not shown on this table, 50% of that ground rent that is paid by the stadium authority is credited against this. The net here, $3.5 million, there were no other credits applied in this fiscal year. With regards to stadium builder licenses, so these are the licenses that allow our fans to buy season tickets Those proceeds amounted to six point eight million dollars so that we are after kind of that initial payoff period of initial sales from SBL's and and so we continue to generate revenues based on either defaults or relocations and and those Those tickets are sold and amortized over a certain payment schedule. Current value of those active SBLs, 560, almost $3 million, so significant dollars that have come through in the form of SBLs. And so as far as face value, $6 million were sold this last fiscal year. A portion of those continue to be made through payments, and so we'll continue to get over the next roughly 8 to 10 years a portion of that $6 million over time. With regards to the discretionary funds, so of the base $4 non-NFL ticket surcharge, $2 are deposited into a discretionary fund. That current balance sits here at $1.1 million. Important to note, it has grown year over year. This is one of the funds used to pay down potential public safety costs over the threshold. With regards to expenses in this last fiscal year, we did have, for the first time, a Celebrate Santa Clara Day on the field. $509,000 expended on that event. It's under the million dollar budget that was set aside. So those activities are shown here, leaving with a balance of $1.1 million. With regards to public safety costs, reimbursement, so this is above a certain threshold. The stadium authority is required to reimburse the 49ers. That threshold was set at $374,000 per game in 25-26. Does include a 4% increase lease after each year. So we do have a public safety cost reserve set aside for those additional public safety costs. We collected about $2.6 million in that table below, spent about 2.5, so a small balance there. So that additional ticket surcharge was sufficient to cover those additional costs over the threshold. With regards to the public safety cost outstanding balance from 2024, we've made progress from the original $14.8 million of that balance when that settlement was approved. That is paid down through a portion of that stadium authority excess revenues at the end of the year. We paid $4.8 million, so roughly $512 million remaining on that liability. With regards to debt service payments, total operating revenues and transfers in roughly $20.5 million or so, a portion of these revenues are collected from our hotels around the stadium, this additional 2%. assessment and then it's passed through the city to pay off that CFD advance that was for public infrastructure built at the onset of the stadium. $3.5 million and then 17.1 for the term A or the primary loan on the stadium. As far as debt numbers here, for those interested in the numbers, the two outstanding debt items on the stadium, $184 million as of the end of the fiscal year on that term aid loan, roughly $25 million there on that CFD advance. That's from that hotel assessment I talked about earlier, so $209.7 million outstanding. debt for the stadium authority and just over time just shows that that payment of the debt we've gone from various uh debt issuance types down to the the primarily the two that are remaining and will continue make to make payments against that for the remainder of the term On the capital side here, a couple pictures of a new boiler and some of the new LED field lights that were installed last fiscal year. $10.8 million or 48% spent on CapEx. We do have some adjustments as those projects continue from year to year, recommended through our budgetary process and then trued up as part of this report. We have adjustments throughout the capital projects in this document. And then on this slide, I wanted to show or summarize the Stadium Authority revenues to the general fund. These are the direct revenues that are deposited into the general fund. The general fund also receives indirect revenues in the form of hotel taxes and then some of the exponential kind of activities as they occur throughout the city through sales tax, et cetera. So as far as the direct taxes and fees and revenues that we track, $10.5 million last fiscal year. And so with that, the recommended budget amendments I wanted to touch on. We have adjustments to all the beginning and ending fund balances in our current fiscal year based on the actual spend and revenues. And we do have adjustments to our CapEx projects included in this report. Before you, there's a handful of those highlighted in both the attached report as well as the report to council. And so with that recommendation for tonight, note and file the financial status report for quarter and fiscal year ending March 31st, 2026, and approve the 26-27 budget amendments in the operating budget, debt service budget, CapEx budgets, based on the troop of items that I talked about earlier. With that, I appreciate the opportunity and here for questions.

All right, council questions. Council Member Cox.

Thank you, Director Lee. So I'll preface this by saying, you know, my recurring theme as we deal with stadium issues is going to be the capital X budget. And I think that we can talk about revenue, but anybody paying attention knows we've hit a financial cliff and we really need to start solving this problem. I'm going to ask a few questions that really focus on that, and you can confirm numbers to me. Some will be rhetorical. But again, Q4 raises an important issue, I think, and the concern isn't simply a capital funding problem, but an execution problem. So I want to historically know the implications of this. If I'm reading correctly, $21.9 million was approved in the capital expense budget. and we expensed 10.8 at about 49%. Now, again, that's rhetorical because we do have those numbers, but what I did in looking at the last 10 years, it has shown that 49% of our used budget is as high as we've ever gotten. We had years as low as 2% of the budget used. And so if we go from fiscal year 18-19, when 22% spend rate was used, sometimes 10%, 18, what I actually see over the last 10 years is that we've expensed 130 in approved budget and only spent 33 million. So 130 million has been expensed and allowed to be spent, and we've spent 25%. So the implications of that to me are what I want to understand. If we're delaying budgets that substantially clearly costs are going up over time. And when I read into old documentation, this was something that was brought up in 2021 as well. As a matter of fact, if I read From there, the budget is presented with the CapEx proposals included by the stadium authority and stadium manager. However, with two fiscal years of budgeted projects, and this is in 2021, none of the projects have been implemented. The stadium manager's inability to complete the budgets and the capital project calls into question whether it's maintained properly and strongly. At the end of this, they said that they have asked for years now for a procurement plan. So with our financial cliff happening, do we have a procurement plan in place to continue to approve $10 million to $15 million budgets when so little of that work is being done? Hypothetically, Director Lee, what I'd like to understand is if those projects had been done on time, one, I can assume right now that our capital expense budget for fiscal year 27 would be half of what it is, because 50% of that is carryover. We would have saved money on making sure that there were rates locked in, tariffs wouldn't have been in place. And I also wonder if the $5.7 million or $3.7 million that we moved last year from our capital expense reserve would have needed to be spent. Now, that's a huge problem because that's a pattern that we see in our 10-year forecast is going to be repeated. What we know right now is our general fund will not make money off the stadium anymore except for our rent. So I want to frame this not just as a problem about a lack of funding, but a lack of execution. So if we are going to continue to approve tens of millions of dollars in budget, what can we do to ensure these projects are done on time? There's also a warranty fund, I believe, that's been sitting untouched for, I want to say, a decade now. That's not much. I mean, it's pennies compared to what we're looking at in terms, but I believe it's about a million and a half dollars. So if we're not asking the stadium manager to use the warranty fund, and I'm assuming that hasn't been brought forward again, is it essentially the stadium authority that's paying for the warranty on these materials? And finally... I would like to better understand, you know, one of the things I think we need to be concerned about as a stadium authority right here with money not coming in anymore is our shared operating expenses. So I'm wondering if you can share with us how the shared operating expenses have grown over the years. We need to be incredibly careful with every penny that we spend in operational money now since we will no longer be making a profit on the stadium. Thank you.

Authority Member Hardy.

Thank you. I know we have a firewall and I'm not as worried about that because we do have a firewall between our general budget and our general funds and the stadium authority. But we're at $209 million for our debt on the stadium and we're paying that off as we go and I know that we have We changed the deal so that not all of it was going to our last bucket, which is the demolition fund, and half of it would come to our city coffers now. I want to just make certain if the trend continues with what we're seeing, will we be able to pay off the stadium within the life of the stadium? Thank you.

Thank you. Authority Member Chauhal.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the report, Assistant City Manager. A couple of questions. I know you quoted multiple times 2024 settlement we did. Public safety cost was $6.1 million last year. How was it compared to the last year, like previous year, if you have that number handy? Because I know we also had some agreement with the POA about reducing the double time on those. So I just want to see what those changes have, how those changes impacted bringing the public safety costs down. My other question is, Net to general fund this year. We have ten point five million dollar net to our general fund How was that compared to previous year? I would love to see those numbers basically and Reason being like we made those changes in 2024 with the settlement and I want to see that settlement is paying us in a better way like how we and I also see The public safety liability as per the settlement we did at that time, it was $14.8 million, which has reduced to $512K right now. What was our forecast to pay that off? And I do understand that a lot of that payment has come from our ticket surcharge from both NFL and non-NFL events, and that has paid off quite a bit of money into the funds to pay off the public safety. But I want to see what was our forecasted timeframe to pay off those old debts when we are only left with $512K.

and i will reserve some of my comments for later these are my questions thank you thank you authority member cox you have i'm sorry director lee i'm sure you didn't want to hear from me again i forgot one question and it was about the the demolition and reserve fund um because 50 of that uh the excess revenue is um going to public safety costs debt which is scheduled to be paid off this year i didn't know that i could find what would now happen If the full excess revenue then has to go into the demolition and renovation fund or if that will free up some money because, again, any time we're pulling from our two operating expenses, we're limiting any movement into the general fund. So does this now with public safety paid off change the way that the demolition and renovation fund works? Thanks.

Thank you. Authority Vice Chair Gonzales.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I think some of the concerns that have been mentioned are things that we're looking at. What keeps you up at night, Director Lee, as far as, I know if we're, we talked about this, having a bigger maintenance, you know, program so that we can Make sure that we take care of this asset and not let it fall, you know and disregard but um What do you see us and how can we get to the point where we have maybe a five percent, you know? Maintenance fee that we can be using in that respect I know that some of the things are getting paid off the debts getting paid off But how can we try to bring some of the things forward sooner? then and remove some of the escalating costs that happens over the years as costs go up with construction and things like that. The thing I was going to mention was as far as the agreement that was in a few years ago, Some of those additional service charges, right, it seems like that's covering a lot of the public safety costs above the threshold. Do you see that going forward remaining the same, or do you see any issues with that? I know there's been a renegotiation of some of the terms of our public safety personnel at the stadium, but how do you see that moving forward?

Any other questions? All right. I have a few questions. Can you show us the new SBLs that were sold but you didn't tell us the SBLs that were defaulted? Can you tell us what the default rate was? And if the new sales outpace the default rate? I think in the report you should show both sides. Also, this report tracks NFL and non-NFL costs down to the per game level. But it didn't include any itemization of Super Bowl 60 or FIFA World Cup costs incurred by the stadium authority. And since this is a fiscal year ending March 2026, there was a lot of costs, you know, up until that point. So can you provide the same level of detail? total costs, reimbursements, amounts still outstanding for both of those events. Back earlier in the year, the executive director referenced that there was over a million dollars in costs that were charged, and this was the beginning of this year, to the stadium authority for World Cup and Super Bowl preparation. But I didn't see it anywhere in this report in these financials, so I'm wondering why it wasn't reconcilable against this report. And I also want to know what the total costs, any costs for Super Bowl or World Cup that were billed to the stadium authority. how much and what were they um so i think council member authority member cox talked about the capex spending which i saw the percentage um zero for contingency and warranty work um I saw that. Of the 11 carried over CAPEX projects, do any of them involve work that was necessary for Super Bowl and World Cup readiness rather than routine maintenance? And if so, are those costs being tracked separately for potential Bay Area host committee reimbursement? I think that's all I have for now. There you go, Ken. Do you need some time?

whatever the preference of the chairs we'd like you to answer every single one right now standing there i will make my usual attempt and if i miss one your attempt and if we need more time yeah you let me know i will let you know and if i uh miss any please do um remind me will we be sure and tell you that exactly so council member cox brought up a very important theme around capex that's a topic that's been a subject with all our budgets and various different elements of CapEx. And so I heard the term fiscal cliff and I do wanna note that the CapEx funding problem as we look ahead towards an aging stadium is one, just like any infrastructure in any city for any jurisdiction is one that we have to wrestle with and grapple with. The lease itself has defined dollars that go to capital. And I think in my budget presentations, three, $4 million if you include a little bit extra through the waterfall. When you look at the size and the value of our asset, that's insufficient. And so we do have to, as an authority, grapple with the funding of and the prioritization of the most important capital projects to ensure that our stadium is kept in top shape and functioning well to continue to attract those money-making events. I do want to note that as a stadium authority, we are underway with a facility condition assessments. I know I think in the last budget presentation, I was asked where we're at with that RFP. That is that was transmitted. I think a draft was transmitted to you as a board at that time. That was the request. That RFP hit the street. We did have 15 vendors come out on a pre-proposal tour of the stadium. I was there, and these are vendors that were from all parts of the country. That RFP closed last week, so this is very active as we speak. We had eight proposals. We are forming an evaluation team. Our goal really is to get through that process, hire that consultant. We'll be back before the board with that award. and to be on our way to understand that problem that we're talking about that's so important to our facility. There were some numbers thrown out, and I know that you mentioned 49% was the highest since some of the prior fiscal years all the way back through 18, 19, and I don't wanna, rehash kind of the history around CapEx, but that was a theme and an issue for the stadium authority for quite some time. We worked through some of those with regards to procurements, prevailing wage, public works contracts. That was a topic of, I think, the 2022 settlement. And so that did slow down some of the projects in those earlier years. We also had the COVID pandemic that occurred and that prevented a lot of work on the stadium. And so just by practice, To the extent projects are identified, that work is not completed. Our stadium manager makes recommendations to our stadium authority for carryover projects. We have started, as funds have been limited in more recent years, started to ask more questions around those carryover projects. Councilmember Cox, you mentioned the warranty fund. That is an area where with the initial build out of the project, there were projects identified roughly 10 plus years ago that were not completed. Those funds were set aside. We are working with the stadium manager on making recommendations to liquidate those funds to the extent we can. So that would free up those dollars for higher priority projects as those funds are limited. So we are actively working through those carryover requests as a staff, especially in times when we have fewer projects.

Ken, on that note, I know the board member and the board knows, but just want to remind the public that the stadium authority or the city does not implement the capital improvement project. Certainly the board has an approval process in the budget and a contracting approval process for contracts over a certain amount. And the stadium authority provides oversight. However, it is our stadium manager that does execute on those projects. And I know, we know that here, but I just want to articulate that. And I know, Ken, you've mentioned some of the reasons for that, and we're also looking into others.

There was a comment, Councilmember Cox, you asked about procurement planning. And so that was a topic many, many years ago. And so our procurement teams are working together. We have a biweekly meeting every two weeks on upcoming procurements, what issues, what resources. We have a team of both legal representatives from both sides to ensure that if there are any contractual issues, those are reviewed. ahead. I think, you know, as a finance director that oversees procurement for the city, we always want to move faster, but there are so many rules that we must abide by to ensure that competition is sufficient. With regards to public funds, you know, the process for competitive bidding and state laws are followed, and so it is a balance. It does take time, and we know our client departments Want us to move quicker and so we are working to try and find ways to kind of move quicker but we do have a flow in terms of Procurement items you see before the board on occasion those those awards come through the topic of dollars how much gets carried over how much is unspent is it an issue of execution and and I would say It's partially both execution and practice. In the stadium authority, we do not typically encumber funds like we do on the city side, so when they identify projects, let's just say a seat replacement or an electrical project, they're trying to estimate the scope of that full project, and they budget those dollars in a full fiscal year, but the time it takes to execute, to your point, Council Member Cox, As far as design, architectural work, to get that across the goal and then to finally bid out the project could cross fiscal years. And so as a result, some of those dollars are carried over from year to year. And that is a practice, a budgeting practice and a a process practice that both on the city side and stadium authority side, we have significant capital dollars that do get carried over year to year. In times when capital dollars are short, we are needing to look at those capital projects to ensure those fall in line with the highest priority projects as we complete our facility condition assessment. that that assessment informs what projects are funded as we move forward. And there may be projects, as you may recall, with the later discussion on CapEx projects over the five-year plan that the board did not approve, the executive director did not approve. And that's the kind of conversations we'll continue to need to have with our stadium manager to ensure that the highest priority projects are brought forward. What's the impact on the general fund? And to the extent that there are excess dollars that result at the end of the year that goes to the general fund, we pay down different, fill different buckets, public safety costs, reserves is one of those buckets. Councilmember Cox, you talked about, hey, when we pay off that public safety cost reserve, does that free up money? Does it go back to the demo fund? And so that public safety cost reserve, once that's paid off, that goes to the general fund. So the general fund, a formula that was redefined as part of that 2024 settlement. Previously, those excess dollars, 100% would have gone to that demolition fund reserve. under the new formula for excess revenues, 50% goes to the demolition reserve, 50% goes to the general fund, or half of that goes to pay off this public safety cost of 25-25. And so I know I'm seeing a lot of different numbers. I'm getting a look there. Can I maybe add to that a little bit to clarify? Yeah, sure. Go ahead, City Attorney.

Yeah, so... Yeah, just to make that a little bit more clear, consistent with what the finance director described, the revisions in the amendment to the lease per the settlement agreement does modify how excess revenues flow through the demolition fund, right? There was revisions to Section 14.7 and 14.8. It used to be 100% of that would go to the demolition fund until it got up to $70 million. Now 50% of that goes to the demolition fund. And the remaining 50%, if there's an outstanding public safety balance, is split. half of what's remaining of that 15% or 25% goes to offset the public safety cost outstanding balance, and the other 25% goes to the stadium authority discretionary fund, which can be used for a variety of purposes, including payments to the general fund. Once that- However, the stadium authority decides to spend it. It's in their discretionary fund. It can be budgeted. Typically, all of that has flowed to the general fund. Once that public safety cost balance is exhausted, then 50% continues to go to the demolition fund, used to be 100%, and the full, as Director Lee described, the full 50% then goes to the stadium authority discretionary fund, again, which can be used at the stadium authority sees fit, including the entire amount to the general fund.

Understood, but just to clarify, the reserve fund that you're talking about can only be expended if the upstream buckets are full.

I'm sorry, the reserve fund. You mean the excess revenues.

No, the excess revenue is split 50% to the renovation demolition and 50% to... The operating reserve? No, the discretionary fund. But the discretionary fund, the other 50%, may only be expended to the general fund if the upstream waterfall buckets are complete, which means if we are depleting our operating expenses, which are buckets four and three and five, sorry, we can't use that money for general fund.

That is correct. And so, you know, to the extent your operating reserves aren't filled because we've spent it on other expenses, that bucket needs to be filled up first before it flows toward the end.

Yeah, I get it. I would love it if it was clear to the public, but I absolutely get it.

Just to be clear, then there wouldn't be excess revenues in the first place. I think that's the point. Those things are filled above in the waterfall. It's not that those discretionary, if monies make it all the way through, they're spent how I'm described. If those things above the line in the waterfall are depleted, then yes, those need to be filled. Is that accurate clarification? That's correct. Okay.

And also I want to point out the discretionary fund doesn't automatically flow to the general fund unless there's an agreement by both parties for under very strict circumstances. So it's not an automatic flow to the general fund.

That's actually not true, Madam Mayor, with respect to the excess revenues. The excess revenues can flow as stadium authority sees fit. You are accurately describing the relationship with respect to the reserve fund where the surcharge money is deposited.

For discretionary. We can decide to take that money and put it directly in our general fund.

the excess revenues that flow all the way down in the way I described could go to the general fund at the stadium authority.

We make the decision that it goes to...

The stadium authority decides. I didn't see that anywhere. With respect to the excess revenues, but you're correct about where the surcharge money gets deposited, that has, that needs to have at least a million dollar balance and potentially monies above that can be spent if in fact the capital, there's no additional capital needs. Yeah.

And that never happens. That's different. Yeah. What I'm saying is, so money that goes from excess revenue directly in the discretionary fund, so then annually you will take it out of the discretionary fund and put it in the general fund. Is that what you're saying?

I just want to clarify. So the discretionary fund is a very- I just want money in the general fund, Ken. Understand, understood. Yeah, so the discretionary fund is a very specific fund where half of the non-NFL tickets are charged, gets deposited, that $2. With regards to the waterfall, that does not touch the discretionary fund, but at the end of the waterfall, there is excess revenue, if it exists, can go to the general fund. In this fiscal year, $4.8 million went to the general fund in the form of that excess revenue at the end of the year. It's not a discretionary fund. That's something totally separate. But you are right.

So that never hit the discretionary fund? That never hit the discretionary fund?

Correct. That $4.8 million does not hit the discretionary fund. The discretionary fund is a separate pot entirely generated from that $2 non-NFL ticket search.

That's what I thought. OK. Yeah, they're different.

They're different terms. The discretionary fund is different than the discretionary expenses that we get at the end of it.

I was just talking about the discretionary fund.

One more clarification, actually two points. I will say, when we have this discussion, and we will be having this discussion, there are some amazing charts and graphs and diagrams that explain all of this, and we'll be sure to bring those out. Also, we've called it the demolition fund. Just want to remind everybody, it's called the renovation and demolition fund. Given the amount of expenditures for capital, we may be having discussions around how that fund is used. Again, a conversation for a later date. Just want to know, while we casually call it the demolition fund, It is the renovation and demolition fund. Back to Kim.

All right. So board member Cox, there were some comments made around general fund, CapEx, and then operating expenses and their impacts. And I think the intent behind those questions, I do want to Clarify, to the extent there are CapEx dollars spent above and beyond that transfer, that impacts capital operating reserves, would impact that excess revenue at the end of the year. To the extent that there are shared expenses and those expenses are budgeted and spent for various activities, engineering activities to help maintain the facility security, allied services, grounds keeping as well as operations to the extent those shared expenses grow that restricts or limits kind of the flow through to that excess revenue. The key there is to ensure that revenues are sufficient to cover those expenses and or grow at a clip that's at or greater than some of those expenses to ensure that that revenue at the end of that waterfall continues to exist. Board Member Hardy asked about the $209 million in debt we have. The majority of that is fixed rate that's gonna be there for the bulk of the remaining years in the term. As far as the trends to pay that off, the payoff of that fixed rate debt was defined when they issued the initial bonds. They projected the cash flow of the stadium revenues over time, over 40 years when they issued it. It is in line with projections. We've had years that accelerated the payments of debt where we had discretion, you know, flexibility to pay those off. And in fact, we've paid all those off and right now we're there on the fixed debt. So we will continue to pay that debt throughout the remaining years. So the trend would hopefully be there in terms of the revenues to support that. Um, Board Member Chahal, um, talked about, uh, the public safety cost of $6.1 million. I do want to note in Table 2 of the attached report, page 6, we do have a five-year trending, um, of public safety costs. That, that cost will vary depending on the number of events, the type of events, to the extent our, our police department assesses the risk to be higher. They will deploy, uh, to meet that, that safety need. And then the pace of the growth of those costs to the extent MOUs are approved and the salary increases or benefit increases are defined or grow. When compared to the prior years in terms of general fund transfers or the net transfer to the general fund, you know, it varies. This year it was 10.5 million. That includes 4.8 million of excess revenue, 3.5 million of performance rent. Last year was slightly over 20 million, but that included some of the extra dollars that were part of that 2024 settlement that had multiple years of performance rent that was built in there. over the last two years, over $30 million transferred to the general fund. Prior to that, there were some years impacted by COVID. Those were some years where those dollars were less, but that transfer to the general fund does vary depending on both the waterfall, the debt outstanding, as well as what's going on from an activity standpoint. But a strong year last fiscal year. Public safety costs, the outstanding balance from 2024 settlement, $14.8 million, down to $513,000. We are slightly ahead of that forecast from 2024. It's hard to predict what that excess revenue is. I think the budget had 3.5, we had 4.8, so roughly a million dollars ahead of the forecast, at least for last fiscal year. I fully anticipate that that gets paid off this next fiscal year or the current fiscal year, and that's in line with the forecast we had at the time. Board Member Gonzales asked the very important question of what keeps me up at night. And so I think for public record, in terms of the stadium authority, you know, there's, you know, in my expanded role, I think, you know, in my, Acting assistant city manager job is ensuring that the events are safe I think that's the the primary goal of as a stadium authority to make sure that you know the the patrons that come through the events or Have a good experience and that they're safe and then as a finance Director, you know ensuring that our debt gets paid and that our asset which is the stadium is maintained in a high quality fashion. And I would say that I want to ensure that our bondholders know that we have accelerated payments of our debt. We've made great progress on it. We've had strong revenues to ensure that those bonds are paid off. And so as a finance director, one of my primary goals is to insure from a financial standpoint. We're doing well now as we kind of look ahead. You know, I've been to the stadium a couple of times this year. I think the facility looks great, but we know that under the paint, there's always issues and behind the scenes, there's always issues. So working on a plan on financial planning as we do within the city to ensure that there's a method and a plan to to keep that facility and that asset protected as a stadium authority. And so those are the key goals. Do they keep me up at night? I think a lot of things keep me up at night, but I think we've done a great job in those areas. I know our executive director wants to comment as well.

Thank you. I know Councilmember Jehal, you asked our finance director that question, but I'm going to take a little liberty to expound upon the answer. Not a lot keeps me up at night, probably more because I'm tired.

That's Vice Mayor Gonzalez's question.

Oh, I'm sorry, Gonzalez. I thought it came from Raj. Not much keeps me up probably because how tired I am, but I will say a significant concern with the stadium, and as we talk about finances, it's very much the entire structure to really fund some of the stadium authorities' costs is really dependent upon non-NFL events. And it's important to note that however large or beneficial the non-NFL event market is, it is a market that does ebb and flow. And certainly in the Bay Area, we have seen that even when acts are touring to the Bay Area, there's real competition, right? There's the stadium and the arena in Oakland. There's Chase Center, there's AT&T Park, there's Stanford, there's Sharps Arena. And major acts have a cost structure where it may mean there may be fewer seats or fewer tickets to go to Chase, But depending on the configuration, an act may choose to go there for various reasons. And so making sure that our cost structure to do an event at Levi's is competitive, making sure that we maintain our reputation so that we can attract the events that come. And let's be real, when we talk a major non-NFL event, There's a small subset of artists that can sell out Levi's Stadium. And the number of those artists that are touring in a given year is even smaller, right, a fraction. And so our ability to remain competitive, balance all of the community issues, and ensure that when acts are traveling, and they travel in a circuit right oftentimes we are hit because the the act is coming from las vegas or going to las vegas or coming from la right and so there's a time at which we are competitive and we attract non-nfl events and it is a market that edmund flows certainly we saw that with covet but but certainly in general as we balance all of the issues we have to remain competitive and that includes costs that includes balancing community impact etc thank you

A handful of other questions Vice chair Gonzales asked about these service charges or fees covering public safety costs How's it look going forward? So in my report I summarized that we received about six point one million I think in in public safety costs surcharges or this extra fee against No sorry 2.6 or so which was above the threshold i think we had 2.4 million above the threshold so small balance so it did cover it um there is uh you know the goal is to that that fee would continue to cover it to the extent it doesn't there are other buckets the discretionary fund is one and then there's also the excess revenues to the extent the goal here is really to the hope at least from a financial standpoint that those as we continue to charge those fees on those events, that covers where it grows at least at the pace of the cost of deployment. And so to the extent that deployment costs grow quicker than that fee, then we'll have to look at some of the other pots. And so it was designed to have multiple options there to ensure that it maximizes to the extent the coverage of those costs. Mayor, you asked how many SBLs were defaulted. So I want to note that on page 17, table 10, there is a column 947 SBLs were defaulted. Roughly, I think it's a 1.4% I'm getting. notes from staff that roughly, you know, every year there's a churn in terms of season ticket holders that decide they don't want to continue on paying and so those defaults occur. and those are remarketed. So 1.4% and then we did receive about $6.8 million in revenue.

How many were purchased? Because I think when you give the report, you should say what new ones were purchased and also which ones were defaulted so we can see if the trend is above

Yeah, I think we'll work with the stadium manager to parse out some of that data. I know there is a timing difference in terms of when they default and when they're remarketed. So if they default.

It's good to know what the trend is for us. We can take a look at that in person. So you don't have that number?

I don't have that. I have the number of defaults and the revenue generated, but not the number. Okay, thank you. So we'll work on that. There were a couple comments on costs related to Super Bowl FIFA that were funded in the stadium authority or from the stadium authority, as you know, as it was a topic of prior discussions, the Assignment and Assumption Agreement. had for the staff that are budgeted in the Stadium Authority general and administrative line item, those staff would not be reimbursed by our Bay Area Host Committee. Those would be charged here. There is a line item in the operating budget for general and administrative, so those costs are included in there. I don't have the exact number. You quoted a million dollars.

Well, earlier in the year, I think it was like I can't remember what the executive director reported, like a million two or something like that in the beginning of the year before we even hit March.

So I would have to get that updated number and provide that as supplemental information. But we have that.

Thank you. So I'd like to know what that is. And was there any additional charges to the stadium authority for Super Bowl 60 or World Cup games?

Sure, we can provide that information as Director Lee mentioned a subject of significant conversation and even council approval of the structure, whereas there's general administrative and overhead that we budget to the stadium authority. And so whether it was a Super Bowl event or a regular event, the cost for, for example, the time we spent at this board discussing agreements and negotiating agreements was not charged to the event.

I don't know why, but I just want to know the amount.

And so we can provide that, but it's certainly budgeted.

When will I have that? I'm going to ask because I'd like it sooner rather than later. Just give me a rough timeline so I would know.

We'll go back and confer. I know we're tracking the cost, so.

Yeah, we have it.

We'll provide it. A week or two. OK, thank you.

Via email, I assume is fine. I do want to note a couple of things on that topic. With regards to FIFA, we do continue to have activities related to it. So the G&A cost of my time and staff's time that are budgeted are continued to be tracked. and charge the stadium authority. We are working with the Bay Area Hosts Committee with the acknowledgement that with the federal FEMA dollars that are funding a lot of the FIFA costs, there are additional tracking and backup documentation requirements. We're working with them to capture a portion of grant dollars to reimburse the stadium authority for some of that. But that's ongoing.

So you're continuing to charge the stadium authority for Super Bowl and World Cup costs. Is that what you just said? That's why I want to know the total to date, what you're charging the stadium authority, which is the public. What are you charging? So if you can get me that information and the council, stadium authority board, I appreciate it. Sure.

Mayor, we will get you that information. I think to be clear, I would not say that we are charging the stadium authority cost for FIFA and Super Bowl. I think as we all know that with all the costs, there is an overhead charge as well as there's budgeted costs for general running of the stadium authority. But we'll provide that information to council.

Thank you. We'll provide it. There was a comment or question around the carryover projects. Were they for Super Bowl? And is barrier hosts going to pay for it?

So I do want to of the 11 carryover project, correct?

Which is on page 31 and 32 of the report which outlines the

projects that are carried over and are being adjusted in this report. As you can see, some of these projects, the LED retrofit project, portion of the naming rights, locker rooms, but a good portion of projects were high priority projects identified years ago. So security projects, plumbing, boilers. So we would consider this just as projects necessary for the stadium that were approved as part of a budget in a prior year. There is no agreement for Bay Area hosts as these are general kind of projects that support the stadium for Barry Hose to fund a portion of these CapEx projects. We do have, to the extent there were new pieces of equipment that were necessary for FIFA and Super Bowl and necessary to purchase, rental rates were applied to reimburse at least a portion of those costs.

And to put a fine and punchier point on that, none of these projects relate to FIFA or World Cup. In fact, the only required project for Super Bowl was the bowl. I'm sorry, the only required project for FIFA was the bowl modifications, and that was not charged to the stadium authority and paid for with private dollars.

I think that's all the questions. If I missed any, happy to respond.

Authority Member Cox. Yeah. And so I feel like I got a very sugary version. So I'm going to try to get some concrete numbers, and if you can't do it, but I do hear you saying, and again, I want to focus on delayed project execution right now. And so you've said that you guys, we did not ever get a procurement agreement from MANCO, but that you guys have a team that's working on it. I'll reiterate, at best, in 10 years, we have completed 50% of the projects that have been budgeted, 49% this year. and so i understand things take time but even in a rollover scenario i would like to know what a good budget number that we as a board authority should aim for because we cannot continue to budget tens of millions of dollars and have a fraction of that done inflation costs go up the cost of projects rise how do we hold uh your team or the 49ers accountable for saying if we budget projects they're going to get done I see that as a much bigger problem than just saying, oh, our capital reserve fund has gone up substantially. So what is your team looking at in terms of concrete execution of capital projects when you do it? And when did you guys get into place? I also wanted to know, and it's a hypothetical, you don't have to answer it if it's uncomfortable, but if we would have done a... fraction more of these capital projects, would we have needed to pull $5.37 million last year from operating, which restricted it from going to the general fund? And I'm not talking about the firewall. I know that our general fund isn't ever going to pay for this stuff. What we do know, though, is for the next 10 years, we will not make any money. that we're gonna only get performance rent. And so what I'm trying to look at is what ways can we restructure this? We've talked a lot about looking at the waterfall and saying it's obviously not working. We're putting so much money in a renovation and demolition fund that can't be touched for 30 more years, all right? And that's the backlog. I know that it takes litigation, it's awful, but my reading in here is that our contingency increased on these five to 10% already. from the projects. Ten percent over $100 million is a huge, huge amount. So what are we doing to ensure our projects are getting done? Yeah, I guess in a broader scope what I'm saying is how much of today's pressure that we're feeling is actually really just that we didn't build our reserve fund, but how much of it should be that we didn't hold people accountable to do the projects that we budgeted them for?

Okay, I'll have some comments, and then I think some of it the executive director will also chime in on. And so I think in general for across the country, inflation is an issue with regards to construction costs. And it's not just our stadium, but it's on the city side as well. And so to the extent necessary projects are delayed, that increased costs. For the stadium, there's also a balance, too, and I'm not saying that this is a situation. To the extent there was a plan to replace a capital item and it lasts longer than the expected life expectancy, there is some savings. So to the extent the lights or the seats last longer than what they had been planned to last, there are some savings. You're right, there's a cost on the escalation. So does some of that savings offset each other? I think that's kind of a philosophical. We have to work with the public works team on what the general practice is. But I would agree with you on the trend that, You know, we want to execute on projects that are critical that we've identified today so that to the extent costs grow. But it's difficult to predict tariffs. It's difficult to predict what oil prices and that impact is on it. But to the extent these are critical projects, the goal is to get them done and identify them, budget them, and award them. With regards to the procurement plan, I talked about a procurement team. We have a collaborative process to ensure that the procurement projects that they're working on come to the board for review, approval, get scrutinized by our procurement team, get reviewed by our legal team. And so our due diligence to ensure that proper procurement's followed and brought to the board is what I was referring to. with regards to the procurement plan i think you talked about in in prior budgets i would refer that to more as a capital plan or what is our long-term capital funding what is our long-term capital need i think they have been on record to say that they're conducting a facility condition assessment i think part of the goal with our facility condition assessment consultant would be to gain access to look at theirs, have it peer reviewed, whether there's agreement or disagreement, to find out why that's the case. And then how do we execute on this? I know that it takes resources to deliver on projects and stadium managers not alone. Through their shared expense stadium manager budget, they have requested for, the board has approved engineering positions to help move some of these projects along. They have, considered and brought forward, third party as needed. Contracts with regards to electrical plumbing, general contracting. That team of both contracts and in-house staff is what's necessary to implement. Now that takes time. Is it quick enough? Is the stadium manager onboarding enough people to for the future need of capital projects. That's a conversation we'll continue to have with them. As they request resources, both third party contracts and staffing through shared expenses, we're gonna ask them, how does this relate to their capital plan? Is this the right proportion of engineers? Just like with our geo bond on the city side, we've had to add engineers. Is this the right proportion of staffing necessary to implement in a timely matter? I know it's impossible to implement hundreds of millions of dollars in need overnight, and so what's the plan, a balanced, measured plan based on projects? That's an ongoing conversation. There is no comprehensive capital plan that we know of today outside of the budget process that has kind of a five-year plan that they submit.

Ken, can I make some comments on that? Because being with the stadium authority for the last 10 years, since the stadium was built, we hired Manco to be the property manager. So understandably, they're in charge of procurement and coordinating all these capital improvements. But it's our responsibility in the stadium authority to oversee what they're doing to make sure that they're getting this done. During the pandemic, they had full staff there that the stadium authority paid for. They were fully able to do all the work because the COVID-19 didn't prevent them from having work done at the stadium with their full staff that we were paying there. So when you talk about 10 years of projects that haven't been completed, but the money was allocated by the stadium authority board, it's it's it could be either bad management and lack of oversight by the stadium authority to make sure that those projects get done so you can you know say hey dog ate my homework couldn't get it done but full staff and their staff has increased dramatically over the years that the stadium authority has paid for i mean dramatically and so every time they've asked for staff we have accommodated their ask. I'm not sure what else we could do besides at one point we tried to get new property managers, but this council changed that. At this point, we have to hold them accountable to get this work done. It's just a matter of they've been working on a facilities condition assessment for two cycles. like how long does it take you said we had 15 responses like i'm sure and they have less restrictions than we do to get facilities used where is this and and we're you're you're right this this facility is it's considered older now it's it's aging and although it looks nice you said you went out there it looks nice no i mean it does look nice but the systems themselves Some will be upgraded, repaired, replaced. It's coming up now. It's just like a house. When you have a house and you have a roof, all of a sudden at 10 or 15 years you need to replace it. That's what we're talking about. But the fact that there's no guidelines, there's no report, they have nothing, or maybe Maybe they do, they're just not sharing it with us. You can't be working on a facilities use condition assessment for two years and not have anything. I know we're doing ours and actually we should have, it should only take like six months or less to get this done. Without a plan, they don't have a good track record of getting this work done even though the money's there, even though they have enormous amount of staff that the public's paying for. I don't know what the excuses are. I mean, we had to teach them how to procure contracts, right? We had to do a lot of things for them to help them. And we have helped them and assisted them in every way because they weren't built to be property managers. But the fact is, There's no more excuses, but we have to hold them. Our responsibility to the public is to hold them accountable to get this work done to protect our asset that the public owns. It's our property. We have to make sure it's protected. I think that's the concern here because I'm not going to be here after December. When you talk about a fiscal cliff for capital improvements on that stadium, we're all in denial if we're not facing it now. I know the staff knows this as well. You can make it sugary, as Council Member Cox said, but the fact of the matter is that's going to be a real big issue because that stadium is going to need... some improvements in the tens, maybe $100 million range. So I think the concern is get it now, oversee them, hold them accountable to get the work done that the public has already paid for. But 10 years of nothing getting done, full staff, a lot more than full staff, I think is unacceptable. Sorry, I'm on my... Train here. Thank you. Oh, Council Member, Authority Member Park.

Yeah, so thank you very much. I mean, these kinds of discussions are unfortunately exactly why I think that City Council never should have been made a stadium authority. I mean, City Council that largely knows nothing about managing or maintaining a stadium or anything of that size. I think that even staff has had to learn, had to come up, and I think they've done a very good job of this. But during that time, I don't know how much the stadium authority itself has learned other than through these kinds of discussions. I think that being the property management of housing or even a commercial building is very different from being the manager of a stadium. And we've seen this. We've seen these reports. I've actually gone through. I've talked to people. I've done these. And I've realized that, you know, we kind of need a professional stadium manager, professional stadium authority to deal with this and keep it apolitical. But again, you know, this is what we have. I was actually waiting to hear about COVID deferments before asking some of my other questions because I had some. I mean, we talk about, I heard that the accusations are bad management and lack of oversight, but there are so many other options that we could use. Maybe if it were clearer which costs were deferred because of disuse, because we had COVID. Some that were... done earlier due to accessibility. As the mayor mentioned, as the stadium authority chair mentioned, they were there during COVID. And again, you don't really maintain things that were not being used. I mean, you have to make sure that they're clean. You have to make sure that they don't worsen over time. But the fact that we had extra year or two of, you know, disuse, maybe that's what helped extend some of our seedings, some of the other things that the financial director was talking about. But again, maybe if it were clear how those effects came. And we have to understand that there will likely be other waterfall adjustments. I think that there is a little bit of a lack of understanding of what the waterfall is, and we can see this when we look at the definitions for excess revenues. But there will likely be other waterfall adjustments as we get closer to certain buckets being filled and some being not filled or some being, you know, as we get closer because, you know, the changes that we've seen will change again. Public safety costs will change based on contracts, based on other things. And I do not expect that the trend that we see today will be the same numbers, the same trend that we will be discussing or the future council will be discussing in 10 years. I mean, the chair would like us to clearly define what costs are normal costs, are the normal costs of owning and maintaining a stadium, and what costs are increased because of use. And I think that that's exactly the problem, because use is how we generate revenue, regardless of if the events were mega events, subsidized by the Bay Area Host Committee or not. And I think that this is very difficult. It's like saying, you know, what part, I mean, it's trying to determine when does a tadpole become a frog. At some point, there is so much overlap in these terms that it's not easy to pull them apart. And when we're going to try to nickel and dime for a political end to say that, oh, we're not getting things done, instead of looking at how are we maintaining the resource that we own in this city and how are we getting that done? I mean, if we are short, then we 100% need to find out how other entities such as the Bay Area Host Committee could help with those funds. But at some point, we need to take responsibility for the resource, for the stadium that is ours. At some point, we had an understanding of what we were bringing in, or we didn't. And now we are in the business of maintaining, whether we want it or not, we are in the business of maintaining and having a stadium, and we need to get the best use out of this. And one of the best uses is, whether we pay more or less, but we need to make sure that we're not losing money, one of the best uses courses of action is to maintain good relationship with our partners and with the people that are trying to help us use our stadiums so that we can generate revenue. Thank you.

Thank you. Members of the public, Brian, please come forward.

I hate to admit this, but you lost me after Levi's Stadium.

It's complicated.

Yeah, it is complicated. It's important. If there was some way to put it simpler, probably not, but if there's some way to put it simpler, that might help us. What you said, Ms. Cox, was really good. That was helpful. And the question's asking, then you get a little frustrated and I think of shaking my fist at the Yorks and they're not really part of this. It causes a lot of just bad blood in the comment sections on many of the, places that you read, odd line. But I didn't understand it. I just know it's an awful lot of money. I wish I had it. I would personally buy the Best Western and turn it into a group home, which is something, before I pass away from this world, I would like to leave behind. But $100 million, $200 million, that's a lot of money. But the stadium really is a jewel for this country, well, actually for this country, too, but for this place, for Santa Clara and the Bay Area. And you do have to be competitive. If it was simpler for the people like myself who don't do this for a living to understand, maybe we could come up with something that would be helpful, actually. You have a lot of people out there that do want to help. Thank you.

Thank you. Edward, go ahead, Edward.

Yeah, I just want to say maybe that related project had the retail hotel restaurant phase completed, we wouldn't be having a problem with the funding right now. And yeah, I don't know if it's because Silicon Valley power, that's one of the excuses I've been hearing. But what I don't understand is why would Related say, oh, yeah, since such a date, we're going to have the groundbreaking. Since such a date, we're going to have the groundbreaking. I mean, I believe that happened like three or four times. So if there was a Silicon Valley power problem, wouldn't they have known ahead of time and why would they set a date for a groundbreaking? That part I don't understand. But yeah, I'm just hoping maybe we'll soon have a groundbreaking and I don't know what the answer is to fund some of the problems that we've got right now, the deficiencies we've got right now for the future. But yeah, that's all I wanted to say, thank you.

Thank you, Edward. Is there anyone else that would like to make a comment? All right, Council, City Manager, well, Council, this is a note and file.

Madam Mayor?

Yes.

There's another hand.

Oh, sorry.

Anthony.

Oh, Anthony. Go ahead, Anthony.

Good evening council. I find it kind of funny that the mayor considers you know bringing this up every few meetings and complaining about this for the last decade when you were the one who helped bring the stadium here in the first place and a lot of those people in that city council right now were against it and they knew this was going to come. I knew it was going to come. But you know when we were making the settlement agreements and trying to get out of the situation that you got us into by changing property managers. We try to do the best we can. We try to get the best we can. And guess what? It's not like you can negotiate with your, you know, a multi-billion dollar company to give you a better deal in the city because you should have done that in the first place. So when we talk about accountability, it should land on you. You've been there for over 10 years. You know everything about this. You were part of the signing of the deals. You inked it. You should have known. So accountability, it should start with you because look at your own properties. Look at your own properties as a property manager. It's a start with you. All about accountability. So, you know, and then also the last caller talked about related. When are we going to hold accountability to related? Why are we not micromanaging the related company? Because it's not politically convenient for the mayor. So I think it's just disappointing that the mayor considers to do this for 10 years and keeps raising all these red flags. And I think the 49ers should be paying their fair share. And according to the records, they've been paying it. But again, you seem to like to have revisionist history, I guess, or just change the way the political winds go. So if you're gonna do accountability talk, you should take accountability yourself.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Is there anyone else? City Clerk? All right. Authority Board, can I get something on the authority member, Hardy?

Thank you. We've had a long discussion about lots of parts of this financial, but as was pointed out, the recommendation and what is on the council docket for tonight is to note and file the report and to approve the budget adjustments or amendments in the operating budget. So I'm making a motion for staff recommendation.

We have a motion by Authority Member Hardy, second by Authority Member Chihal. Executive Director, you have some comments?

Sure. Thank you, Board Chair and Board. We've certainly had a robust discussion tonight and significant comments. And certainly this is a very complex and nuanced issue. And we will certainly have additional discussions as we begin to discuss the CapEx challenges that are before us. And actually, even this week, on Thursday and Friday, we have meetings with Manco to continue in further discussion. So know that your staff have been working this issue. And we do anticipate returning to the City Council within the next 60 days to really re-kick off the process and all of the work that needs to happen in 2027. And I really don't want to say that history is not important. And certainly, we have spent time discussing prior events and based on comments tonight, we will certainly continue to do that. But know that staff's focus really has been looking through the windshield and not the rearview mirror and really focusing on the challenges that are ahead of us. And so, We have taken note of your comments and we'll certainly fold those into the larger discussions that we will have and also have noted comments from staff or from members of the public to break down some of this information and make it digestible for our public. Thank you.

Thank you. So Assistant Stadium Authority Clerk, when you're ready. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously with those present. Reports of members and special committees? Anybody have one? All right. We have action on Council O, written request, Council Policy 030, submitted by Council Member Hardy to place an item on a future agenda to consider Santa Clara's participation in the Just Serve Volunteer Opportunities Platform. Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. I will try to keep this to, this is just a request to put this on a subsequent agenda to look at this further, but this is something that came up at the National League of Cities Conference and many other cities have signed on. It's for nonprofits, local governments and all, any churches, anything where no commerce is involved. And it's a free platform to help connect entities that need volunteers with people who would like to volunteer. And it's excellent. I will say Red Cross is the biggest user of it. And I would just like to put this on a subsequent agenda and I've had staff already look at this. That's why it wasn't brought to you until now because I wanted staff to vet this appropriately after I saw it at the November conference. Thank you.

Is that a motion?

Yeah, I'd like to make a motion to put this on a subsequent agenda. Second.

So we have a motion by Council Member Hardy, second by Council Member Park to put this on a subsequent agenda. And again, comments only on putting it on the agenda. Council Member Park.

That's one.

OK. All right. Any member of the public like to speak on this? You got a hand clap there. OK. Assistant city clerk, when you're ready.

Please register your vote.

And that passes unanimously of those present. Next, we have the City Manager, Executive Director report update from City Manager, City Attorney regarding status and timing of future City Council agenda item to report out on City's pending investigation into alleged FIFA leaks. City Manager.

Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, members of the City Council and public. As you may recall, on July 14th, the City Council directed staff to provide a public report to the City Council regarding an investigation that staff had initiated into what appears to have been leaks of confidential information to the media regarding the terms of then under negotiation of agreements that were then under negotiation related to the city's hosting of the FIFA World Cup events that would occur in Santa Clara in 2026. That motion for that item was made by council member Park, seconded by council member Jane, and the city council voted six to one to approve the referral. Within the last week, the city attorney and I have met with the outside firm that is conducting the independent investigation. Council members may recall that you were informed that the FIFA investigation had been inadvertently delayed due to a miscommunication. However, we stated that at that time that we believe that all relevant City Council email communications on our city systems were preserved. We have confirmed that such information and records were indeed preserved and are in possession of the independent investigator. We were also informed that the investigation is nearing completion. Barring any unforeseen complications, the investigator anticipates concluding their work within the next four to six weeks. Upon conclusion and per your City Council direction, a public report including findings will be presented to the City Council at a public meeting. Thank you. That concludes my report.

All right. Thank you. Do we have questions from the Council? No? We have a public member that would like... Oh, Council Member Park.

Yeah, I mean, my light has been on. I don't know why people don't see it, but... Oh, let me look here. Oh, you just put it on. Oh, I didn't just put it on. It's been on for some time. I have not touched this.

May I clarify why this is happening to you? I'm seeing this now. Because when I'm clicking, which is time stamping each segment of this agenda, you're raising your hand on the previous item So when I timestamp, I have the 111s before your hands is up and just clarifying. Okay.

So the short answer is I know that you do this, which is why I wait for the appropriate time. And as soon as I think something has happened, I will click this. And for this item in particular, anyone can see I was not touching my screen, my screen. I had clicked that button several times. I don't think everyone's watching you, Council Member. That's true, but that's why you make these accusations so boldly because you know that people can't.

Excuse me. I wasn't making an accusation.

You just said. You just clicked that right now.

Excuse me. Listen. When I see, my eyes are not always on the screen. I'm running a meeting, talking hair, doing this, looking over hair. I'm not 100% looking at it. But when I see a hand, I did see Anthony on the public, but I didn't see yours. I'm not doing it deliberately. You're making something out of nothing as usual. So go ahead.

Actually, no, I saw what you did, which is you weren't even looking at the screen where I was there. But then you made the accusation that, oh, you just put it up. And I'm thinking if I'm making out something out of nothing, this is a waste of time.

So go ahead. Would you like to speak?

Yes, I would. So I think the city manager talked about delays, inadvertent delay due to miscommunications. Can you tell me what kind of inadvertent delays to miscommunication? Because this is years afterwards. I mean, we have this report that was asked years ago when we had a different makeup of council. Now you're telling us that the information was preserved, which is good. They are in possession of the independent investigator, which is good, but they're concluding their work in the next four to six weeks, which would make it, again, years after this report was requested. I would like some explanation on what were the inadvertent delays and miscommunications which caused that report to be delayed for years.

Sure. At a high level, there was a communication to the firm regarding this investigation. There was some miscommunication on their side and on our side. That will be recapped in the information that comes to you. I think I want to make it clear that staff has not been driving this investigation. This investigation has been an independent effort and certainly I know I and the city attorney have not had a lot of interface with regard to the investigator. We certainly launched it but then stepped back because both our email addresses as well as all council email addresses were in the group that had access to the confidential information based on direction from the city council to check in on the status of the investigation. We've done that. I understand you would like more details around the miscommunication and what happened. Unfortunately, I don't have all of that information in front of me right now, but I can certainly inform the investigator and make sure that that information is presented to the City Council when they bring the public report.

City Attorney?

Yes, and I will add there actually was a fair amount of description of that in the confidential report we provided you on both investigations back in your March 31st email from me and the city manager. So you may want to refer to that in the interim. We can provide additional information when we come back.

Understood like I do did read the report. In fact, that's one of the reasons that this came up and I just want the Items in the report. I do want the I want and when you say there was good description. There wasn't good description I think that the good description is there were delays in miscommunication and again I wanted the public to hear that and I want to know I want to make sure that any reports come in will detail the the Delays and misinformation and the miscommunications that occurred because again, this is in several weeks. This is in several months This is several years. Thank you.

Thank you Anyone else on the council? Anthony go ahead

Yes thank you. So again as Councilmember Park just said delay delay delay. This is all I've known since I was on the City Council. This is all I've known since I've known about politics in the city. It's delay it's delay tactics. And I think it's just it comes down to one you know questions of incompetence questions of whose loyalty lays where. But four to six weeks that takes us to Election Day. That takes us to Election Day and even maybe takes us all the way to when the mayor steps off the dais. So this was initiated in May of 2024. This has taken very long. I mean, it seems like things that we don't want to solve are never solved, but things that politically want to be solved happen. And that is a concern to me because it seems like it's all selective and it's all one sided. But again, no Kathy Watanabe was interviewed who was there. No Anthony Becker, me, who was there, was never interviewed. None of us. It seems like we're just trying to get rid of this. But again, staff should have been investigating this city leak all the way back when it first happened. But again, you know, when I interviewed the city attorney and I asked a question about, you know, hey, will we look into any Brown Act violations if there ever was? Guess not. Nobody wants to take any responsibility. Nobody wants to look into any information. But yet we're going to take four to six weeks. We know something was done again and it just proved this is selective nature. So but again are we just waiting till the mayor leaves the council or are we just trying to buy time so we think it's just going to go away because something did happen and something needs to be explained. And if there's findings that say nothing ever happened then that was a waste of money and a waste of time because we know somebody did it. And we pretty much know. But again, I'm very disappointed at how long this has taken. I'm glad to see it moving forward. But again, this is a tactic in the city for years. Delay, delay, delay. And people in this city need to wake up and see that.

Thank you very much. All right. City Manager, do you have any other things you want to report? I saw that we got a notice about the Arts & Wine Festival and a lot of information about that. That's this weekend, everyone. Most fun in Santa Clara. 19th and 20th, Saturday and Sunday, Central Park. Be there. See you there. Now, City Attorney, we're going to adjourn to closed session. Do I adjourn this meeting? I have a couple of adjournments, so tell me how this worked.

Yeah, Madam Mayor, I would adjourn this meeting in the manner in which you want with your adjournments. And then we will adjourn to closed session. And thereafter, that meeting will adjourn to the next, you know, council meeting.

So maybe we'll adjourn to closed session because there's a public comment period for that. And then... Adjourn this meeting? Should I do it that way? You could organize it how you want.

If you want the last thing you say to be the heartfelt adjournments, then you can ask people about the closed session item now.

All right. We have two closed session items. One, City Attorney, would you like to read the closed session items, please? Madam Mayor? Yes.

I haven't clicked on to the next thing yet and Council Member Park has .

Council Member Park, what item are you on?

Well, I was on the O30 request. I mean, I had my hand up and it was taken down when the O30 request, but there was a public member that asked about accessibility in meetings. And we were talking about language accessibility. But I was also, again, I went to the Gilroy City Council meeting last night and they have a wonderful system where you can see on the screens, you can see the translation, the transcript, in another language. They have an app that you can scan on the app and you can choose one of many different languages. They use Sentio, I believe. I forgot, but I took screenshots of that as well. And what that does is that provides transcripts for the hearing impaired and not just You know, they have to go to videos to see this, and I realize that having transcripts of what's going on, what goes around this issue of, I think Councilmember Jane has stated many times that action minutes don't actually capture everything that happens in a meeting. We've mentioned that our school board does this, you know, does live Spanish translations since 2020. I saw the live translation going on. I picked several other languages because I was able to do that at the Gilroy meeting. And again, I've talked to the city manager about this and other tools and some tools to help with PRA requests, for example, without any idea of where we are with any of the recommendations or the questions that I've brought up and with any explanation of why we don't have them already. I also thought about this a bit because when I saw them, and again, I took pictures and I took some video of the technologies that Gilroy was using because I said this is exactly something that I was going to bring up, so I'm very glad that somebody else who didn't, you know, knows about this. But even the way that we have rounds of questions and answers affects accessibility. I worked with another public member, and I realized that if a person watching the meeting on video wants to know what the answer to a question is, they have to go back and forth between different points. They have to skip ahead to get the answer because we have all these questions and they have to go skip ahead to get the answer. And if the answer is not given or sometimes forgotten, I mean, you're looking for a long time before you realize that this hasn't been done. And then you have to go back to get context, and the viewer may miss, you know, any changes. For example, there may be an answer given, and then a little bit later on, somebody has to ask the question, well, you didn't really answer this part of the question. And those addendums would get absolutely missed because what we've done is we've said, Well, we're not going to have the questions and the answers in one digestible piece. We're going to have questions and questions and questions and questions, and we may have answers that we tried to do in order, but sometimes we say, well, we're not going to answer the questions in order. I'm going to start from here. I'm going to talk about these issues. And we've made it very difficult for people who are watching our meetings on video to digest, to actually understand what's happened here. And I would like to... an o 30 request to look into accessibility not just for language translation but look into how everything that we do on council including our transcripts for the hearing impaired so that people don't have to watch a video meeting in real time to to see what happened but if we had uh transcripts that people could download official transcripts they could see they could find the things in the meetings that would be very easy um about how we ask questions i would like a A report with some actions on how we can make the meetings much more accessible to people brought back for us. That's my author request.

That's really very large. City Manager? I think it should be focused more. City Manager?

Certainly heard what Council Member Parks said. As far as a 030, I think that there were many parts of the statement, some related to technology, some not, some related to City Council policy. I would ask for additional clarity and a vote should we go there. Also, I would say that staff did note the comments made earlier today about accessibility. I know conversations have already occurred with our IT director about that. We've also had prior conversations as well. I will also note that one of the things that I did ask the IT director to do was to reach out to all of council members and schedule individual one-on-ones to talk about technology and enhancements some of the items that council member Park just mentioned. I know that he has met with one council member, but he is still ready and will do another reach out to give council detailed briefings on where we are with a lot of our technology. I know the city council is aware that our IT department and our contractors have been working at improving some of the basic technology here before we take it to the next step, but certainly understand the concerns with accessibility and we will note those and get back to the city council.

What would you recommend on that? Because he talked about, Council Member Park talked about accessibility and also Council policy on how we conduct the meetings, which was agreed on by the Council. So how would you recommend we move, you know, Absolutely. We deal with this potential 030 because it's all over the place.

I understand, Mayor. Your 030 policy, Council Policy 030, allows for both verbal and written 030s. I will say the verbal 030 portion is meant for short, succinct things that are sort of easily digestible that you can understand and take a vote on. Some of the things that Council Member Park mentioned have been talked about in the Governance Committee, may be more appropriate for the Governance Committee before coming back to the full City Council. Others he may elect to talk about through a 030 or in the priority setting process that we've had some difficulties scheduling, as you know. With that said, because of the complexity of it, I would actually recommend that Councilmember Park write up that 030 and follow the 030 process, which does include a consultation with staff, and then a written 030 if needed.

Understood, and I will do that, but I also want to make a point that many of the items that we put, the reason that this becomes so broad is the pieces that we've discussed have gone, unactioned, and I have heard, I have learned from this executive staff that if it doesn't go into a motion, if it doesn't go into the council, then it may as well not exist. I have had governance ethics meetings that where we have recommendations to bring things forward to the full council, which have been changed when they came to the full council, which is I voted on it in governance and ethics, and then I voted against it on how it was presented to the full council. I have looked at all of these different things. You know, we have looked at—governance and ethics has been delayed. It's been canceled many times. I mean, currently we have a member of the committee who is not here, which is why we have some issues. But if we look throughout the last couple of years, we have been delayed. We have discussions about how the economics and marketing team—I mean, somebody Somebody that came up here said that they had monthly, even bimonthly meetings in the library, and we've asked to have more meetings. We've asked for them to pick up the cadence because when we look at the number of items that the Governance and Ethics Committee has to look at, we have a lot. we haven't even gone over a lot of the items that we brought up last June. And I think, again, we had another public member talk about delays and talking about other things, and I would like to make sure that these items are not delayed, that they are coming before Council in a timely manner, and I will submit this in writing. But, again, the reason that this has become so big is we have chosen not to digest these smaller pieces when they've come before us. Again, the discussions about technologies that we could use, all of these could have been brought up, could have been discussed in other places. To hear that we've got IT people coming to individual council members about issues, that's fine. It would be really nice to know that we are doing this rather than hear about this in a council meeting when other members on council have already been interviewed. This is like communication, communication, communication. We need more transparency here. I will submit this in writing. Thank you.

City Manager, did you have any further comments?

No.

Okay, thank you. All right, we are going to adjourn to closed session for item number nine. City Attorney, would you like to read the closed session item?

Yes, Madam Mayor, I'll read it in. Or should I read it? And then recuse myself. You can, yeah, I can do it, Mayor. Okay, go ahead, please. Yeah, this item is public employee performance evaluation pursuant to government code section 54957B1. It relates to the review performance appraisal process for the city attorney and the city manager. For obvious reasons, the city manager and I won't be participating in that discussion. You do have a staff member from HR who will be providing support on that, and then Sue Ruder from my office, Mayor, will be available remotely to provide legal support if necessary.

Thank you. Thank you for that. Do we have any comments about the closed session? Please come forward.

I don't know if this is the best time, but they're both good folks and I hope they deserve to stay here. We definitely need a stable city manager and city attorney. I think they do a wonderful job. Thank you all. Sometimes I see a little bit of friction up there, but I really do think all of you are good people, so I wish you the best.

Thank you for participating in our meetings, Brian. We appreciate it. Do we have Anthony online? Are you here for closed session? Comments?

Yes, I am. Okay, go ahead, please. I am very glad to see the council's finally moving forward with this. However, there is concern when the mayor continually misled the public and the city council that there was no performance reviews ever being taken place when the individual themselves was the mayor and other council members in line with her that were avoiding having this performance review. That right there is trying to violate the charter. And I think that in itself requires an investigation into two people who intentionally were trying to create a narrative, and secondly, trying to create a situation of a crisis within the charter of not having performance reviews. The fact that we are now having them now is great, but you know, Mayor, if you think I'm wrong, there is written public record between council members trying to initiate this process two years ago. So if you wanna go and say that you're right, no, you're wrong. We have public records that prove that you have that you were intentionally trying not to go to these meetings. And I think it's it's disgraceful. And I think it's also requiring of an investigation into the individuals who trying to prevent this. performance reviews from even happening. And I think that right there is a concern about ethics and public trust. So I hope the council looks into this because people should not be forcing things like this or trying to avoid topics because they feel it's politically inconvenient or it's politically convenient for themselves. So I hope that the council takes some action. Glad to see your performance reviews moving forward. But again, the public records do state we were trying to do this two years ago, Mayor, and you need to apologize to the public and the council. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Is there anyone else? No. All right. I have two adjournments for this evening Before I adjourn the regular council meeting to closed session I'd like to ask That we adjourn this September 15 2026 meeting in memory of Frank L D'Souza and Frank William Wright Frank L. D'Souza, a longtime Santa Clara resident, passed away on September 7, 2026, at the age of 81. Frank was a devoted son, husband, father, and grandfather. He worked hard throughout his life and was known for cooking for his family and welcoming anyone to the table. He was a generous person who would give the shirt off his back to help others in need. Frank will be remembered for his kindness, dedication to his loved ones, and the care that he extended to others. His legacy will live on through the memories and love shared by those whose lives he touched. I'll also be adjourning tonight's meeting in memory of Frank William Wright, Frank William Wright was born on June 13, 1946, in San Jose, California, and passed away peacefully at his home in Eagle, Idaho, on August 27, 2026, at the age of 80. Frank was a devoted husband, father, grandfather, and friend. He was a beloved high school biology teacher, NPE teacher for 36 years and a baseball coach for 42 years. During those years, Frank also taught and coached at Bookser High School in Santa Clara. Frank was a minor league baseball player who was drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 1969. His legacy will live on through his wife, Gail, his son, Matt, his daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Alex, his grandson, Roman, sister, Jean, and nieces, Kathy and Carol. So I'll be adjourning tonight's memory in favor of Frank L. D'Souza and Frank William Wright. Meeting adjourned to closed session.