City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

GOOD EVENING AND WELCOME TO OUR CITY COUNCIL MEETING OF JUNE 17TH. I DON'T WANT TO GO TOO FAR HERE. THIS IS OUR REGULAR MEETING. WE'VE GOT SOME FEEDBACK. Test again. Okay, that sounds good. Everybody okay? All right. Nothing like feedback. Let's see. So where was I? I want to advise everyone that this meeting is being recorded, and the recording will be made available on the city website. I'd like you all to please stand, join me, remove your hats, place your hand over your heart, and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. 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. Thank you. Britt, will you please proceed with the roll call?

Members of the public may participate in this meeting in person at the location listed on the agenda or via remote attendance using the information listed on the agenda. Public attendees participating remotely are automatically muted and are not viewable on camera. I will now call the roll. Council Member Aftab?

Present.

Fitzsimmons? Present. Zhao?

Present.

Vice Mayor Walia?

Present.

Mayor Page?

Present.

We have a quorum, and the agenda was posted on June 11th.

Thank you very much. The City Council held closed sessions on June 5th and 6th, 2026, and there was no reportable action from those meetings. Early this evening, we held a closed session on public employment and conference with labor negotiators, and there's also no reportable action from that, sorry to say. We also had a study session a little while ago about climate resilience districts, and I was wondering if our acting city manager would give us a A little summary of what we discussed.

Sure. Thank you, Mayor. So tonight we talked about CRDs, as the Mayor mentioned, as Climate Resilience Districts. And this is relatively a new financing tool that, you know, essentially could be worth exploring for the city of Saratoga. CRDs were authorized by the state through Senate Bill 852, and they're a specialized form of an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District. Essentially, they are designed to help local governments fund climate resilience, adaptation, and mitigation projects such as wildfire preparedness, vegetation management, emergency response infrastructure, stormwater improvements, drought resilience, and other climate-related initiatives. So we had a lot of discussion, just really what is a CRD? How is it formed? One of the primary objectives is to have a CRD that is really resident-focused and a board that would have resident input on what would be needed. We did run out of time a little bit, and the council felt as though they needed some more time to continue researching this. So we will, at a later date, after staff gets through, some bigger initiatives will come back. That was determined at the end of the meeting to come back to discuss more of what perhaps a resolution of intent to form a CRD would look like. So that was essentially what we discussed in the study session.

Thank you very much. The next item is oral communications on non-agendized items. And this is the part of the meeting where we invite anyone, any member of the public, to come forward here in the theater. I'm sorry, the council chambers to speak on any item that is not on tonight's agenda. Remote attendees, the point for oral communications on non-agendized items is closer to the end of our meeting for you remote attendees. So if there's anyone in the chambers today that would like to come up and speak on a non-agendized item, now's the time. No slips, I take it, Britt. Okay, seeing no one rushing the stage, we will close the oral communications on non-agendized items portion of the meeting. Next up, we have some announcements. I have a few announcements for the public. Coffee with the Mayor. Please join me at Sue's Gallery Cafe this Friday, June 19th, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., or thereabouts. It's a great opportunity to share your questions and thoughts with me and connect with fellow residents in an informal setting. We hope that you come and enjoy some coffee, conversation, and, of course, the great community that we are. Let's hike. Join the city's Parks and Recreation Commission and our Youth Commission on Saturday, June the 20th at 8 a.m. to hike the Stevens Creek County Park and the Fremont Older Open Space Preserve. Hikers should meet at the parking lot. or the parking location, I guess it is, at 11401 Stevens Canyon Drive in Cupertino by 7.50 a.m. The 5.4-mile Tony Look Trail to Coyote Ridge to Lookout Loop offers a moderately challenging terrain with stunning views taking approximately three hours to complete. This is a great opportunity to enjoy nature, get some exercise, and connect with fellow outdoor enthusiasts today. in our beautiful Saratoga community. Registration and the liability waiver are available on the city website. Saratoga election orientation. This is an election year, in case you hadn't known that. In November, there'll be an election for three seats on the Saratoga City Council. But if you're thinking about running, this is a chance for prospective candidates to attend the 2026 election orientation. It's Monday, June 26th from 6 to 7.30 p.m. in the Linda Callen Conference Room over in Saratoga City Hall near the City Manager's Office. The orientation will provide an overview of the election process, including eligibility requirements, nomination papers, deadlines, and other important information for those considering to run for office. Learn more about Saratoga's elections at saratoga.ca.us slash election. Are there any council members who have any announcements? Seeing no one. Next up, we have a ceremonial item. This is the recognition of community members through the Building Communities One Neighborhood at a Time program. I'd like to invite Michael Bustamante, Jim Cargill, Ben Dubin, Frank Lazzaroni, Diane Porter, and Tom Sloan to please join the city council up here on stage with me. All right, I'd like to welcome you all here. Let me squeeze in here somewhere, kind of in the middle. Why don't I get here between you two guys? Oh good, I look tall. Sorry, couldn't help it. I'm wearing flat shoes today. I don't normally wear heels, so it's not a big deal. When I became mayor, when I was elected by my peers here, I said that neighborhoods are the foundation of our community, and I truly believe that. And so we invited people to nominate people in their neighborhoods for good things that they've done, for things that they've done to retain the neighborhood quality. And so we have some recipients of commendations here. And I'm going to read a little bit about each one. So bear with me for a few minutes. And I'd make them all read it, but then they'd turn blush and they'd get all embarrassed and stuff. So I'm going to do it. Michael Bustamante. Raise your hand and wave, Michael. There you go. Nice to see you. Has been a leader on McFarland Avenue for decades. It's okay I said that, right? Okay. Sorry, we should have asked first, I guess. There you go. From advocating for neighborhood traffic improvements to organizing neighborhood gatherings and creating spaces for neighbors to connect, including a front yard bocce court, Michael has helped build a strong sense of community and neighborhood pride. And we have a certificate for you, Michael. Should be the first one if I did my job right. There you go. Thank you. And we're going to get back and we'll have a chance to commiserate a little. Jim Cargill. Take a bow, Jim. There you are. Was recognized for his exceptional service and leadership. He reestablished Neighborhood Watch, helped launch the Firewise community in his neighborhood, organizes neighborhood events, supports emergency preparedness, and consistently steps up to help neighbors and strengthen community resilience. Thank you, Jim.

Ben Dubin.

Oh, you can hand it to him.

You're Ben, right? I thought so. Thank you, Ben.

Ben was nominated for his quick action during a late night landscape fire. This is really cool. After noticing a fire while walking nearby, he alerted the homeowners, took immediate action, called the fire department, helping to prevent this fire from spreading. So we thank you very much for that. Gosh only knows what would have happened if you hadn't been there. Frank Lazzaroni. Say hi, Frank. There you go. Frank was recognized for every day the way that he supports those around him, quietly helping maintain shared spaces and consistently stepping up to help neighbors without even being asked. Thank you very much, Frank. Diane Porter. Must be you. I kind of figured that, huh? I knew that. And it's good to see you, Diane. Diane was nominated for bringing neighbors together as the Neighborhood Watch representative for the Saratoga Vista Block and organizer of an annual neighborhood block party. Am I going to get invited? Okay, cool. I always like that. Her efforts helped create a better bond and strong neighborhood connections. And Tom Sloan. Where's Tommy? There you are. Tom grew a mustache. There you go. Tom has been described as the kind of neighbor that everyone hopes to have. For decades, he's built connections through friendliness, willingness to share his knowledge, and readiness to help others. When a fallen tree blocked the neighbor's driveway, Tom and his son stepped in to help clear it. So Tom, thank you. So I want to personally thank each and every one of you very much. Would you all give them a real big round of applause? And then, do we have anyone here to take a photo tonight? Oh, okay. Oh, there's Jocelyn. Thank you. So we'll take a photo, if everybody can squeeze in a little bit. Hold up your award. Thank you very much. And we have a parting gift for you. So if you'd all exit the stage right. and we're going to have a little parting gift for you. Thank you so much. Jim? All right, so if there's any member of the public that would like to make a public comment on the awards that we just made, now is the time to do that. That could be remote also, if there's anyone. I don't see anyone. Is there anybody online? I can't see them, Britt. OK, thanks. OK. Next up is our consent calendar. The consent calendar consists of items that are typically routine and not controversial, although that does change from time to time. And so what we do is we'd ask if any council member would like to pull an item. And we do have an opportunity for members of the public to come up and make a comment or request that an item be pulled. So does any council member like to pull an item? Okay. We can do that after the motion. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Is there any member of the public that would like to make a request?

I do have one speaker slip.

Oh, okay. Excellent.

Okay. Bill Dalton.

Bill Dalton. Come on up.

I'D LIKE TO REQUEST THAT ITEM 1.7 BE PULLED FOR DISCUSSION AND HOPEFULLY THE $40,000 ALLOCATION FOR A COSTCO EL PASEO TRAFFIC STUDY IS DELETED. THIS STUDY WAS EXTENSIVELY DISCUSSED AT THE 520 MEETING. HERE'S WHAT I HEARD IN SUPPORT OF THIS EXPENDITURE. MAYBE SARATOGA WILL GET A GRANT FOR TRAFFIC MITIGATION WITH THIS DATA. I say fat chance for that. It's more likely that Elon Musk will be living on Mars before that happens. Supposedly, the baseline data will help design mitigation once the problem occurs. No one can explain how it helps. Baseline data will be used to deal with resident perception about how much traffic increased. I ask, would any member of the council pay for a plumbing survey of your home without an explanation of what it's going to get you? Does Saratoga... have any limit for when we do traffic mitigation? In other words, at what volume do we consider doing traffic mitigation? Do we add a speed bump because three people came and complained about traffic in their neighborhood, as was hypothesized at the 520 meeting? Should Saratoga spend $40,000 to deal with perceptions about traffic increase? At every meeting, I hear that Saratoga doesn't have enough funds. Do you really expect that voters will approve any tax increase when you keep funding new expenditures which have no use, which clearly have no use? Please remove this study from the budget. Thank you.

Thank you, Bill. I see a hand on the line.

Right. Are there any other speakers in the theater? Okay. Go to remote. Glenda.

Hi. Thank you. Tonight I would like to, I'm actually, my comments are also have to do with the budget, approving the budget. I would like to clarify the comments that I submitted earlier. regarding this budget, I really propose, I recommend that the city consider priorities because we don't have enough money to cover everything. And I'm not requesting the city to stop allocating all funds to parks and trails, but why can't we reduce it? The city is responsible for safety on the trails, but they're also responsible for safety on streets. And yet we can't seem to find the funds for projects on Pierce road, for example. Um, and while the city may have received a grant for the quarry park walkway, it still looks to me based on what I see in the budget, the city is funding about 500 K for this project. And yes, it's funding that was, it's been carried forward a couple of years, but still. We don't need this part. We don't need this. This is not a priority. We could just stop that. That's 500K, 200, 500K, something. I just think we need to rethink our priorities. We are in a very constrained fiscal environment, and we must rethink what our priorities are. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I see no more speakers, so we'll close the public comment period and bring it back to council for any requests to pull an item. Seeing none, do we have a, yeah?

Comments or?

Well, motion first and then, well, typically, I mean, we can make comments if you want.

All right, I'd like to make a, actually a question for the city attorney. Let's see, because we have to adopt this whole budget, In case I would like to see that the 48K traffic study for Costco and Purcell development to be removed, this is the only item that I disagree in the budget. How do I vote on this budget?

You would make a motion to make that change?

Well, first we'd have to pull the item.

Yes, we have to pull the item.

So before we get there, if you want to pull the item. Okay, I'll pull the item. Okay. Okay. So 1.7 is pulled from the consent calendar. Do we have any other items like to be pulled or a motion?

I'll move to, on all the other items, 1.1 to 1.10 with the exception of 1.7.

Do we have a second? Second. Thank you, Cookie. I have a motion and a second on items excluding item 1.7. All in favor, please say. I have a comment on that. Oh, you have a comment now. Sure.

Thank you. So I'd like to comment on item number 1.3. In the interest of time, I did not want to pull it. So this is the final map approval item for the Williamson Act cancellation. And as I said, the final map approval for the nine lots located at 18500 to 18520 Marshall Lane. And essentially this item is only saying that the applicant has complied with the conditions of approval laid out in the project. And the city is, to my understanding, legally required to approve the final map at this point. I want to clarify that I opposed this project. I voted against it when it came to council a few years ago. I am supporting the final map approval tonight because that is what we need to do. That does not mean that I agree with the project, just like I did not agree with the project at the time it came to council and I voted against it. I just wanted to make that statement out there. And yes, I will be voting for the final map approval tonight.

Thank you. Any other comments? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries 5-0-0. Item 1.7.

Thank you, Mayor. My question is, I agree with everything else on the 2026-2027 budget, except I disagree with the $40,000 on the capital improvement project for the traffic study for Costco and El Paso development. So how should I vote for that? I mean, I have nothing against the rest of the budget.

Richard? So you could simply vote no on the budget, or you could propose an amendment to the budget to take that out and see what happens with that motion and then make a decision on whether you want to vote for the budget as a whole.

All right. Then I'll make a motion to approve the budget with removing the CIP project on the traffic study for Costco and AlphaCell development for the $40,000 from the general fund.

Do we have a second?

I can second that.

Okay. Discussion?

Yeah, sure. I'll jump in. I recognize sometimes there is process understanding as well here. What I would say is the Costco project is going to be one of the most impactful things for Saratoga over the next decade. It's going to go in Prospect at Lawrence. And it's going to mean that the amount of traffic on Prospect, on Lawrence, down Saratoga Avenue, down Quito, and all the corresponding neighborhoods is going to increase dramatically. The EIR estimated that there's going to be a 9 and 1 half times increase in terms of the number of shopping trips that will be taking place in the area. Generally, so I served five years in the Traffic Safety Commission prior to me being on the City Council. And one thing we would do is when residents would have the opportunity to come and discuss an item in a neighborhood of concern. And the thing that we always do is we have the baseline data available, both from speed surveys, but then also from specific ad hoc requests from residents to be able to go out and say, hey, is there actually a speeding problem here or not? The reason why that's important is you need that data to be able to then make decisions in a couple of ways. Decisions in terms of where are we seeing changes in traffic patterns? Are we actually seeing speeding? If someone's seeing speeding, there's always going to be some people driving a certain speed and some people driving way beyond the speed limit. Do we need to make those changes accordingly? And so are people actually going 40 miles per hour in a 25 all the time? Or are people generally going 25 and the one resident who's complaining is just complaining about one car they see every once in a while? That way we can sort of use the data to make that decision. The other perspective on this is that I've had several conversations at the county and with our neighboring cities about us coming together, recognizing that the Costco going in here is going to have a material impact. And the way in which we generally tend to approach things like this at a local and then at a state level is that when you have a study in place, you can then use that study to apply for grant funding to help you fund improvements. So especially when we as a city are in a situation where we're considering budget cuts, a dire fiscal situation. And we can use this study as a baseline to then partner with other jurisdictions to now go and get additional grant funding at a regional level. Because Lawrence Expressway intersects through there, there actually are a number of county and other local jurisdictions that are impacted by this. I RECOGNIZED THE REST OF MY COUNCILMEMBERS WERE PRESENT, INCLUDING YUJIAN, BUT ACTUALLY OUR NEIGHBORING DISTRICT ONE, SAN JOSE, ROSEMARY CAMEY, SHE PUT TOGETHER A STUDY GROUP FOR A YEAR IN 2023 THAT MET, I WANT TO SAY PROBABLY AT LEAST A DOZEN TIMES, AS WELL AS WITH with San Jose State and San Jose Department of Transportation professionals to actually come together and say, what are actual recommendations we can make that are going to improve the overall safety of this area, given all the development that's happening? There isn't just a Costco in there. There's a Whole Foods. There's a whole lot of new development. And this area has been designated an urban village by San Jose. So we had actually, when it came to this project, this is why we discussed having a traffic study here, to actually explore and be even more proactive. We tend to be reactive, which tends to say, hey, now there is this huge influx of traffic here. What do we do about it? Given we know that we're going to see a massive change to this area, we're taking a proactive measure to recognize that the amount of traffic and car movement in the area is going to change. So we need to make some changes accordingly. especially in an area where there are a number of schools. And so I think that the critical thing, and by the way, I think we're going to be talking about a potential bus pilot as well, where a lot more students will actually be taking the bus to school from intersections that are going to be impacted by this Costco. So there's going to be a lot of areas that are impacted here. At the same time, I fundamentally believe in compromise and working with my fellow council members on that. When this first came in front of the council, the proposal was for $100,000. And we actually then moved it down to $40,000, given our budget constraints, to make it more reasonable. So for that reason, I continue to be in favor of this. I hope my fellow council members are. And if you have any more questions, Council Member Zhao, please let me know.

Yeah, I did. Just one comment real quick, and I totally understand where we're coming from, but the problem with we funding the study, the current study pattern, I'd rather use this money to actually help us to mitigate any problems when all those developments come into City of San Jose. When we find that there's a If there's a problem, we should use that money to solve the problem instead of to study right now. Right now, when there's no development, yes, we understand the baseline. But what are we going to do once the traffic? We all know the traffic is going to get increased by how many times? I don't know. But with all the development, Costco, TNT supermarket, Whole Foods, and a lot of urban village Happening next a couple ten years and I think it's important we use the money where it should be spent and just do a pure consultant study spending Very constrained budget we have right now. I think it's just for me. I feel it's a waste of taxpayers money and if we have you know, there's something that we can do about with this study, I would be in support of. But just with the study, there's nothing we're going to do with the data we're going to gather. Thank you.

Can I give a counterargument to that? So actually, the whole intent actually is, and I think it's absolutely a reasonable argument to say, hey, let's, instead of spending this $40,000 on a study, put it directly into concrete, to put it directly into the road. I think that's what you're talking about, right? The way I think about this, and just thinking about how things get done at the state level and the federal level, is oftentimes you need a validated study from a third party professional to be able to go and get additional grant funding. And the idea behind this $40,000 is, yes, we can put that $40,000 in here, but we can use this $40,000. San Jose can put in theirs. The county can put in a couple hundred thousand. And we can use that to develop a better study and use that to get several million dollars. That's really the intent here. So the idea is to actually turn this $40,000 into multiples of that as opposed to just putting it in here. But I understand there's a version of doing it just putting $40,000 in or using that $40,000 and turn it into more. That's been my argument and my thinking.

Right. Just last time when we discussed this item, last time I asked, you know, , our public work director, is any potential grant that we can apply? The answer was no.

Right. And I remember I was at the, I wasn't at the 520 meeting. If you recall, I wasn't present. I was out of the country at the moment. But I remember we discussed this multiple times in terms of including at the January budget meeting as well. And at that point, there are times where staff is directly aware of grants and directly applies for them, including at the VTA or at the state level. And that is the par for the course. I think a really critical part of us as elected officials is going and advocating on behalf of our residents to elected officials, to our counterparts in other jurisdictions and saying, hey, how can we work together to get more funding for the city? And so that's what's actually happened here. I've actually gone and had conversations with elected officials at the state and at the local level to say, hey, we have this upcoming problem. We need help. And what they've said to me is, we need a study in place for you to be able to get more grant funding and for us to be able to help you out. So I just want to give you that context because I recognize I wasn't present at that 520 meeting when you asked that question.

By the way, I did ask, I'm on the VTA policy advisory committee. I actually asked, is there any possibility with the, you know, the study that we get today in the future when we see the traffic is going to get worse with the neighboring cities development is any chance that we can actually apply for some kind of grant for the traffic calming or anything that we can do? I didn't get a positive answer. That's why I'm kind of opposing this study for spending the $40,000. If there's a potential that I know with this study we can actually get a potential funding to solve future problems, I would be in favor of it.

And I think from that perspective, I think the VTA, for example, is one source. And as we've discussed at length many times in our council meetings, Saratoga has historically struggled to get grants from the VTA. They have their own criteria for when it comes to applying grants, usually from an equity perspective that Saratoga ends up not qualifying for, very understandably. There are other means of doing this. So, for example, a couple of years, Saratoga got a $1.5 million grant grant. FROM THE STATE TO DO SOME IMPROVEMENTS AROUND JOE'S TRAIL AND THE RAILROADS, RIGHT? SO THERE ACTUALLY ARE STATE RESOURCES THAT WE CAN GO ON THE BACK OF HAVING A STUDY LIKE THIS, AND IT WAS IN CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR STATE ASSOCIATION MEMBERS OFFICE AND OUR SUPERVISOR THAT WOULD INFORM, AGAIN, JUST TO GIVE THE FULL CONTEXT. I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND YOU DON'T WANT TO SUPPORT IT. NOT A PROBLEM AT ALL.

THANK YOU.

YEAH.

ANYBODY ELSE? TINA COOKIE? TINA? Well, we've got a motion on the table, so unless somebody wants to make a second motion. There was a second, right? There was a second.

No, I only seconded her motion so that we can have a discussion. There was no second motion.

Okay. Yeah, we just have a second of Ian's motion to approve the budget without the $40,000. Right. I concur with what Bilal has said. If we don't have a baseline, then as our Director of Public Works explained to us, When the community comes forward, and they typically go to traffic safety, and we've allocated a bunch of money to them, then they will say, oh, you know, there's a bunch of traffic on my street. They'll go out. They'll look. They'll do a study. Or they'll watch it. They'll see trucks. They'll see cars. They'll see whatever. And then they'll go put in a speed bump. And then they find out that it wasn't there. You find that we might have a situation like you've got at the corner of Cox and Glenbrae, where some work was done and then all of a sudden another bunch of money had to be spent to take it out. I would prefer we have the baseline so we absolutely can answer the requirements, the requests from the community, and we'll have something behind it. Oh my gosh, you're right. You're getting 40% more cars on your street. We need to do something. Versus it's only 4%. That makes a difference. Without the baseline, we can't do that. So we will go and spend money, and it may not be this council, but it'll be some council five years in the future, and they'll be spending a lot of money that the city really can't afford to spend then either. So I'd rather spend the $40,000 on the study to have that baseline and be able to do it right the first time. Tina.

Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate the discussion, the back and forth, and you have heard my comments. I have struggled with this one multiple times. We all have deep concerns about the fiscal situation for the city. We are really, really strained. When I look at it now, based on the comments that Council Member Aftab just made, $40,000 is $40,000. It's a lot of money, and yet the fact that it's going to impact a huge percentage of our population, the traffic coming from Costco and all the development around El Paseo, I'm willing to say, okay, let's... Getting the baseline may open up the situation, especially the way you expressed it's not the $40,000 study, but a more comprehensive study when we add money from the other neighboring jurisdictions. So with that in mind, I would support keeping that in place. I have concerns. I have expressed concerns. But I think with that, I'm open to keeping that in place in the budget. Thank you.

Thank you. OK. All in favor of the motion, which is to approve the budget without the $40,000 study, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Opposed.

Opposed.

Opposed. Any abstentions? None. So the motion fails 1-4-0. Do we have another motion?

I'll motion to approve the budget item 1.7 as currently presented.

Okay, do we have a second? Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Opposed. Any abstentions? Motion carries 4-1-0. Thank you very much. Mostly non-contentious, but sometimes. Because without proper discussion, we don't get through the thought that we really need to have happen. OK, so next up is our public hearings. First public hearing is a public hearing regarding our brush abatement program. Do we have a staff report?

Good evening, Mayor Page, Councilmember, Vice Mayor Walia, and Councilmembers. My name is Nathan Sagastumi. I'm the Code Compliance Officer with the Community Development Department. Tonight, I will be presenting the staff report for the public hearing regarding the 2026 Brush Abatement Program. The City of Saratoga partnered with the Santa Clara County Fire Department to implement the Brush Abatement Program. This program focuses on reducing wildfire risk within our very high, high, and moderate severity zones by identifying hazardous vegetation, ladder fuels, and other conditions that can increase the risk of fire spreading to homes or neighboring properties. It's important to note that the brush abatement program is separate from the county weed abatement program. While the County Weed Abatement Program addresses weeds, dry grasses, and general vegetation community-wide, our Brush Abatement Program specifically focuses on defensible space, fuel reduction around developed properties in the Hillside and WUI areas. Santa Clara County Fire is responsible for inspections and enforcement within this program, and if property owners do not comply, Those cases can be later referred to the County Weed Abatement Program for the next year's cycle. On May 20, 2026, the City Council adopted a resolution declaring its intent to identify certain properties as containing hazardous brush and vegetation and set tonight as the date for the required public hearing. At that time, four properties were either noncompliant or pending final inspection. Since then, Santa Clara County Fire Department conducted follow-up inspections. As of June 10, 2026, all four properties have achieved full compliance with the Brush Abatement Program requirements. Even though all properties are now compliant, holding this public hearing remains an essential step. It ensures that affected property owners or any interested members of the public have the opportunity to provide comments, objections, or additional information before the council considers finalizing the annual nuisance abatement process. Because all previously identified properties have corrected these hazardous conditions, no properties will be referred to the County Weed Abatement Program, and no further abatement actions are anticipated for the 2026 inspection cycle. In conclusion, the annual brush abatement program continues to play a key role in the City's wildfire preparedness efforts and risk reduction strategy in our Hillside and WUI neighborhoods. With all properties now compliant, tonight's hearing completes the City's required process FOR THE 2026 BRUSH ABATEMENT PROGRAM. THAT CONCLUDES MY STAFF REPORT. I'M AVAILABLE FOR ANY QUESTIONS AT THIS TIME. THANK YOU.

THANK YOU, NEET. ANY QUESTIONS? SEEING NONE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. WE'LL OPEN THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD. BRITT?

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL ON THIS ITEM, YOU'RE ATTENDING THE MEETING IN PERSON. NOW IS THE TIME TO APPROACH THE PODIUM. IF YOU'RE ATTENDING VIA ZOOM, NOW IS THE TIME TO RAISE YOUR HAND. Mayor, I see no speakers.

I see no speakers. We'll close the public comment period and bring it back to the council. Any comments? I'm just happy to see that everybody followed the directions and got it done. I can tell you the last council I was on, it wasn't always that way, and it got very contentious. So happy to see that. So great job. Thank you. All right. Next item is our fee schedule amendment, the city arborist plan check fee. Do we have a staff report? I mean, I know we do. I invite you to come down and give this.

Good evening, Mayor Page, Council Members. Tonight I'll be talking about a fee schedule change, changing the Arborist Review deposit on building permits to a flat rate. The Community Development Department continues to look at process improvements that will expedite issuing permits. In January of 2026, the Building and Planning Departments began concurrent reviews under building permits for all projects that do not require a planning entitlement. These are small projects such as small additions, ADUs, and pools. These projects can still require an arborist review if the proposed work is within five feet of the canopy of a protected tree. Under the current process, the applicant establishes a deposit account with the city. The city charges hourly for review of the project and deducts the time charges from the deposit account. I'm unable to review a project until the applicant has established their arborist deposit account and submitted a deposit agreement form permitting the use of these funds. This causes unnecessary delays in the acceptance of the project review. This proposed change to fee schedule will replace the arborist deposit account with a flat rate for projects that do not require a planning entitlement. Projects that do require a planning entitlement vary widely in scope and complexity from single family homes to multiple building developments. It will still be processed utilizing an arborist deposit account. Modifying the fee schedule to charge a standard flat rate for arborist review of building plans will streamline the process more for residents, eliminate the need to execute a deposit agreement, and eliminate the need to refund unspent deposit funds. The Planning Division already charges flat rates for most projects, so the proposed change is consistent with the City's current practices. That concludes my staff report, and I'm free to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you. Any questions? Belal? Thank you for the presentation. So just to clarify right now, basically, if I come in, I open up an account, essentially, a deposit account, and it's uncertain how much I'll be paying. There ends up being a lot of back and forth. Basically, what we're saying is we'll go from that to having a flat fee.

Yes, but also when someone submits a building permit, they may not know they need an arborist review. So they submit for the building permit, and then I look at it and say, oh, you need an arborist review. And then I can't really review their plans until they've come back to the city, added additional funds, and signed an additional form. And then I can look at their project and give them comments. And by then, they may have already been cleared by other departments. So we really want to, I want to jump on this when they submit, get them their comments they need, get them their approval they need as quickly as possible.

So this provides clarity and helps it go faster for them.

Correct.

There we go. Thank you. Tina?

Follow-up to that. Thank you first for clarifying the building permits and the planning entitlement for residents to understand the difference, what we are doing here, what you are proposing. So to have the follow-up question to Bilal's question, that could save how many days of delay and the surprise element for residents who may be adding 500 square feet to their current building and not realizing they need this. Roughly how many days could that be?

It's going to save at least one review period, which is 15 days. But we had an applicant recently who lost four months in their review because they didn't know they needed to pay that fee up front. That's actually why I'm here today, because I don't want that to happen to another applicant.

Four months, and the angst, and the surprise, and the you didn't tell me earlier kind of a thing. Because, yeah.

Their contractor got the email saying these need to be paid, but then that wasn't forwarded on to the homeowner, and they weren't aware. And so there was a miscommunication on that particular permit. And I would like for applicants to be able to move forward in this process without something like that hitch where they need to make a fee and submit a form.

So if this were to be approved by council tonight, and if somebody comes to the planning counter asking for a building permit, or building counter actually asking for a building permit, Where would it say right at the top that you need to pay this fee and then this takes care of the arborist review? Would it be very clear?

It's in their checklist whether they need an arborist review, so they need to be aware whether or not there are trees within five feet of the project. So hopefully they're aware those trees are there and they submit what they need to submit up front and then their project is reviewed. If they don't submit their arborist report with their project and I have to let them know they need that, there might be a small delay while they're trying to get that arborist report together, but I've already given them a full list of everything they need.

So up front on the checklist, there will be a line which draws their attention. Okay. I just wanted to make that very clear because that element of surprise can cause a lot of angst and why did we? And also this way the staff time would be saved. Exactly. Thank you.

Anybody else? One question for me. So this is typically for smaller type projects where people – THEY'RE DOING A SMALL REMODEL OR SOMETHING OR ADDING A ROOM. THEY DON'T HAVE TO GO THROUGH PLANNING. MAYBE YOU CAN EXPLAIN HOW THE PROCESS WORKS. I GOT AN ARCHITECT OR A BUILDER AND HE'S LIKE, YEAH, I CAN ADD A NEW BATHROOM FOR YOU, WHICH MY WIFE WOULD LOVE. HERE'S HOW YOU DO IT. I GET THAT PLAN AND I COME DOWN AND I GO SEE THE BUILDING PERMIT GUY AND I SAY, HEY, I'VE GOT THESE PLANS. I'D LIKE A PERMIT.

So in January, the planning department moved all reviews that would have been over-the-counter or technical reviews, these quicker reviews, we moved those straight into the building permit. So now when they submit for their building permit, they're also submitting for their planning review. And so these are happening at the same time rather than going through planning and then taking that approval and taking it over to the building counter and getting their approval there. So these things can happen together.

Okay, so would I walk away from that bringing in my plan with a building permit or... I'll come back in two days when we've done... whatever review has to happen.

So the initial review is 15 days for all of the reviewers to look at that project. So they're going to planning. FIRE may take longer than that. They have a lot of reviews to do. They may or may not go to GEO. And then the building will also review them for building compliance. So there's a lot of people that need to look at this. So 15 days is actually a really short amount of time for all the people that need to get their eyes on the plans.

Gotcha. And how about if I'm, say I have a two acre parcel up in the hillsides. I have lots of trees and I know that where I'm going to build this, it's going to do that. It may take. and certainly I know if the average is five and a half hours or something that you spend, it might take 10 or 20 hours. Do we just, 1,500 is all we need to charge? How are we going to do that?

Well, it's not dependent on how big your property is. If you have a big two-acre property. But if your project is small, so you're putting an 800-square-foot ADU on that property, it's not typically that different than putting an ADU on a smaller parcel. So it's the project size, not the property size.

Gotcha. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Anybody else? Okay. Thanks very much, Christina.

You're welcome.

We'll now open up the public comment period. Anybody that would like to make a comment on this item, we'll listen to Britt.

If you would like to address the City Council on this item, you're attending the meeting in person, now's the time to approach the podium. If you're attending the meeting via Zoom, now's the time to raise your hand. Mayor, I see no speakers.

Okay. So we'll close the public comment period and bring it back to Council.

I JUST WANT TO THANK STAFF FOR BRINGING THIS FORWARD. I BELIEVE THIS FEE SCHEDULE AMENDMENT DEFINITELY IS A PRACTICAL PROCESS IMPROVEMENT THAT WILL MAKE THINGS EASIER FOR RESIDENTS WHILE ALSO IMPROVING ADMINISTRATIVE EFFICIENCY FOR THE CITY. So I want to thank you for doing that, and this is exactly the type of customer service improvement that our residents appreciate. So I just want to thank you. I'm in full support, and I'm ready to make a motion to adopt the resolution approving the amendment to the city's fee schedule for fiscal year 2026-2027, effective July 1st, 2026.

I second the motion for the reasons as stated by my colleague. Thank you, Christina. Thank you, CDT.

Thank you. Any comments? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries 5-0-0. Thank you very much. Next item is... Landscape and Lighting Assessment District, LLA 1, public hearing. This is the approval of the engineer's report and the confirmation of assessments for fiscal year 26 to 27. Hi, John. Hey, how you doing?

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. The recommended action for this item is to conduct the public hearing, consider public comments, and adopt the resolution ordering improvements and confirming the diagram and assessments for fiscal year 26-27. AT ITS DECEMBER 3, 2025 MEETING, THE CITY COUNCIL ADOPTED A RESOLUTION DECLARING ITS INTENT TO ORDER THE LEVY AND A COLLECTION OF ASSESSMENTS OF THE CITY'S LANDSCAPING LIGHTING DISTRICT FOR FISCAL YEAR 26-27 AND CALLING FOR A PUBLIC HEARING ON THE MATTER FOR TONIGHT, JUNE 17, 2026. SO IT ATTACHES THE FINAL RESOLUTION REQUIRED TO COMPLETE THE RENEWAL OF THE DISTRICT FOR THE UPCOMING FISCAL YEAR The resolution approves and appropriates the energy error, confirms the assessment for the upcoming fiscal year. And if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Do we have any questions?

Yeah.

Thank you, John, for your report. We did receive an email from our resident regarding the fees they paid for LPR and cameras. So do you think the county will refund them if... No, the city would. City would. Okay, so how would that be done and when will it be done?

Depends on what happens with the sheriff or the public safety contract. That's what we're waiting for at this point. So if, for example, if the sheriff gets the contract, then we'll have to look for another provider, which wouldn't take much. Let's say in a month's time, you decide that you're going with the sheriff. We go get another provider. And within the next couple of months, we could have another provider providing the service. If you go with Los Gatos, then we could continue using Flock. So that's kind of where we're at. That's why we haven't really kind of keeping everything at status quo right now, because we really don't have a decision point at this time. I mean, there's always options, of course, but that's the nuts and bolts of it.

THAT WOULD BE GREAT. I THINK THAT WOULD BE GREAT IF WE CAN SEND THIS MESSAGE TO OUR RESIDENTS WHO ARE CONSTANTLY ASKING US ABOUT THE ALPR CAMERA FUNDS.

HOPEFULLY THEY'RE LISTENING.

THANK YOU.

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? OKAY. THANKS, JOHN. AT THIS POINT, I'D LIKE TO OPEN THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD. And anyone who'd like to speak on this item, please come forward. Or if you're attending remotely, raise your virtual hand. I see no speakers. So we will close the public comment period and bring it back to council. Discussion or motion?

I'll move to adopt the resolution ordering the improvements and confirming the diagram and assessments for 26-27. I second.

We have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? So the motion carries 5-0-0. Thank you very much. Next up is general business item number 3.1. This is our fiscal year 26-27 community event grant program competitive allocations. Hi, Jocelyn.

Hi. Good evening, Mayor Page, Vice Mayor Walia, and council members. My name is Jocelyn Bin, and I'm the Administrative Analyst with the City Manager's Department. TONIGHT I'LL BE PRESENTING ON THE COMPETITIVE EVENT GRANT ALLOCATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 26-27. BEFORE I GET INTO MY STAFF REPORT, I'D LIKE TO INVITE OUR EVENT GRANT FOLKS UP TO THE FRONT AS YOU'LL BE PRESENTING SOON. SO IF YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR WAY AND SIT HERE, THAT WOULD BE PERFECT. ALL RIGHT. SO THE COMMUNITY EVENT AND STREET CLOSURE GRANT PROGRAM WAS ESTABLISHED BY THE CITY COUNCIL IN FISCAL YEAR 2013-14 to support volunteer-led events that foster community engagement and strengthen Saratoga's sense of community. There are two tracks, a secured and competitive process in which applicants are evaluated and selected by the city council. The secured grant process is reserved for long-established events and organizations which were brought forth to council earlier this year. THE COMPETITIVE APPLICATION PROCESS THROUGH WHICH CITY COUNCIL REVIEWS AND SELECTS GRANT RECIPIENTS. UNDER THE COMPETITIVE COMMUNITY EVENT GRANT PROGRAM, THE MAXIMUM GRANT AWARD IS $2,000 PER EVENT. ON MARCH 4, 2026, THE CITY COUNCIL APPROVED $8,000 IN FUNDING FOR FISCAL YEAR 26-27 FOR THE COMPETITIVE COMMUNITY EVENT GRANT PROGRAM. This year, the city received five applications requesting a total of $10,000 in funding, which exceeds the available budget by $2,000. Attachment B to the staff report provides a summary of each application and a staff analysis. Staff also included one potential allocation scenario for council consideration with final funding allocations at the discretion of city council. Five of the five applicants are here to provide a brief presentation supporting their financial request. And at this time, I'd like to invite applicants to provide their presentations. Each organization will have the opportunity to briefly present information regarding their event and funding request. I will begin with Asian American for Better Community Foundation.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Lisa Wang, and I'm a board member for AAPC, Asian American for a Better Community.

Can I scoot this over?

We are an organization that...

Thank you.

We were founded in 2017 by the president, by the resident of Saratoga. And we are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. And we currently have three board members. I'm one of it, Jerry and Hui Ling, and also our advisor, Ai Ling and Teresa. Our mission is to provide community services and also to organize community events and lastly is engaging in civic responsibilities. Providing community services, we have during the COVID-19 pandemic period, we have been supporting our servicemen with masks and also gloves. We provide distribute masks and gloves for our sheriff and local fire department, hospitals, senior centers, and also nursing homes. And also We also, besides Saratoga, we also serve other community that needs help, like Paradise Fire victim and also the Half Moon Bay victim. To organize community events, we have been organizing hosting an annual Dragon Boat Festival every June since 2022. And this year is our fifth year. And then we successfully bring our community together so that people learn the Dragon Boat Festival's culture behind. And we provide, because Dragon Boat Festival is a very important cultural event, festival in Chinese culture. So it has a lot of meaning behind, a lot of story, good story behind. So let me show you the... So we have been doing this for five years. We bring a lot of children and residents together to celebrate this event to see what we can offer to see what real culture is. And also we engage a lot of civic responsibilities. Next, this is our flyer for this year's Dragon Ball event. And this was held in West Valley College. And you can see all the pictures of all the events. And we have thanked all the council members for participating in this special event. In the past few years, we have a lot of you coming to the event. And you can see the events not only for children and for adults also. We have, in this past two years, we have fire department, Santa Clara Fire Department involved to have a booth on site to explain to other residents how they function, what kind of service they provide, and just bring a lot of us together. And also we have Peninsula Human Society come over to have booth with us. This is the second year that they have been with us. And then this brings a lot of interest for pet lovers to see what kind of service they have. And we like the facility in West Valley College. The parking lot provides a lot of room. A lot of convenience, a lot of parking and convenience for all the residents to come over without any congestion. And also you can see the qipao dance that all the ladies come over to perform. Thank you.

Thank you. So let's hear from everybody first and then come back and ask questions if that's okay.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, we'll get questions in a bit.

Next up, I'd like to invite Congregation Beth David to present.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Mayor, council members, and staff, my name is Art Singer. I am on the board of directors of Congregation Beth David. I'm here with one of our young congregants, Joshua Singer, who has just recently earned his Eagle Scout. And this is our senior clergy, Rabbi Kunin. I'm going to give a brief overview, and then we can go through it. So we're requesting a community grant to help to fund an event that we've done in various iterations over the last 10 or so years, and we've received funding in previous years, but we haven't done it consistently in the same way. But generally what we do is we have an event that's open to the community where we have a component of service attached to it. We've done volunteer days. We've done... other volunteer opportunities open to the community. We've also done a service project in connection with previous Eagle Scout that came from our congregation who was one of the first class of female Eagle Scouts in the whole country. And the impetus for the theme for this year's event is this young man had put together a project to build a an area for a peace garden in an unused portion of our parcel. And in the process of doing that, he put in a lot of time and effort. And during that time, there was an impetus for a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of contention due to all sorts of geopolitical events that were happening. When he was just at the completion of the project, there was a ceasefire and a release of hostages, and he thought that it was a good idea to dedicate the wall to peace, and he took the remaining capstones that he had, and he spelled out the word peace in one direction, and shalom, which is Hebrew for peace, in the opposite direction. So part of the idea was to bring the community together and to bring the Rather than bringing the animosity and the war that's in the headlines to us, we thought we could bring the peace that we have in our community and foster understanding and community and bring that to help to create a force that would go out from the states and hopefully be a good example going forward to all. So the idea of this particular event would be to have a dedication, an unveiling of the wall and plaque associated with it, then have interfaith leaders. We have a group that we work with called the Abrahamic Alliance, which has Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith all represented, and we work together on projects like Safe Park and other things that we do with the community. And we've done in the past what we call blessing bags, or they're basically hygiene kits that we give for the unhoused and for those in shelters. And so part of the request is going to be to use the money to purchase items to go into those blessing bags and have those distributed to the unhoused and to those in shelters. As well as the more funding we have, the more that we'll be able to do. We've done this in the past, and as you'll see, That's one of the first female Eagle Scouts. This is part of the active building of the blessing bags that we've done in previous years. And the other part of the project this year is that in addition to the blessing bags, we're building two large ADA-accessible planter boxes that will be above ground on either side so that people can come and garden, and those would be part of a friendship garden that we'd be putting together. So if there's additional funds, we'd use that for plants and soil and whatnot to fill the planter boxes. But I'll turn it over to you. Do you want to go?

Okay. So this project is very important. One of the aspects of the project that Art didn't mention is the fact that we'll also be including speeches during the event from the Abraham Alliance, also from the Saratoga Ministerial, on which the city council has been part of for many, many years, as a way of bringing people together from many faiths to share their perspective on the importance of peace. And that way, through these many voices, try to teach the broader Saratoga community and the broader community of Silicon Valley how religions are very capable of working together for peace and understanding rather than tearing people apart.

And in addition to what my dad said here and him, there will be a local jazz artist performance, community meal and conservation, and public gathering space for families and interfaith reflections from Saratoga clergy of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and others that will help bring the entire community together for a celebration of myself and the work that I have done, as well as a service project, which will be the hygiene kits or goods, goodie bags.

Blessing bags.

Blessing bags, I meant. And then this program will move into recognition, to reflection, and to share community service, and then to music and relationship building. And here's a brief timeline that you can see up on the screen. And to the bottom right, you can see the people's performance at the past event. and we're expecting to have 250 participants, 400 bags assembled, 150 youth volunteers, and many religions coming together as one to work together amongst ourselves. And we had hundreds of volunteer service hours, and in total we had 1,051 hours amongst 70 people to build the 46-foot retaining wall. And our funding structure is we're asking for a grant of $2,000, and we will get the rest of the $5,800 from community. And the total cost for the entire project and event is going to be $7,800. And this will help fund the blessing bags, the funds for the live and jazz music, and the entirety of the celebration.

And some food. And also food, yeah. And everyone on the council is encouraged to attend as well. You're all welcome to attend.

Invited.

Invited, yes.

I just want to mention that Josh did all the work to put together the retaining wall from the planning and bringing it to the city, as well as organizing the volunteers. So it was quite a monumental, I think much bigger than he expected, Eagle project. And then focusing it on peace is quite a special way of really making his Eagle project last for our whole Saratoga community.

And tying it in with service, which is one of the values of scouting.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

NOW WE HAVE EXPERIENCE EXCELLENCE.

GOOD EVENING. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you tonight for my proposal for a Nowruz celebration event. Nowruz literally means a new day, and it is celebrated as the first day of spring. It has been celebrated for 3,000 years amongst Iranians, Afghans, Central Asia, throughout the world. The goal is pretty simple, but meaningful, to promote cultural awareness and inclusion, foster community connection through interactive and educational experiences, reflect Saratoga's diversity, appreciation for the arts, and welcoming spirit, and finally, create opportunities for meaningful cultural exchange among families and residents of all backgrounds. The event will include a variety of engaging activities. Guests will experience traditional half-scene table, which symbolizes the values and hopes associated with the new year. There will be Persian dance performances and workshops where attendees will learn and participate. There will be arts and crafts, such as planting seeds, egg coloring, et cetera. Fire jumping, which is a celebration that happens right before the new year where we throw all of our negativity from the previous year into this pretend fire as we jump over it and make wishes for the new year. Nauru's inspired food, music, et cetera. I have years of experience organizing events and specifically in this community. I am doing this through my event company, Experience Excellence, which is in Saratoga. As you can see in these pictures, for many years I've done this at Argonaut Elementary School, where my kids have been going, and two of which are here tonight to motivate and celebrate and hope that we can do this on a larger scale. When I first started doing it at Argonaut, it was just the classes that my kids were in. And throughout the years, the other teachers asked, oh, can we combine the classes? And two years ago, they asked if I would do an event in the NPR for the whole school. So it just kind of grew because the teachers wanted... this celebration to be embraced by the entire community, which is why I have come to you last year and thank you for the grant. We had a wonderful event that was at Saratoga Library. I knew it was successful because the person from the library who was sitting in the back with the clicker came to me at some point and she said, I stopped clicking at 216 people, which is the highest number we've had in times that we've recorded. I also know it was successful because I had a lot of angry friends who said, I'm sorry, I just couldn't deal with the parking anymore. I turned around and I left. So there are opportunities to make it better, probably a shuttle or work with the church or school nearby. But all in all, I would say it was successful, and we did well together. Let's see. So marketing strategy. The previous year, we ended up doing a lot of WhatsApp messages throughout the community. All of the schools involved have different parent groups. So that's how we marketed a lot. We had flyers in some of the businesses downtown also going to do that. The schools really became a pillar of our marketing because they wanted their students and families involved. So we are following that same guidelines as last year in hope of success. The budget, the plan is that every dollar is going to go toward creating a high-quality and accessible and welcoming event. Last year, I ended up covering part of the funds from my business because $2,000 wasn't enough. There is dancing. Every organization and pieces of it cost a lot of money. So the grant is going to cover supplies for arts and crafts, the dancers, the musicians. and marketing collateral. The $1 million liability insurance is going to be coming from Experience Excellence. And with that, I hope to answer any questions and celebrate Nauru's together.

Thank you.

Next, Saratoga Emsen.

Thank you, Saratoga City Council, for inviting us to speak. So how do you combine environmental awareness and STEM youth enrichment in one word? Pumpkin smashing. My name is Anya Vora, and I am joined by my colleagues, Anvi and Dr. Ann Kuan Nguyen, sitting back there. We are from Saratoga High School's MSET Robotics Program. We are a 501c nonprofit organization that not only competes in competitive robotics, but also hosts a variety of outreach events for the Saratoga community, our largest one being the Smashmaker Fair. So a well-known problem every year is that pumpkins cause greenhouse gases. So billions of pumpkins after Halloween are left in the landfills and then produce greenhouse gases, which is extremely harmful for the environment. Residents are usually not incentivized to compost their pumpkins. So as a result, to combat this issue, our organization, our robotics team, custom designed and built three pumpkin smashers. You can see them live in action over here. So during our one-day smash event, Stairhook residents are invited to carve the pumpkins and place them into our pumpkin smashers. A kid is allowed to then press the button on our pumpkin smashers and smash the pumpkin. But of course, safety comes first, so the students are equipped with safety goggles, and we also have safety tape around all of the pumpkin smashers, ensuring that all of the attendees are away from any harm that might possibly happen. After the pumpkins are smashed, they are then sent over to West Valley Recycles, who then compost the pumpkins. To make pumpkin smashing as exciting as possible, we turned the boring, maybe mundane, process of smashing into a one-day STEM-driven event called Smash. So the day after Halloween, Saratoga residents can enjoy our fifth annual Smash Maker Faire, where we have clubs, science experiments, STEM activities, robotics teams, and more. We invite educational agencies from UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley to showcase how innovative and creative STEM can be. We have included a link for any photos if you guys want to see later. But every year we strive to grow and improve our event as much as possible. So last year we actually grew our event 100% from the year before, from 400 to 800 attendees. and 1,200 to 2,300 pounds of pumpkins composted. This is still a growing community event, but everywhere we strive to make it as Saratoga-centric as possible. So you can see these are all the organizations from Saratoga that we invited to our event, including all the robotics teams from the elementary schools, middle schools, friends from the Saratoga Library, Saratoga Fire Department, Sustainable Saratoga, and of course, Saratoga High School Clubs. So as for budgeting, our Saratoga MSA organization will cover all construction costs for the pumpkin smashers, including wood, tools, screws, and any tools needed to construct our pumpkins. And what we request from the city is the, we request from the city to cover the costs for our event, including promotional materials, any activities costs, and more. And we have included a link to how we document our process, and we continue to document our process through the same way. That's all I have for today. Thank you, everyone, for inviting us to speak, and I hope you have a good night, and I'm here to answer any questions.

Thank you.

The fifth presentation is the Youth Art Movement.

Good evening, Mayor Page and Vice Mayor and all the council members. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you all today. My name is Isabel Batonio, and I'm the CEO of Youth ARF Movement, or YAM. And today I'm just going to briefly talk about what YAM is. YAM is a student-led nonprofit founded back in 2020 by four students at Saratoga High School with the goal of providing young artists an opportunity for creative expression and today we continue this mission. YAM is operated by students from schools across the Bay Area and through our organization and chapters we hold a diverse set of art opportunities such as showcases, speaker programs and art competitions and art drives to make art more accessible. Here there are pictures from our art donations from the past year and what we've done throughout COVID. And as our organization grew, we want to give back to the community that supported us. Therefore, we started Community Concerts, a free public event that brings together performers and audiences of all ages and backgrounds to connect more through music, dance, and art all together. And then since then, we have hosted three successful concerts supported by our volunteers and As you can see, the evolution, we started back in spring of 2025 with 100 attendees. But since then, in our last spring concert this year, we had around 350 at Saratoga High School's McAfee Center. And we're looking forward to planning our next spring concert in 2027. And we're looking around... 400 attendees and 440 performers with a wide variety of vocal and instrumental performances to represent our diverse cultural backgrounds. And to help support the next concert, we are requesting $2,000 in funding, and this funding will be used exclusively for the venue rental costs at the Maccabees Center, which is the largest expense associated with this event so this will help us keep the concert free and accessible to the public and these events reflect our values and also the Saratoga's values of education and supporting the arts and our cultural diversity and this brings together performers and audiences from different generations and backgrounds to foster cultural appreciation and strengthens our community and contributes back to Saratoga's vibrant art environment. And since our organization was founded by Saratoga high school students and That means hosting the concert back at McAfee Center allows us to continue giving back to our community where YAM began. And with three successful community concerts and proven records of managing event planning, volunteer coordination, and recruitment and outreach through our graphic design posters, we are confident in our ability to deliver another meaningful and well-organized event. So thank you so much for your time and contribution, and I'm open to any questions.

Thank you.

Thank you. Have a great rest of your night.

Okay. Council, any questions for any of our presenters? Nobody? I have a couple questions. First one is for the Dragon Boat folks. I was curious, and I apologize if it's in our staff report somewhere and I just overlooked it. For your event, you bring in a lot of people and it's an interesting event. How much money do you raise? And then tell me about the, not this year because you just had the event, but before, where have you given grants recently? I know you talked about the the stuff during COVID and whatnot and the fires, but like for the 2025 event, where did those funds, the profits that you made, where did you donate them?

We have local people that donate money to us. And then we, maybe you want to explain.

That's okay.

Yeah. So the fund that we've been collecting are used,

Mayor and the city council. You can pull that down. Okay. Mayor and the council. This organization, when they beginning, the founder donate money to there. And then founder's friend and the outside people, they donate. So this organization is public organization. And then we try to every year have the Dragon Ball in Satoka City. Then we like to city support us. The other money came from every friend or someone like to donate to this organization.

I'm more interested in where you guys donate to. You raise the money, and you get donations from people to put on the event, and then you raise money during the event. I know there's tables selling things and different things. What do you do with that money? Oh, we donate to a lot of... Like from the 2025 event, where did you invest in the last year? What contributions did you make?

We contribution to local organization like...

dancing, like, L-C-A-A?

L-C-A-A?

C-L-A-A.

C-L-A-A. D-A-A. Yeah. The line dance. Line dance group, association. Yeah. And also, like, we donate to the, if some organization, they have the, they need some funding, we donate to them.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, and the funds that we would contribute would go towards exactly what?

The city support.

Yeah, if the city was going to donate this year, what would you apply them to?

Like we have the Dragon Ball event, then spend a lot of money to rent the Vesavadi space, and like insurance. Right, and we hire the local band that we need to pay. And each activity we need to support them to like material or something.

Okay, and how do you advertise to get more people there?

We use social media, Facebook, and also we spend some appetizer money to do the appetizer. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much.

Thanks. I have a similar question for Art. How do you advertise to bring in more people? I'm sorry, this is for Congregation Beth David. I used Art as his first name. Sorry. I'll get to you guys. Don't worry. How do you advertise to bring in more people? You talk about being multi-denominational.

So we put out an invitation to the other Saratoga clergy. We've invited personally some of the pastors and imams to invite their congregation to attend. We've also got people to attend through the Abrahamic Alliance, which generally has a good turnout. We've also invited HAVE THE SCOUTS FROM BOTH THE POLARIS AND PIONEER DISTRICTS WHO WERE INVITED AS WELL AS THE DISTRICT and council representatives are putting it out to all of their folks so they'll be in attendance as well. So generally we have a large number of youth participants from scouting from various troops in the area and we're also putting it out through various social media and publicizing it through through various organizations. We have flyers in various locations for people to sign up as well. So we're hoping the bigger the turnout, the better the impact, and hopefully the more good we can do with Service Project.

Okay, thanks. Thank you. I'm just going to keep going. Sorry. Let's go with Experience Excellence. I know last year you got a lot of people that were in the library. It was really cool. What are you planning on doing about the parking and things this year?

So if we have enough funding, I was thinking about getting a shuttle from West Valley College to bring people so parking is there, but the library also spoke with me after and they suggested if we were to redo this, which they're on board, the school across the street often allows them, a church allows them to use the overflow parking. The tricky part about that is we're hoping they don't have an event so that we can use their parking lot, but ultimately it costs money to have a shuttle.

Okay. And then how do you advertise?

So there's a lot of social media. This year it was WhatsApp groups, print media. I personally advertise on Instagram. If there's enough funds, I also do promotions. I actually pay for those advertisements on Instagram and Facebook. And then the PTA actually got involved in every school to help advertise, which I thought was pretty cool. Saratoga High School gave us volunteers who were manning the stations, the various kid activities. So the advertisement, which I have found successful, has been these groups that are also involved and they get to come and bring their families, and that's been helpful.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

And MSET, where are you guys? There you are. I did get an invitation. It wasn't because I was on the council. I did see your invitation. So tell me about how you advertise.

Oh, yes, of course. So we have various ways that we advertise. So the first way that we advertise and probably the primary way that we drive attendees is through our robotics demo. So our team, we are a robotics team, so we attend all of these Saratoga festivals and events prior to the event, such as Farmers Market, the Halloween Festival at Menlo Church, the Pumpkin Patch at Saratoga Elementary School, Queens Pumpkin Patch, and a few more that I can't think of at the top of my head. But we stay there. We demonstrate a robot for a couple of hours. We hand out flyers. We talk about our organization and our event to advertise. The second way is through PTA. So we reach out to every single elementary school in Saratoga and asked if we could include the flyer in their PTA newsletter that comes out every week. In addition to the schools, we also reached out to other organizations in Saratoga, such as Saratoga Girl Scouts, some other Saratoga organizations, but they also include it in their weekly newsletters. Additionally, we also go to all of the libraries and the Starbuckses in our area, and we have a flyer on the bulletin board. Fourth, we also have lots of WhatsApp chats. We ask all of the parents to include it in any group chats they have and advertise it through there. Additionally, we also include it in lots of calendars. We included it in the Sarasota City calendar. We included it in Eventbrite. It's an advertising platform. But we have all of these documented on a spreadsheet. And additionally, at the start of our event, we asked all of our attendees to fill out a Google form indicating where they heard about our event. So we actually have all of that documented as well.

Excellent. Thank you.

Any other questions? No, unless anybody else does.

Thank you. Yeah, I just love saying the word. Anything orange is kind of cool, except for Bill's shirt.

Yeah, we have also multiple ways that we advertise digitally and physically. Digitally, we have social media. We have a large following where we display certain art tutorials. So through then, we have flyers either at libraries or... posting through, like, word of mouth through different, like, chats as well. And we also use Eventbrite and Zephy to, um, reach out on, like, the people in our community as well. Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks.

All right. Um, No other questions? We'll open it up to public comment. If there's anybody who would like to comment on this item, now would be the time to step forward or raise your virtual hand. Britt, I don't see anybody. Do you? Oh, wait.

I have one speaker slip from Bill Dalton.

Thank you.

Well, I think the events sound interesting, but I'm opposed to funding for any of them. I noticed that nobody mentioned they used Saratoga Source to advertise their event. That clearly indicates to me that these are not intended to be citywide events but are targeted to specific groups. One group is one event. is put on by an LLC, which is clearly a for-profit organization. I looked at all the applications and their budgets. Here are some of what I consider the more egregious expenses in the budgets. Live jazz music, $1,200. Food was listed several times. up to $1,500. Marketing and printing, $250. Venue renting of $3,000. Site setup and decor, $1,000. Vendor tables and booths, $2,500. Don't vendors supply their own tables? Costume rental, $500. Music instrument, I presume this is rentals. Technical production support, $600. A dance performance and workshop, $750. In summary, I don't think any of the organizations should get any funding when they have items like this in their budget. Every organization budget included at least three things that fall into these categories, and one included six. I thank you.

Thank you, Bill. I don't see anybody online, do we, Britt?

I have no other speakers.

OK, thank you very much. So let's bring it back to the council. Yan?

Well, thank you, everyone, for coming tonight to present your organizations and all the activities you have done. I am just actually quite inspired because Saratoga, one of our strengths is our vibrant and engaged community, and all those events help bring residents together and celebrate our diversity, encourage volunteerism. AND CREATE MEANINGFUL OPPORTUNITIES TO CONNECT. SO I ATTEND QUITE A FEW OF THOSE EVENTS, AND I REALLY APPRECIATE, YOU KNOW, IT'S ALL VOLUNTEER-DRIVEN EVENTS, AND I WILL SUPPORT STAFF'S RECOMMENDATION AND FUND ALL FIVE ORGANIZATIONS. SO I'LL BE HAPPY TO MAKE MOTION, BUT I CAN WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE TO MAKE A COMMENT FIRST.

OKAY, THANKS.

I want to thank all the applicants for all the work that you do in coming from different perspectives. Because I can look at it as critical feedback or that you're trying to bring people together from the angles that you are interested in, a perspective that is of importance to you. It takes a lot of volunteers to put any event together. Earlier this evening, the mayor had given commendations to some residents for building communities. And I really admire that, Mayor Page. So when I look at the community events, those are also targeted at building community. And I believe I attended as many as my schedule allowed this year. There were two I had a schedule clash. One was a niece's wedding. So I was thinking of those pumpkins getting smashed, much as you would be surprised, Anya. But again, there are needs. And I commend staff for the effort you have put in to find a way to stay within the budget amount allocated by council a few months ago. I am very open to supporting exactly what staff has recommended. I have one thought, as Mayor Page was asking some questions, and I also read in a comment earlier in Bill's email, that none of these, or maybe not all, were, because I do know, I think one of these was listed in the Saratoga source, whichever events get Taxpayer dollars because that's what you're talking of here as a council. This is taxpayer dollar. I Think there was one I do recall that I read that so Perhaps we could whichever we choose at the end of this agenda item perhaps we can say make it a requirement that The group has to ensure they reach out to the city they inform the city so that There are two things. One is they say it is a city-sponsored event because we are giving taxpayer dollar, or maybe different language. If you don't want to say city-sponsored, I use those words and I realize not quite. But something to that effect to let the public know we are using taxpayer dollars, if that makes sense, unless city attorney says not a good idea, and I'm fine with that. Just thinking aloud. But for sure, we should find a way to include them in the Saratoga source and other city channels Maybe that would even help the organizers cut down the marketing expenses for them to spend money on advertising, because that's the criticism I heard from our resident bill here. We are essentially feeding that. There is a better way to do it, is what I am thinking here. And I think we can all learn from the young students. Anya listed a pretty comprehensive list of how they are advertising their event. So those are my thoughts, Mayor. Thank you.

Anybody else? Bilal? Sure. I mean, I'll be quick. I really appreciate all the organizations coming together and presenting. I think these events are really important. The thing I consistently hear from a lot of folks in Saratoga is they really crave that sense of community, especially with the community that's aging in place. You know, they may have kids that have aged out of the school system, but having events like this across a variety of cultural or religious or artistic sort of movements I think makes it really accessible. And so the... request I would have is just making sure that we're inviting as much of the city as we can to come together. That's really the intent behind this, right, is to bring people together, to build that sense of community, that sense of belonging, that sense of place like this happens here in Saratoga. We've actually iterated a lot on the policy this past year in a way that I think it's finally come to a pretty good place. One of the things that we debated was supporting nonprofits, definitely, but then, for example, if there is an LLC or a company, sort of being thoughtful about when that's happening. I'm supportive in this situation because it is a Nauru's event that is open to the public. I try to attend as much of these as I can. I'm open to the staff recommendation, but also if my fellow council members have recommendations, I'm not really set on these exact numbers. If there's a different recommended allocation you have, for whatever reason, if you think one number should go up and one number should go down, I'm very open-minded to hearing on that. Don't have any strong opinions on that right now.

Okay. Thanks. Cookie?

Thanks. I think what appeals to me most about this is that it is volunteer-driven. I love that. I think volunteering should be encouraged and supported. I've been volunteering in Saratoga for 35 years, and I just think it's so valuable to the community, but also as an individual. There's a saying, why don't volunteers get paid? And the answer is because they are priceless. So I do support this. I think fun is good. Celebrating the community is good. Creativity is good. I am open to looking at adjusting the numbers. I know we agreed that 8,000 was a good number to land on, but I'm also open to possibly lowering the numbers as well and open to suggestion on that.

And thank you. I thank everybody when this was first put in place. It was all about, well, every council member runs for office, and you'll hear everybody say, I want to build community. And we do, but we don't have the time individually to do it. So we rely on our community members and the volunteers that help to put these together. I mean, I think of the 4th of July celebration that we have every year, and I encourage you all to come at Kevin Moran Park on the 4th of July at 9.30 in the morning. It started with 25 people at Azul Park, and it was one guy who decided to do it. And it's now probably, I don't know, 1,000 or more people that come, and there's room for more. So we encourage you to do them. But that's what we need. And I love the fact that a lot of these are cultural in their origination. But we share our culture with other people. And I think that that's the really important thing. I told my kids when they were growing up They really didn't know how lucky they were living in this city, because we do have a very diverse community, and that diversity is shared amongst us. So everybody gets to experience a little bit of culture of different people. And that only helps you to grow to be a better person. And I think that's really important. I am concerned about some of the numbers of people that we're reaching. And that was one of the reasons I asked the questions about, how do you get the message out? You know, the MSET, you guys got 1,000 people. You get the message out. Thank you so much for... And that's why I asked you to share it again, because it's cool. You really know how to do it. I'd love to see more people be able to participate. I am concerned about when an organization puts it on, and if they're, quote, non-profit, and... All they do is put on an event and other people buy booths and they sell stuff. That concerns me because I'd like to know where the proceeds go. What are the profits used for? I didn't hear a lot of that. I'm concerned if an organization is more advertising themselves during it than they are promoting the benefits that people can get from it. So those are two things that concern me. I'D LOVE TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE'RE CONTRIBUTING, YOU KNOW, $8,000. WE HAD A MOAN SESSION ABOUT 40 GRAND. 8,000 IS SMALLER THAN THAT. SO I THINK WE DID THE RIGHT JOB IN ALLOCATING A SMALLER AMOUNT OF MONEY. BUT PERHAPS WE CAN LOOK AT IT FURTHER. SO I'M WELCOME TO LISTEN. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE MAYOR DOES. MAYOR GETS TO GO LAST. WELCOME ANYBODY'S THOUGHTS. YOU CAN BE LIKE BILL. IT'S OKAY.

I'M READY TO MAKE A MOTION. I MOVE TO ADOPT STAFF'S RECOMMENDATION.

DO WE HAVE A SECOND? THEN WE'LL HAVE DISCUSSION.

OKAY. I'LL SECOND THAT.

DO WE HAVE ANY DISCUSSION?

I'LL JUMP IN. So there is the potential allocation of the staff report.

I read this a few times and tried.

I feel like the reason why I said I'm open-minded on this is I feel like I could justify it any number of ways. Do you justify it based off of this allocation based on the number of attendees, how long they've been doing it? Do you take into account other factors like the organization? There's all these different factors. And so that's why I'm confused. Generally supportive, because I think we're talking about a $200 to $400 difference across all, $200 to $400 delta across all of these. I do share some of the concerns you shared, Mayor Page, around just like if this is a nonprofit, just having some clarity around what those proceeds are used for is often helpful, but also I think helpful for the organization to say, hey, we're doing this event, and it's for the community of Saratoga, but it's also going to benefit X, Y, and Z. I think that just makes it more clear for everybody. And so that's where I say I'm open-minded on that, because I don't have a very strong point of view, because I feel like I can argue it anyway.

Okay. Anybody else? I was thinking that perhaps we'd pick a number. Like, we'll do it this year, and then it may not be the same next year. But, for example, we would cover 25% of the costs that they've laid out. Something to that effect. Again, I'm not trying to be stingy or anything. I just think that a lot of events, when the major events that we have in our city started, they didn't have any funding. And they got off and they kicked off really, really well. I haven't seen some of these events grow, and that concerns me. But I'm willing to go staff report until the council decides that we have a different methodology we want to use. SO I'M HAPPY TO GO WITH STAFF RECOMMENDATION. BUT I WOULD THINK THAT THERE'S PROBLEM IF WE DEFINE THAT PERCENTAGE, PEOPLE ARE JUST GOING TO INCREASE WHAT THEY THINK IT'S GOING TO COST TO RUN THE EVENT. SO YOU'RE KIND OF DAMNED IF YOU DO AND YOU'RE DAMNED IF YOU DON'T. SO I'M OKAY WITH STAFF'S RECOMMENDATION. AND AS IT REGARDS TO THE SOURCE, I KNOW THE SOURCE, I JUST CONFIRMED WITH THE ACTING CITY MANAGER THAT THE SOURCE WILL advertise events that are free. So if any event charged anything, they wouldn't be able to put in there, which I don't think any of these do.

Mayor Page? Yeah. The community events that we support, isn't that a requirement to be a free event?

Yeah.

Yeah, so... I had that in mind when I picked up on that, that they're not being advertised in Saratoga Source. And the other part, the more I think about it, good idea not to say they're city-sponsored because they're really not city-sponsored. But we support it.

There could be something like, what do you see on PBS that says made possible through a generous grant from the city of Saratoga or the mayor? You know, whatever is appropriate. I think the city of Saratoga might be made possible by a generous grant from the city of Saratoga.

I think we have a suggestion from us.

No, I think what we can do is just, you know, suggest, we'll think about the language of it, but I think what's most important is that what we'll do is stay in touch with the recipients of this because sometimes we know it and other times we don't. So I think it's important that we just, we'll follow up to say let us know what your event is and we're happy to help promote it in the Saratoga source because as to what the mayor said, When our events are free, we're happy to promote.

I'm also supportive of including you in the Saratoga Source, especially if they're getting these grants, and supportive of what council members have motioned.

Okay. Any other comments? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Congratulations, and thank you all so much for putting on these wonderful events. Okay, it's 9 o'clock. We usually take a little bit of a break, so we're going to break for 10 minutes before we reconvene at 9.10. Thank you. Have anybody seen Councilmember Zhao out there?

Thank you.

OK, welcome back. Thank you very much. Next up on our agenda is general business item 3.2, which is universal design standards. And I see that Chris is here for a staff report.

Yes, good evening, Mayor Page and council members. The housing element includes a policy that the city initiate a universal design standard study by no later than this month and bring before the city council by December of this year. Universal design is the adaptation of environments that are usable by all persons, including seniors and those with mobility needs. It includes such items as no step entries, wide doorways and walk in showers. The existing building code already includes several requirements for residential construction, including specified doorway widths and requirements for adaptable bathrooms. THE ADOPTION OF THE UNIVERSAL DESIGN STANDARDS WILL BE AN INCREASE IN THE CURRENT BUILDING CODE REQUIREMENTS. TO ASSIST CITIES IN IMPLEMENTING UNIVERSAL DESIGN, THE STATE CREATED A MODEL ORDINANCE THAT CAN BE VOLUNTARILY ADOPTED WHICH WOULD APPLY TO NEW RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION AND REMODELS. ALL THE STANDARDS IN THE MODEL ORDINANCE ARE NOT MANDATORY. INCLUDE FEATURES THAT WOULD ONLY BE INSTALLED IF REQUESTED by a property owner and would not cause an unreasonable delay or significant cost to the developer or builder. As mentioned, adoption of the ordinance is voluntary. The staff report includes a description of alternative ways to distribute information to the public regarding universal design. Staff recommends that the City Council accept the staff report and provide direction to staff. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. Any questions of staff? Tina.

Thank you, Chris, for your report. Just very quickly, for option number three, how do you see that working out if there were to be a community development department checklist on universal design standards? How do you see that working out?

Again, so since it would not have an ordinance, there would not be any requirement for a developer to install the Fixtures at the request of a property owner so this would just be more of a voluntary type of item that would get information out to the public of what options are available that they can Install in a new home or a remodel so the residents when they are coming in for a new home or for a remodel as you pointed out and

this would be a list ready for them to see in one place rather than having to go and do their own research. For example, somebody has, let's just say, has a physical issue. I have had feet issues multiple times. As everyone knows, I've worn a boot. And in that scenario, if somebody needed to have a wheelchair in the house, they come for asking for, okay, we're going to increase this in the bathroom or something, rather than going and doing the research, they will find there are five other things they could do if they wanted to.

Right, because many homeowners may not know what they can do. So this is give the information to them in advance.

This is helpful to them.

Yes, correct.

Thank you.

Any other questions? For option two, creating a brochure on a web page, do you have a sense of You know, how much effort are we talking about? Is that, you know, someone's job going to be for six months? Is that a relatively quick item? Do we know?

I can't even estimate what that would be. It would be a number of hours to create that page and probably have to create some illustration to be on there. So it would be quite a bit of work.

Thank you.

JUST TO CONFIRM, SORRY, JUST REAL QUICK. IT SAYS IT'S VOLUNTARY, ALL WE ARE ASKED TO DO IS TO HAVE THE CITY COUNCIL HAVE AN INITIATIVE STUDY SESSION, BUT IT'S NOT REQUIRED BY HCD TO ADOPT. TO ADOPT TO THE UNIVERSAL DESIGN STANDARD. IS THAT CORRECT?

RIGHT. THERE'S NO REQUIREMENT TO ADOPT. OUR HOUSING POLICY HAD A REQUIREMENT THAT THE COUNCIL CONSIDER SUCH A PROGRAM AND THIS MEETING WOULD SATISFY THAT POLICY.

GOT IT. THANK YOU. JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE.

OKAY. THANKS. And so I'd like to inquire a little bit more about what Bilal was asking, the website, which I think is a great way to get the information out. We contract somebody to do that for us, right? Do we do that ourselves?

We do that ourselves. And honestly, the website itself is very easy and quick to do. It's more of a matter of gathering the content. to determine what we need. But all in all, I don't think it's a ton of stuff. And I think we could probably find the information. There's probably information that exists. And internally, we do do that. And we can certainly make that happen.

OK. Tina?

So Leslie, follow-up question for you. So gathering the content, it doesn't have to be a list which lists every single thing. We could say, here are some examples. That way we can control the number of hours that staff has to spend.

And there might be existing content out there where there's hyperlinks that you can just put, you know, hyperlinks on a webpage and say go here.

We considered this in 2022, and at that time we were proposing precisely this to put something on the webpage on our website. City of Fremont has an ordinance, has had for a long time, and we were very clear that we did not want to do an ordinance because that can add cost. to residents, and also then staff has to look more closely at the applications. That is the far end of the spectrum. But pulling an ordinance either from HCD or pulling an ordinance from Fremont or just the standard, as you said, the hyperlinks, and saying here are some examples which can meet this requirement.

Yeah, I think that we don't need to recreate the wheel, and we can find existing things and just make it into our Saratoga version. Thank you.

OK, thanks. I think we're done with questions. Thank you, Chris. And so we'll open the public comment period and invite anyone who'd like to speak on this item to please come forward at this time or to raise your virtual hand. I see Bill. Thanks, Bill.

Well, I have a couple simple comments. I'd be absolutely opposed to an ordinance that requires this of anybody. I mean, government already goes too far in terms of sticking their nose into everybody's private business. As opposed to having some kind of information available, that's great. I'd support that. I don't support a lot of money for it, though, and second, Sending a link to Fremont's ordinance or anybody else's.

That's not what would happen.

People are not going to read an ordinance. It just needs to be a simple list of suggestions. Maybe a link to somebody else's list. Anyway, that's my only comments. Thank you.

Thank you. I see no hands online and nobody else in the chambers, so we'll close the public comment period and bring it back to council for discussion or motion or Hopefully both.

I think this would be very helpful. Saratoga has aging population. One-third of the residents are seniors. We also have a very active population. Active population means there can be some temporary mobility issues and things like that. If residents are aware of some simple steps they can take, For example, when they're getting some remodel done, maybe not having steps to the entry of the home, it can help them have a home that is accessible by all. It is not necessarily only related to age-related mobility challenges. It could be at a younger age or a much broader variety. Already indicated ordinance is expensive and all of that. I don't support having an ordinance in place. I do think there is a very easy fix to have web page dedicated to this with some list, not an exhaustive list, but a list of simple suggestions and maybe a couple of hyperlinks to some organizations. There are some institutions on the East Coast that have done extensive work, and if somebody's interested, they can read that. If not, for example, here are five things that they can do. So with that, Mayor, if you permit me, I'm ready to make a motion to go with suggestion, or is it option number? Yeah, option number two, which is to create a brochure, and I'm not thinking of anything complicated or very formal, just a simple brochure and a webpage on the City of Saratoga website dedicated only to disseminate the information regarding universal design use by homeowners and developers. This is forward thinking in my mind.

Okay. Do we have a second?

I'll go ahead and second that. There's a Tremendous amount of thought that's gone into our ordinances and our design standards in Saratoga in general by my fellow council members on commissions and just in general over the years and so I think that's something you know a process that we should honor and continue to follow. I think this information is obviously quite helpful and having an easy to access brochure or website and I defer to judgment of staff in terms of you know what level of detail and you know what you do and don't want to include to try and NOT MAKE THIS WAY TOO MUCH WORK, BUT ALSO MAKE IT HELPFUL BECAUSE I KNOW THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE I TALK TO WHO WOULD DEFINITELY FIND IT HELPFUL UNDERSTANDING WHAT ARE BASIC THINGS THEY COULD DO TO MAKE THEIR HOME MORE ACCESSIBLE AS FOLKS ARE AGING IN PLACE. THANK YOU. AND ADDING A LOT TO ORDINANCES WOULD BE EXPENSIVE. IT ADDS A HUGE COMPLIANCE BURDEN THAT PROBABLY WON'T BE ENFORCED FOR A LOT OF REASONS HERE. DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO ADD IT, PER SE.

I agree. I think, you know, educational effort, I'll be supporting with that.

Thank you. Good. And I also agree, and the last thing we need is more ordinances on stuff that we don't really need. Thank you. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? None. So it passes 5-0-0. Thank you very much. Okay. Next up is general business item 3.3, a review of the city's compliance with housing laws. And I know everybody at HCD is tuning in right now.

We're in compliance, HCD.

Well, that's got to be the quickest staff report I ever heard.

So thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. Last year, your council directed that the Community Development Department and the city attorney's office work together to assess the city's compliance with the state's housing laws. This is something that we've been doing in general as legislation has passed, but Council wanted a comprehensive soup-to-nuts review of how we were doing to make sure that we were doing everything as we should. And it's been a very interesting undertaking. It's an incredibly complicated process. And I realized as I was thinking of a metaphor that I'm dating myself a little bit, that to me, it's like a fine clock. There are many moving pieces. And the state has a law. We put that law into an ordinance. The ordinance is applied by staff at the counter, by the planning commission, at the planning commission hearing. BY APPLICANTS READING THE CODE OR NOT READING THE CODE PERHAPS, READING HANDOUTS, WEB PAGES, POINTING PEOPLE TO DIFFERENT AREAS, INFORMATION THAT RESIDENTS SHARE AMONG THEMSELVES, AND WE'VE BEEN REALLY TRYING TO LOOK AT ALL THOSE, AND WHAT'S GREAT IS YOU HEARD Examples tonight in the Arboretum staff report about process improvements that staff has identified, and there are all kinds of small adjustments that are made. So I had my clock metaphor, and then I realized here I am in the heart of Silicon Valley, and perhaps it's even as complicated as the architecture of a microchip. But I don't understand those at all, so I'm going to stick with my clock analogy, but I'm also not going to force it any further. So what we did is, starting end of last summer, beginning of last fall, my colleagues Gabe Ross and Nardos Girma worked with the... CDD staff to identify, they first did a comprehensive assessment of all the state laws that have passed relating to housing since 2019, which is when we had SB 330, which is the law that sort of, that was called the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 and included the first sort of most intrusive rules on local governments and permit processing. That's the law that says when an application is submitted It vests to the laws in effect at the time the application is submitted. And the application is a preliminary application. It's basically a conceptual plan, which allows them to freeze the laws in place. And then we all realized that in 2020, 2021, the courts said, oh, well, That vests the builder's remedy also, so that applies, and we've had countless laws going through, and I'm not gonna go through them all. What I just wanna say, so we've looked at, we started with the code, and does the code include what it needs? And for the most part, it does. We've identified some small areas for improvement, and we'll be bringing those forward as part of the code update this fall, and it's pretty routine. We are we have been working with staff and with ourselves reminding ourselves. We need to be very vigilant every year In October after the governor has signed the legislation for that year We need to begin a process where our office identifies the laws sits down with CDD staff and goes through and says okay THIS REQUIRES A CODE AMENDMENT. THIS REQUIRES A PROCESS CHANGE. THIS REQUIRES A CHANGE TO AN APPLICATION FORM. THIS REQUIRES POSTING SOMETHING TO A WEBSITE. SO WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A STANDARD PROCESS TO DO THAT EVERY YEAR AT THE END OF THE LEGISLATIVE SESSION. AND AS I SAY, WE'LL BRING IT FORWARD. That's something you've seen a lot before as we bring forward our annual code updates. But application processing and looking at the way the application processing process works revealed a lot more to us, both about how we can be compliant with these laws, impose deadlines like we have never seen before. And we have to be We have to meet those deadlines, number one, to comply with the law. But of course, complying with the deadlines also helps the applicants for the projects. And that's also a benefit. So in the staff report, we have links. The CDD has put all kinds of new information up on the website to make it much more clear to people what they need to be doing. And we've gone through, we've identified some tweaks to that that we are providing to them to clean it up. The other thing that we've done is the objective design standards. And your council has worked both on the residential design standards and on the village design standards for new residential projects and new projects in the village. We have objective design standards now. And that's a big accomplishment. And we should all pat ourselves on the back for that. What we've noticed though is, as with anything, you work on something and then you find, oh, there's always room for improvement. And your council has had a lot of appeals relating to privacy standards and people feeling that their privacy is not protected. So it might be, and I'm going to, at the end of this staff report, I'm going to go through a list of potential recommended actions. It's on the last page of the staff report, so you don't have to keep track of these as I talk. We think council might want to direct staff to work on developing objective standards for issues that continue to be of community concern, and privacy is the chief among those. I don't know my own strength with my swiping. We also find that WHILE WE'VE CREATED THIS PROCESS THAT WE NOW HAVE THREE PATHWAYS FOR MINISTERIAL APPROVAL, STAFF APPROVAL, AND PLANNING COMMISSION APPROVAL, A LOT OF APPLICANTS ACTUALLY DON'T LIKE THE OBJECTIVE STANDARDS AND THEY WANT TO GO WITH THE STANDARD APPROACH, BUT THEN THEY'RE CONCERNED about how long that takes and how subjective it is. So we're going to be looking at ways to find what it is that the applicants don't like about the objective standards and see if there are ways we can tweak that to bring more projects into the objective standards approach to speed things up. And then for the design review, we think it would be valuable to take a look at our design review findings for the projects that aren't ministerial objective standards projects and see if there are ways that we can make those more objective or at least easier to follow and easier to apply for the commission because the standards right now leave a lot of room for interpretation. And that's perfectly legal because we have a pathway for people to get ministerial approval, but we think it could really help speed things up. We also think that it would be valuable to have more training for staff and for the Council and Planning Commission on the housing laws. And you'll remember it was a year ago last November, so almost a year and a half ago, We gave a big presentation on housing laws, primarily at Builder's Remedy, to the Council, and the Planning Commission was here. I could imagine a series of three trainings like that, at least for the Planning Commission, going into different aspects of the housing laws and how to apply these standards, where people have a chance to think about it outside the drama of a particular application, and begin to think about how those things work. So more training is something that we think would be valuable. We have standard conditions of approval, which we will probably begin using in a month or two. And this is something that other agencies do, and we've done it in an informal way, but it's the kind of thing where because there wasn't a standardized form, things could drop off or people couldn't remember, oh, how did we do it last time? And we're going to have a nice, clear process for that. We're working with staff on all sorts of internal templates for, oh, you have a project and they've claimed this CEQA exemption. How do we go about evaluating that? Oh, and if they fail, what do we do? What's the other CEQA exemption? Because again, and one thing for you to be aware of is you hear from your residents, and we talked about this at the retreat, but the legislature is every year exempting more projects from environmental review. So there is going to be much more development with much less environmental review than has been historically the case in Saratoga. And we are under very strict timelines as to how we make those decisions and process them. So we're working with staff to develop best practices for running that. I've just got two more topic areas, and they are both internal. One is internal to staff, and one is internal to the city council. The internal to staff is because of the tight timelines that we're on, we really need to work on ways of improving interdepartmental communication. We are a minimum services city. We rely on all kinds of outside agencies to do things that are in-house in other cities. And even within the city, we have a public works department that is devoted to protecting the city's public works infrastructure. these development projects have impacts on that and we need to find ways to make sure that we in the city have processes and resources available so that all the city departments and our partner agencies are all on the same page working to create the most effective conditions possible to protect the public interest to the extent that we're allowed to under the laws. And then the process improvement for the city council is the council has a history of doing site visits for development applications and that adds time to the process, and it also could interfere. There is a law that actually came into effect in 2019 with the SB 330 that imposes what we call the five-hearing rule.

And you think, five hearings?

We never have five hearings. But it turns out a hearing is basically a meeting. So we haven't run into this yet, but a site visit would definitely count as a meeting. So we would recommend that we stop that process. And again, there's always room for council members to go out and make site visits on their own. Staff works hard to talk with members of the community. If people of the community want to have a meeting with a council member, staff can help facilitate that. But we think that the formal site visit process is a way that we could streamline it. So on the last page of the staff report is a list of, there are things that we are just doing because they're well within what we have to do. But we have a number of bullets of things that you could direct us to do. Develop additional design standards in areas of concern, such as privacy. develop objective standards for when public improvements should be required. Part of our overall mission is to prepare ourselves for laws that say you may only apply objective standards in effect as of the time the project was applied. And that will be the case with future Builder Germany projects. It'll be the case with SB35 projects and even projects coming up under general state housing laws. And in the past, we've done a great job of just negotiating with developers. They want to do this. We say the city needs these improvements. Well, under the law, We can only require that when we have an objective standard to do so. If we can work it out, great. But if we need to be able to require it, we need objective standards for that. So that's something else you could direct us to look into. We think that we could do another review of the design review findings to make them more clear. You can direct us to provide further education to the Planning Commission. We can conduct a formal assessment for opportunities and strategies to improve interdepartmental workflows, the processing of applications. And part of that is getting in-house engineering support for the development review process, and then changing the site visit policy. So that is a much longer staff report than I usually give. But it's been a year of very hard work, mostly by people other than me. AND I HAVE PEOPLE ON THE PHONE IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR I CAN FIELD THEM AS BEST I CAN.

ANY QUESTIONS OF STAFF?

YOU MENTIONED REMOVING SITE VISITS FOR COUNCIL. ARE YOU CONSIDERING THE SAME FOR THE PLANNING COMMISSION AS WELL? THE PLANNING COMMISSION DOESN'T DO SITE VISITS.

I have a question. Privacy appears to be, to me, to be a very subjective thing. How do you objectify this very subjective thing?

We talk to experts, planners, about doing that. For example, and again, I am not a planner, but well, I actually have a degree, a very small degree in planning. But for example, you could have a standard that says, if you want... ministerial review. You can't have a balcony greater than six square feet, so there's no gatherings outside looking down on the neighbors. You could have, oh, the windows have to be above a certain height. But again, I'm not sitting here tonight to say what we would do. You would tell us, and we would go talk to experts and look at how other people have tried to address the issue and find best practices. Thank you.

Anybody else? Yeah.

Richard, thank you so much for your presentation. I'm looking at the bullet points on the last page you provided. The last one, you were talking about developing in-house engineering expertise to assist with development applications. So is that something that do we have the resource to do that? Or are we talking about we have to hire?

So right now, we use an outside engineering consultant. And they do fine work. But the transaction costs of sending something to them, them looking at it, they may have to coordinate with another consultant From our conversations with staff, it seems like it would add a lot of improvement to helping things move more quickly if we had an engineer with the expertise and job description to facilitate the engineering issues with respect to private development projects.

I agree. Thank you. I think applicants will appreciate you can shorten the time of review and Okay, thank you. I just want to make sure this has to be something new to our...

This would be a, and again, it follows the conduct a formal assessment of opportunities and strategies to improve workflows. I think we would need to look at what is everybody doing, where are opportunities, maybe there are ways to consolidate functions. We have to, we identified the need. We haven't, just as, I can't tell you how to have an objective standard for privacy. I don't know how we'll get there, but I think I would recommend that it be a place you try to go.

Okay, thank you.

Tina?

Richard, thank you for a very comprehensive report. Really appreciate all the work the staff does, all the teams, and especially how with the last few years changing state laws with respect to housing, how our city has kept up with them. So if I'm asking the question now so that, if the council decides in the discussion all of these make sense, because they do make sense to me, we could leave it to staff to decide how they want to prioritize all these items. And that could be an overall direction we could give. And then staff looks at them closely and figures it out.

Yes, I think that would be my recommendation, that you say we direct staff to do these things and report back to us in a year on how they've been accomplished.

Okay. I'll ask you for the words when we come back to discussion. Thank you.

Cookie, anything? Yes. I have one. It's back to this engineer thing. No study's been done about how much time we'd need for that or how many projects a week that require that. Is there?

No. No.

So we have no idea if we truly need one.

Well, it is our experience in work. We've been working closely with staff on a number of projects. We being the lawyers. The legal team and CDD staff have been working together, and in our conversations about the process, it seems that having that expertise would help speed up the process. Whether it needs to be a quarter-time position, a half-time position, I don't know if Brian wants to I DON'T THINK WE'VE GONE AND DONE THAT KIND OF MATH. I DON'T THINK YOU NEED TO.

I JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE IT WASN'T FLUSHED OUT. IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE IT'S NOT AT ALL. NO. THANKS. ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? WE WILL OPEN UP THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD. ANYONE THAT WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT ON THIS ITEM, PLEASE COME FORWARD IN THE CHAMBERS OR RAISE YOUR VIRTUAL HAND IF YOU'RE ATTENDING REMOTELY. I SEE NO ONE RACING TO THE STAGE, AND I SEE NO HANDS, AND THANK YOU FOR CONFIRMING, BRIT. SO WE'LL CLOSE THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD AND BRING IT BACK TO COUNSEL.

NEW SPEAKER I'LL PUT A QUICK COMMENT ON THE MIRROR PAGE ON THE ONE I REALLY STRUGGLE WITH IS THE PRIVACY PIECE. HOW DO YOU CREATE AN OBJECTIVE STANDARD THERE FOR ALL? I JUST DON'T KNOW HOW WE DO THAT. or do that in a way that a future council wouldn't want to change the second they're on it. Or make an adjustment based off a house that doesn't fit the ordinance as we've described it. All right, Tina.

That has been one of the challenges that council has faced because residents have a set of expectation, especially when they look at the design review findings as currently laid out and then in the transition phase with objective design standards coming in and state taking away our choice or control really in terms of design. Those do rise to the top for me. I also think about the value in having the council resident engagement that happens at the site visit. I understand it's not a good idea anymore to retain the site visit. So I appreciated when you referred to that there could be other alternate paths that staff could think of so that residents feel heard and council can go individually or something like that. To me, all of these at a very high level, at the policy level, as you have expressed, they all make sense. And it's a nice comprehensive list. Ongoing concerns as well as the really important ones which are forward thinking of what we could deal with later on in terms of developing policies standards for public improvements as conditions of approval because the application, even a very, very basic concept application ties in with the laws in place, the ordinance in place at the time. So at this point, my personal thought is, as you mentioned earlier, you made a remark about staff coming back in a year with a report or something like that, prioritizing internally and finding solutions rather than coming back to council for each one of these items and seeing where council is. That takes longer. That's where I personally stand. Mayor, would you want to have more discussion? Or in the interest of time, I could make a motion to that effect and happy to change it later.

Well, after we have a second, we can always have more conversation.

Okay. So I would like to make a motion to request staff to work on the list on the last page of the staff report under next steps to pursue all of these, prioritize them internally at staff level, and come back to council in a year with a report on where we are and what we have achieved.

Do I hear a second?

I don't understand. Is that we're just doing what the staff recommended here on the list? Is that what you're? Okay, I'll second that.

Basically the next steps, I think, and have staff prioritize the list. Any discussion?

I'm good with that.

Cookie?

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for a great report. You could really see all the hard work that was done in it, and I really appreciate that. And I thought it was thoughtful and measured and reasonable. And I think your entire last page, top to bottom, I think just follow it. That's our motion. I think you did a great job. You've identified the areas of improvement. And I like your recommended actions. And on the privacy-related bullet point, there is no answer. But that's what we're going to find out is if there is an answer. And I'm OK for people to move forward to find out if there is an answer or there isn't an answer.

So I support.

OK. And I'd just like to add that I think that the privacy thing, I think that all of these things, if staff, if the direction as we've laid it out, the motion says to tackle them all, there ought to be a, not a cost-benefit analysis, because the only cost is staff time, but the feasibility and the time that it would take to do it. So if I was looking at this list, privacy goes on the bottom because that's going to take way too long. The interdepartmental workflows is the top priority because the last thing that we want is to have a project come in and because of our own internal misworkings, we delay the project. So fixing our own internal processes should be first and foremost. And then I think updating the design review findings, and obviously education is really critical. So that's where I would personally go, but staff can do what they want. You just take my suggestion as you will.

Mayor, do you want me to add words?

I think staff is more than capable of doing the right thing.

Thank you.

Okay, so we have a motion and a second, and we've had some discussion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Anybody abstain? No. Okay, the motion carries 5-0-0. Thank you very much. And we're ready to move forward to council assignments. We'll start at the far end of the dice.

All right. The only one, I'm reporting a bit early on, but I have ABAC tomorrow, the Association of Bay Area Governments, and so the General Assembly will be then. I just wanted to share with the residents, but also with my fellow council members, there is going to be a session on the upcoming arena cycle, and there have been some materials that have been released, and so I just wanted to give folks some quick updates in terms of KEY CHANGES AS PART OF THIS CYCLE THAT ARE EXPECTED. THE FIRST ONE IS THAT THE NUMBER WILL BE PROVIDED A YEAR EARLIER. SO INSTEAD OF TWO YEARS BEFORE, THREE YEARS BEFORE. SO IT SHOULD BE EXPECTED BY JANUARY 31, 2028. AND THAT'S THE BROADER RENEWED DISTRIBUTION NUMBER. THAT WILL GET A PERCENTAGE AT THAT POINT, I IMAGINE, THAT WE CAN THEN APPLY TO SARATOGA. THE SECOND IS THE NUMBER WILL NOW CONSIDER HOMELESS. and housing needs. And so that will probably increase the number as well. Third is there is an element of comparisons when it comes to cost burdens that's going to be changing. I don't have much detail on that. But once I get more detail, I'm happy to share that. But basically, just how HCD compares the cost burden overcrowding in a region is going to be changing. Again, I don't have the information on that. There will be two new income groups. And so what was previously included in very low income is now going to be split out into two categories, acutely low income, so 0% to 15% of area median income, and extremely low income, which is 15% to 30% of area median income. Climate change constraints will now be considered. THIS MAY END UP BEING SUPPORTIVE FOR SARATOGA, WHERE BASICALLY THE METHODOLOGY WILL CONSIDER CLIMATE-RELATED DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINTS, THINGS LIKE EVACUATION CAPACITY, WILDFIRE RISK AND SEA LEVEL RISE. SO THAT MAY END UP BEING A POSITIVE. AND THE SUBREGION ALLOCATION SORT OF ON A COUNTY BY COUNTY BASIS WILL BE THE SAME. THESE ARE ALL SERVICE ASSOCIATION OF VARIOUS GOVERNMENTS. You take a look at the General Assembly for June 18th. There are materials that go into a bit more detail on this. And I'll report back after tomorrow. After, I'm sure, will be a riveting meeting.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate that.

All right. I have one meeting to report. West Valley Sanitation District Board of Directors meeting. We conduct our second public hearing on the budget, which was passed for fiscal year 2026 and 2027. ALSO, WE PASSED COMPENSATION PLAN FOR ALL THREE CATEGORY EMPLOYEES FOR DISTRICT MANAGER AS WELL AS OUR REPRESENTED EMPLOYEES. SO THAT'S A BIG UNDERTAKE. SO BUDGET AND ALSO COMPENSATION PLAN FOR NEXT YEAR.

THANK YOU. THANK YOU. COOKIE?

NOTHING NEW TO REPORT.

OKAY. TINA?

I have two meetings to report on. The first is the Santa Clara County Library District JPA meeting was held, I think, two weeks ago on a Thursday, and there is nothing to report there. The second one was the Cities Association of Santa Clara County. In view of their June board meeting, we had a big summer membership event, which is all council members and city managers across the county in the 15 member cities invited. We had a great turnout there of 65 attendees. There was an excellent panel discussion on really leadership through crisis for council members, what they need to know in terms of emergency preparedness response and recovery. This was the culmination of the prior two board meetings at Cities Association, and we had panelists from four different aspects of emergency preparedness. Town Manager Chris Constantin from Las Gadas, County Fire Chief Savannah Kurdkow, County Undersheriff representing law enforcement Mike Doty, and San Jose Emergency Services Director Ray Reardon. We received excellent feedback on this event. And truly, it was an honor for Saratoga to host this event in our city at the Prospect Center. And a very, very, very big thanks to the Saratoga City staff. for organizing the logistics at Prospect Center. I've been hearing fabulous feedback on that from quite a few attendees. And I want to thank my colleague Jan for attending and also for the mayor for stopping by briefly. That's it. Thank you.

Thanks. I hope that you gave them directions on how they can rent it. I have one meeting report, and that's the Silicon Valley Clean Energy Board meeting. There were several items that we discussed. One was stress test results of the financial status, and it looks like it's pretty resilient in the near term, but if market conditions continue to deteriorate, it doesn't look so good. We also approved a financial levers playbook, which was a pretty interesting discussion. These are the playbook of actions that the staff can take in response to financial problems CONDITION CHANGES AND THEN THE THIRD ONE WAS AN INTEGRATED RESOURCE PLAN PROJECTS NEAR THIS IS SOMETHING THAT WE THE BOARD HAS TO OR THE ORGANIZATION HAS TO PROVIDE TO THE STATE EVERY I GUESS EVERY YEAR AND IT'S IT'S ABOUT HOW HOW WE'RE GOING TO MEET THE ENERGY REQUIREMENTS THROUGH 2045 WHAT IT IDENTIFIED IS THAT FOUR GIGAWATT It's four gigawatts of generation power must be built for our area by 2045 to meet that demand. So that was pretty interesting. And good luck with that. So that's all I got. Let's move on to any city council items. Anybody have any items that they'd like? Yes, yeah.

Dory Albert, our traffic safety commissioner and some railway PTA staff, board members and some parents have been working on Redwood Middle School VTA bus pilot program, which is scheduled to launch on August 10th this year. And I would like to propose a council item to receive a presentation regarding this Redwood Middle School VTA bus pilot and discuss what roles our city will be playing in this pilot program.

I'll second that.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Anything else? Okay. Any council communications? I thought of one before, but it's totally flown out of my head. So we're getting by that one. Do we have a city manager's report?

Nothing to report.

And how about a city attorney? Because you haven't spoken enough tonight. I've used all my words for months. Nothing to report. Wow, we're going to have a very low lawyer's fee in the next bill in the next month. So next item is oral communications on non-agendized items from our remote attendees. So if there's anybody attending remotely that would like to speak on non-agendized items, now would be the time to raise your virtual hand and let us know you'd like to speak. Seeing no one raising their virtual hand, I will close the oral communications on non-agendized items for remote attendees portion of the meeting. And with that, let's adjourn to a closed session. Thank you.

Thank you.