Oversight Board Committee - Regular Meeting

Start recording?

Yes. It's recording.

K. Very good. Alright. I would like to call to order this meeting of the Governance and Ethics Committee, for Monday, March at 10:02AM. We have meeting instructions for the public that may be attending.

This meeting will be recorded. The Zoom application will notify you that this meeting is being recorded. Please press continue on the Zoom application to stay in the meeting. Use the raise your hand feature in Zoom when you would like to speak on an item. Please unmute when called to speak and mute yourself when you are done speaking. Please lower your hand when you are finished speaking. If you are calling in by phone, identify yourself by name before speaking on an item. Press 9 on your phone to raise and lower your hand. Press 6, by phone to mute and unmute. Okay.

We have I'm confused. Usually, minutes are on consent, but they're not on consent. So we don't have anything on consent. So we will, then move to public presentations. Are there any members of the pub oh, roll call. Sorry. Would you like to call the roll, please?

Let me

do a roll call real quick. Chair Jane?

Here. Member Shahal?

Present. Member Park?

Here.

Thank you.

Good morning, honorable leads. Hello, everyone. Thank you for all the support. And this is regarding one of my request as a city member in area of environment preservation or endangered species preservation. And I'm looking to know if there are any bodies functioning within the city who are exempt from complying with The United States or California laws or the branches.

To add the context that to me as a resident, all the endangered species guidelines or laws must be complied upon by everybody. And I tried to explore a bit further, and it is not known to me if there is a process or if there is a comprehensive process. And that was something I wish to bring to the attention of the leads. And if there can be any guidance, like, the stakeholder, like, that we all, as authorities or the city members, can work together to enhance the prod. Just to bring it further the government and committee meeting that if there is a possible

Okay. We do have NEPA and CEQA, and I think you can talk to someone in the city manager's office or in the attorney's office about exemptions to CEQA. We have category goal exemptions and mitigated neg neg deck. Maybe they can explain that to you.

I tried to pursue in that regard, and I want probably some of the there may be some internal processes that would be nudged. I think it it would be great.

Okay. Thank you. Any other member of the public wish to speak on an item that's not on the agenda? Okay. Alright. We're gonna move on to general business, which is approval of the minutes for the January 16 special governance and ethics committee. Is there

a motion?

Sure, Jane. I actually have a hand that just got raised online.

Okay. Sure.

So we have Adam online. Adam, if you could unmute yourself.

Hello, counsel and committee. How are you? Can you hear me?

Yes. We can.

Hi. I'm just calling in about, to discuss the o 30 process and some of the issues that we've recently, seen and faced with getting an item put on the agenda. And then subsequently, you know, on the subsequent next meeting without taking up the original request for the first one made by Noah, a community member three weeks ago. And so I'm just wondering why we've made it so difficult for community members to bring up issues that may or may not be want to be discussed by either the city council or city staff because there to be a lot of gatekeeping. I know some people that, you know, there was a but we shouldn't be losing democracy ability to voice concerns and issues within the city in a timely manner.

It shouldn't take three meetings with the approval of city staff or, the city council. So about three weeks ago, a community member came to the council meeting, requested that we discuss, the RFP process for the downtown. The council meeting went long, I believe, until two or three in the morning. That item was not discussed and subsequently was not put on a future agenda. Then there was a written petition that was submitted that was also not put on due to city staff saying that it wasn't done in a timely manner, although the request had already been in for over a week through the public, and we were just doing it through a formal, written petition process to try to make sure that it was heard at the next council meeting.

But as I stated, the mayor had an item she wanted. And not only was that o 30 request listened to and discussed ahead of all the regular regular agendas agendized items that that council meeting, It was also then agendized for future council meetings. So I think there's some definite issues with the o 30 process. I don't think it is very community centric. I do understand that you don't want a bunch of bogus stuff going through, but the way that it's working right now is is not good if there's anything that the council or the staff does not want to have discussed. So I would like you guys to relook at that and have a bigger discussion. Thank you.

Thank you, Adam. I think that there was quite a bit of discussion at that meeting about whether something could be agendized from a public presentation process. We're not allowed to have extensive discussion on this, but, we we may go back and look at the zero thirty process. We have the city manager to respond.

Thank you, chair Jane. Just wanted to note on our agenda under the section of committee member reports and future referrals for consideration, we do have council policy zero thirty listed here. Committee member Park did mention that, and so that's on our agenda today to talk about whether the committee desires that desires to agendaize that for a future governance committee meeting.

Thank you. We have another member of the public that would like to speak.

Sure. Last meeting on March 24, I asked about having, I believe it was policy 55 be amended or taken a look at to include a consideration of having the items that the public pulls to speak ahead of anything like a budget, any anything else to make sure that we have a chance to talk about stuff and not being pushed out until one in the morning to speak and not being able to find out what's going on until after two or three in the morning. So that that's what I want.

Could you state your name for the minutes, please?

K. Thank you.

Thank you, Jay. Anybody else wish to speak on an item? Yes. City manager.

Or just regard to that public comment, and just wanna note the process for that. So we heard the public comment. At the end of the agenda, when we get to council member reports or future referrals for consideration, that's point in the agenda where if a committee member would like to uplift that item and have a discussion on agendizing it, that we can take up policy 55. It doesn't have to be written on the agenda for the committee to have that discussion today.

Okay. Very good. Any other members of the public online? Or

There are no other hands raised.

Okay. Thank you. Now I'll entertain a motion for the minutes.

I'll make a motion to approve minutes of January 16 meeting. Second.

K. Second by council member committee member Park. All in favor? Aye. Okay.

Opposed? Abstained? Passes unanimously. Alright. Now we move on to the second item on the agenda.

Actually, can I ask a question? Sure. About this item, item one, I I believe the chair is correct when he noted that minutes are usually on consent. Why are these minutes not on consent? Why is there an inconsistency? Is that a inconsistency because of something special, or is it just something different for today?

So we recently moved it over to general business after I talked to our city attorney because with with consent items, if you have more than one item, then we would put on consent. So I had moved it to public business. Is that correct? For approval of minutes when you only have only one item on consent?

Yeah. I don't remember it, actually. Vin, you would remember better than me discussing that for this item. We did modify that practice practice for the charter review.

Correct.

Commission, I don't remember us talking about it with respect to this commission, but member of heart, that's essentially, you know, correct. The the the value of having a consent agenda is when you have a a number of items, right, that are all bundled together and expected not to have any, you know, communications on. When there's only one item, in effect, the public could pull it anyway, and you have to go to the public to check on the item. So it's a virtual general business item when there's only one. There's no legal requirement to have it work that way.

It was just intended to recognize the practical nature of when there's only one consent item in effect. It's a general business item anyway. So that was the thought process, at least with respect to charter review, you know, commission, and that's why that agenda is being managed that way. This one doesn't need to be, but there is the same practical considerations here as well.

Yeah. I sit on a number of committees for different agencies, and I've often seen minutes on consent as the only item. It just threw me for a loop because it's the first time I've seen it like this. Alright. Now we can move on to item number two, which is review and provide direction on the 2026 city council priorities setting session framework. City manager.

Sure. Thank you, chair Jane, to the committee members of the public. For this item, we really want to have a discussion with the committee on our annual priority setting process. I have a brief PowerPoint that I will run through really just to set the table, for the committee and the public for this discussion. But as the committee knows, annually, the city of Santa Clara has a priority setting process.

We typically have hired a facilitator. Thank you. We've typically hired a facilitator, but the goal is to receive an update on existing initiatives and also to undertake a process by which counsel will review those, any of the ongoing initiatives, and then adopt any new initiatives for the subsequent year. Typically, we have this process in March or April. We admitted immediately pushed it back a little bit this year so that we can have this conversation with the committee.

One of the things we heard two years ago and last year are concerns with wanting to change the process. And then a number of council members had a displeasure with the outcome of what actually landed on the prioritized list. And so did not want to begin this year to do the same process that we we had been using, but wanted to take some time to have a discussion with the committee on how we process forward. Attempting to change the slide. Just advance.

Okay. Current process, as I said, annual here. For the last two years, we have used a consultant firm called Ralph Tellus. In 2024, we had a document that was published called priority areas of focus with strategic outcomes. And in 2025, you may remember that our process really centered on focusing on the big lift in in the next twelve months, which was really preparing for FIFA and and Super Bowl, and now we're sort of in the middle of of executing.

If I go to the the next slide, one of the things we that the council adopted in the 2025 process are really four pillar priority focus areas, Excellent city government, reliable infrastructure, outstanding quality of life, and a thriving community, and then there were strategic outcomes under each of those and then a host of strategic initiatives that underpinned all of those. Important to note that the council priority areas of focus and strategic initiatives are really meant to sit on top of all the other work that staff does. Right? And so what you've seen before is we oftentimes have a iceberg example or image during our priority setting process to really articulate there's so much that happens under the surface in normal city operations, improving the organization, even management initiatives. And the council initiatives really sit on top of of all of that work and are meant to both be high level and striving for something that the council wants to enhance or change.

And so next through the next slide, through our priority setting process, we've used different tools and city you cities use various different methods to identify individual council priorities. Those are then distilled and ranked. Sometimes the process of identifying priorities happens actually before the priority setting meeting, and so council may be asked a week or two before to catalog what you what your individual priorities are and submit those. Other times that happens at the at the meeting. There is then a process to rank the priorities.

Oftentimes, and and I do believe that this is a best practice, when it's over multiple days and even there's some time in between, staff can analyze and provide a budgetary analysis because when oftentimes you have council priorities that cannot be accomplished within existing resources, so they may require additional staff or money. It is helpful when there's space in between the identification of the potential priorities and the adoption of those priorities for staff to have time to do some high level analysis so that you are making an informed decision on what it would take the organization to implement them. You may recall we have had priority setting processes where the adopted initiative or priority was really a concept, and it needed to be flushed out more. Right. And so there also can be processes where after that initial adoption, there's a circle back with the council once staff has has had some time to fully analyze what it would take to accomplish that initiative.

And we may have additional policy decisions for you at that time to really point us in the right direction. And then other times, a initiative could be very, very straightforward, like we had one which was implement a rainbow crosswalk. Right? And that was very clear. We knew what council wanted. We really just came back to the council with location decisions. And then lastly, we prioritize those. And we've had a lot of conversations, certainly in the few sessions that I've been in, about how we prioritize the initiatives, right? Do we prioritize them in groups? Do we prioritize them individually?

And then how we report back on those. But every every year, when we report back on initiatives, we typically report back on those that were completed, those that are ongoing or baseline, and there's a distinction there. There have been times where the council has adopted an initiative that really was a change to how we do business, and so what we've articulated is that's baseline. Right? We're we're no longer going to track this because now we've heard from counsel, we've made some changes in that baseline.

There are other items that are ongoing, and what those typically are are multiyear initiatives. Oftentimes, we recognize that a given initiative cannot be accomplished in one year. It is, by its very nature, going to take multiple years to accomplish. Next, we report on items prior slide. We discussed any new items, and we talked about the prioritization process for that.

On the next slide, one of the things that staff did just to give the committee a flavor of how other cities do their priority setting process, and this is admittedly high level, but I'll I'll go through it. Fremont has an annual priorities setting process where they do a retreat. We'll talk a little bit more about the difference between really a priority setting session and a priority setting retreat because there is there is a difference. Molpitas has an annual process. They're currently undergoing a transition from a quarterly to an annual process with a six month built in check-in at the policy level, not just a report or individual items coming before the body, but a formalized check-in.

Mountain View has a biannual process really aligning to their biannual budget. So every two years, the council establishes a work plan with top priorities to advance strategic visions and priorities. Oakland also has a biannual process where council members submit up to seven expenditure priorities that are ranked in order to the baseline budget. You may recall one of our priority setting sessions, we had council members bring forward a specific number of initiatives and then had a process to distill that. Palo Alto has an annual retreat.

San Jose, the council submits priority for consideration to be a part of the mayor's March budget message. In San Mateo, they have an annual priority setting process. And in Sunnyvale, they have a biannual process where council members may submit up to three council priorities for the workshop every two years. And that's meant to I I know a little bit about their their process. They limit it to three so that there's time to really delve into them and have a more robust policy setting conversation at the retreat so that the initiatives are developed with a little bit more focus than really just a high level goal or strategy that needs to be flushed out afterwards.

As we move toward our 2026 framework, there are a couple process components that we want to discuss. One is providing a status update on all of our existing priorities from twenty six twenty five, twenty six. Again, those are new things that were adopted last year as well as things that were ongoing from prior years. We'd like to have a budget update. We typically have a very, very high level budget update.

Next, we will have a prior we we suggest, and I think the committee and council will agree to have a priority setting process where we identify council's top priorities, and we should get some feedback on how the prior processes have worked and what you would like to see going forward. Next, we would certainly have to have public comment as a part of the process. Sometimes there is public comment throughout the day. Other times, there's public comment at the beginning and the end of the meeting. I can't, at this point, recall, but I I do think one time we had public comment only at the end of the meeting.

And so we we need to discuss that. But also with regard to public comment and public participation, that really lends itself to the to the conversation. Are we having a retreat or are we having a session? And what I mean by that is typically a priority setting session is no matter where you have it, and oftentimes, they're not at city hall. But it's really around a dais or table that has a fixed camera and everything happens really in that setting.

A retreat is typically a longer process, may span multiple days, but it also is more interactive. You may have breakout groups where there are roundtables or various sessions and and icebreakers. That doesn't necessarily lend itself to robust remote participation because not every not all the conversations are on a microformed at the dais. And oftentimes, what what council councils do is they have a retreat where it is certainly a Brown Act compliant meeting, but it is not televised on on the TV or on Zoom because they recognize that it's a retreat setting, whereas you're moving around and really the public participation is those that come to to to the retreat. And so we should discuss that and and how how how the committee would like to have the public engaged.

And if you really want the public to be a part and participate in every portion of the day remotely, that's gonna dick that's gonna impact how we actually set up the room and how we plan for the day. The other component of our priority setting process this year is conflict resolution training. You may recall one of the recommendations from the grand jury was that the city council undertake conflict resolution training both both on an individual basis and on a collective basis. And so in staff discussions, we thought that that would be an appropriate component to undertake during our annual priority settingretreat process. And then lastly, we have had discussions around a dashboard to update the council and the public on where we are with our strategic priority.

Staff is That's an existing work plan item and staff will be ready to present on that. And we are looking at software that where we can have a dashboard that is constantly or periodically updated so that there is not really defined periods of time. But at any given time, people can go on the website and have a an update on where we are. So with that, really what we want is a discussion and feedback from the committee on how the priority setting process has worked. And we we can return to the slide on components when we after we've had some pros and cons from the committee in order to end today with a with with some pretty good direction so that we can go back and execute and and plan this year's priority setting session.

Again, we we've delayed it a little bit for this conversation. We are targeting May this year. I'll also note in the budget process, we are looking to reserve funds for council priorities. And so if we if we do trail the budget, the core budget discussions and adoption, I do think that that's okay because I think we can reserve the budgetary budgetary funds and then even go back for additional appropriations as net if necessary. But what we really wanted to concentrate on is the process and plan a session that meets with your objectives and the larger council's objectives. Thank you.

Yeah. Do you have any comments? If not, I have a bunch of comments. Yes. I can start.

Thank you, city manager, for the screening of the process and where we are trying to end up on that. So my first suggestion is I think we had this process going on very early in the year, my earlier sessions when I started on the council. And I would like this to start in early January. It should sometime in the January, it should finish it off. The reason that I'm asking for that is because even if a new customer get elected in the December, they can participate, and they can throw in their priorities, whatever they are.

And staff that way gets ample time to plan for the year. And if it is you know, we have a midyear budget transition, '26, '27, or working '25, '26, they can plan accordingly for that budget. So that's one time I I would suggest that and we fix the timeline. It don't keep it, like, fluctuating. If we can fix the timeline that, okay, every year, we will have a council priority session in January, that would be good.

That way everybody knows. The residents know knows about it, and all the stakeholders, staff, everybody knows about it. So fixing the time early in the year, that would be fine. There's a lack lack of decision making because staff has to decide. We can come up with any priority depending upon what the feedback from the residences or whatever needs of the city down the line, but we have to be cognizant of what's the budget and what's the cost.

Like, is it feasible or not? Basically, study session for that. So for that reason, having early session would be really helpful. And that way, you can come up with a budget, and if you need time to study a session, that would be good. And for that matter, I would like that we should have a six monthly review so that staff can come back with the suggestions.

Some of the things we're talking about in January are not feasible because of a, c reasons. Or some of the things we're talking in January are really doable, and we already completed this thing, and we come on to complete next six months. Six month review is a must. It can be shorter duration, like half a day session or something like that, but that would be a good thing to do on that. And next one is the communication with the residents.

I know you discussed about retreat versus council priority session. So irrespective whether we go for retreat or whether we go for the council priority session, I would highly recommend that we set up some good communication with the rest that, hey. We will be holding this priority session. And in the past, these were our priorities. What are your thoughts of the past priorities as well as what are your thoughts on the future?

Because if we look at the actual participation during the process, it's very minimal. But if we give ample time, focus it on communicating with our residents and different stakeholder. When I say resident, I'm including all the business owners, all the other stakeholders within the city so that they can get back to the staff as well as to the council.

If I can, committee member Jahal. I believe once we've done, in my time tenure here, a survey, cities oftentimes do resident surveys in advance of a priority setting process. That that is one method to populate that information for your study session. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah. That is good. Right? And it should be a little bit of wider survey, basically, if I may, because sometimes our sample size is very small. And if we can have a bigger sample size, that would be good. Yeah. But the that is that can be one tool that have survey based on priority session only items. That could be good. In addition, we can go to communication, like city manager's newsletter or council member's newsletter and the aspects of that. That would be helpful too in addition to that.

And I really like the idea you threw in reserving some funds for the priority sessions. We are trying to do that this year, but if we can make it every year because there have been some priorities which have been low hanging fruit, but we don't have the budget or constraints of budget, those thing. But if you can make it as a regular practice, whatever, like, either in real dollars or percentage of the general fund, whatever we want to. So that would be really helpful. So at this stage, those are my comments about it. Yes.

Member Park.

Yeah. I actually agree with committee member, Chahal, which is I would prefer a little earlier. I would like a little bit more I would like a lot more public input. As the committee member, you know, noted, anyone can bring up any issue. And I think that we're having, you know, having time for not just staff, but also for counsel to discuss or to consider the items prior to putting them on a priority list?

I mean, there are always a lot of issues, and the ability to prioritize is the reason that we have these these sessions. Right? The ability to simply raise an issue or put it on a list is is that that's we don't even care about that. That can happen at any time. I think that the the ability to prioritize and rank the issues is what I look forward to in a priority setting session.

I mean, that's typically the only thing that we consider. And this is done by discussion. It's not just check marks next to items on a list, and I think that that's what's been missing. I mean, when I take a look at the history of of this in 2021, that was my first year in priority setting. We talked with a facilitate facilitator who asked about our individual items, brought them forward.

You know, we ranked top priorities at a session by by talking about the items, and staff analyze the priorities and the budgets, and we categorize the priority areas. You know, and then the 2022 is aborted in the middle. Like, we had the same facility facilitator, but there was no discussion. There were no identification of individual council priorities. We skipped ranking the top priorities, and then we skipped the rest because it was aborted.

In 2023, we skipped everything because staff said, well, we'd like to wait until executive staff comes on board. And I think this is exactly not the thing. We don't need executive staff to facilitate the ranking of priorities. In fact, my comment was it would be better for executive staff to come in with council priorities already set rather than have to come up to speed and then talk about priorities at the same time. It would be better to be given, these are the council priorities.

And there are a lot of new things that would come up, but there were a lot of council priorities that we had previously that we got no we didn't even get reports on because we decided, our staff decided, to skip the 2023 priority setting session. 2024, we had the process at the Convention Center. That was the first time that we had the the new executive staff in. And we did have a good discussion about council items, items that we'd like to bring forward, but there was no discussion no discussion of ranking the top priorities. I mean, again, we talked about putting check marks next to items on a list.

That is not a ranking. There was no discussion whatsoever, and there was no way to see how the items that we checkmarked factored into the top priorities. Again, the the ranking is a discussion. The raising of priorities is a discussion. We can we can call it just ranking, and we can just vote for the ranking. But without a discussion of what's important to people, I have no idea why another committee member or why a council member wants one item versus another. I have no discussion as to, well, I understand what you're saying. If we do this first, maybe we can get other things done. Or, you know, I, you know, I can tell people, this is why I think this should be a priority versus an over another priority. But we have none of these discussions.

I think that not having discussions is the is the reason why I have been dissatisfied with almost every single priority setting session. And in 2024, we ended the process in the middle of the second day. I mean, I thought there were gonna be hours left, and I thought that discussions were coming. But the second day ended with hours left on the schedule, and I was shocked. I think a lot of public members were shocked.

I think a number of people came to me and said, oh, is it is it over? That was that was a surprise because there was so much left to do when it comes to the actual process of setting priorities. And in 2025, it really wasn't a priority setting session for the reason that I told you. There was no setting of priorities. It was basically a report on items in progress with some tie to items in the priority list, which is we skipped identifying the visual council priorities because we already had a list.

I'm saying the reason that I suggested we go forward with 2023 priority setting was the you know? And the reason that I suggest we go forward with it because we already had a priority list was the reason that we didn't have any discussions in 2025. And I thought that was unfortunate. We skipped ranking the top priorities, and we simply given a report of these are the top priorities from a previous year. This is what we did last year, and this is our report on progress on it.

In fact, we dropped items. We dropped the censure item for the mayor or, you know, sending a letter to the to the governor, which we found was absolutely right. It was not right for her to do that. But we dropped that item, and I don't know why we dropped that item because there was no discussion of this. If there was a ranking, if there was a vote which says that some items would be dropped because, well, they didn't get enough votes, there was no voting.

If they would be dropped because people wanted them dropped, there was no discussion of of these kinds of things, which is why dropping an item, especially one as as political, as important as the center of the mayor, I don't understand how that was done unilaterally by executive staff without a discussion, without a priority setting, without a ranking, without a talk with either the public or council. So and we have community workshops. But how many of these retreats have community workshops prior to prior to the the retreats or prior to the priority setting sessions. I mean, we talked about surveys, but the surveys have been problematic. I mean, even when we had the survey about measure a and measure b in 2024 about elected versus appointed positions here, there were lots of shenanigans with those surveys.

Both sides made accusations. And in fact, I can see how a survey like that would be would be gained. We had a lot of outcry because this council voted in majority to have the fireworks at Mission College, and there were a lot of reasons for that. In fact, I think that a lot of the people that complain that the fireworks were not brought back to Central Park completely ignored the fact that most of Central Park would have been closed during that time due to remodeling reconstruction. Right?

But when you looked at the demographics for the survey results, the demographics clearly show that there was a bias in geography, bias in the type of applicants, and we don't discuss that. I think that having a workshop where we can clearly see who's there, where people can submit also online, also, you know, anonymously, they can do that. But having a workshop would get a lot more engagement. And a survey, I don't know who the survey goes to. I think that the survey, there are types of people. I think people who are less stable, especially socially, have less time for surveys. People who are more more stable have more time for surveys. This is a kind of a socioeconomic effect that nobody's looking at.

No. You have a hard stop. So

Oh, I I I know. But this is a very important thing because this affects all the work that we do. And the fact that we haven't done this, again, if we don't start treating priority setting as priority setting and if we don't start treating priority setting as a discussion, then it doesn't matter when we have it. But these are the issues that I have. And, again, I'd like to as we go through the priorities, I'd like to bring up all the priorities we had previously because we've never had a ranking. We've never had a priority setting discussion on any of them.

Would you like to respond? Or

Sure.

Just we'll come back to this, but I want to note that committee member Park mentioned having a workshop for more engagement more engagement and also a survey. I think we need to come back before we end today and land on retreat slash workshop or priority setting session and understand how how we can engage the public how we engage the public. I think there there there there's a a method there where we can have a survey and then have more of a retreat, or we want to get plan it as a workshop where we're inviting people to come to the workshop. And so we'll wrestle with with those. I I think the the the other piece that the committee member mentioned about priorities being dropped, I do remember that priority setting session and lots of follow-up conversations.

I think from the staff and the consultant perspective, council went through a process to vote on what the priorities were that year, and only the items that landed on the final list were moved forward. And I do remember the consultant discussing that anything that did not make it on that prioritized list would be would be dropped from the list. And I remember that discussion because we had a number of different buckets of things. We had council member referrals. We had council priorities, and then we also had new ideas.

And there was a process where the council went through to decide what landed on on the list. But what I would say, if there was anything that and I remember there was a lot of things that were dropped because they didn't make it on the final prioritized list. If if there's anything that council members want to bring back, we can certainly bring back them and add them to the list. And when we talk about what process we will undertake this year, we can identify that as a core component to have a discussion on. I do think, though, no matter what, it will be important to end with clear direction from staff on what's on the list and and what's not what's not on the list.

And I committee member Parker, I totally understand that that prior

because I don't wanna see anything drop without a discussion. And at some point, when you have a a consultant or staff unilaterally drop something because they decide that it didn't get enough votes and there's no transparency on what the votes are and or what which items will be dropped, they're just gonna be dropped in a report after the fact, That that denies that that's against transparency. Denies voice and light and air to the items that we need to discuss. I

totally understand that. And so I I think going forward, we'll have just a very clear understanding of what the process will be to distill down to what makes it on the adopted list. So and and leave the priority session setting with a very clear understanding and recap what's on the list and what's what's not not on on the the list. List.

Because I would like to see all the previous priorities brought back so that we can actually have a discussion about ranking them, about setting priorities for them, not just have them dropped and never seen again. Because as as I noted, some of these items seem very political, and that shouldn't be the reason for them to be dropped.

Hey. Member Chahal. Just a quick moment.

I do agree with the the committee member Park's discussion about ranking. Because let's say we have a I just take a hypothetical example. We have million dollar to spare, and we have three priorities or 10 priorities. Now the ranking really helps us out. Like, where should that bulk of that $1,000,000, which we have a spare to invest into the community, which of those 10 should be first funded out of that?

So from that perspective, like, if there is a process to rank these I know we had 20 priorities, but people even lay, oh, my number is eighteenth. Am I eighteenth in the ranking, or am I first on the ranking? So that ranking can be very self explanatory. And if you don't want to rank all 20, at least we rank top five or something like that, that these are the rankings based on the budget as well as the staff availability or the or the studies we are trying to do. Yeah.

These can be the top five. And from that matter, I don't I mentioned six month review. But if we can if the staff needs some more time to come back for the ranking discussion for the council, I think two months or three months can be adequate time so that staff can judge what are the budgetary requirement, what are the staff's time requirements are there. So they can come back sooner. And within two months or three months, they can come back, and we can rank those at that time. That council can, as a body, can rank those. But that's important to me. It's very important. Thank you.

Okay. I had some comments. You know, the the I'm really not happy that we don't do the goal setting meeting before the budget process. And I know you say we can reserve some money, but, you know, it could be that we have a pretty expensive priority. I don't understand how councils do two year processes because things come up all the time.

You know? That's kind of the point of the zero thirty process is that a member of the public might recommend that we do an RFP for something and comes up in the middle of the year, and we have to commit certain amount of money to that, and that becomes a budget amendment requiring five vote votes. Doing it in advance of the budget process doesn't require the five votes. So there's a difference in doing it be in the budget process versus as an amendment to the budget. So there is a distinction there.

And my experience of the priority setting was probably in about 2018. It was just staff members would just report on what their their job functions were and what they accomplished, and then we just set up these pillars. They they were apple pie pillars, like, we'll be financially responsible. We'll, you know, rep take care of our parks and things like that. It wasn't really items to be added to the budget.

And then if you remember those of who have been around that time, every item on our agendas for the council would have to rank how that item fit into the pillars that we had. It was crazy. And so my experience is in 2020 well, in, say, you know, I got elected in 2020 and was here in 2021, And then we had, basically, COVID that we didn't have money. So, basically, there were no priorities for a number of years. And even you know, I do these zero thirties, and people would say, oh, you need to wait till the goal setting, but then we didn't do anything in the goal setting because we didn't have any money.

So it was problematic. Then in 2024, we actually had a process where council members on the spot basically came up with their priorities. I think it was seven five to seven each. And that's problematic because people don't have time to think about it in advance. Sunnyvale, they have to put theirs in, like, three weeks in advance.

I like the idea of having the staff go and look at the resources required for those priorities in advance. I mean, I was on the audit committee here, and we had a budget of three thousand hours that we could spend on items. We had a bunch of things that we wanted to audit in the city, and staff had come up with the number of hours each of those would take. So based on the number of hours, we can then select which ones we wanted to do this year in our three thousand hours, which ones we wanna do next year in our three thousand hours. So I like the idea of having them in advance and having the staff report on resource requirements, and I like to do it in advance in 2024.

The problem was the process was we would come up with our five to seven items that got put on the board, and we were given an unlimited number of red dots, and we were given a limited number of green dots. Red dots were kind of like a veto, and it was odd. I watched Lisa Gilmore veto every single one of my items. It was crazy. So then, fortunately, there was a process where you could put the green dots on there, and some of my items got four green dots, so they continued.

But it was a broken process that I mean, it was a a method of ranking things because if you got four votes, then you could advance your item, but it was a little problematic. But I I want to have this process done well in advance of the budget, and I want to have it done with some sort of ability to provide council priorities, individual council priorities well in advance and have the staff come up with some sort of resource budget for those items. So that's pretty much I could you explain how other cities do their two year process?

I'll I'll turn to Maria. I know you did the research.

Let me go back to that slide, but I believe Oakland was one of the cities that I did look at in the benchmark, and they do it with their budgetary process. So the council members would submit I forgot the exact number, but they would get a top priorities that they would have to submit. And then the staff would analyze it against the budget process and then define if there's enough budget allocated for their priorities, and they'd come back with that report to them. And that's how they would rank it.

But if something occurs in the within those two years, two years is a long time. Yeah. So what is the other cities? We have kind of a zero thirty process,

but Yeah.

They got shut down for a number of years because we didn't have money.

Sure.

I'll take that. And and that this is based on my prior experience working in other agencies and being a consultant and the research we did here when we modified the zero thirty process. Santa Clara really was the only city that had a formalized zero thirty process. What in my experience, what other communities do is they adopt priorities, whether it's an annual or biannual process. And then new items that come up through the year, they either come up through governance or they come up through some sort of a prioritization process on how individual council members can put things on the agenda, right?

A lot of people have what we have, which is an individual council member can suggest an item and then that eventually makes it makes its way to council. Some committees have governance meetings where the new items would go through a committee to be studied first, And then when they come to the council, they have a little bit more fleshed out policy analysis tied to them. But I guess in general, it's easy to say either in my experience, everyone has some sort of priority setting process, and then things that are urgent make their way to the agenda either because a council member brought it up or they they they come up through staff.

Yeah. Whoever VTA has a referral process, and so I I see that hap how that happens. Essentially, our zero thirty is that referral process. The last thing I wanted to understand is the distinction between retreats and formal sessions with a with a dais or a a roundtable. I talked to the city manager of Mountain View, and she loves retreats. A lot of people like retreats. I I wanted to understand how that works with Brown Act, how we allow the public to have engagement.

Sure. I love retreats too. I've done them in in other communities. With respect to the Brown Act and having a meeting that is not on Zoom or not televised, I'll toss it to the city attorney, then I'll talk about retreats.

As long as every council member is there in person, you can have a meeting that's not, you know, televised and and broadcast and require people to appear, you know, to participate in that. I'll check on that and and confirm that. But from a Brown Act standpoint, there's no such thing as a meeting of city council people discussing business issues where it's not open to the public and with with, you know, participation. And so any meeting I think you've heard about in other jurisdictions, regardless of what it's called, if it has a quorum or more of you meeting and discussing city business, there's always a requirement for both public observation and participation in

the meeting.

In person or electronic? So under the new rules, do we need we have to require even without a remote participant, we need to have electronic, you know, opportunity for us. So it doesn't need to be broadcast. Right? Doesn't have to be on the tell the television channel? But we need some form of Two way telephonic or audio participation. Participation. Yeah. So which can be set up. Right?

That's not any technological challenge. We do that and more, you know, here in chambers every night. But so we do so, absolutely, the public needs to be there. And under the new set of rules, absolutely, there needs to be two way, you know, you know, participation of the public, either in person or through remote participation. But it doesn't need to be broadcast, you know, on

It's broadcast our live channel. It's broadcast over audio. People have to be able to hear what's happening in the room. Right?

Right. So That's a Zoom it's an effective Zoom meeting. Right. So you have with a telephonic option.

Mhmm.

Yeah. And then the last thing is that I really like having three distinct times for public participation. One at the beginning of the meeting where the public can suggest ideas, and then they can be deliberated by the council members, and then maybe midway and then at the end. So I really like because people can't always commit to being there for a full day, so I like to have three opportunities for the public to weigh. Thank you.

And just coming in from a a legal standpoint, that absolutely, you know, can be designed. I think it even was designed at the last retreat. I think there were multiple opportunities for public input at different, you know, milestones, right, of the of project itself. So that's the kind of input that I think city manager is soliciting from you of of, you know, public definitely needs to be there no matter what kind of meeting it is, and it can be structured to provide multiple inputs at, you know, logical, you know, strategic times throughout the meeting.

I would prefer them to be time certain.

Okay. So irrespective of of what it's called, I think we can break it into two type of processes. One, where the council is sitting at a dais and all the work happens at a dais. Right? And we can have public comment at time certain times before, after, during.

The other process that would still be Brown Act compliant is a process where there is a dais, where discussions happen at the dais, but then also there's what you would typically think of when there's a retreat or a workshop, and there are roundtables, there are breakouts, there are time for for for facilitated discussions. That is still, and I'm looking to the city attorney, very much Brown Act compliant as long as you have a way for the public to participate both in person and in electronic form.

Yeah. That it's a little you you know, we had a version of that in one of our last retreats. It's a little it it can be tricky, you know, to manage if if any of those breakout groups are a quorum or more. That needs to be, you know, fully transparent as well. But there are permutations of that that we can design and make Brown Act compliant. No doubt. Right.

Thank you. Right. So do we have to make a decision at this point?

Let's step through the various components that we've talked about. I think one of the things I've heard is council would like a survey of the community prior to the session. I'm sorry. The the committee would would like a survey. There have been discussions around making sure that it's as broad based as it can be.

And we've utilized systems in the past that I think count the committee member Park mentioned the survey for measure A and B. I really would break out our surveys into two types of surveys. One survey type, we hire a consultant form or it's more statistically valid. Those are the times where, typically we've used them for ballot, but we've also used them for other processes where you receive a phone call, you receive a text message, but it's attempted to be a statistically valid survey. Then there are other times where we utilize tools that we have internally, whether that is SurveyMonkey or a function on our website.

And we articulate it via social media, various press releases, but we ask the public to simply go on to that survey platform and provide feedback. We can do either. Certainly the former takes longer because we need to engage a consultant for that. And there needs to be a certain, and a certain survey size so that it's attempted to be statistically valid. I will say my experience with surveys, people fill out surveys oftentimes when they are very passionate about a subject, oftentimes when they're when they're sometimes frustrated about a subject.

Many times, we do not get over 5,000 people. Right? And some people will say, oh my gosh. This is a city of a 100,000 people. How can you not even get 5,000 people?

I think the reality is when we utilize all of our communication channels and push out a general survey, we get a relatively small survey size. And so, certainly, I'm happy to work with staff to facilitate either type of survey. This year, my recommendation is that we would begin that if council desires a survey before this year's priority setting process, we utilize some of our internal survey tools and just do the best job we can to get that out to the community. And in future years, we can look at undertaking a RFP for a consultant so that we do a statistically valid survey.

You have member Chao. Thank you, chair.

So on the surveys, I would always say that scientific surveys are much more cleaner and political free, basically. So I would suggest that. But if we can't do this year, that's a different story. But as a process, that should be a scientific survey. Because I've seen some of those scientific surveys when we had so much issues with the stadium. We had the EMC survey, and that really laid down very clear things. Like, the politically, there was a noise of something. Oh, this is bad. This is bad. This is bad.

But when the survey came back, those things were number seven out of the 10 and very minimal impact to the community, basically. So I would highly recommend scientific surveys going forward. Okay.

And with with that, I just want to note, oftentimes with those surveys, there can be frustrations because you take the survey when you're outreached. It's not that you can go online and find the survey link, right? And so we can, in theory, do a hybrid, but my experience is when we do those surveys, the company, most of the times they're using the voter rolls, right? But they contact people and they get them on the phone or they they send them a link. And so for priority setting process, that can sometimes create a conflict because you may have a member of the public showing up and saying, care about x, y, and z, but I wasn't able to take the survey. And so I I just wanted to put that out there for our discussion.

I'm not opposed to the hybrid part of it. Like, we can have our own staff surveys from that one. But at the end of the day, we'll have a mixture of both of them, basically. And one thing I were forgot to add is, you know, we all have city has different commissions. If we can ask each commission to put their two priorities, what they want in their own commission before the priority session with the council. That would be really helpful. We always say commissions are our ears and eyes, and we don't even we used to have meetings with them. We stopped doing that anymore. And so that would be really beneficial. As a focus point, we tell them, hey.

Give us your two priorities or three or one priority. Whatever we wanna decide, give us those priorities depending upon irrespective of budget, irrespective of at least if they give a priority, which is lot of budgetary constraints, at least we know that what the community needs, and we can plan it long term. That, yes, this is a priority, but we can't do it next one year or two year because of budgetary constraints. But in the back of the head, the council knows that this was a priority and how we can make it happen down the line. Right?

And I know it's a long process. I remember in 2019, retreat priority session, I brought forward two items. Like, one was the business license tax and shuttle free shuttle. I know it came to fruition way later, and somebody else took credit for those things who opposed that thing at that time. But it can take some time, but it will happen, like, if we have a priority set on or a discussion of the priority on those matters, basically. Those are my government.

Thank you.

Member Park? I know. We're going a little long in discussion. We need to get in with the rest of the meeting. I do have a hard stop, but it's possible that I can take a stop, a break. Maybe we can break for twenty minutes, and I can return to the meeting. I don't know if that's an option. But I do have some comments about the survey results, which is, I mean, from these city manager's own description of the frustrations of people wanting to take the surveys, it kind of shows the inherent bias in some some of the ways that we get input. And if we don't publish the demographics and we don't normalize that data, we just have numbers, then as committee member Chahal mentioned, it becomes very political. And I think these are the things that we don't want.

We don't want priority set by for political purposes unless the political purposes are for the the improvement of the city. Like, to to not acknowledge that there are politics that affect this city that are you know, that actually damage this city in lots of different ways, then I I think that's something that nobody wants to say out loud but absolutely does happen. We talk about 5,000 people responding to surveys. I mean, we have surveys where we get fewer than we get less than 500. And, again, if we don't take time to normalize the data or publish the results.

Like, I remember in 2024, I asked for analysis of the raw data for the survey, the survey for the ballot measures. And because there were some anomalies there where people were sending a lot of lot of input really quickly or from the same IP address, and nothing was looked into. I think at some point, we need to look into these if we believe that we are doing a benefit for the public, not creating a political tool for people to use to drive certain priorities or drop them. And I think that this is something that's big enough and important enough that I would I would even suggest having an investigation or a look into how we have fair surveys or how we look at the data and we publish information that's normalized so it so it doesn't give too much too much voice to one side.

City manager. Sure. So what I'm hearing and and, Pierre Jane, I know you haven't spoke on this, but what I'm hearing is a desire for a more scientific based survey versus a more general survey tool. So I I totally get that, and we can look into our ability to execute on that this year. But I I think

Chair Jane, we also have a member of the public with her hand raised just

for Yeah. I'm gonna get to them. I'm just okay. So

so so with that desire for more scientific survey, next, I think I heard a desire to have a prioritized list at the end of the day to actually have counsel prioritize the initiatives. Fine. Leave with a clear understanding of what's made it on the list, so we we we can certainly do that. I I also heard a desire to bring back everything from the 2024 priority setting process that didn't make it on the list. So that's option one.

I will proffer another option, which is that we can provide counsel with that list and then have a process where counsel members bring forward their top x. And then if there's something on that list that you would like, elevated, I just I I put that out there as an option, but I I think we should have a discussion on that. Next, there was a desire to start earlier in the year. I think January was mentioned. I would say if we start in January, it almost really has to be late January given when new council members are seated and and some time to onboard them.

So at least late January with the goal of being completed before budget adoption is what I think I've heard almost unanimously. There was discussion on how to rank the priorities. We didn't delve down deep into this, but there are a few options there. We don't have to decide this. But there's majority. There's super majority. And then there's a process that will ensure that at least one or two or a subset of things that every individual council member brought up makes it on the final list. Right? And we've had that we've actually had both. Right?

We've had processes where everything was tossed in, and then there was a majority vote, and then a super majority vote for the things that people cared about most. And then we've had a process where at least something from every council member made it on the list. So does the committee have a preference there?

I I like the voting process. The voting process I know Healdsburg does it in public where each council member will suggest their three items, and then the council will vote on those items. We could do it that way, or we could do it pseudo public like we did with the dots last time where, you know, who's visible, who was putting dots on which which items, but there's either way, I don't really care.

Okay. Voting method aside, is there a desire to have a process that is a majority or a supermajority, or is there a desire to have a process that ensures that at least something that every council member brought up makes it on the list?

I would prefer both. One item from each council member gets on the list, and then there's

And then everything else. Majority.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. I I prefer the same thing. Hybrid matter. Like, majority can be there, but

But at least from Fair.

Okay.

Last is format. What I think we've distilled to is having a survey beforehand. And I think I've heard a desire for more of a retreat slash work stop stop show style where everything is just not at at at at at the dais, right, that that council members actually engage and have components or or or interaction and activities during during the retreat.

Okay. Before we decide anything, I'd like to go to the public.

Are there any hands raised? There was one. I think they jumped off. Anyone online would like to raise their hand? Okay. One second. Wanda Buck, if you wanna unmute.

Sorry. Having trouble with my mouse. You know, overlying all of this, it's it's so complex, and it takes so much time. And time is such a huge issue, whether it's this meeting or any council meetings, that there isn't enough time for you all to address everything. And it really is an issue.

I I I think that it needs to be addressed in circular and certainly related to engagement. You don't want a bunch of people like me because there's not enough time. I've also so I wish it could be simplified as complex to look at some key issues. The engagement for the public, which usually brings them, is that they want change, and it can be seen as a complaint on something that they feel, know, is important. But if you want and I'm not getting everything in I want because of time.

But I just filled out a survey that was by the county on seniors that was at the senior center that was labeled as it'll take ten minutes. It took me almost two hours, and I know that most people wouldn't be willing to do that. So the simplicity of engagement and, also, you all been pretty polite to me most of the time for all I take up. However, people are disparaged, and it's really hard. I actually use two minutes normally rather than three, but that's something important to look at.

I have just different points, but one, of course, the most important point to me is ethics. When I look at your model, it's like trust and engagement of the community. I think it's in the first one on it. And I think the the definition of ethics seems to be a word that maybe we don't wanna use as well as political. And my understanding of ethics is doing the right thing, which isn't necessarily political, although I understand the ties. And I once told a former mayor, the first mayor of a large city in San Jose

Wanda, could you wrap up, please?

Yes. That I hate politics, and she says everything's political. So, you know, when you consider all these, I hope you consider that. Thank you. And thanks so

Okay. Yes.

Next, we have Dan on the phone. Dan, can you hear us?

There we go. I unmuted. Yes. Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Dan Andresecker, Flamingo Downtown. I wanted to comment on the survey that the the issue that we saw on the last survey was what is top of mind. And I think in this day and age with Iraq wars and but, you know, all this stuff that's going on in the state. I think your answers that came back top one one and two was homelessness and drug abuse. This city does not have a department of drug abuse.

It doesn't have a department of homelessness. It does have a department of planning. So I think and I I highly strongly recommend this that you ask the public what is the most important project that this staff is working on for those citizens. I think it's fair to them, and it's something that is in your circle of influence. Drug abuse is county.

It's BHSD or whatever, and homelessness is state. This is something this what can the city focus on? And these projects are you're you're putting a a lot of energy into each one of them. You need to know what the citizens want. And so that's that's my my 2¢. Thank you.

Thank you, Dan. The city actually is working on an interim supportive housing project for taking people off the streets, and the city's putting money into that. I just wanted to clarify that. Could you come forward?

Okay. Hi. So the point I wanted to make is that you can give the public a bunch of opportunities, either in person, online, etcetera. But if they're not at times or with enough time for them to respond, it's meaningless. Because you can say, for the record, like, oh, we gave this much time for this, or we gave this meeting or that meeting.

But if it's not at times that people can actually attend, if they can't actually make it to them because they're in the middle of the day right now, or it's in the evening when everyone's finally home for the day, or it's a survey that, you know, their email inbox is full and they never get around to it, you know, this and that and the other. You then get the problem that's as tales old as time with county governments and city governments where only the people that have maximum amount of time, homeowners, older, elderly, retired people, and or people that just, in general, just are more involved because they're local businesses, whatever, they're the then the only ones that you hear from. Marginalized communities then don't get to hear any of that or just simply people like me who are I have to take care of my kids twenty four seven. I've barely just now finally been able to get time to come to these kinds of things. So I think that's the important thing is that I believe that you guys should not go with a 100% supermajority or majority from the council members.

So if the council members could be influenced by all sorts of people, businesses, and outside interests, the surveys should come from the council members to their own districts, and they should ask them and give them a long amount of time to respond, what is your priority? And then the council members should bring forth, what did my district tell me they actually want? And those are then therefore, each council member should have something from their district that became a priority. And then if something isn't able to be addressed directly, it should then be put on a backup list. Park mentioned that. Like, stuff gets dropped. Okay. It shouldn't get dropped completely. It should be put on a backup list so that if something else gets completed, you have these backups already in place. Thank you.

You. Anyone else?

We have another hand online. Adam? Adam, if you could unmute.

Hello. This is Adam Thompson. Hi. Thank you for taking the call. I would like to just note, you know, you guys had a pretty robust discussion on getting community input, and I think that's where the priority session has struggled in the past.

I think, you know, during it during doing it during the day, really does limit participation because most people do have to do work, as well as only having a single meeting where, you know, things are talked about, discussed, but not all the answers might be available, from a budgeting standpoint. And then ultimately, decisions are made. I think, one of the council members brought up decisions are made by the consultant staff or council without coming back to the public and having that discussion. So I would really like to see more public engagement and more of a discussion versus, just a chance to voice our our concern. Also, you know, looking back at the twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six priority session, I noticed there were a lot of priorities on the goal setting list that I don't really feel are goals for the city.

I feel that those should be goals for city management and city staff, I e, the writing ambiguous contracts that are less ambiguous that would provide the city more protection. I think that's something internally that's not a goal for the city. That's not something we should strive for. That's something we should already be doing. Also, with morale of city employ employees, again, that's not something that's a goal of the city.

That should be something that staff and leadership manage. And, you know, if need decisions need to be made to make changes there, then so be it. But it's the the long term planning and the long term goal setting for the city should be based on budgets, should be based on where we see ourselves in the future, how we determine ourselves to grow, where we think we can generate revenue, to pay for the services that, you know, the the residents have either come to enjoy or are asking to add to the community. So, those are really it. More in community engagement, better conversation, and back and forth to make sure that we get the great community involvement and goals prioritized, and then making sure the goals and priorities that we list are actually real goals for the city and not internal goals for staff.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Adam. Anyone else?

There's no more hands raised online.

Okay. I'm gonna try to summarize what I've heard that we do wanna do a survey. We wanna make sure that the survey is not self selecting, you know, just the people that are disgruntled or or people that are homeowners and retired and have time to take the survey rather than, you know, people that have kids and are really struggling with finding time. The goal setting should be in well in advance of the budget. I'd kind of like to see it put in the calendar whenever we have a calendar for the meetings for the next year.

Just put it in there as a placeholder so it it won't have to be you don't have to go through doodle polls and delay it and all of that. I wanna see maybe council priorities submitted three weeks in advance so staff has time to look at the resourcing. Consultants should certainly meet with each council member, and then we should look at what the commissions want. You know, maybe I like member Shahal's idea of one to two priorities from each commission that we have. And then I we haven't really done this before, but I'd like to try the retreat.

Those are kind of line. I don't know if my fellow committee members concur with those ideas.

Yep. It's a good idea. And I would like to learn more. Like, I know Fremont, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto, I think they're doing the retreat. So have a little bit more idea of what they do, how they how they process of it. Sure.

So, Deepak, do you have a comment?

I was just saying I don't really care about the format of the meeting if we don't have discussions. I don't really care about the format, where we go, how we do this. I actually think that having it in the library was was pretty good because it was much more accessible. People didn't have to drive someplace where they weren't already, and, you know, people could come throughout the day. I don't care about the format, but the other things that the that the chair talked about, which is having a survey, actually getting results, I would like a data analysis of the results and and and how that input gets back because we have seen how these surveys are being used politically.

Scheduling in advance, priority submitted, sure. Consultants that meet, again, I don't care about the process. I wanna make sure that the public has a voice, that the input that we get is fair, and that the input that we get is diverse and covers the city.

Is that enough direction? Do you wanna comment on that?

Yeah. I think that there are a couple places that deserve a little further conversation before we end today. One on surveys. We started by saying scientific versus general, and then I think the community gravitated toward more scientific. But what I hear now is we want the scientific survey so that it is normalized, but we also want anyone in the community that wants to take the survey to be able to take the survey.

And so on some level, those are two different things. We can attempt to do a scientific survey and have a general input portion, so people that are not contacted directly, and have the consultant segregate those summaries. So you get a summary from the scientific survey, and then you you get the general response you get the general responses. And when I hear we don't want the survey politicized, what I'm hearing is we don't want certain we just don't want the survey overly influenced by certain constituencies that overpopulate. And so we want a more scientific survey so the results are normalized.

And so what I think we're saying is actually both. And so I think the takeaway is from staff, we're going to either do two surveys or try and get a consultant that will do one survey but have a split result. I heard comments from the public about time during the daytime, in the afternoon when when people can't attend, and I know we've grappled with this before. Right? We we oftentimes grapple with this.

When you talk retreat, my experience are most most of those are during the day, and they it could even be an all day retreat, sometimes on a Saturday. Right? When you have a meeting in only the evening, whether that is weekend or weekday, I think here, we like to begin at least six at 06:00, and we like to not go past ten ideally. And so that's only four hours. Not enough time to grapple with the type of things we're talking about grappling with.

And so I do think that that is a issue where we we we need to decide. Potentially, we start at 01:00 and and then go into the afternoon, so that people can attend the latter half. That may be a way to split it. But I'm saying this to sort of elicit desires from the committee as well as there was a note about having commissions have input. We can totally do that and send the survey to them.

I just want to note that we did do a process whereby the commissions now establish work plans, and their work plans are adopted by council. And part of that strategy was to have if something on their work plan requires council input, it will come back to council. And so I just wanna think that through about how do we have them both give priorities and have a work plan. I wouldn't want it duplicated, but I I totally understand the point of let's make sure that the commit our commission board and commission members have have way to provide input. Lastly, I think we need to decide on how we bring back those 2,024 items.

You want them provided to you for you to bring back to us individually, or do when we have our priority setting process, would you like them all populated there so that they can be discussed as a whole?

Okay. I prefer that you give us all the twenty twenty four priorities in advance and publish them on the website so the public can see them. But just having them in advance because our priorities might have changed as council members, so we might wanna submit new priorities. But we should be able to see what we discussed at the last one. And I think possibly a 1PM start time Going till 8PM might be sufficient or may you know, maybe 9PM.

Our council meetings go well past 9PM. That would allow some members of the public to weigh in in the evening times, especially if it's a retreat format where we won't be broadcasting it over video. Member Chaw. Thank you. So

my comments on the service is when we pick up a consultant, like, whatever concerns we have today, like, let's generate some concerns. Like, we have to be very specific with our consultant that we need to pick up demographics of our city, basically. We need to pick up income levels. We we have to define those things. And that's the beauty of the scientific surveys, basically.

Because if they have a sample set of 100 people in a particular demographic and they want us result from 100 people and they don't get it, then they have to widen their dataset, basically, so that they can get it. And that's the reason I'm saying scientific surveys are much more scientific assets, and results are much more what actually community needs, basically. So defining those, like, what our community needs, that would be a one fundamental reason that we have to define. Okay. These are our parameters.

We want results from families. We want results from single residents, basically. We want results from different income strata, basically. We want results from different age groups within the city. But yeah. So defining that to consultant would be much better.

Totally fair. But did I pick that up correct that the committee wants a scientific survey, and then they also want a general population portion of the survey? Act actually Or not?

The resident rightly put in that the council member can can do their own surveys within the community. That doesn't hurt to present of to present it by a council member. Hey. This this is I did, and this is what I came. And that can be presented in either during the retreat or the workshop with whichever we are doing or can be presented to the staff in advance. Hey. This is my survey. You wanna look at it. The staff wanna look at it. That's fine too.

Well, I hear you articulating for only a scientific survey.

That's I more focus is on that, but I'm not opposed to an hybrid approach where we get it. But if the hybrid if the other surveys are more skewed like outliers, I would try to ignore those outliers, basically. Yeah.

And and you get what I'm trying to avoid. Right? Because there could be John that comes to say, hey. You did a scientific survey, and I didn't get to participate in the survey. Right? So I'm just trying to solicit feedback from from from the committee on scientific, hybrid, or general population. And

on the commission work plan, you mentioned that all the commissions have a work plan, which is submitted to the council. I think those are two different issues versus just taking a one or two priority from them versus a whole work plan. So I would still suggest that we should ask them for one or two priorities on it. Thank you.

What I might suggest is that if we open the survey for, say, a month, a weekend, you look at the demographics. And if the demographics are skewed because you take take some demographics information in the survey, then you start doing extra outreach to those underrepresented populations. You might be able to adjust the outreach based on what we're getting from responses, but I don't really have a good solution to that because everything is always biased. You always get more people complaining about, you know, affordable housing projects in their neighborhood.

And I would highly suggest, like, if we have a a suggestion from customer park about tracking the IP, that will be a good thing if the city had the capability to track those IP addresses. Like, oh, one IP address sending hundred hundred responses. That is outlier, basically. We can completely ignore it, basically. Yeah. If you can have that facility, that would be great.

Yeah. Member Park. So, again, we we'd talk about scientific and normalization. I think you can normalize any dataset. Like, any output can be normalized. And at some point, we need to know what demographics we're targeting so that people who are left out can say, hey. Wait. I'm not included in there. Like, this is a this is a demographic that I'm part of that is not included in there. I do like their chair's suggestion that we can try to get more input from the the communities than from the demographics that are excluded.

But, again, you can normalize any data set, and I think that we haven't been doing that. Like, we have we can do Pareto analysis where we can get the top top three and the top you know, the bottom three. I'm not saying that's how we set priorities, but there's lots of ways to look at the data. I know that in we just had the Olympics. Olympic voting, they top out the top they throw out the top score and the bottom score, and that's a terrible way to determine priorities.

But it's often a good way to look at how we get input from the communities, which we we take out, you know, the the item that got the the highest score, and we normalize that. We take the item that got the nor the lowest score, and we find some way to bring it into the data without making it last and bring it in bring the top one into the data without making it without making it first. But we should be able to identify trends where certain demographics, certain respondents are in clearly one one bucket or another. And if we're not gonna do this kind of analysis, if we're not gonna tell people in advance what demographics they they belong to, then we won't know who's excluded. We'll we'll only know, you know, how the people responded based on the demographics we set up in advance.

Like, we don't know the things we don't know. This gets very scientific. Yes. It does. Because without the scientific background, it only stays political.

Do you have enough direction?

Very good feedback. On the staff level, we will coalesce all of this. We will put together a plan for the twenty sixth priority setting session. When we get to our very last item today, we'll talk about if we have a special meeting or not. But I do think that at the staff level, we need to talk about how we coalesce all this information and create a actionable plan to implement for 2026. That may very well mean summarizing all of this and bringing it either back to the committee or directly to to counsel so that there's a full comprehensive understanding of what the 2026 process will look like. But thank you for your input. I think it's very valuable and insightful as we prepare your priority setting session.

Okay. So now I want to ask my committee members. We have essentially three more items on the agenda, and we're already at 11:40 with a hard stop. I can go till 12:30, and then I have a hard stop. Do we want to change the order of these?

We can take the committee member reports and future referrals first. We have members of the public here. I don't know. I want to ask staff of numbers three and four, which are easier to defer. Staff of numbers three and four. That's a performance review process. And then there's the committee work plan. We're probably we're not gonna get to both of them.

My recommendation is that we do number three on a different day, and we can schedule a special meeting for that. And because it involves both Glenn and myself, we would step we were planning to step away for that item. So I think we take item four, and to the extent that we can get to the very last item, which is referrals, we we can take that up as well.

Okay. So I would like to recommend that we schedule a special meeting so that we can cover the item three. These performance reviews keep getting delayed, and I'm not happy that they keep getting delayed. But we I would like to have a special meeting to cover item three. So now with the consensus of the committee, we could move on to number four. Member Chao, do you have a comment?

I I I'm okay with reorganizing the order, basically taking number four right now before item number three. But I think on item number three, there have been a lot of basic studies already been done, if I I'm not wrong as a committee member or as a council member. So if time permits, if you wanna set up a deadline of 12:30, if time permits, maybe we should take it today.

Well, we will, but we will move it to to after

After the full.

After even the committee member reports. Oh, yeah. That's fine.

Okay. Okay with that.

We should Do I have consensus of the committee? Okay. Alright. Now we're moving on to item number four, which is the work plan. Is there a staff report?

Thank you, chair. Maria Lett, assistant to the city manager. I'm gonna go over item number four. This is part of your annual process for the committee. It's usually the first meeting of the year when you determine your work plan items for the calendar year.

So on the first slide here, which just has the background to that process, the work plan that you have in your report to council does include items that were carried over from your previous work plans. This is due to just staff time and changes in meetings and items that took longer than others. And something to note as well is that throughout the year at your committee meetings, you can always bring forth new referrals or any other items that need to be recommended to come that are not part of the work plan that you approved today. In addition, staff may also bring forth items that they may need to bring forth during the year. So here for the March meeting, we just have the items that we run today's agenda.

I won't go over those. We were already planning to have an April 30 special meeting. The last meeting you had in January was also a special meeting where you had the ethics consultant come to present on the review and recommendations of the potential adoption of the ethics commission and the ethics program that had proposed changes to the existing policies. This item would be continued on April 30 because you were not able to finish that item. In addition, we also added the review and approval of amendments to council policy zero four two, which is reconsideration of council action.

And for May, we were also tentatively planning a special meeting for May based on all the work plan items, and we were gonna bring forth there the review of council policy zero fifty five, which is the meeting management protocol, which would return to this committee. Number two would be discuss and provide direction to staff on a council policy that provides guidance on the scheduled start times and frequency of our regular city council meetings, and in addition, the process for scheduling city special city council meetings and closed sessions.

Okay.

And one more slide here. Your regularly scheduled meeting for June and September and December. We just listed one item each here, but, of course, there's room to add more. For June, it'd be the review of policy limiting resolution matters outside the jurisdiction of the city. This would be a new policy brought forth for review, for the September meeting.

This is one that was on a previous work plan. You may recall we brought forth, the review of text messaging retention programs, in a past committee meeting where we presented an app called SMARSH to the committee. And at the time, the committee, requested staff return with additional applications. The reason why we've tabled this is because we have a new director of IT that's now working on this item to come back. For December, we have review of the proposed comprehensive city council policies and procedure manual.

Last year, this was on our work plan. This is basically to create one comprehensive manual so you don't have 55 or so separate council policies. And with that, we look for your recommendation and review of this work plan and any addition additional items.

K. Fellow members.

So I have a lot of comments on here. First comment I I have is, like, we need a way of of reviewing even the council change the changes that we've made even in the last five years. There have been a number of changes that have been made, policy changes that have been made, and they've been made by the majority that have had a really bad effect on the city. And I I think at some point, before we allow them to become tradition, we should review what the effect is. So whether we had a majority or not, we can we can have a report on what is working and what is not working before we simply accept them as tradition.

I'll give an example. We have a tradition now of asking questions in rounds and getting answers to questions in rounds at city council meetings, which, again, goes against robust discussion. I mean, being able to ask a question, get a response so that I can formulate my next question is a you know, really important in how I and and how I like to talk about things. And, again, people ask, why do I talk so much? Why do I why do I say so many things?

Because I need to know some answers in advance before I give you my next question. Otherwise, I'm gonna have to assume I'm gonna have to presume what possible answers could be and then give you all my other questions based on the the possible answers rather than simply getting an answer resolved, and then I can move on to my next question. I think that this is a terrible process, and it's it's for efficiency. Robust discussion is not efficient. As one of the the public members noted that, you know, they've got time.

They take a long time because at some point, the information that's contained within the input, in the engagement is important. And if you simply say, well, we're gonna limit that based on efficiency or time, that's a different problem. This council deals with a lot of things that no other councils have to deal with. We've got a stadium. We've got a an enterprise fund.

We've got and to state that this is this city is the same and the meeting requirements for this city council are the same as when it was set up, you know, a hundred seventy years ago, seventy years ago, that doesn't make any sense. This committee, the governance and ethics committee, is so backed up on items because we've had so many cancellations in the past. We have a rather short meeting for what we're trying to accomplish, and I don't think there's any any acknowledgment of this. I mean, maybe it's come to the point where we need a full time city council to address the different issues. We have a $1,700,000,000 budget compared to the other city budgets.

Like, Cupertino has less than a fifth of that, maybe a sixth of that. Sunnyvale has a third, less than a third of that. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that this city has grown to a point where having a part time council with committees, where we we drop committees committee meetings, we have to reschedule them, not just because committee members can't make it, but because the alternates also do not come. I think we need to have a real discussion of of these kinds of things. I'd like to know who bring brings these items on here, like the June 1 review of policy limiting resolution on matters outside jurisdiction of the city.

What what determines what the jurisdiction of the city is? We can look at a lot of different items that we bring forward. I'm getting attacked a lot because of my supposed request for a ceasefire. No, that was a comment. My comment, my motion was for how do we support the people in our city who are Jewish, who are Palestinian, have Palestinian relatives that are being attacked, that are being bullied in schools, being bullied in the streets?

My request was, how does this city protect its residents who are being attacked? And people said that's not in our jurisdiction. That is absolutely within our jurisdiction. If you want to couch it so that it's not, so that this is a foreign policy issue, I readily admit that we do not change the policies. We do not change foreign policy.

We do not have a a lot of effect on things that are happening half a a world away. But to say that showing support for people of the of that demographic in our city is beyond our scope. Who's putting this on here? Like, at some point, we should decide that than a case by case basis. But to use this as a filter, as a razor to cut input even before people have had a chance to to discuss it, that doesn't sound right to me.

Who put this on here? We have another item. We have a number of items here, including the o 30 policy, that don't have any time on here. I mean, I would suggest that until we get caught up on some of the issues and some of the issues that are affecting the city today for example, we have a reconsideration policy, which is the the o four two that we should have taken up before we did this last consideration. You know, at some point, we have made so many policies here that are either really late or really bad for this city.

And at some point, if we're not gonna have that discussion in public in a timely manner, then we're just gonna pass bad policy and then say, well, oops. I'm sorry. We didn't get there in time. And to me, that's max of corruption. When you are asking for excuses, when you are asking for exceptions to policies, to items that we should have had defined in advance, but we're simply gonna say, well, let's do it this way this time, come up with a better policy next time, that smacks of corruption.

And this is the kind of thing that we need to discuss openly, you know, every chance that we get to have to see that this is the committee that has the most cancellations, maybe because of people coming, maybe because of trips. But at some point, we need to schedule more meetings. Like, we need to get on top of these issues before we simply let them pass without any kind of of control at city council meetings. So I agree that we with with these items, there are gonna be more items put on here. I think that the o 30 policy really needs to be looked at.

The o 30 policy has been hampering the entire city, residents and council members alike, because of the way that it was written. I mentioned before, and we'll talk about this later, but we need to have these kinds of dis discussions. There doesn't seem to be any time for for these kinds of additions that we know are coming, and I don't wanna see that. I wanna see more meetings on here. I know it's a little bit of a burden on us, but, again, it's a burden on us, and I'm willing to accept it if other if other committee members are as well.

Any other comments? I have a number of comments. Okay.

So,

you know, our work plan is very full. We certainly you know, like, today, we didn't even get through the agenda because these are issues of governance and ethics. There's a lot of debate. There's a lot of opinions about governance and ethics. These are not items that can be decided on consent or anything.

So things that I agree we need to certainly look at our policy on reconsiderations, on how items are brought to the council zero thirties, but there's a number of things that I came up with. We had 41 council meetings last year. That's well over two a month. And the problem is if we don't schedule, say, three a month, we always end up burdening staff and burdening council members of doing all these polls to sneak in another meeting somewhere along the way. It should be on just like the goal setting should be on the calendar that we approve for the next year, three a month or whatever we need.

Three

a

month only gets to 36. That's less than 41, which is what we actually had, but it's far better than 24. The gift policy our current gift policy says I need to declare a pencil that I got from attending a meeting with the public. I mean, anything over $0 between 0 and 50 has to be declared. That's kind of absurd and has not been followed by the council.

Tonight, we have a grand opening at a restaurant, Jazen, that, you know, I'm gonna have to ask the owners of the restaurant what is the value of my meal. That doesn't happen very regularly by this council, but I will have to, you know, ask the value and either pay for my own meal or put it on my form 700 if it's over $50. There I really like the policy that the planning commission has. If you have five planning commissioners there and an item needs four votes, it's the applicant just can ask to defer that item automatically because we noticed this at the last meeting because we had two council members missing. It was very hard to get to a vote of a majority when you don't have enough council members.

And especially if you had four, then you need a unanimous vote, which is very difficult. So we should discuss how we're gonna approach like Planning Commission does. We we had an issue with meeting management at the last one where we basically had an automatic zero thirty request from the public, and that was acted upon by counsel. And, you know, we're technically not supposed to act on items that are brought up by the public, so I would like for that to be addressed. The tentative meeting agendas, I think it is terrible that our agendas are released on Friday evening, and the public has until Tuesday to read and organize people to come to a council meeting.

And the tentative meeting agendas, we publish them, often they're out of date. Most people don't even know that we issue tentative meeting agendas, but we I had always wanted for our agendas come out Wednesday before a council meeting on the Tuesday. That gives people time. We've never been able to accomplish that. There were rare occasions when we got them out on Thursday, but, you know, it's not something you know?

And then, of course, I'd like to address some sort of restrictions on members of the public issuing 280 PRAs to me. I think that that is excessive. Most of these PRAs are misspelled. They're not even seriously considered. They're just to annoy me because they're full of spelling mistakes.

I mean, the person who's issuing these is just trying to annoy me, and it takes, like, five seconds to write a PRA to me that cost me hours to to respond to, that we have an election coming up. What are we gonna do about maintaining a fair election this time around? When we have complaints by candidates saying that other candidates are acting unethically, how do we address those? Those are supposed to be addressed by our city clerk, but we have no control over the city clerk, and the city clerk can just choose to ignore all of the ethics violations. We have, in the past, hired ethics consultants to help us with those elections to make sure that they run smoothly, that we have a process for challenging flyers, comments by some candidates.

We had an issue with people complaining that some council members were traveling too much, and we have not addressed how we're going to allocate budgets for travel by council members. Another thing that came up was that we have this mayor and council email account. I just submitted members of the public send to the mayor and council email account. I just submitted my expense report to the mayor and council email account. It's it's confusing to the public and to me that we have the one account.

I would certainly like to address I go to a lot of conferences. I almost can't think of a city council that does not get health care, and we are way behind all the other councils in California in providing health care to their council members. In terms of meeting management, you know, at the last council meeting, the mayor continually cut off member Park when he was speaking, and I was ready to make a motion to allow council member Park to speak during that meeting. I think it was I understand that the mayor runs the meeting, but there have to be some sort of constraints on the mayor preventing council members from speaking. So there's a lot of things.

That's why I keep thinking that we might have to move to monthly meetings of this committee, but there are a lot of things that need to be addressed. And, again, everything takes a lengthy discussion because there are issues of ethics, and there's the law and then there's ethics. And they're very different, so it does require robust discussion. Those are just a few of the things I wrote down. So alright.

That's that's all I have. Thank you. We should we go to the public, or should we okay. We can go to the public. Any member of the public wish to speak on our work plan? Come forward, please.

Is it on? Okay. Is it? Okay. So, yeah, I really love that you said that, council member said, about the difference between legal versus ethics.

I think that's a really important point because just because something is legal doesn't mean it's based on moral or ethics. And I haven't been to very many of the council meetings. But seeing the council meeting on the twenty fourth, I heard from others that it was a bit highly, like, top level, top five worst sort of issues with inter council member situations. But then reading the grand jury report that was done on how that's all been going, it's very, very telling. And just seeing how this committee is discussing things in a very civil and, you know, very, like, productive manner Compared to what happened at the twenty fourth meeting, I think there is sort of this issue where, like you guys said, your meetings have been canceled, delayed, or whatever.

But these ethics things are playing into all of this stuff. And if there is an issue where a not enough discussion is given and there's a clear animosity between council members, that really just ruins it for the public, and that's going to decrease the involvement that you guys are seeking. So I think because there hasn't been a consultant found to help you guys with your cons conflict resolution yet, I think there needs to be something more expedient done to help resolve this issue because especially the dynamic of the mayor between everyone else, it was incredibly unprofessional and, frankly, absolutely disgusting. I could not believe the levels of disgust I saw on her face in an open meeting in front of a camera, for other council members speaking. It was horrific.

I've never seen that level of unprofessionalism with council members. So if you're struggling to find staff is struggling to find a consultant to help with conflict resolution, I think you need to find some other expedient measure to address that because you guys are never gonna get anything done if that's not resolved. Thank you.

Anyone else wishes yes.

Hi. I'm I'm Jay. So like the previous speaker said, that that meeting last week was pretty wild. And I think if you can find a way to constrain things so that an hour isn't spent bickering between people on the council and the mayor and stuff, that would be really helpful and be much more productive and conducive to good meetings and getting more stuff done.

Thank you. Anyone else?

There are no hands raised online.

Okay. So I'm gonna go back to staff. I brought up a lot of items. How do we define a work plan to address a number of these? We probably I mean, I just laid these on you. Should we should I put them in a list, and then maybe we could review the list at a future meeting? I would like to get some direction.

Yeah.

So those were a lot of items from council member Park and council member Jane. I'll say a couple things. The reality is every organization has but so much bandwidth. And I think in our last few years, where whether it was at a priority setting meeting or these conversations, we've talked about the bandwidth of staff. With regard to the the need to have more meetings, I've said consistently.

I totally agree. And we are constantly pulling for meetings, special meetings, and sort of a never ending saga. Right? On an operational side, staff has developed internal policy around how we pull for meetings that we can certainly share with the committee because there I think we have came there were some challenges with individuals having concerns with how we selected what meeting we would have. Because, as you know, oftentimes when we poll for special meetings, we don't get all seven, and and oftentimes, we struggle for even a simple majority.

And so staff has developed additional criteria around how we poll for meetings and and and track them, and and we will do that. I think specifically with regard to the items that were brought up for the governance work plan, we don't have enough time to to go through those. And so we certainly need to push that to another meeting. I I also want to say that in my experience, we have not had a very clear process on how items get on the governance committee agenda. What I've heard is, historically, it was more relaxed.

Right? It was if one committee member brought something up or there was a general consensus at a meeting or staff raised a concern. It sort of all went on the agenda, but there was enough time to process through things or potentially not enough time, which is why we have such a backlog. I think we're at the point now with the desires and and backlog of items that we need a very structured process on how something goes on the governance committee agenda. And so what we attempted to do in this meeting is to provide the known items that we have on the work plan that we've discussed before, however they got there, whether it was staff initiated, committee consensus, or even one council member.

But there are things that we've in general talked about being on the work plan. And then we listed a number of things from council member Park under referrals. And then suds, probably 80% of the things you've you mentioned, we've talked about, right, in our one on ones. And so I think we need to plan a special meeting, have a elongated discussion about the items that you guys would like to discuss in governance and a process on how those get on the agenda. My recommendation right now is that we need majority committee support to put things on the agenda.

And I say that not to disrespect any item that's raised by one committee member. I just think the number of items that and the number of ideas, we just don't have the bandwidth. Right? And so if everything goes on the list, we then need a prioritization process. And so I I think the the best place to start now is let's schedule a special meeting where we can talk about all of the desires for for governance and then have the committee vote for what items get on the list, and then we can strategically plan them out.

If that means having more meetings, it will mean have having more meetings. We'll plan that out. I do need to work with staff because there is a workload capacity. Right? This is but one item that the the staff that are here that support this committee work on.

And then as we know, this is one of the busiest years the city has ever seen. Right? And and so there there's a certain bandwidth capacity. So with that, we will schedule a special meeting to to have this discussion. I I think with regard to council policies, on the work plan is a effort that is already going on, which is, I think, that's scheduled for the December 7 meeting, yes, a comprehensive council policy and procedural manual.

As you know, what we have right now is individual council policies that have been adopted over the years, many of which have been revised over the last several years. But they're not all consolidated in one place. Some refer to others, and it's candidly a bit of a mess. Right? And so what we wanted to do was to establish one comprehensive council policy and procedural document.

Other cities have them. I've developed them in other cities. And through that process, we can address some of the concerns that that were raised here today, but I understand that that will be a elongated process. And there may be some policies that the committee feels like, you know what, we need to address right now because we're having challenges with normal operations. We're having challenges with how the council meetings are occurring. And so as we have that conversation, and we'll that, we may need to prioritize. Right? What goes in the longer council policy and procedural manual development, and then what needs to be addressed right now. Okay.

Member Cha. Yep.

Thank you, chair. Just to bring it on record, I agree with both comments from council member Park and Jane about what needs to be bring on the work plan. I only didn't speak because I wanted to save some time on that because they already took everything. But on record, yes, I am with them. Thank you.

Member Park?

Yeah. I mean, I I wanna make a a point, which is we have a marketing, and we have a marketing subcommittee. And the marketing subcommittee has had full support. They've got a staff member who supports that entire I I mean, I was on the marketing committee for two years, and we had zero meetings. And I was told we had zero meetings because we we did not have staff to do that.

After the election, we had one staff member, and now we've got especially this year, we've had last year, we've had meetings of the subcommittee. We've had public subcommittees in the of the marketing subcommittee. We've had more meetings there, and I think that governance and ethics is at least as important as the marketing subcommittee is. The fact that we don't have a staff member supporting governance and ethics, the fact that we don't have additional meetings with workshops, with talking about what the work plan items are, preparing for the what we discuss here, The fact that we don't have staff in support of governance and ethics here. We used to have an ethics consultant.

It wasn't Tom Shanks. Tom Shanks, we didn't renew his contract since 2014. There's a PRA request on the public website, which clearly shows this. Like, when Tom Shanks, the ethics adviser, tells us that he's got you know, that he, you know, resigned in 2018 when the city canceled its ethics program and then asked candidates to sign an an ethics pledge, which itself isn't very ethical, it's kinda ridiculous. It's it's clearly it's clear that we've got ethics problems in this city, and those ethics problems aren't just with the city, but with the people on the outside trying to push push actions inside the city.

You know, we we we should have workshops and planning meetings in addition to scheduled meetings to talk about ethics and, you know, governance and ethics. Like, we have all these issues. There are so many issues here. The fact that we looked at travel policies last year, that we spent two meetings and hours in in council on travel policies, I I agree that's important. But those aren't necessarily the most important things that are stifling democracy in our city.

I mean and we didn't get a chance to to vote on that. That was brought to us by who? By staff, I believe. And what I'd like to see is I'd like to see real discussions on setting what the priorities are for even this committee. As issues that come up, we see these issues.

We know that these issues come up. I've been waiting for literally two months to come to this meeting so I can I can give my referrals? I could have said this in counsel, but, you know, I was told that, well, since the ethics committee is coming up, you know, be before and now it's moved until today, you can just refer them yourselves in in governance and ethics. That's true. But I'm saying every single time we push back a meeting, every single time we cancel a meeting, every single time, you know, we have to refer another item to governance and and ethics, we blow up our work plan.

We we, you know, create a lot of work for staff and for ourselves that we're never gonna get through because you're telling us you'd like it to make it harder to for people to put an item on a work plan rather than you would like us to find a way to get to the work plan and to deal with these items better. That is not what what I believe the direction should be. A direction should not be making it harder for people to put items on their work plan. The the action should be how do we address more items? And if that's more work, if that's more more meetings, you know, we may complain about staff.

Maybe we need more staff. We've talked about how we poll. You know, council members can't make it. I have seen that if I can't make a meeting, it's scheduled anyway. But I've been told at least once that, well, the mayor can't make it, and it's important that the mayor be there. If we are treating people as more equal than others, then we've got a problem in this city. I mean, again, we talked about this before. Full time council, maybe maybe it's time that we acknowledge that this city has enough issues, has enough infrastructure, has enough resources to consider a full time council. I mean, I let's first is to be honest with the work ahead of us. That's the first thing.

The second thing is to give council members no excuses for meeting me for missing meetings, especially as an alternate, or no excuses for responding to residents. I think at some point, the city deserves you know, we have a stadium authority. What other city deals with the stadium authority? That council deals with the stadium Or a utility, you know, enterprise fund. Or, you know, lot lot of different things.

The mayor says it all the time. We're a medium sized city but with large, you know, large infrastructure, with with large concerns. And at some point, maybe we be honest and realistic with those concerns. And we need to have a full time council because this is a part time council. Part time council, as chair of Jane, we don't even get health insurance.

At some point, having a requirement for council, for people to come to council that does not allow renters, people with jobs, people with multiple jobs to participate, excludes those members of society. And maybe it's time that we allow those members of society, not a homeowner, not a retired, not a I own my own business elite, to to run this city. I mean, the issues that the people who are unhoused, that renters have, that people those are the people that should should have some say in how their city is run, not just have some input. And now that we've made now I'll let you talk. I'll let you finish talking.

Okay. And now that we've made it the the o 30 process impossible for people to put items for the regular person on the street, for residents to put an item on the agenda without having agreement two times from either staff or people on council? It doesn't make any sense. So I'm gonna say I I see this work plan. I don't agree with all the items here.

I don't think that based on priority, those are the things I I really care about. I think that having a comprehensive city council policies and procedures manual is good, but not unless we have some kind of workshop or some kind of study session where we can review, you know, not just the the policies and procedures that are coming before us or that we've but also a review of the of the ones that we've passed in the recent future and what the effect has been. And at some point, I wanna see those side by side with what the charter allows even before we make these charter changes, which we talked about in this in this body would have several tiers, items that we just needed correction for you know, we we number two, with things that are important but not not that earth changing, and some that are so important that we want them on individual ballot measures. And then to see that go to council as we just want we we are not gonna give you any direction on what kinds of items that people are going to see. And to have the city attorney sit here, tell me that reassure me that we have these different tiers, then go to counsel and say, I put none of them into the action, into the motion in front of us, is really disappointing.

So I would like to to continue this item. I mean, we are not gonna decide on the work plan here. There is a lot more there are a lot more things that need to go into this. We're at 12:15 right now. I don't think we're going to accept this work plan.

I might propose that we do bring this item back, that my fellow committee members do not violate Brown Acts and their recommendations to staff, and then we can have a discussion at our next meeting on the work plan and priorities. And I'm certain that we'll require more special meetings.

Yes. I do think if we need we're gonna need a meeting before April 30. So we will attempt to schedule a special meeting to talk about the work plan and item three that we did not get to on today's agenda.

Also,

given that, because it is sometimes very difficult to schedule that that meeting, Does the committee want to have the meeting if only three of you can if only two of you can attend? Or given that we've had the this discussion today and there are distinct desires from all three of you that are the appointed members, do you want us to find a time where all three of you can be there? Because that that is oftentimes our problem, right, when we schedule special meetings. And there have

been times actually, that's one of

the reasons why this committee is actually occurring today because one of the members was not able to attend, and so we delayed until we had the full complement of the regular members knowing that we were going to discuss issues that we've talked about before, and we did not want to disenfranchise any of the regular members. So I'll pose that question.

Hey. We've actually had this problem at BTA where we often don't even have a quorum. But if they're information items, I prefer I actually recommend that we meet as a committee of the whole and actually have the item discussed without taking action. So we have a lot of I mean, there's a lot of discussion that has to happen for these items. And I personally am fine if we have two people attending, but because we we do have a very heavy work workload.

That's my opinion. Yes. Member

Shahal. I do agree. I know I had to skip because of family issues, but I did convey to the staff if I'm not able to, please go ahead and schedule a meeting. So I'm I'm okay with having two members to conduct a meeting. In in case I have to accuse or have some emergency, I'm okay with completely okay with that.

I just wanna point out it wasn't just the fact that the committee member couldn't make it. It's also the alternate could not come. Like, we have alternates for a reason. And if an alternate cannot make any of the meetings where the they are the alternate too, at some point, we need to consider what alternate means, and we need to consider the efficacy of of that alternate. I also do not mind if we have a a body where two to meet.

Again, we have the same problem that we had on council with with you know, we have we have an item where we need four votes and four four people are present. We have an item that needs five votes and only five people are present. The reality is quorum determines whether or not this committee can meet or not. Quorum determines that. There is there is a desire.

There's a preference to have more members or to have all members, but that is never a requirement. And to be told that, you know, these are considerations that executive staff is having, I think it puts in my mind a lot of doubt as to the direction that executive staff is is taking us. So, again, I would I would love to consider more meetings. I would love to have more meetings. If there are study items, I think those study items, we can suggest those even at workshops.

I think for the same reason that the council needs priority setting, maybe governance ethics and ethics are important enough that we should have we should have priority setting as well, that we should have discussions on this as well. Does that mean more meetings? I'm saying it does. And at some point, if the number of meetings, as chair James suggested, even three meetings a month, it was not enough to handle the meetings we had last year. At some point, we need that published. We need that people to talk about that. We need that to be a real advertised thing because it's it's clear that in some cases, this city has outgrown outgrown a part time council.

There are no other comments. We'll go to the public on this. Any member of the public?

There are no hands raised.

Okay. So I believe that as city manager said, we will need a special meeting maybe before April 30 to handle our workload. And, again, I think we we have direction that two is sufficient to have that meeting if necessary. Of course, try for three, but if you have to

Right. And and and we will, via email, publish to the committee how we selected the meeting. I just don't want staff to be accused of different disenfranchising one the the the one member that couldn't make the meeting that we scheduled. Right? And so we have a process, and we will articulate exactly the the how we chose the meeting that was scheduled.

Okay. We are essentially at time. You can we I'm gonna ask the city attorney. Can we start a discussion on the referrals, or should we defer that?

Member Jane, I we certainly could. It's up to to you all on how you wanna approach that. Most referrals for this group when the work plan is on the agenda is, you know, in my head, is that that's part of the work plan discussion unless referrals unrelated to setting your future agenda or referral in effect, right, has something that comes back to this committee in the future, and that, by its very nature, I think, was what the work plan discussion was about. So if there was something that wasn't raised that was that's desired for a referral during that discussion, If you've got time, it's up to you, presiding officer, to see if you wanna entertain any new matters.

Yeah. I since these two items were brought by member Park, I would like your opinion on this, how you see this as maybe not fitting into our next work plan discussion.

I mean, at some point, we have the same problem that I complained about with the o 30. We need to plan. We need to get permissions, so many permissions before we can even discuss it that discussing it is no longer timely or discussing it is really difficult to do. I'd rather discuss the item rather than discuss whether or not it needs to be put on the work plan. I think that all of those are just are just busy work to prevent us from getting actual work done.

My concern is I'd like to talk about them. Reconsiderations? Reconsiderations is broken. And the the item that I would have liked to talk about reconsiderations for is already passed. It's already coming to counsel because of, I'm gonna say it, I believe, potentially even illegal recommendations from the city attorney.

I mean, right now, I would like to talk about things that prevent democracy, including the o 30 policy. The o 30 policy, which which denies the public from putting an admin on the agenda without prior approval from either staff or council, that is terrible. That is the reason why we've had so many people coming to council in the last several months because there is no longer an ability for the public to put it on the on the agendas themselves. People have said, well, we don't want a lot of you know, we'd like things to be efficient. Democracy is not about efficiency.

It's about voice. And if we are going to deny the people voice, I don't wanna be part of that. I know when this was passed. This was passed in October 2023 in council. I attended as the alternate of the governance and ethics committee meeting that this was discussed and referred to to counsel. And I was there in October 2023 when it was voted on my counsel, and I voted against it. And I try to tell people it was about democracy. People pushed it because of efficiency. Efficiency is not what democracy is about. If a thousand people wanna wanna come in front of council and say the same thing, they are legally allowed to say that.

Fact that a thousand people wanna say the same thing, they all came to counsel to say that, tells us is a different type of statement in and of itself. But for staff, I I mean, my bigger concern is all the policies I've looked at, public speaking policy, the o 30, o 20 policies, you know, the proclamation policies, every single one of these policies that was brought forward to us, to this committee, by executive staff has done more to remove the democratic process than it has to make the efficiency of the city better. Every single one of them. I mean, we have a proclamation policy which allows the mayor to basically veto to have control over every proclamation proclamation made in the city, which is not something that was not a power that's reserved by in the charter. There's nothing in the charter that suggests that.

And I'll recall, I've I've forgotten when it is, but it's in my notes. When the city attorney is telling us that, well, the mayor is allowed to do this. My challenge was I do not see anywhere in the charter where some of the some of the the abilities that the city attorney suggested exist in the charter. I could not read in the charter where those existed. In fact, I read it out in public, and I will provide that information to staff and to to the public as well.

But we need to review all of these things, and we need to review these policies not based on efficiency, not based on our preference, but based on, you know, how we are removing the the democratic voice of the people. And if we are removing the democratic voice of the people, then at some point, we need to reconsider these policies or maybe challenge challenge these policies through a lawsuit. I'm not suggesting that anyone should do this, but I'm suggesting that it's that important that we consider what we have done. O 30 policy, it should never require approval. If if a a member of the public wants to complain about a corrupt council or a corrupt city and we need somebody from the council or somebody from the city to even allow that to be discussed, that's an affront to democracy.

If we need a majority of council to agree just so we can talk about it, that's an affront to democracy. This is essentially what we have done. A lot of the people that have brought issues to us, including the RFP for the downtown pro project, they wouldn't have had to come to any council members. They wouldn't have had to put these processes in place, come to you with with with an email if they could have done that themselves, but they cannot do that. And as a result, they're coming to us.

And they're coming to counsel, and they're still being stifled. This is a problem. Like, at some point, governance and ethics, I wanna go even lower than that. I want everything that comes before governance and ethics, if there's a challenge, to be answered from a a democracy standpoint. Like, at some point, some of the things that we have done deny people voice.

And in every single one of those circumstances, I think we should challenge what the city has decided. O 30 process is only the start, but proclamations, public speaking it's funny how we pass public speaking because the the executive staff has told us, well, the mayor can speak because it's not disallowed by the by the charter, and council members cannot speak because it's not explicitly allowed by the charter, then we pass a public speaking policy where we speak even less in the city than we have prior to that policy being put in place. A good example of this is the the tree lighting ceremony. Who decides who the the honoree is? We had two years ago, we all had a script, and every council member participated in the tree, the tree lighting ceremony.

Last year, we did absolutely nothing. We had no say in who was selected for the to be the honoree. We had no say. We we could not even address. We did not even address the public. These are exactly the types of issues that I brought up, you know, when we were considering a a public speaking policy, and it has become even worse after the policy has been put in place. And at some point, I can't blame the council. I can't blame this committee because the council and this committee have no say in the matter. So at some point, we need to have discussions like this. We're not gonna decide it here, but we need to do something.

Yes, city attorney. Mister chair,

I do I do think the nature of those comments are potentially work plan, you know, discussions to the extent you wanna add those. And so that is gonna happen as soon as that next special meeting occurs. I will point out already on the work plan in front of you is discussion of the policy zero four two, the reconsideration policy, and the next month meeting management, you know, protocols. A lot of the issues, both member Park and I think you, mister chair and member to Hall, you know, brought up are germane, you know, to you, you know, revisiting those policies. What's not on yet and certainly could be if that's what the the the the desire of the committee is to add the zero thirty, you know, for further discussions too about what happened, how it's working, and whether or not any amendments, you know, would be warranted.

So that's potentially something that could also be added. It isn't currently, but zero four two and zero five five are already on there.

Thank you. City manager, were you gonna say something? Okay. The the zero thirty process was changed because we had members of the public wanting to do censures, and it was it was became political and a war where both sides had people that were gonna censure the other side. And we thought that there should be a few guardrails to prevent that war from happening. If you want to cosponsor every single recommendation, zero thirty from the public, you're welcome to do that, member Park.

This is not about whether I want to do that or not. This is about a situation in the future where nobody on council wants to do that. It is a it is a situation that we've had in the past where a majority, if not every single council member, may have been biased on a on a specific side, and nobody wanted to put this forward. If it's a complaint about the very nature of the city, about corruption, that corruption of every single council member, crush corruption of the city city staff, that nobody on the city city staff, it is not about what any specific circumstance today. It is about what we need to safeguard free speech for the future.

The fact that we had a lot of people coming to staff and saying they wanna censure, they wanna do this, they wanna that is that is unfortunate. That is true. It is unfortunate that people can come out and they can accuse. They can say whatever they want because of free speech. But that's exactly what free speech is for.

It's not for when we are inconvenienced. It's for when we are oppressed, and we need to make a statement to talk about the oppression. This is why I think having council members who, you know, do not come from the working class, having council members who, you know, again, may be minorities but no longer sit on the in the minority demographic is not the best situation for a council. I think that having people who are oppressed being able to sit on a council, we know with support so that if they have to quit their jobs, if they have to take time away from their families, or you know, so that they don't have to take time away from their families. So they can do the job during regular regular work hours and be compensated for it without having to put their their family's undue burden by having to quit their jobs.

These are the things that I believe this council is not considering. Like, I I've talked to Ayesha Wahhab. Ayesha Wahhab makes it very clear. She is one person out of 40. She's the only renter in the senate out of 40.

And the her ability to pass, you know, rental policies, very small. Because, a, she has to get a lot of people who do not even understand what the situation to understand the situation, and then she has to get them to agree with her. I think at some point, we need to look at not just how the the council looks, how diverse the council looks in terms of ethnicity or race, but we also need to look at how diverse the council is in all other aspects, whether it's financial, with all the other demographics as well. And it is very clear that by not having a council that is that understands the issues of oppressed people, that we are increasing the level of oppression.

Okay. I need to go. We will continue this discussion. I will adjourn this meeting, thank you, at 12:37.