City Council - Regular Meeting

Okay. Good afternoon everyone. The time is 401 and I will now call the March 10th, 2026 regular city council meeting to order. Madame clerk, roll call, please.

Council members present and Norah Bloom um vice mayor um absent. Okay, now is the time for the invocation led by First Church of Christ scientist Newport Beach, Dr. Joan Bernard Bradley. Following that, we'll have the uh pledge of allegiance by Council Member Stapleton. Will you bow your heads while we pray? Dear gracious and loving creator, thank you for the abundant blessings that you have bestowed on this beautiful city of Newport Beach. We ask your blessings on this council meeting and on those elected to conduct its affairs. We acknowledge that you are the source of wisdom and guidance. Grant this council wisdom as they deliberate the issues on their agenda. inspire them with a sense of what is just and right and the ability to work together in harmony even when there are conflicting perspectives. May their decisions reflect your justice and benefit all who live and work in this beloved community. and may your divine presence bring them joy in this work. In your most holy name I pray.

Amen. Amen. All right. Please join me as we salute the greatest uh symbol of freedom in the world. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Moving right into our first study session item, capital improvement program early look. Before I turn this over to the city manager, I'm going to ask council members to note any conflicts of interest that they may have regarding the projects and to leave the room during the discussion if any project with which they have a conflict uh is discussed. Um, council members, does anyone have anything to announce? Council member Wan, none. Council member Barto, none. Council member Grant, none. Council member Weber, Council member Stapleton.

Yeah. Baloa Yacht Basin uh dock replacement and vessel sewage pumpout replacement conflict based on financial relationship with a client who owns adjacent property and then also the Birch Street to Bristol Street to Jimbury Road Street improvements conflict based on interest in 4100 and 4110 MacArthur. Mayor Pro Blum.

Thank you. I have conflicts um due to an interest in real property at 224 Marine for the Baloa Island drainage pump station, Baba Island Seaw Wall permitting and sign and the Bow Island tide valve replacement. In addition to that, I have an interest in real property at 417 and 50130th Street with the Bow Island concrete and road alley improvements as well as Vito pavement rehabilitation. That's all. and I have a conflict with the landscape enhancement program on Pacific Coast Highway in Chronomar based on my interest in my personal residence. I will now turn it over to Simone Georges, our city manager.

Thank you, Madame Mayor. Good evening um to you and the city council. Um every year we discuss our budget for the upcoming fiscal year. And part of that budget review process is looking at what of our what are we going to tackle and spend on our capital improvement program. So with me is Jim Hulahan from he's the deputy director of public works. He has a a brief presentation on all the capital projects that we have planned going forward and into the future. We appreciate your comments and any changes to priorities throughout this um study session. So I'll hand it over to Jim.

Great. Again, Jim Hulahan. Um uh thank you for having me here, Mayor Kleman and council members. Um, as uh Simone had mentioned, this is the early look and what we focus on primarily is the new money being uh proposed for projects uh for our CIP and our our capital improvement program. Basically, what it does is it's helps set priorities and appropriate funds. Uh it's the basis for our planning um and identifies potential conflicts. helps uh develop and construct identified public improvements, addresses the significant maintenance projects that we have, and also res helps respond to the changing priorities and conditions throughout the city this year or this coming year 2627. Um there are uh general fund allocations. Um our baseline allocations um in our CIP general fund is typically 6.5 million and we're looking at additional 1.4 4 million um from our program balance that we already we have currently in uh in our CIP general fund and in addition 2.5 million uh baseline general fund investment in and an additional million from our FMMP which is our facilities maintenance master plan general fund balance and lastly our uh 2.3 million baseline general fund investment for park our park maintenance master plan also our PM MMP which we call that. So the current budget uh for the 2526 year is $12.3 million uh of which 98 million is currently either in design or

construction or completed. So quite a bit of that uh 112 is inactive uh is active right now. Um our preliminary uh total for this coming year 2627 is 95 million. Of that 47.6 in new funding and 47.4 in rebudget which is funding that occurred um in pri prior years either just last year or maybe even the prior year before that. Um of that uh rebudget here's a list of some of the significant projects. uh Balboa Yacht Basin. Um one of the uh large projects is coming forward. It's in design right now. We've just finished the dredging of that area and uh we'll be getting into construction in approximately 8 to 12 months for that project. Um another item here is lower Cways Park that will be coming back to city council for discussion uh in the next meeting. The breakdown of the new funding is shown here. Um general fund as I mentioned uh total of 7.9 million. uh diff the various roadway funding we have from the state and county SB1 gas tax measure M2 those are all uh tax based um state and county driven water wastewater uh 8.3 million uh FMMP facilities uh finance plan the FMP I mentioned earlier PMMP 5.8 8 million tidelands 2.7 million uh neighborhood enhancement um is a is a balance that we have from prior years in our CIP. So, we're looking to um get that into play. And then the grants contributions and these items here, 11

million. The big number there uh is that 11 million. 10 million. 10 million of that is actually a loan from the Orange County Water District. That is going to their board uh Thursday, I believe, for discussion for our our new water well. I'll talk about that in a sec. So, I'm going to go through each section uh of our CIP. Um there's in total 45 new funded actually they're not all new fun uh projects. Some are rebudget and added new money, but 45 total programs or projects. Um the first section in our facilities, I'll just touch on a one in each section. Um this one is the council chambers and community room AV upgrades. Um that one will will be looking at the uh technology here um meeting new state standards and uh doing some refreshments as well. Um in that uh we have PEG funds which is um it's a public in uh education and government funding. Um, and it's specifically dedicated to that type of use u u accessibility and such for uh public meetings and and video and and uh projection that type of thing. So um total in the facility section 5.1 million under our streets and drainage section um first item shown here is the BOA island concrete road and alley improvements. This is in uh tied to our undergrounding operation and this work specifically would be uh the south bayfront and Park Avenue uh portions of Park Avenue but all of uh uh South Bayfront. Quite a large project. It's total projects over $6 million. Um the undergrounding is taking h more than half of it. The other half is coming

from general fund neighborhood enhancement and our water fund. We have some water lines that were put in years ago that the roadway was never repaired. So anyway, that's a large project and uh large uh contribution from these different funds. In uh additionally from streets and drainage under landscape enhancement, the Mesa Drive trail um that's shown on the left hand side. We're looking to extend that um and very much like it is looking there um extending that all the way down to the park at the at the uh bottom of the hill. So that's uh in design right now and we look to get uh into construction in the next 6 to 8 months. Um San Miguel Drive paving um Sanwaqin Hills Road to Oakville Road large paving project that is uh well needed in that area. uh additional street and drainage. We've got uh an intersection and roadway at Vito. Um so from Newport Boulevard to Via Malaga, um we'll be grinding and overlaying that road. And then at the intersection of uh the Vito or the Leo Plaza area, Leo village, we'll be looking to move the crosswalk to the other side of the street to allow traffic to flow better through that intersection. turning into the village and um right now the crosswalk it's constant and uh to move it on the other side helps flow uh and and not the backup into Newport Boulevard. So we'll be looking at working on that. We're designing that right now. Total for streets and drainage 7 $17.1 million. in the transportation section. Um the traffic signal rehab program will

be focused um on uh signals on Birch and um some work also on um San Miguel. So, right, uh, coming forward in the this coming year, um, we'll be actually in construction on MacArthur, which is fully budgeted, so there's no new money, that's why it's not listed, but, um, we'll be doing multiple signals on that roadway as well. underwater quality and environmental. Um, one of the areas we're going to uh look to uh improve is the trash interceptor. So, we're going to look at doing some modifications to that um in help um with the vegetation. That's the biggest issue we're having today. It takes a a lot of work to get that vegetation out of that river. and um the the mach the interceptor's working. It's when it gets into those big mats um we have to do a little more hand work. So we're trying to figure out um different ways to maybe increase the power motor, those type of things. So we're uh dedicating um the environmental liability fund which is tied to trash um toward that those modifications. So we'll be working on that for next winter. in the parks, harbors, and beaches. Uh we'll be working on the Bonita Creek Park athletic field turf replacement and also the the lighting there as well. So large area. We're going to increase the turf into the uh softball field. So that's a permanent turf field. And um we'll leave the one closer to university as a natural um brick dust and and grass. Uh, additionally in the harbors and beaches section uh we'll be working on u

some of the bulkheads and seaw walls uh on the street ends um specifically around um Marcus in that area and um some along the Ryan as well 29th and 28th Street. Um we've got a repairs and I think there's one or two that we'll be replacing as well. And lastly, we're looking at uh replacing some tide valves throughout uh the peninsula area as well. In the water section, the large project that I mentioned earlier was the new wells in Fountain Valley. And uh we'll be starting to drill those um those uh wells uh early or late summer. Um, we've we've been working with Orange County Water District for a loan um of $10 million. There'll be an additional 8 million or 8.5 million next year that we'll be looking for uh which will be um from our water funds um for the additional work for site development and such. But um total water 13.4 4 million and the wastewater. Uh these are typical programs we have every year um funded by our wastewater fund. And then lastly, our seventh cycle housing element planning is going to begin uh this coming year and it'll happen over the next three years. Fun again. And um so that's what this item is. And then looking forward in the five-year look ahead. Uh so first of all the bubble island seaw walls uh we'll be looking at the design. We're already we're starting the design now for the entire island and the little island. Um and in the following year, as soon as we

get through permitting, which will be the biggest issue with coastal, uh we'll be looking for phase one, which is the Grand Canal and the West End to uh add and put in a new seaw wall. And in 2829, we'll be looking at the police station, which we'll be discussing later uh right after me. Um 29:30, uh the Newport Pier. Um we've moved it back a bit. Um but um you know that it's not gone. It's uh still in our discussions but um moving it back a little bit uh with some other priorities. And then 20 or 3031 fire station number three and 3132 uh it's already time to replace the synthetic turf. That'll be 10 years. uh that's typically when we replace synthetic turf uh due to degradation over that time. So that's we'll be looking at it. If it's if we find that it's uh good at that time, we'll we'll extend it. And with that, if you have any questions, I'm ready to answer them.

Thank you, Mr. Hulan, for that very thorough presentation. We have a lot going on as always in the city. Um okay. Are there any questions up here for staff? Council member Wan.

Yeah, I just wanted to comment on that Orange County Water District loan. That's on Thursday. We have a subcommittee as a director for the Orange County Water District. I get to uh serve on that. And uh that was something that we implemented a couple years back. So, so far only Seal Beach and Santa Ana have gotten that. So, Newport would be the third city. It's not an unlimited amount that are available for loans. So, it's a very select group. So, thank Mark Vquick back there that has worked hard on establishing that and getting that set up. Um, that will be uh voted on on Thursday and then we go to our main board. So, it's a subcommittee on Thursday and then our main board will hear that on the following Wednesday. So, uh appreciate staff's hard work on that because that will give us additional funds to use for other things and uh I appreciate that. Council member Grant,

I would just comment that's a remarkable amount of work to be achieved even in a fiveyear period, one-year period, and I'm grateful that you and your capable staff will be heading up heading up all those projects for our community. Thank you. Other comments up here? My question is, are we pursuing any grant opportunities? I know we've engaged towns in to look for grant money wherever we can find it, especially for I know we have a lot of grant money that we've already used to build the trash interceptor, but any more opportunities out there?

There there are opportunities and we continue to work with uh Townsen. Uh we we go through our list and we sit down with the city's man city manager's office to identify those areas where there's opportunity. Um it's challenging um competitive uh typically and um so anyway we do we definitely do and and with OCTA we'll definitely you know when there's opportunities on the larger construction projects we look for uh for their M2 funds the competitive ones. Yep. Great. Thank you. Okay. We'll now open it up to the public. Mr. Brass, I see you're ready to go.

Uh full house tonight. So good. Um, and the parking is so full that I'm sure people are still streaming in and you have the overflow going tonight, too. So, good job. Uh, mayor, uh, council Dennis Brass Balboine, I just want to comment on, uh, the wells in Fountain Valley. So, that's going to be awesome because that's going to give us, um, then full 100% local water, right, where we don't have to count on the Colorado River. And I don't know if you've read in the news, but there's a lot of might go to legal in regards to aotments coming through. So, it's good we're properly planning. So, my question would be when are those wells going to be officially up and running and when would we start receiving water uh from those wells uh in that project? Thank you very much.

Thank you. Any other comments from the public?

Good evening, mayor and members of the council. That was a very good presentation and I just wanted to let the um city council know that uh island leaders have been working closely with your staff for years and we concur with the recommendations of the staff. Two quick notes on the um seaw wall replacement. It's a very it's going to be a very costly endeavor and I've encouraged the staff to look at um other technologies where maybe we don't have to replace the seaw wall and we can use shoring or other methods to give it another 40 years of life. So um I would encourage the staff when they're evaluating alternatives to include that what I think is going to be a much cheaper alternative. And then a final comment out in the five-year spectrum. We've always talked about when we've done our part as property owners in doing the undergrounding and replacing the alleys, begin the street replacement program out about 5 years. That's when the poles will be down and it'll be calm again on the island. But uh if the staff could include out maybe five years um to maybe look at beginning the street reconstruction on Beloa Island, we'd appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Afternoon, mayor, council members. Denise Overberman. Uh great job for staff and providing an overview of the capital improvement programs. I just had a couple of comments. One is relative to the $110,000 that was stated to be allocated for signal synchronization. I think there is a much broader need for evaluation of our entire signal system in light of a dramatically increased traffic flow that can be anticipated through the de the other economic development with housing and other development along Mariners Mile and a number of other areas. Also with the advent of the ebikes and the multimedia pressure that's put in our roadway system, including around residents and also schools, uh my sense is that $110,000 is remarkably skinny and a scope in the budget with that could benefit a look. And then lastly, relative to the five-year budget, I think it's a good global look. It would be helpful to know what the vision is for the amount of capital that is required for those various programs that were identified. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Adam Leins. Lots of interesting things in there and whole lots of money. Thank you. Um, having recently seen a presentation at a coastal commission meeting on microlastics, I'd hope to prompt some thought about when there's replacements of artificial turf with more artificial turf or conversion of real turf to artificial turf. Um, there's ways to measure what comes off as that gets used. And I was kind of shocked at some of the measurements I saw in this presentation at Coastal. And the science on microlastics is evolving right now. And and I just think these are things that should be thought about. It's maybe going to turn out like back in the early 1900s when smoking wasn't bad for you and was cool and fashionable. So, I just like some thought put into when turf is going to be substituted or replaced with something that appears to have all kinds of harmful effects, especially being so close to the water as we are. And I'd say this ties into the water quality elements up there, too. So, just something to think about. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Uh, Mayor Kleman, members of the council, my name is Jim Moer. Uh first first I'd like to observe there was was a time when members of the public coming to these meetings and especially study sessions like this could expect to find in the lobby a paper copy of the presentation and those who were interested could take that copy and uh follow along a bit a little better than they can with the slides that are shown for a moment and then disappear and actually take notes on those to give you better comments than is possible. Now I I think the reliance that everybody is online following this is probably misplaced. The second comment I would make is which I made in writing is uh there there appears to be whether there is currently in our general plan a expectation or actually requirement that the entire CIP budget or project list and not only our own cities but those of other agencies that might be planning to do work in the next 5 years in our city are kind of consolidated. ated together by the public's work department and presented to the planning commission to make sure that they are consistent with our general plan. I believe some years ago a similar requirement in our charter was removed but there still seems to be a state law requirement to do that. So I'm wondering how we're fulfilling that obligation to make sure all these projects anthos by other agencies that may be happening in our city are consistent with our general plan. And then my final comment since I didn't have a paper copy to take notes on as I believe one of the last slides mentioned and this is kind of apppropo to your next study session item which is about relocating the police station. The public works department is apparently not even expecting to begin thinking about that until 2028.

And I find that interesting when we're here today to be initiating something that is not even in our capital improvement program and not expected for the next several years. Thank you. Thank you. Any other speakers on this item? Seeing none, I'll bring it back up here. Any other comments, my colleagues? Okay, moving on. Uh, I do want to mention before we get to our next study session item, we do have some seats available up here for anyone standing in the back who would like to sit down. We'll now move on to the Newport Beach headquarters reconstruction study session. Mr. Jurgis.

Thank you, Madame Mayor. I appreciate it. Um, with me is Dave Webb, our public works director. So, this evening's item is really to talk about the reconstruction of the police headquarters and really specifically as to where we've already talked about in the past um how old our facility is. It's over 50 years old and by the time we build something somewhere, it's going to be, you know, another seven years old. Um we from a staff standpoint, we understand the complexities of building a police station at Santa Barbara and we understand the issues with regards to Dove Street. So our choices are really really small at this point. Hence we've floated that idea of building it at the civic center. There's been a lot of conver uh conversation and press media about um removing the the bunny bunnies or the sculpture garden and that's not our intent. Our intent is really to study it. We need to study the civic center if there's a council consensus on it and so we can understand the environmental impacts, the traffic impacts, where we can relocate the sculpture garden, where we could relocate the the bunnies that we have out here. So, it is a conversation. I am looking for a little bit of consensus madame at the end so we can continue the studying process and hire consultants so we can answer some of these broad questions that everybody keeps posing to us as far as how do we mitigate some of these impacts? What are the traffic levels? what is the view um the view impacts and we don't have those answers yet because we haven't studied it. So u I'm going to hand it over to Mr. Webb. He's going to go ahead and make a full presentation about the other project sites. With us this evening is your police chief Dave Miner is your fire chief Jeff Boils and community development director Haime Mario. And we're all here to answer any of those questions that you may have after the presentation. So thank you Dave.

Well good afternoon mayor, council members, members of the public. My name is Dave Webb, public works director, and thank you for coming today to talk about a little bit more on our presentation regarding the policeville facility replacement. So, let's start in and talk about recent undertakings. I want to I'm probably going to do some of this as a little background for some of you, but others who haven't been in the conversation want to make sure they understand that uh we've been working on this for quite a while. Um, and particularly recently on November 4th of 25, the council set up a Newport Beach Police Headquarters ad hoc committee and that has Mayor Prom uh Blom on it and also council members Weber and Balttos who've been looking at that. Um, with that we also hired a outside firm Griffin Structures to give us some support in terms of constructibility and costing and things like that to do the rough quantities and and look at various items and give us a a kind of a feel what we're looking at. And then the committee started looking and considering various sites and I've had four of them listed on here. Uh the current location Santa Barbara has been looked at and we'll talk about that more tonight. Um we've also looked at the proposed 1201 Dub Street location. As you recall back in May of 23 the city bought a facility thinking that might be a good location for the police station. And then we've looked around the civic center area. And also recently we started looking at the civic center park. And I know that's a note of interest for a lot of folks tonight. So let's let's start about talk about the p first place is the existing police facility and that that's been a conversation popping up with a lot of people and they've asked the question why can't we just build it where it's at? Well I want to let you know that the the committee did look at this and we did extensive review and and I happen to be around for many years and we looked at this before with other councils. It's very challenging to build it on that site and I'm going to go through some reasons. But with that reason, we even looked at and bought the Dove Street knowing that it's very difficult to build an existing facility, a new facility on existing site. But the current site is 4 acres. The the zoning on that site is public facilities. It's got a residential overlay and it's got a height limit of 300 ft. That's a

significant point because that's changed a lot since we originally built and bought the property and built the facility. Now it's a residential overlay with a high uh height limit on it makes it very valuable. And the one of the questions that comes up and the ad hoc had to work on that is is do we want to put a a police facility an important facility but on a very valuable piece of property that has a lot of high value in another way. So that's an important point we may talk about tonight. The current police facility is 49,200 plus square feet. It's a concrete tiltup. It was built back in 197 1973. the site uh building shares with the fire station. Fire station number three is on that site. Takes about 1 acre of the four acres. It's a 13,000 square foot concrete building and that was built a little earlier, 1971. As you can tell from the dates, all these facilities are aging. Um so we talked about the facility condition. We did an assessment of all our properties in the city, all our facilities in 2021 and we have that assessment and when we looked at the police building, they rated it as fair at the time. Um, just as a note, the fire station on the corner number three is rated as poor currently. Um, these buildings are 50 plus years old and they very important. They run operations 247 critical public safety functions. So, we have to really look at these and make sure that that we're staying up with and investing in that. So, what we're finding increasing system system failures. There's a growing need of more maintenance cost and various uh items that are breaking down on these older buildings. Just for instance, on the police building, I look back for the last three years, we spent about $1.5 million in upkeep, maintenance, small capital projects just trying to keep the building up to shape. Uh the fire station itself, smaller building, but we spent another $170,000 a year on that the I'm sorry, for three years on that building. But we're finding it's increasingly we have system failures, growing maintenance needs, and that's like any building as it ages. It just you have more maintenance needs on that. Um, recently we've had sewer problems in the police facility and you

can imagine, uh, cast iron pipes, uh, old pipes, maybe rust, things like that. We've had some electrical issues come up. We actually had a fire in one of the buildings that was a shorting with wires. And then, it's funny, recently, we do a lot of work to keep these buildings in great shape. Our utilities departments routinely test our generators and switches, but we had a power outage and the the the switch failed. And it's just from an age related thing. It's not from our lack of attention on it. So, those things are starting to show up in signs. other things, major structural infrastructure concerns. You have an agent building that's requiring more repairs. Um, you've got lots of systems in there and they're getting outdated. Uh, they're they're way past their intended life. When I say that, think about 1970. We are all excited with copper phone lines. We started getting coax cable. We're way beyond that now. We have Cat 6 uh cable. We have fiber optics. There things have really evolved and this building wasn't set up that way. Um, many systems are outdated in that. So, the other thing is the employees inside the building. this building has only 20% natural light inside of it and and that makes a difference for employees morale and things like that. So, we looked at things like that. And the other big thing being a critical facility, if if you're aware of structural codes, they're built at higher levels. When we have an earthquake, we want those buildings to stand up even when others fall down. So, this building doesn't meet current codes and seismic standards. So, that's a consideration on the existing building, too. We looked at the technology and digital evidence demands. Again, digital is so much further than we had when we built the building. There's there's a need for uh modernization for allowing that technology. Think of a data storage. We have uh the need to store a lot more data from body cameras and video data and things like that. So that that and its servers and the network are in there. The electrical needs of the facility are much different. Think about the AI discussions we're having now with all that demand. We have data storage here now that needs a lot more. We actually have drones now running out that are electric. We we just need to upgrade the electric systems. And then again um just retrofitting the aging infrastructure is costly and inefficient. So when you when you start thinking about an old building, should

we put a lot of money into that? The operational constraints of these buildings. Our police department is as we've grown as a city, their their needs have grown. Space limitations on the department are are huge. We don't have significant parking on there. We have insufficient size in that. And the operational support areas are are sometimes constraining the operation itself. The facility layout design um it just is it's not modern. and it needs updating on that. So, one of the questions that the ad hoc looked at is when you start looking at old building, should the city continue investing its major system upgrades in a building that's basically reaching the end of its life? And that's an important question because you're you're needing to dump a lot of money into this building and communications and drone technology and other things. So, we looked at that. Other um things that that AD hawk really took a lot of interest in and and did a thorough job in this, they've set up criteria to look at these buildings and and various components. We have an operational continuity. This is important because when we get into replacing a building or moving something, something as critical as a police service, can we keep it working uninterrupted during a construction process? That's a big question. Location, central location. This discussion has been around, but right now is where's the proximity of the building to the civic s center or services and the the center of the city. Um, that's that's a discussion. Fiscal responsibility. What's the total cost to taxpayers for a building and a facility? That includes land acquisition and construction. Those those come into play. And then constructibility. There are there are sites we can look at but very difficult to construct on including the existing site and we'll talk about that a little bit. Can we even construct it without too much disruption? And then long-term functionality. This is kind of looking into the future. This building going to be around support policing needs for decades because these buildings tend to be longevity wise long. And then land availability. Um we're looking for land and we're looking we're preferencing something we already own. city- owned land is obviously favorable over uh very expensive commercial land around it. So, those are some of the criteria that went into it. So, I'm going to stop and and focus a

little bit on the existing facility now because I know there's been a lot of questions, but I will tell you the ad hoc looked at this prior ad hocs and prior councils looked at this. As I mentioned, we looked at other places because the difficulty of building on the current site. Our construction folks worked with us. We looked at three probable options to do this. And before I look through those options, I also want to note, remember we have a fire station on the site. And it's very important to note before we can rebuild the police facility, we have to move the fire station off. It's it's due for replacement anyway, but it would be in the way of a new facility. So, we have to go find a place for that. That adds about three years just to design and construct that type of facility once we have a site. So, when we looked at the current site, figured how can we reput the police station there, we looked at three options. One would be renovate the existing structure and add to it. Um that would be a full retrofit, seismic retrofit, adding about 20,000 square foot and then building a parking structure of about 250 stalls. Um and again, all these are estimates. We're doing block diagrams, so don't get too caught up in the specifics, but we're we're moving these around to kind of see if we can fit. Option two, what if we build a twostory police facility? We demo the existing structure. We build a new building about 75,000 square ft and then we also build another parking structure with that 250 square ft. And the third option we looked at was building a three-story structure. Again, smaller footprint higher up and again building a um a parking structure a little smaller and then some surface lot parking. Again, that brings the cost down but it does take up room. So, as we looked at these options, we wanted to lay it out for you because we did do a significant review of this and the ad hoc kind of really looked at this and and looked at all the facilities, those criteria they're looking at in regard to this. So, if I look at option one here, we're talking about temporarily, and I put these photos on here, you can kind of understand the sequence. Phase one, we have to basically remove that fire station. Remember, to begin with, and then we temporarily build a a trailer complex on that site. We need some place to put the the staff and the operations. The note on this though, look at that.

You're basically building a trailer village. It's about 15,000, maybe 20,000 square ft of of space we could do. Remember, this building's about 50,000 ft. What that's telling us is we're not be going to get all the the uh functions of personnel in that facility. We're going to have to do some of that. So, we end up having a major disruption. We have things like uh outsourcing the jail service or evidence service or shooting galleries and other things that the police use daily um will not fit on the site. But this option we explored further. So then we would um we would go ahead and demo the not demo but rehab the existing facility. And you're going to have to do a really major rehab gut. You're going to take it down to the the concrete and the steel. You're going to have to do a seismic retrofit, put all new systems in, build a new building within that old building, and then add about 25,000 square ft to that. And once that's done, now we can move the police into that building, get rid of the temporary facilities, and then build a parking deck on that. Again, as we do this, you see some of the challenges. I said major disruption because the police are going to have to move out of their building and operate in a temporary way. And that's that's very concerning because again we need them to operate and function normally and this could put some operational uh shackles on them that we might may not feel that's warranted to do. The other the other concern in this is required off-site parking and it probably need a shuttle. If you know this area and you think about Santa Barbara and Newport Center, where are you going to park all these people when I when we can't park them on site? Because when we're building this, there's about 300 plus vehicles there. We figure that's going to take about 2 acres. We're going to need a secure area with the police vehicles and employees and and I've scratched my head to figure out where we do that. My my brain goes to maybe the Hyatt parking lot off uh the drive over there or the dunes or something, but we really don't have a real close proximity place to put these people. We're going to have to shuttle them back and forth. Why I'm saying that it's an inconvenience. Um it's it breaks up the operation. We're concerned about that. Um, looking at the timeline on this again with the fire station being

about three lo years to relocate and get up and running, you got another four three or four years on the police side to basically get that facility up and running. So, you're looking at a maybe a six to sevenyear total time frame to bring this into com uh where we want to be with a new facility. So, that was option one. We looked at option two a little different. Um, in this case, we're going to build a new two-story police station, 75,000 ft², and then we're going to put that in the formal uh uh fire station site in the parking center. So, in this case, the existing building is still operable. We'll keep the police running in that while we build a new station next to them. But again, notice we've removed all the parking, so we're going to have to build an off-site parking lot and run that. Um, and we'll get the new station up and running. Um, and the pictures again are blocked because remember you need areas around that block to stage and lay down steel and have cranes and concrete and things like that. So, it really constrains the site even though we're going to keep trying to run the existing operation there. Once that's building done, we move the police into the new building. We go to the old building, we demo it, and we build a parking deck over there. Again, we've got a disruptive operation. This one's a little quicker because it's two stages. Again, we need an off-site uh lot. We haven't figured that out yet. um it's going to take about three years, maybe six years total to do the whole operation. And then we looked at one other one to try to see if there's a a better way to skin that. But this this is a a more four- stage where again we build a temporary parking structure on the fire station lot. Then we construct in this case a parking lot first, a little smaller parking deck, 160 stalls, and then we come back where the temporary parking was and we build a three-story police station. And then when those two are up and running, again, we still need offsite uh parking because we don't have enough to work. We would take down the old station and build a surface parking lot there and some supplemental um u facilities for the police station. Again, you're looking at three year three years for the fire station. You've got another three, four years to build the new police station. You're looking at a seven six or sevenyear time frame to do

that. So, we put these in a slide and again um these are all available online for you. We published the slide so you can see it if you want to get in the detail but the detail here is that that ad hoc looked at is the options one two and three and kind of comparing them how to do it on site and again I I I will emphasize that it's not an easy process and there's a lot of thought that's gone in here and it's difficult but if you look at some of these things disruption we don't have a dollar value on disruption you'll we'll talk about that later but we know there is a dollar value associated with that and no one wants a disrupted police department when we're trying to operate a city but there is some level of that um temporary facilities we need. We're not parking on and off site. Again, just the challenge is we haven't got to solving the problem, but we know there's a problem with trying to locate a twoacre parking lot somewhere. Secure it with on-site security and fencing so that the employees and our equipment are safe. Um and then get them back and forth to the police station. There's a shuttle operation that that's a complex thing we have to figure out if we go that route. And then some other things, building presence, site constraints. They looked at um equipment. uh can I move equipment around and build it here highly limited things like that and then the schedule and then the bottom line there's the cost just the hard cost to construct these facilities that last line there cost exclusions is important because we don't really know all this what we do know let's say option one is we're going to have to basically not we're some of the facilities uh operations will not be able to fit on the site we'll probably have to work with I've heard maybe uh Huntington Beach or the county to move our jailer operations there what about dispatch is that going to go somewhere else is it going to go with the county. How do we do with our evidence rooms and and things like that? Where do we put that? There's a cost, a hard cost to that and we estimate maybe between 5 and 20 million, but there's an unspoken cost. We don't know what the disruption cost is on all that, but there will be one. So, those have to be accounted for and that's kind of shown in this slide. So, with that, we looked at it going to another property, and this would be 1201

Dove Street. 121 Dub Street is a property the city bought for $28.7 million back in uh May of 2023. Um it made a lot of sense at the time. It's it's still a a good move, but uh the the the committee looked at it. Should we build up there? Should we put the police station so far away? Um this site is zoned currently for residential, too, and could do 179 units on it. So, it since has changed its zoning and has other opportunities. If you're familiar with the airport area, there's a lot of residential development going up there. So, we don't know what the best use of that is, but that was one of the things. So, the ad hoc looked at this and and they looked at it and and the good news is is that this is an incomeroucing property. The city made a wise move, I think, when they bought this. They bought it in the commercial downturn and now they have an asset that's producing revenue. The revenue income there, by the way, that that's a a dash, not a negative sign. It's actually a positive 2.3 gross revenue a year. and uh positive 1.2 net annual revenue that this building's generating for the city along with the value of the building. Um however, it's located outside the civic center area. It's not really central to civic services. I added a map there to give if you don't know where this facility is, the blue dotted line in that map is the city boundary. And way up on the top in the airport is where this property is located. And you can see it's quite a ways from the center of the city. And if you want to get towards the civic center, which is um I don't know if I can point there, but it's it's down by the bay there. You can see the mass where Newport Center is. It's quite a ways from that. This affects response times, uh, connections with the civic operations, things like that. So, that's a consideration on this building, his location. Um, but the good news is that, uh, the construction cost a little less, 1.5 million or 150 million. We looked at this site. Um, but on the alternative, if we didn't do that, the property could be used and sold to help fund a new police station if that was the choice of the council. They wanted to go there. So there's there's strengths and weaknesses here and they outlined that as they

reviewed these sites. Another potential they looked at was what if we went out and tried to build a new police facility closer to the civic center. And again I I I'm going through this detail because there there's been a lot of thought put into this and we wanted to share it with you and we've just started this the discussion. That's why we're here today to kind of have more discussion on that. So the the ad hoc looked at various locations around it and obviously if you look around Newport Center it's it's pretty well built out. there's no land around. So, the only really way to do that is look in and maybe buy a potential property and redevelop it. So, they did some rough work in that that little um weird shaped uh rare uh not it's a rectagon but it's an off shape is kind of one of the areas they looked at. There happened to be a building up for sale and they said well let's go look at that in representative of where we can do around here. So, we did some rough layout. We came up with the scheme um kind of saying how would we lay out a police station? We did this. Um, this is kind of a just a rough sketch to say we can build it. We can get this done. So, should we pursue this? The rough estimate to build it is about $153 million. That excludes the land cost though. And again, all this goes into the calculations. Then we did some appraisals of the land. There's four parcels there. We'd have to assimilate together should we have a willing seller. Um, there was one for sale at the time, I believe. But you're looking at about 3.6 acres here. And the appraised value was 80 million to $90 million just to buy the land. to add that on top of that $153 million cost to construct that now becomes kind of the baseline they have to evaluate on that. So that that's what we did around here and again there's really limited options to build around the civic center. So that led to another discussion about well what else what is around here and close and that brought in the conversation maybe is there a portion of the park that might work and the ad hoc said well let's take a look at it. So there we have our civic center park next door. Proximity to civic center and service city services is great. It's right across the way. You're coming here to, you know, to do some police work. You can come over and get your parking permit at the same time, whatever you're

doing. Um the city owns the property, so there's no acquisition cost. That's a big plus in this case. Um it integrates the public safety into the campus real well. There are some downsides. There's a lot of grading that would al obviously say happen here. there's an existing park that we'd have to basically look at redoing or uh massaging to a new uh geometric format. Um and again the estimated cost is 162 million. I will note that 2.5 million of that is money that we would need to rebuild and design uh re u facilitate the adjacent park. So just as a note there we looked at this in terms of the park itself. The park is basically 9.45 acres both sides uh across San Miguel. Um, this would take about 3.5 acres of that, leaving the residual of 5.59, about 6 acres left. And we thought we could reimagine maybe the sculpture garden there. There's a lot of area up there along with the dog park that might be able to be repurposed and reused. And there would be a connection between the civic center and the park. I know the square doesn't show that, but there would have to be some kind of park trail that goes around there and connects the two. So again, this is highle block diagrams. We haven't got to that. So that's the conversation that kind of took place in that. And then we laid on just a real simple overlay. How would we do that? And that's the one we we previewed on the planning session in um January 31st that you got the initial thought process. What do you think about something like this? So to have a police building in front, there'd be a parking structure in the back of some sort and then some service areas between the two buildings. It's going to change when you get into the hard architecture, but that's just kind of layout to understand the size of that. So then the the ad hoc committee kind of looked at, okay, let's put them all side by side. what are our best options? And they started using their evaluation criteria. And we've got the current site, the Dove Street site, the private uh center, or maybe the civic center campus. And this kind of lays that out in a holistic view. And you can see it it the costs vary a lot because some of them have land, some don't need land. The construction, the

constraints, uh there's a lot of them on the current site, a much much more because you have you have temporary facilities you have to deal with. You have disruption to the current service, you have longer construction side times. um you have to move a fire station to even get that that one off the ground. Dove Street has its own concerns. It's got income to it. Um it's quite a ways away. It's not civic center centric. Um there's increased response times if we had to deploy out of there to get towards the beach areas. Um the private land has its own issues. I mean, it's great that it location is really nice, the one we were looking at, but it's got significant cost to it. And that's again, remember those criteria. It's it's about usability. It's about total cost. It's other things that the ad hoc was looking at. So, and then again, the civic center uh campus is very well suited. It's also cheaper overall, but it comes with some other costs as you know, we have a park that's involved there and other needs. So, that's kind of what we summed up and why we want to bring that tonight for discussion. The ad hoc wanted to bring that to the full council and the public to talk further about this. So, tonight we're looking for additional uh input from the council and the public to talk about these sites. And then the ad hoc's basically requesting direction. Do you want us to continue and evaluate potential sites and timing and things for the police facility or would you like us to now focus in maybe consider evaluation of the new police facility at the civic center park? And that would include at this point we as the city manager mentioned we would then move into maybe hiring a set of consultants to dig deeper into look at different concept designs, tighten that up, get the traffic involved. what kind of offsites are we going to have to do and mitigation, do the environmental documents. Um, and then with that, we know we are affecting the park. So, there'd also be another element where we're soliciting input from the public and the arts commission because we'd have to redesign and rework the park in a way that we'd still have a park, but what's that going to look like? So, we'd want a lot of public input. Or the third option here is to pursue other directions as provided by the council's

directions. So, that's kind of where we we land tonight and we turn it over to you council to give us input. Thank you once again for that very thorough presentation and I want to thank the ad hoc committee for what seems to be a tremendous amount of study and analysis. Um before we open it up for discussion, I would like to invite the chiefs up just to get a better understanding um both fire and police chiefs. I know we're talking about the police station today, but because we're talking about Santa Barbara site and um trying to get an understanding of all the logistics, it would be helpful just for everybody, certainly for my benefit, but for the public and for the rest of the council to hear your perspective about today's operational constraints and um and your general needs and then we'll open it up for questions from the dis.

I can go first. Madame mayor, council members, Dave Miner, your police chief. Thanks for having me here. Uh, I'm impressed with Dave Webb's presentation. It covered a lot of the concerns and discussion points that I'm familiar with. I think overall my concern as your police chief is maintaining operational excellence in the level of service that we provide to the community. I have concerns about maintaining that operational readiness and success. Uh if we're operating out of a construction zone for three plus years on our site, uh I think it would create significant disruption. Uh were that to happen with many of the things that Mr. Webb covered. I also think operationally it's beneficial to be centrally located to be near the civic center to be uh as centered as possible geographically for response times understanding that our officers do have assigned areas. So if they're assigned to the Baloa Peninsula, we do have officers that are in their beat. But keep in mind we have a jail, we have property and evidence, we have regular meetings and discussions. So, if an officer down by the Balo Pier makes an arrest, he or she has to transport that body all the way to our jail to be booked or if they seize property or if they have to uh have a meeting or deliver paperwork. So, that's time to drive back and forth. And so, yes, we do have officers that are distributed evenly throughout the city, but there is time uh where they come back and forth between the police station multiple times a shift. So, that is a consideration. Uh but speaking of the current facility, Dave covered it very well. It's 50 plus years old. Uh it's routine that we have sewage backup that we had, you know, the electrical fire last month, the power outage with the failure of the backup generator in November. These are all things we've grown somewhat accustomed to. So I do

support wholeheartedly imagining or researching where a new police station can be. But we definitely do need a a new building. Uh and happy to answer any other questions you have for me. Thank you, Chief Chief Boils.

Good evening, Mayor Klyman, members of council. Jeff Boils, your fire chief. I'd like to echo uh Chief Miner as well. Dave did a great presentation outlining some of the challenges that we're facing with our current fire station 3 over on Santa Barbara Avenue. Um it is a couple years older than the police facility and has its challenges as well. Uh some of them downstairs, specifically gender challenges with chief officers and and uh captains. We don't have any female captains or chief officers yet, but when we do, if and when that happens, it will need a major remodel in the downstairs area. Dave pointed out that we spent about $170,000 just in maintenance in the last three years, but over a half a million or nearly half a million dollars in the last 10 years. And I'd just like to point out too that we have some heavy rollup garage doors to the tune of about $300,000 that we decided against replacing the last couple of years thinking that this move was on the horizon. So, we were just trying to work around that. But they do create significant issues when they break. We have to move the rigs backwards and send them out of the other direction. It just gets to be pretty challenging. I would also like to point out what Dave's timeline reference. I saw I believe 3 to four years, Dave, if I'm not mistaken, for a fire station build. And in my experience, our buildings are pretty complicated. There's a lot that goes into them with technology and some of the different avenues for housing and and um hosting firefighters on a 247 basis. So 3 years might be a little aggressive. Just uh no knock to public works. It's just how building and construction goes. Just seeing how the uh concrete pour in place junior lifeguard building went. You can see how that timeline in my opinion could stretch even a little bit further pushing the police move even further

out. So, I would agree that staying centrally located for our fire station 3 is um paramount to our service in this area, but it it does need to come in the near future because it's aging out. Thank you. Okay, I'll bring it back to the dis and open it up for questions or comments up here. Okay. Yeah, we'll hear from the public now. Thank you both. Okay, we'll now open it up to the public. Mr. Brass, first up again,

front row. Thank you, Mayor, uh, council. Uh, Dave, great presentation. Uh, first of all, I just wanted to say Dennis Brass, Balbo Island. Uh, thank you very much, U. Simone, and for staff to make this available to the public. As you can see by the amount of people that are here, it's a very important topic. So, thank you for the transparency. Um, yeah, there's a lot going on. First thing, 53-year-old building for the police. We got to get them a new building for sure. So, I had spoke at that Saturday meeting about um the possibility of uh further investigating uh all options and one of them was uh the park. That said, after final review and I sent you all an overview of my position and that was I think option three is the best. we already own the land where they're currently at. It seems like the bigger issue is how to mitigate during the time of the build uh for u the police department to function. Um that said, we already own the property. I don't think the location of the building we have that's outside of the zone makes sense just because of its location. And I think um one of the keys is for a win-win is to be able to have the current location that you're used to lo local to uh Fashion Island. So that's what I would say from my perspective and thank you for allowing for public comments.

Thank you. And on that note, I should have um first taken just a a quick survey. Show of hands of how many people in the room are planning on speaking on this item. Okay. Um so I think we do have a lot of interest a lot of passion uh on this issue. Um I will go ahead and limit to two minutes was Mr. Breast's comment about two minutes. Um and I just want to remind everyone to please maintain decorum. Um please be respectful. Thank you. Next speaker mayor and members of the council. I'm your Centennial Mayor, Don Webb. And uh I'm here I I was actually here in 1968 when I started to work, but I remember the police facility being built. And I was very lucky because when they moved out, I got to move into a new office uh that was a temporary building, but it was still one that I enjoyed. So I've experienced it but I was also on the council when in 2006 when we appointed the committee to find the city hall and we were uh very interested in in looking at all options and we uh ignored this particular site because we owned the property. It was part of, as I remember it, now I might be wrong on this, it was dedicated uh to us by the Irvine Company as a part of the circulation improvement and and open space agreement that was instituted in the '90s in which the Irvine Company uh made public uh street improvements in exchange for uh

additional uh property uh development rights. and they dedicated this as open space for us and I feel that that we owe it to the public. I know that we took a little bit away for this city hall, but uh we have really enjoyed using the park. I came across a couple last week that uh uh had come up here and they had met. One was coming from San Diego and one from Santa Clarita and they'd heard about Bunny Henge and they really enjoyed the walk through the faulk. It's one of my favorite walks and I I feel that a if you take onethird of it and build a wall across it, it's going to totally uh ruin the feeling that we have today and something that we work so hard to create when we built this wonderful facility. So I would suggest across the street perhaps.

Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Mayor Kleman and members of the city council. I'm Ron Rabbino. I live in East Bluff. I'm a 39-year resident of the community. I appreciate the opportunity uh to provide input by the public, including myself, and I think this is a a very big decision. It has longtime implications. I've read the report. I've seen the examples. I think Dave did a great job of walking you through it. I I believe that this report does give you options within the options and I believe the park site should be excluded and not considered and and I think it's irreplaceable but I do believe the solutions are available without it. I do believe the police department and fire department do need new facilities. No disputing that. I think if you replace the fire department and you designate that location, it's got to go first. And I think everything in the examples represents that. It frees up the current site. And I do believe the logistics of building on the fire station low site to build a police department could be handled logistically with the police staying in their existing site. So I think the most economical solution is staying on that location and working out parking down at the Hyatt down in uh the the the park on Jamberee is possible for a shuttle on a short-term basis if that was required. Right now, the fire department doesn't provide any parking to the police department on their half of the property. It includes their parking. So, I just don't find the need for additional parking. Now, if there's construction and disruption, that's logistics and you have to work through it. I think the city could also look at this site across the street. It's in the map and there's four parcels and I know it's private property. That's ideal to have access to something right there across the street. That might be a great location for the fire department if it can be acquired. And I don't think you need all four parcels. You could

probably do it on two of the four. And it's on a corner with access in and out for the for the fire equipment. So that might be what has to go first. And then I support that you move forward, study these locations, but I hope tonight you'll exclude the park from the study and focus on the other options. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Marbino. Feel free to line up on either side as well. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Kleinman, council members and city staff. My name is Dennis Baker. Excuse me. I'm the president of Line in the Sand. Uh that's an advocacy group here and we've been kind of quiet recently, but I want to take a little different approach. It's about the the whole process has been going on. So, uh Line in the Sand was formed in 2014. We su successfully defeated measure Y of that year. In two weeks in 2016 over the Christmas holidays, Line in the Sand collected over 14 or close to 14,000 signatures to qualify a referendum regarding the museum house. Now, there's a a story to be learned from that process. The council reversed the decision after we pass got the referendum qualified. That resulted in the Orange County Museum of Art suing the city, suing this young lady over here, Nancy Skinner, and myself. We were named as real parties of interest, and we spent a year in court. The city spent a year in court and spent a lot of money in legal fees. I do not know how much the city spent, but we spent $150,000 in that year to defend ourselves for our attorneys and to represent us. And it resulted in a settlement. Hornes County Museum of Art did settle with us. In the fall of 24, the council made the decision regarding the Carnell Market. I don't need to go into that. That didn't come out too well because it didn't get a lot of community input. what that was ignored. My point is that this process, the whole process is not being done really out in the open. We are an

organization that concentrates on referendums, initiatives, recalls, and that is a very, very poor way of doing government. And that doesn't mean we don't use those tools. We're not willing to use those tools. But it is very important that that be left as a last resort. Thank you. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Madame Mayor and members of the council. My name is Nancy Skinner, and I want to start by thanking Mr. Webb for giving us such a complete background to this whole story. All the different people you connected with, but as you were speaking, sir, uh I realized that there was one major missing thing, and that was the city. people. Those of us that live here, we didn't get any input, any asked or any ideas ahead of time. And that's I think you'll see from the what's in the audience today. That's what I think would be really helpful. We want to get along. We we all love the police. We love the firemen. We want to do the very best for them. In fact, I personally hope they do get a brand new building. I just think we have to keep it out of the park. I I'm I was one of those that went against all of my friends who wanted to not even put what we have there in the park, but I said that would be something acceptable, but I just certainly at the time was informed and believed that we would have the rest of the park as a park. So, I'm just shocked to think that we with just a small ad hoc committee made a decision without any significant input from residents in the city. So, thank you for giving that some consideration at us now. Thank you. Hi, my name is Pamela Marx. I live right on the other side of Avocado. So, this is very personal to me. I use this park often to exercise several times a week. I volunteer with the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center and I've released wildlife in this park and I know once you start tearing it up and paving it over, the animals are going to leave. It's a beautiful wetlands. It's it's such an asset to the community and I you know the old saying pave paradise put up a parking lot. It just breaks my heart to think that that could happen to this beautiful park that hasn't even been here very long and and it's just

gorgeous and I see that the employees are using it every day. I use it several times a week and you just can't chop it in half and think it'll be the same. So and the cost of things can't always be measured in dollars and cents as you know. So anyway, thank you. Uh thank you, mayor and council members for listening to the public tonight. My name is Sean Hannah. I live in a house that looks overlooks uh the city hall right over here uh just across MacArthur. So when we first moved here there was this was just all wetlands and uh our family we saw of course first the town hall going here and of course that was a problem. Um but you know, we want to support things and um you know, obviously I want to register my opposition to using the police department for in the in this park area. Um we feel like uh our community, we've been pretty tolerant of all the construction that went on over the many years uh of the city hall, but to take away the park uh in addition to that, what we've already gone through is is is a problem. So again, we hope that you'll look for other options. We support our police, but I think that there the an option other than taking away the park is the best one. Thank you,

Mayor Kleman and members of the council. My name is Lily Lieberman. I'm a lifelong resident of Newport Beach. Thank you very much for this opportunity to share my thoughts. I'm a firm believer that stakeholder involvement in the planning of a new public project is a strong indicator of that project success. This belief is one of the reasons I'm grateful for the time to speak and listen today. However, my belief in the value of public engagement is also what leads me to be ultimately disappointed in the council's process and move to oppose the relocation of the Newport Beach Police Station to Civic Center Park. My frustration stems from the distinct impression that the project was conceived without public involvement, is progressing without public involvement, and ultimately will occur regardless of what your constituents have to say in opposition. Councilman Blom, you were recently quoted in Voice of OC as having said, quote, I enjoy the idea we get the input now. I don't necessarily love the idea that input starts at the very beginning before we have any concrete pieces to play with. Councilman, you and I have very different views about when the beginning was. My parents, who in 2008 had recently moved to Newport Beach, were arts professionals committed to a robust and well-rounded education for my sister and I. Their support for the costly relocation of the civic center was founded in large part on the promise that was made to the voters. high cost in exchange for a park that preserved the natural environment, added to the cent's display of artwork, expanded the library's offerings to young families, and heightened the city's reputation as a leader in shared public good. My grandparents, residents since 1971 and founding donors to the library were similarly convinced. Crucially, they were all involved. They were asked in an open and equitable forum whether this was what they wanted. Councilman Blomier also quoted saying, "I fully understand it's a huge cost, but I have full support behind it. I do not know how you can say that for certain as you never put it to your constituents until now. I can only assume you refer to conversations that voters taxpayers were not privy to. I would prefer to underline rather than readressing the presentation what I've already said that an ad hoc committee of three council members cannot claim to be operating based on the public's desire

when the public has not been involved. Please consider other options. Thank you very much.

No clapping, please. Uh, good evening, Mayor Kleinman, gentle council people. My name is Maryanne Soden. I live in the Harborview Hills community and I am more or less a lifelong resident of Corona Delmare. Um, I'm here also in opposition to the police station in the park. I think we have a lot of interesting opportunities and different locations and so I really encourage you to consider um what the police department needs and where different facilities need to be located. Um, I was looking on the police website. There are a lot of office jobs, infrastructure jobs for the police department that possibly could utilize the building at 1201 Dove Street as it is. It's an office building. You could put the the records department, you could put the call center. There are different um you could put the detective offices. I mean, in some ways, what the police department needs are offices, and the report indicated they wanted more light than they have in the current police department. And so, that structure maybe has a life that could continue. And then we're looking at building something smaller and more um tailored to uh more secured functions like a jail, like a property room, like other things you might need. So, I would encourage you to think about whether it needs to be one great monolith to the police who are a fantastic resource in our community like our fire department. Um, and maybe there's an opportunity if you feel there needs to be a substation or some smaller um police facility in and around uh the civic center area. Maybe that's something that gets paired with the with the fire department and instead of a library, we have I don't know what that is, but a fire department and a police substation. and there's access because I think our security and safety comes from those patrol officers who are surrounding us in the community at all times and there are different

ways to divide up this service that might still give the police department the resources they need and the space they need without um diminishing the park and the value for the community. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Good day, Madame Mayor and members of the city council. My name is Charles Globe and I am the current president of Still Protecting Our Newport or Spawn. We support providing our police department with the best tools to help them perform. That includes a new police headquarters when needed. The idea of putting it in the park was cooked up by three or maybe one council member and with no public involvement. We oppose considering the park site for this use. One reason is the park site is serious environmental issues that must be addressed and it looks like the city is underestimating the costs. Take the placement of an underground fuel tank to fuel our police vehicles. The California Underground Storage Tank Program has new regulations that became effective January 2026, requiring tanks to be placed in double line containment vaults and have extensive leak detection systems. This is particular important here because the tank will be placed directly in the path of groundwater streams that drain the hillside communities to the ocean. Permitting is reported to take more than two years and will involve multiple state agencies for approval. As stated in the letter from the California Native Plant Society, the park itself is a Raparian habitat wetlands. Birds, animals, and butterflies call it home and will be dislocated by the placement of the police station. State regulations may require mitigation for taking Raparian wetlands. Lengthly environmental litigation is also likely. The fiscally responsible thing for this council to do is stop now, find a lowerc cost, less environmentally damaging location. The location is an environmental disaster waiting to unfold. Please consider another location. They say politics is perception. This is an election year. Four city council members will undoubtedly run for reelection. You can bet that opponents will use this issue against you. The council has already seen two or maybe four voter initiatives. Opposition to this location is huge. This would be an easy initiative to get signatures for. Thank you for your service.

Roy Engelre, Noah and Joe, nice to see you. Lear Hayes and I sat up there for many, many years, so I know how tedious public comment can get. So, thank you for bearing with us. This whole issue of the Central Park and the relocation reminds me of a country song by Cody Johnson called Dirt Cheap. He's a sharecrop farmer. developers come, they buy all the farms around and they come to this one last farmer. They make him an offer. We're going to make you a rich man. We're going to build a subdivision there and I want to get it right. The farmer says, "Boys, whatever you're offering, it won't be enough because I got a little girl that used to swing right there and I can still see a pink bow in her hair. She's in the big city now, but what about if she comes back and it's gone? And he says, "Right over there, I got down on one knee." And it's about memories here and the Central Park. There's no dog in this fight from my standpoint. But how about all the moms who bought their kids to play in the Central Park and 20 years later those kids bring their kids and it's gone. How about the moms who did birthday parties in the park for their little kids and those kids 20 years later bring their kids is gone. How about all those young men who bring their girlfriends and get down on one knee in that park and an anniversary they come back 10 years later it's gone. So it's about the memories when you think about the memories that have been in that park and the memories that are going to be there again. So think about where you locate this police station. Thank you guys.

Uh thank you mayor and thank you city council. My name is Ron Vanderhoff. I'm the vice president of Rogers Gardens right across the street. I'm also the state president of Cal Flora and a director of the California Native Plant Society. And I was asked probably 16 years ago to be on the advisory committee that established this park. We worked on the design, we worked on the restoration of the park, the trails, and all of the what you see today. And we worked rather hard to develop this park. and I would would be unfortunate to see it lost. Um, in addition to that, I submitted and performed a biological survey back in 2014 that was submitted to the city inventorying the biological species, particularly the plants, which are my specialty, no surprise. Uh, and submitted that 152 plant species at that time uh, called that space home and probably more today. And I'd like to read the last two paragraphs of my report that I submitted, which is still on file somewhere in the city, 27page report. And I'll read those two paragraphs. The natural area and the surrounding park is a quality example of a positive trend in public landscapes. By blending the community's need for recreational space with the need to protect and preserve some of our remaining natural areas, spaces such as this are important in our communities. Use of limited natural resources, particularly water, is well accomplished at this site. Additionally, many negative environmental impacts associated with traditional parklands have been greatly reduced here. These reduced impacts include limited green waste, fewer carbon emissions, reduction in fossil fuels for maintenance activities, and a reduction of nutrient flow off the site, and lower noise

pollution. And I have no more seconds left. So, thank you for listening. Thank you. Please refrain from clapping so everyone has a chance to be heard. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Walter Star. My family moved here in 1972. My parents, John and Elizabeth Star, were active in various public projects, notably raising the money to build the Newport Beach Central Library. One of my late mother's strongest memories in the last years of her life was the groundbreaking. She described it as being out in the middle of nothing because, of course, there really was nothing here uh at that time. Now we have the library, the civic center, and the civic center park. Some members of council now want to take a large fraction of that park to make way for a police station. To my mind, that makes no sense. Parks are sacred spaces building on what are we just heard. One does not destroy a park to make way for an office building because face it that's what a the police station really is. It's an office building and a parking structure and a huge gas station. Imagine that you were on the city council of New York City and someone suggested taking five acres from Central Park to put up a police station. Well, you would shoot that idea down immediately. You wouldn't even entertain it. Ditto. If you were a member of Congress and someone suggested taking part of the National Ball, let me circle back to the library. Today, it's not uncommon for moms to bring their kids to the library and then come up here to check on the rabbits, both the both the rabbit sculptures and and the real rabbits that are out there. Well, that's not going to be possible if there's a huge police station sitting between the remainder of the park, which is basically going to be up there at the dog park and the library. Find another place. Save the park.

Madame Mayor, fellow council members, I'm Tony Pro. I want to uh address the issue that's come up that in some manner moving the police station will complete a comprehensive plan or a master plan for the civic center. I would like to disabuse you and the public of that notion. In 2004, measure B was circulated to the public. The very first sentence was an initiative to move the administrative offices and parking from 3,300 Newport Boulevard to uh the Newport Center area. It did not speak to the police station. Furthermore, the models that were in the library or in the lobby of the then city hall showed the design of this city hall. It did not include a police station. Public comments were gathered for more than 70 meetings. Never was there a discussion of the police station. I sat on the council and was part of the building committee for this facility. We did not entertain at any one point putting in a police station in this location. Furthermore, I just retired from the firm that did the EIR for this building. One of the primary reasons that there is a park there happens to be that fenced area right in the center of it. Rich riparian habitat for which we could find no mitigation. No mitigation. The only mitigation for that was avoidance. That's why there is a fence around it. I beg you do not listen to a small group, an echo chamber. Do not be influenced by unions or outside sources. Listen to the people and start at the beginning for an alternative. Thank you,

Mayor Kleinman and members of the council. My name is Rhonda Watkins. I'm a longtime Newport Beach resident and a transition specialist at Bon Valley High School. The argument purposes per for preserving the sculpture garden in its current state rather than replacing it with a new police headquarters which is needed but not there. It is supported by extensive evidence on cognitive, mental and physical health benefits of art and nature in urban environments. Far from being a secondary concern, public art and green spaces act as a crucial costeffective infrastructure for community well-being. From a neuro aesthetic standpoint, evidence has shown that art strengthens the mind. It helps with cognitive en enhancement. Research indicates that viewing art activates specific brain regions involving perception, memory, and emotion, increasing blood flow to the brain by approximately 10%, which is equivalent basically to looking at a loved one. Critical thinking and problem solving are also uh enhanced by the art that we have in our community. Interpreting complex visual stimuli such as sculpture requires analyzing patterns and symbols which boosts higher level critical thinking and problem solving skills which we can all use from a young age on. Memory and focus viewing art even without creating it has been shown to activate the hippo campus and improve memory processing. It also helps with stress reduction. Um it gives you a moment of pause and it releases um dopamine which helps counter daily stress. Also the benefits of green um spaces and nature give mental health boosts, physical health improvements. Um time in nature helps all of those and cultural and social cohesion. Sculpture gardens in particular create landmarks that uh foster a sense of community,

identity and pride. These serve as a vital, accessible, and inclusive public space for residents. We don't want to cover it up. Please consider other options. Wow, that's a tough act to follow, right?

Um, yeah. My name is Paul Watkins. Good evening, uh, Mayor Klyman and members of the council. Um I I really said that because I now I don't have to sleep on the couch tonight which is very much a benefit. Um we've heard from uh Mr. Jurgis on his update and from Mr. Webb today. U there is nobody that disagrees that the police headquarters needs to be updated. But like Mr. Petros, I went to read the 2008 February 2008 measure B and there's a pretty good description of a park site that needs to be here in connection with the civic center. And I I think that commitment ought to be honored by this council. Um I listened to Mr. Webb on options two and three of the Santa Barbara site. Um, yes, it's disruptive. Uh, whenever my beautiful wife wants me to remodel the house, it's very disruptive. It's very expensive. It's a hassle. I'll agree with that. But, um, options two and three, I think, are common sense. I think options two and three are cost-effective. I think it can happen on Santa Barbara. And finally, uh, from a legacy standpoint, I I think you guys will be very proud of a Santa Barbara, uh, project, and frankly, in the, uh, decades to come, I think it'll be a legacy very worthwhile for this council. Thank you.

Hi, Mayor Kleman and council. My name is Wade Wack, 30-year resident of Newport and a retired law enforcement officer. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Um, I just wanted to float an idea by you guys each have a copy of this. Many folks in the crowd do. Um, I wanted to float the idea of building a new structure above the employee parking where the first level would stay employee parking. It's coincidentally, if you look, it's the size of the existing police station, 25,000 square feetish. And so, we could put a second story and have state-of-the-art dispatch centers and state-of-the-art uh crime response centers and drones and all that. Um, if we want to go bigger, we can go three floors and we can have 50,000 square feet of office above 25,000 ft of parking. And if we want to go even bigger, we can go four floors and have 75,000 square ft of police facility ready to serve our citizens. And so on the side here, I put a few notes. You know, lots of natural light. I think that was one of the goals when you do this new building. I think it will be not disruptive in terms of it's the employee parking. We could do what the malls do and do a shuttle from another parking lot for employees or by the time this happens we'll probably have Whimo here or what have you. Um I think it's fiscally responsible. We already own the property and we could do this quite affordably affordably and sometimes I feel a sense of urgency from the council and I think we could start on this like right now right here right now. So anyway, just wanted to share that thought. Oh, in the bottom we could do a firing range. I think they want a new firing range. So

in the basement down underground do state-of-the-art fire range so our officers have every tool they need. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Kleinman and members of city council. I'm Arlene Greer and I know all of you and uh thank you for giving us the opportunity to comment this evening. We really appreciate it. When we as a city initiated discussions about a new city hall over a decade ago, the conversation included ideas and proposals from a variety of stakeholders throughout the city. Many public meetings were held. Many diverse voices were heard. And in the end, we created a municipal campus that is both beautiful and functional. We did more than just build municipal buildings. We built a community center that serves the administrative needs of this city and the cultural needs of the community. It was always assumed that the civic center would be amended. amended it evolving as it need it as it needs appeared and the in interest of the city evolved as well. The library lecture hall is a result of that evolution and now maybe the addition of a new police headquarters and the next step moving forward may or may not you know come to fruition. We'll just have to see. Uh but if the next step in the evolution of the civic center is that the removal of a large portion of the sculpture garden, something that in a few short years has become a place of solace, reflection, public enjoyment, and civic pride, I've seen phases through phases one through nine as a member of the city arts commission and serving in leadership as that happened. It is enjoyed greatly enjoyed by the public and their civic pride and we need more study more input from all the

stakeholders in our community. We need to consult with the original designers of the community center especially those architects Bolan Shazinski and Jackson the original designer of the gardens and landscapes surrounding the civic center. Peter Walker and associates who designed the World Trade Center memorial gardens. Um, we need to have the same vision, the original council to see what will best serve the future generations of our city. Thank you, Arlene.

I just want I applaud the work of all of you on city council and hope that the ad hoc committee will hear what we have to say and I look forward to being part of the continued legacy of the city and um and basically appreciate your work and look forward to hearing more. Thank you.

That's another hard act to follow. Um, my name is Phil Greer. Uh, I was going to come up here and talk about one of the most under represented and disparaged groups involved in this whole process, the bunnies, because nobody has talked about the bunnies. And as the executive director of the Newport Beach Foundation for the Preservation of Concrete Bunnies, I felt it was my duty and obligation to do so. However, listening to everybody tonight, listening to the wonderful report that was done by staff and everybody else, this isn't an issue to be frivolous about. This is a serious issue. And I think if the council takes anything away from the discussion today and the comments that everybody's made, it should be that there needs to be more participation. There needs to be more input from those stakeholders, from the kids who go to that park, to the moms who take pictures, to the wedding couples who have their pictures taken on the bridges. They need to be inputed. The arts commission needs to be inputed. The arts foundation needs to be inputed. All those people who have contributed and participated in the arts exhibits and the art uh in the park events have to be considered because what you're doing is you're talking about a major change to something that this city has grown up with and loves. So I just ask that you listen to what the people are saying, involve and invite the people to participate in this and don't make this a secret city council thing. make this a public thing we can enjoy as we enjoy this city hall and the library and the new library lecture hall. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Jasmine Moini. Uh I'm not an important person. I don't own a company and I I'm not on any boards. I'm simply a resident of the community. And I want to agree with the previous speaker. I think before the and first I want to say how much we appreciate you and the great work that you do and a lot of times it's thankless and people don't know how much time and energy goes on behind closed doors. Um we all love and appreciate our police officers, our firemen. That goes without saying. But I think before the um the council makes such a big decision um why not put the choices in front of the people first and get it get some feedback before it gets to the point where then people you have this backlash of people who are against the particular choice that you've made without consulting the the people here. The other question I have and may maybe this is not a a really intelligent question but um what's wrong with the um Newport 6 theater there and what's wrong with going up a little bit on Jamberee? I keep hearing about the location we have to be central central central but Newport Beach is a small city. I mean you're talking uh the difference of a mile or two. So that's my two cents. Thank you for listening. My name is Omar Herrera. I'm a resident of Newport Coast. I would like to thank our current city council for their efforts in funding our police department appropriately. When public safety is properly funded, it produces real results. As of February 2026 through today, March

10th, our city has had zero home burglaries. That is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the command staff and officers of Newport Beach Police Department along with our detectives who continue to put criminals behind bars. Thank you for your commitment uh to keeping our community safe. I would also like to recognize a quote from a former mayor, Keith Curry, who I see him sitting here, and I I really thank you for this quote. Quote, this quote is from more than 10 years ago. The news, the new city hall and library expansion will allow us to improve the customer experience for all our residents for the next four generations, which I believe we're barely going to be touching number two generation. We are now in a central location accessible from every part of our city. Thank you for that vision. Former Mayor Keith Curry, I just want to say I would love for you to enjoy your retirement. We We got this for for now. I fully support building the new police department station next to city hall. A modern facility in a central location will make services more accessible to all residents and support our officers in doing their jobs effectively. Let's also continue to protect the wildlife that makes I guess I'll stop there.

Thank you guys for your everything. Thank you. I'm Is this is Is this on? Yes. Okay. Uh my name is Gary Galloway. Um I'm Omar's neighbor and he dragged me into this. So I'm glad to be here though. Uh I have um just a couple questions. Starting with the city staff gentleman that made a great presentation with regard to the park. Sister, sir, please direct your questions to the city council and comments to the council, please. It's the time for public comment. So, better to keep to comments and not questions. Thank you.

Oh, comments. Okay. uh if the footprint is not going to take up uh more than 50% of a new police uh facility that's going to do all the things that those of us want to see that happen and it still left a good portion if not a majority of the park then that would be another debate. Thank you very much.

Hello, my name is Margarita Abila. was going to speak, but I realized I had to come and say because I am a victim of a home robbery and my I live in Newport Coast and Omar is also my neighbor and he stayed with me till 3:00 in the morning. Police were wonderful. They came in, but Newport Coast is a little far away and that is part of Newport Beach. So, I'm just here to support the police and to be able to say to upgrade whatever facility they need for this time. We live in different times and I've lived in Newport Beach for over 50 years. Been a homeowner for over 30ome years and I lived in an ideal deal section about what Newport Beach was like until my home was robbed by professional professional robbers. And I just wanted to make that statement to support the police. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Kleman. My name is Debbie Stevens and I'm speaking um as a member of the Harborview Hills Homeowners Association and thank you for the opportunity and the public input that you are receiving tonight. Uh our forever mantra is to please protect the view plane ordinance and I will say that on behalf of our organization and the best way to do that in my opinion is to avoid putting anything uh additional in the park. I think the thing that's the most disappointing is that there was so much work and effort as Tony Petro um talked about in putting this whole city hall together in the park and just to see it being discussed differently and to throw it out is is disappointing. Uh remember that there are about 2,000 additional housing units in the the general plan and the housing element that are scheduled to be put into Fashion Island uh Newport Center. Where do we get additional open space? Where do we get additional park? There's been no discussion about that. It's very difficult to do. So, I don't support the idea of paving over green space to put

in um concrete. Um the the plan for California related right across the street was just approved. I think we're better off leaving the commercial stuff and commercial areas. So, whether it's Dove or whether it's Santa Barbara, I think that's a better place to put it. So, thank you. appreciate your your um attention.

My name is Linda Watkins and my field is leadership and over the years I've come before council and said several different things at different times. Um mostly I'm talking about leadership and so I listen to the report and um it's very rational lot a lot of data in it but we're not when we dealing with quality of life what we want Newport to be it's not necessarily rational is it so what I keep saying and have over the years to council is it's really a time for innovation It's a time to think of something that because we have facing wicked problems everywhere and we have a problem. We need a new building for the police. But don't do it the old way, the old-fashioned totally rational way because there'll be too many people against it because they're pushing hard for quality of life. Okay. Thank you,

Adam Le. Adam Levers. Again, I don't have the historical knowledge of this subject matter that many in the room do, but I've had a number of people reach out to me, and I've read the number of letters submitted to council. Um, to characterize this as an argument between supporting the police and not supporting the police, that's not it. I don't think there's opposition to giving the police and fire, current technology, current facilities, up-to-date infrastructure. the opposition is putting it in a park. And as I understand it from speakers tonight, that was promised as a park in 2008. And I would hope that there would be continuity between electeds that where if a mayor and council make a promise that their predecessors keep that promise or at least consider keeping that promise. And I've also heard mentioned, you know, numerous times this years about transparency. The increasing reliance on ad hocs of a few council members not subject to the open meeting law requirements damages the public trust and similar to not keeping promises. So there's just all it's a simple ask a higher level of integrity and I don't think it should be that challenging and I hope that we can all strive for that. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor Kimman and council members. My name is Dorothy Larson. I'm a longtime resident of Corona Delmare um and supporter of our police and fire, by the way, and and also very appreciative of the hard work that you all do. I know I see you everywhere and I know how much work it takes. um and especially the places that you're not seen studying these issues. Um so as said, we do support our police and fire. We want them to have the best possible resources. That does not mean that we have to take away a priceless her uh generations long a uh attribute of this city that I just can't imagine what future residents the kids that are seeing the park now playing in it come back and like the former speak uh uh speaker said come back in a few years and and it's mostly gone. Even if there's some little remnant token, even if half would be token, I just implore you to look at other um options. One of the things that was said, well actually let me just say that I was traveling when I heard that this was happening and I just was shocked and I don't think um residents of the city that are pretty involved should be surprised when they hear about something that seems to be a done deal. With all due respect, can I note that most of the people, the primary people speaking about, well, the people from the city speaking about the options, the options being limited, the costs all work for you. So, I think

there's a vested interest there. And I do believe that this would be a catastrophic change to take away the sculpture garden in any part. Thank you. Thank you,

Madam Mayor, members of the council, there's a lot that could be said about uh the analysis presented here tonight. I want to focus on one very compelling and I'm sure very disclosure, and that is that the Dove Street site is $50 million less and Santa Barbara is $30 million less than the Civic Center site. When you cost Dave's variables that haven't been costed yet and put those into the mix, that's real money. It's equal to 2/3 of the entire police budget. and you're going to need a better reason for spending an unnecessary $50 million and we simply don't want it there. Next, I want to address the frequently heard comment that the location of the police station is related to response times. The city manager repeated this canard in his weekly newsletter. As all of you know, we do dispatch officers from the station. They're dispatched from a very wellorganized patrol plan. Next, the assertion that our police cannot function if construction is occurring next door on the fire station site. That option does not require the police to vacate uh their current station. There's parking spaces at Chase Bank that could be leased, spaces in the city on private street. I counted them the other day. Uh you can have some shuttle parking. It could all be done during the nine months it takes to build a parking structure at considerably less than the $5 million estimate for a mitigation fee for disruption. So, let's complete the sentence. We cannot build on the fire station site because it will be disruptive to the police station next door. Therefore, we will spend $30 million more to force the station to be on a smaller site in a city park that will add two years to the environmental review and mitigation. That doesn't seem fiscally conservative to me. Finally, since I was quoted tonight, I will just say we never intended to put a police station here. We understand it's a walled gated compound. It's going to look like an embassy in the Middle East. We understand it doesn't work here because it's incompatible because we release a thousand prisoners a year who'll be hanging out in the park and in the library waiting for a ride home. It's incompatible because sex offenders are required to register there. And that's why as you look across America,

nobody puts the police station in a park. Mayor Klyman, council members, fellow residents. My name is Chuck Fans. Um I I serve on our city's uh water quality committee. And in that work, I've had the pleasure to work with Dave Webb and the public works department on matters regarding this city's water s circumstances. And I just want to share to everybody that their work is done well and you can trust their work. I don't think there's an agenda that comes out of Dave Webb. He works to call it as he sees it. We need to we need to we appreciate that. Secondly, I don't think there's a done deal on where this council and the ad hoc committee. There's no done deal done on going to the Scopal Park. That's my takeaway. I don't read it. I don't sense it. I don't see it. I think that what we need to take away from tonight is that the city needs to involve the community in this in in this debate, discussion, and resolution. You've got to listen to the community and involve them. Secondly, I think that the there's push back, clear push back on using Sculptor Park. You need to write that in bold print and put it up on the wall. It's clear the sample. We have only a sample of residents here, but they speak volumes. I sense it in the community. I think it's real. I think you've got two practical options of the four, and that's Dove Street and the existing site. If you're going to focus on the four, you need to drop two and focus on those those two options and

be efficient with your time. Thirdly, I think there there could be other options out there. And I challenge you to make sure that you've exhausted all options. So I I think you have work ahead of you. Please include us. And thank you for dealing with what everybody agrees to be a need. There's no question about the need to to for a new police and new fire. Thank you.

Mayor Council members Denise Overberman. I think most everything that I'd intended to say has been said, but I'm going to say it again. This is an this is an ill-conceived notion. Everyone supports the police. It's not at all clear that there's been a lot of thoughtfulness or adequate thoughtfulness about how the police department needs to function. It's not only about the headquarters building. It's how to access the various areas. Should it be centralized or decentralized? For example, the fire department has a hybrid, central, decentralized. Has that been looked at? That's going to change the perspective on the physical building locations. Secondly, there are we are losing open space and I know it it's been historically something that's been taken for granted, but we've kind of lost track of our general plan and what the underlying values were that contributed to the general plan in favor of very opportunistic development that's been housing focused. So without without discussing the merits of all the housing that is proposed, decided upon, and about to be underway, full steam ahead, there are a whole bunch of consequences of that that have yet to be planned that will impact the police and the fire department's ability to effectively respond. Not the least of which is traffic there. We are going to grind to a halt. So this may feel like the center of the city, but we're talking about a tremendous concentration of development not only in Newport Center already on the table, but imminent on Mariners's Mile Corona Delmare. How can we operate with only one facility? So what should be in the

headquarters? What should be elsewhere? Should there be like many substations? It's definitely not the park. totally incompatible use. We know that from our general plan. We know that from the public. So, please take a step back and listen to the people. Lots of good ideas. Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Hi, my name is Arthur Yelc. I've been a resident of Newport Beach of 40 years. My wife Karen is president of the police foundation. Um, I have a proposal that I think has no negatives, which all the other pro do have, and I've written you all an email, and I want to thank Robin Grant as the only person who responded to me. Thank you, Robin. The uh the police station is ideally located where it is right now. The solution, which no one has considered, I haven't heard anyone else consider it, is, and this is a win-win for everybody, is for the city to purchase the Range Rover dealership, which is right next to the police station. Has this been discussed before? I haven't heard it. Um, and offer in exchange or for money the site we have on Dove Street for the dealership. Now, there's a win-win for everybody. We preserve our parkland. You don't have to totally re the police station stays located centrally in the in the city and it's better for the Range Rover dealership because they'll be right around the corner from both Lexus and Fletcher Jones for whom they compete their business with their business. The location they have, Range Rover is a poor location. I've done business with most of these dealerships. Sterling BMW is an example. It's a standalone dealership. It's one of the smallest BMW dealerships in the country. Range Rover would do much better near Fletcher Jones and Lexus. They'd be competing for the same customers. And it would allow the police department to stay there and expand from their current facility. I haven't heard anyone consider that. If you'd like me to negotiate with Range Rover, I volunteer to do that. But it's a better location for them and it doesn't have any of the negatives that all the other all the residents are talking about. So, I hope you'll consider it. It's more work. It's more effort, but you can do it. Thank you.

Um um good afternoon or good evening, Mayor Klyman and city council. I'm Karen Clark and I live in Corona Delmare. I'm afraid I don't have anything exciting like Mr. Yeltie to volunteer, but I'm really here to defend the park. Um when the city hall was first built, I was actually against it. I really that land was donated by the Irvine Company as open space and a park. Um, but I lost and now I really like it and I love the the sculpture garden and the park. I use it all the time. The thought of those bunnies leaving just brings me to tears I have to say. Um but the one thing that you know listening to the city discuss the options they value the park as zero. This was free land as opposed to buying stuff. And and I thought so the use of a park by the public is valued in terms of the finances of the city as zero. Now, maybe that's the way you do it as if you're a CPA and you're doing that analysis. But if you're a resident who loves the park and appreciates the benefits of the city, it is not zero. It is worth millions and millions of dollars. So, I just wanted to add that and I thank you for your time. It is now good evening. My name is Ruth Kobayashi. In 2000 in 2013, it was said of our new civic center that for the first time now, Newport Beach has a heart is an iconic portion of our city for the next four generations. Well, that heart beats strongest when public safety is at its core.

Just imagine an active shooter on campus at CDM or Newport Harbor High School. Officers rush in. Not just those on patrol, but sergeants, lieutenants, detectives, and command staff rushing in from the station. Extra weapons, SWAT vehicles, and rapid response resources are right there because seconds count. Picture armed criminals at Fashion Island, Neiman Marcus, escalating from theft of purses to hostage taking. The specialized equipment and leadership needed for immediate action are centralized and accessible because seconds count. A civic center police station would ensure that central command and seamless collaboration with the emergency operations center. Police leadership and specialized equipment in the heart of the city to quickly respond to serious incidents. a visible deterrent to crime and a welcoming, reassuring sense of safety for visitors and residents. Public safety is the foundational essential service that a city provides. It deeply saddens me that such determined efforts to block relocating the police department to a civic center location has been done before any of the analysis, department needs, or expert input was presented. We all value our public spaces and art, but the heart of our city is the civic center and the police belong here, too. Thank you.

Hey people, let's have respect for everyone. Thank you.

Thank you, mayor and city council. Um, certainly appreciate everyone's time. Um, my name is David Gonzalez. I'm a Newport Coast resident and I wanted to speak to a couple things. The first is uh I think obviously we all agree that we want a new police department. Seems to be the common thread. What doesn't seem to be the common thread is where is it located. I would say that if I were not a resident and I heard the arguments in the room today, I would assume this is the only park in Newport Beach. There's 64 parks in Newport Beach. This would eliminate one of those 64 parks. There's nobody in the room that's probably a bigger animal lover than me. I love rescuing dogs and cats and bunnies and all of those things. They're very, very important. But there's nothing more important than a human life. And nobody cares about the fire department until their house is on fire. And nobody cares about the police department until somebody's in their home. And I can tell you centrally located, I believe our police chief makes a very good point that centrally located is critical. There's many more functions than just dispatching cars. So with that, I would ask all of you in this room to understand how precious the life of a bunny and a bird is, but I think the life of a human when we're being under attack the way that we have been at our malls, in our residences. my wife, her ability to go to sleep at night with peace of mind is the most valuable thing to me. And I think a centrallylo civic center um and police department is a uniform policy across the United States. That's the majority of them are together for efficiencies. Let me just give you a

couple of those and I'll be done. So centralized services and many of the approximately 19,000 mun municipalities in the US um security planning the police department adjacent to city hall provides an inherent layer of security for local government officials and public records and historical planning. Could you wrap up please? Thank you. Anyhow, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. We're almost through it everyone. Please just be respectful. Thank you.

Yeah. Hello. I'm Neil Dit and I'm a uh 20-year resident of the Newport Coast area. Uh I'd just like to say that I support a centralized purpose-driven police department on the civic center property. Uh the reason for this is severalfold and uh some of those were captured excellently by the the previous speaker. Um but response time is important. purpose driven would basically put us on par with cities like Ontario and Beverly Hills. You know, we don't want to be behind the game in this when it comes to other police departments and their ability to respond. Sadly, crime has become worse over time and I know that's unfortunate, but we need to be able to deal with that and we need to be able to respond to that. Also, too, that was an interesting statistic that 64 parks are in the city of Newport Beach. I knew it was a huge number. And I think the thing that gets mischaracterized by a number of the speakers tonight was they're acting like we're taking away the entire park, like we're going to take it away and there'll be no park left at all. It's less than a third of the park. If you look at the uh the presentation earlier, it's just a it's it's it's a small percentage when you think about the value of bringing local law enforcement into a centralized area where we too like Beverly Hills and Ontario could boast of a worldclass policeup supported uh single focused environment. Thank you. I wasn't going to speak but I just uh one of the prior speakers mentioned the Range Rover uh dealership and that brought a whole another idea. I think we've been very

limited in our thought. A lot of people are talking about access and how seconds are important etc. I think we should consider perhaps some kind of a substation down on the peninsula at the end of West Newport. Uh there are many places in Newport Beach that are a long drive, especially in the congestion. Somebody was mentioning the um Big Newport. They're going to put two sixstory 70 unit um condos in there. that's going to have a lot of traffic. Where are those people going to the park? But I think we really need to expand our thought on what is um to be considered. And I am a huge huge supporter of the police department, the fire department. This is not against them. It's making the best for our city. Thank you. Uh Mayor Kleinman, City Council, Karen Tringali, Cronad Delmare. Um, I just I wasn't going to speak, but there were a couple of comments recently. So, um, I'm not a fan of AI yet, but I sat in the back and I asked where is the center of Newport Beach? And the center of Newport Beach was um, the answer to that was Newport Center Civic Center. So, the current police station in fact is in the center of Newport Beach, the geographic center of Newport Beach. So there's an argument for maybe considering expanding and improving the property that we have there. Um the other comment was about the 64 parks. Um the this entire piece of property was dedicated to open space and in 2006 78

and on um we spent probably tens of thousands of hours in public comment meetings. city council meetings that went until one and two o'clock in the morning. And some of our council members that sat through those are in the audience today. And you know, together we worked on this compromise. We'll have a great civic center. We'll have a great worldclass park. And so, um, unlike one of the arguments in measure B in 2008, well, we don't really need open space because we have an ocean. Well, that's not you can't that it's just not equatable to what a park is for family. Um people that just need a place to be uh quiet and peaceful and enjoy the surroundings. And um I think we've made the compromise. We need to work on finding the right solution for our fire and police important services to the public. Um but um we've made the compromise and we need to move forward. Thank you, Mayor Kleman and council members. Um my name is Bruce Clark. I live within view of you here over in Harborview Hills. Um uh and I do believe it's going to be the using this park site is going to be a problem for the neighbors immediately across MacArthur. But the more serious thing uh that worries me is the traffic is so bad on this side of the of the uh Newport coast new sorry Newport center that it's going to be very difficult for police and fire to leave this area and go to other parts of the city. There are parts of uh MacArthur Boulevard that are completely jammed up for two or three hours every afternoon and every morning. I can't see how it's going to be a logical place to to locate one of these facilities that's going to be uh

impacted so much by the by the traffic. Now, I have another suggestion. This is my last suggestion. I have another suggestion we should think about. And one is I don't see a a large value of the police department being right next to the city uh the city council uh facilities and I don't think it's all that important for the fire department to be right next to the police department. So, one of my thoughts is why don't we take the fire department, move it to a smaller site not immediately adjacent to the current police department and then use that entire site to rebuild the police department at a location also still here in Newport Center, but has much better uh opportunities to get back onto the highways uh away from where uh the the police department is currently sitting. It seems to me that's a good location, but if we split the fire department and the police department some distance apart, I think we could find a small area for the fire department to put a new facility in and solve the problem here in Newport Center. Thank you. Thank you,

Mayor Kleman. Members of council, I would ask the staff to put up a picture of the wetland signed in the park. So I have a my name is Laura Curran. I live in Corona Delmare. In 2005, I started walking this site with Jan Vand Derloot who it after whom the oak grove at Castaways Park is named. And we thought about Deborah Allen and the park commission's original plan for a park and thought about how could we really make this a site that embodied Newport Beach that was really Newport Beach local. And the vision is to have coastal sage scrub landscaping. So today you see oaks, lilacs, toyan, sugar berry and many other plants to retain the wetland wildlife. And may I have the next sign please? And as you see here, this is our wetland interpretive sign. It shows that the park welcomes blue heron, snakes, raccoons, small amphibian critters, and as people were telling me today, hawks and other raptors. So we have a beautiful site and in fact our general plan calls for maintaining property um in the biological resources element with use of native plants in parks and wetlands present pre uh in NR12 the policy 12.3 calls for wetlands pre preservation. So our own general plan obliges you to retain the wetlands. Many people have talked about the issues of building on this site and the need to truck in landfill. As we trucked out 200,000 tons or pounds of dirt for the site, we'd have to truck that back. I will also remind you that with the general plan in 2005, Banning Ranch was prioritized as open space. And as we saw, the city was obliged to retain that designation and prioritize Banning

Ranch's open space. So I ask you to stay true to the vision and retain the park as open space. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker. If there are other speakers, I'd ask that you please be ready to speak. Line up. Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Reema Pulcelli. I just moved in this morning. No, I'm just kidding. I've been here for quite a few years. Um, David, great presentation. Mr. Nelson, I love your idea and I think yesterday was the anniversary of Rodney King. Can we just all get along? I came here with a different impression and I changed through here. It's obvious nobody wants to take away the park. However, everybody at the same time wants to be at this location. I believe the police department and fire department cannot operate functionally while there's construction going on. It's hard enough having your home remodeled, let alone trying to run a business. And I totally agree. A life is more important than all of this. So, here's a far-fetched idea, which might be crazy. The Dove building, sell it for 27 million, try to get your money back. Take that money and is it possible to build over the parking deck, a three-story police station over the existing parking deck that's here? I know it's farfetched, but with the 20 this way, you have it at the civic center. You have the police station here. No, you can't build over the parking deck. Okay,

you heard that, right? Okay. Okay, that was a crazy idea. I'll go back to my seat. Thank you. Thank you for your comment,

council staff. Thank you very much for having us today. Uh very good presentation. Um I just wanted to say that I'm in favor of the police department being on the civic area that we're uh standing in right now. Uh various reasons, but we do have uh we do do not have a shortage of parks in the city. Uh I think the number was 64 or 68 and we are surrounded by uh one whole side of the ocean, Pacific Ocean. I think it's important to have all the facilities in one general area. Um, and I think that since the land is here, it would be economical to do that as well. So, I'm in favor of keeping the police station on the plans for right over here at the park location and uh we could replace the bunnies and the butterflies will find uh a very good park to go to in one of our 68 other parks. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for the presentation. I love the park, but there's half of the park that I really don't love. It's the one with all the people sleeping on the sidewalks where you don't want to walk your kids by and where you say, "Oh, don't look over there." when you're on the way to the doctor because there's people showing their body parts. Can we swap? Like instead of taking the nice part of the park by the library, can the police department take the part where you don't want to bring your kids and freshen that area? Just a thought. Um, thank you so much. I know it's a lot to listen to.

Good evening everybody. I want to grab the situation. First of all, thank you very much for listening to all the statements. I am Iranian and the community of Iranian in Newport coast, Newport Beach, Ka Delmare are very appreciative for all Americans, all the people, all the neighbors who host us and giving us the opportunity to think that this is our land. America is our land. We are proud of Americans. We are proud of everybody. Thank you very much. Sorry I didn't I was not supposed to say anything but I was impressed by your patience and I want just to say thank you very much again and again and then I would like to tell you that in about 10 days from now

sir is your comment related to the study session item? Excuse me. Is your comment related to the study session item? We do have a time later in the agenda for public comments on non-aggenda items. Sorry, it's not a problem. You can come back and and tell us about Naruse later. And I want to tell you that in about 10 days. Thank you. We we'll bring you back at that time. Thank you so much. Do we have any other comments on this item? Again, if you're planning on speaking, if you could please stand up and be prepared. Thank you.

George Lesley, Mayor Dyman, council, thank you. I wasn't going to speak, but a number of people said, "Well, we have 68 64 parks. This is just one park." First of all, it's not 68, it's 65. This is not any park. This is the flagship park of this city. I live in an area. We have a park here, park there. They're about the size of this floor. They're just grass and a little sign that says park. So, you can't compare that park with other parks. This is the flagship park. That's it.

Any other speakers? Okay, seeing none, I'll go ahead and bring it back up here. Council member Grant.

Thank you. I'm impressed I'm the first to speak here, but I'm pleased to do so. I first of all want to acknowledge everybody in the audience, all the public that have spoken today. There's been a lot of very um earnest opinions, a lot of great ideas, and I'm proud actually of this process. This is exactly the process that we should be engaging in. I also want to thank staff obviously um our public works director Dave Webb gave us the opening remarks which established exactly our starting point and I think that there's um a really relevant point to make here. Our starting point is is that we all believe in public safety and we all love our parks. I I don't know that anybody in this audience disagrees with that. And the reality is is that we can have both. Um it's important to begin with a point of agreement and that's I think shared by my council. I've seen it shared here in the public and I know it's shared by the staff. Newport Beach will have a modern state-of-the-art police facility. One that our officers and firefighters, including police facility and fire station, and it's one that our officers and firefighters will deserve and that supports their critical work. The question before us is not whether to build a police station, but where to build it. Several proposals have been submitted and are before us, and each has merits and each has complications. There is no correct one answer. We really have a job to do up here and in the public and in staff and looking at each of these proposals and figuring out where the right landing spot is. Since this project was first discussed at the January planning session, we have learned much much more about the potential impacts. That new information raises serious concerns. foremost and I think it's as as an attorney I'll say um the thing speaks for itself. Foremost is the process. Public engagement before a decision is

made including public workshops and an opportunity to participate is essential to good governance. When city hall was planned, I think many people mentioned this. I didn't expect that everybody knew about it. A resident committee conducted more than I thought 50. I've heard 75 from I think former uh council member Tony Petro. I respect his number. He was here. There are more than 75 public meetings assessing dozens of sites. By contrast, the park proposal has been developed solely through a three-member council committee. Our community expects and deserves a more open and inclusive process. Second, the financial implications. The park site could add millions of dollars to the project. Park cost estimates do not fully account for environmental environmental mitigation. It was the first thing that stood out to me when we were in the planning session and I had a conversation with our public works director Dave Webb about it. I know he's very sensitive to that issue and he's looking forward to digging into it, literally digging into it. Um, but the environmental mitigation is something that we have not fully accounted for in these estimates. We're also demolishing millions of dollars of public improve public infrastructure. There's replacement parkland and then absolutely the potential for litigation, environmental litigation and other litigation. Maybe a ballot initiative. I don't know. I've heard a lot of ideas out here today that could delay or halt this project entirely. We're not talking about two years or four years. It could be entirely halted. These uncertainties are difficult to reconcile. Third, viable alternatives exist. We've had some discussed by staff. We've had some interesting proposals from um the the the public here today. Um these include the existing Santa Barbara Drive location, which I personally prefer, but I don't have enough information to even make that decision, or other sites within Newport Center that could deliver the same police facility faster for less cost and really in a more um acceptable way to our community.

These would all still meet the operational needs of our police department. And finally, I think a very important consideration is the civic center park itself. I think Mr. Lesley called it our foundational park or this park was promised to the voters as our city's premier public space. It is a defining element of this campus and reflects the quality of life our residents deserve. Tonight, we are considering the largest civic investment in the 120 year history of Newport Beach. And we haven't had one public meeting other than this study session on that 120-year decision for the largest investment we will have made in that 120 years. I find that to be remarkable. We are not engaging you in a meaningful way. We owe it to you to broaden the conversation and ensure all viable options are evaluated through a full public process before we move forward in investing a million and a half dollars or any dollars. That is how we build the right facility for the police department. That is how we maintain the public trust. I support option three. I'll just mention that. And I know my colleagues are going to want to speak, but I support option three to instruct staff to pursue other direction that would include adding resident participation to the existing community committee and commencing a public process to consider locations for a new police facility before we commit to any expenditures in excess of just regular expenditures that we do in the regular course of business. I do want to just put a footnote on that. I've heard ideas about which have not come up today, so I'll just mention it very briefly, but I've heard ideas about perhaps selling the Santa Barbara site to finance this project. This is an expensive project. We are going to need to finance it. I hope that we don't have a rush to judgment in that as well. I can't imagine why anyone would think

that we would sell a appreciating asset like valuable land to create a depreciating asset. Today, our police station from what I hear is worth zero. We're going to demolish it. In 50 years, whatever we build here will be worth zero. But that property on Santa Barbara is going to be worth, I don't know, maybe a billion dollars, not a hund00 million. That is the legacy of our children and our grandchildren. Thank you.

Once again, I'm going to ask everyone please no clapping. Council member Barto,

thank you. Um, I am very grateful to my colleagues for allowing me to sit on this ad hoc, though politically it might be fraught. Um, I'm happy to have the opportunity. Um, when I was elected as a resident by city to be on serve on city council, I recognize that it's very important to balance all the things quality of life, safety, and fiscal responsibility. These are all things we have to take into account. Um, previous councils have studied that Santa Barbara site as they mentioned. That was the reason they decided it was important to purchase another site. And while this site at the civic center may not be the final site, this is a study session. This is to study the site when you're evaluating the cost, land that you own is something that you should look at versus making a new purchase for land. And there were there I understand fully the emotional component because I am probably one of the few people who spoke who is actually a young mom who took their kids to that park who has memories there. We have photos that would be my I spoke with my children. They're like really it's there's things that you have to balance. The landscape of the city changes. The things that we have to hold true that give us the quality of life that we like are fiscal responsibility and public safety. That's what makes this place so special. So when we evaluate things, we do need meaningful public engagement. And that's why we're here as a study session to hear your engagement. This is not an a done deal. This is an ad hoc. This is to study. I've heard so many issues with what potentially could be under the ground. And I was previously built a project um when I was on the school board that had environmental issues. It uh forced us to reconsider where we put things. So I'm very sensitive to the fact that this may not be the final cost. I don't think anyone who is on this committee, who sat there, who grew up here, who has kids who hopefully come back to live here with their grandchildren, is taking lightly the fact that these are things that we will have to deal with. Whether we are

financially irresponsible by spending too much taxpayer dollars and making this city less than it is, whether we are relocating the safe, you know, what the police have asked for. I'm not the safety expert. I'm not the police expert. the police have said we would like to be in a central location. I do think that is worth considering as we consider with our ad hoc. So as we look through all of these factors, this is a study session. This is your chance to come and talk to us and I'm so glad that all of you did come because it's an opportunity for us to go through all the wise and the process of what how we got here. Um and I think it's important to know we are listening and sometimes people say you're not listening because in the end the decision is different than what they would have liked. We are listening. We do take that into account and also we are going to be looking at the cost and if it comes back and all of these environmental issues as are they say um impossible to and again it's dependent on where my colleagues want to go but if we come back and there are all these impossible environmental issues we'll have to look elsewhere and in fact in that end that actually preserves that space in a way that wasn't you know documented before so I think that when we're looking through all of this there's this idea that there's this rush you know We do have a building that is 50 years old that is rapidly decaying. We do have a need for public safety. We do need to move forward and we having the residents participate is very important. But I think listening to the police who are going to be operating that facility and listening to what is important to them while balancing that fiscal responsibility while balancing that public safety and that quality of life are all things that we consider and I hope everyone considers that thoughtfully um as we move forward.

Council member Wan.

Yeah. Thank thank you council member Barto and council member Grant for the comments. Um you know as council member Barto said this is a study session. So this thought that we're making a decision tonight and this is the end all be all. We're not voting on anything other than a straw vote to say how we're going to proceed going forward. And so as council member Grant had said that she's disappointed that this is the very first discussion that we've had in this uh you know we unanimously decided that we would authorize a study of the civic center site at our planning session that was an open meeting that was broadcast to all and we had a debate and a discussion months prior to create an ad hoc and I know council member Stapleton and and maybe council member Grant I think were on the opposite ends of how the decision of that was going to make that that was an open form and discussion as far as how our ad hoc makeup was going to look. I don't think that that ad hoc did anything to prescribe that there was some nefarious discussion that I've seen some commenters uh post to us or or or send emails to us on. It just started the process and we gave an opportunity to begin this long arduous process of studying and and and we opened up ideas for Santa Barbara. We've considered Dove. We've we're looking around uh and we had a close session that discussed a parcel that's nearby here to purchase perhaps for a police station. All of these options are challenging and and and obviously many of you have come out today to speak against the civic center park um uh removal and and look, I I get it. I I I appreciate council member Barto's comments. My kids I have tons of photos in in in my phone of us walking this park. my kids when I was on planning commission would come and meet me before my 6:30 meeting because they weren't going to see me for dinner and we go walk up there and and have a nice

uh time together. So, I get there's that emotional attachment. My other emotional attachment is the fact that my mom served in that building on Santa Barbara for 33 years. My dad served in there for 11 years. So, I heard a lot of residents say, "I'm a 30-year resident of the city." My mom was 33 years in that building as a resident, as an employee representing the city. and she told me at many times at kitchen table dinner discussions how that building was impacted when she was there and she retired in 2010. So, you know, she said, you know, I would have loved to have gone to uh city hall that was literally right across the street and she spent a lot of time going to city hall down on the peninsula. And so those were moments that she spent in the car. she had to drive down there, have her meeting with either revenue, with traffic, with public works, all of these entities that she worked with, and then have to come back to the to the office. So, those time commitments that are unrealized uh when it comes to staff's work, and there's a lot of times that I'm in this building that there's PD who are in that building. So, they had to drive over from Santa Barbara. Not to say that that's a long distance, but what if you had something that was here on the park that they could just simply walk to an office that they could experience the remainder of the park that would exist. These are just thoughts and scenarios. Again, you and I hear laughter and I appreciate that. But there is some serious discussions we have to have. And for all of these options that I've seen on the table, options 1, 2, and three of the Santa Barbara rehabilitation or recreation, to me, it's not acceptable. It's not feasible. I don't want to impact one employee, and any potential for a call of service response due to uh equipment replacement, staging, um any type of uh impact that occurs when you redo something. There is if you're I am

absolutely against any type of remodel. That would be that would be the worst decision that we make. But you could clearly see that you cannot park every employee on all three of these options. And I think that in is a tremendous impact. We haven't even evaluated the process of how you do that. And I think that the best options are to look outside of Santa Barbara, but within the Newport Center area. So, I would be supportive of studying uh additional options for land use opportunities in the area, but you see the costs presented. You know, 20 million for one parcel, 15 million for another parcel. That adds up. So, there's extreme expense when it comes to looking for another site here. I'm absolutely against relocating a police station in Dove. I would be happy to sell that parcel tomorrow. Um I I I do not see that that is a viable location for a police department in the city such as ours. This core is here. As as was even said by a commenter, this park is the core. So that means this city center is the core. So I want to see something here in Newport Center. So I would like to rule out options 1, 2, and three on the uh Santa Barbara site. And I want to rule out the dove location uh as our options. So uh that leaves us with studying here. And again, this is a study session. There will be plenty of opportunity and and and and council member Grant had said um that she supports this process that happened in the past when it came to this site. I support that process that will occur at this site related to the police station. So, I want to see public outreach. I want to see community town halls. I want to see polls. I want to see input from the average resident who isn't here because a lot of you and I appreciate you all coming, but that you it's it's the same folks that come to the meetings every time there's a controversial issue. And I appreciate your comments and I see you shaking your head, Denise Oberman, but you're here at every single meeting. So, this is the chances

of this city does not participate in these types of discussions. So yeah, I think it's important to have a public outreach at every area, perhaps one per council district, and each council member can moderate that discussion with city staff and have an opportunity to discuss what the impacts would be to this civic park. An opinion at somebody in uh Newport Coast might be a different opinion of somebody on the peninsula or in Dover Shores or in CDM or somebody who's right here in this neighborhood. And those impacts need to all be played into a consideration. And I'm not taking it away from any specific resident, but you get an opportunity to have a wellbalanced and discussed uh uh conversation. And so I'm not against what council member Grant's saying. I just think that it's premature to say that this process is flawed and that we've done anything nefarious from this council from behind the scenes. So I and again the laughter it it it it's comical to me because I sit on this council and I haven't seen it personally. So if if you feel that way, great. But I as a council member come here to represent the city and I took a pledge that public safety would been my top priority. And I think that the department and the men and women who serve this department owe it to us to make a decision on a headquarters that isn't impactful to their day-to-day life. And that would impact response times. And these response times are key to life or death in this city or your property or or or any criminal activity occurred against you. So, I appreciate the public comment. I want to be open and transparent and allow for this process to continue. We already unanimously approved at our study session a discussion on uh a funding to uh a study this site at Civic Center. I want to continue on with that process. And again, as council member Grant said, maybe it's not even feasible. Maybe it comes back and says that that millions

and millions of dollars in mitigation or extra expenses that we're not anticipating makes it unviable. Okay, great. Let's get an answer and understand that that's what it is and we can at that time kill the project. But until I know that answer to be definitive and true and and exact, then I want to see it through the process that we can analyze this site right here because I think it's the most viable option in my opinion and because options one and two are not. And I don't think we're going to find a a buyer or I'm sorry, a seller of a property that's going to be affordable for our city to relocate in the Newport Center area. So, I've probably gone on too much. I probably offended too many people, but I've heard many times tonight that this is an election issue and that um uh four of us council members are up for reelection. I I didn't get into this role to run for reelection. I got into this role to do what's right. So, if this is what it takes for me to stand up for something I believe in, to lose my election, I Okay, that that's fine. I and I I appreciate all some of these commenters nodding their head, you know, go after me. That's fine. I I I I didn't do this for that reason. I did this for the best interest of my city and my family who will be in the city beyond my time and their kids who I hope will be in the city be beyond their time. So that's all I have.

Just real quickly, I would like to reiterate that the public had their opportunity to speak. This is the council's turn to have a discussion. So please do not clap, don't yell, don't laugh, don't cheer. Okay, let's all be professionals. Council member Weber,

thank you staff um and to our chiefs for speaking um and all of the work that went into evaluating these options and thank you to the community uh who are here and part of this discussion. I think having a study session is exactly what we should be doing and it provides the transparency into probably one of the most important decisions that the city will make. So I'd like to just take a moment and remember that the civic center has served as the hub of municipal services in Newport Beach. And I think it's important to acknowledge the leadership, you guys all know who you are, who envisioned and created this complex. City Hall and Civic Center are defining spaces in Newport Beach. I love them. Civic Center itself was created through forwardthinking planning and we have the exact same responsibility today to plan for the civic needs for the next several generations. So based on the presentation and community feedback, I do think there is a broad recognition that we need to address the current condition of the police headquarters. Over 50 years old, operating uh challenges, infrastructure challenges, continuing to defer the issue is clearly not responsible. And so as I listen tonight, I hear the same kind of three topics come up. Location, cost, and then the sculpture garden. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be sitting up here talking about the bunnies, but here we are. So, from a location perspective, central access is extremely important for police operations, response times, and in my opinion, maintaining a visible public safety presence in the center of our city. When deciding where one of the most arguably the most important civic

functions is going to be located in our city, it absolutely belongs where our other civic institutions are and that is at the heart of our city. So, Mayor Keith Curry, you get to be quoted again tonight. Um, for the first time now, Newport Beach has a heart and it's going to be an iconic portion of our city for the next four generations. So if the civic center presents represents the heart of Newport Beach, then public safety should absolutely have a place within that heart. While Santa Barb Santa Barbara is definitely centrally located, I seriously consider the importance of operational continuity. We just went through a remodel. I'm actually lucky I'm still married after what we went through rebuilding on the ex existing site. When I read things that it would be highly disruptive or require police operations to function next to a major construction zone for several years, it is very concerning about a disruption to service, security, and day-to-day operations. Public safety doesn't simply pause during construction. So maintaining uninterrupted operations has to be a major consideration for this. Now, I've heard a lot about costs and obviously fiscal responsibility is extremely important to me as it is I know many residents. Cost absolutely matters, but it cannot be the only factor in a decision of this magnitude. We have to consider the operational efficiency, public safety needs, and really the long-term value this facility is going to bring to the community for the next several generations. The lowest upfront cost doesn't necessarily translate to the best long-term decision for taxpayers. So, I understand the concerns residents have raised about the sculpture garden and the open space of the civic center. I love the bunnies. Like, for the record, I love the bunnies. Anything that has to do with any holiday, I'm here for.

So, I pulled up the final EIR um for the Newport Beach City Hall and Park Development Plan. And the quote from it is the project will consolidate public services and would provide an integrated civic center complex to better serve the needs of community through enhanced access to city government buildings and a central library. I think it's extremely important to separate the facts from the misinformation that's been circulating. The civic center option doesn't eliminate the park or the open space. So, unless I've seen something different than the slides from the planning session or tonight, I'm a little confused as to how the narrative has spiraled so far out of control. In many ways, this builds on the original vision for the civic center and gives us an opportunity to thoughtfully enhance the complex for the next several generations. So, I would love to see the city continue its efforts and resources on studying the civic center site. The location provides the police department with the facility it needs, a central location, utilizes the land that the city already owns, but most importantly, it allows the current headquarters to continue operating without interruption while a new facility is built. I equally think it's important that a public committee is formed at the right time, providing feedback, helping guide the design and open space and sculpture garden. I think a robust web page with an FAQ and the ability for the community to submit comments, questions, concerns is just as important. The community absolutely should have a meaningful role in helping shape how the project respects the park, sculpture garden, and open space. At the end of the day, protecting our residents is the most fundamental responsibility we have as a city. Our officers deserve a modern facility that allows them to do their jobs

effectively. And our community deserves a headquarters that reflects the importance of that mission. Public safety and open space at the civic center are not mutually exclus exclusive in Newport Beach. We absolutely can do both. Thank you, Council Member Stapleton.

Where's he told everyone not to clap when I start speaking? All right, that's fine. Uh, yeah, thank you. Noah's booing at me already. I I want to start by just thanking everybody and I just love the passion and I think this is why we all love Newport Beach. What a world class a first world problem to be discussing. Do we want a world-class police headquarters of Santa Barbara? Do you want to remove some of the sculpture garden? Just just keep in mind that we are in the very very early stages of this conversation. There's a lot of people that have been on city council well before our time and they understand firsthand that this is the very beginning stages of a very long process. So I just want to thank the committee members or staff and of course each of you the residents. I do believe a process like this needs to have a tremendous amount of public input. If we're talking spending north of $150 million, obviously the public needs to be included and we need to have a really good understanding what all decisions are put in front of us. I remember my predecessor Dian Dixon sitting up here discussing this very issue when she was on council and discussing that Santa Barbara wouldn't work and doing the site uh and purchasing Dove. Uh we've been talking about this for a long time. I think if we accomplish anything tonight, it sounds like everyone's agreeing that we need a new police headquarters. So I think that's good. If we accomplish anything tonight, we'd all agree that we need a new police headquarters. Now, we got to figure out where to do it and the best most cost effective way to do that. I'm a big fan of a process and making the right informed decision. Uh especially on something like this. I've heard a lot tonight from all of you, from staff, from my fellow council colleagues. There's a tremendous amount of pros and cons that come to each one of these sites. I think we need to continue to study uh so we can really digest and figure out what the design is going to look like in any one of these locations. Uh, and maybe there's a solution we haven't even thought about. Um, not sure if it's the Range Rover dealership. We love our sales taxes here in the city of Newport Beach, but there

there certainly might be other opportunities uh to continue to discuss and chip away at. Uh, just a couple quick points. I I for one feel like I make the best decisions when I'm informed. As I sit here today, I have no idea if this sculpture garden is even possible understanding the environmental issues and everything else. I would like to continue to study that so we can keep it on the table. We can take it off the table. I don't want to make a decision tonight removing something when I don't know if it's even possible. It's feasible. Maybe, maybe not. Um I think we need to continue to have meetings like this and engage uh the public uh whether town halls, study sessions, workshops. We need to engage the community to make sure we've got the most transparency as possible in dealing with a project like this. We need to work together. We need to understand the actual design. We don't build anything in the city without going to the public. I look at our fire stations in the city and I've been a part of almost all those process in the last decade and there's three, four, five, six different designs that go through and the community comes and we're about to break ground on fire station number one built in the 1960s that is going to be world class and I just loved going through the process and understanding what the design works uh and having that public input. Uh secondly, I am very adverse to taking on any like staggering amount of long-term debt when we have resources here in the community uh to build what I think is a world-class facility with potential properties that we don't need anymore, whether that's 121 Dove. We are not that far off, maybe in the next 5 to seven years, maybe longer depending on market returns, from having an unfunded pension liability. an additional $45 million a year that we can put towards different projects in the city. Maybe I should step aside and get on that council. That'd be a lot of fun. Uh so obviously there's a lot going on, but shovels are not in the ground. Design work's not done. Uh the funding certainly hasn't been secured. There are so many steps that continue to remain uh out there. Um, and I for one am just really looking forward to getting out in the community,

understanding the best process, continuing to see what we can do here, uh, at all the different sites, and maybe there's something, like I said, we haven't even discovered. So, with that, I appreciate all your time and the continued effort, and I look forward to continuing this forward. Mayor Prom Blum,

thank you so much, Madame Mayor. All right, this is exciting. I like it when we we get some feather up there. So, um, the first the first date that was thrown out by some people out there was November 4th of 2025 when the ad hoc was formed. I remember that date fondly. It happens to be my birthday. It's right around uh the election as well. And that's when we formed an ad hoc up here, which means we didn't meet for quite a while after that because as you know, no one works in December in Newport. Um, and by the time we did start talking about it, we were we were looking at January. That was 4 months 4 months to now. And so this idea of transparency not engaging I I have to say it it doesn't exist. That that original meeting was to discuss ideas options because you can't bring an infinite amount of something to everyone. You get an infinite amount of return. We have to whittle down ideas and be able to offer them. That's the point. That's why all of you elected us to sit up here. Well, not some of you, for me, but for the rest of them. Sure. But this is the process. The reason in January that we called it a planning session, I mean, we weren't just throwing random words out there. It it was about planning. It wasn't a definitive agreement. It wasn't an absolute decision. It was planning. And now we're all sitting here acting like there's some nefarious activity when we're having a study session. So we've planned and we've studied. Feels like we're actually running

through a pretty good process on this. But then I thought a lot about that November 4th, 2025 date. And I thought about the six years that I've been up here. And I thought when I first came on, we had a long and arduous talk about how we couldn't build a new police station during one of our CIP meetings, one of our capital improvement project meetings on the Santa Barbara site. So we started looking other places throughout the city and that's where Dove came about. And at the time when we discussed that it was an option. It was an option because no one really cared about the airport district. Let's be real. I mean most of you don't even know where it is. Sarah for sure. But as we start looking at what's happening up there, we start dealing with housing elements and things that are forced down from the state. We had to pivot. We had to adjust and in the best possible way with the most local control. What was our adjustment? We wanted to create another village, another community in Newport. And that's what the airport district is becoming. And so when we look at that property, yeah, we've paid $30 million for it. I'm willing to say that its value is far exceeding that $30 million. In addition to the fact that we make about 1.25, that's, you know, 1.25 million a year just by holding it. Unlike city hall that we built on bond measures that we will be paying $9 million a year for until about 2040 to be sitting in the building we're in right now. We didn't take out a bond measure up there. We aren't paying interest debt. That is straight money coming back into

our budget. So when you talk about why, and I think that is the question that perplexes a lot of people out there, why not just rebuild on Santa Barbara? Well, even though the costs vary by about $10 million, the reality is how do you pay for it? Because it's all of you that pay for it. Every taxpayer. And I can talk about parks and sculptures and open space and my three-year-old daughter that walks it all the time, but that's not my job. My job is to make sure that we do not continue spending money that doesn't need to be spent. We look at a state that overspends. We look at fraud that's rampant throughout this country, throughout this state. And I'm going to sit here and tell you that this city doesn't do that. We look at the most fiscally responsible way to move forward. And the way I look at this, that Santa Barbara property is worth about the same amount of money as building a new police station. So instead of straddling debt onto every taxpayer in Newport Beach, I want to sell a building to buy a new facility. And when I look at the facility we have and I think that it's older than me, not only does that scare me cuz I'm sure its knees are going out and it back hurts. But I imagine that since it was created before we had cell phones, I mean, there was a time where we used pagers and payoneses. That was my high school career. So this is years before that. I can't imagine we have an infrastructure that's ready for it. Can't imagine we have power going to it that's ready for it. So this idea that it's a simple rebuild, it's not a fire station and the infrastructure that goes with our

police station is catamount to how we operate our city. Every time we get a complaint about we have too much homelessness, which thank God Mayor Kleman has addressed with her full vigor and it now is a much better state of this city. We look at the crime and we talk about it on a regular basis. We look at what's happening on the peninsula and we want to correct that. All of these are something we do with the structure that we have in place. So is the plan to demolish the structure because we don't want to give up 3 acres of a 9 acre park. Okay, I get it. Can we give you more park? Are there other options? Is there more open space? I'm not looking to negate. I'm looking to create. How do we build and adjust? And how do we do it for the future generation so that they appreciate it? Because when I was growing up here in the ' 70s, this was a ravine with a drainage ditch that was man-made that was owned by the Irvine Company. And when they built this parcel, they had to mitigate environmental issues. When we just did the library lecture hall, we built it over a drainage ditch. We had to mitigate environmental issues. I get it. But this city is very good at those things because we actually care because we have the brains, technology, and knowhow to make them happen. And so I do I listen to what everyone has to say. But sometimes the job is not to be governed by emotion. The job is to be governed by the reality that I don't want to force anyone else to pay more to pay for emotion. I want to make the best decision that is in the best nature

of every single Californian moving forward. And for me is studying this parcel right here. And yes, it's sad that we have to reimagine the other 6 and 12 acres of park space, but I would love for a committee to be formed for that. I would love to see the paths intersect more. I would love to see more art there. In fact, I'd love to see more art throughout the city. I know that's not our general council policy, but I'd be in favor of that. I love the idea, but at the end of the day, the job has to be fiscal responsibility because we don't want to find ourselves in another position. Thank you.

Okay. Uh sounded like that might have been a partial straw v motion. some support across the dis here um for continuation of studying the option of locating the police station here at civic center. Um, it does in fact require additional study and attention and as everybody has talked about tonight, more public engagement. And um, I do like the idea that the mayor prom just suggested of possibly creating a committee to talk about how we reimagine and what other open space options we have in the city. Um, with that I will ask for some direction from the the dis here from my colleagues. Does that generally sound like the uh the support that we have up here? If so, can we have a straw vote on that?

My full support, Madame Mayor, those terms. Can I ask just a point of clarification? Um I I would support is are you are looking for guidance now or is what Noah said I was looking for guidance. Correct.

I I I want to remove out the um plans for anything at Santa Barbara. I want to remove out any plans for Dove. Um and I want to continue studying any plans for Dove as far as a police station. If I need to be specific, I we can discuss what we're going to do with Dove later, but uh I would like to pursue potential opportunities in the Newport Center area. And we've already approved unanimously at our study session, but maybe we need to recclarify that here tonight that we've authorized funds to study a civic center park um or or or having the police station be in the civic center park. I'm open to all of the other suggestions, especially when it comes to public discussion. I I I would expense resources to go to the average person to understand what their opinions are that aren't necessarily participating in the civic process on a on a routine basis. Um so you know whether that's town halls in each of our council districts, if that's community outreach events, that's staff driven. We've already got a website already created that has a lot of information. Um, but you know, going further out to the community, maybe doing some type of polling. Um, you know, I'm open to all of these uh as needed. But we've already kind of given staff direction uh at our study session or our planning session at the end of January. So, I want to continue to see that through to understand what the impacts are here and if this is viable. this isn't viable, then we move on and we have to look to to to discussing other options and and uh seeing what is around here or if this council maybe it's a new council um after November. So, you know, they can decide what they

want to uh pursue going forward. So, for me, I think the the that we've already um kind of had a lot of vision so far, but there's still plenty of opportunity for the public to engage here. Um, but I I want to see what that looks like uh going forward. So, u options one and two I want to eliminate. Three and four keep on the table.

I agree with the specificity of council member Wan's comments. I agree that we're only looking for the straw vote for uh future funding for the civic center site and um that we would look towards a future ad hoc committee or a public committee to discuss the reimagining of the sculpture garden. Council member Grant,

I just want to make a point of clarification. I discussed this exactly this point with the city manager after the January planning session. And it was my understanding from our discussion that we did not authorize funds to be spent on any particular site, but all we were doing was authorizing a budget amendment to accomplish that if and when staff came back asking for u a budget request for studying that site. So, um, at the planning session, we addressed the council that if we want to look at a police station and a civic center site that we're going to need some money to do the study and if there's council consensus for us to move forward with doing that. So, and the the it was unanimous for the staff to move forward with that. um we will have to do RFPs to make um consultant selections um for the EIR and for any of the site design work that we need to do and we'll have to come back to council for you to approve those se council um consultant selections and uh with adjusted uh budget amendments.

So I did go back to the notes and in the notes from the planning session it says council unanimously supported funding police and fire station projects. We did not have any specificity there and that's exactly why I called you after I read the notes originally that um because I was a little um concerned with how vague this was and I think that we did have a discussion about the fact that we were going to amend the budget to allow for that to occur, but we weren't actually voting on expenditures. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay. Thank you,

Council Member Stapleton. Yeah, I don't want to get in over my skis here. Uh, Councilman Wag, I understand your comment, but I don't see any ad I don't see any advantage to us taking something off the table and we haven't even studied the if this site is doable. I think when you look at Dove, I'm I would I'll go on the record saying I'm not in favor of moving it out of Newport Center either, but until we study the site and figure out if this is doable or not, I think we just keep all options on the table at this point. So, I would I would move forward and continue to study this site here to see if it's possible, but I wouldn't want to be supportive of removing another site until we know what's going on here. I

I just don't want to spend any money studying Santa Barbara because I find that it's that's that's what I mean by eliminating that option. We were presented with four options tonight. So, I want to eliminate two of those and continue on a discussion to see what Newport Center looks like. Are there any sites in around this area that are viable? We saw an example of one. Do we rule it out completely? Maybe. But are there other options out there in Newport Center? Okay. So, you're saying

I'm okay with that. I really want to see that maybe something comes along that is this amazing thing. Like you said, your comments were spot on. I don't want to rule out something that we're not even thinking of. We're not the, you know, 100% experts and we're not the end- all beall at times. we we trust the public to make some comments to for us to listen to and I think we've done that here. Um but we get an opportunity to say hey there's plenty of other sites in Newport Center that could be potential for this. Um you know uh Mayor Kimman is working really hard at OCTA to get the fire station relocated to the bus depot that every one of the audience can agree on that. That's a really good thing. We can eliminate that and move that to another part by the airport. So, I think that that's a great piece, but until we even know that aspect, we might not have an opportunity to move on that fire station that's at the current location for multiple years thereafter because every one of the sites that are here in the civic center area where the fire station has to go is extremely expensive. And we're looking at options for 20, 15, $25 million. that could be a cost that we're not even anticipating for the fire station to relocate to um if we don't get to move to the bus depot. So, I I'm not there's puzzle pieces to be played in Newport Center that I'm still open and willing to accept. In the meantime, that's all we're doing here tonight is letting an option on the table to study the Civic Center Park as a place for our police station. And by doing that, we'll know the realities if it's feasible or if it's not. And if it's not, we move on and we cross that one off the list and move on to others. So I I I think for me seeing four options, two of them are a non-starter for right now and uh the other two let's move forward with council.

Uh yes. So I think it's and maybe I'm not understanding clearly but I want to make sure we're on the same page. So the last slide is are kind of the options. Um they are talking about options for sites, but I think um as part of the ad hoc what we were looking for was um whether we continue to review evaluate potential sites and timing for citing the new police facility or continue further evaluation of a new police facility in Civic Center Park um with the hiring of consultant team and also soliciting further input from the community and arts commission or three pursue other direction. Um, from what I'm hearing, it sounds like option to continue further evaluation at Civic Center Park is where everyone's going, but also making sure we solicit input from the community. That needs to be part of that. And then I think maybe it eventually comes to a 2B if we can't, you know, but that's down the road. We have to have another slide, I think, in discussion if we're continuing to review additional sites in the future. Um, that's the way I understood kind of what we were asking, but um, I'm open to my colleagues.

So, thank you, Council Member Roto. I agree with that assessment that we're moving forward right now with just uh, looking into the civic center spot with the opportunity for community input on the arts piece. Is that about where staff sees that? Okay. So, if we could take a straw vote, I would appreciate. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing as well. Let's go ahead and try that again on the straw vote. Ju just for a point of clarification like if we're not ruling out anything in the Newport Center area though with that that we can still discuss, you know, if options become available or as council member Stapleton said, you know, maybe there's something we're not thinking of. I I just I want to make sure that we're

short of the Santa Barbara. There's still yeah Santa Barbara and Dove, but the other the other there's there's something around here if we're not thinking or we're discussing uh the civic center. I'm 100% on board and I don't know that there's the consensus to fully remove Dove. So, I wouldn't want to just say that we're there necessarily.

If we need to do a straw vote that bifurcates that out, I I'm ready to I'm ready for Dove to be be tossed aside. I just don't need I just don't think that we need to pull any I mean obviously Santa Barbara's look we have all this stuff that staff has presented and we have the reasons that we you know have the the things that we have seen however I think that just saying right off the bat pulling you know dove off the table that's not we don't even really need to do that right now what we need to do is evaluate this site we need to make sure the community is involved and again there are interesting ideas that keep people keep bringing up let's keep moving forward with what we are doing versus just saying we're taking options off the table. I think we have a direction without doing that.

I I think the public gets an opportunity to say that those are off the table, so we're not discussing it any any further. That's why what we're here to discuss. So for me, I I I I would like to clean the dove piece off of this um for a number of reasons. One, it's not central to anything we're doing within Newport Center. Um, that's not that we don't have a value ad or asset there. Um, and we're going to continue talking about Dove in a million different ways moving forward, but as far as for a police station, I do not have a love or passion behind that. So, I would like to move forward with the straw vote. moving forward on removing Santa Barbara and Dove, focusing on Newport Center, and creating a public community uh group that looks at the art and reimagining of the sculpture garden.

I I'm going to ask for a friendly amendment. This is so let's just I'm I'm all in favor of putting a little bit of money to go hire a consultant, do some environmental studies, and see if this is even viable. the conversation about studying what art and sculptures and paths and removing dove removing center but we don't know what the heck is possible here let's just I I think we have support large support just continue to study the site see if it's possible if it's not we move on we got other things to look at I I don't understand pulling Santa Barbara off for the sake of just moving this along let's just study this and if

I'm okay with that uh you know where I stand I'm with you clear on on Santa Barbara and dove, but let's just I'm I'm okay with that. We I think we have pretty good direction, but you know, I'll let the mayor rand handle the rest. Council member Grant's been waiting to speak.

I would I would suggest that we look reook at option one to continue to review or evaluate potential sites and timing for citing the new police facility and that we don't take anything off the table and that we don't overly invest in any particular site. I'm not in favor of spending the full million half dollars on this site. I think that we do have some work to do before we make that kind of investment. I'd like to see us continue to look at all the sites. We've had a lot of good ideas here today. So, I would make a straw vote suggestion for item one.

So, I think there's a lot of different motions out there on the table. It sounds like there's general consensus to move forward with number two. So, maybe we just draw vote that first. But everyone's in favor except Robin except uh and only are you saying only two or we going to vote on each one? What? How are you doing this? I'm I'm saying that it seems there's consensus to move forward with just two only two So can we vote again so we get an accurate vote moving forward with just number two?

All right. Six in favor. Council member Grant opposed. I want to thank everyone again for coming out tonight. This was a was a a long discussion, but we appreciate everybody spending their evening with us and all of the thoughtful comments. Thank you, Robin. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on. Maybe take us a fivem minute break. Not really. No. No. Okay, we're still in the meeting. Please don't approach the dice. Please don't approach. We We're still We're still moving on with our with our meeting.

Okay, we're going to go ahead and move on to our next agenda item. Madame Clerk, please read the notice regarding public comments on agenda and non-aggenda items.

The city council of Newport Beach welcomes and encourages community participation. Public comments are invited on to items listed on the agenda and non-aggenda items. Speakers must limit comments to three minutes per person to allow everyone to speak. Written comments are encouraged as well. The city council has a discretion to extend or shorten the time limit on agenda and non-aggenda items. We'll now proceed with public comments on all agenda and non-aggenda items. Please note that members of the public will still have an opportunity to comment on agenda items under consent and close session later in the meeting, provided they do not offer comments on those items at this time. Oh, hey guys. Hello.

I know you're probably all pretty bored, but now you finally get to hear something besides the police relocation. So, that's good, right? Um, uh, before I start, I just wanted to let you know that I'm not speaking just as myself. I'm speaking for a bunch of kids my age and teenagers, probably up to 15. Um, so good evening. My name is Finn Wahberg. I'm 12 years old and I'm here tonight to ask you like the city of Newport Beach to set aside an area to build um sanctioned community dirt jumps so that we can like ride our bikes without having to be like um cuz Park Patrol came along and destroyed all of our dirt jumps. So, I just wanted to let you like Yeah. So, when I was about like 10 2 years ago, um one of my friends showed me some dirt jumps over by the Back Bay and it was some of the most fun I've ever had. Um after like a little while, we started building our own and spent about 6 months like designing and building. Um, and we made like some new friends like through this community. Like it it was super fun. Um, I have three reasons why you should let us um have our own area to build these. Um, reason number one that kids need something to do. The first reason is like simple because kids in Newport Beach don't have enough to do. There's not a lot of fun active options for teenagers and a bike park would give kids a real place to go, a reason to put their phones down, get outside and be

active. Um, my second reason is for community building. Um, it I feel like a bike park can bring the community together. When we had all those dirt jumps, kids of like all ages and skill levels were out there riding, learning from each other, and making friends. That's community building and action. a sanctioned bike park could do the same thing but even better. Um, my third reason is that it solves the neighbor problem. I know that there have been some complaints from neighbors about noise, ebikers, and unsanctioned riding, but sanctioned bike park fix that. We could have posted rules like being respectful, keeping the noise down, riding during set hours when kids have a real place to go, the problems with neighbors go away. And um if you even consider this cuz all the police drama going on. Um I just wanted to be clear that I'm just not I'm not really asking for like something without

Go ahead and finish. Okay. Thanks. Um I'm just not asking for free land to build on. Um we can have fundraisers and we can ask people to help us pay for it. And so here's what I'm asking. Help us build a community bike park in East Bluff. We'll raise money. Follow the rules. We just need the city to meet us there halfway. There were dirt jumps. There were kids outside. Now there's nothing. Please help us change it. Thank you. Thank you. What a thoughtful and well articulated presentation. Amazing leadership. Thank you. We needed that tonight, sir. Thank you for your patience. I know you've been waiting a long time to come to speak.

No problem. Uh thank you very much of having us here mayor Clayman and the council members. My name is Cameron Tagiri and uh I'm the residents of Newport Beach for past 48 years here and also I'm the board member CFO and director executive director of the Iranian American Community Group. We call it ACG. We established that group 15 years ago. It is nonprofit organization and it is non-religion and it is non-political. Is basically we are doing all cultural work. Everything is based on cultural and Iranian and Persian cultural and we do have a um standing festival every year for the past 15 years that we have it and we always had in the airine and in the park next to city hall and we normally had always had uh in the beginning of the March 21st of the March the first day of the spring there's a Persian new year is always the first day, first day of the spring. This year, for the first time, we do have that kind of the small festival in Newport Beach. We always are in Irvine and we have in Newport Beach. And since situation right now is a little bit not clear, we are not going to have a large gathering. We are going to have very small gathering in the city hall here, basically room behind us. And uh I send the flyer to many of the council members and the mayor and I also give a flyer here and we're going to have that one on the 26th of the March. March 26 is on Thursday from 3 to 5 and basically we have a small group of people displaying

the some kind of the cultural uh uh items and sweets and the tea and the small uh folk and the cultural children dancing basically that we present the beginning of the spring and I welcome all of you to come and we're going to talk about more about nor that means the new day and it's as I mentioned is a Persian new year and always the first day of the spring that fall on the 20th of March or 21st of March. Uh I give it some flyers to the city clerk over there. I hope you receive it and I hope we can see many of you on that day. Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you. Next speaker please. Good evening, mayor and members of the city council. My name is Susan Pearl and I live on Baloa Island. As president of the Balo Island Improvement Association, I'm speaking on behalf of our residents. Thank you for the leadership you've shown in bringing new businesses to Newport Beach and encouraging responsible economic growth. It's clear you care deeply about keeping our city vibrant, competitive, and financially strong. That's important, and it doesn't go unnoticed. As Newport Beach has grown, an effort has always been made to protect the character that makes the city special. Charm is just as important as growth. And nowhere is that more evident than Balboa Island. People don't travel across Southern California and AC and from across the country to experience something generic. They come for the quaint streets, the walkability, and the neighborly feel. They come to stroll Marine Avenue, greet shopkeepers, enjoy a frozen banana on the boardwalk, and feel like they've stepped into a simpler time. Balboa Island isn't just a commercial district. It's a living piece of Newport Beach history and our homes. We recently conducted a resident survey. The results were clear and probably not surprising to anyone who has driven across the island lately. The number one concern is maintenance and repairs, specifically our streets. Dog waste, our longtime champion, is no longer number one, but is still a solid number two. And close behind that is traffic control. Beginning at Thanksgiving and continuing through the whole month of December, our residents experience gridlock. Both coming and leave both coming home and leaving the island. Summer weekends can be just as bad. Residents are asking for the basics. Safe streets, clean sidewalks, and the ability to get home without gridlock. As you continue encouraging new development and attracting business investments, we respectfully ask that you also protect

the qualities that make our city unique, especially on Baloa Island. When we maintain the character of the places like Baloa Island, we protect the very thing that draws people here in the first place. Newport Beach's brand isn't corporate sameness. It's coastal elegance, walkable neighborhoods, and local shopkeepers who know your name. Baloa Island is one of the clearest expressions of that identity. Property owners have invested almost $50 million in new alleys, beautifying the island by undergrounding the utilities. This benefits the city of Newport Beach by increasing property value, and enhancing the experience of those who come here to visit. Today, we encourage you to continue fostering economic growth, but also to intentionally protect our history and character. Let Balo Island remain quaint by providing the basic services required to keep our sidewalks clean, deal with gridlock, and maintain our streets. Let it remain the kind of place where a visitor feels like they've discovered something special. Once that character is lost, it cannot be rebuilt. Growth is growth is important. So by so so is protecting what makes Balpoa Island special. That's what keeps Newport Beach an exceptional place to live, shop, dine, and visit. Thank you for your leadership and for your commitment to keeping Newport Beach both thriving and timeless. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please. Just a reminder that your comment should relate to the city and be something within the council's purview. I have handouts. Do I Does it relate to the city?

Beloved mayor, council members, administration, and citizens. Uh I am brother Steven Gerard Sidlovski. I am providing you a revised um revision to the resolution of which you've already received I think in the last um month or two. Um, I'm asking that uh you look at this new um resolution in support of a Newport Beach, California declaration of a safe pre-born personhood city. This is something that we can do now because the US Supreme Court DOS decision was established in 2022. So, cities that have charters, uh, citizens can actually decide if they want to move in the new direction to put personhood language right into the city charter. And Newport Beach has a city charter. I'm giving you the step one of this wonderful moment, and that is the resolution itself. Step two is where the citizens would actually vote in the language into the city charter. I'm delighted to u let you know that Pope Leo, our American pope, just made a statement. He said that he delivered one of his strongest pro-life messages to date talking about how the culture of death

focused on Newport, please. undermines peace. Go ahead and keep it focused on Newport, please. I'm sorry. You're you're talking about things going on in Rome. Keep it focused on Newport.

Okay. Well, he does talk about how municipalities, it's your responsibility with the citizens to actually move in this new direction. I didn't provide this as a copy, but I'd be happy to email it to all of you so that you can review it. But the biggest amendment to the resolution itself I think you'll actually like uh 1 2 3 4 the fifth whereas of the resolution says California's model is Eureka and the golden state and a lot of the citizens the majority of your citizens prefer the golden rule. So that's right in holy scripture too. I hope you've had time to start reviewing the information that's been presented to you. I look forward to now traveling to other cities and I will be attending the Sacramento March for Life, the California March for Life this coming Monday right before St. Patrick's Day. So, peace and all good to you. God bless you with the loving wisdom and I hope one of you or two of you are going to jump on board with this new possibility. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Well, hi again. Uh I'm here to speak about the finance committee uh issue that's on your agenda. For the past 15 years, the finance committee has provided important independent financial advice to the city council. Some of our most distinguished citizens have served on the committee. The committee helps the council and the community to understand financial issues when they are not self-evident. And as an example, we just saw a discussion on the police station. I've always said that when the economics of a matter do not make sense, it's because you're looking at the wrong economics. I appreciate Council Member Blum's uh clarity because it appeared that the issue was the location of the station, but the real issue is the ability to have a land sale transaction for Santa Barbara. That's how you plan to pay for it. Uh the relocation of the police facility is just a necessary step to be able to sell those properties. The finance committee can help in fairing out those issues so that they're clear to the public. Another role of the committee is identifying risk elements that might not be evident. Again, using the police facility as an example, risk of project delay, litigation, environmental mitigation, site preparations, state permitting, and inflation appear not to have been factored in to the council's process up to this point. And once again, the financial the finance committee can help you with that. The impact is likely tens of millions of dollars. Now, some of you have expressed an interest in having a more direct connection to the committee. Three of you can serve on the committee and those not on the committee have the ability to personally appoint to representative. As proposed, you would use that right and the mayor would make the appointments. Let me just say that the public is not fooled. This proposal reduces transparency and it reduces public participation. I just encourage you to do the right thing and leave the finance committee as it is. Thank you. Okay, seeing no other speakers, now is the time for council. Oh, excuse me, Mr. Moer.

Uh, thank thank you, uh, Mayor Klyman, members of the city council. My name is Jim Moer. Uh, I don't know if this is I'm not sure that this is working.

It is. Uh uh f first thing I think this is the only opportunity to comment on agenda item number Roman numeral 4 which is a motion for reconsideration. You may have noticed in my written comments I suggested that you reconsider your vote at your last meeting approving the minutes from the meeting before from February 20th because they were lacking a record of what your vote had been on the matter about the beach shade structures and the changes to the safety enhancement zones and also the Bay View uh street calming measures. Uh, I happened to look just before this meeting at the recorded copy of those minutes and I see the votes are now in there. I don't think I was hallucinating though because I see a little note in the electronic version that was changed last night, March 9th at 5:38 p.m. My problem with that is there's no indication of who made the change, why they made the change, what the change was, what their authority was to make the change. And if minutes can be changed, can resolutions be changed? Can ordinances be changed? I I really think a formal vote to reconsider that and bring back the correct minutes would have been the proper course. And then on the consent calendar, I cannot guess what items will be pulled. So, I want to comment on one of those, which is item number four, the report required about the completeness of our fire inspections in Newport Beach. I made a comment that the state law seems to require that report to come with your budget discussion as if the fee structure was part of what the discussion should be about. I actually this morning looked at some reports from

other Orange County cities that have been filing those reports for some time. None of those actually scheduled it with their budget discussion or discussed the fee part of it. But what I would notice, they invariably said how many inspections had been made so that the public would have some idea of the scope of what their fire department does. And the report before you tonight is completely silent on how many inspections were made. We're told 100% of what we required was made, but not how many that was. I really think like the other cities that at least should be included. Thank you.

Thank you. And now it's the time for council announcements or reports and um announcements or committee activities rather from council members. The time for council members to request an item be placed on a future agenda. Council member Wan, do you have any announcements or reports?

I've said enough tonight. No. Council member Roberto. Uh, I just wanted to thank Council Member Wagan for attending my water quality committee. It was nice to see someone I knew in the back. Um, I wanted to just say that our water quality committee heard a really wonderful presentation from Lisa Haney regarding um from the OC water district regarding sand and sand replenishment. And it's a topic that we've talked a lot about here. Um, it's something for future and I just look um forward to having further discussions and reaching out to our county supervisors to assist with that. Council member Grant, none. Council member Weber, none. Council member Stapleton.

Uh, I just wanted to spend just two seconds and thank the, uh, lower Castaways Committee. Uh, we had Commissioner Langford, Kirby, uh, Hayes, and Commissioner Rudy from the Harbor Commission. Uh, and then my commit uh, council members who served. We have sunseted that. That committee is going to come back uh for uh discussion and recommendation on the next council meeting on the 24th. So in disclosure of public comments and transparency, if you are interested in the 65 or 68 or 69 parks we have in the city, this could be another one a beautiful 4acre park that I'd love to have people come and speak with. Uh and um uh I did get some comments that the finance committee has been uh the last the next two meetings have been cancelled. That is false. Uh we condensed the March and April meeting into April 16th. So, uh, if you're interested in the finance committee, April 16th is our next meeting. Uh, same place, same time. Thank you,

Samurai Blum. As is my way now. Okay, Madame Clerk, do you please read the notice regarding public comments on the consent calendar?

This is the time in which council members may pull items from the consent calendar for discussion. Items 1 through 11. Public comments are also invited on consent calendar items. Speakers must limit comments to three minutes. Before speaking, please state your name for the record. If any items removed from the consent calendar by a council member, members of the public are invited to speak on each item for up to three minutes per item. All matters listed under consent calendar are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion in the form listed below. Council members have received detailed staff reports on each of the items recommending their action. There will be no separate discussion on these items prior to the time the city council votes on the motion unless members of the city council request specific items to be discussed and or removed from the consent calendar for separate action.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Before we consider the consent items, I actually would like to propose an amendment to agenda item number five, exhibit A, regarding the resolution on the finance committee. Specifically, I propose to modify the membership structure and attachment A. So, the committee will consist of either five or seven members, the council will seek to appoint four citizen members. However, if four qualified individuals are not available, the council may appoint two instead. Citizen members would be appointed through the standard board and commission vacancy screening and recommendation process set forth in council policy A2. So if that could be recommended or excuse me incorporated into the motion, I would appreciate it. Council member Wagan, do you have any items to pull from consent calendar or conflicts to announce related to items number 1 through 11?

No, I do not. Council member Barto, I do not. Council member Grant, yes, I'd like to pull item five. Council member Weber, I do not. Council member Stapleton. Mayor Prom Blum. I have none. I do want to uh thank staff for their work on item number three. Um I'm not pulling it, but I'm very appreciative of the work that was done on that. Okay, we'll go out to public comment.

Mayor Klyman and members of the council, my name again is Jim Moer. Uh I appreciate that item five has been pulled and I will speak separately to that but one of the motivations between preparing item five was to bring greater transparency to financial matters and have more discussion here before the city council and I would just point out that we don't even read the titles of the items on the consent calendar and so I'm not sure that anybody watching this meeting will know that item nine on the consent calendar is the second quarter budget update, something typically discussed by the finance committee. And item 10 is a I don't know 260 pages or something. It's our city's annual financial statement and the audit results for that which again are things normally that have been in the past discussed by the finance committee and I am not hearing a lot of prominence or discussion at the city council even with these items on the agenda. So for what it's worth they are here and I don't know where the discussion is. Thank you. Thank you. I'm

Le again. I was really glad to see no public hearings on the agenda so we could have a short meeting tonight. Um on consent three, a resolution revised for revised salary schedules and new classifications for key and management group. This is changing the job title of real property administrator to real property manager and code enforcement supervisor to code enforcement manager. The staff materials indicate that the estimated annual cost to reclassify for the next fiscal year is $28,391 and change. I'm just going to call this transparency. Looking at transparent California for the last year, they have their publicly sourced information available. The real property manager or administrator before the job title change is identified as Laura Whitinger. uh total pay and benefits $23,519 and change. The code enforcement supervisor identifies as John M. Murray $218,591 and change pay and benefits. And you've heard from me before, I I would hope that civil servants here recognize how fortunate they are to work in a temperate climate in a good, pretty crime-free clean city and and just appre appreciate these pay levels. and I strive for people to be aware of what their civil servants are paid. Um, I'm glad item five was pulled. Item seven is revising a contract for uh restroom security for the public restrooms. You've heard about me on this matter a number of times, as have the harbor commission. With these automatic locks, I hope there will be consideration to expanding the hours, particularly on the peninsula when you've got hundreds and and thousands of people exiting bars and restaurants at closing time or fishing on the peers and there's no restrooms. Staff materials indicated that the restrooms locking at 10 and staying

locked till 6:00 in the morning has reduced overnight occupancy and deterred vandalism. That all makes sense, but it's increased human waste in alleys and dark corners and the harbor and the beach. And I would hope automatic locking gates at least could be automatically changed to expand the hours that the public has access to the restrooms, particularly on these very busy, warm weekends. Thank you.

Seeing no other public comments, I'll bring it back up here. Do I have a motion on the consent calendar? Thank you, Madame Mayor. I'd love to make the motion on consent um with the adjustment to the minutes and item five being pulled by Council Member Grant. I have a motion. Do I have a second? Seconded by Council Member Weber. Let's go ahead and vote. Oh, we're frozen. Do you want to do a straw vote instead? Oh, and we're back. Motion carried by unanimous vote.

Okay. Item number five was removed from consent calendar by council member Grant. Council member Grant, did you want a staff report?

We could just have a short staff report for the record about exactly what we're voting on. I'll just pull up a quick PowerPoint presentation. We'll walk through it with you. Uh so the purpose of this item is to consider amendments to the structure appointment process and responsibilities of the finance committee. The proposed changes are intended to strengthen fiscal oversight, improve transparency, broaden financial expertise, and improve the efficient use of staff resources. These recommendations were developed with input and direction from the fiscal transparency ad hoc committee. Before discussing the proposed changes, I'll briefly review the background and how the committee d ar arrived at these recommendations. The finance committee was established in 1994 and has periodically evolved to reflect the city's governance needs. Earlier this year, the council created the fiscal transparency ad hoc committee. The committee was asked to evaluate opportunities to improve transparency, accountability, public engagement, and the efficient use of city resources. The proposed resolution before you tonight reflects the recommendations developed through that process. The proposed resolution makes several structural changes to the finance committee which are summarized on the next slide. The proposed focus on the proposed amendments focus on four primary areas. First is the overall structure of the committee which has been amended uh with Mayor Kleman's um adjustments um which would keep it at seven members with four appointed um up to four if two at a minimum. Second is establishing clear qualification standards for citizen members to ensure financial expertise. Third is a revised appointment process involving mayoral appointment and

council confirmation. Um and finally the proposal clarifies that the role of the committee as a technical advisory body with major policy discussions brought to the full council. This one's kind of outdated since we've made those changes. And that basically concludes my recommend my my presentation. Did you have further questions? No, thank you. I'll just u make a comment I guess. Am I I'm the I don't Okay, I guess I have to request to speak, right? You're up. Okay, I'm up.

First, I do want to mention that I support strengthening the qualifications. I think it's a very good idea for residents that are going to be serving on the finance committee to be extremely wellqualified. And if we can strengthen that um part of our policy, I think that is a very good idea. These individuals with proven experience, you know, provide that fiscal stewardship that I think is um what our community deserves and I've seen it firsthand how it works and I think it works well. I do not support eliminating individual council member appointments to the finance committee. The existing structure allows individual council members a changing that structure avoids any act you know if we if we keep that structure we avoid any perceived undue influence over the finance committee and I think it's very important this committee is tasked with over $1 billion of assets and it serves as a critical advisory role to our council there's no advantage to changing this existing process I also don't support shortening the length of the term to two years I don't didn't see that in your report necessarily made by Mr. You skipped over it, but I think that's still there. Two-year terms failed to take advantage of the value of continuity and institutional knowledge. So, I would propose adopting the enhanced qualifications, but preserving the council member appointment and four-year term structure. Are there any other comments up here? Any comments from the public? Uh, Mayor Klyman and members of the council, my name is Jim Moer. Uh, first first of all, in my written comments, in my haste, I copied and pasted from the proposed resolution, a wrong sentence, and it may have given the impression I had some objection to the mayor appointing the three council members on

the committee. I actually intended to I I have no particular objection to that. A presiding officer usually chooses which colleagues will serve on various committees. That's typical. What I objected to was the provision that the mayor was going to appoint the two citizen members because I believe in our city charter individual council members are not supposed to be acting individually. the whole council is supposed to be acting collectively. So I am pleased to see the proposed amendment which I did not see in the staff report that the process for appointing the citizen members would now be the normal appointment process in which the applications would come to the entire council for their choice of which citizens should serve on it. And apparently now it could be four instead of two. I I support that. Uh, I do think that the terms, if they're going to be two-year terms, should be staggered so that the citizens don't all change at the same time. And I think if it's not being changed, there's a limit to two two-year terms. I think that's rather limiting. A total of four years service. there might not be all that highly qualified people in the sea who want to uh devote themselves to this. So I think you need more flexibility on that. And then uh there were extensive changes made to the what would be the purview of the finance committee and since there was not a red line it was hard to tell what that was but I did go back this afternoon and look at the previous enabling resolution and some of the things that have been delete. Well, first of all, in the current one, there's a responsibility C about making

advice about the recommendations about the budget, which seems redundant with the one before that responsibility B. It seems to already cover that. It says that they will make a recommendation about the budget. Some distinction between budget and final budget. I do not understand what that is. Things that were removed though, the former responsibilities included reviewing and making recommendations about the reserve policies. I don't know why we are deleting that. Seems like something you would want good advice about. Another thing that was removed was the responsibility to review debt financing proposals. If you're going to have a technical task force that is good at reviewing these things, why do you not want them to be reviewing that? And then finally they had a responsibility to serve as the audit committee. You might want to be the audit committee. Now it's not clear though that the current resolution is actually saying that. So I I think the audit review responsibility needs to be clearly spelled out somebody and need I think ultimately should be coming here but you might want their advice on that. So, those are my suggestions and I'm a little confused since we heard the staff report that did not include the amendment. So, you may want to repeat what that is. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mo. We thought you were infallible. Good to know you're human.

Adam Lance, one more time. Um, this is a result of the formation of the fiscal transparency ad hoc. I find it a little puzzling that the removal of two citizens from the committee or the potential of the removal of two citizens as a step towards transparency. I appreciate Mayor Klyman what I understood is uh if you can't find four qualified then you would do two. So that's somewhat mitigating that. I I don't like uh three council members now the current structure appointed by the mayor subject to full council approval. The proposed structure removes full council approval. I I'd like to have more than the mayor authorizing these things. And these are incredibly important positions, whether they be council members or citizens. And I a counterpoint to Councilman Grant, qualifications and standards. Yes. But as I understand it now, you vet people. If if there are people who don't have financial degrees, who don't have lots of money like to limit it to a certain subset of a certain college degree or business experience, I hope that there would be an open mind because because sometimes you can find a qualified person who doesn't have a formal education and it it's good to look at out of the box ideas sometimes and I hope that there's some receptiveness to that. Thank you. Any other comments on this item? Seeing none, I'll bring it back up. Uh, Council Member Grant, was your comment actually a motion now that we've heard from the public?

Yes, it was. Do we have a second for Council Member Grant's motion? My motion was to accept the increased uh requirements portion of the proposal, but to not change the council member appointments or the terms. I I would accept that as a revision of my motion. So, you're willing to Okay. Okay,

I'll amend my motion to in uh accept the increased requirements for qualification for the finance committee to delete the proposal to change council member appointments and accept the terms as two-year terms. That's it. Okay. So, that's my motion. So, I will second that. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Let's go ahead and vote. Or do we have an alternate motion? I guess I

Yeah, I'll I'll make a substitute motion. I would I would take the um staff recommendations through the ad hoc with the friendly amendments uh that mayor uh Klein put together that council will seek to appoint four uh citizen members. However, if four qualified individuals are not available, the council will appoint two instead. And then uh in addition to the citizen members would be appointed through the standard board and commission vacancy screening process outlining council policy 82. I'll second that for discussion. I I had a little bit more things I wanted to to to speak upon. Um just on Jason uh attachment B. If you could pull that up, that would be helpful. Just so the public knows that at least we think that there's going to be less conversation, less uh transparency. I I think that this slide deck, this item here of attachment B basically says that this council will see a significant increase in the duties that the finance committee will either send to us or have at our disposal. and and and I think that that's really important for us and the public to understand that that there's a significant amount more council review on a lot of these items. So, I appreciate the ad hoc uh coming up with some of these uh this tenative schedule, what this process is going to look like. as far as um the conversation about who gets appointed, how it goes, the the change to the normal process still allows us as a council to override that decision process. So, we still have an ability to say no. I think the committee's um requirements and qualifications are significantly increased. So there may not necessarily be as many as there was

when we had the committee in its previous setup. So having yes us choosing who that would be, I think the committee has to now vet and choose a specific candidate that's based on these requirements. So I I I think that that is actually a good thing because we're having policy experts. And as far as the discussion about, you know, a two-year term or four-year term, it looks like you could serve at max essentially an item B here a four-year term with one two-year term with an ability to go for a second. You that doesn't necessarily mean that that process is locked in there, too. I I I can recall this council having discussions that if there's somebody who's really wellqualified and somebody who is a good uh choice that we want to keep on board, we still as a council can override these rules and continue to allow that member to serve. So I I think this could be a work in progress that we have an opportunity to go forward with what and I'll support um these recommendations with the amendments, but we get a chance to, you know, see how it's working out. If we need to change it, we always come back and do so. So I I I would make I think the motion.

Okay. So we have a substitute motion actually. I did second it. So yeah. Yes. We have a substitute motion made by uh council member Stapleton and a second by council member Wan. Let's go ahead and vote on the substitute motion. Motion carried by the vote 61 and council member Grant opposed. Madame clerk, please read the statement on motions for reconsideration.

A motion to reconsider the vote on any action taken by the city council at either this meeting or the previous meeting may be made only by one of the council members who voted with the prevailing side. Are there any motions for reconsideration? Hearing none, we will move on to public comments on closed session. Do we have any public comments on closed session? Seeing none, Mr. HARP, close session announcement, please. Thank you, mayor. The city council will journ to close session to meet with legal counsel regarding the initiation of litigation. And that's set forth on the agenda under item number 5A. Thank you.

Thank you. We are recessed to close session. Oh, yeah. I I had my hand up. Yeah.

Mr. Harb, do you have a closed session report? I do. Thank you. Regarding close session item 5A, a motion was made by the mayor and seconded by Mayor Prom to authorize the city attorney to initiate litigation in regard to one matter. All council members voted in favor of the motion. The action of defense and other particulars shall be disclosed to any person on inquiry once the action has been formally commenced. Thank you. With that we are adjourned.