Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

Good evening and welcome to the Public Safety Committee meeting of Tuesday, June 9th, 2026. The time is now 6.02 p.m. and this meeting may come to order. Before taking roll, I will provide instructions on how to submit speaker cards for items on this agenda. If you're here with us in chamber and would like to submit a speaker card, please fill one out and turn one into myself or a clerk representative no later than 10 minutes after the start of this meeting. or before the item is read into record. Registering to speak via Zoom is now due 24 hours prior to the start of this meeting time. This meeting came to order at 6.02 p.m. and speaker cards will no longer be accepted 10 minutes after, making that time 6.12 p.m. Sorry. We'll now proceed with taking roll.

Council Members Brown.

Present. Five. Present. Houston. Present. And Chair Wong. Present. Thank you, we have four members present. Chair, before we begin, do you have any announcements at this time?

Yeah, just one announcement. Due to the number of people that we have in the room and we want to make sure that we can get through all of the public comment in a timely manner, we are going to limit public comment to just one minute, okay? Thanks, everyone. We are limiting the public comment to one minute.

Thank you. Starting off with item number one, approval of the draft minutes from the committee meeting of May 26, 2026. We have no speakers on this item, just need a motion.

Move approval of the meeting minutes. Second.

Thank you, we have a motion made by Council Member Brown, seconded by Council Member Five to accept the draft minutes from the committee meeting of May 26th, 2026. On roll, Council Members Brown. Aye. Five. Aye. Houston. Aye. And Chair Wong. Aye. Thank you, item number one passes with four ayes, so accept the draft minutes as is. Reading in item two, determination of schedule of outstanding committee items, and we have one speaker that signed up to speak.

Okay, great. Anything from the administration before we go to public comment?

I do, thank you, Chair. Through the Chair, item number two on our pending list, no date specific, we wanna go ahead and remove that because it is a duplicate item.

Great. Okay, calling in the name that signed up to speak on item number two, Blair Beekman. Okay. He is not on Zoom. Chair, that concludes all speakers for this item. We just need a motion.

Councilmember Brown You want to move it Council number five second

Thank you, we have a motion made by Council Member Houston, seconded by Council Member Fife to accept the determination of scheduled outstanding committee items as amended, noting the withdrawal of item number two under the no date specific. On roll, Council Members Brown. Aye. Fife. Aye. Houston. Aye. And Chair Wong. Aye. Thank you, item two passes with four ayes to accept the pending list as amended. Now reading in item number three. Adopt a resolution awarding grants to 21 community-based organizations for community violence intervention services set forth in Tables 1 and 2 for the period of October 1, 2026 to September 30, 2029, in a total amount not to exceed $38,100,000 and authorizing the city administrator to negotiate and enter into grant agreements with the named grantees with authority to extend the terms of the grant and modify the grant amounts as set forth herein. And we do have over 60 speakers on this item, just noting that as this item has been read into record, it is now too late to sign up.

Okay, thank you so much, Madam Clerk. Dr. Joshi, this is the major item of the night. The floor is yours.

Thank you, and thank you for everyone who's come. The Department of Violence Prevention is here to present our recommendations for community grants for the period of 26 through 2029. I understand the advocacy in the building this evening. I've been in the agency director's shoes, working to keep the doors open and services flowing in an Oakland-based nonprofit is not an easy job. I've read each advocacy email and each letter sent. My lack of response does not signal lack of awareness. understanding or lack of compassion instead it represents my commitment to my duty to follow the city contracting process which includes not interacting with cbo applicants about the rfp process during active and open rfp process so before i get into the slides i think it really is important for me to put tonight's presentation and associated conversation within the context of the funding landscape that we were all facing as community violence intervention practitioners. The field of CVI, despite a growing body of research that speaks to the efficacy of this work, is underfunded. We know what is happening at the federal level with the closure of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and large cuts to CVI grants across the country that have impacted us here in Oakland. CVI is underfunded by the state, and in Oakland, our total investment in CVI is approximately $22 million, to include $5 million from the General Purpose Fund and the Measure NN dollars that we are here to discuss tonight. So considering these realities, the resources we have available to us to allocate to CBOs through this process are clearly not enough and do not adequately address need and very challenging decisions have to be made i'll take the slides please so we are recommending awards to 21 community-based organizations for community violence intervention services from october 1 2026 to september 30th 2029 The total annual amount is approximately $12.7 million, and the total amount for the three-year period is $38.1 million. And please keep in mind that we are updated by finance each year as to what the actual revenue amount will be, and so we're usually being presented with estimations until the measure end and revenues come into the city and are solidified by the finance department. So just as a reminder for everyone in the room, Measure NN passed in November 2024 and replaced Measure Z. That is really an important point because some folks who weren't here during the Measure Z and Measure Y times believe that this is new money. It really is replacement funding. This is a sustainability fund for the city at this point. It does not represent deeper investments in CVI or in our CBOs. It allocates approximately 40% of the annual tax revenue to violence prevention services. 75% of that 40% that comes into the Department of Violence Prevention must be allocated to community based organizations in the form of grants. Just one additional note about the money flowing out of the city to community-based organizations. Although we are grateful for the voters passing Measure NN, the CBOs did experience a reduction in overall funding because when the city was in a stronger financial position, we would supplement Measure Z funding with general purpose funds. And of course, the city council also invested one time reimagining public safety dollars into CBOs in 2020. So again, measure NN is a 16 million plus estimated for violence prevention services. 12.7 will be allocated to the CBOs. 4.2 million is kept internal by the DVP for our staff that administers the grants and for some of our direct service providers currently working on the lifeline, the ceasefire lifeline strategy. The measure requires that the department, that all departments receiving funds develop a three-year spending plan and that is exactly what we did. We presented that spending plan to the Measure NN Commission as required by the statute in June 2025. That spending plan that informed the RFP process focuses on evidence-based community violence intervention services. The spending plan built off the values and service priorities that we identified in the 2022 through 2024 spending plan, and that spending plan was based on an extensive community engagement process. It involved town halls, focus groups, and interviews with a wide range of stakeholders. We updated those findings based on surveys with staff at CBOs and the DVP, interviews with the leadership at those CBOs, surveys of participants, best practices in the growing field of community violence intervention work, and of course findings from the Urban Institute's evaluation of Measure Z services. The final plan incorporates what we already knew to be true about CVI work and new insights and lessons learned, and it outlines the evidence supporting each service. The plan focuses most specifically on individuals who are at the highest risk of gun violence or gender-based violence in Oakland. The core tenet of community violence intervention work is focusing prevention and intervention work on individuals at the highest risk of violence. It is not upstream services for individuals who may be at risk in the future within the city of Oakland. Many upstream services are covered through funding sources including OFCY, EWDD, employment development. This is our gun violence criteria. It must be documented in our system. This is how we will ensure that our agencies are working with the highest risk. I know that question has been asked of the Department of Violence Prevention by numerous council members who are concerned and committed to making sure that tier one or Oakland's highest risk individuals are served through these proposals. With that being said, I'm going to turn it over to the Deputy Chief, Jenny Lynchee, who will go over this request for proposals process, which I know folks have questions about. Thank you.

Thank you. Good evening, Council. Jenny Lynchee, Deputy Chief with the Department of Violence Prevention. We undertook a structured competitive request for proposals or RFP process to award this funding to agencies. One important thing to note is that the RFP process has two components to it. The first component is that applications that are submitted go to our city's citywide contracts team. They review the applications for all required application elements, and then agencies that meet those criteria, that screening, are then forwarded to the department for reading and scoring. And that's the case with all departments, as with the Department of Violence Prevention. So we first undertook an RFP process that started in December of last year and closed in February. Unfortunately, when the DVP received the applications that were approved by the citywide contracts team to do our review and scoring, 14 of the 41 that were submitted were deemed ineligible based on technicalities with the application process. So that's a 34% failure rate. We felt that that was unacceptable. We consulted with the citywide contracts team and the city administrator's office and were told that we only had two options. One was to accept that failure rate and continue with the agencies that were deemed eligible or to cancel the RFP entirely and to reissue it. And so we elected to cancel the RFP and reissue a new RFP in order to establish a fairer process that allowed more agencies to pass that initial screening, which again was simply technicalities around submission. So the second RFP, which is what these funding recommendations are based on, was released on March 13th. It closed on April 1st. In that process, we received 40 responsive applications from the citywide contracts team for review and scoring. That was out of 44 entities that attempted to submit applications. So that was a 9% failure rate. So we reduced it from 34% to 9%. We then undertook a very structured review and scoring process that involved three reviewers reading and scoring every application. The citywide contracts team requires that three individuals review and score all applications, but they do not require that any external reviewers are included in that process. They can all be citywide, or city staff. But we elected to have teams composed of two internal DVP staff members and one external reviewer with expertise in the service category. As an overview of our funding recommendations, we're looking to award funding for a three-year period from October 1st, 2026 through September 30th, 2029. The total funding awarded is 38.1 million, which is $12.7 million per year. We are looking to allocate 22,875,000 to gun violence services, and then 15,225,000 to gender-based violence services. and we are looking to fund a total of 21 total community-based organizations, and that is the same number that we currently fund, so we're continuing the number of agencies. It should be noted that we did receive direction from our former city administrator to reduce that number, but we are maintaining that number. Okay, so we are keeping our investment in gun violence services relatively constant. We are increasing from 7.5 million to 7.625 million. That's essentially cost of living increases for staff. The way that we conceptualize our gun violence services is into core services, violence interruption, hospital-based intervention, life coaching, and youth diversion. Those are the services by which we identify and engage individuals who are at highest risk of gun violence in Oakland. Then we have support services, emergency relocation, housing, employment, healing, and family and victim services that are primarily available to individuals who are engaged through the core services based on need. You'll see that some services, specifically housing and employment, appear to be potentially duplicative from services that are funded through other departments in the city. We have entire departments that are focused on employment and housing. But it's really essential that the Department of Violence Prevention fund specific versions of these services that are tailored to the unique needs and safety concerns of individuals at highest risk of gun violence. So some examples of the unique needs and considerations of this population are that individuals at highest risk of gun violence cannot travel freely throughout the city. Even within specific regions of Oakland, it's not safe to travel several blocks from where one may stay. Services need to be mobile. They have to be brought to individuals where they are. Another example is that group services are very unique for our population. Individuals cannot be in groups with other individuals who they are in conflict with. If an agency is delivering group services, there has to be a deconfliction process where you understand the allegiances of the individuals and take precautions to make sure that, again, individuals in conflict do not come into contact. A third and last example is specifically related to employment. It's often safer for individuals to seek employment opportunities outside of Oakland because, again, of the concerns moving safely throughout Oakland. so across our core services we are proposing to fund 24 full-time direct staff members who will serve at least 288 individuals and the annual funding for that is 4.55 million we envision this to actually be closer to 200 unique individuals because we expect individuals who are served through the hospital-based intervention strategy to then be referred to life coaching or in some cases youth diversion. So if we take that 200 number of unique individuals and we add that to the DVP's capacity to serve approximately 150 unique individuals through life coaching, we get 350 unique individuals served through these core gun violence services. And you may remember that the California Partnerships for Safe Communities that conducted an audit of the Ceasefire Lifeline Strategy back in 2023 found that at any given time in Oakland, there are approximately 350 individuals who are at highest risk of drawing or driving gun violence. For our support services, we are looking to fund 16 full-time staff who will serve approximately 400 people at a cost of $3,075,000 per year. These 400 individuals are, some of them will be duplicate individuals, but we should still have capacity to serve the 350 who are being identified and served through the core strategies, as well as some additional individuals who can be referred through other pathways. So what we're doing is we're trying to create an ecosystem of support services for a cohort, a small group of individuals, again, approximately 350 who are at highest risk for drawing or driving gun violence in Oakland. I should also note that the emergency housing relocation services will be augmented by a $500,000 grant from a philanthropic partner that the mayor's office was able to secure through a partnership between the DVP and the city's Department of Housing and Community Development. So that work will be enhanced with the hiring of a full-time housing navigator and additional funds for relocation. One thing to note here is that there was a typo in the resolution for this item, which says that $275,000 is being awarded for housing services to Bay Area Community Resources. The overall funding amount in the resolution is correct, but it's just that one line item, there's a typo, and the city attorney's office has confirmed that we can amend that and submit an updated resolution to full council. Moving on to our gender-based violence services. Similarly, we conceptualize these services as being divided into core services that result in the initial identification and engagement of individuals at highest risk of gender-based violence, and then support services that are available primarily to those individuals based on need. We are very happy to be able to invest more in gender-based violence services during this upcoming grant cycle. We're increasing the investment by 1.66 million, going from a current 3.4 million to 5.1 million overall. So across our core services of crisis navigation, hotlines, and life coaching, we are looking to fund 15 full-time direct service staff members who will serve 371 individuals at $2,675,000 per year. This we are thinking of as really being closer to 275 to 300 unique individuals because the hope is that crisis navigators refer to life coaching. So again, the unique population is closer to 275 to 300. We are significantly increasing our investment in crisis navigation services. We're going from approximately 4.5 full-time crisis advocates to seven. This is in response to a few things. One, feedback from community organizations that it's incredibly hard to staff full-time crisis response services and additional resources are needed in order to adequately do that. Um, we also have heard that OPD is looking to increase their human trafficking operations. And so we want to ensure that we have enough capacity to respond to that while also maintaining capacity for domestic violence response. And then one last thing to notice that crisis navigation services will also include street outreach. And then for life coaching, we are significantly increasing our investment in life coaching. We currently fund two youth life coaches. We're going to a total of eight life coaches, four focused on youth and four focused on transitional aged youth. And this is resulting from the fact that the two current life coaches are always at capacity. There is just clear and abundant need for additional capacity in that service category, as well as findings from the Measure Z evaluation that was conducted by researchers from the Urban Institute. This was one of the number one findings as it relates to gender-based violence services, was that we need more capacity for life coaches and individuals who can serve as the individuals who are navigating people through services and who are holding them through the process to make sure that they don't slip through the cracks. And that, just one last point on the life coaching, that makes sense to us from a gun violence standpoint because that's what we use as well for gun violence services. Our life coaches serve that quarterback role and are very effective in helping people access different services and move through barriers and challenges they face. For our support services, healing, housing, and legal services, we are looking to fund seven and a half full-time direct service staff members who will serve approximately 420 people annually at 2.4 million per year. Again, if we're looking at serving 275 to 300 unique individuals through the core services, we should have capacity to serve those individuals through the support services plus additional individuals who are identified through other referral pathways. We are increasing our investment in housing services by $275,000 here. Housing seems to just be the number one support service need for this population, no surprise given that in the Bay Area, but also, again, unique to the population of survivors of sex trafficking and domestic violence. And so what we are looking to do is fund a variety of different housing options that can respond to the unique needs and preferences of any individual. So we have emergency hotel stays, we have relocation assistance if individuals are looking to get out of Oakland, we have rental assistance if individuals are looking to stay in their homes but simply need support paying rent. We have shelter for youth for transitional aged youth and for adults and we have transitional housing for youth and for adults and so we again we're really looking to meet people where they are in terms of what they need. And then lastly, partially in response to concerns that have been raised by this body previously, we are strongly prioritizing performance management in the upcoming grant cycle. So we will be establishing service deliverables and service benchmarks in partnership with the community-based organizations that we get into contract with. This has always happened since Oakland Unite, but what is newer is that we are aligning service deliverables and benchmarks with evidence-based models. So things like number of contacts per week, number of in-person contacts, those expectations are being raised and are being aligned with evidence-based models and with practices implemented by the DVP's own direct service team. The service deliverables are reviewed by the planners and program officers within the DVP who manage the grant awards on a monthly basis so that they can see how agencies are progressing in terms of meeting their deliverables before a quarter ends and it's time for invoicing. So in circumstances where they are seeing that agencies are falling behind, they can have conversations ahead of time proactively to understand what's happening and to work together to address any service concerns, to provide training, support, capacity building, whatever is needed. If that attempt at support and proactivity is not successful and we do continue to see deficits in deliverables over time, we can do payment withholdings of up to 20% based on not meeting the scope of work deliverables. And then ultimately, if we are seeing that services are not being delivered as expected over an extended period of time, we can terminate grants early and reallocate funds to a different agency. Secondly, we have participant surveys that are expected to be completed when individuals complete services. The surveys ask questions about the quality of the services delivered, the service experience, and then also the impact of services, so the changes in individuals' lives, behaviors, thought processes, support systems as a result of services so that we can really start getting at impact. And this is a way for us to continually be hearing from and learning from individuals who are directly impacted so that we can be adjusting services and service models based on that feedback. We also, this grant cycle, re-implemented program site visits where program officers and planners go out to agencies They observe programming, they meet with staff, they review documents to really get a better understanding of what services look like. We'll also be doing annual fiscal audits during the upcoming grant cycle to review backup documentation for invoices, This unfortunately is in response to prior experiences that we have had with agencies where we have discovered that funds were not being used appropriately. And in some cases we have had to terminate grant awards due to that. So we really want to make sure that we're being good stewards of public funding. And then lastly, of course, we will always support and participate in impact evaluations that are conducted by external evaluators. So we know that the Measure NN Commission is tasked with hiring an external evaluator to evaluate NN services, and we will obviously fully support those efforts, and it's written into the contracts with our community-based organizations that they will also need to support those efforts through focus groups, surveys, interviews, whatever is being asked. That concludes our presentation. We are happy to take questions.

okay um great i i also just before we go to colleagues and public comment i know this is um thank you so much for the thorough report and i know this is incredibly important work measure nn is something that is critical to to get right um and also as you know um especially the topic of human trafficking and domestic violence the gender-based violence services i care a great deal about just um So just thank you guys for the work on that. Council Member Brown, you have a comment or question?

Yes, I have many questions, but I'm interested in hearing from the public speakers first. But before that, I wanted to just get some clarity on the, I guess the amendment that was mentioned, because Bay Area Community Resources in the tables, they have two funding allocations. So can you just clarify what the error is again?

Yes, it's for the housing services for gun violence. In the resolution, it says 275,000 annually and 825,000 over the three-year period. That should be 300 and 900. Okay, excellent, thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Houston, go ahead.

Through the chair, I want her to come back up. I wanna be clear, and I'm gonna say this, we in East Oakland are the most at risk with this gun violence, period, point blank. And some of the individuals that I know have mentioned and said, how is East Oakland being represented? and I wanna know how is East Oakland being represented, but before I ask that, I got technical questions on the technology and the platform that we were using the first time, and I saw some percentages. I heard you say 9%, and then a 34%, so tell me on that, what was the old platform and what was the new platform, and the individuals that did qualify for the first time, Were they put in a placeholder to qualify for the second time or was it done over?

So again, the RFP process entails applications being submitted through a platform called iSupplier. Initially, when applications are submitted and received, they are reviewed by the citywide contracts team to ensure that they have all required application components. Then they are forwarded to departments for review and scoring. In the initial RFP process, 34% of the entities that attempted to submit applications did not meet the criteria, just the administrative criteria necessary to then be advanced to the department for review and scoring. And so our only options after consulting with the contracts team and with city administration were to entirely cancel that RFP and issue a new one. So to your question, no, the initial agencies that applied and that did meet the criteria were not held in abeyance and preserved for the second cycle, all agencies had to reapply to the second RFP process. And in that process, only four agencies, or 9%, were deemed ineligible for further review and scoring.

Okay, thank you. And through the chair, I wanna find out, and I'm hearing, East Oakland is not being represented. So through these nonprofits that were chosen and they were ranked by their application, how can we clarify, like I said, East Oakland, we, we in East Oakland are the highest at risk.

yes through the chair absolutely as you're aware the department of violence prevention is completely committed to east oakland i am personally connected to and committed to east oakland both deep east and all the flatland areas i think the statement or the assumption that east oakland is being left out of the service provision priority because there's not enough, in some folks' eyes, agencies that are located in Deep East Oakland on the list of recommendations is either a very strong talking point or it's a lack of understanding of how community violence intervention work is deployed in this city today. The way that community violence intervention work is deployed in this city is not based on the geography of the community-based organization. It is based on the reach of the staff that are from Oakland, that are credible messengers, and that have the ability, number one, to be safe across the city and to do their work anywhere in the city, but also for the agencies doing the work, hiring to staff that have specialization in specific areas of the city. As we all know, Fruitvale, including the track in the Blade area, San Antonio Park, West Oakland, and Deep East Oakland are the areas of most concern that have been historically impacted by gun violence that continue to be at the top of our list for priority areas for gun violence. As an example, a practical example of what I'm describing, the Department of Violence Prevention is based in downtown Oakland. I had my staff run a heat map, which I'm happy to share with everyone, to indicate where is the Department of Violence Prevention staff currently focusing our priorities, meaning from the highest risk clients that we serve in the Department of Violence Prevention, where are they most often coming from or where are they most often living? And to no surprise, the reddest areas are the hotspots, the places that have the most clients are deep East Oakland and West Oakland flatlands. So again, the location of the community based organization matters in many service categories. If you are providing a drop-in center for a particular population in your neighborhood, it's important that people can access the drop-in services in their neighborhood. If you are providing medical supports where people need to come into the physical building and they can freely move in and out of their neighborhood safely, those are important geographic considerations for where the physical building is located. But for the way that community violence intervention is deployed, including life coaches, hospital-based intervention, violence interruption, the expectation is that us as an ecosystem are hiring to staff that have expertise in particular areas of the city. And as a team, we can deploy to those areas. We, as CVI practitioners, have to go to where our clients and participants are. not the other way around. The expectation is not the clients and participants are coming into the physical location on a regular basis. In fact, if we're all working with the highest risk populations that are currently at the highest risk of either drawing or driving gun violence, then we understand that even our clients that are laying their head in deep East Oakland or West Oakland at night are not free to even oftentimes move three to five blocks outside of where their house is, let alone move completely freely all over East Oakland. That's not how the service population is moving in this city. And so I just want to stress that our investment in the entire city, but specifically where the need has historically been and continues to be, will remain intact.

Through the chair, thank you, doctor. I wanted just to make sure, and I saw numbers, 275 and 300 of the high risk tier ones. I wanna make sure that money is going to my brothers and sisters that are tier ones. Is that gonna be shown in the data?

Absolutely, so first and foremost, based on your concerns, based on other concerns raised by council, based on the evaluation done by California Partnerships back in 2023 that led us to this path where we are focused on the highest risk individuals, the entire RFP process was meant to rank and score agencies based on their application and capacity described to serve those specific individuals that you're asking about.

thank you you answered my my third question so i got a couple more but i'm gonna pass it on and let the audience speak because i want to hear the audience okay great um before we move it to the audience i just had a couple of quick uh clarifying questions um so there was a 1.6 million increase in the gbv services is that on an annual basis or overall okay yes annual And other question, this is directed at the procurement team, which I believe is online. So just, I would love to understand in terms of process, since there were two, there were two rounds, or not rounds exactly, there was the first RFP, 34% of people were failed out, as we understand, or not eligible, whatever the term is, and we did a second round. Can we get clarity as to why is it that the only option is to restart the whole process?

So I'm, for the record, Brad Johnson, Director of Finance, and we have our Contract and Purchasing Administrator, Laura Gonzalez-Woodward, on Zoom. Laura, please jump in if I, if I can provide any initial context. An RFP process is designed to be a level-setting, impartial process by which organizations, contractors, community-based organizations present their best pitches to the city as to how they will utilize scarce dollars to execute on a resource. When we go out and do a round, we are bound, if we are going to follow sort of ethical and procedural standards, to follow that process either through the end or terminate it midway. We cannot put our hands on the scale and allow favorable treatment to one group of applicants versus another. we have to allow it to move directly through the entire process from the beginning to end. When it was discovered at the application stage that we had a high level of failure of community-based organizations submitting applications to this program, and it was such a high rate, determination was made at that stage it was probably a flaw in communication or the process. And so the appropriate thing to do was to go back to the beginning and give everyone a fair shot from the beginning to apply to the additional round of noticing. And that is actually how we have to do procurement across the entire organization to not have favorite treatment to certain applicants versus others. We have to treat everyone in the same process. I would note this is analogous to hiring. When you all apply for an application, there's a deadline to where you can apply to for a job. And we can't open the application period later on because we'd like to get a couple more applicants. We have to have a fair, impartial process that is governed by rules. And the same thing aligns procurement to ensure we're aligning with our muni code and our standards.

And is that set by ordinance or just like, yeah?

It's a combination of your purchasing code and the professional practices that exist within public procurement. And again, most of these are anti-corruption and anti-favoritism procedures.

Understood, thank you. All right, let's move to public comment. Okay, all right, fine. Council Member Houston, go ahead.

All right, Brett, through the Chair Bradley, Mr. Bradley, can you come up? What was your decision to choose RFP over RFQ?

normally when you will have a pool of money out and you have a set pool and RFP is the particular instrument that's normally used for that as opposed to an RFQ which would normally be used in like a professional service context as opposed to a place where you're doing evaluations of like late stage criteria or providing direct services normally an RFP is that process again Laura if you're on can you speak to the difference between those two procedures most the time an RFP is the appropriate space for directly provided community services or like bidding a public infrastructure project contract. And RFQ would be used more on like professional services, information support, analysis, that sort of thing. Ms. Gonzalez-Woodward, if you wouldn't mind jumping in a little bit on the distinction.

Yes, you are accurate, Bradley. To further share, request for qualifications, that's the RFQ process. It typically would put folks in a pool and then there would be an additional round of review and evaluations to later enter into an agreement via award. Based on the scope of these grant agreements and the timeline, it was recommended to move forward with a request for proposal.

Okay, through the chair, because I thought that RFQ is for qualifications in it to have the individuals that were qualified for this RFP as proposal, because anybody can do a proposal out. I just wanted to know what was your reason?

It's a, the distinction between RFQ and RFP is more on the process by which you would do selection. In an RFP, everyone's noting their proposal on the front end, everyone has sort of the front end space where they provide the proposal, and RFQ has on the back end that process, but they both involve scoring the proposals that come in. In both an RFP and RFQ, you sit down, you score, and you evaluate the different options, and you evaluate the criteria against them. They're just slightly different procedures under the muni code, and you use them in slightly different circumstances. Most big community-based things are gonna be RFPs, and again, most, professional services, we need help with this analysis, are gonna be RFQs.

Brown. Excellent. Since we're on the subject of this, what specifically changed between the two RFPs, and did the RFP actually require proof of concept? Basically, does the agency that applied for said service, do they actually do the service?

Related to the actual scope of services, I'm gonna defer to DDP, as it relates to the change in the operation, what happened, some of the initial RFQs were coming dually in on a separate platform, and so some of the information was provided via mechanism that is not compliant with the city's community code, where we could see that people were attempting to get us the relevant documents, but were not doing it in the proper way. So we saw sort of a mechanism why we were getting non compliance at the same time and so the second time around we were being very clear that I supplier is the only mechanism by which you can submit and that was it was. I would say at the time there was some rationale why there might have been confusion at that space and so remedying it with a reapplication seemed particularly useful because it allowed us to eliminate that confusion and we did see a much higher uptake rate of the people who wanted to apply in that second round.

And through the chair, I can confirm that there was no substantive, there were no changes to the content of the RFP, only to the instructions around how to apply.

Okay, go ahead, Broome.

The second part of my question was did the RFP, outside of providing proof of concept, did the agency actually need to prove that they can do that service that they've applied for? What was that kind of factor in that determination?

Through the chair, we had a number of questions in the RFP that agencies had to answer to specifically related to their prior experience delivering services, the skill sets of their staff members, the cultural competency of their workers, their experience serving individuals at highest risk of violence with serious safety concerns, things of that nature. And so the narrative portion of the grant applications spoke to that. excellent so all of the awardees in our attachment currently perform the services that they are receiving like if if this is approved yeah i would say for the most part there are some examples of ones where maybe agencies are um have done similar work and we are asking them to um pivot slightly or

Through the Chair, I just want to add some nuance to your question. I think that you may be getting at a point, a question that we also had for the Contracts Unit, which was, are we able to include in the scoring rubrics a section for past performance? for the agencies that we have contracted with in the past. So we had that specific question. Are we able to include a section or a metric for past performance? And the answer was no. So we were directed by the contracts unit to score the applications based on the articulation of the agency's capacity in the application. We were not able to score on past performance.

That wasn't quite my question, but it was genuinely just looking at some of the allocations and this question of, hey, does this organization do, and I'm just throwing this out there as an example, it's at random, do they provide housing resources? Is that something that they currently do in their portfolio? Or was the application that they provided more of, hey, here's this lane that we wanna get into?

I did not review the application specifically. Jenny and her team may be able to speak more detailed to it, but from my understanding and the briefing that I received from staff, there wasn't an organization that was far outside the box of what they work on. People were applying to their subject matter expertise.

I see, okay, thank you, thank you.

Okay, Council Member Fife.

I just wanna hear from the public. It's been about 84 years since we said we're gonna hear from the public speakers. I wanna kinda get to that.

Okay, I was about to get there. Sounds good. Let's go to the public comment.

Calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number three. In no particular order, you can come up to the podium. State your name for the record before making your comments. Also, if anyone is ceding time to you, please state that before beginning. If you are ceding time or have time ceded to you, the person ceding their time must be present to acknowledge that they are giving you their time. As standard practice, we are going to take in-person speakers first. If you're on Zoom, please raise your hand to be easily identified. Again, in no particular order, you can line up. Amba Johnson, Dr. Aisha Mays, Madison Barton, Asada Olavalla, Blair Beekman, Donald Frazier, and I do apologize if I mispronounce any names, Jamie Gomez, Uceguera, Demaria Truck-Evans, Dwight Hasklins, Darrell Allums, Harry L. Williams, Setia Frazier-North, Terrence Washington, caesar johnson uh achilles martin carlton crossley john jones iii quiche myisha johnson jonte gamble esmeralda manzo calvin colding iii anthony martin andre park Stephon Brooks, Ap Jones, Rashad Nortu, David Boatwright, Darius Almas Desmond and other, Dr. Nicole Petway, Jerry Law, Marissa Seco, Andrea Barnes, Aaron Scott, Millie Cleveland, Tunisia Owens, Lisa Williams, Brenda Grisham, Almaz Yedego, Joan Hoffman, Desmond Iman, Michael Uvell, Paula Hawthorne, Darrell Miles, Anthony McNeil, Dendon Thiem, Jonathan Brumfield, Martin Hurtado, Harris Khan, Gary Miller, Nimrod Cain, James Delgado, Alfonso Rodriguez, Linnea Forsyth, Hislu, Frewary G, Lajon Loggins, Madeline Stacey, Ann Jank, Demarie Evans, Jeffrey, Michelle Clark. Nilda Aldridge, Jennifer Lyle, and Dwayne Jones. Again, please state your name before beginning. If anyone is seating time, please state their name and they must be present in chamber or on Zoom to acknowledge that they are seating their time. You can come up to the podium. Well done, Madam Clerk. Go ahead.

Good evening. Esteemed council members of the public safety committee. My name is Dr. Aisha Mays and I'm the founder and CEO of the dream youth clinic here in Oakland dream provides 100% free services for the most vulnerable youth of Oakland ages 13 to 25 medical care, mental health care and crisis intervention services. 80% of our young people are impacted by gender based violence in over 50% of our young people experience sexual exploitation. This January we started the first ever in Oakland and nationally, mobile clinic for sex trafficked youth on International Boulevard, directly serving young people impacted by street-level sex trafficking. From across the city, Deep East Oakland, Fruitvale International Boulevard, the bottoms of Oakland, downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt. We are grateful for the Department of Violence Prevention that they recognize the importance of resources for youth-based, youth-serving organizations to lead CSEC and gender-based violence efforts in Oakland. Thank you for your comments.

Hi, my name is Amba Johnson. I'm the grant manager for human trafficking prevention for OUSD. I have been working in human trafficking services in Oakland in every aspect of it for over 25 years. The agencies that are being funded in this grant are the agencies that have worked most closely with us in the last years so that OUSD had the partners they needed for the interventions when youth were identified. It has been painful that their services were limited by their funding, and we are really, really urging you to move this forward so that we can expand the amount of response we have. There's not a school in OUSD that I have been to that does not have youth that are impacted. Every single school in OUSD system, secondary school that I have been to have youth that are at risk, being currently impacted, and we are struggling to surround them with all.

Thank you for your comments.

Hi, I'm Satia Frazier-North. I'm ceding my time to Donald Frazier.

Dr. Nicole Pitway, giving my time to Donald Frazier.

Good evening, council members. Lisa Williams, ceding my time to Donald Frazier.

Miguel Garibay, ceding my time to Donald Frazier.

Give me one moment to adjust your time. You'll have a total of five minutes.

Thank you, I appreciate that. And good afternoon or good evening. My name is Donald Frazier. I'm a CEO with Boss. Chair, vice chair, committee members. I've been doing this work for 35 years, working in esteemed organizations in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and now Oakland. I've never heard of a process like this in terms of reissuing an RFP because of a failure rate or percentage. I've never heard of that. And if it was part of the procurement process the way they did it, why would they have to go to the city attorney to get a legal opinion on it, right? It's ridiculous. I want to just move to my comments. And by the way, with the community-based organization in East and Deep East Oakland, it was more about relationships. It's not about place-based issues. It's about relationships, deep relationships that those organizations have with the people. Their families come to those organizations. Excuse me. I'll get to my comments. So across all media outlets, Oakland city leaders gave credit to an all hands on deck approach to fighting crime. And crime prevention is one of the reasons for the huge drop in crime statistics. In 2025, the city recorded its lowest number of homicides since 1967, when Oakland's population was significantly smaller. That momentum has continued into 2026, with year-to-date figures showing that total homicides down 38% and assaults with a firearm down 9%, building on double-digit reductions in both 2024 and 2025. Additionally, more than 54% of violent crime goes unreported, because many people are distrust the legal system and community-based organizations have filled the critical gap that traditional criminal justice system often fails to support. By these facts alone, you must recognize the current CBI ecosystem was working just based on the facts, on the numbers. And so why would you want to change it? And where's the logic with the DVP funding recommendations? So they say if it's not broke, why do you want to fix it? I want to go to four final points. Hopefully I'll get through it with the time. And it's aligned with the Violence Prevention Coalition request that we're asking for full scoring and audit record for the 2026-2029 CVI RFP, including applicant scores, scoring sheets, ranking, service categories, scoring rubric, reviewer composition, reviewer conflict disclosures, and any written rationale used to determine the final award recommendations. We're asking that bridge contracts be bridged with funding before October 1st, 2026 for CVI providers needed to prevent dangerous gaps in citywide services, especially with attention to east and deep east Oakland. Then we're asking for full violence prevention funding map showing measure NN, general fund purpose dollars, carry forward balances, federal grants, state grants, county funds, philanthropic funds, and whatever other sources that are not restricted and flexible. And the map should also show how much funding support directs DVP operations, CBO contracts, intermediaries, technical assistance, policy organizations, and frontline neighborhood-based providers. With the remaining of my time, I just want to go back to this whole contracting process. And it may have been legal, but is it fair? uh... the person from the finance department said it was ethical far from it far from it so if you are going to give the folks who didn't do the process right the first time so you're going to say okay we're going to give you a second chance to do it again so we're going to throw out all of the folks who did it the first right the first time didn't matter then we're going to give everybody else another chance kind of leads to a situation of not just fairness, but maybe even potential favoritism that's cloaked in a process of decisions that we're just going to have everybody do it again. I'll just, if I could give my 20 seconds to somebody else. Thank you.

David Boatwright. In this item, CBOs are to receive $12.7 million per year based on the continued work of the Oversight Commission and using a structured review process whose ranking point system has not been described in the report. This is a tremendous amount of money spread over 21 different entities, some of whom may never have been used by the DVP before. Using the in progress commission report and undetailed CBO ranking process, i.e., were the questions objective or subjective? These qualifications decide the CBO's performance review parameters include surveys, of the CBOs and individuals, but no well-supported actual violence reduction results. The order to justify the grant funding, I recommend more concrete support.

Thank you for your comments, Mr. Boatwright.

My name is Carlton Crosley. I seize my time.

How you doing, I'm Terrance Washington. I'd like to wave my time for Darrell Ellams.

Hey, my name is Quashay Johnson. I'm waving my time to Darrell Ellams.

My name is Achilles Martin, and I'm waving my time to Darrell Ellams.

I am Darrell Ellams. So first and foremost, we gonna take some time and have a moment of silence for our sister, Bridget Cook. Amen. In honor of Bridget Cook and the last former VPC chair, I now sit in that seat as a violent prevention coalition chair. Behind me, I have credible messengers from Haven for Black Healing in East Oakland and Deep East Oakland, where we serve on a daily to our community. Not first team responders like our CVIs, right? We ain't that, but we come behind them as brethren supporting our other fellows, right? This math, right? I'm from a foreign country called D.B. Oakland, okay? Let's get that on the table first. But the math, right? When you cut out, I seen the recommendation, not taking nothing away from those powerful organizations that got recommended to receive the Measure NN money, not taking nothing away from them. They go crazy. We need them all. But you're missing some pieces. The CVIs all through the city of Oakland. if you got 30 right now not including the school base not including the hospital base but if you got 30 right now and then you only go down to eight that's missing 22. so i'ma say this here with those individuals those violent interrupters out there just one individual have at least 50 relationships in our community that's not they're not just losing their job we're killing relationships and then East Oakland, my foreign country, where we have the highest violence in our community, shootings, other violence, gender-based, in deep East Oakland, in East Oakland. We don't have a haven. Where is the doors open? Where is the funding going to our East Oakland CBOs to keep those doors open? Because sometimes little Jewel Bug and Nene, they need to run a business somewhere because they need some help, more than just resources, right? These CVIs, I know this for a fact. I didn't see them talk people off the Golden Gate Bridge. I didn't see them stop people from jumping in the lake, marrying and killing themselves and drowning. They are here on a daily fighting for our people lives on the front line, being first team responded to the shootings and homicides at the bedside, at the hospitals, but also in the schools. The concerns is right now is these relationships you got all these relationships about to get killed and demolished and it takes time to build relationships and oh by the way we do have a search and rescue team where we have brought back since 2018 over 400 missing black girls in oakland california yes we have did that front line right but we have to remember about East Oakland. We gotta remember East Oakland. We gotta remember deep East Oakland. We got to remember this here because there's CBOs out here that do that work and their doors are not being able to be open because the funding not there. I seen the recommendations and I say this again, man, there's some powerful people that got awarded, but there's some other ones too that was left behind. So I'm asking y'all not to take nothing away, but go find some more money. I know y'all can do it. I know right now if y'all say recess and y'all go back there in those chambers, y'all can find some money for these other CBOs. It's lives on the line right now. Bridget Cook, SAVE, Soldiers Against Violence Everywhere. They stand on the corner and this is what they say.

Somebody died here. We need to kill it.

That's what we do in these streets, supporting our families. So I didn't come here to beg. I came here to speak peace, but also know there's powerful minds that sit behind these seats. And I know if y'all all come together, y'all can help this problem that we have, this funding. We like gangbangers right now in this room, all these organizations. We might as well have guns and everything about to shoot each other because we fighting for crumbs. Tired of fighting for crumbs. We voted y'all in these seats to support our community. Y'all put us out here in these streets to support our community. It's a team effort. So let's work together as a team. So make sure that East Oakland be able to get funding and these CVIs, these credible messages don't get cut. Thank you for your time.

My name is Reverend Harry Williams and my whole life changed one day when I walked outside of Allen Temple Baptist Church at 85th and International Boulevard and I walked by the parking lot and somebody had been shot to death during the church service. That told me that religion had to come from behind the walls of the church and into the streets And during my journey as a violence interrupter and a community, someone who loves this community, I've learned that these people that are here fighting for their jobs, fighting for resources, do the work. Because I know what it is to pick up the phone and call Darrell Adams and say, there's a problem here and I need you to show up. And I know what it is for him to call me. And also Tribe in Fonktown, who are doing amazing work with people. There's so many people of goodwill here. Ms. Holly Joshi and so many of our staff do amazing work, but I think we could stretch this a little bit more to keep the numbers going down in the homicide department. Thank you very much.

My name is DeMaurier Truck Evans, and these brothers is going to exceed their time. How you doing?

My name is Dwight Haskelyn, CVI for Boston. I'm giving my time to Mr. DeMaurier Evans.

Hey, hey, my name's Jonte Gamble, I'm from Balls, I'm a VI, and I'm giving my time to Truck Avenue.

Yeah, how you doing? My name's Jaime Osageta, I'm giving my time to Truck.

Please give me one moment to adjust your time. You'll have a total of four minutes. You can go ahead and begin.

Okay, I am a bereavement pastor in the city for 18 years. I have participated and served in some capacity in over 1,200 funerals. 600 plus was due to homicide. Somehow, someway I ended up in this CVI work, is where I need to be. I'm not here to say who shouldn't be. but I'm just here to ask, why not us? The time I've been here, I've been able to develop relationships with a bunch of different people who look just like me, come from a lifestyle like me. I come from amongst the crowd. I'm someone who was cleaned up, trained up to be able to go out and serve this city in the capacity in which it needed. I have the license to operate just like all of the other organizations and the people that I work with and the relationships I built because I lean on them from tribe to youth alive to and even DVP, right? We all work together. But to be in this work field and on the street and working amongst the community and seeing that District 6 and 7 is not covered, the people is not covered. I'm saying that because when we look at the time in which we have to respond, East Oakland, deep East Oakland gets a lot of our time. The relationships that is developed doing this work is going to be so key going forward to continue to see the numbers that we seeing. Am I saying we don't need life coaches? No, because they've been both working together. But to see the reduction of who's going to be on the street, the fight was fought with the Joshua's of the world. And we have to be able to be able to connect with the people. We have built relationships in communities. I know people in East Oakland I never knew. Because of this work that we've been doing, still in contact with families that we didn't serve, making sure folk are safe. So again, I'm not saying who shouldn't be, but I'm just asking based on the numbers that we're seeing. No, they're not all ours, but we've been a part of it. We didn't help in every kind of capacity you can think of. So all I'm asking is not why them, but why not us?

Council members, how y'all doing? My name is Cesar Johnson. I'm a life coach, violence interrupter, and a senior case manager through a couple different programs, through San Francisco with BACR, through Success Center II. Run my own organizations. I lost my brother. to gun violence. My nephew is three generations. When we was politicking, I had this violence prevention coalition and all that, right? I never seen you in East Oakland a day in my life. And you say you was there. That's not cool. But we here right now, right? And there's been people doing this work. And we do this work at a real large capacity. And for us not to get funded like that and continue to do this work is fine. It's real fine. It'd be a lot of games and tricks and be playing. But here, I watched this for years. And I'm going to just say this. We here right now, we can make some choices, and y'all can talk about, you know, put some, find some money about that 800 million that's back there, or we can continue to be in places from somebody did what they were supposed to do, somebody didn't do what they were supposed to do, or somebody did some shit they didn't have no business doing. Choose wisely.

Good evening, for the record, John Jones III. Through the chair, I wanna begin by first thanking the chief and the amazing staff over here and the team at DVP. Through you all, I know you all care about public safety in Oakland, and I think it's important to understand a few things. NN was meant to supplement our existing funding sources, so it would be egregious to overlook what was once the elephant in the room has now become a woolly mammoth, and that's OPD's budget. We gotta come to terms with the fact that we have a department that routinely accedes the overtime budget allotment that you all as our legislative body puts into place. It's unconscionable to allow that to continue. And it's a disservice to DVP, it's a disservice to these community-based organizations to be reduced to scrambling for crumbs when we do have money, but it's being mismanaged by a department that chooses to recede and operate with wanton impunity. You have an opportunity to address that on Friday. So thank you very much for your service.

Good afternoon. My name is Anthony McNeil and I'm here today as a community member who cares deeply about public safety, youth and families, and the future of our neighborhoods. I want to speak about the decision to take money away from an amazing organization called BOSS that is doing good, meaningful work in the community. When we talk about public safety, we cannot only talk about what happens after the violence. Real public safety starts before the crisis. It starts with prevention, intervention, relationships, mentoring, outreach, youth engagement, healing, and supporting the families. Organizations like BOSS are the ones who are closest to the people. They need help the most. They know the youth by name. They know the families by name. They know the neighborhoods. They're able to step in before things get worse. That's the kind of work that cannot be measured by numbers or statistics. Sometimes the success is the fight that did not happen, the young person who did not get arrested, the families that did not fall apart, or the life that did not get redirected. Taking money away from organizations.

Thank you for your comments. Your time is up.

Hold the claps. I got one minute. All right, my name's Jerry Law. I'm from East Oakland. I'm a product of Boss. Spent 15 years in prison, and I didn't have nowhere to live. I didn't have a job. Boss supplied that for me. Supplied that for a lot of my brothers and sisters that's coming out of prisons, and I'd like to thank them brothers. Now, if you take the money away from them, what do you say about these people here? This is real life. I just got one question. If we all know that East Oakland is the proverbial house on fire, why would you send the fire trucks that way? That's all I got to say.

hey how you guys doing i'm uh nimrod kane life coach for safe passages uh fifth generation oakland resident uh victim of violent crime in 1997 i lost a kidney right um 71st and international i just wanted to come up here speak in honor of the rfp um you know working with dvp uh dvp in general i'll just have support because we know firsthand we can see like what happens with these services and i feel like any delay any disturbances will obviously have you know the results the consequences and that's all i wanted to say good evening my name is aaron scott i'd like to cede my time to l autumn king

Good afternoon, Council. I am L. Autumn King. I am representing Family Violence Law Center as a board member and a proud East Oakland resident. DVP legislation states that the purpose of DVP is to reduce both domestic violence and commercial sexual exploitation. But as proposed, the DVP's investment in legal services for domestic violence was cut by more than half. Also, domestic violence restraining orders do not just prevent future violence. They have the ability to settle custody, visitation, child support, property and insurance issues, and the ability to determine whether the survivor and their children can stay in their family homes. DVP is not recommending any funding for culturally responsive services for Latinx and Mayan immigrants, survivors of violence. These cuts jeopardize the jobs of Spanish-speaking attorneys who provide culturally responsive services to Latinx and Mayan immigrant communities, and these cuts eliminate the therapeutic and supportive services provided by Mujeres Unidas y Activadas. we ask the city council to request that dvp to restore funding for legal services for domestic violence and trafficking survivors and restore funding for culturally responsive services for one of east oakland's for one of oakland's excuse me largest population of survivors i will say i am on the board because i intimately understand the work that these people do I am intimately involved and have been serviced by this organization. I beg of you, I ask of you to prioritize our families. Domestic violence is on the rise right now, whereas other crimes are decreasing nationwide. We have just now had three major cases here in the nation where husbands killed their wives. We also see it in reverse. We are asking that funding be restored so that we can protect families, save families, and prevent future violence, thank you.

Good evening. My name is Andrea Barnes. I'm the crisis services manager with Family Violence Law Center. I live in Oakland and I am a voter here in Oakland. And I just come to talk a little bit about restraining orders. So oftentimes restraining orders is what some of our survivors need in order to free themselves from the abuse. And sometimes that helps them to also to stay in a house where an abuser can get moved out even though they are on the It helps our clients to stay in the place. It's a way to also get child support and custody, which is often a thing because children are also abused in these relationships. Just as trying to escape the abuse, again, it's always not, because a lot of our clients don't want to leave. A lot of clients aren't looking for emergency shelter relocation or housing relocation because they feel comfortable. People don't want to leave outside of Oakland. As an Oaklander, I feel the same way. I don't always want to have to leave my home to go somewhere else in order to protect the person that's harming me. Thank you.

Good evening, my name is Tunisia Owens. I am the policy and advocacy manager at Family Violence Law Center. I am a homeowner and a voter in Deep East Oakland. The city's proposed massive cuts to legal services for domestic violence survivors will eliminate services to Oakland survivors like Alicia, who sent this message to FVLC. Thank you so much for helping me prepare my domestic violence restraining order for that hearing. It was the lowest point in my life. I had to take a medical leave from work because of the stress of dealing with the abuse. This survivor was able to engage with an attorney and was able to get a restraining order and to get sole physical and legal custody and be able to work on disentangling herself from her ex. She said that it is so hard to describe how much better my life is since I received this restraining order.

Thank you for your comments, your time is up. Thank you for your comments.

I'm Marisa Seco and I'm ceding my time to Alicia Jimenez and she'll need extra time for Spanish interpretation.

Please give me one moment. You said Marisa Seco and then it's Alicia Jimenez. Okay, we'll have two minutes for Alicia and then two minutes for translation. Just give me one moment to adjust your time.

You can go ahead and begin.

Buenas tardes. Mi nombre es Alicia. Soy sobreviviente de violencia doméstica y actualmente soy miembro líder de Mujeres Unidas y Activas MUA.

Good afternoon. My name is Alicia. I'm a survivor of domestic violence and currently a member leader of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, or MUA.

Hoy estoy aquí para compartir mi historia y pedirles que consideren el impacto real que estos fondos tienen la vida de muchas personas como yo. En el año 2019 llegué a Mujeres Unidas y Activas en busca de ayuda. En este momento estaba viviendo una situación de violencia doméstica. Me sentía sola, con miedo y sin saber a dónde acudir. necesitaba apoyo, orientación y esperanza para poder salir adelante.

I'm here today to share my story and ask you to consider the real impact that these funds have on the lives of many people like me. In 2019, I arrived at Mujeres Unidas y Activas seeking support. I was in that time in a situation of domestic violence. I felt sad, alone, and didn't know where to go. I needed support, orientation, and hope to be able to overcome this.

Al llegar a esta organización, encontré mucho más que recursos. Encontré una comunidad de personas que me escucharon, creyeron en mí, me acompañaron en uno de los momentos más difícil de mi vida. Recibí apoyo emocional, orientación legal y acceso a recursos que me ayudaron a recuperar mi seguridad, mi confianza y mi independencia.

Upon arriving at the organization, I found much more than just resources. I found an entire community of people who listened to me, believed in me, and accompanied me during one of the most difficult times in my life. I received emotional support, orientation to legal services, and access to resources that helped me recuperate my safety, my confidence, and my independence.

Gracias a este apoyo, puedo comenzar un nuevo capítulo en mi vida. Hoy no solo soy una sobreviviente, sino también una líder que acompaña a otras mujeres que atraviesan Situaciones similares he visto con mis propios ojos como esta organización transforma vidas, brinda esperanza y ayuda a mujeres y a familias a encontrar un camino hacia la seguridad y la estabilidad.

Thanks to the support, I was able to start a new chapter in my life. I'm now not only a survivor, I'm a leader who accompanies other women going through similar situations. I've learned with my own eyes how an organization can transform lives, bring hope, and help women and families find a path to security and stability.

Por eso les pido de corazón que no elimine estos fondos. Detrás de cada programa y cada servicio hay personas reales que dependen de esta ayuda para escapar la... For this reason, I ask with all my heart that you do not eliminate this funding. Behind every program and service, there are real people who depend on this support to escape violence, protect their children, and reconstruct.

Thank you for your comments. Through the chair to the member of the public, the lady that spoke had time seated to her, so she had two minutes to speak and two minutes for translation.

Good evening, my name is Dr. Gary Malari. I'm a psychologist, program evaluator, and program manager with Safe Passages. I'm here to support the continued uninterrupted funding for violence prevention services. As an evaluator, I care about data and accountability, but as a psychologist, I know that some of the most important outcomes can't be fully captured in a contract. The question I ask is, are young people better off because of our involvement? Do they have trusted adults that they can turn to, that they feel connected with schools and the community? Do they have a future worth investing in? Even more fundamentally, am I safe? Do I belong? Does anyone believe in me? Violence prevention works because trusted adults consistently show up and build a relationship over time. Those relationships cannot be paused or restarted without consequences. This is why funding stability matters. I urge you to protect funding programs that are demonstrating results and actively serving Oakland youth. The young people we serve deserve consistency, stability, and continued support. Thank you.

my name is john de brumfield from safe passages um first i want to say we honor the rfp process because we do know the impact that dvp services have we reduce violence throughout east oakland from sabrani park all the way to harvard's court and from harvard's court all the way to west oakland through this process what we don't want is for any interruption of services based on anything that's going on with funding so with that being said we would just like for whatever choice is being made that you do not interrupt or disrupt what's been going on with the services that all of us are providing thank you

My name is Haris Khan. I am the program assistant for Get Active and Youth and Workforce Development at Safe Passages. I just want to say that we want to honor the RFP process because this programming has had a significant impact in reducing violence in Oakland and any disruption to that process would cause violence to go up. Thank you.

My name is Mariner Taro. I'm a life coach for Safe Passages, and I just wanted to talk about the importance about the DVP grant. I think if it was to get cut off, you know, start violence, because like an example, like I'm able to give them a stipend if they complete one of their goals. It might be like get off probation, complete GPS monitor. So like that kind of motivates the youth, you know, to want to do better. Or like if they need like emergency funds, like they might have a they might need their electric bill, it might be due, we're able to pay them with those funds. And I think that helps the youth from thinking about doing something negative to go get some money illegally. That's all.

Hi, my name is Alfonso Rodriguez. I work for Safe Passages. I work at the local middle school and high school in East Oakland. So what I see through my time working with the youth, it comes to a point where the youth glorifies gun violence and crime and being in the streets. You know, I know that because I used to be in their shoes. I used to be a young man myself not that long ago. This program, the DVP grant through Safe Passages, helped me get out the street. It helped me have a new vision in life. can be good at multiple. It made me think I could be good at multiple things. So I think these kind of little programs and, you know, you know, stuff like that, you know, it's good for the youth and it's good for our community. So, you know, to get these young guys or whatever, you know, out the street, you know, working. That's all I got to say.

Good evening. My name is James Delgado. I'm with Safe Passages. I'm just here to say that we honor the RFP process, knowing that DVP is a pillar in reducing violence. Any interruption within that process could increase violence in Oakland. Thank you.

I'm Michael Ubell. I'm ceding my time to Paula Hawthorne.

Anne Jenks. I'm ceding my time to Paula Hawthorne.

Paula Hawthorne, so first of all, I'm asking you to reject this resolution. Please reject it and send it back to the DVP. It is for three-year grants. We have not done three-year grants in my memory. Three-year grants are too long. We usually do two-year grants, sometimes even one-year grants with the option to renew. This means for three years, the grants are locked in. People that didn't get it won't be able to get it for three years, means for three years you will not see it back at City Council. Do you really want three years with no oversight from the Measure In and Commission or from you? I am asking you, please reject this and send it back and have them come back with two-year grants. That's the first thing I'm asking. The second thing is we need more money. We all see we need more money. Measure NN should not be the only thing funding community violence prevention. Let's be clear here. Measure NN provides all of the funding that you see in this. It provides 7% of the funding for the police department. What if we said the police department was only funded from NN? That'd be interesting, wouldn't it? But I'm not gonna ask for money from the police department. Look at the budget that you have before you from the city. you will see that Public Works gets $14 million more in this budget than they did a year ago. $14 million for Public Works more. Transportation gets $9.6 million more than they did last year, just last year. What has changed there? You'll see the city administrator gets $4.9 million more than they did last year, just last year. That's not just cost of living, folks. That is an incredible increase. You look down, and I have brought the numbers, which you can get yourself. It's on the city website. Not the way that I did it, by the way, because I went through and found how much money people were getting. If you had this amount of money, and you took it, and even half of it, you could double the amount of money going to the DVP to fund these people and people like them. We need more money for community violence intervention. Either you believe in community violence intervention or you don't, I assume that you do. If you do, then you know we need more money to do this work you have before you. Please, look at this budget that you've been given, pull the money out of it that we need. A budget is a moral statement. Our morals, many of us have a shared faith that our neighbors is the second commandment given to us, is to care for our neighbors.

Good afternoon. My name is Brenda Grisham and I work in the community. I'm here to say just a couple of things. The work that I do is the work that I do. I don't get funding, because I don't have time for this stuff that's going on right now. But I tell you, when I need some help, I can get it from the people that are not being funded right now. And that's very unfair. I don't like to get into these entanglements about crumbs and all of that, but I feel that there's a way that everybody can benefit from keeping the people in Oakland safe. I'm in District 2. Now, I ain't heard nobody talk about District 2. Because I tell you, I get calls three times a week, like I'm the police, with the people holding the phones up, with the pimps shooting back and forth. On Instagram, there's a video of two young men running down international with guns shooting at each other. Who got them? I mean, are they a part of that percentage? Are they a part of the DVP? Or are they just on their own? We got to be concerned about everybody. And if you got people that have boots on the ground, that's who you need to fund.

Hi, my name is Almas. I am here to represent Global Communication, Education and Art, the African Resource Center. I want to begin by saying, City of Oakland, the Department of Violence Prevention, thank you, and an organization recommended to the measure and end funds. We are not here to oppose funding for the other organizations. We are here because important community appears to be left out. GCEA, which is the African Resource Center, was on the community organizing, involving in the outreach, mobilizing, listening efforts, and helping shaping the original violence prevention department. We are participating.

We have a lot of minutes.

Through the chair to the members of the public, if people are ceding their time to you, please state their names. They must be here to acknowledge that they are ceding their time and they must have an individual card filled out for them.

I'm Jefferies.

I'm Dennis. And then... Jeffery.

Dr. Jeffery.

Dr. Joy.

Dr. Joy Aralo.

I'm sending my time to her.

Kawane.

My name is Denda.

Okay, and then do the chair to the members of the public with seating time. And Kawane. There's a maximum of five minutes as you've already had one minute, you'll have four minutes remaining.

Okay, then continue. So we are also. Continue, he's gonna continue.

Good evening, everybody. We're not here to complain. We're here to see what the solution really is. This funding opportunity was released March 13th and closed April 1st. That was just approximately 19 days. The recommendation covers approximately 38.1 million over three years for communities that are already connected to the city system. So what happened to those communities that are not connected to the city system? That is why we're here today. How do we gain access to this funding? Now, my record shows that only 1% of African American firms have received this funding, only 1% of African Americans. We Africans, you know, the African community is the fastest growing community in the Oakland area. We have businesses everywhere. We get robbed all the time. We get beaten all the time. We just recently lost one of our very good sons last week to gun violence. And yet, we feel left out from these kind of opportunities. So the question is, we're not coming here. I didn't come all the way from Africa to come and beg for money. We're not coming here to beg. We just want to have access. And the requirement that they put forward does not guarantee access for everybody. Because if we look into their program right now and their record, you will see that the access is within, you know, the people that have the access are the people that, you know, you know somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody. So there are a lot of opportunities, there are a lot of communities like ours that don't have access to it. All we're asking for is seeking for access. And how do we get those access? So the way they have it set up right now does not benefit everybody. It just benefits the few, the people who already have access to the city system.

African immigrant families are navigating violence, trauma, housing instability, language barriers, immigration challenges, and growing uncertainty around access to healthcare, food assistance, and employment authorization. These pressures affect community safety and family stability. gca responds to these needs every day through legal navigation medical medical enrollment cal fresh assistance workforce support civic engagement and housing stabilization services last year alone gca served more than 1 700 individuals reached over 25 000 community members housed 84 individuals and helped more than 700 people access medical enrollment and re-enrollment The Department of Violence Prevention was built on the principle that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution. GCA helped inform that original vision, and today we are asking for our opportunity to help fulfill it. Tonight, we are asking the city to work with GCA to establish a three-year African immigrant community stabilization and healing initiative that includes, one, culturally responsive licensed therapists, One, immigration legal representative or legal navigator. And two, community case managers dedicated to housing benefits access, family stabilization, and violence prevention. This investment would help ensure that African immigrant families have access to culturally responsive support systems rooted in trust, language access, and community relationships. We are not asking the city to take resources away from the community. We are asking the city to recognize the growing community, acknowledge existing service gap, and invest in.

Thank you for your comments. Thank you for your comments all the time that was seated.

Let's go on it.

Through the chair to the members of the public, we will honor two more minutes as you guys have seven total. Through the chair to the member of the public, if there are seven cards, there will be a total of seven minutes. You guys have already used five. There are two minutes remaining for your time. Please give me a second to adjust the clock so you guys can use your two minutes. Just give a second. Please give me a moment to adjust the clock so I can give you your time. Hold on a second, okay?

have African people throughout the community from north, east, west. Our people are literally they have violence against them within the community and the largest community. So I can volunteer, I only can give an hour here, an hour there for seven years, but I could not see funding that permit to support the African American at large. We as an African, we commit We work, but when things go wrong in our community, individual, excuse me, individual like myself, I have surgery within. In my household, I have violence for mental illness within. Yeah, the African comes out and they look good. But I have to couch serve. When I go to the largest community, it needed just a place to stay. And I have three surgeries. What cannot find when but I have to couch serve for six homelessness affect our community our children in Mental health I can bring them for you the violence that is affecting us, I can help you, one household, two household, in one community, I won't be saying Pacific, I can just go to the north and teach you 200 people who are affected by violence, by . Yes, yes, it looks good.

Thank you for your comments. Thank you for sharing.

Okay.

Thank you for your comments. Ma'am, your time is up. We still have a number of speakers. Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Linnea Forsyth. I'm a managing attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid. And I am here to express deep gratitude for the recommended funding for legal services in Bay Area Legal Aid. We know that there is a justice gap. There needs to be 9,000 more attorneys to meet the civil legal aid here in California. 40% of the survivors that we serve have at least five or more civil legal needs, and FVLC spoke very powerfully about the need for more legal services in Oakland. We need help with restraining orders, family law to keep families safe, housing, immigration, reentry services, public benefits, all of those services which we are committed to providing with this funding, wraparound legal services for survivors in Oakland. And we are excited that Oakland is investing in that and encourage you to grow that investment.

Good evening, council members. My name is Dwayne Jones. I'm a director of Youth Employment Partnership. I want to first thank you all for asking many of the questions that I had so I don't have to ask those questions about track record and process and things of that nature. I got some of those answers tonight, but not many of the ones that we've been writing letters and trying to figure out some of the double of the details to. I think one of the things that should be clear is that this is not an us versus them. We see the advisors, the life coaches every single week. The credible messengers are in our office constantly trying to connect our kids or their kids or our collective kids to the opportunity in a real context. YEP has been part of the violence prevention strategy from day one. It is insane. for us to be on the outside of that loop. And I hear kind of, I wouldn't say wrong, I would say strange things in the process that says we're gonna restart and somehow.

Thank you for your comments. Your time is up.

Hi, my name is Michelle Clark. I'm the director of YEP. I've been out on leave, but I am here tonight because it's important. This is extremely important. I wanna talk, I mean, it is insane that YEP is no longer part of this. But more insane was this process. So this process was adopted in between the two oversight committees, and there were dramatic changes to the strategy without the community involved. And we see what happens when the community is not involved in what is the most important way to have a strategy. I've never been, in 37 years of being at YEP, I've never been in a process that was so untransparent. We weren't even notified that we weren't funded. Not only were we not notified, I bet you weren't notified about who isn't funded, which is amazing programs who are doing amazing work. I have never seen an RFP process that behaved that way. Please push this back and let's get a fair process. Thank you.

My name is Millie Cleveland. I'm with Coalition for Police Accountability. I want to talk about why the community has been forced to fight over crumbs when this council constantly is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is OPD's overtime. We had a lieutenant that made $450,000 in overtime in a year. The council is just now discussing how to convert sworn officers doing civilianized work to give that to civilian employees so to pay out less money. And we also have a budget that was presented by the mayor that allocated $450,000 to a police oversight position within the city administrator's office without fully funding the police commission. So I want to ask you, how many shelter beds would that provide? How many interrupters would that provide? I'm talking about over... Thank you.

Hello, my name is Stephon Brooks. I'm a Street Peace Ambassador for Tribe. I'm here to urge you to delay the funding until you have taken a look at the potential impacts. Others will talk to you about various aspects, but I will speak to you about what I know. From being out here and growing up here, I know how violence works. I know how real community safety works. From having the VI's program cut from East Oakland and from our organization, Tribe, is going to affect the whole structure we have set up. The VI program is a big part of this, helping to watch our backs and letting us know the situations we need to be aware of and keep in mind that we are outside on the avenues and streets all day, every day. I urge you, please take a good look at the funding and prioritize East Oakland, prioritize place-based organizations who are outside every day. Thank you.

Anthony Martin, and I'm ceding my time to Andrew Park.

Hello, Andrew Park with Tribe. And yeah, I'm just going to speak on relationships and this ecosystem. I think what happens sometimes is people talk, and like using this language, and they'll mean one thing, but then when they go to other rooms, they'll mean another. And people get confused. That's how we always come. Like, who's outside? Who's really doing the work? What's this going to hurt? Who's it going to hurt? How's it going to affect things? I just don't want it to be like a year from now and we didn't speak up because it sure does feel like we are fighting for crumbs out here. It's not it's not your fault. Maybe it's your fault. Maybe it's OPD's fault. I don't know. But the thing is, is is that that's the feeling. But I need to let you guys know that the tribe district to East Lake, San Antonio. I mean, even parts of Fruitvale. It's like. It's a whole ecosystem that we've been putting down. Stefan shares what he does with ambassadors every single day. Maybe part of the criticism of what we do, what other organizations like Roots and Boss and whatever, is we do more violence prevention and not interruption. You've got to go more ceasefire. You've got to go more focused deterrence. And that's a strategy. It's like we have difference of opinions. But we just need to let you know what we see out here, how we're answering the call, how for very violent situations with shootings, we're handling that every single day. It's just smart and sound. I'm going to join the chorus of voices that are saying, let's get this process more transparent. Let's get the scores out there with OFCY. They probably had three times the number of applications, right? But they put out scores. They put out rankings. And they put out a way to appeal, too, as well. None of that is available here. And we just need to let our people know, our community know, because we don't want them, come a year from now, Tribe, how come you're not out here? See, the VI, the ambassadors, the resource navigators, they all work together in an ecosystem for us in order to be able to deliver the service, being outside every single day.

Hello, I'm Esmeralda. I'm a family navigator with Tribe. Every week I see the needs of families we serve through outreach, food distribution, and family navigation. We serve 250 families weekly. And we help them with CalFresh. We provide them with diapers, clothing, formula, and referrals. The VI team is an important part of the work we do. They help build relationships in the community, respond to situations before they escalate, and help create a safer environment for the families we serve. Because of their presence, we are able to do outreach, connect with residents, and provide services in the community more effectively. Thank you.

Madeline Stacy, D3 resident. I have been touched by domestic violence. I think nearly everyone in this room has probably been touched, if not directly, indirectly by domestic violence. I know it's a personal, a topic personal to Chair Wayne. And that's why I'm concerned that the Family Violence Law Center is getting zeroed out on legal services and even youth services and housing services. nearly half their clientele are oaklanders and they support like roughly 500 survivors per year these are big numbers and a lot of our residents that would be losing services if they didn't get funding oakland department of violence prevention is proposing slashing legal services funding by about 50 this cycle and legal services are vital for survivors i'm also concerned about our immigrant siblings The one agency that's receiving legal funds cannot support undocumented clients, but families.

My name is Lee John Loggins and today I feel a little different. I at least want to start off by saying that the application process was a little confusing at first because they said some requirements you can apply, then the requirements later, you would have to prove some of the requirements later. There was some changes in the RFP as far as like letters from hospital and different stuff like that, so there's some changes, but I digress in that. It's been hard for me because I've been in, I'm trying to come up with mine, because I've been losing loved ones, right? I lost my auntie, she was hitting a car in San Francisco, and I just lost somebody, Aisha Lewis today. And I've been a reflection of, When I'm gone, what will people say about me and my work? Whenever I come in here, I'm always telling people whatever, and I don't feel good sometimes because I don't want people to think that I'm an asshole or something like that. I just love this city, and I want better for this city. And so I thank the committee and everybody for at least giving some of the.

Thank you for your comments. Thank you, Leijon.

Hello, my name is Jennifer Lyle, and I'm an Oakland resident and the executive director of MISI, an Oakland organization serving young people impacted by sexual violence, commercial sexual exploitation, and sex trafficking. For 19 years, MISI has provided housing, food, coaching, workshops, supportive relationships, and safe spaces for young people to heal and rebuild their lives. Last year alone, we served more than 730 youth. I want to thank the Department of Violence Prevention team and acknowledge Dr. Joshi's leadership and recognize the many community organizations doing extraordinary work across Oakland. I know difficult funding decisions had to be made. My concern is not with the process. My concern is that there is simply not enough funding committed to the Department of Violence Prevention. Everyday organizations are reducing violence, preventing exploitation, and I'm concerned about the fact that there is an underinvestment in the Department of Violence Prevention and violence prevention in this city.

Hello, my name is Nilda Aldridge. I'm the Integrated Services Manager at MISI. I am an Oakland resident. I am an Oaklander from West Oakland, and like many young ladies, black ladies specifically growing up in Oakland, we had to escape being targeted, groomed, and turned out for sex trafficking. That is why I do the work that I do. I now supervise the team that works directly with our young people. And I just want to thank you all for the consideration because I have a friend who lost her life being exploited, turned out, using drugs the whole nine and lost her life. And today I do this work in her honor and this funding helps us continue to do that. So thank you.

How y'all doing? How y'all doing? My name is Rashad Norton. You can call me Country. I wasn't going to talk today, but just hearing the statement that an officer made $400,000 a year is crazy. $450,000? Half a million. And me and my team over here are doing the work with no gun. So that just shows you what type of work we do with no gun. I'm on my second year going to Merritt College to be an SUD counselor, and I want to get into public health. I couldn't do that. unless they had this program, to be involved, to evolve myself into different healing groups, to actually go out and see the difference that certain programs can help you. So I just want to really, really, really, really put this on your mind and think how many people are you saving that looks like me, that who does this work, and who can start off.

If your name was called and you're in chamber and would still like to speak, please come up to the podium.

The document speaks to, in the report on this item, that there will be a opportunity to assess the quality of the services. And that's gonna be done by a exit survey. Exit survey. Now what you need to find out when you evaluate the quality of services is measure the outcomes, identify areas for improvement, and determine whether the goals were met, because certain goals were supposed to be met. I don't know how you're gonna do this with a exit survey, and that happens at the end of services. I'm also concerned with equity. With y'all being a sanctuary city, there's the possibility that citizens are.

Thank you for your comments, Mrs. Sada. Switching to Zoom user, Madison Barton, you can unmute yourself and begin your comment.

Good evening. My name is Madison Barton speaking on behalf of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking nonprofit that has served Oakland and Bay Area residents for the past 15 years. Thank you to the city of Oakland and DBP for investing in our housing program. In addition to housing, we also submitted proposals in crisis navigation, life coaching, and healing and mobile service categories. These proposals were intentionally built around partnerships with Deanna White of Faith4 Ministries, Valerie Brown, of DPSS and Norma Ward of Progressive Transitions. These are three black women with deep roots in Oakland who live in Oakland, serve Oakland, and have spent years supporting their communities. They are not waiting for grants to do their work. They are already responding to crisis. As future funding opportunities are developed, I encourage the city to continue finding ways to invest in trusted community leaders who have already demonstrated their commitment to Oakland through years of service.

Thank you for your comments. Chair, all names have been called.

First of all, I wanted to thank every single person who either commented here in person or online. I know that many of you are on the front lines of many of the crises that we see in our communities of trauma, that it is often just, it's a labor of love, truly. And I just wanna thank you all for being, not only for being here, but for doing the work that you do and just that is gratitude for myself as the chair of public safety. I did want to acknowledge, I do have, look, there are lots of good things In this proposal I also though have some concerns in particular this two-round process really does seem like an aberration that that I have concerns about in terms of we know of at least two organizations that got kicked out of the second round, but their applications qualified the first round. And it just, that seems incredibly unfair and seems unusual. I don't know how often this has happened. Can somebody from the procurement office speak to how often this happens? Because those individuals don't get to even have their applications evaluated, right? And that, to me, I think is the concern I have on that. Is Bradley Johnson, or was it Teresa Malone?

Through the Chair, the Contract Administrator is on Zoom to answer.

Good evening, this is Laura Gonzalez-Woodward, the Contracts and Purchasing Administrator. Sharing that when we run solicitations, RFPs, RFQs, any formal solicitation within the RFP, there is language around be it is at the city's discretion to cancel an rfp at any given point in time i do want to clarify that these are not actually rounds we issued the original rfp it was cancelled and then when we reissued a new rfp we did notify all of the original proposals of the cancellation as well as the new solicitation. So we did send communication not just through the iSupplier portal but we did reach out via email as well. And we have cancelled RFPs for a variety of reasons within the city. It's not a standard, it's not something that we do often, but it has occurred. And I will share that it was a risk assessment that was provided to the DDP as well as the previous city administrator to opine on how we would like to move forward and collectively it was decided we would cancel the original RFP and offer a new solicitation.

Was there anything in the first round or whatever we want to call it? What was the cause of such a high degree of failure at 34% failure rate?

In full transparency, the original RFP required proposers to submit on two different platforms based on conversations. It was internally right that we believe that. Proposers did not follow direction. And they wanted to collectively, the city wanted to ensure an equitable process for all proposers. So we reissued, we canceled the RFP and we reissued a new RFP. In which we only required 1 platform for submission, which was in fact, I supplier.

Okay. I'd also think it's important, and it's been stated by the public comment as well, if somebody can make clear, what are the consequences of not voting this through, given that the contract period starts October 1st? Will there be a lapse in services? Because that is also a key thing we need to grapple with as a body.

Through the chair to Chair Wong, the contracting process takes at least three months. So once we have approval from city council, we are able to then embark on actual scope negotiations, reviewing of budgets, we prepare contract packages it then gets sent to the citywide contracts team for extensive review and then routing for final approvals and that entire process unfortunately takes at least three months to do and so if this doesn't move forward at this time it will delay that process and if we are unable to have contracts executed by october 1st there will be a delay in services because we have been told in no uncertain terms from the city administrator's office that we cannot have people operating out of contract.

Okay, that's helpful.

Go ahead, Council Member Brown. Thank you so much. I guess I just had a follow up to that because I believe on, I think this item came to us last year, the current contracting agreement with the current CBOs, when does that expire?

through the chair, September 30th of this year.

Okay. And then Council Member Wong, I have a handful of questions, but did you wanna complete, I just wanted to hop on while you were on that subject. Thank you, I appreciate it.

I do have a couple of more questions. Again, I wanna also acknowledge the positive things, especially around the street outreach, I think. I see a lot of that coming out of directly some of our engagement with the human trafficking providers. I did want to understand why this was a three-year RFP. There was a deliberate policy decision around that.

The Measure NN legislation requires that departments create three-year spending plans. So the RFP process and the grant award process aligns with that requirement in being three years. The other benefit of three-year grants, which is standard practice from the state and from the federal government, is that it provides consistency, continuity, stability for agencies who are able to know that that funding is secure over that period of time. And then it also is a more efficient use of city resources. When we go through this RFP process, it's an extensive use of staff time. So to minimize that is another benefit.

Sorry, just to follow up since you mentioned a three-year spending plan does a spending plan require a three-year contract length or these are two different cause to me these are two different concepts and I just want to make sure we we clarify for My colleagues as well as the public The NN legislation does not require three-year grant agreements.

It requires a three-year spending plan which to be in alignment with that we have decided to do three-year grant agreements and

Okay, understood. I think the other thing that struck me was that the RFP, like the timeline to respond didn't seem very long, which I think for me tends, my concern with that, and not necessarily a deal breaker, especially given I do not want to lapse in services, but I have concerns and that can, skew the favor in terms of organizations that have grant writers, right? And those that are sometimes the organizations that have grant writers and those who are able to do the work on the ground have completely different skill sets. And I just would like to understand that since i think i would imagine an organization that was very scrappy was out there doing the work in the field maybe doesn't have great in-house grant writing capacity would need longer than i think it was what roughly two or three weeks to put together a grant application right so the original rfp was 10 weeks i believe um so agencies had ample

maybe not ample, standard, very standard amount of time to create grant applications. When we canceled the original RFP and reissued, the pure intention was to allow agencies to submit correctly. In fact, the explicit request recommendation was that agencies upload all of their original materials again without editing. So it was simply, we were reopening to allow agencies to correctly apply not necessarily to prepare fully new grant applications.

Okay, thank you. And then I just have one final question, and this is for the procurement office. How many organizations qualified in the first round, or whatever we're calling it, the first iteration of this RFP, and then they were disqualified in the second round? And which ones were those?

but this is Laura Gonzalez-Woodward. Through the chair, I will share that I just wanted to, add some additional insight regarding the advertisement period for the second RFP that was released. Per our OMC, we are required to publish for a minimum of 10 days, and we recommended to extend that time period. So I do wanna highlight that was, we were mindful in that approach, but we did meet the requirement of the OMC in advertising. And then to your next question regarding the original list, of applicants from the first RFP, I believe, I will have to verify, I can do a compare list, but I know for... Laura, I do have that number.

You do? Great, thank you. Sorry, it was 27, so 27 applications, 27 agencies' applications were... sent to our department for review and scoring in the first process. And that was out of 41 that attempted to submit.

And how many of those were disqualified in the second iteration?

Our understanding is that of the agencies that applied to the first RFP, only one was disqualified in the second version. Okay.

Do you know which one that is?

I do.

Okay. Okay, Council Member Houston, go ahead.

Yeah, through the Chair, I wanna know who that organization was.

Okay, I'm sorry, we've been under very clear instructions from the Contracts Unit to not share information about the process, but the agency was the LGBTQ Center.

Are you, do you have a question? No, no, I have a question. Okay, Council Member Brown, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, you do have a question? Okay, Council Member Houston, my apologies.

I have a bunch of questions. I sit in a unique seat here. I ride with East Oakland, and I'm from East Oakland, and my community has been suffering for a long, long time. I heard country just say something about officer making $450,000. So, so, so, and I, let me finish. And I just asked my council member, because I didn't know, I asked her what was our yearly budget, she said two billion, what was it? $2.1 billion, and I got the budget right here. I feel that if we can't find something in this budget to close that gap of what's needed in my community, where I sleep at night, where my family die, where my family die, we got a problem. I got a bunch of questions that I'm gonna let Councilmember Brown, because I wanna know if there's an appeal process. See, I don't know the legal ramifications of me making a decision, because I'm Vice Chair, I have a voice too. So, I'm gonna let Councilmember Brown say what you wanna say, but I wanna find out, is there an appeal process, or how can we hold back, because we got this $2 billion budget right in front of me, and why can't we find these peanuts?

yeah before we move to council member brown why don't we have somebody either from procurement or dvp respond to the question around appeals sorry brad johnson director of finance laura could you speak to the process as it relates to any appeal process that sits within our authority in this in this space sure so i do want to highlight that we are

Currently in an active RFP, typically once a formal award has been made, potential protests are allowed, but it's essentially protesting our process, not necessarily the award as far as who the selected They can always do a public records request to inquire about the evaluation process. However, typically protests are. Regarding. Like, an unfair, unjust process with with the RFP, we typically would review will complete our analysis and our investigation and identify if there was anything. That was unfair throughout the process, but it's truly based on what the protest includes. But as I mentioned, we do a full investigation and we provide the results. And if it's a system inquiry, if it's regarding, I mean, we'll take care of that, right? We investigate that. However, if it's regarding the evaluation process, we would coordinate with the to address that. But I will share so long as we are in, if we have an active and open protest that will delay the execution of those new agreements.

Hmm, okay. Well, we have a tough decision ahead of us.

Council Member Brown. All right, well thank you so much. I of course wanna start off by just thanking the DVP team for all of your amazing work. And I recognize and honor the strategy that informs the recommendations that are before us. And also at the same time, you know, when I think about the, or just the public commenters or even this letter that's in front of me highlighting some of the organizations that definitely support Deep East Oakland, I have concerns, right? So usually when we are facing, you know, kind of a matter of this kind of magnitude, I always take notes of each public commenter and I'll say, okay, did they say yes, they're in favor of this, or no? And so I'm just gonna read off just some of the organizations that I heard no, right? So we heard from BOSS, we heard from Violence Prevention Coalition, we heard from the Family Violence Law Center, we heard from Miss Pamela, and then we also heard from the African Resource Center, And, you know, one of the main questions that I actually was gonna ask was gonna focus in on how, when I look at the table and I see how the funding is being allocated, one of the questions that I had was, you know, who's supporting our LGBTQ community members, right? And so... As was noted, the only one in the resubmission of this RFP, that was the only organization that did not, I guess, you know, basically fell off. And so, you know, all in all, I have concerns. I'm not necessarily concerned about the space of where a location is located. More than anything, I'm concerned about the cultural competency and the ability of organizations to do the work and the work that they have been doing. And so I have a handful of questions. I'm gonna start first by, I think I wanna just really address that as a city, yes, we do have a really large budget and I think that we, as a body, we do need to look very critically around the funding that we are providing to certain departments, public speakers mentioned OPD, so I do think that we should make some shifts and changes, but I did have this question around what is the current funding gap that I guess Measure Z used to provide to support the violence prevention efforts, and how does that compare to the Measure NN allocation and just wanna see what that difference is.

Through the Chair. I wanna make sure I'm understanding your question, Council Member Brown. Are you asking about the difference between the investment? Can you? I can clarify, I'm sorry. Thank you, thank you.

It's been a long day for me. I've been here in this chair since nine, so my brain is a little tired. So I guess I'm specifically talking about how in Measure Z there used to be support from the general fund to help support violence prevention. Do I have that correct? Oh, I see, I see. And so then I think I heard someone mention that, I mean, we're so grateful, we should all be really grateful that the voters approved Measure NN to support this effort. And we can't take that for granted. And I think that it's amazing the amount of investment that we are pouring into violence prevention. But with that said, I guess I'm trying to identify And when I'm looking at all of the money we are allocating to the various organizations, it still seems like we are lacking. And so I'm curious, what is that number?

Okay, I understand your question. Thank you for the clarity. So it wasn't that measure Y or measure Z allocated more money to CVI work. It was that as a city, we were allocating additional funding on top of the measure. So to many of the speaker's points here today, Measure NN at this moment in time is serving as the city's only investment in community violence intervention work for the CBOs. That wasn't the case in the past. The case in the past was that Measure Z and Measure Y were supplemented by investments from 1010. So that is why you're hearing from us that the investment does not represent the need and that it represents a decline in the overall city's investment in CBI.

I see and but I guess once again I guess I'm trying to figure out like when we're looking at the table and we're adding up the total amount what is the like dollar amount that is that is a gap the difference yeah okay so it has varied over the years depending on the city's budget but it has most often been between three to five million additional dollars from the general purpose fund okay and how does that compare to what we're allocating right now

Right now, there's no additional money from 1010 going.

Okay, so more specifically, on an annual basis, when we look at the chart, I don't know what the number is, so the annual amount right now for year one is what? Over 12 million. 12 million. For CDOs. And so if it's 12 million, basically we would be adding an additional three.

Plus three or plus five, depending on the investment year and what the city's 10-10 general purpose budget looked like.

I see, and then I'm sorry to put you on the spot, so I'm gonna ask a question just so that I can get some historical context. Can you share with me, for example, in 2024, How much did we allocate out of the door? And what was the general fund contribution? Do we know that number? I don't know it off the top of my head. Maybe Maylee does.

Maylee, do you have a number?

I'm gonna call up my deputy director of administration. She has a lot of institutional memory. Excellent, hi Maylee.

Hello, Maylee Wong through the chair. I don't remember the exact years, but what I can say is that the seed money from reimagining public safety allowed us to deeper our investment in CBO contracts. So for instance, say one year of measure Z was $10 million. We supplemented about $5 million from the general purpose fund to put out a $15 million spending package. The following fiscal year, it was about $17 million. I see.

Excellent, thank you for providing that clarity. And so just a few more questions. When was the last time we had a report back on just the impacts of these contracts that have gone out the door in previous years, whether it's 2024 or even the impacts in 2025 of some of the service providers, because I guess my larger question here is, as we can see, many folks in the room are saying, hey, these services are gonna be impacted if they are not funded. Can you speak to, hey, what could be some of the impacts of not servicing some of the providers that were mentioned? not providing funding to some of the CBOs that were mentioned.

Through the chair, so we, I know that the Urban Institute, which was contracted by the city with Measure Z dollars to conduct an evaluation of Measure Z funded services, presented to council on their findings and their impact analysis. I'm not sure that the DVP, at least in my time, has come before this body to present on

deliverables of specific contracted organizations although we certainly could do a report if that would be of interest yeah i think so um i'll hold um my questions okay i have a couple more but i'll hold okay thanks councilman brown um i did want to just in in a discussion with the committee on how we move this forward i think For me, I am very concerned about a possible lapse in services. I think that's real. And I do not want that to happen. And I think there are good programs being funded through this. There really are. So I don't want perfection to be the enemy of the good at the same time. This is $38 million. This is an enormous... funding package over three years and so I have discussed with the attorneys that it would be possible to Recommend this forward but as with a recommended amendment as a one-year Contract only and I wanted to plant that seed and see what the body thinks Councilmember fife

Yes, I would like to understand if you got this information from the city attorney, I would like to hear from the director of DVP and our parliamentarian on how this might conflict with the ballot measure that was passed. If it was required that there's a three year spending plan that was included As a part, I'm not saying that I agree or disagree. I just want to understand if there's any conflict there and if we're going to run afoul of the actual language of the ballot initiative.

Yeah, absolutely. I did just hear that there was no contract. There is a spending plan requirement, but not a contract length requirement. But yes, let's turn it over to Chief Joshi through the chair.

Thank you for that question. it is true to our understanding from the city attorney as well there is not a contract time limit within the legislation to my deputy's earlier point we were simply trying to align the three-year spending plan with the three-year RFP process for ease of accessibility for community-based organizations and to spare the DVP staff and community-based reviewers from going through that very lengthy process of an RFP and the review that goes along with that. But there is no requirement that we enter into three-year grants.

Yeah, I I would argue that there is probably a there is an accountability element to and requiring people to apply and In subsequent years and it's not guaranteed. I understand there's also downsides right the the lack of stability and not lack of guaranteed funding but think given some of the process concerns that weren't even the DVP team but rather what happened the upfront with the procurement side of things where things didn't even qualify to begin with that we have an argument to be made that to shorten the grants so we don't have a lapse in funding We shorten the grant period, and we give many of the organizations that spoke up today the opportunity in a year's time, or less than a year, whenever it would open up to apply. So that's my thought. Council Member Brown.

I mean I had I had several questions and I do want to I wanted to get an understanding from you chair in your prep do you know approximately how long the next agenda item and I mean I saw at least one public comment here from mr. David boat right here but I I think the next item I don't sense it's going to be as

rigorously discussed as this item. And we only have one other item on the agenda.

I thought one item was removed from the agenda. Do we have three? we had three okay uh the first one is removed we still have the measure mm not measure nn so okay i would just like to ask a few questions of course i did want to get a reaction from from you uh director joshi about the impact to changing the time frame because i do know that it is um challenging sometimes for city departments on the runway to get an rfp out and i hear my colleagues saying that you know maybe an rfq but i i want to understand in terms of the time timeline starting a whole another process and going through several rounds how would that impact your the services that we all care about the service delivery through the chair i

would ask and recommend that we do not do one year grants through an entire RFP process. What we did last year was we asked for extensions to existing grants and that is why the one year made sense for extensions to existing grants. But to turn around and go through the same RFP process that we just went through in six to seven months from now, that is when we would need to begin to prepare another RFP process is not my recommendation. The lift that it takes for staff that are still continuing to do their other jobs. We were involved in this RFP process at the same time we were working on our budget, at the same time that appraisals were due, et cetera, et cetera. And keep in mind that on the review panel, I had included my direct practice team because we did want the expertise coming from the streets And so the direct practice team was also holding all of their clients holding all of their violence intervention work across the city While being asked to review and participate in the procurement process So I would say that if we were going to reduce the timing if that is important to the council I would ask that we do it to two years instead of one

I support that. I support that. I know it. I know the work that it takes. And I've seen things go awry when we're rushing the work and then there's Our staff have to do more than one job at a time. I think we just heard, I can't say it better than the director did, but I did have other questions around through the chair. I'm not sure if it's Ms. Lynchie or you, Director Joshi. I just have a couple questions about protest to the process because this sounds incredibly messy and I'm not exactly sure why. I haven't heard in the presentation about why there were two processes or why it was canceled.

Can you run through that again for me, please? If Laura is still on, please, Laura, jump in and correct me if my understanding is off, but I'm gonna try to speak it in plain language, Councilmember, because we were catching up with the procurement process and being trained on it by Laura and her staff as it was moving along, so by no means are we experts, but from my understanding, When we issued the first RFP, it was our intention to utilize a grants platform. So we included a grants platform with iSupplier, and so the applicants were required to submit their application on two separate platforms. Because that seemed to be overly complicated for almost 40% of the community-based organizations who failed to successfully upload the technical documents necessary into both spaces, we did not I come from the belief that if 40% of the students failed the test, the teacher didn't teach. That's simple from my perspective. So we went to the city administrator and to the grants and contract folks, not the city attorney's office. They were not involved and did not need to be involved in that conversation. to ask what our options were. And we were told that the only options were to either move forward with a 40% failure rate, which some of the agencies in here today would have failed the first test and would not have even been sent to the DVP for ranking at all. So we decided to cancel the first one that too many agencies were disqualified from for technical reasons. Because again, remember this is a two part process that involves two departments. So the DVP does not even get the list of applicants to review. We don't get those folders unless they have passed the technical piece of the test. with the contracts unit. So because so many people were 40%, well 34% were not passing the technical aspect of the test, we were seeking to modify and simplify the technical aspect of the test so that the applicants could actually make their way to DVP for the formal review process and not be taken out of the process before they had the opportunity for their applications to be seen. So that is what occurred, and although it was not a completely perfect process, it's the process that made the most sense in the moment, and the process got us closer to what we wanted, which was we would always want to see every applicant come before us so that they at least had a fair chance to be scored. As was outlined by Jenny Lynchie,

the failure rate then became nine percent instead of 34 once we reissued the second rfp i hope that that was yeah i i got it that time thank you um and have has out of that nine percent have then there been protests to the process still out of the nine percent the only

And Jenny, please jump in if I'm wrong. The only organization that we know of that is protesting and sending letters, I don't know if they've done a formal protest through the contracts unit, but that is sending protest letters and advocacy letters is again the LGBTQ Center.

Would the population that they prioritize still be served by the grants that have been issued? Because I know there was a lot of conversation about it's not about where you're located, it's about the services. Can you speak to that?

So first and foremost, I want to say and uplift the LGBTQ Center. They have always been a really important partner in this work. So this RFP process for all of the agencies is not an indictment of the agency's performance. We were not reviewing performance. The LGBTQ Center serves a very important role in citywide violence intervention. With that said, we are confident that the organizations that are recommended for funding here today are able, and in fact do, serve LGBTQ populations. To specifically name one of the agencies, MISI, they have on their application and website the percentage of young people that they serve that identify as LGBTQ, and I believe it was 25% with 10% specifically trans. So the vast majority of the organizations that are being funded are specifically working with the individuals that are at highest risk, particularly when it comes to gender-based violence, when it comes to intimate partner violence, when it comes to sex trafficking, because we know that LGBTQ youth in particular are at greater risk for trafficking in this city.

And have the applicants, the agencies who have not been awarded been notified that they have not been awarded through the process, all of them?

Through the chair. They have not, and it was our understanding and the direction from the contracts unit, again, the contracts unit being the city's expert in the contract process that we are taking direction from as a department, that we are not allowed to communicate directly to the agencies until the RFP process is actually officially closed, and that the RFP process is not considered officially closed until the council votes to approve the recommendations. And so we have not communicated at all with our organizations about this RFP process at the direction of the contracts unit.

And so what would the impact be if we did not move this item to the full city council tonight?

I think first and foremost, the impacts are the timeline and the considerations around significant disruption and services. That is definitely my number one concern because we have done this process a few times now and the timeline that we mapped out was considering the contracts process and how long it takes to get the procurement settled. With that being said, I think the other thing philosophically is that an RFP process is a competitive bidding process. That's what it is. It's not a process of guaranteeing or ensuring that the same agencies get the money year after year after year. Although I understand the agency's struggles, their concerns, their desire to have sustainable funding from the city, an RFP competitive bidding process is not set up that way. It is set up to open up the city services opportunities for other folks. And that is the flip side of the coin of the critiques that we have heard over and over again, is that the procurement process ends up never being open to community-based organizations outside of the folks that people think are the anchor agencies. So I would just encourage council that if we want to think about measure NN allocations differently, then we should do that. We should think about do we want measure NN dollars in the future to go out through a competitive bidding process or do we not? Or do we want part of it to go out through a competitive bidding process and part of it to be allocated to agencies that we believe are anchor agencies? That is a council decision. That is not something that the Department of Violence Prevention can do. The Department of Violence Prevention was tasked with, through the direction of the city administrator, to run a competitive bidding process, and that's what we did. Understood. Thank you.

Okay, one point of clarification I also wanted to make just to the body. I did have conversations with the city attorneys because I do have concerns around the LGBTQ Center in particular because they were the one agency. If you get two bites of the apple, right, because there were two iterations, they... They successfully did the first one. Second one, weren't able to get through because of an aberration and this addendum. If you read the documentation that Sean had sent us over today, but we do not have the authority to direct staff to say, I asked, like, can we, because my interest is not saying let's direct money to a specific organization, but to ensure that at least there's process fairness and that individuals can essentially any organization that qualified the first iteration uh and didn't qualify the second iteration could have at least been evaluated right by the dvb team but we cannot do that uh that is not uh an authority that we have as a body we have to uh either vote this through vote a shortened time period um or vote it down and and face also the consequences of a lapse so uh councilmember houston

I have a question. So, as Council Member Brown had mentioned, it was a gap like three to five million dollars. If we find that three to five million dollars in here, Where does that, I'm just saying, if we find in this $2.1 billion, does that go to the organizations that have been qualified or that went through the application or could it go to other ones that were not? And here's the other question. If one of the organizations fall off, what if they don't bring the result-based accountability or they just fall off? Does that money go to the other ones that are in queue, or does it go to the ones that did not make that cut?

Okay, thank you, through the chair. So for the first part of your question, Council Member Houston, if we're able to find additional funding, who would that go to? That is the question for the council. I think that there's three options. The first is that we would allocate additional money to the organizations that were already selected for funding. That's option one. Option two, because there's a ranked list that we're happy to provide. Option two is to go further down the ranked list and bring more organizations into the fold. If we are currently, for example, funding the top three agencies, then additional funding could open an opportunity to fund the top four agencies in a particular category, for example. or the other opportunity that I believe you all may have as council and has happened in the past, I wasn't here for this, but again, my deputy May Lee was here for this, was that council in the past had a discretionary fund. And the discretionary fund for council is that council can decide to do mini grants or give grant funding to the organizations

essentially of their choice so i think those are three options if you all find additional money and last question if we decide to move this it goes to full council and we and it's another reading on if we move it or not correct because i want the public to know that yes

Yeah, I don't think we're gonna be moving this on consent, that's for sure. So, yeah, and I, Council Member Brown, and then I'll put a motion on the floor.

Excellent. Thank you, Council Member Houston, for those additional questions. I think Bradley is still here from Finance. who could, hopefully it's not outside of the scope, but shed some light on how our general fund is doing and whether or not we have this agency to pull from it given our current fiscal state.

I will say it this way. The council, through the amendment process, which we'll hear on Friday, may make adjustments to the proposed budget in the way you deem fit. Any changes to that budget need to be costed and budget neutral, so any additions need to be accompanied by reductions. that would be relevant to the council to provide I would note that I believe the deadline for submitting amendments for Friday has passed and so these would need to be amendment the council would have to not take action on Friday in order to put amendments of this nature on and consider them on Wednesday

Excellent, thank you so much. And then I guess my last question and or comment, I guess I continue to be, I guess I've found, and I'm not sure who can answer this, maybe Laura from Contracts, Bradley, or the administration. As various items come before us, sometimes we get insight into the scoring criteria that goes into who is receiving the funds. And so I do have this question around, I guess for this specific kind of allocation that we're making, at what point are we, let's say we advance this to the full council, are we actually able to get that attachment of everyone who applied and then the score for each?

I'll defer to Laura on whether or not we can deal with that under our current rules. Laura, would you go ahead?

Sure, as I mentioned earlier, this is Laura Gonzalez-Woodward. Through the chair, I wanted to share that we are in an active solicitation, right? And so a formal award, this is essentially just a recommendation. And the formal award is made after we've consulted with Duess in most cases. I will share that we could provide you information. I think that may be beneficial, we are unable to make any changes to the scoring evaluation for any of the proposers. I just wanna make that clear. We could provide a background and share those scores, but we are not at liberty to change them. that evaluation period has concluded. But I just wanna be completely transparent that typically we don't share scores until we've made the formal award. But I think if it highlights more transparency for this conversation, I would welcome the idea.

Were you gonna add more, Bradley?

I was simply gonna make the point that I understand that this process is confusing and difficult, and as we work through the process that's being led by Deputy City Administrator Davis on contracting reform, part of what we need to focus in on is better understanding of the scoring rubric on the front end so that we are not having conversations on the back end of who is awarded and we're able to stand behind the outcomes of our processes. And I want to uplift that because there's been a lot of conversation around the contracting process. We understand that our processes are difficult, that it's driven heavily by government procurement rules and our muni code as it relates to things. And we are working on changing those processes and they need to do more work on the front end so that the back end results, wherever they may lay, are better able to stand up to scrutiny. I'll say it that way.

Thank you.

Okay. Through the chair, could I just add one point of clarification? Oh, of course, yes. So the questions that agencies were asked to respond to were detailed in the RFP itself, as well as what percentage each section would be weighted. So that information was provided in the RFP. Got you. Thank you.

okay I'm going to put a motion on the floor I'm just given some of the conversation I'm going to put a motion on the floor to advance this item but is a year and a half long contract process Think just given again that this is 38 million dollars That's an enormous amount of money and I think it's actually worth having that Accountability that halfway through there is another RFP process especially given the aberrations Involving I supplier etc that that happened this this round or this iteration whatever we want to call it um and i also want when it moves to the full council i do want the full evaluation criteria to be included as well i think that transparency is important council member houston

Oh, and I guess the other thing that was coming to my attention, and I guess I just wanted to say it out loud that, and maybe we have some precedent here. I guess I just don't fully understand why we would have like an RFP that's open for 10 weeks and then because of the need to like cancel and resubmit, why would we not give the organization's the same amount of time, which is the 10 weeks. So how's that, like, I know I heard Laura say, oh, you know, we followed the standard procedure and it's 10 days. Like, it was more than 10 days. But I guess I'm curious why we wouldn't do the same timeframe.

Yeah, through the chair again, the intention was to allow the agencies that applied to the original RFP to submit correctly. It was not to reopen the RFP to all agencies in Oakland to craft new applications, although that still could have been done in a three-week period, but the intention truly was for the agencies that applied originally to have them all apply correctly so that we could receive all of their applications and read and score them.

interesting and do we know offhand of any organizations that applied the first time didn't make it to that shorter time frame the one agency which is the lgbtq center oh i'm sorry i thought that they just didn't make it because of a technical error or something they didn't make it the second time because of a technical error got you they made it the first time yeah i guess my larger question is with the reopening of the rfp how many were there any organizations just missed the communication altogether? Like say they applied the first time and they're like, okay, we're done, and they didn't even see that it had been canceled and reopened.

All of the agencies that we know to have tried to apply the first time successfully applied the second time, except for the LGBTQ Center.

Okay, all right. Council Member Houston.

Through the chair, Dr. Yoshi spent, they spent a lot of time, they went through this whole process with the applications. It's complicated. And if we move, and you said a year and a half, I don't get it if she just said two. I mean, if she says she couldn't do it in a year and a half, well, I mean two years maximum.

Well, what I heard is that she wouldn't advise it, which I understand. I also think that, and the reason I put the motion on the floor, and anyone's welcome to put a substitute motion for two years, right, is that I think that this is a three-year spending plan. A checkpoint halfway, given that this is an enormous amount of money, is actually an important part of also accountability. And that is really important and also given the unusual nature of this particular process where we had two iterations of the RFP that I think that is something worth thinking about and therefore I am putting a motion at least to advance this with the recommendation for a year and a half long contract period.

I guess I should just say it, I don't think you have a second chair. And I can't support that because I know, I just chaired the Life Enrichment Committee where we ran into issues because the individuals in the department We're doing work on top of work for somebody else's work and there were errors in the process because they did not have the proper staffing and oversight to manage a process with procurement with. an entirely different department. So if we're hearing from the chief director of the Department of Violence Prevention that she needs a minimum of two years, I support the staff recommendations in this particular case because she knows what they can deliver and what they can't. And so I don't want to have to come back here. We're already shortening the length of time on a competitive process where this whole system is messed up as far as I'm concerned. The fact that we even have to be here debating these dollars is just ridiculous. But it's the system that we have and the fact that people have to compete. I see so many of my people in here. I see so many folks that I've known for years that are doing this work. And somebody said a labor of love. No, it's a labor of necessity. It's a labor of life and death. Because if it's not done, we know that people will die. That's just what it is. And the fact that we have to be constrained by these... minimum dollar amounts. We heard from a public speaker, like if we could have the courage to explore over time, if we could have the courage to look at our pensions, if we had the courage to do some of this other work, then maybe we could spread the dollars out a little bit more, but we don't. Today we are here. Our director asked us for for a minimum of two years. That is the motion that I would like to put forward. I would appreciate a second so we can at least make sure that the organizations who have funding can move forward with their work. I would like to work with the mayor's office. Madam Mayor, I don't know if you have staff listening. to help to try to find out how we can fill in a budget deficit for these other organizations that were not funded. I'm happy to do fundraising and it would be behested payments. My staff don't typically do this, but I will beat the streets to try to get support for organizations who typically don't have access to these resources to have access. But what we are here to debate today is the framework that's in front of us. I'm amenable to shortening the timeframe by a year. And again, that is the motion that I'm making to move it to the full city council on next Tuesday.

Council member Houston.

I'm going to second that to move that with us looking in this $2 billion, and it's coming up on Friday, to find some money. I mean, it's like this. It's like we're fighting over peanuts. I mean, they might not think it's peanuts. They might say it's a lot of money. It's not a lot of money when you've got $2 billion we're playing with, and we've got somebody doing $450,000. $450,000? I seen something else in here.

Another five. Well, colleagues, as much as I hear what you're saying, I didn't see any. Let me finish, let me finish. I'll let you finish.

So we got another like 500,000 I'm seeing here that shouldn't be in here in my opinion. Then I see another 450, 64,000 in here for a DOT project manager. I mean, I see some stuff in here that I don't even like. So I'm gonna be straight. we don't know i want to do that second we don't move it for discussion we don't look for uh... some money in this i just want to say i hear what you're all saying but also i want to point out we have enough

I'm allowed to talk about the budget item on Friday, the special session. I haven't seen in any of our amendments added funding for what these folks have asked for. So I also think that we need to vote on this item assuming for now that this is what we have and then we move in the budget process to how can we get that added funding, but we cannot assume that. Councilmember Brown.

Thank you so much. In order for me to support moving this forward, there's some specifics that I would need to see that would entail like a one-year report back on And I'm happy to, I feel like I don't have the specifics in this moment, but I feel like I wanna focus on two things, right? Like service impact levels of providers no longer providing the service, and then impacts of those who have received the funding, like one year. And so if we're gonna move forward with a two-year contract, I would want us to get an annual report.

Through the chair, if I can comment. We're more than happy to provide any type of check-ins on whatever schedule is amenable to the council.

Council Member Houston.

I had to ask through the chair, I had to ask for a six-month report back for result-based accountability, Councilmember Brown, for data collection. I wanna make sure that they was touching our tier ones that needed to be touched. That's what I had spoke to doctor about, because I wanted it not a year later, I wanted like six months. I'm not stepping over you, Councilmember Brown, I'm just saying I had asked for six months, because I wanna know who's doing the work and why my people are dying and why my people ain't eating. That's what I was asking for.

Through the chair, six months is what you'd asked for in a previous meeting. Council Member Houston, Administrator Phillips and I had met on the whether or not DVP could do that and we can. So six months is the timeframe for council. We can do that as well.

Yeah, that's fine.

Through the chair, I just have a quick question. Can I get clarification on the request from Council Member Brown while I'm making my notes? Thank you.

May I submit it in writing to you? Through the chair, yes ma'am. Okay, thank you.

Council Member Fife.

I'm complete, predatory capitalism? I don't know, I think Council Member Hewson asked why, are we here, but I would like to call the question.

Through the Chair, we have a motion on the floor through the Chair to the maker of the motion. Does your motion include the amendment that was stated previously? The amendment to the legislation for the housing service dollar amount? Is this motion to include that amendment from staff earlier?

Through the chair, we were told by the city attorney's office that we could simply submit a new resolution with that amount corrected since the overall amount is correct. Oh, the typo that they mentioned earlier, yeah.

okay thank you so we have a motion made by council member five seconded by council member houston to approve as amended the recommendations of staff and to forward this item to the june 16th city council with the amendment to the legislation to change it from a three-year contract to a two-year contract with a request to staff to provide in six months a report back regarding the service impact levels no longer providing services and impact of those that received the funding. On roll.

Before you go on with the motion, I know that there's been direction from the city attorney about that typo, but we still are right now recommending including that information about the funding amount for that particular grantee, so we'd also recommend that being part of the motion also.

Through the chair, do you need me to state it again? You got it, okay.

Okay, repeating the motion. A motion made by Council Member Five, seconded by Council Member Houston to approve as amended the recommendations of staff and to forward this item to the June 16th City Council agenda with the amendment to the legislation to change it from a three-year contract to a two-year contract and to amend on page three of the legislation correcting the dollar amount under the housing service for the Bay Area Community Service Resource Inc. to reflect an annual amount of $300,000 and total funding of $900,000 with the request of staff to provide in six months a report back regarding the service impact levels no longer providing services and impact of those that received the funding.

And for the report that goes to city council to include the evaluation criteria.

and to include in a supplemental report the full evaluation criteria. On roll, Councilmember Brown. Aye. Five. Aye. Houston. Aye. And Chair Wong. Aye. Thank you. Item number three passes with four ayes to forward this item to the June 16th as amended on non-consent. Passed with four ayes. Now reading in item S4. Before beginning, this item was added at the three-day noticing, so this does require a motion to accept the urgency binding. We just need a motion to... accept the urgency finding.

Can someone make a motion to accept the urgency finding? Colleagues, we have one more item. Can someone make a motion to accept the urgency finding?

What was the rationale for the emergency finding? Can you spell that out?

This item is a requirement of Measure MM providing public accountability and oversight of the use of wildfire prevention funding under the voter approved measure. This was the urgency finding provided. We have a motion made by Council Member Brown, seconded by Council Member Fyfe to accept the urgency finding on item S4. On roll, Council Members Brown.

Aye.

Fyfe. Aye. Houston. Aye. And Chair Wong. Aye. Thank you, the motion passes with four ayes to accept the urgency finding. Now reading in item S4, receive and file verbal and written annual report on measure mm spending the or spending from the oakland wildfire prevention commission and we have four four speakers that signed up to speak on this item okay all right daniel take it away thank you chair daniel hamilton chief resilience officer in the city administrator's office thank you for your patience we will do our best to be brief

We're recommending that you receive and file a verbal and written annual report for Measure MM spending from the Oakland Wildfire Prevention Commission. We are at the end of year one of this commission created by a voter-approved measure in 2024 to oversee $2.7 million in parcel tax revenue, primarily to implement the vegetation management plan of the city. The chair of the commission, Tom Grossman, is here to summarize his report for you.

All right. Thank you, Daniel. So my thanks to the council members for being here. I admire the strength of your sitzfleisch and the fortitude of your bladders. I'd like to thank members of the commission who joined me in our work this year. Three of them were present. One had to leave, but two others are still here. I'd like to thank the many members of city staff who came and spoke to us. They are listed in the commission in our report. In the interest of brevity, I'll speed up on my planned remarks. We have a number of recommendations for you. The context is it's early days and we don't yet know enough about the spending and we have not yet received all the information we need to make sense of what the city is doing. The single most important recommendation we have is to expedite the hiring of a Measure MM supervisor. The person who is necessary to administer the Measure MM monies has not been hired. The city has been bringing in a temporary person for a 90-day period of time to manage this. This is a complex thing. There's lots of details. There's a 600-page environmental impact report that has to be honored. There's a lot to it. And so if one thing you could do is to expedite and get that person hired, that would do more than any other single action you could undertake. As described in the report, there are many opportunities to improve the city's ability to survive the fire that we know is coming. It's difficult for us to understand what is happening. We have many more information needs. We are optimistic that we can solve next year, but we don't yet have all the information we need. There's detailed information on specific mitigation activities that have been undertaken this year and going forward. There's no good reporting structure in place that we can make sense of. We don't have insight into the timing and amounts of the Measure MM receipts. We are aware that some Measure MM expenditures are paying for overtime. We don't have clarity on what is being done with those overtime monies. We understand it's because due to the absence of the full-time person to manage things, Public Works is backfilling as best they can. We also would value historical budget information on spending to ensure that the Measure MM monies are genuinely in addition to ongoing city expenditures related to wildfire and aren't just going to displace existing funds. That was the promise of the voters. The next things of interest are a stronger commitment to compliance. The fire department's doing a good job on inspections, but follow up on properties that are perhaps not doing a very good job at mitigation could be strengthened. There are a number of properties in the city where there may be opportunities to do better enforcement to ensure that that the necessary work is being done. It's important to remember that this is herd immunity. When one house strengthens its fire safety, it protects the entire neighborhood. A handful of houses that don't do anything put entire neighborhoods at risk. So it's very important that we are successful in compliance. There were some interesting questions around properties that are not residences. There are undeveloped private parcels. It seems that they are not being maintained properly. There does not seem to be a mechanism to go to those property owners and get them to take necessary action. And it is possible, but not verified, that there may be parcels where the owners have specific mitigation commitments, either in their lease with the city or in their conditional use permits, where, again, it's possible they're not undertaking mitigation activities. So an inventory of those would be very important and very helpful. In addition, there are very detailed strictures in the environmental impact report related to endangered species that may not be adequately honored to date, and that would be very important to do. There's other recommendations on Wildfire evacuation routes, particularly hardening of wildfire evacuation routes. We lost a police officer in the 91 firestorm due to congestion on an evacuation route. We've seen many fires where evacuation routes have not been cleared of flammable fuels, causing the evacuation routes themselves to basically become ovens. And our city seems vulnerable to that. There's more details in the report, but in the interest of time and the late hour, I think I'll stop my remarks there.

Okay, let's go to the public comment.

Calling in the names that signed up to speak on item S4. In no particular order, you can come up to the podium, state your name for the record. David Boatwright, Asada Olabala, Blair Beekman, and Elizabeth Stage.

Yes. Thank you, good evening, I'm Elizabeth Stage, D4 resident. I'm a member of the Wildfire Prevention Commission, but I am here speaking as a community member to underscore the urgency of these recommendations. Tomorrow night, the Oakland Hills will be under a red flag warning. I'm sure you all know what to do. You got it on AC alerts. You got your go bag ready. You know your evacuation zone, right? I do. I will tell you how worried I am and suggest how worried you might or might not be. Why the urgency? Oakland Fire did a great job with the Keller Fire, contained it before it engulfed the whole city. If the winds hadn't died down in 91, the entire city of Oakland would have been toast. As it is now when we have fires in the hills, the particulate matter hits everybody in Oakland, particularly the.

Thank you for your comments, your time is up.

David Boatwright, there's no way I can get through this in one minute. You guys have a copy of it. Can somebody up there just read it out? I mean, you've got more time than I do. Seriously. I've been here for three hours.

Try your best, David.

The Public Safety Committee and all council committees should improve their oversight and follow up of approvals by requiring periodic reviews of the many high cost, high impact projects it oversees. Measure MM was authorized one and a half years ago by voters. However, the management and implementation of this measure is not progressing so that its very important objectives can be met. Examples of areas needing more attention are in its April 16th meeting, five months after the Wildfire Prevention Commission's first public meeting, the city's MM supervisory employee borrowed from the Parks Department was introduced as a 90-day temporary position that ends about June 30th.

Thank you for your comments.

Asking if you wanted the time. I continue to challenge you on the fact that Skyline High School, with 1,400 students, there is no evacuation plan. Those students are instructed to go to the football field and shelter in place. You continue to ignore it. The credibility of that, I question your credibility. Shadow Woods, where I lived before, the balconies allow barbecuing with less than 10 feet structure, and there's high risk for fires. My son lives there now, and downstairs, he's using charcoal, flames popping up all over the place. So there are a lot of things that are not being brought up, that's one of them, that is high risk. You're just talking about the visitation, but there are practices.

Thank you for your comments. Chair, at this time, all names have been called. Okay.

Thank you. I do have some questions. When I look at this report, and I've started to really ask some questions around the parcel taxes that we levy and how we're spending them, I don't see an itemization of what we're spending the money on. I see a lot of narrative. Why is that not available?

An itemized spending plan for Measure MM was included in your budget adoption process last year for this. I'm happy to go through the high level for it was about $800,000 for goat grazing. The majority of the rest was for shrub clearance with about 200,000 additional and for the hiring of a Measure MM supervisor that you heard about from several commenters, and about $200,000 for tree clearance, which is right now set to be spent, I believe, in Laurel Canyon over the next month or so. So that constitutes most of the $2.6 million. There's small parts in there for attorneys and for finance and for others in review, but that's the bulk of the spending as outlined in your budget approval from last year.

Okay, thank you for clarifying that. I would just, my commentary is that reports going forward need to include that level of detail. I don't want just narrative. It needs to be spelled out. There's a lot of just skepticism, clearly with what happened with Measure E, with that we're spending the money right, that we're even spending down these parcel taxes, and so I just, we need to see that evidence, and whenever we discuss a parcel taxes and just aimed at you, that is the sort of level of detail that I expect. So, thank you. Any questions from my colleagues? Council Member Fife.

Yes, through the Chair, what is the timeline on hiring that director position, the manager position? Do we know where we are in the process of? Anybody?

So through the chair, I actually just had to ask our parliamentarian if there is a full-time FTE built into the measure or if this is something that was allocated. So through the chair to council member Fife, I did, that's why I went up and asked Daniel if we had it funded as well. So I was doing a little bit of research here. So I don't know if we have that information, if it's a full-time FTE that was budgeted through the measure. and if there is continued funding for this FTE ongoing. I don't know the answers to that, but my colleagues may.

Oh, the ones that are at home eating dinner right now? Okay, is it possible that we get that information emailed to us before Friday?

yes it's it's in the measurement so the measure specifically says that it will include staffing to manage implementation of the funds and in the last budget process the council appropriated funding in oakland public works for the hiring of that position

But my question is, what is the timeline? Because what I heard from our presenter is that that's the single biggest action that we could take to bring that person on. So I'm trying to understand the timeline and what needs to happen to bring that person on.

We don't have a representative here from Public Works tonight, but we'll be sure to get you that information as quickly as possible, certainly before Friday.

Is it Public Works or HR? Do we know?

Position is housed within Public Works, but obviously the hiring is done through the HR process So we'll ensure that we get opinions from both of them to provide the accurate information I also understand that chief Covington happens to be online chief coming in Do you happen to know this the answer to this question even though it is within Public Works?

Yeah, good evening chief Covington open fire Through the chair. This has been kind of a back-and-forth issue between Public Works and fire and Um, that the measure money was put into public works budget. That's why this position falls within public works. But as we've tried to hire that position. 1, we found we came into budget issues, obviously, as the city, the entire city did, but also there's some very, um. specific qualifications that this particular position has to have for us to be CEQA compliant. There's another compliance issue with bird nesting. So some other issues have come up as we've tried to identify this position. Public Works has put one of their current positions into an interim position just so that we can keep the measure going. We can get contracts approved and get the work done but um it is still an ongoing process that we're working our way through it's been a little clunky but i think we're towards the end of it okay can someone just explain why this is a public works position

I've just noticed, you know, for example, when we had our Life Enrichment Committee, that again, there was, through Measure Q, money that was being for parks that was going through public works. And I know that an ongoing conversation is just, you know, this sometimes this disconnect between public works and parks, like the people who see the the daily degradation of parks and the department who's responsible for the actual maintenance.

So Madam Chair, I could answer from the fire department's perspective. The reason that I believe that the budget and finance department put the funding into public works is because they are the keeper of contracts. And so they had some contracts in place and they were procuring other contracts for roadside clearance and other vegetation management measures. And that's why they received the measure in money. We were initially we thought the fire department was going to receive the funding, but it didn't. So we'll see. You know, we're kind of using it as a litmus test to see how things go for this first year and see if there needs to be adjustments moving forward. But we've worked. with um tirelessly with public works to make sure that we get contracts in place and these these positions are hired full-time so that we can get the get the work done throughout the city okay thank you director johnson did you have anything to add here no okay councilmember houston i'm through the chair i have one of my commissioners in the audience and i wanted to know how what her thought is is how public works can assist the commission

um that was just my question i wanted to call her up and see what she thinks um rhonda can you come up here real quick i just wanted to find out what do you think about how how can we assist this commission that's been that's come on up here young lady Good evening, you've been here all day. I saw you up in the crowd and all of a sudden everybody going, I still see you.

You did, you did. How can Public Works assist the commission?

How can they support you guys? Thanks a lot for asking the question. The biggest support would be for Public Works to provide the monies that are needed to support our commission. And we've already had the support of the fire department And that's pretty much about it. We need the funding.

Okay, thank you. I just wanted to hear you.

From, oops.

She's scared of the mic.

Yeah, we need. Okay, thank you, Rhonda, thank you. I just wanted to hear your voice.

Okay, do you want to make a motion, Council Member Houston? Yes, I'll make a motion to move it. I'll second that.

This is to receive and file in committee. Okay, yes, you got it.

We have a motion made by Council Member Houston, seconded by Chair Wong, to approve the recommendations of staff and to receive and file this informational report in committee. On roll, Council Members Brown. Aye. Five.

I wanted to ensure just that we're getting that information as soon as possible. If the budget has been already allocated, I want to see if we can do what we were asked by our commissioners. So I don't know if that needs to be reflected. It doesn't. Yeah, aye. It's unnecessary.

Through the Chair, to Council Member Fife, if you wanted to get additional information on this item, maybe the motion instead of accepting it would be to continue it to another date to get that information, because otherwise if it gets accepted, the item is done, and so to get that information, it could be a different motion to forward to Council and at that point ask for a supplemental for that information. I just wanted to lay out there what the limitations are if you accept it and you want additional information the item is done at this point I just recanted because it feels like this can be done administratively so that's why I said never mind

Okay. Okay. Aye. I'll quickly repeat the motion. It's a motion made by Council Member Houston, seconded by Chair Wong to receive and file this informational report in committee. On roll again. Council Members Brown. Aye. Five. Aye. Houston. Aye. And Chair Wong. Aye. Thank you. Item S4 passes with four ayes to receive and file this informational report in committee. Moving on to open forum. Calling in the names that signed up to speak for open forum. Deborah Nelson, Assata Olabala, Blair Beekman. David Boatwright, Millie Cleveland, Ann Jenks, Paula Hawthorne, Gabriel Garcia. L. Autumn King, Burnett, Ana Ordaz, Maria Leon, Daniella Flores, Damaris Jimenez, Norikata Matias, Leticia Diaz, Leticia Ramirez, Florestina Tok, Martha Sanchez, Meiko Koma, Laura Aguilar, and Adriana Martinez, and Griselda Jimenez.

Here's some guidelines for the NSA. Please do not be insulting, bragging after 23 years you're coming out of the NSA. I heard some conversations about people in the city bragging 23 years. Please do not. be insulting by saying we're gonna be enforcing constitutional policing. The NSA is a specific lawsuit around police brutality, excessive force, racial profiling, falsifying of records related mostly to African Americans. 119 people filed the case, 118 were African-Americans. I don't want to come back in here and tell you, don't brag about you coming in. And when you come out of it, you still have anti-blackness going on in the Oakland Police Department. The black police officer's grievance indicates in 20...

David Boatwright, I'm not gonna read the rest of this, but the important comment is, as a resident of the city and a payer of Measure MM wildfire prevention parcel tax, I do not feel confident entering the second fire season since MM was approved one and a half years ago that the city has done everything it needs to do to try to avoid a wildfire in Oakland. Hey everybody, wake up. We have a fire danger. We need to be doing something about it and not just talking. Read this list, pass it on to whoever needs to see it, but we gotta do something. It's dangerous.

Good evening, council members. My name is Gabriel Garcia. I'm the policy and advocacy director for Youth Alive. It's been a long day. I just want to thank you for your attention to the violence prevention, intervention, and healing spending. Throughout the conversation, your critical, thoughtful questions were really appreciated. I know for us, just listening to some of the comments you made, Council Member Fife and Houston, our goal has been to bring in additional funding from the state of California to augment Measure NN, and I would like to reiterate that measure nn is the floor not the ceiling on the city support for violence prevention intervention and healing we're grateful for the proposed funding from dvp there are many great organizations and programs not included in that funding so as you're looking at the budget would definitely appreciate consideration on how we could just bring more funding more attention more support to those programs and organizations thank you

Anne Jenks, District 3. I'm with the Coalition for Police Accountability. And you know, you're not going to rationally balance this budget without looking at OPD spending and ensuring that efficient and effective policing and public safety is not just throwing whatever dollars you have at it. I don't hear this committee spend time looking at the OPD budget seriously. Over a year ago, you instructed the city to look at beginning to civilianize the internal affairs staff over to CIPRA, which would be less expensive and more effective. Internal affairs has been part of every scandal and every cover-up. And you could have saved money there. But then you never followed up, and the city administrator for over a year just didn't do anything. And I'm sorry. There's also the police union contract that's being negotiated right now. There's massive money involved in that, and it needs to be discussed here. It needs to be discussed in this committee.

It's been a long day. 515, I've been waiting for this. Good evening, council members. My name is Deborah Nelson. I'm a lifelong East Oakland resident, and I'm here regarding the 73rd Avenue Active Routes Transportation Project. For nearly two years, I have been asking questions about how community engagement was conducted for this project. I am not here to debate whether safety matters. Safety absolutely matters. I'm here because transparency matters, too. I want to acknowledge Director Josh Rowan for meeting with me directly, helping me to facilitate responses to questions I had raised. My concern is not with one individual, it's whether overall engagement process for people who matter, the voices in East Oakland, not the bike and the pedestrian community, but transparency in engagement. That hasn't happened. Director Josh Rowan told me himself, DOT doesn't even have an engagement component. And to that extent, transparency needs to engage. And so do.

Thank you for your comments. Thank you for your comments, Chair,

Sure, go ahead, Council Member Peterson.

So can you elaborate on that a little bit, Deborah? I can.

Since 2024, when I heard about this project, and I have lived in East Oakland for the length of time I have, and I have watched DOT and the bike and pedestrian community come and decimate Oakland, and I saw that BRT come through, we knew it was bad. It's no surprise it's that amount of fatalities along that corridor. Brookins, Allen Temple, probably not the social services components that are within Eastmont Mall, definitely not the principal at Markham Elementary, not my uncles, not my colleagues that live not on 73rd as the Oakland side report reported yesterday that they engaged people on 73rd. They haven't engaged. I am requesting that as a council that you responsibly look into the transparency of engagement and what happened to asking for $30 million in 2024 and now it's $40 million. I wanna know for public funds, where does that, what's the difference? So I wrote my letter today. to DOT, to several of you, all as a council, to mayor, to city administrator, and I will continue to advocate for transparency rather than the lack of voices that come from East Oakland, because we tired, and everybody's not gonna sit here until nine something at night, like I did. But I'm trying to represent, and I think that there is an expectation for fairness and equality, and that Nobody is riding bikes to the extent that the city of Oakland can consciously request $40 million to put a bike lane down 73rd from Foothill to East 14th, Ken.

Did you hear me?

And it was 30. What's the difference in the 10 million? That ain't right, we need an audit and we need a lot more. And I'ma be back, because I'm not letting this go. I have a trail of emails from 2024. And I'm on this.

Thank you for your comments. Chair, all names have been called.

Okay, thank you. Thank you for everyone who came and has stayed engaged with us through this late evening. And with that, we are adjourned.