City Council - Regular Meeting

the Pacifica City Council. City Clerk Coffey, could we have a roll call, please? And we understand that Council Member Beckmeyer is on her way.

Council Member Espinosa?

Here.

Council Member Beer? Here. Council Member Beckmeyer is en route. Vice Mayor Wright?

Present.

Mayor Bowles? Here.

So I'm going to just start by reading... an announcement about public commenting at these meetings. Public meetings are a limited public forum, meaning that there are rules for commenting at these meetings. Comments on non-agendized items must address matters within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city, and comments on agendized items must relate to that specific item. If comments do not fall into one of these categories, the city will provide you with an initial warning to stay within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city or on topic. If the warning is not followed, I will direct the city clerk to cut off the microphone. And throughout this warning system, I will seek the assistance of the city attorney in identifying comments not related to the agenda item or not within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city. And I just want to welcome City Attorney Mark Tran, who's sitting in for City Attorney Kenyon tonight. Thank you for being here.

Thank you.

With that, I will read our land acknowledgement. The City of Pacifica acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who were the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We honor the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples for their enduring commitment to Mother Earth. As the indigenous protectors of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush Ohlone have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all the peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. And it's my turn to lead us in the salute to the flag.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And then I do want to remind everyone that you need to put a parking pass on your car dashboard. So if you haven't done that, there are slips downstairs right by the exit door. So our first item is a special presentation presentation a proclamation for pride month um and i'd like to invite uh dana johnson um the co-chair of the san mateo council san mateo county lgbtqia commission um to the podium if you don't see them here okay oh okay yeah please okay that sounds good come on up and and uh Yeah, see if you can flag her down if she walks in. Yeah, if they walk in, sorry. Sorry, and I need my reading glasses. This is smaller. Welcome, Laura. Okay, whereas the City Council of the City of Pacifica recognizes and proclaims the month of June 2026 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Aromantic+, LGBTQIA+, Pride Month throughout the City of Pacifica. And whereas the City of Pacifica joins the County of San Mateo in observing Pride Month by raising pride flags at City Hall, the Community Center, Council Chambers, and Shark Park Library for the month of June to honor the histories of LGBTQIA plus communities and to support the rights of all citizens to experience equality and freedom from discrimination. And whereas the pride flag is widely recognized as a symbol of support and identity for the LGBTQIA plus community, and whereas while society at large increasingly supports LGBTQIA plus equality, it is essential to acknowledge that the need for ongoing education and activism remains vital to end discrimination, prejudice, and harassment. And whereas reinforcing the principle that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, the City of Pacifica is committed to supporting visibility, dignity, and equality for LGBTQIA plus people in our diverse community. And whereas the City of Pacifica operates on the principle that every individual has infinite dignity and worth and recognizes the immeasurable impact of the LGBTQIA plus community on the cultural, civic, and economic success of our city. And whereas celebrating Pride Month expands awareness and provides support and advocacy for San Mateo County's LGBTQIA plus community, and is also an opportunity to engage in dialogue, strengthen alliances, build acceptance, and advance equal rights. Now therefore I, Christine Bowles, on behalf of the City Council of the City of Pacifica, and all its citizens to hereby proclaim the month of June 2026 as Pride Month in support of the LGBTQIA plus community and be it further resolved that the pride flag will be raised on June 1st, 2026, recognizing all LGBTQIA plus residents whose influential and lasting contributions to our neighborhoods make the city of Pacifica a vibrant community in which to live, work and play.

Thank you. As the board president of Coast Pride, thank you so much to all of our city council members, and happy Pride Month.

Oh, thank you, Laura. Is that all? Do you want to tell the whole community a little bit more about the Pride event?

Sure, I actually have notes for public comment.

Oh, you can make them right now.

I'll make them right now. May I just grab my... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I know Dana was going to try to dial in. So, Dana, if you can hear this, I'm really sorry. I'm not trying to steal your thunder.

Do you know if they're online?

Do you see someone in Zoom?

No.

There's not? Okay. We must have had a miscommunication. But here I am. So this is great. As I mentioned earlier, my name is Lauren Smith. I'm the president of Coast Pride. And what I wanted to talk about during public comment, but I'll talk about now, is Pacifica Pride, which is coming up on Saturday, June 6th. It actually, at 11 a.m., we'll start our parade, our procession down Palmetto. And I'll just give you my spiel as well, because I have to give the plug to our programs. But on June 6th, Coast Pride is bringing Pacifica Pride to life right here in our own backyard. A family-friendly celebration where neighbors can come together, kids are welcome, and our whole community can show up exactly as they are. Pacifica Pride is a public declaration that this city sees its LGBTQ plus residents, that this community belongs here, and that Pacifica stands for inclusion, especially at a moment when that message has never been more needed. We live in a time when LGBTQ plus people, and particularly queer youth, are being targeted and made to feel unwelcome in their own communities. Pacifica Pride pushes back on that. It tells every queer kid, every same-sex family, every trans person on the coast side, you are not alone, you are home. Coast Pride delivers on that promise year-round. At the center of our work is Owl Cove, which if you're not familiar with, I highly encourage you to learn more about. It's a new drop-in center in Half Moon Bay offering mental health, primary care, and peer support for any young person who lives on the coast between 12 and 25, regardless of who they are or where they come from. And Pacifica Pride is a key pillar of that same mission here in Pacifica, bringing it out in the open for the whole community to see. And at Coast Pride, community is our superpower. Everything we've been built has been built together, and our collaboration with city governments and engaged citizens like yourselves isn't a nice to have. It's essential. As federal funding continues to shrink, I have to have my shameless plug here, we are asking the council to fund Pacifica Pride and send an unambiguous message about the kind of city Pacifica chooses to be. Pacifica has always looked out for its own. LGBTQ plus Pacificans are your own. Please show up for them on June 6th.

Thank you so much. Are there some comments council members would like to make?

Yeah. Lauren, it's so good to see you. I'm so glad that you're the president of the board of Coast Pride. They got a good one with you. Miss you. I miss being on the board. I really do. This is the first time I haven't been involved with Pride. I haven't been in the planning committee. I haven't been able to do anything. That day is a very special fifth grader in my life who's graduating from fifth grade, so I can't even come to the festival, but let me tell you, that boy comes first, and I'll just bring him along next year. Coast Pride is an extremely important agency on the coast side. I encourage everyone to take a look at their website to support Coast Pride in any way they can. The young people from Pescadero to Pacifica are benefiting greatly from all the services that Coast Pride is providing up and down our coast side. In my day job, I do the prevention and intervention work at Alcove San Mateo. And so I'm really excited that there's going to be an Alcove on the coast side. It's going to be perfect for the coast side. And so I'm really excited about that. We can never have enough services for our young people. So I'm super stoked about that. And everyone show up at Pride. And yeah, thank you so much, Lauren and Dana. I miss you.

Thank you very much for showing up tonight. Sitting up here gives me an interesting chance to reflect. In my short lifetime, people never would have sat up here and talked about this stuff. And how things have changed that we're able to do a proclamation and talk about it in public, on TV. That's a big deal. And I just want to leave you guys with that. Thank you.

It is important not to celebrate on June, but to celebrate every day. And Pacifica is very diverse, and we still have a long way to go when it comes to the gay community. Even in my own culture, we have a lot of education to do still. And I wanted to let them know that we see you, we value you, and we are proud to be your neighbors. Thank you.

It's very rewarding for me to see that pride's happening, continuing to happen. I think back on that first year, OMG, when we had to have a parade down the street. We had to and did, and it was their children in the room, but it was a challenge. It was a challenge because anyone who's been to Fogfest knows what the reality of Palmetto is with the cross streets and all of that. So to have a parade safely down our street, Palmetto, walking, is challenging. And so we do a car parade now, woot! Because y'all figured that out and said, yeah, let's just do a car parade. So it's the working together, the collaboration. It makes me cry when I come around the bend and see the pride flag. I cannot wait for June 1 to see that because it is so meaningful and special. Really thrilled that you're the president. And also Dana's here. So Dana gets to talk when we're all done talking.

Go, Christine, go. I'm sorry you missed the proclamation, Dana, but we'll give it to you and take a picture in a moment after we're done here. But thank you so much for being with us today. We're really grateful for all the work that Coast Pride does here in Pacifica and down our coast. And what a celebration it is, right, for our diverse community. The parade is still really fun, even though, you know, they don't close the streets and there aren't people necessarily standing in every corner. But you can come early, decorate your car. There are always, you know, additional supplies there. And, you know, as Lauren mentioned, the celebration itself at IBL really is a joyous gathering. It warms my heart to see young people that are, you know, that obviously identify in one of these letters, the LGBTQ plus, IA plus, really being their whole selves there in community with all of us around. So do join us. It's a fun day.

Through the mayor.

Yeah.

One thing I forgot to say. I'm super, super, super proud and excited that this year The Lions Club of Pacifica will be tabling at IBL.

Would you like to make some?

I'm Dana Johnson.

Hi, Dana. Hi.

Thank you for having me. I identify with they and he pronouns. I am here to accept the proclamation on behalf of the LGBTQIA Plus Commission and as well as I hold space as a board member for Coast Pride. So I'll be accepting it on that behalf too. I just wanted to say thank you to the City Council of Pacifica. and all that supported with the Progressive Pride Flag Proclamation. We truly, truly appreciate this affirmation of inclusion for the LGBTQIA plus community here in San Mateo County, but even moreover on the coast. My fellow commissioners and I will continue to advocate for the importance of equitable and inclusive community for our diverse LGBTQIA plus community. We are constantly and constantly trying to make sure that we are seen, that we are visible, and that we are belonged in the spaces. And so the proclamation and hopefully raising of the Progress Pride flag really lets us know as a community that we are belonged here and that we do have safety here in this space. So again, we thank you for the proclamation and look forward to your Pacifica Pride on June 6th.

Thank you. I'm so glad you're here. Yeah, and if you want to stay there and learn, if you want to come up too, we can take a picture.

I was somewhere.

Thank you.

So I did want to open public comment on this item. I don't have any cards.

There was one.

There was one from Lauren that we took. Yeah. So if anybody else would like to make a comment, come on up. And you can fill out a yellow card in the back afterwards. Is there anyone online? I don't see anyone getting up. So I will close public comment and then bring it back to council. Before we jump into the consent calendar, I wanted to ask if council was open to rearranging item 4, the appointments to commissions, to the end of the meeting. since we have a lot of people here for the actual committee commission presentations.

I thought it was at the end of the meeting.

Yep.

Crazy. Yes, I completely support that idea. OK.

Thank you. Do we need a vote on that, Sarah, or just make a motion to amend the order of the agenda and vote? OK.

So moved.

Second.

OK.

Thank you. And then that brings us to our consent calendar, items one to three. Are there any council members that want to pull any of those items? Seeing none. And I also don't have any cards for the consent calendar. I'll open up public comment just in case. Anyone on the phone? Okay. I'll close public comment. So I'm willing to And obtain a motion unless there are other questions or comments.

I move to approve the consent calendar.

Second. Please vote.

The motion to approve the consent calendar made by Councilmember Beer, seconded by Councilmember Beckmeyer. The motion passes unanimously. Great. Thank you.

Okay. And then that brings us to public comments on items not on the posted agenda. I currently have seven cards, eight cards. So we'll start, you'll have three minutes. I'll start with Ed Ochi, followed by Delia McGrath, and then Charles Gautius. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing your last name. Gautius. Go ahead, Ed.

Thank you. EVENING COUNCIL MEMBERS, CITY STAFF. MY NAME IS ED OCHE. I'M SPEAKING NOT FOR THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE, BUT RATHER AS AN INDIVIDUAL AND ONE OF THE SORT OF LOOSE ORGANIZERS OF PROJECT 1334. AND JUST WANTED TO GIVE A QUICK UPDATE. WE DID OUR OFFICIAL LAUNCH AT THE LAST COUNCIL MEETING. And we're actually pleased to announce that by now, so that's barely two weeks plus a week of organizing, we already have 48 businesses which have signed up, meaning there's at least 48 businesses saying WalletHub didn't tell the full story. Number's pretty remarkable considering the short fuse this whole thing has had and the kind of ad hoc way we're doing this. When the project was conceived, we were planning to run it for the month of May because that coincided with the Small Business Administration's Small Business Month. We're going to be consulting because we're finally starting to get some masks there. We're still getting sign-ups of businesses. This morning, I had two more sign-ups at our... So it's still rolling there. So we're actually going to go back to the businesses who have signed up. This is their thing. So we're going to poll them and ask them, kind of, what do you want to do with this project? Because we are starting to gain some traction. We're getting some media attention. And we'll be back at the next council meeting just to tell you what the decisions with businesses were made on that. I do want to take a moment, though, to do some very special thank yous. Number one, thank you to the council members. I know that a number of you, I've gotten referrals back from them, so thank you for going out and talking to businesses, talking to residents about what we're trying to do here. Also want to thank the council members who've given time on things like holidays to show up and speak with the media on the project's behalf. Also, did want to kind of thank the city. You paid official attention by mentioning it in Connect with Pacifica. Actually, you don't know what that means to some businesses and the organizers because Connect with Pacifica hasn't always been a real good avenue for communicating this stuff. A couple volunteers that hide in the background or don't get mentioned a lot. We have Paul Jordan, Pirates of Manor. He's been doing a tremendous amount of legwork out there. We have Anna Biddle who came out of nowhere to pick up our social media stuff was lagging very badly behind. It didn't launch. She picked it up and overnight she started doing stuff for us. So they get shout outs. All the participating businesses get a shout out for jumping in there and doing some really creative advertising. Real creative thinking about what their 1334 specials are. And finally for the Pacifica residents who embraced Project 1334. So more to come. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Ed. And have a luck there lemons with 1334, all over town. Delia, followed by Charles, and then Sam Houser.

Good evening, Council. It's nice to be here. I haven't been here for quite a while. So I want to bring your attention to two specific concerns that are both having to do with world peace, but also because of our implication in wars all over the place, the huge military budget is impacting what we cannot do here in Pacifica. So I want to make that link with the first concern that I'm bringing. Two years ago, in May of 2024, The then city council, which three of you are still from that council on this one, unanimously passed a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza. And the Pacific of Peace people, of which I'm a member, had provided some ideas and language, and ultimately some of that was incorporated into the resolution. Despite the ceasefire of 10-20-25, Gaza continues to be destroyed. People are dying of hunger and lack of medical care, and many are still being killed daily. Shockingly, our government continues to arm Israel with weapons to carry out this ongoing genocide. I personally have persistently requested Congressman Sam Liccardo to join the growing numbers of congressional representatives, there are 69, latest count, 16 from California, who are sponsoring H.R. 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, introduced by Congresswoman Delia Ramirez of Illinois. I'm hoping that you, dear members of Pacifica City Council, will use your influence to press Congressman Liccardo to become a co-sponsor of this important legislation. It may even be time for a new resolution from this City Council for that purpose. And my second concern is the safe parking program must be continued. It is due to expire in June for lack of funding. Do not let it end. There must be a way to continue this invaluable program so competently and effectively being implemented by our Pacifica Resource Center. So this is one example of all the money going to the military to do bad things all over the world. We need services here. Thank you.

Thank you, Delia. So Charles, followed by Sam, followed by Al, Alit, and Alisa.

Hi, my name is Charlie Getchis, and I live at 311 Nelson. A week ago, I sent an email to the city council about the increase in air traffic noise over the Manor area. Subsequently, I found out that the city council has actually dealt with this issue before and has done a lot of work on this, including sending a letter to the FAA a couple years ago. But currently, allegedly because of runway repair at San Francisco International, we're getting just a steady stream of huge airliners over our neighborhood. And we will be going to the community group meeting next week. And I know some of you are involved in that as well. But the airport has said that... There's going to be a 30% increase in air traffic over areas of Pacifica until October. We feel that it's much more than that because of the size and the height of the flights. And we'd like to request that a letter be sent to the airport requesting specifics of source-based data because they're the ones in charge of administering whether the flights take off and where they go. And so we'd like to know what the air traffic was over the manor before March and what it is now. And we'd also like to get a commitment, if not date specific because of construction delays, we'd like to know for sure that it's only a temporary increase. And with that, I'd like to thank you for your time. Thank you.

Elisa Fassler, thank you for hearing us today on this matter. And I think Charlie said everything that we wanted to say as far as coming to this meeting on June 3rd. But just from a different perspective of what we're actually dealing with, I mean, these flights are, they're nonstop. There is basically maybe two minutes in between each plane. The sky is constantly rumbling. It never stops. Our bed on our third floor bedroom vibrates because that's how close these planes are. Sometimes when you see them fly by, you feel like you can almost throw a rock and hit them. That's how close they are. We don't like to spend time outside anymore. We keep our windows and doors shut, even on nice days. It's becoming maddening and it's becoming absurd. We do understand that there is runway work going on. But this started going on, I would have to say, maybe late last year is when the traffic really started picking up. This year will be 20 years for me at our house. My husband has lived there since 1989. We understand traffic increases, flights increase, you know, it's just the way of life. But what's been happening within this past almost year has become almost intolerable. And we really would like some help with our voices to let SFO, the FAA, know what's going on to help us with this.

Thank you so much, Lise. I do, yeah. Okay, Sam, yeah. Come on up. And then Gloria Stofan, you're next.

Good evening, council members. Samantha Hauser speaking as an individual. I wanted to just speak very briefly about pollinators. I've noticed some next-door posts about bees swarming, and we happen to have one, a huge swarm, in our front yard over the weekend. And we're a city that's rooted in climate positivity. And being a tree city, we could also be a pollinator city. So I just wanted to provide some information that I feel like I've learned, which is that When bees swarm, it's because they're looking for a new home, just like many of us. They're in their least aggressive state, and it's not the time to kill them or call a terminator. It's the time to call someone like NorCal Bees and rehome them. So I just wanted to give a shout out to our little furry friends. Thank you.

Thank you, Samantha. Okay, Gloria, and then Ellen Haig, and then Suzanne Moore.

Good evening, city council members and city staff. My name is Gloria Stofan, a longtime resident and homeowner of Pacifica since 1966. Pacifica's safe parking program, very successful, proven program, may come to an end June 30th. That's next month. due to lack of funding and realizing that there is still a major housing crisis here on the coast as well as in the Bay Area, this isn't good news. Many of us are hoping that the program can remain or at least be extended to continue here on the coast. Those of us who work or have worked in a nonprofit know that once a program is lost, it's hard to get it back. This program's the only one of a kind on the coast and in this county. It provides wraparound services to our unhoused neighbors living in motorhomes to return to permanent housing. Currently, the Coast House is the only shelter on the coast which has a two-month wait list. Recently, the PRC's Pacifica Resource Center's Homeless Outreach Program has recently identified families living in large vehicles and motorhomes on the San Mateo Coast, and these include families of very young children to our newborn. At the recent annual strategy plan goal setting, the council directed city staff to seek ways to extend the program to assist the coastal unhoused. I know that our mayor, Mayor Bowles, has reached out to San Mateo, to Half Boom Bay's city councils, and I'm hoping that there's some type of solutions that we can probably extend this program to our coast neighbors, El Granada, Princeton, or Half Moon Bay. Please continue supporting this vital and irreplaceable program. As Delia said, don't let it end, please. Thank you.

Thank you, Gloria. So Ellen, followed by Suzanne, and then Linda Peoples.

Good evening, city council members. My name is Ellen Haig. I'm a long time, really long time, resident of Pacifica and a leader with Faith in Action Bay Area and Coastside Faith in Action. I'm speaking this evening about the Pacifica Safe Parking Program. This afternoon I looked on the City of Pacifica website to confirm the date that the program is scheduled to end. I'm happy to report that Rosie, the AI attendant, informed me that our successful safe parking program will continue until the year 2030. Well, I think Rosie was a little premature, but I will take what she told me as a very good omen. Yesterday, our country celebrated Memorial Day. There is a sacred Marine Corps belief no one left behind. I'm trusting in your leadership, compassion, and care for all members of our community, no one left behind. A society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members, and I have confidence that you will find the funding that will help with the help of the county, to support folks living in their RVs in Pacifica and continuing down the coast to expand the program. So that members of our community can work towards permanent housing and so that they have the ability and opportunity to move on in their lives and to flourish. Yes, we all belong. Thank you.

Thank you, Ellen. Suzanne Moore, Linda Peebles, and then my last card is Valerie Lappin.

Suzanne Moore, District 2, and my views are my own this evening. Oh, and I think Rosie's great, an optimist. And also, before I start, I just want to say I support Delia McGrath and her bid for peace. Very soon we will receive two county reports on homelessness. The executive summary of the homeless count for 2026 and the county's first homeless mortality report. I thought this might be a good time to consider what we already know about homelessness and our unhoused neighbors. There are two causes of homelessness, poverty and lack of affordable housing. Pacifica and our coast are among the highest rental rates in our county with a low vacancy rate. Many workers here have seen the cost of living climb much higher than wages, especially this year, with costs of housing, food, gas, utilities all going up because of war. Who are our homeless? Our unhoused are our working poor. Past surveys show that many were formerly housed in our community but were priced out. There seems to be an increase of first-time homeless among folks over the age of 50 who are on fixed incomes. Those most at risk for homelessness are veterans, young people transitioning out of foster care, victims of domestic violence, young families, people of color, and LGBTQ+. Past studies show that stable housing increases mental and physical well-being and actually increases longevity. Homelessness does the opposite. Mental and physical health deteriorate and longevity decreases. In fact, the community as a whole benefits from reduction in homelessness with increased housing stability for our workforce, reduction of environmental concerns involving trash and waste, and improved sense of community well-being. Now we know there are successful ways to reduce homelessness. By providing temporary and permanent housing with wraparound services we can prepare and assist successful transition to permanent housing and productive transition and return to our community. Several studies, including work out of the primary care unit for homeless at UCSF, show it can be done. Pacifica Safe Parking Program with places for respite and individualized plans to regain housing demonstrated a greater success rate of return to permanent housing than any other similar program. I'm grateful to the city's past support for the Safe Parking Program. The need is still there. The year has been tough. Please continue efforts to find funding and support for our successful program, which meets continued community need. Thank you.

Thank you, Suzanne. Go ahead, Linda. Hello. There is a little block down there that you can pull out to stand on, if that's helpful. We can see you. Oh, hello. That's much better.

Thank you. Thank you. Hello, dear council members. I'm glad to see you. My name is Linda Peebles, as I think most of you know. My husband David and I have lived in Pacifica for almost 60 years now. Amazing. I also would like to speak in support of renewing Pacifica's safe parking program. This program has been a success. Since its beginning in 2022, it has allowed many individuals and families to go from temporary shelter in motor homes to actual permanent housing. That's success. This program is consistent also with Pacifica's strategic plan, as well as San Mateo's continuum of care program, both of which are committed to ending homelessness. We are currently living in a messy and very chaotic time. There are lots of things that we cannot control happening on the national level. But we can make differences in our own communities. Pacifica's Safe Parking Program is a successful community program. We are helping our own neighbors. We are fostering hope and human dignity. We are making a difference. I know all you wonderful city council members love Pacifica and the people who live here, despite some of us being a little pesky sometimes. So please, please renew this safe parking program. Thank you.

Thank you, Linda. And Valerie, your last card.

I think I need the Barbara Boxer box myself. Being 5'2". Hello, Mayor Bowles and city council members. Thank you for this opportunity to speak. I'd like to talk to two issues. One is the airport noise issue. I'm here to support what Charlie Getchis and the others said. I live at 616 Manor Drive. So I'm higher up the hill. I don't get the noise quite as badly, but when I heard that this was going to be going on until October, my first reaction was, okay, we can tolerate that. But when Charlie explained to me that these planes are bigger, I got concerned about what might happen beyond, too. So I support their efforts and thank them for bringing that to our attention. The other issue I'd like to talk about is somewhat related. It's also a noise issue. It's about the fireworks. This weekend, they started already. I have a beautiful mix, flat-coated retriever, golden retriever, who just goes bonkers when the fireworks go off, and it takes hours to settle her down. Two years ago, the fireworks in my neighborhood actually started the first of June, and last year, they lasted after July 4th, and I never called the police before, but When it was two days past July 4th, I was beside myself and called, and I spoke with a dispatcher who was very sympathetic, and she explained to me how difficult it is to kind of find the culprits. And so I raised this issue. And this year, I spent a good part of the weekend, even before I heard the fireworks, trying to find a place where I can go over the July 4th weekend and take my dog. And that's probably going to cost me about $1,000. To me it's worth it for the peace of mind, but I kind of feel resentful that people are making me spend my money to leave my home during a holiday where I'd like to be here in Pacifica. So I raised this just, it seems like every year this happens and we wring our hands and we can't figure out what to do about it. And I spoke, sorry, spoke with one neighbor last year and we thought maybe we could do a neighborhood watch and sort of assist the police. and trying to find these people who are setting off the illegal fireworks. So I just want to raise it now because we have a little time. And thank you for your attention to this.

Thank you, Valerie. Appreciate it. Okay, that's the last card I have. And we don't have any raised hands. Okay. So I will close public comment. All right. And so that brings us to item five. So the annual reports to city council from The Planning Commission, Emergency Preparedness and Safety Commission, Beautification Advisory Committee, Library Advisory Committee, and Open Space and Parkland Advisory Committee. So we'll ask our city manager, Shawn Sharpentier, to introduce this item.

Yes, this is the annual reports from the Planning Commission, Emergency Preparedness and Safety, Beautification Advisory, Library Advisory, and Open Space and Parkland Advisory. And this is related to a City Council resolution that requests that the commissions come in annually and present on their accomplishments. These committees and commissions are a vital source of advisory information input to the city council as well as feedback from the residents as to what the city's doing and how to help shape city council policies and projects. And the first up is the planning commission.

Okay, great, thank you. So, Chair Hauser, whenever you're ready. Thank you so much for being here with us tonight with your lovely family.

Thank you guys so much. I'm Samantha Hauser. Hi again. I'm here with Commissioner Redfield. We are honored to be here representing the Planning Commission and we are honored to serve you guys and the City of Pacifica. So really quickly, I am just going to kind of go through who we are, what we do, and then I'm going to turn it over to Commissioner Redfield to talk about some of the metrics from last year. So if you go to the next slide, actually two slides then, to our committee members. Here we go. Oh, no. Turn around. So the purpose of the planning commission is to recommend and advise the council on matters related to programmatic and land use documents, essentially. And we also advise council on private development plans for the city in accordance with state planning law and our city's municipal code. And a lot of what we've done over the past year or so pertain to some of these bigger programmatic documents. If you go to the next slide, you'll see who our members were in 2025. So we're comprised mostly of construction, engineering, land use, and business professionals. We have two new members, Kevin Fisher, who has a background in biology, and Rebecca Lynn Sanchez, who has a background in real estate. And those folks, as you recall, joined in 2026. And then if you go to the next slide, you'll just see we had 15 regular meetings and two special meetings. The commission heard on nine different development proposals, including the Crespi mixed-use development, which was heard on a couple of times, and expansion of storage facility. And then as I mentioned on the earlier slide, we spent a lot of time kind of finalizing the work that we had put into 2024 projects looks at both short-term rental ordinance and the housing element rezoning. We were very pleased to have very informed staff, but also a very, very involved community who gave us a ton of great feedback, not just on short-term rentals, but also on the rezoning of the housing element.

Good evening, staff and council. Chris Redfield. Just the metrics for you to look over. So building permit activity from 21 to 25. So that pretty much stayed roughly the same. There's a pretty good average there in our numbers as far as the commercial evaluation has fluctuated, but still things are kind of moving up and we've got quite a few things in the pipeline. So residential evaluation as well. YOU CAN SEE ALL THE NUMBERS ON THERE, SO THAT'S DOWN A BIT, BUT THAT WILL...

IF WE COULD GO TO THE NEXT SLIDE, I THINK THAT WOULD SHOW.

THERE WE GO, THANK YOU. AND NEXT SLIDE. COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT ADUs. SO IN 21, 2021, we had 40 ADUs coming in. In 22, 28 units. 23, 17, so that decreased. In 24, it was 20. When in 25, we did 42 ADUs, so that's definitely an improvement. Next slide. And in a major policy, things to coincide with the goals of the council. Goal number one is to enhance organizational and fiscal stability. Strategy C is prioritize implementation of the economic opportunity study. And goal three, prioritize protection and development of affordable housing, a key thing. Strategy A is to complete the housing element update, which that's been done. Strategy B, UPDATE THE SHORT-TERM RENTAL ORDINANCE, ANOTHER MAJOR THING. STRATEGY C WAS TO PRIORITIZE THE HOUSING ELEMENT PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION. AND GOAL FOUR, PURSUE CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION. STRATEGY A WAS TO ADOPT AND BEGIN IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CLIMATE ACTION AND ADAPTATION PLAN. STRATEGY C TO UPDATE PACIFICA'S LOCAL COASTAL PLAN AND IMPROVE COMMUNICATIONS IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CALIFORNIA COASTAL COMMISSION.

And I just, you know, the ADU metrics, which Commissioner Redfield went over, are fabulous. That's not actually something that the commission participates in a lot, but it's really a testament to planning staff who are able to process so many of these ADUs because they do contribute to our arena, which is very important for our housing element. So with that, thank you very much. We're here to answer any questions.

Thank you. Thank you both. Are there some questions from council or comments?

One quick question. You mentioned that you approved 22 new units of residential housing. How many projects was that?

That's a good question.

I don't know if we have data on that. I think planning staff is here and looking, but I will say that that number does include things like ADUs, SB9 lots, like there are other, it's not like we got a 22 lot subdivision, which again, for our arena target would have been lovely, but we did not receive that.

Three projects.

Three.

Thank you. That was it.

I had a question, too. On one of the slides, it actually talked about the amount of commercial space the year before in 2024. I don't know if you can pull that slide back up. Not that one, the next one, yeah. So I see the little star in 22 that included the commercial valuation, $11,788 million, sorry, $11 million, was for the Civic Center renovation partially. But what is the $14 million in commercial valuation for last year?

It's significantly less.

Thank you, Mayor Bowles. Samantha Updegrave, Community Development Director. I do not have that information on me, but I'd be happy to look into it and follow up. Okay. All right.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments?

Well, I have one comment. Just the appreciation that I had for working with Commissioner Devine and Godwin and you two in particular, not to mention our other esteemed Members, and how fortunate I was to be able to work with you and how well you guys understand land use and long-term planning for our city and the vast amount of work you guys do for us. I just want to express my appreciation for all you do to make this city better. Thank you.

Yeah, the Planning Commission is extremely, extremely important to us. We honor the work that you do. I rely on it. because you are the experts. So thank you so much for your time and your service. Commissioner Redfield, you've come a long way. It's a good job.

I just want to say how much I appreciate your graciousness when we sometimes have to have a different point of view when things are appealed to us. And I always feel really torn. because I trust you and I know you're thinking through all the eventualities and working closely with our staff. And sometimes we just have a different decision that we need to make, but it is so important to me to have your counsel. Thank you.

I just want to thank you for what you do and your work is super important. You guys are as important as we are here because you had to make decisions on big projects, and we really appreciate you guys. The other thing that I'm looking at is the increase on ADU. Do you think it's because more information was available in 2025 than in 2024?

I mean, I would posit that we have a staff that's really closely paying attention to this and processing things more quickly. And I would also say that state housing law has come a long way on clarity. And with those two things combined, I think those are helping to push those numbers.

Thank you for your work. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. I, too, want to thank you for your work and the level of professionalism you bring with all your different backgrounds. TO THE COMMISSION AND ALSO A PLACE FOR THE COMMUNITY TO COME AND ASK QUESTIONS AND, YOU KNOW, FEEL LIKE THEY'RE BEING HEARD, TOO, WHEN THEY'RE BRINGING CONCERNS UP TO YOU. AND WE ALL UNDERSTAND, AND I'M GOING TO SAY THIS FOR THE PUBLIC WHO MAY NOT ALL UNDERSTAND, BUT THE STATE IS REALLY TYING OUR HANDS A LOT AND WHERE WE CAN HAVE A VOICE IN APPROVING PROJECTS, ESPECIALLY PROJECTS THAT INVOLVE HOUSING BECAUSE OF THE DIRE NEED FOR HOUSING. Anyway, thank you for all your work and partnership with staff to guide us forward. I'm looking forward to objective design standards and other work as part of the housing implementation that we have yet to come.

And I have something to say here. Are you done? I'm done. Go ahead. So someone came to your meetings last time you met, and that person was telling me how professional you guys were. and how proud she was of you guys. So I just wanted to let you know.

All right. Thank you. Thanks for being here tonight. And just to let everyone know, we'll take public comments at the end after the presentations from the other committees as well. So next up, we have the Emergency Preparedness and Safety Commission. And Chair Deborah Johnson is here to present. I see Bonnie Miller.

Michael Wallman. I don't think I need the stool, though. Hi, welcome. Thank you for letting us come and present. My name is Deborah Johnson. I'm the chair of the Emergency Preparedness and Safety Commission, and this is our report from May to May. This is Bonnie Miller, my co-chair. Vice chair. Vice chair.

Michael Wallman, member, commissioner, and Evelyn Taverna.

We run in a pack these days. Here we are. So next slide, please. So again, and I'm not gonna read all the names, because I think we can go through, but we are a member, we have active members, and this year we have two new members, Ophelia Bertuccio and Micah Wallman are our two new members, and we welcome them and look forward to many more opportunities for them to be involved in emergency preparedness. Next slide. We also have ex-officio members, Betty Fleming from the Red Cross, Jorge Machado from the Pacifica School District, Marcus Peppers for Jefferson Union High School, and our wonderful council liaison, Mayor Bowles, truly love having and our staff liaisons that I cannot express how wonderful the Pacifica Police Department has been in helping leading this and really great support Captain Bill Glasgow and Sergeant Tom Cumming. Excuse me, next slide. So the purpose of the Emergency Preparedness and Safety Commission shall be to recommend and advise the city council on city programs, activities, plans, and other related actions that assist the city in preparing for possible future disasters, and we all know it's not if, that we're really dealing with when. Next slide. So to gather information, we need to get information. And so we've had special presentations from various members in our community, county, statewide that come and speak with us about issues. And so this year we've had a presentation from the fire marshal of the North County Fire Authority, a wonderful presentation from the Ingrid B. Lacy sixth grade leadership class put together a beach safety brochure to hand out in hotels. It was, I just can't tell you how much it warmed my heart to see these sixth graders get up and make a presentation to us and make this beautiful flyer to hand out with excellent safety tips on beach safety. We had a presentation from United Policyholders and the Assistant Director of San Mateo County Emergency Management. So we kind of take in all these information to help as we move forward in what's important for our community. Next slide. So, year in review. Community education is basically a lot what we do. We want to get, as most people, aware, and so there's many events that we participate in. The Wildfire Awareness Event, I think, is happening right now as we speak. The San Mateo County Disaster Prep Day, we have had a table. I went to the very first one. That's how long I've been on this commission. and each year it has turned into this phenomenal disaster day with, oh my gosh, so much stuff for kids, food, just wonderful, and we've had a table each time, and of course our highlight was always the Pacifica Fog Fest where we have a table, earthquake preparedness, tsunami, two CERT courses, promoting SMC Alert, we did a first aid, class city council study session because we are reviewing our charter and moving forward with that. Next slide. So CERT, Community Emergency Response Team classes, and I have to give so much credit to Bonnie Miller, who has taken over as the volunteer chair and has really revitalized this program. Many of you in the room, you might see yourselves in these pictures, have participated. Four members of our commission, the four of us, are all CERT members. Our commission also helps with some of the teaching and on the final day as volunteers. And this is a wonderful program that gets the community involved. Plus, we now have like this cadre of people that come to help staff our table so we feel like we can get to more events. Next slide. Looking ahead, so we want to continue to improve community engagement with our classes, really working on increasing youth engagement. We've had the discussion with the city council about how to bring in youth into our commission, expanding social media, always adopt our charter review, and collaboration on the local hazard mitigation plan. Next up. Next slide. Looking ahead, so upcoming events. So, of course, tonight is the wildfire. Last fall, we were able to get a booth at the farmer's market, which was a great success. So this year, we're doing two. We did one on May 20th. Actually, the next one will be July 15th. Pacifica Pride. So I volunteered at the last two Pride events at the school, and I thought, Wow, why don't we have a table there too? Because it's a fabulous event, so we're really excited that we're gonna do Pride. Also gonna have one at the July 4th at Frontierland Park. We'll certainly participate again in the San Mateo County disaster. Preparedness Day on August 2nd, and of course, we'll get our two days in at the Fog Festival. So we got a busy year with lots of community engagement that we're very excited about and moving forward. And I believe that's, next slide, that's it.

Any questions? Thank you so much for your presentation. Are there questions or comments from council?

No? It's OK.

I just want to thank you for your work. A similar comment in terms of the background and preparedness of the people on the Emergency Preparedness Commission, it always gives me great comfort knowing how many medical trained people, how many folks with expertise in their previous employment that have specifically to do with these issues. It's very reassuring. Thank you.

Thank you.

Did you want to say something?

Yeah, I just want to say that I'm happy to see that 41 of the people in the community got certified. So it makes us feel that we are safe because this coastal community, we have tsunamis, we have floods, we have earthquakes. So it makes me feel good that we are having so many people getting certified SO THEY CAN HELP OTHER PEOPLE IF SOMETHING HAPPENS. HOPEFULLY NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. AND WE'RE PREPARED. SO THANK YOU SO MUCH.

I JUST WANT TO SAY WHAT A JOY IT IS TO SERVE WITH ALL OF YOU. AND I ALSO SIT ON THE EMERGENCY SERVICES COUNCIL AS PART OF THE COUNTY. AND SO IT'S JUST REALLY GREAT TO BE ABLE TO BRING INFORMATION BACK AND FORTH. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT'S A LITTLE DIFFICULT AS A COUNCIL LIAISON IN A COMMITTEE IS THAT WE COMMUNICATE, RIGHT, WHAT WE LEARN HERE AND OUTSIDE TO YOU ALL AND BRING THINGS BACK. BUT IT'S NOT OUR ROLE AS ONE COUNCIL MEMBER TO EVER GIVE DIRECTION OR, YOU KNOW, TELL YOU ALL WHAT TO DO, RIGHT? IT IS THE WORK, YOUR WORK PLAN IS UP TO YOU TO FIGURE OUT, RIGHT? AND WE'RE STARTING A PROCESS, WELL, A FEW OF THE OTHER COMMITTEES OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, FOR EXAMPLE, THE CLIMATE ACTION committee um and uh library and like sorry um go ahead like i forget what the other one is um do have work plans that um are coming to us and we're trying a little bit more to see how we can tie them into um you know the city's goals and strategic plan and some of the work especially knowing that we're short staffed um and one of one of the things that um i've been learning about and i appreciate um Bonnie going with me last week is some of the efforts the county is looking to tie community-based organizations and nonprofits as also partners in communities in disasters. We attended a meeting last week where they're hoping to have regionally, and there's one section for the coast side, where there are non-profits in Pescadero, in Half Moon Bay, and they're looking for non-profits in Pacifica to be the trusted partners for communication, because all of our members are on the ground, so you can confirm if something is really happening. There are sometimes a lot of rumors, right, to be able to say, yes, indeed, there's been erosion at the site or flooding at the site, and also to be partners in communicating back to the community beyond what the Resources of police and fire and the city manager might have right to be able to communicate that so that That discussion will continue in September and I'll bring that back with you at the meeting The other thing we had a presentation from thrive a year and a half or so ago that I learned about through the Leadership Council thrive rise which is which is also working, it's, again, working with nonprofits to help them be partners actually in responding to disasters. And I, sorry, I had their little mission thing, but I'm just wondering if that's something that the committee might be able to be interested in looking into a little bit further. Bonnie and I met when we had, sorry, I'm I don't have all my notes in front of me that I thought I had prepared. But when they presented a year and a half ago, Thrive was saying that they were focusing on the southern part of San Mateo County and didn't really have resources up here. But we just learned last week that they've just hired a new person. So there is capacity here. And I think it would be really neat to meet with them again and see if we could just start with one nonprofit and see what what kind of partnership that might be to understand the resources they have and how they might be able to help us too. So I'm not giving you direction today. No, no, no.

You know, at the time when they came and presented, it was a little like... you know, how do we fit in? But now as it's evolved, I think it's critical. Yeah. I think all this of everybody kind of knowing and communicating and so that, like you say, we have different avenues to deal with situations because most likely a lot of times we could be on our own. Right. So I think it's excellent. I mean, maybe we, when that person, we can have them come back and do that and maybe see what you

where it goes.

I think it's a great idea.

Yeah.

Okay. Wonderful. Yeah.

I just wanted to thank you all for being here. I really appreciate the work you do. And again, I want to shout out to our Pacifica Police Department for graciously leading you and providing everything. The staff is tremendous. So thank you to our police department. And then Maybe someday when I'm not on council, I'll have enough time to take certs. So maybe not this fall, but next fall. I will keep chasing after you.

Yeah, it's wonderful. It's just to see so many people. And you know, just as a side, I don't want to take up too much time, but so many people in the cert classes are business owners. So we've seen a lot more in a lot of these communities. And so not only are they taking the initiative, but we're all in a room together and everybody's talking together. And so it just, I'd like to say the love grows. Community.

Thank you. Thank you all so much for being here. Any other? Say something, please. Sure.

I'd just like to also express my appreciation and and say that Pacifica is a very tight-knit community, as you know, and a lot of what you're doing is really helping build community. You're preparing for the worst. That makes me feel a part of. It makes me feel safe. That's really important to me, and I so appreciate the work you're doing to put that together. You're preparing for the worst at times to look out for all of us, and I can't express my appreciation enough. Thank you.

All right. Thank you all. And next up, we have the Beautification Advisory Committee. And I saw Chair Gail Bennett. Come on up.

Oh.

And I'm thrilled to see that I have my slides, Sarah. So welcome, everyone, in the public. And good evening to the city council members. And I'm here again. And the presentation this time is a little bit shorter. And like I said, I'm thrilled for slides. As you can see, we have been very active this year with members showing off working down just on the other side at the Palmetto Plaza painting, and these are our members. This year we have a couple of new members, Taylor, Deborah, and Miley is our first student member for the BAC. Next slide. And our purpose and objectives is to implement the Keep Pacifica Beautiful program, which was approved back in 2013. Before it was called the Beautification Advisory Committee, it was called the Beautification Task Force. And it was approved by the city council, like I said, in 2013. So we developed guidelines and policies for implementing the Keep Pacifica Beautiful program, including signage, project costs, locating sites in need of beautification, engaging and educating the public in how beautification strengthens our sense of community and pride. Excuse me, and I think you're gonna really see that in the slides Next slide sir. Thank you. So we have successfully reached out to the community through Schools through their PTO s through connect with Pacifica the city of Pacifica's Facebook page next door and found ways to reach out to the community and then I myself will also follow up when somebody gets involved then I get their contact info and then they're never safe, right, Greg? So the next one. Slide, please. Excuse me. And we do have a sponsorship program working where we work, BAC and Public Works Department. We could not do this without them, definitely. And they do help us with installing irrigation, et cetera. And... Then we assist with design as well as training volunteers, purchasing materials, signage, and all of that, working, again, like I said, with Public Works. Next slide. And these are the sponsorships that we've done. So Grace McCarthy got a nice upgrade for Earth Day on April 18th, and there were the Rotary Club. BAC, as well as teen volunteers from Reardon High School in San Francisco. They upgraded, and we got all our new plants in, a ground cover, and, of course, my favorite, poppy seeds. Community Center Planner Boxes is another sponsor area. We currently have Pacifica Garden Club and the Pacifica Resource Center there. Next slide. And our other sponsors is the group that I always have lots of volunteers, including children, is down at Cabrillo Elementary School. And I apologize on this slide. I say it's only Cabrillo and BAC. But in the back, if you see, Rotary Club is involved with us as well. Thank you. Next slide. What happened? Linda Marr is the next one. There we go. And then we also have sponsorships from the North Coast County Water District doing the median on Linda Marr Boulevard. Right here on Palmetto, we have local businesses, community organizations, and individuals that work together maintaining our bulb-outs along that area. Next slide. And we have worked for the past couple of years with Cindy Abbott and the Sanchez Art Center, making awareness about our program and participating in it. the Fogfest. Next slide. And then our public art mural subcommittee is made up of Cindy Abbott, Linda Jonas, and Teresa Sulzer, and they basically meet when someone sends us a proposal for a mural, and so I'm just showing you some of the murals around town. The Pacifica mural, by the way, that's on the arches on the others on Palmetto, that was done prior to the public art and mural subcommittee. Next slide. And the project's happening now. So this past, in the fall, we did a review of our charter with the city council. And one of the things that came out of that was an adopted tree subcommittee. So we are currently working on a resolution draft for that. We have an ad hoc committee. And Taylor Sebaugh is in charge of working with that. We are also collaborating with a local sponsor here in Pacifica to sponsor one of the larger planters right there at the community center planters. So it's right along Highway 1. And then in case anybody's interested, we are doing a workday this Sunday from 9 to 12 at the Crespi Bioswells, which are located right in front of Cabrillo Elementary School. Next slide. And probably the most exciting one for us right here is right on Montecito, which is right behind. We just had a public meeting last week and received lots of positive responses, and this is going to be a 105-foot-long mural on the Sharp Park Pump Station. And the tentacles will be reaching to the Pacific Ocean. Next slide. And then if you have any questions, you can contact me.

Thank you so much, Claire. And that's questions from Council.

Yes, I do. I just want to thank you. And thank you to all the volunteers who give their weekends to pull out weeds. It's important, though. We are, this committee is very active. They do a lot of cleanup. I don't know what the city would look like without the beautification and also the Pacific Coalition. Because they do, Beach Coalition, they do a lot of work for Pacifica. So thank you so much. And like you said, anybody's welcome to come next Saturday. to help out, to pull out some weeds. Actually, this is what I do to clean up my mind. Sunday. Is that Sunday?

Sunday. It's kind of relaxing. Sunday, May 31st, 9 to 12, on Crespi. Plenty of parking on the street. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to exercise my gardening skills on various weekends throughout the year. Having been the council liaison to this committee for many years and having been strongly urged to shepherd the committee by a former council member and Mayor Mary Ann Neihart who had everything to do with getting it started. I've taken that to heart and it was really a gift for me to give to Ms. Myra Espinoza the liaison position. I miss you and occasionally get to be the backup. But I get to be there on the weekends most of the time, except for not this Sunday. I'm so sorry. Really appreciate all your work. Thank you.

I was also thinking about Marianne as you were presenting. So it's very touching when you can think about all the connections that have been made over the years and how important it is. And I love the partnership that you have with Cindy Abbott and the Arts Center. The murals are... spectacular and I think that, you know, there's been talks at other committees and commissions about kind of tying them into like an economic development piece where we could tour the murals and, you know, I don't know, but there's, they're spectacular and I cannot wait for that Oculus. It's going to be cool. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mary. You're welcome. I've been fortunate enough to work with you a little bit from time to time and You have my phone number if you ever need anything. Please feel free to continue to give me a call. But the public doesn't understand how much of a pleasure it is to work with you and how you make it fun, how you make it feel rewarding, how you're an incredible leader to make all that happen. And that's meaningful. And people, if they don't know you, they should get to know you. The best way to do that is to pick up a shovel and join you on Sunday. Thank you.

Thank you so much for being here with us, Gail. I feel like I learn new things every time. I didn't know you did painting, seeing you painting that blue, or tailor it was in the particular picture.

We got overzealous. It wasn't me, it was the committee. We had permission and consultation with city staff. It was fun.

But we're really excited about the Adopt-a-Tree program too. And I know Taylor's been working hard at that with a pilot in Sharp Park and just ensuring the trees that we plant survive, right? Yeah, we don't want to do that work and have them die on us and increase our canopy goals. So you're a key part in that. So I really appreciate it. And I'm super excited about the octopus mural too. So do you have any idea when that might be starting or are there still some approval steps that's the only one that we have right now but I know that there's a couple others that people are talking about but we haven't heard anything Cindy will be on it and I did hear today actually that Cindy is working on a tour of the murals at least for seniors as a starting point as part of our active senior group so I think there'll be more coming there too thank you so much for all you do Okay, and then we have our Library Advisory Committee. Welcome, Jennifer.

Good evening, Mayor Bowles and council members. My name is Jennifer Lavin, and I'm here to report to you from the Library Advisory Committee. Next slide, please. So we have nine voting members. Some of them are here with me tonight, thank you. And I'm one of those voting members and I was also recently elected chair of the group. Next slide please. Sorry, next slide please. And in addition to voting members, our group includes ex-officio members, our Pacifica Libraries manager, Hillary Ake, who I think is also here tonight, Councilmember Beck Meyer is our liaison, and also our city clerk, Sarah Coffey. So beginning our year in review, you can see that we've done outreach at community events, large and small, to promote public awareness and engagement for the library project. We went to Coast Pride, the Blues and Brews Festival, Frontierland Park on the Fourth of July, Fogfest, and finally the Merry Manor Art Walk. Community engagement has involved a presentation to our Pacifica Committee on Economic Development, recruitment for youth committee members at Terranova High School, and inclusion in the city's Business Matters newsletter. This year, we created informational boards to be used during upcoming tours of the Sharp Park Library. We plan to offer tours to key stakeholders to highlight the current condition of our library building. To further support outreach and engagement, our committee also created and distributed promotional materials. We've left some of these on the back table. We've also worked with Bodewell Group to have a regular presence on social media. And throughout the year, we've collected names and email addresses of residents who want to know more about the library project. Now I want to highlight some key decisions and the resultant timeline for our committee. In December, City Council announced they would not consider a bond measure for library funding on the November 2026 ballot. And so the next opportunity for a bond measure will be in November 2028. Our committee discussed this decision and we decided to refocus our efforts. We've been reading and discussing Before the Ballot, a book that we hope will help us lay the foundation leading up to a potential ballot measure. So what is our current status? We are unclear on the funding and timeline for the library project. Recently, the city council strategy document was changed to move the library project from goal two, which concerns infrastructure and facilities, to goal five, which concerns public communications and collaboration. We'd like to understand the implications of this for our committee and for the library project. So looking forward, we are using the before the ballot book to help us create more strategic messaging. We've also determined that we need more expert input as there is only a 57% success rate for library ballot measures nationwide. And most importantly, we are requesting a city council joint study session to share what we've learned and to request council direction on funding, timing and strategy and how the council will take actions and make decisions to move the project forward. Okay, so some of the city resources we may need in the coming year include funds to pay for expert input, time from city staff to keep us on track, funds for tools and materials used in community engagement, and funds to hold events to meet with key stakeholders and community leaders. All right, any questions?

Thank you so much, Jennifer.

I'll just go ahead. Thank you so much. I love the direction that you're going, and I think the book study is super important and relevant for the library. So I'm so interested in that, and I really appreciate that you're asking for a study session. I think it's important for us to hear those asks. So we can consider that. Thank you so much.

Thank you. We're really looking forward to working together with you to find the right way forward. And we've learned so much from this book. So we're really excited to share what we've learned.

Yeah, I'm going to definitely check out the book.

Libraries are great learning spaces. They're community spaces. They're an integral part of our community. And I want to appreciate your willingness to work on this. I'm particularly impressed that you have two youth members on your committee, and so you're looking for a breadth of perspective across the community. And I would love to know just one thing that the youth perspective has brought to you that you might not have thought of without them. Could you just highlight one of those things for me? Or is it more a general thing?

Well, I would say definitely when it comes to social media presence, they're the experts. Unless we have someone on our committee that does that regularly during their job, it's obviously the youth that have a little more to say about that. That's really helpful. Yeah, and I think it's been nice to have them there. And they've brought up things that aren't even related to being high schoolers. They've had some really good insights for us. So it's just nice to see that.

Thank you so much for including them. Thank you for the work you're doing, and I look forward to passing, beating the odds, and doing better. Let's make it 58%.

Yeah, we have to beat those odds, don't we?

Definitely, we need a new library, and I support the new study session that you are proposing, so I don't know what can we do to bring money to get So maybe brainstorm with you and see where can we find some money to get a better library, because this library really needs help. So thank you so much.

Thank you.

I would like to thank you for your leadership and taking on chairing this committee. You've stepped into big shoes, and you're doing a great job, a really good job. So thank you. And I would like to inform the council that at our last meeting, even though this isn't council communications time, it seems opportune to let you know that this idea of a study session came up. And part of what was discussed around that was that there have been many presentations to councils in the past having to do with the site, the plan, the building, how it's been designed and the history of that. But there are a few of us that have that history in our minds and some of us that don't. And many in the community who either don't remember it or never knew it. So it seems a very opportune time to resurface that through the vehicle of a study session. The other thing that was being discussed, and we don't have answers yet, but we're looking they are looking at is the role and responsibility of a city committee versus a campaign committee eventually. And at what point does information stop and campaigns start? Right now, with no ballot measure on any ballot and no plan specifically, We're looking at 28 thinking that's our next opportunity, right? We discussed when we decided not to do it this year. It's really important to understand those roles and responsibilities. And being there is no longer a Pacifica Library Foundation and the funds that remained when the foundation folded were given to the San Mateo County Library Foundation earmarked for Pacifica, but what hasn't is what can be used, what can be used for. One thing that has always been discussed is there's a certain amount of fixtures, furniture, fixtures, and equipment, FF&E, remember, Mayor? We had to learn all these acronyms, that has to be funded outside of the bond so that there's always that. But if we don't get to a bond, we'll never need that. So there's some questions there that the committee had and that, you know, they continue to push forward and ask. And I'm working with our library director and the representatives from the Samtown County Library who are engaged with this committee frequently.

As well as the library JPA, too. Right? So there's been discussions around the FF and E. Yes, FF and E. As well as the possibilities of just the very beginning of maybe a new assessment. But We'll see how that goes. We just passed the budget at the JPA, so those discussions, we'll see.

Yeah.

And I just want to add, I just really appreciate the work that you're doing, and I'm sure it's frustrating to not know, like, what the next steps are. We have so many infrastructure needs, and it's, you know, we're not hearing good polling information from our consultants right now, and we want to make sure we're not We're spending the money wisely when we put things on the ballot that really have a chance of succeeding, because we all want this library to be built. And for people that don't know, it's proposed at the same location as the current Sharp Park Library. But it will be a multi-million dollar project that'll take some time to fund. I love the book that you found, right? So that somebody has written that about libraries in particular. And, yeah, we'll work on scheduling something before the end of this calendar year so that Councilmember Beckmeyer, who's been on this committee for a long time, can be an important voice in that, too. So we'll get back to you.

Thank you so much. I just want to add, we know this is a big lift, but people have been really smart and dedicated, hardworking people have been working on this problem in our city since, I think, 2004. Is that right?

At least. The city, the last assessment was done in, I think, in 2011. Yeah. So it's been a long time.

It's been a long time.

It's been a long haul. And it continues to be because... Without funding, we can't do the project.

Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And I just want to shout out Cindy Abbott, who brought the book forward. She's been a longstanding member, former chair of this committee. And the organization that wrote the book, produced the book, is Every Library, a nonprofit organization that the Friends of the Library and the Library Foundation formerly met with in like 2015, 16, when they were first getting started. And so they've thrived and are hopefully going to be engaging with our committee in some pro bono work on messaging and such like that. So it's good. Good work is happening.

Fantastic.

Yeah, thank you.

Okay, and then our last but not least committee, OPEN SPACE AND PARKLAND ADVISORY COMMITTEE. AND I WANT TO INVITE UP CHAIR AARON REEF.

THANK YOU. I'D LIKE TO INVITE OUR TEAM UP SO EVERYBODY CAN SEE WHO IN THEIR COMMUNITY IS HELPING. SO HI, EVERYONE. MY NAME IS AARON REEF AND WE'RE YOUR OPEN SPACE AND PARKLAND ADVISORY COMMITTEE. CAN WE MOVE THE Slide, please. Great. So Arlene Patton, a lot of you know her. She was our chair. She put in eight years with our open space. So we're really proud of what she's helped us accomplish and want to recognize her as the chair tonight. And I'm Aaron Reif. I'm very excited to make our home better. This is my second term. I have Michael Kahn. He's going to be your new vice chair. So Michael loves flowers, and he knows where and when all the flowers are. So if you become his friend, maybe you'll learn something there. Let's see. I have Remy Tan. A lot of you know Remy Tan because he volunteers in all of our agencies. Pacifica Beach Coalition, he's a big volunteer. He was on the planning commission. He's a really great asset to have on our team. He knows so much about the building and our codes. And so we're really glad to have Remy. We have Mark, Mark Hubble. here and so Mark is very involved with the health of the creek near Lindemar and he's very passionate and he's known all over town and works with other of our famous former council members like John Keener for example so we're really happy to have him Kevin Kevin is a Well, it took a long time to convince Kevin to join our committee, but luckily he comes to every trail workday so we can hound him like nonstop. But we finally got him, and we're really happy to have him. He's very positive, and he's great with the pick and the shovel and intelligent. So Kevin is our... newest member of the team. And then we have Erica. Erica, she teaches AP Environmental Science, so we're hoping to utilize her expertise as we move forward with our work. And then we have Ariel Cruz. Ariel is a tick and mosquito expert, so she knows a lot about the outside as well and is a good fit for us. She builds a lot of our flyers and does a lot of that type of work for us, so we're really grateful for her. And then finally, we have Jamie Wong, who was here tonight but needed to go home. She is our student, I guess we call her student member. So that's our... And we have I believe one vacancy and so that's our committee. Can you please go to the next slide? So you all might have seen this before and we have all this amazing open space and and all this green and I'd like to point out that Really what's so amazing about Pacifica is all this open space leads to more open space so we're like kind of like this gateway and like We have the most beautiful town, so here it is. Look at all this ocean is also open space, and the sun gets to set in it, and we all get to enjoy it. So it's all so important to our community. Can you please move the slide? So just quickly, we all know the benefits of open space. It brings tons of tourism with it from every kind of thing, from hikers and surfers and all that and we all need the natural beauty and and you know Go watch the sunset at the end of the day is really special. We have such a special town So we all know what the open space provides. Can we please go to the next one? Okay, so our open space task force is we're just trying to be leaders and make sure that, you know, like 50% of our land is open space and it's so important. So we try to track that and improve it and here are some of the accomplishments, you know, preservation such as Maury Point and Pedro Point Headlands, Merlagra Ridge and others. These are past committees that have done a great job and we owe them for what is Pacifica. So, you know, like we're passionate about what's our mark going to be too. Like we want to, we want to make a better than we found it kind of place. Can you please go to the next slide? Um, yeah, so we redid the purpose, uh, with the council a few years ago for this new resolution and I'll let you guys read it. Um, it's available online. Again, we're here to improve the outside for all the residents to use and enjoy. And I think we've been doing a great job. Could we show you some examples on the next slide, please? So here's some of, even you'll recognize some of these people standing here on this lovely trail workday. Man, what a great job we've done. This trail was in... desperate need of love, and we've just been pouring it in, and every month, and we went from, and now we have so many experts, like, these guys that you see, they come so much that they can lead their own work now, you know? So I think that's really one of the most important things is, like, okay, if I know how to fix a trail, but I won't be here forever, so how do you teach all the other people to take care of it too and make it better? So once a month, this is what we do. The pompous gas problem, like, We've eliminated the pompous grass problem basically from the top of our hill. And if any of you have ever been into Rockaway, you see it's just like dominated and taken over. So we're really proud about that and Thistle and we're doing a great job. Please advance. And as you can see here more of our trail work days and there's a picture of the bench we had made with with the old Mayor Tiger and Mike's removing some pompous grass and some of our volunteers are moving pompous grass and we had this great work day in the rain finally and it just started pouring on us one day and man, everybody was like splashing around and having fun. Remy was like, he was ecstatic and we were just like jumping in the puddles and you watch the water like coming down the hill now where it's supposed to. And it's like, wow, you know, all that hard work and you're out here and you actually see it working and it's like, okay, there's the payoff. And then you realize like, look, what we built is like protected from these huge rains now. So it doesn't take a lot of maintenance. So now like to maintain this trail, one person could take like maybe an hour or an hour and a half and you could walk up the trail and clean the gutters. And this is just like, you know, how they built things like in the ancient times, like water was dealt with, and things lasted a long time. And that was our goal. So thank you. Next map, please. Slide, please. Next slide, please. Thank you. So there was a lot of work done in partnership with the planning and our city liaisons and we got this really nice status report that we used to try to track the parcels so that we can be on top of what's being built in our town and it can be accurate and this is all available on the city's website that anyone can go and access right there. So it's a really powerful tool for everybody. And maybe we can go to the next slide, please. Then we also we invite people who want to come before us to present. And so we had a presentation from Juan Picardo Ranch Road, and as you see their football field in the picture, so that's Terranova High School, and they're the valley up in the back. Next slide, please. And we had some comments for the applicant, and we know of the existing PG&E roads and... some of the other issues. Can we please go to the next slide? Thank you. So the Ohlone-Portola Heritage Trail is a countywide project, and it starts on the county border of Santa Cruz and San Mateo. It's the trail that the old, when the Spaniards and the Indians had met, and they showed them the San Francisco Bay. And it's a multi-agency trail project. So we took on Pacifica's part and we routed it from the south end of tunnel and we put up all these wayfinding signs, hoping that we could drive some traffic. We brought it along the beach. and through some businesses where we thought maybe somebody along the way could stop and have a coffee. And then it goes up Fassler to the trail that we just talked about that we all volunteer and fix. So we fixed this important part of the Ohlone Portola Heritage Trail. The cost was not very much because we did it all with volunteer work like we do everything with. Just a huge success. And Arlene really like, you know, we had to work with Caltrans and all these different state agencies. And I don't know about like having a patience for all that. So Arlene handled it. So we appreciate her on this. Next, please. Okay, and this is a really great project we got done. The new trailhead kiosk sign. So this is the same trailhead sign the county parks use. And we, Arlene, We went after Measure K money and we went before the county supervisors and we got $10,000 for this sign. So again, it cost us nothing. And it's an incredible sign. There's two sides to it. So we have like maps on it and our communications subcommittee helped like us fill it up with these great like flyers that show like a bird and like some of the flowers on the trail you know like local things so I'm really proud of what this trail really has become now next slide let's see more so here we are at the trail cutting ribbon-cutting ceremony where we had VIP guests and like I think there was probably a 50 or 60 people there when I turned around at some points. And it was a lot of effort. Tiger, again, I want to bring up Tiger because he put in a lot of effort to get us that kiosk. Like Tiger was like hounding. Like he was a tiger and he got us that. So let's go. I love that guy. All right. So, okay. And then we got these, we worked with the Department of Public Works and we got these trash cans and dog bag They take care of weed whacking for us right around this little area. The trail has improved a lot with this, so we're super proud of the impact it makes just giving everybody who wants to do the right thing the ability to do the right thing. you know people are using this trail now and it you could come from san mateo county and come up and over the discovery site and down this trail it was in so bad shape they wouldn't but now i'm seeing all kinds of new bike riders on uh even like uh gravel bikes coming over to hill and so they're pro they might be spending money on something when they're in town so it's a really great asset and uh It shows what we can do as a group. We transformed this trail that was a liability into like a gem. And the sun sets up there and our secret bench, oh my gosh. So like, I'd argue we have one of the most beautiful spots in California to sit and watch a sunset. It's spectacular. And we'd be happy to show you guys the secret bench maybe. Can you go to the next one, please? Okay, so we attended the Pacifica Beach Coalition's EcoFest, and there's four of our members. Ariel had an idea to make some butterflies, and you can see that Erica there had the kids making these paper butterflies, and it was a really great event. We connected with a lot of our other community groups. Next one, please. And then for Russ Hartman, the presentation, Preservation Award winner we had him nominated by three different agencies and so it was pretty overwhelming that Pacifica was really proud of of what this man has accomplished for us in this town and We were really proud to be able to present it to him and a few days after we presented it to him I was riding my bike on a trail and And I came up on this guy and he's like with a pick and he's like getting after this, this weed, and I was like, Russ. And sure enough, it was Russ. So even after the award, Russ was immediately out there doubled down. Good choice. Next slide, please. And this is your OSPAC. This is all of us. And we're a great group, and we hope to leave a mark of positivity that you guys will remember on our town. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Aaron. Thank you, Aaron. what the energy and enthusiasm you bring to this group.

Yeah, what a pleasure. Thank you so much, all of you. Yeah, I could not stop smiling the whole time. So thank you for your energetic presentation and for all the work that you do. And Aaron, I think I owe you a little apology offline, so I'm going to reach out to you. And that's what we get to do as humans, right? Thank you.

I just want to Thank Aaron for, in particular, the enthusiasm, but also specifically all the work he did to make the bench thing happen as well. The rest of the committee is fantastic with all the trail work you do, but we couldn't do it without a fearless leader like you keeping the motivation going. And thank each and every one of you, but in particular you, Aaron. Thank you.

I just want to thank you for protecting what makes Pacifica unique and special. And I wanted to know where that bench is. And also, I want you to discover some areas on top of the hill that is a trail that connects Westview to Fairmont. And I already talked to the city manager to see if we can kind of discover that. I would like to also, Mark and I, we walked from Fairmont to Fairmont West. That was a nice walk. So I also wanted to, and I think Suzanne Moore also went there with me. So I would like to see that area rediscovered. And also see if people will get more business, if people get to do the walking and they're hungry so they can help the businesses on Fairmont. So hopefully, let's schedule maybe a time to show you around. It will be nice. And I'm open to help out, too. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Erin, for your leadership. I think, Sarah, if you could bring up packet page 141. I don't know what slide number it is, but the secret bench is depicted with Tiger, the tiger, sitting among a group. I remember trying to talk you into joining. So you're paying it forward, right? You're doing the same with your other volunteers. And I remember you like, no, no, no, I just want to work, no, I just want to work, no, I just want to work. Well, here you are leading. Thank you. And for being a liaison with the biking community that uses that trail. I think that was really, really important. I remember at that ribbon cutting for the kiosk, just suddenly this whole cadre of people, and you knew every single one of them, And so it is important that, as Mary always says, the relationship building helps so much. So thank you for continuing on.

Thank you all for your patience with me.

I had a couple of questions, actually. And thanks for meeting with me recently, Aaron, so I could learn more about what your whole committee is doing. So in this... resolution that we adopted in 2024, one of the statements says, be it further resolved, OSPAC may plan and undertake periodic trail improvement social work days for trails located on city-owned property in full coordination with the city manager. And so I'm not sure if this is a question for you or for the city manager or staff, but I'm just curious how, what's the process for identifying trails that need work? that are brought to your attention. I was noticing like in the Public Works also has a list of capital improvement projects, which included improvements at the Ani Cattle Hill Trail. And so I don't know where the communication happens between the different departments.

So this project basically began with just me meeting Arlene on the trail. And she was the chair of OSPAC. And I was just the guy who uses the trail the most. And we talked about how to make it better. And I was like, I mean, it's easy. I could just fix it. We didn't want to, you know, it was more like, hey, can we do it? Let's start in this one spot and see, can we do it? Can we get community engagement? Is it important? We hadn't really branched out beyond this trail, but, you know, our committee would certainly like to take it back to the rest of our members and discuss. We certainly, I mean I know every trail that you guys are talking about obviously. I've been on them all very recently and I could give you an idea of what's going on if that's what we're asking. But we don't really have a mechanism right now to discuss are we allowed to go in another location. So I think that would be a very important thing if you could help us with please.

Okay, well, and I'm asking staff, too, and I know, I mean, we've had a lot of staff turnover in planning and public works and our city managers. We might not have a protocol established right now, so.

Good evening. I'm Sean Charpentier, city manager. I don't know if we have a protocol. We'll look into it, and if not, we can bring that to the committee in the upcoming year and talk about how that occurs. Although it feels very organic now, but what are, how that occurs for their volunteer activities and how to prioritize those.

Right. Okay, great. Thank you. I really appreciate that.

I think we had to add that into the charter in 21 to 24 in order to start the trail work stuff, I believe.

Well, it's definitely in here, so it'd be good to find out the process, right?

Thank you.

And not to overwhelm you either. How do you prioritize the work and what work needs to be done by city public works, right? It's complicated, I'm sure. And then the other thing, I actually asked at your presentation last year, so when we did the charter review, there was a lot of discussion about drafting a letter that your committee working with planning staff would work on to invite developers that own parcels that are in the open space manual to invite them to come to your committee. And I know there's, we talked a lot because the state restricts public meetings for projects now to five. But if you get wind of an application, and I appreciate that you have planning staff, you know, informing you about the projects coming up, but if you can invite them before their application is deemed complete, my understanding is it doesn't count as one of the five. So do you know where we stand on that letter? Is that something that is being sent out when

I am unsure about that letter. It definitely needs research, and I'm happy to reach out and try to find that information. I have been involved with the committee even longer than I've been on it, because I just used to come every month.

I see Community Development Director Updegrave behind you. And Rami, too. And Rami, too, who you might know. Yeah.

Thank you, Mayor Bowles. Samantha Updegrave, Community Development Director. Staff did work with OSPAC to draft a letter, and we do send it out when we get a development application on a parcel that is an identified OSPAC site. Okay. Okay.

Good to know.

Thank you. All right.

Well, that's all I had. We're just really appreciative of all your work. I mean, our Yes, our open space is what defines our city. And we really appreciate your stewardship of this land.

And thank you, Arlene. We love you.

Thank you for all your hard work, Arlene. We are going to have a proclamation for Arlene. It's not quite scheduled yet, but it will be very soon. Fabulous.

Thank you all.

Thank you. Thank you. Do you have to open up public comment? Oh, yes.

And now I will open up public comment. And I don't have any cards on this item. So if anybody wants to speak on all five of those committees, any and all, you can come up now. And Emily's not there. I don't know if... Oh, yeah, come on up. I wasn't sure if that... Your card just said climate change, so I'm not sure if that was related to the committees. Ken?

Good evening. Ken Miles from Valleymar. Thank you for this opportunity, but I would I mentioned the open space people talking about bike trails and things. A lot of us senior citizens and people with kids and dogs, we have a hard time navigating ourselves around these electric bikes and bicycles. And I think they've got to work it out somehow when they do these trails that everybody can enjoy them. We don't want to be hit by a 25-mile-an-hour bike with a 200-pound person on it. It would kill them. I think you've got to remember that. That's all.

Thank you. It is being looked at. Thank you. Is there anyone online, Emily? Okay. Oh, wait. Suzanne Moore, please come up. If you could both fill out a card afterwards so we have a record. Ken, I've got yours.

Will do. You know, I'm just totally amazed how much volunteer work is done and that these committees are just filled with volunteers who have passion and what an incredible thing that is for our community and what it means to our community to have that force. So I just wanted to thank everybody who's volunteering on these committees for all your hard work.

Thank you, Suzanne. Ditto. WE ALL REALLY APPRECIATE ALL THE WORK. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A VOLUNTEER APPRECIATION PARTY LATER THIS YEAR THAT'S NOT YET SCHEDULED. SO ON OUR PLAN. OKAY. WELL, THANK YOU. SO THAT MOVES US TO OUR NEWEST COMMITTEE, THE CLIMATE ACTION AND RESILIENCE COMMITTEE AND A DISCUSSION OF THEIR WORK PLAN. SO WE'LL START WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CITY MANAGER SHARPENED HERE. But I'd also like to invite Chair Deirdre Martin up with a few of the members from the CARP committee.

Just as a quick introduction, this committee is the Climate Action and Resiliency Committee, and it came out of the approval of the CARP plan last year, and I think it is sign of the success of Pacifica trying to address climate resiliency with in collaboration with its residents so after the adoption of the climate action and resiliency plan one of the recommendations was the formation of this committee and that was the carp was approved in July the committee framework was approved by the City Council in September and since then they've had five committee meetings in this current calendar year, excuse me. And in those meetings, they've been able to accomplish quite a bit in their inaugural year, including being involved in discussions about the tree canopy, as well as the creation of their first work plan. And they're here tonight to present on the work plan that they've been working on and That's my introduction.

Thank you. Cool. Now a good time to start? Now's the time to start. All right, great. I want to thank Mayor Bowles for putting us together because this is sort of like a discussion more than a presentation. But we do want to give you a little bit of information about what we have planned. And you all have in front of you our work plan, too, so you can reference that at the same time. So as we go through this, you can look at that, ask us questions as we go through. I'm Deirdre Martin, and I'm the chair of the Climate Action Resilience Committee, otherwise known as CARC, right? So you will hear it referred to as CARC, C-A-R-C. We will also be referring to the CARP, Climate Action Resilience Plan, okay? And this is Margo Meiman. She is the vice chair, and this is Celeste Langeel. She is a member. We also want to thank Mayor Bowles for being our council liaison. I want to thank Brittany Hernandez for being our program manager, and Bella Carrion for being our Civic Spark fellow. Samantha Updegrave for being our staff augmenter ever since Elizabeth has left. So let's move on. As you all know, this is a very new Oh, good, thanks. This is a very new committee, not a commission. You can also find our CARP at www.planpacifica.org backslash CARP. So if you're online, you can go ahead and look at that right now. We... Okay, there we go. We are... There's three stages of team development, right? Forming, storming, and norming, right? So forming is where you're getting to know people, right? And we've basically already done that. These are all the folks. We've got Calvin Chang, Michaela Jennings, Celeste Langeal, myself, Margo, Lauren, Ren Murphy, Ellen Natesian, Ethan Ng, and Joy Richardson. Some of these folks have been around. You've seen their names for a while. Tonight we will complete our storming, right? So forming, getting to know people, storming, that is where conflict and competition comes together, right? So we have looked at everything that we've got on the table and we're coming together to raise everything and all the conflicts and resolve them to present to you and basically come together and say, yeah, these are the things that we We are now not in conflict on. And then norming, right? We're going to get to that, right? The harmony, the cohesion once we agree on what's next. Okay. So how do we form the subcommittees? These are our subcommittees here. Electrification, permitting, EV and charging infrastructure, urban forestry and resilience, food systems and recovery, transportation, mobility, and community engagement. The CARP members identified specific actions within the CARP that they were most interested in advancing, right? So everybody sort of became familiar. We were so blessed to have Margo had already been a member of the Climate Action Resilience Planner. She had basically worked and written it with the whole team. So we were so grateful to have her because she basically knows it inside and out. A lot of us are still getting to know it, right? But from there, we took all that information, prioritized initiatives that we felt were both achievable within the next year and capable of delivering meaningful impact while also considering individual member interests alongside broader city and county climate goals, right? So that is to reduce GHG emissions at least 45%, reduce GHG emissions from buildings by 24%, and this all will come out in the wash, reduce vehicle miles traveled by 12%, and increase Pacifica EV adoptions. There's a lot more information that goes along with that. But it's in the plan, trust me. So we will move on here. And I will hand it over to Margo, I think, right? MARGO RODRIGUEZ- Yes.

So before we actually get into the work plan, I'm on packet page 156. I think that's where we all are. It does say CARC work plan. But we want to talk for a second about work items that are ongoing first. So it's worth just noting that we're in a transition period right now. We're between developing the CARC, which we did over the past couple of years, and actually implementing the CARC, which we're starting to do now. So certain activities have carried over. One is tracking progress. And admittedly, this is one area that we don't have a formal structure in place just yet. But we do like to think of this in two kind of buckets. We've got tracking the committee progress. What are the people on the committee doing? What are people on staff doing? What are people doing? And so we do need to create a formal tracking process for this. But other than that, we also need to actually track our goals that are stated in the Climate Action and Resilience Plan. We're talking about, as she was saying, reduction in emissions, increase in EV adoption, all of those things. So in order to track that, of course, we need data. And currently, we're getting a lot of this data from Rincon Consulting, who in turn gets it from a variety of sources. And I do want to mention that there's an opportunity to get better transportation data Right now, currently we're getting transportation data from MTC, Metropolitan Transit Commission. But there is an organization called Replica that would have more accurate data. It would cost an additional amount of money, not a lot of money, a couple thousand dollars per year. Our program manager, Brittany Hernandez, already shared this opportunity with city staff. Apparently, it's not a priority right now to do this because of budget constraints. understandable but we you know it's one of these things we need to recognize that better data would allow us to have better accurate reporting ultimately we need to figure out how to present progress on the carp to the community this is going to be an ongoing conversation and this is an area that will take some some staff time for us to do well next slide it's important that carp doesn't operate in a vacuum. So this is where liaisons come into place. There are other commissions and organizations that have similar overlapping objectives. Of course, it's beneficial to share resources and know what's going on in the county and the state so we don't miss opportunities. Liaisons for PB&R and the Pacifica Land Trust have been attending all of our meetings so far in 2026, which is wonderful. We've got, of course, Mayor Bowles is our liaison on city council. City Manager Charpentier was there at our last meeting. We're also grateful to have dedicated staff time from our Community Development Department. There's a water heater pilot that I'm going to mention in just a second, and I mention it now because you see RICAPS there on the right-hand side. RICAPS is a countywide coalition of city staff, sustainability managers, And we are attending those meetings. And we found out about this water heater pilot from RICAPS. LEARN, you see there, L-E-R-N, Local Energy Resources Network. It's a statewide organization. And there are a number of different grant opportunities that we've passed on to staff that we have learned about by attending LEARN meetings. Next slide, please. One of the goals that we have, or one of the actions that we have in the CARP, action C3.1, was to establish a webpage with resources for residents. This effort was actually launched already in 2024 by Brittany Hernandez and Bella Carione is maintaining it right now. They're doing a fantastic job. We are excited to continue making it even more user-friendly and helpful for residents. Bella has launched Carl's Corner. the monthly newsletter with updates on the CARP for our community. And I just want to mention that this kind of outreach is just one example of the importance of staff support. Our Civic Spark fellows, which include Gabriel Trevino, the first one we had, Brittany, who then became our part-time program manager, and our current Civic Spark fellow, Bella, they've actually been critical crucial to CARP, and it's essential that the Civic Spark funding continues for CARP. Staff members, these Civic Spark fellows, they're able to devote time and effort in ways that the CARP volunteers just cannot do.

And Deirdre, I think you wanted to... Oh, yeah, I just wanted to mention that is one of the climate action goals that was recommended on the original climate action plan from the founding... founding members that there is an ongoing staff member dedicated to this effort. So I just actually wanted to thank Brittany Hernandez because her last day with the city is – well, her last meeting with us is June 8th, and she's been instrumental in helping get the CARP off the ground and working with both teams. And I want to wish her well. And I also just wanted to say if anyone has any connections, please reach out to me and I will get you in touch. She would be a valuable asset to any organization. I assure you it's a great loss to us as an organization here. So just keep that in mind as we continue on. We didn't put it in our pages, but every single subcommittee here had a goal of making sure that the council knew we would love a full-time staff member.

So moving on to the actual work plan, I'm not sure, would this be a good time to just pause for any questions, or shall we just go ahead and go through?

I have questions. You do? I do.

Well, go ahead.

Go ahead, then.

All right.

Did you want to ask a question?

No. Oh, sorry. Okay. I misunderstood you. I want to hear the plan. You want to hear the plan. All right.

Okay. So here we are on our work plan, and I think at this point we are still on, what, page 157 in the agenda packet, I believe. So our work plan for just this year focuses on seven areas. They come from all the different sections of the CARP. And you can see the list of them here. They actually mirror the subcommittees that we established at the beginning of the year. So let's talk about the first area, electrification. It's not advancing yet. Here we go. So one of the goals in the CARP is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, specifically for the building sector. It turns out that about 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in Pacifica come from buildings, and most of these are residential. So we decided just for this year to focus on the permitting process for replacing large appliances such as water heaters and furnaces. Obtaining a permit can sometimes be a hurdle due to the expense and potential delays. We don't know if that's the case in Pacifica because we are looking into it right now. We separated out water heaters here because fortunately, as I mentioned a second ago, the city's participating in a countywide pilot that's looking at the permitting process specifically. The pilot came to our attention through our participation in RICAPS. We are one of nine jurisdictions taking part in it. The consulting team, TRC, is providing technical support and outreach. So we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. It was like something that was just dropped in our lap. The timing was perfect. Ultimately, the pilot's going to provide information about best practices for the city and resources that the city can share residents with. We're hoping that this pilot could identify best practices that might be adaptable to other kinds of upgrades, not just water heaters. Essentially, we just don't want the permitting process to be a barrier for someone who wants to electrify their home. Next slide. Do we want to ask any questions about that one?

Any feedback?

I think we'll let you go through. And this is like a normal sounds good. Sounds good. Yeah. OK. So we'll ask questions, go to public comment, and come back for deliberation.

So in Pacifica, transportation accounts for about 48% of greenhouse gas emissions. And it makes sense, therefore, to encourage adoption of electric vehicles. And really right here, we're talking about planning here, about identifying opportunities, developing policies, creating a strategic plan that will facilitate widespread adoption of EVs. And action item T3.3 in the CARP states that the city will install 508 EV charging stations by 2030. Notice that that is not on this year's work plan. But we do need to create a plan for that. And my understanding is that cities are much more likely to be eligible for EV infrastructure grants if they have an EV readiness plan in place. So the CARC members want to support that effort. So with resilience, we are pretty much talking about research efforts, supporting grant writing efforts, and conducting outreach here. And two big buckets, shoreline resilience on the one hand, coastal resilience. and wildfire resilience on the other hand. So there are a lot of other groups doing work in these areas. We want to support what the Pacifica Land Trust is doing with their coastal resilience opportunity study. We want to be identifying other stakeholders that are doing work in this area. And again, you see on the right-hand side, wildfire resilience. We also want to be looking at potential permitting processes for helping to allow people to, with home hardening and defensible spaces efforts.

Awesome. Okay, food systems and recovery. Sorry. Is that right? We're seeing that, yeah. So, again, this is, For food systems and recovery, our goal is to reduce the solid waste sector 75% GHG below one level by 2030. So what does that mean? That is essentially like solid waste. They're referring to like food, right? But what this subcommittee is looking to do is to trace the food in Pacifica from the source to the compost pile. Essentially, this year is going to be focused on mapping out our food recovery system. We want to look at stores, restaurants, what's going on with PRC, what's going on with the community center, and increase the mass of food that's recovered. Look into zero waste programs, food waste hubs, and just reduce the food going into landfills. So this year is going to be mostly focused on mapping, researching, and identifying areas for communication. There's not a lot of money being spent this year on any of this, obviously. We have to do a lot more research on this one. Okay, transportation and mobility. We're looking to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 12% by 2030. So what does that mean? So 48% of all Pacifica's GHC emissions right now come from transportation. That's like car and bus. So right now all of the GHC in Pacifica comes from cars and buses. That's 48%, right? So what do we want to do? We want to promote alternate transit options. Some of the ways that we can do that, some of our low-hanging fruit here, right? We can research grants. We do have a bicycle pedestrian advisory committee in conjunction with the parks, beaches, and recreation. There's a master plan that was awarded grant a while ago. So they're working on that. We'd like to collaborate. We've already been meeting outside and just making sure that that the two groups are working towards the same goals. We'd like to promote transit options. There are things like Clipper Start and city manager, Charpentier, has let us know about San Mateo County Express Lane Go program. So there are things that we don't know about that we need to start promoting. We also have a carpool culture toolkit, which our own committee member, Calvin Chang, has put forth and I think you all have been, you actually proved it and it also went to the county supervisors and it's basically a toolkit that any school could take and promote and employ for ways to increase their carpool, carpools at their school. So a lot of research. There's also a Measure W. I mistakenly put Measure A in here. We have another member Murphy that has stepped back a little bit here. So I don't really know much about Measure A. But I know that Measure W is a regional sales tax measure that's going to be on the November ballot. We could potentially get some money. It's just being monitored right now. But we'll see. If it does pass, there's some money in it for us. And we could see how we could promote some transit options and just get a little more visibility here. Urban forestry. Thank you so much. You all agreed just a couple weeks ago to increase our tree canopy goal to 25%. We've already kind of hit that goal, so thank you by signing off on that one. And then these other ones, you're all pretty familiar with these ones. The loophole language, that's low-hanging fruit. These are things that don't cost us too much money, right? Supporting the Adopt-a-Tree Program, coordinating with PB&R on Tree City, USA, and Arbor Day, happenings and then working with public works to develop an urban forest plan when and if we do have the money. So we're here to help. That is really it on that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was it. The only thing I wanted to say on this, the other one I wanted to say on this one was there is a note on this one from the from on staff comment that just says that there doesn't need to be staff involvement. And I just kind of want to mention that that may have been a mistake because there is staff involvement needed. If a CARC member is not able to attend a LEARN or a RICAPS meeting, their representation from the city would be needed. Things like grants are announced in those meetings. For example, today there was an urban greening grant announced at a RICAPS meeting, and both Margo and Bella were there. And if Bella wasn't there and Margo couldn't have been there, we wouldn't know about it. So representation equals knowledge equals opportunity. So my recommendation is that we do make that something that staff should keep their eyes on. That's it. Next slide. Community engagement. This one also is just a little bit more of a high level as a subcommittee. Coordinating with all the other subcommittees, right? For education, outreach, attending events, supporting climate action newsletter. We would love to eventually be able to update the resource webpage with statistics when we do get them. And then there's the carpool toolkit that has already been adopted at 28 schools. So with... With all these opportunities, with being able to engage with the community, it just becomes more of a multiplier, and we just continue to get our work out there. We have attended the Eco Fest. There was a Pacific Beach Coalition. There was a movie and a cleanup. We're attending a Climate Jeopardy next week with the Rotary Club. And then there's potentially EV Expo.

in October.

Yeah. So it's just, you know, a multiplier there for all the engagements. Anything else on the engagement? Oh, yeah, land trust meeting that you had two weeks ago, right? Yeah, it was about two weeks ago. So that's another partnering opportunity, which was mentioned up above. So, yeah, that's it, community engagement. And that's our last slide, and we're hoping to kind of have a dialogue here, which is thank you to Mayor Bowles for creating this space for us.

Oh, Absolutely. We're so grateful for your work carrying on not just having a plan but being able to implement and start to meet our greenhouse gas reduction goals and take better care of our planet and our little piece of Pacifica that we have here. Thank you. You've done a lot in these five months since the committee has been organized. I know there will be direction that we need to to give to them on the work plan. There's been some input from staff about concerns about staff capacity that we'll need to talk about a little bit. I'm not sure that all those questions will be answered today. Our next meeting on June 8th is when we are really digging into our budget and staffing levels. So in terms of city staff, civic well fellows, and et cetera, I think that is going to need to wait until that meeting later in June to have that conversation. Is there anything you wanted to add, City Manager?

Just to thank them for their work and also note that the CARP is three things all at once. It's necessary, it's aspirational, and it's multi-year. And in the staff report, we tried to make a good faith estimate of how some of these activities would fit within the current staffing resources we have available, and also that there, as you noted, the June 8th meeting will have a broader organizational discussion about what the budget looks like and how we have requested. We're facing a $2.8 million deficit, and that's approximately before the VLF funding was not included in the governor's revised budget. and also what the target reductions for each department is. I didn't want to mention this in the introduction because I didn't want to dampen the aspirational aspect of this because, as I mentioned, this is necessary and aspirational for us to accomplish our goals. It's also multi-year, and through that budget process, we'll have an outline of sort of what some of the resources will be within the context of the entire city organization.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And sorry, just a quick question. I see the recommended action is to receive a presentation and provide feedback. Yes. And I'm just curious if the feedback is just like on our presentation or if you're going to say, yes, we can, no, we can't.

I think the feedback is on the work plan is my understanding, right?

That was the intent, yes.

Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to, yeah, I'll, What I want to do is open it up to see if there are some council clarifying questions right now on the side of public comment. And then maybe we can go back through each of your proposed areas of work and talk about them in a little bit more detail one at a time. That sounds OK?

Yeah, I think that would be great, because I feel like I have things to say throughout. So if we're going to go top down, that'd be great. OK. After public comment? Yeah.

ANY QUESTIONS NOW BEFORE PUBLIC COMMENT? OKAY. I HAVE THREE CARDS. SO WE'LL START WITH JESSICA SHEPHERD FOLLOWED BY REMY TAN AND THEN KEN MILES. I ASSUME YOU WANTED TO COMMENT ON THIS ITEM ALSO BECAUSE YOU WROTE CLIMATE CHANGE. HI, JESSICA. WELCOME.

Hiya. Good evening, Council. Good evening, community. My name is Jessica Shepherd, and I really appreciate the presentation you guys put together. But I did want to alert you of a resource that could potentially be useful not just for the committee, but also for local residents and potentially local businesses. There is a... Business app, essentially, called Too Good to Go. Some of you may have heard of them, some of you may not have. However, the idea of Too Good to Go is that businesses can basically, at the end of their closing day, put up whatever is left. of their food and you can pick it up for a fraction of the cost. And the thing with it is you don't know what you're going to get in the bag. So, for example, a bag that might cost you $25 worth of food regularly might cost you $7 because it is the end of the day and they want to turn a profit and you might want some food for cheaper. And that could be something around food donation, food accessibility, that we could potentially get our local businesses involved in, particularly Mazzotti's, if you're hearing me. I would love a brown muffin at the end of the day. But no, there are plenty of businesses that have some amazing food in Pacifica. And that could be one way that even our low-income residents could afford a really nice meal every once in a while. I don't know if that's feasible within the committee's plans, but it definitely fits within that food waste reduction for sure, because there are plenty of local businesses that have amazing food, and maybe they have nothing to give at the end of the day. But whatever they do, I know would always be appreciated.

That's all. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jessica. Remy?

Hello, Ramey Tan. I'm speaking as resident CIFICA. Great report. It was super. Just had some comments. SamTrans is our transit agency here. THEY'VE UNFORTUNATELY CUT BUS SERVICE TO THE BONE HERE. I REMEMBER WHEN I MOVED HERE, THEY HAD EXPRESS BUSES TO THE CITY, EXPRESS BUSES TO BART, AND I USED TO RIDE THEM. BUT THEY'RE GONE, SO LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, WE GET IN OUR CAR AND DRIVE. SO I THINK ONE THING YOU GUYS GOT TO GET WITH SAMTRANS AND REALLY PUSH THEM TO RESTORE THE CUT BUS SERVICE. the the DX to the city that bus was standing room only and they cut it so no it seems to be no rhyme or reason and then now we got new technology like I mean the way way more driverless cars are amazing and you know I think driverless shuttle buses would be around the corners that should reduce cost to Samtrans and you know that would hopefully help restore bus service and actually you know, have more bus service because, you know, you don't have the cost of the drivers. And PCE, Peninsula Clean Energy, they got a really great program for hot water heater emergency replacement. And that's usually when people replaced a water heater, when that thing breaks and it leaks water all over your house and you need a water heater tomorrow. So I know those guys are addressing that. And Margo, I saw you at the last community meeting for PCE. And so they're really on top of it and they're a great partner. So please continue working with them. Regarding EV charging. Maybe look at the different charging companies. ChargePoint is probably the biggest one, Electrify America, and a lot of these companies will pay part of the costs for putting in the chargers. I know we don't like Tesla too much, but Tesla has a really good and fast charging system as well. And for carpooling, there's a new company called Cruise, C-R-E-W-Z. And they're just starting out. They took over, I think, one of a very similar thing as the old carpooling apps we had before the pandemic. So you might want to reach out with them. And again, coordinating with the schools is a great thing. Thank you.

Thank you so much for me. Ken Miles, and then the last card I have is from Carl Schwab.

Thank you again, Mayor Bowles and City Council, and a new mayor, I mean, a new city manager. What I like about this plan you have with the resiliency plan, I guess you'd call it, is that you're working with the urban force And the only thing I comment about that is it might be in conflict with some of the issues of wildfire that you have. Because I remember in this town we have a lot of eucalyptus trees, scotch broom, and acacia trees that are really prone to blow up and that. And they're all over the neighborhood. So I don't know where the only thing I can think about. is that we either have a good law on that and people that violate the defensible space area, they have a code enforcement officer come and remind them a couple times they don't do it. You have somebody else come in, and they will take care of the problem and then charge them on their thing. I also like the idea about solar power. One of our big problems here in Pacifica, And I think around the whole state, northern state anyway, it's PG&E with their survival against costs. And they're not undergrounding their lines when they should be. We should have that here in Pacifica because that would be, instead of removing the palm trees in Valleymar or elsewhere, and they don't replace the trees that they do remove. So it's going to be like a battle between urban forestry and fire safety. We have to keep that in mind. Regarding solar power, I think I have it in my house. More and more people have it. But PG&E is fighting it through different ways with the insurance commissioners, et cetera. But I think we could, if all the people that live on the sunny side of the valley had solar power and they can generate what they need and then sell, quote, unquote, to the people that live in the shade, that would be a way of maybe we could do something community-wise without PG&E involved. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Carl Schwab.

I don't know if you need an address or something? No. That's good enough. Okay, I was one of the people that helped write the CARP plan, and now the baton has been passed over to the the CART committee and it's a really daunting task and I hope that, but it's important. I mean, it's something I think we have to address one way or the other if we want to keep, you know, having a lifestyle that we've become used to. Anyway, so I thank them for their work and I hope that they'll get cooperation with the city and the various other organizations and funding sources and actually make this thing happen. I JUST WANT TO WISH WELL AND HOPE PEOPLE CAN COOPERATE ON MAKING THIS HAPPEN.

THANK YOU. NO PUBLIC COMMENTS ONLINE? ALL RIGHT. I'LL CLOSE PUBLIC COMMENT AND BRING IT BACK TO COUNCIL. I'M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT PAGE WE SHOULD START ON. THERE WERE ONGOING WORK PLAN ITEMS THAT WERE DISCUSSED STARTING ON PAGE 156.

I think you can probably skip over them because they're, I mean, maybe unless Samantha has a different recommendation, because they're ongoing. We, as a committee, already agree that they're ongoing. I don't think there's any real staffing issues unless maybe Samantha disagrees. There was maybe something in regards... Oh, the... Yeah, yeah. So I do think that maybe we could start at...

I did mention the funding for the data. I did mention funding for the data. So that was like $2,500, right?

$3,000 for one year and an additional $7,000 if you wanted them to go back and make it match with previous data, is what I understand. Okay. So...

And that's just for transportation? That's just for transportation, right. Vehicle miles traveled. And if you wanted more information about that, we could get information from Ryan Gardner of Rincon. He has a number of slides and details about the kind of information that we could get from REPLICA.

And then packet page 157 looks like a good place, the very bottom. So fiscal year 2026, CART work plan, priorities, recommendations, developed by CART might be a good place to start.

Okay.

And let me just check in with city staff. Were there other things before jumping to this item of the work plan that you wanted feedback on?

Some of the preceding items, notice, included the recognition that If it were an ongoing item under current staffing levels, we could probably manage it. But that was very, we very deliberately defined that as current as of right now.

Okay. Well, I have a question on that. On packet page 156, with regard to item near the bottom of the page where it says item 1B, I think it's a 1, right? 1B, liaisons to city committees, commissions. And in line 1, 2, 3, 4, it references the contributing relevant information to the city's regular CARP-related newsletter prepared by staff. That's the CARL newsletter. And in light of departures of staff and uncertainty about staffing, who's doing that right now?

Right now, that's being taken care of by our, or being done completely by our Civic Spark fellow, Bella Carrion. So if the Civic Spark fellow position is not reinstated, continued, then Carl's Corner might go away.

And Bella's contract is until the fall, I believe? I believe until October.

I don't know.

Bella. September.

September.

September 2026. So it would mean we would have to, I think it's apply for the grant. I think there's still funds. You still have to pay some money, right?

Yeah, my understanding from previous years, it's about a $40,000 payment from the city. And yeah, it's grant funded otherwise, you know, to pay a proper salary for that work for an 11th month period. So that would be something that would come before us for discussion on June 8th. That's correct.

Those are going to be very hard discussions for us to have. Absolutely. I appreciate being able to look through all this tonight. It's going to help us in our conversations then. There was something I had a question about. Sorry, excuse me.

Can I just make a comment on that? Can I just make a comment on that one? Because that is a very good example, Council Member Beckmeyer, of the kind of representation that would actually be lost, Bella wouldn't have been in that meeting today, and we wouldn't have known about that grant. So, Mary, that's kind of just what I'm saying is like, if we don't have that representation, it's a circular discussion, then you don't get grants and none of this happens. So I apologize for interrupting you.

Oh, no, because kind of that's where I was going, because it made me take notice when... if one member can't go to a meeting, and then we're gonna expect staff to go to that meeting, and I think that's the gap, and I'm concerned about that. Also because our staff is already overworked, and so yeah, we're gonna have to have a conversation about that, but I understand the importance. But yeah, that was something that stood out to me. And there was some, okay, I'm good for right this second. I'm excited to talk about transportation, though, so when do we get there? Okay, we'll keep going.

Okay, and like you said, I mean, right now, I mean, I'm grateful that Margo was able to go to that meeting, but you can't necessarily commit to having a committee member who's a volunteer attend these regularly because they're during a work day, right? So not everyone is able to do that.

Is it possible for one of us to do that?

It's an, I don't, the group is made up, so RICAPS is made up of sustainability managers or other city staff. I see. City council members don't generally take part in these meetings. Okay. So.

And even having you participate is a little.

Even having me participate is, it's not, well.

Weird.

They're being kind to allow a volunteer member of the community to participate. But I have been glad to do it for the past couple of years. Trying to work with what we got. Just a wealth of information and resources about what's happening.

Are the RICAP's agendas public?

Do you know, Sean? No.

Will they have to be recorded?

No. It's a meeting of sustainability staff. It's a CCAG program. Right. It's a meeting of sustainability staff, so I think they might be intimidated if a council member showed up. Not intimidated, but it might create a different vibe, if you will. And it would be atypical to have non-agency staff on a regular basis.

Right. I was just thinking, if there's a way to monitor... the subject matter through, you know, receiving the agendas, receiving the slide decks. It's, you know, are they Zoom meetings or in person?

There are usually Zoom meetings, but then there are quarterly in-person meetings. And the Zoom meetings are not recorded. The slides can be available, but there's nothing that replaces the in-person meetings. Either in person or viewing it.

Oh, believe me, I know. Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out how we're going to cover all the bases that are mentioned here in this plan, of which there are many.

Yes.

And they're all important.

Yes.

Top priority important.

Yeah.

So. Yes. I'm just trying to get my arms around what is being asked for here. Thank you.

Are there minutes of those meetings?

I don't think so. A lot of it is staff brainstorming around potentially, sometimes they do multi-jurisdictional applications and how to deliver these projects or grappling with a lot of the same issues that you hear in the work plan and in the committee of how do we make this happen when the need is so great and there are so few dedicated resources. But if it's a matter of funding applications, I can reach out to their staff and have them send them to us because there are two types, one of which is these are funding applications available for public agencies, such as ourself, and then also, for example, the hot water rebates or other rebates that are available on the consumer level. And we can use Connect, Pacifica Connect, or other channels to distribute the consumer-based rebates or applications.

Thank you. Thank you. And before we get to, and then the other item was the website which again right now is being updated by staff which is okay under current capacity but we'll find out. Okay. And does the city ever allow a committee member to do website updates or does that have to be done by staff?

We would do that. City staff. Although committee members could write text and narrative that could be inserted.

Yeah, I was just going to suggest that, sorry, that is something a CARC member could do is create the content and then pass that along to staff members and then the staff members would just, of course they would need to be approved, but just upload it.

Yeah, that would help a lot. Thank you. Okay, so let's go on to your work plan. So the tools for tracking progress, is that where we are? No. 157.

Yeah, I think the bottom of 157. Roman numeral 2.

So I think this is something that we've directed, right? That in the future, you'll be presenting your work plan concepts to us earlier in February so that we have the information before our strategic goal setting, and then it factors into the budget discussions every year.

Yeah, I like that. Smart.

I think that sounds good. We can move on.

We're looking at 2B, home electrification permitting process.

I have a question on bullet point 1, 2, 3, 4. Support recommendations to streamline permitting processes and ease zoning restrictions related to heat pump placement. So it sounds like there's a determination or a sense that the zoning regulations are make heat pump water heater installation difficult. Am I correct in the way I'm reading that?

That's correct. Not necessarily for Pacifica because we don't know that, but in other jurisdictions that has apparently been a barrier.

Does that have to do with setback requirements?

Yes.

From a side perspective or a rear perspective?

Say that again, please.

Side perspective or rear perspective?

Side setback or rear setback? Side or rear? On the property. All of the above.

I don't see that as being a big problem in Pacifica. Typically, most of the bathrooms are on the rear of the home where there's ample space within the setback requirements. But I do think it merits a look to make sure where there are setbacks potential conflicts that we figure a way to make it easy, but we need to consider fire code, particularly on the side setbacks to protect neighbors from...

Absolutely. It's complicated. If it was easy, we already would have done it.

Yes. And we're not here to debate the exact requirements here today.

This is something that they want to work on, right?

To understand what the restrictions might be that you know, might limit the locations.

Is it likely that we'll receive a number of recommendations from you like about bike charging plug locations and perhaps new construction projects, charging ready circuits being involved, any other kind of code changes like perhaps making setback requirements exclude solar car ports? Are there A number of those kind of ideas that potentially may be forthcoming in the future?

Potentially, maybe. I cannot predict what will be forthcoming.

Just to give a shout out, one of those projects we talked about earlier, the 19 units, each one of those garages will have a solar circuit, or not a solar circuit, a circuit ready for car chargers in every garage. I would love to see that across Pacifica.

We know.

Well, my understanding is that we, you know, Cal Green standards, building standards are mandated. That's what my understanding is, so we're heading in that direction anyway, so.

So the way this is written, it's really about permitting and trying to make all that easier, right? So you're making this easier for a homeowner or his home who wants to do these improvements to get their permit more quickly and reduce the burden. Correct.

With the understanding that safety is very important. The inspections are important and all of those things are important.

And I know there's some staff pushback in the staff report just because a lot of this is planning and building who are really an impacted department right now with all that the state is forcing upon us and all the applications. So I'm just wondering if, I mean, what I'm seeing is sort of review and in your language, like maybe for the first year to try to take some of the burden away from staff Could this be like looking at best practices in other cities, you know, you all reading our codes to understand what we have now, what we don't, what might be necessary without us having to give direction that planning staff, we want you to work on this, right? Because I think that's going to be difficult for us to do. Yes. Okay.

And also the time frame, right? Like we could, I feel like it needs to be extended. I know how important this is, but when I see the 26, 27, it's like, I know there's a lot. And so I guess if it said 28, I would feel more comfortable. But I know how important it is, so I'm not denying that. Just tight timelines.

Could we add a caveat in there sometime that's someplace that says as staff time allows to give staff flexibility that if it doesn't work in that time frame, they're able to say, hey, sorry, I have seven builders remedy projects that have a deadline, it's going to need to wait till after the Builders' Remedy projects are done, for example.

Yeah. Hypothetically speaking. Yeah. And what is next that the state puts on it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, would staff feel comfortable with some of this language being softened a little bit? I mean, what specific kind of direction should we be giving?

Feedback. I think that on the one hand, the flexibility would be appreciated. On the other hand, we want to be able to manage expectations. And how do we prioritize? Because everything we do that's, we have to deal with, you know, the core services. Somebody comes up to the permit counter. We have to deal with the legally mandated services, which are increasing, feels like every month. And then on top of that, there might be a little thin band of discretionary. And then how do we prioritize? So if there is flexibility, I'd want to be able to articulate what the expectations are.

But just going down the bullet points. So review, which is them doing it. Review, which is them doing it. Maybe staff would point them to where these are in our codes, which could maybe just happen at a meeting. conduct countywide best practice support recommendations. So I guess, I mean, at some point the recommendations would have to come to Council. So maybe this isn't something that's in this year's work plan, but maybe it comes to us in February, right, of next year that we can start talking about what you've learned and presenting YOU KNOW, WHAT THE NEXT STEP OF IS OF THE, OF IMPROVING THE PERMITTING AND SO FORTH. SO I'M JUST TRYING TO TAKE SOME OF LIKE A DIRECTION TO STAFF OUT OF THIS FOR RIGHT NOW BECAUSE WE DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT IT IS ANYWAY RIGHT NOW.

SURE. SO MAYOR BOWLES, IS YOUR INTENTION TO LOOK AT THESE SUBTASKS AND THEN MAYBE SORT OF RED LINE SOME OF THEM AND REVISE THEM WITH VERBAGE AND SAYING, MAKING THEM more achievable for staff and for CARC members? Or is it sort of just requesting, is it city manager saying, yeah, like, if we can be more lenient with our expectations, then also you'll be more lenient next year when we go to say we didn't really get a lot of this done? Oh, absolutely, right. We understand all our committees are volunteer. Yeah, because we understand after we read the work plan that, you know, we understand there's going to be cuts, and we understand a lot of this is going to turn into support, research, best practice, mapping, and then doing another presentation that shows sort of all those things. And we tried to pick the low-hanging fruit that was the most cost-effective option. And then when we saw the work plan, it was kind of like we knew what we were going to have to do. But I guess sort of where we are right now is how do we, I'm very procedural. So how are we expecting to move forward from this to the next spot? Are we going to redline here? Or do you want to just kind of agree that like, yeah, this looks good, but we're both going to be able to have to bend on a lot of the stuff?

I think the only sentence that gives me pause is the fourth one, support recommendations to streamline permitting processes and ease zoning restrictions.

Yep, that's the one I brought up.

Because I think that's the one that's not defined yet, right? And we don't really know how big that is. So if that can be, you know, research recommendations and then when you come back again, you know, we can talk about the specifics a little bit more as part of next year's work.

Yeah, I would be comfortable if we extend the timeframe. I think you're going to see all of these are just fiscal year 26, 27. We all just assumed it was just for one year. So I think we can all agree. Margo's term's one year. Mine's four years. We're all like, let's just try to get stuff done. For sure. Yeah.

And you did find low-hanging fruit throughout the whole plan. Exactly. And this is timeline that you want to start these things, not necessarily that they're all wrapped up in a year or two, right? I think that's important. to communicate to us, but also to staff so they're not feeling overly burdened.

I think for that bullet number four, it would be fine to say research recommendations because then we would have an answer. Are we talking about side or rear placement, et cetera, et cetera. So we can change support to research.

My question, once it comes back to us, is how does this potential change in zoning relate to other zoning reviews that we're already planning to do? Where does that fit in? We just finished the building code three-year cycle update last December, I think.

This past December.

Yeah. So we're effectively, well, not yet.

Two and a half years out.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's the timing of those kinds of things and looking at where's staff Working on zoning anyway, I mean, I know that we have some zoning that needs updating. Where is that going to fit in staff's work plan already? So how would this piece align or not align with that? Those are the kinds of questions I'm thinking about.

Yeah. Like zoning code modernization in general is on the planning staff work plan. So this could be something super simple if it's just about setbacks for heat pumps, or it could be very complicated, right? That's just what we don't know right now. Right. I guess we'll find out.

I think the zoning issue is a pretty small number of houses, and I think if it does come down to... Can you speak in the mic?

Sorry, Celeste.

I think if it does come down to the air district requiring more heat pumps, water heaters, sorry. Yeah, heat pump... heat systems to HVAC systems to be implemented then things might change. But I think it's an iterative process and right now we don't have that information. So I do think it's a lower number of heat pump heating systems. Yeah.

But I think just a change in the zoning code irregardless of the number of properties is a certain amount of work. So yeah, if you're willing to change that language then I'm Seriously, I'm happy with all of these.

Oh, and I know you can't speak for them, but in bullet point five, it occurred to me when it says conduct outreach and education for residents and contractors, is this in any way something that you can do in conjunction with Pacific as Environmental Families?

Yes, and PCE, Peninsula Clean Energy, is already doing a lot of outreach that way, so we can leverage what they're already doing. So the answer is yes and yes.

Thank you.

I think what they do is that they, Peninsula Clean Energy, they recommend if someone is wanting to change, do the heat pump, they recommend the contractor. So it's kind of easier for them to do that.

do their own research and also contact the contractor so they already do that which is a good thing absolutely yeah and just like to be super clear that I really support all these goals but I just think we need to be clear that we can't be too specific about how much staff resources we can offer at this time and that I support them in being able to do as much as they can with whatever resources it is that we're able to offer them. And we do have some hard choices that are coming up, but we have to put faith in them to do this important work. They have to put faith in us to make the best decision for the city that we can. And through the city manager's office, too, because he's going to have some tough choices to make as to how to allot the staff time. And we just all need to work together because this stuff is what's going to make the difference in our kids' future.

Yeah, yeah. I think we're all very committed to the work that you're doing. So I don't want you to hear otherwise from us in asking these questions. Okay, let's talk about EVs, Greg's favorite subject. Not quite yet. I didn't see a spot in here about reach codes and trying to move to building more electric, which is, and tell me if I missed it, but that's something that council directed at our goal setting to continue to research, knowing that we have a limited path, as you know, Margo, from what we've heard from Peninsula Clean Energy after the state law, AB 306, that prevented new reach codes for electrification of residential buildings unless they were tied to policies already in the general plan. And so part of what we directed, and that's in the minutes for this meeting, is for the city attorney to research what may be possible. Again, that also is going to take some planning staff time, right, to work out, but... Yeah, I hope that that's something that you all can be involved in as well. I know it's important on the electrification side.

Yes. We could add that to the work plan. I didn't want the work plan to become too busy, but yes, it's still on our radar.

Can we ask them to review it when it's available?

Yeah, or participate in the process.

Yeah, and that belongs here in the building electrification section.

Yeah, though this specifically says permitting processes. And that's where I wasn't sure if it belonged there. But I didn't see another place for it. So just something for you to think about. And we'll learn more again on June 8th. whether there's capacity for staff to be working on that.

Yes, and in fact, in the RICAPS meeting today, they did say, let us know if you would like support with reach code analysis for what your city can do, and so we're going to reach out to them regarding that.

Great. Yeah, I've heard a few other cities have done it in the last few months under their general plans.

Yes.

Great.

Yeah, I had that too, the reach code with a question mark, because I didn't see it in the sections.

Uh-huh.

But that's also a big undertaking as well.

Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll keep that on our, in our top of our minds. All right. So can we scroll down to the next item? Okay.

You seem to have some input questions too. No, I was going to give Greg the floor because this is his favorite subject.

If it was left up to me, I would love to research how much stuff we can mandate be part of any new building or remodel to get as much infrastructure for EVs in place as possible. Perhaps consider a caveat in there about as long as it doesn't trigger a service upgrade because that could get prohibitively expensive, there's going to be a lot of balancing of that kind of load capacity stuff that's a concern. I know with two electric cars myself, load capacity is a problem. And I worry about that on my personal house. So I will worry for mandating anything like that on people too. But it would be nice to start slowly implementing that and figuring out the best way forward for that seeking some clarity and some advice from you guys and your expertise would be greatly appreciated.

There are a lot of groups doing work on this right now, so the idea is to get with them and find out what's happening across the county and see what resources there are for us, et cetera, et cetera. So Celeste and I are on this subcommittee, and we have our work cut out for us.

Definitely leveraging whatever resources that the state or county has and local groups and PCE and all of them is what will move us forward, I think.

And again, I think the language seems mostly okay. That's research and support and partner and So forth.

The one I'm... One, two, three, four, five, six.

Bullet six. Well, actually, I was looking at a different one. Oh. The fourth one that talked about developing an EV readiness plan. So I have no idea what's involved in that, if that's, you know, a cut and paste from what other cities have done or if that is something that needs a lot of planning or public works staff time to do?

Yeah, we are just now starting to understand what an EV readiness plan is, and it's a big lift, I will say. San Francisco published one, I think, in 2019, and it was 117 pages long. So it's a big lift, depending on how robust we want our readiness plan to be. But again, if we want to achieve our goals, we do want to have approximately 540 EV chargers across the city, both public and private. So we need a plan for that.

Well, I have a question as to whether you've heard if there's any data sources or how does one go about finding out? Like, I didn't know Greg had two EV charging things at his house. Is there a way to find out what our own citizens have been doing Because they don't have to get a permit to do that. You know, is there surveying? Is there, hey, how's your EV readiness at your house? We do have, what is that thing called? That fast something survey tool? You know that one that just came out today? What is that thing called? Flash vote. Flash vote, that's it. And other survey tools like that. You know, is that a way to try to get your arms around, our arms around, I mean, certainly the city can say what we've installed on city property or not, or where are we? Like, for example, at the Civic Center where we now have the structure, right? And pretty soon I'm not going to be able to park in those spots that say EV only. As long as there's no EV chargers, that's the only spot available. I'm kind of pulling in there real quick. But I realize that will not be cool very soon. So I don't know if there's a data source somewhere that you have heard of or ways other cities got their arms around this. Anything? Not yet?

Not yet, but I was in a meeting a week or two ago. There's an organization in Marin that's all about EV infrastructure, and they're trying to make their way to work with organizations down the peninsula. So I will be reaching out to them. I don't recall their name right now.

Are you planning on doing any analysis of where the grid will no longer support any more electric cars?

At some point, yes. Yes. We're just getting started in this effort. So, you know, I would, we should probably reach back out to you to get these questions again. Right.

And we can do that. I mean, we can connect with our PG&E people. And there's a lot of information resource. And Christine's on PCE. You know, there's all that. So figuring out what we already have access to, I think will be very helpful. I have to say, bullet point six, I don't know what Cal Green Tier 2 EV charging requirements are. So I really don't know that I can support the implementation of them. I'm sure I need to, but can you tell me more about that?

Well, my understanding is that Cal Green Tier 2 EV charging says that new construction has to be EV ready. It has to have the power ready for level 2 charging, which is 240 volts, I believe. And again, this is a mandatory requirement.

So I think for this one, the specifics of which tier of Cal Green and if it's level 1 or level 2, we discussed at length as part of our building code cycle updates.

Yeah, we did.

And we are not allowed to go beyond what the building code requires right now. So I think, and I don't know if Director Updegrave remembers specifically. I'm sure she can fill you in later on what the right terminology is. But I think supporting the implementation of eRecharging requirements and maybe taking out what the specifics are until we know what is actually allowed.

»» Well, my reading of this says support the implementation of the requirements. So this is not going above the requirements.

»» Tier 2 might not be required, right? So there's different tiers of CalGreen. So there's like the basic requirement and then if you want to go above, cities in the past could adopt reach codes and actually call for something stricter. But I'm not sure that we can call for that. It's a question. »» Okay.

Yeah, I'm not reading this as extending beyond the requirements. So I'm reading this as support implementation, meaning outreach to the community to let them know about it, getting with stakeholders who are in this arena to help figure out ways to support it, but not going above and beyond what the CalGreen requirements would be. Okay. That sounds good to me.

Something else that would be probably useful is in some of the load management stuff, there's a bunch of different control systems. Having some of that information available on our website for normal citizens who aren't geeks about this stuff, to be able to go find a source for the control system that will manage that load for them.

Exactly.

Would be very helpful.

And that was actually... There were some vendors at PCE's recent event during climate week that I attended that do exactly that. So you can share your load between your washing machine and your car charger or something like that. So you don't have to duplicate. It just shuts it off. If you're doing one, you can't do the other. Yeah, that would be really helpful. Because whatever we can do to help people learn that they don't need to upgrade their panels, that saves money and allows more of this to happen.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, then, I see that as part of the EV education and outreach, right? Mm-hmm. Okay.

Yeah. And the other question I wanted to ask, and I don't know if it belongs here, and maybe this is something for Public Works, but in speaking with PCE reps, we as a city are also supposed to work on a fleet electrification plan, right, for city vehicles. And I think that needs to come into effect fairly soon. Do you have information on that, City Manager?

There are state mandates to buy more clean vehicles with every vehicle purchase you do, and the mandates increase every year. I WASN'T AWARE WE HAD TO DO A SPECIFIC PLAN, BUT WE CAN LOOK INTO THAT AND SEE IF THAT IS MANDATED AS WELL.

YEAH. AND THAT IS SOMETHING THAT PC TOLD ME. I THINK THEY ANNOUNCED THIS AT OUR LAST BOARD MEETING. THEY'VE BEEN WORKING WITH ALL THE OTHER CITIES IN THE COUNTY, BUT NOT US YET. AND SO, YEAH, THEY CAN HELP US CREATE THAT PLAN AND ACTUALLY FIND FUNDING FOR CITY VEHICLES TOO. Again, I don't know if this belongs on your work plan or if that's just something that staff does on the side separately. But if there's a way for you all to support it, that helps us all.

So there's a map that Bella put together that shows where our work plan is and where the overlapping work items are. And it's not actually these work plan items right here. It was sort of how... Goals crisscross, right? And so somewhere out there in the ether, there's a map that should show that when the police force goes to purchase a vehicle, they should be consulting some other arm that says that we should be purchasing a clean vehicle. And we can get that map, but it is like, they shouldn't just be going out to the Ford dealership, right? I just kind of want to make sure that that is understood, and I'm sure that whoever goes and does that already knows that too. Okay.

Yeah. So maybe these are further conversations.

Yeah, and I don't think it's like something that we need to. I think it may have already been in their work plan because they work with those folks that do it, but it's part of the partnering. Yeah. Right? Right.

And I think it could be great as part of your communication is what the city is also doing, right? Even if it's not you doing it, but to the public, this is what we're doing.

Yeah, and inviting the chief of police to our meetings.

I'm pretty sure police vehicles are exempted from that, just so you know.

I know, because I remember when we purchased our new fleet, and I was at the moment, anyway, right?

Okay.

Okay. Are we ready to move on? Any other feedback on this item?

Just to once again acknowledge my appreciation for how much they've looked into a lot of this stuff already, that to put this plan together was a big lift in and of itself, and how comprehensive it is is admirable and appreciated.

Absolutely. Well, Margo's really the expert here. So once you get down further, you might loosen up a little bit.

Okay. Resilience. So this is about coastal resilience and wildfire resilience.

I can start with a question there. It says resilience through nature-based solutions. How does that comport with our BBRP plan?

I'm sorry, I didn't hear the last part of your question. How does it comport with?

Our BBRP plan, our resilience plan, the city resilience plan of a combination of some beach nourishment and a seawall.

Nature-based is just typically something that coexists with natural processes and tries to work with natural processes instead of, you know, hardening.

So is a reef included in your contemplation?

Yeah, it could be. I mean, part of it's the state has their guidelines for nature-based solutions, so that's a term of art that they're looking for something to fit within there. So I'm trying to think of the actual... They're trying to... different solutions that complement nature. So, you know, technically, seawalls contribute to, like, loss of beaches. So that doesn't fit under the rubric of nature-based solutions because...

So you would be actively working across purposes with the stated position of the city?

No, no. I mean, this is all in... Obviously, it was researched as part of the CARP and what it is is solutions that the state recommends. So I don't think what the city has currently is.

Our local coastal land use plan has both a combination of arming and natural based solutions. That is the official position of the city. And what I'm seeing here is in conflict with that. And that's what the basis of my question is.

Well, some of the points, identify and collaborate with stakeholders related to shoreline resilience and nature-based solutions, that could be both. The local coastal plan and other resilience-related planning documents. I mean, resilience isn't one or the other. It's both.

Where do you see that it's either or? But we have a plan. It's not exclusively nature-based solutions, and we do have an obligation to support our community so that the ocean doesn't come take their houses.

Well, this is, yeah, I mean, this is all flowing from the approved climate action resiliency plan, and so this is, we're taking the action items and just translating them into to task in breaking them down. So the recommendation was nature-based solutions. And in fact, this one is a great example of leveraging local resources because the organizations, because the land trust applied for a grant with the Coastal Conservancy, which one of the qualifiers is it's a nature-based solution. So they couldn't have got the planning stage money without it qualifying for the nature-based solution. So they're trying to make things fit together so that we can get money for planning for future solutions. And I don't think that those... I think you could have... If there's funding for a seawall and funding for nature-based solutions, they don't conflict. In fact, the...

So it's not an exclusion of one or the other, then?

I don't believe so.

I mean, I think it... That's the clarity I was looking for.

Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I think we're fortunate to have a land trust have applied for the funding and for the planning stage, and then they're, you know, continuing to present those ideas to the public and get feedback. And then, you know, at the end of the year, they're going to try and, I mean, they're not going to try. They're going to submit their proposal to the Coastal Conservancy and hopefully qualify for money for one of those solutions. But, you know, it has to be a viable solution and something that the city obviously would approve, you know, and work with the land trust. So this was to me one of those, you know, great, you know, Solutions where we can leverage someone who's already applied for a grant and the city, you know is in sync with that potential outcome and obviously it has to be Consistent with the local coastal land use plan in the city.

So yeah Have you considered also looking into? any studies on what the potential negative effects of them and dredging a million cubic yards out of the bay, taking that sand away, which is what used to feed our coastline and feed our beaches. And are you going to look into any of those kind of things on how we can resume that natural flow of sand down to our beaches?

I think that's a little more than here. Yeah, that's not... They're supporting... And actually, I think... So in the first item, Pacifica Land Trust is missing, right? You're supporting... their study, which is looking at nature-based solutions. And maybe they would be looking at those effects, not necessarily the committee.

Well, yeah, it's like one, two, three, bullet point four, support grant-writing efforts from Pacifica Land Trust. And then the last one is citywide collaboration with stakeholders, Pacifica Land Trust.

And any other stakeholders. So yeah, it doesn't limit it to the land trust.

Yeah, it seems broad to me.

Great if another organization submits a grant for it. Yeah, well, like the Beach Coalition did the planting of the dunes, right? They had some money for that too. To be practical, yeah, that's our goal right now.

And then figuring out, so you have the subtasks and who is going to be doing them, right? And that goes back to our staffing discussions. So I don't know what you think about that, Christine.

Yeah. Well, and I think there's, I mean, there's definitely overlap with what you have here that staff is working on. And I think that's where I see some of the uncomfortableness and the comments from staff, you know, about this. But, I mean, our local coastal plan... and the Coastal Commission certainly, you know, is prioritizing nature-based solutions wherever they can happen. They're not appropriate for every location. You know, we were told they probably wouldn't work here at Beach Boulevard because we just don't have enough room. I think, you know, a lot of the... the engagement and collaborating with stakeholders could be a really big help to the city because all of our adaptation planning still that work is to come right our local land coastal land use plan took out all the adaptation strategies for the different parts of town and that's the work that we need to start doing visioning with the community about what we want and what are the pathways over time right it might be a seawall here for a while and then we have to do this or you know, here we can do nature-based solutions for a while and then we have to do this, right? And we are short on staff and money and, you know, whatever, I think whatever you all can do to help with that community engagement piece, you know, there's the need to survey, you know, people who don't live here too who come and visit our beaches, for example.

I agree with you. And I think this has to be done in concert with staff, not separate from it. Right. And that's my impression of what you said about tension with staff efforts.

Yeah. I mean, that's what I thought. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we're here to support what the staff, you know, direction is. So we want to do that the best way we can and whatever feedback, oh, we don't, you know, this isn't something the city supports or does, you know, that's what we need to know.

So do you feel like some of the language should, be changed a little bit? Or is it enough that that is the direction, right? Council, I'm asking you.

Bullet point one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Citywide collaboration with stakeholders. To identify and consider nature-based solutions throughout adaptation and shoreline planning processes sounds like work outside the scope of staff, as I read that. So if this lead-in phrase, citywide collaboration with stakeholders, included city staff in cooperation with city staff, as directed by council, things like that would make me feel more comfortable about this section.

Can you say that? I'm sorry. Can you say that again?

So this last bullet on here, citywide collaboration with stakeholders to identify and consider nature-based solutions throughout adaptation and shoreline planning processes sounds very much outside the scope of our staff. which council has already given direction to, to do this. So it's really staff's domain. And the concern I have is this sounds like competing or cross-purposes or we're not collaborating on it together. I'm not sure we're ready to collaborate at this point while we're doing research, right? Isn't that what you were saying is where we're at with this work plan? I think we need to give staff a minute to develop the work that Council's directed them to do.

I hear what you're saying. I have one maybe a correction that may or may not be relevant to your question. But in the at our last meeting that last part of that sentence shoreline and shoreline planning process was supposed to be removed and it wasn't, so that's the only part of the work plan where there was an edit that was missed. I mean, truly our goal here is to work with the city staff, city and staff direction, and so this last sentence really had more to do with the residential like wildfire resilience and just it's going to take some work, you know, and obviously there's even other committees working on this, so that's why, you know, trying to determine how we move forward on the resilience for wildfire mitigation adaptation is a whole other thing that we're just starting to work on and that's, you know, we haven't had that much time obviously as a committee to work on. We know that there's, you know, CAL FIRE's direction and the county's direction and the city has, I mean, the mandates, I mean, from them and so even things like defensible space, like we haven't, the city, you know, we need to know what the city wants to be defined as defensible space. That's not something, you know, we would Anyway, we do want to take our direction from city staff and what the city has as far as the second part Which the second part of this resilience was sort of combined The first part was coastal resilience.

The second part was wildfire resilience, but I'm we're happy to make whatever edits you're comfortable with Well at this point I suggest we strike that last bullet entirely because it doesn't relate to fire and And it does relate to shoreline planning processes, which are already assigned to staff.

I think it's super important, though, to keep a large part of the emphasis on fire, because with the increasing fire risk, I think this work is critical.

And it's work that people do on their own property. I mean, fire every week in Connect with Pacifica is putting the flyers and the information about five feet of defensible space, da, da, da. They lay it out. They make it clear. But I think taking it to the next level and helping people see and understand what that actually means and that it is their responsibility. We had public comment earlier that talked about, well, if they don't take care of the tree and code enforcement visits them twice and tells them they need to and then City's just going to take care of it. With what resources? So, I mean, I get it. It's important, but I think we accomplish it by educating the public about what they need to do in taking care of their property, right?

List of best practices.

Correct, but it's also, yeah, I don't know if the city has, I mean, I'm just, because we're starting out this process, I don't even know if the city has a, mandated defensible space. Other cities do. I know Cal Fire has recommendations. We do not. And the county has recommendations. So that's just something to start the process on.

At this point, our fire, as you can see in Connect with Pacifica, is educating. It's about educating. Community outreach. Giving the public the idea, ah, aha. I mean, it's not hard when you see fires on TV. Not here, thankfully. It's a good opportunity. to jump on that public awareness. But I do believe that it's the education component that they're focusing on at this time, not the policy.

Oh, correct. Yeah, that's, I mean, definitely. But, I mean, what is the defensible space?

I guess it's like the, you know, how do we... Our fire in Connect with Pacifica documents is recommending five feet.

Okay, so...

It's not policy the council adopted. It's not a stated city policy, but that is what FIRE is recommending, which we appreciate because they're the experts.

I think it's also part of some insurance recommendations with the five feet, and I would not be surprised to see that distance change.

And I can't remember exactly, but we just updated the FIRE maps, right? And my understanding is actually starting this year, We don't have any properties that are developed areas that are in the very high fire hazard severity zones, but we have some in the high fire hazard severity zones. And my recollection, which is a little vague, is that property owners will need to start doing these things in those areas. So I think, you know, the fire department is communicating globally to everyone in the city, but there might be more outreach to the people that are actually in those areas that would be helpful for you all to communicate to.

Or that are adjacent to those areas. So it's a targeted communication. Makes sense.

So should we come back to the subtasks at hand here?

Why don't we just strike that eighth bullet. I think we covered it above. And then keep that. The seventh bullet covers what what Councilmember Wright was talking about for the fire awareness. Does that sound good?

Yep, and I'd slip something in there about ember cast venting too. I'm not seeing that for some reason.

I'm sorry?

That's very specific to home hardening.

It's just if you're looking at stuff.

Well, there could be a long list. It was the one above that. Sorry. It's conduct outreach regarding wildfire risk reduction.

There we go.

My bad.

Oh, I see.

Thank you, Deirdre, for getting us on track there. Appreciate it.

I just wanted to move on to the questions that I can't answer for the next question.

Okay. Are we moving on to food recovery programs? Yes, we are. Okay. I have a question on this. Don't ask me. Oh, you probably don't know the answer. We'll see. It wasn't when you were on council. So the city, under Senate Bill 1383, if I'm not mistaken, I could be some other Senate bill or Assembly bill that it related to, but the removal or the prevention of edible food going into the waste stream is really a subject area of this and we, the city, had to adopt policies around that. We, the city, as I recall, help me out, contracted with some group in the county for that purpose. We basically subcontracted that work to them, and they, whoever they are, I mean, I was curious. I'm just curious. I asked, like, so how does that work anyway? And it sounded like they have trucks and they go around and pick up food from places. I mean, they have to work out their procedures, clearly. But we signed on for this in some way. And so what I'm trying to figure out is who did we sign on with? What was the, you know, we signed up with somebody. Who? What was the scope of the work? And how much does it cost us? BECAUSE WE'RE DOING IT.

WE JUST HAD A REPORT NOT LONG AGO ON THIS. I THINK THEY HAVE TO REPORT YEARLY. I DON'T REMEMBER.

SORRY, I DON'T REMEMBER.

NO, IT MAY HAVE BEEN ON CONSENT IN WHICH IT WASN'T DISCUSSED, BUT I REMEMBER.

THERE'S ALSO SOME WASTE MANAGEMENT RULES. YES, SOMETHING WITH RECOLLEGY, RIGHT?

RIGHT, IT DOES MENTION ABOUT CONNECTING WITH RECOLLEGY.

POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE THROUGH THE CHAIR. WE'LL LOOK INTO IT AND SEE IF WE HAD AN ANNUAL REPORT RECENTLY.

Because we don't want to be duplicative, obviously, but there's never, you know, having a communication for people to understand what to do. We heard public comment about one option. You know, there's various other ones around, so. But I am specifically thinking since we are a food program, the city of Pacifica is one. The school district is one with five outlets so we can start there pretty easily I would think because it's you know it's either our own staff or identifiable staff at the school district but what I want to understand is what is that larger thing that we approved and are supposedly doing but I can't remember what yeah and those are minimum standards right and there might be more that you want to do but we don't know We should figure out what we're doing already.

Those are things that... That's the goal this year is really just to map it out, to see what's going on today. There was a mention of second harvest. I don't know if that rings any bells to you. But, you know, just to see what's going on in our city right now, map it out and then really kind of do an evaluation to see What is our food waste? Is anything going to donation? How are we recovering it, and how are we distributing it? So that's what our subcommittee wanted to work on this year, and then collaborating with those folks in the city to see kind of what's next, knowing that there is going to be constraints with city staff. But I think just this year the focus was going to be on the map And then maybe some community outreach in terms of any sort of reducing, reusing, things like that for our community engagement piece. Reduce, reuse, repair, recover.

Yeah.

And, you know, you did bring up a good point. Mayor Bowles is like, there are state reporting requirements for climate action areas. Uh-huh. we haven't talked about that in our, in any of our, in any of our meetings yet. And so that's something that is probably just like has to happen. And, um, city manager, Charpentier, you, you said it is necessary, right? So we probably should identify what, what those necessities are. And at a minimum, those should make it in here too, because we haven't really done what is the actual state reporting requirements, things like, you know, the, uh, the ecology waste reporting or something like that. It's not identified here. Just a point. And we can work on that.

So that's food systems and recovery. So again, it's not necessarily, we're not committing to any staff work here. It's really you all researching what we're doing, what options are out there to do a little bit better job and not have as much food in our

Yeah, kind of a report back, an understanding, really get familiar with it. The folks who are working on this are a little bit longer term on the committee.

Yeah, and down to, like, draft a food recovery program, like, that's later. Yeah. Yeah. Were you going to say something, City Manager?

I was just going to note that I didn't mean to imply we were not

Following any state reporting and my operating assumption is we are completely compliant with all mandatory state reporting Yes requirements and I feel like this thing that we contracted within the county is part of that It took the burden of that reporting from us They were doing it but exactly what they're doing and who they are. I don't remember and how much it costs And I'm sorry if I implied that my apologies I

But I guess I do want to identify if that is a state reporting requirement and it does relate to a climate action goal. We should mark it somewhere because if we're achieving a goal somewhere and we're not aware of it, we could put a feather in our cap not knowing it.

Talk about low-hanging fruit. We're already doing it.

Woo! All right, cool. Okay. Transportation and mobility. Sorry, so were you okay with all those bullet points here? It's really just food recovery program, tribute educational materials. I don't actually even know if that's really going to happen, but it's just tracking and supporting city. There's nothing to produce, really, except mapping and eventually recovery programs. Did you want any changes there?

Well, the first... Oh, wait.

I'm losing track of what page I'm on.

Okay, on 159, it starts on 159. Yes. Coordinating with our staff, coordinating with Recology. Develop a map. The next one, draft a pilot recovery program outline and identify participating businesses and organizations.

Yeah, and we know that's not going to happen this year. Right. We said everything says fiscal year 26-27, and we knew that that wasn't going to be a one-year program.

So do we take that off of this timeline or do we soften the language?

Begin thinking about, begin... You could say... Consider. Consider best practice food recovery programs or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I like that.

Somebody must be doing a really good job of it. Did the AI get that? Consider. Consider. Best practices. Okay. Okay.

And just on the last bullet point, just because we are already doing some of that, you know, I think you could take the word consideration off. Support city long-term food recovery programming.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

Okay. So we have two more sections. Transportation and urban forestry. Right? Yep.

No biggie.

That's our time check. Huge.

It's 10 to 10. 10 to 10. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. This is taking a little longer than Greg and I had budgeted, but I think we're good. We'll do a time check. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So for the subtask for this one, we do have a CARC liaison. Well, sort of unofficially, the CARC liaison, and we kind of want to make that official. I've already been invited, I think, to a BPAC meeting. In order to have a bicycle pedestrian master plan, we have to have a BPAC. And so I think we're going to meet in July. Okay.

So you're talking about BPAC, is that item 11G or you're on 11F? I'm on 160.

So on F, item F?

Transportation and mobility. Yes, so Subtask A or 1, Subtask Bullet Point 1.

Okay. But when you were saying BPAC, you made me think about bikes.

Yeah, so PB&R Commission is the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory. Sorry, I complete the two because they are the same thing. Yeah, so that's sort of taken care of. A lot of this stuff is already in process, so it's not any much of a heavy lift. Develop communication strategies to promote transit options. I'm not so sure it's going to be like us developing communication strategies. We may be leveraging potentially like county strategies and maybe just develop maybe getting developing the script and maybe sending it off to somebody to put it on Carl's Corner.

And also there's commute.org that's already doing this kind of work, so we might want to include that in there. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I'm the liaison for commute.org, so a lot of good stuff there.

That's awesome, yeah. I'm still getting up to date with this and working with Rick Nahas on some of the stuff he's super involved with. Smart guy. Yeah, with all the transit options, and I appreciate Remy Tan coming up and talking to us about that too because we've been working trying to work on the increased bus access to BART and things like that for a long time.

And Commute.org also once a year has, like, a little competition, right, for people to log their transit commutes and so forth, and there's prizes and just helping get the word out about that kind of stuff. And mini grants for outreach.

Oh, nice. All right, well, cool.

An individual could win. All right. Not we as a city.

Yeah. Yeah, so then the coordinate with the PPD, there may be already stuff being worked on, but this was mentioned in one of our meetings. And so we may be consulted on this.

Yeah, this is a big one right now.

I mean, we're not, you know, this came up as... you know, as an option just to be consulted on, so threw it in there.

The work that's happening on this right now is through Safe Routes to Schools.

I know there's a county-level work going on, too. That they're tied in with, yeah, and with the police departments across, yeah.

So we're available. And PB&R is doing some research, too. Yeah, I feel like we don't need to duplicate. Like, it would be helpful for you guys, since you have a PB&R liaison, like, to learn what they're doing. but maybe not to have this as a priority item for you so that we're not duplicating staff efforts.

I'm fine with it not being a priority item. It is part of the CARP to try to reduce vehicle miles traveled by encouraging, but not to say that we're encouraging e-bikes, but just e-bike safety, but encouraging bikes. Exactly. So I'm okay with removing it, but... And I don't mind adding that language instead, right, of this. So was there a change there? Did you want to remove it?

I think the concern is not duplicating efforts, so how do you make it more collaborative? Coordinate with the police? Well, are the police already coordinating with PB&R?

Yeah, I would take the police off, but Do we want them involved with e-bike safety or just promoting biking in general?

PB&R, you mean?

No, I mean this committee.

Oh. Well, and law enforcement can be part of the conversation when it's time for law enforcement to be part of the conversation.

I think we should take it off. But they'll be part of the conversation with PB&R, who is doing the research.

That's fine. I think in bullet point one it covers it. We can take that out. Okay. That'd be great. And then we still would love to advocate for infrastructure projects such as bike locking stations, which we need desperately around town, including... Yeah, we need them desperately. So if there's any opportunities for grants, that would be great. That just would be us looking out for grants and saying, hey, this is available. That's advocating.

Mm-hmm. Sounds good. You guys mentioned the carpool toolkit. Mm-hmm. And I'm super interested in that because I don't know, switching my hats, if Jefferson Union High School District is aware of it or has anything to do with it. So I'd love some information about it. Oh, okay, great.

Yeah, we'll make sure that you get that. Okay, cool, yeah. And you can give a presentation.

Thanks.

Okay, so we did break this out to bike and ped here because the top one was transportation mobility. I don't know how this kind of got mixed up too, but almost kind of saying the same thing. Support the bicycle pedestrian master plan.

And I just want to, I think, I mean staff was pointing out, I've been at it advocating for a TDM plan for a while, and I know that there are some grants that, you know, grant funding that was, you know, brought to our attention that was specifically for Pacifica, but sometimes even if the grants are there, we don't have staff capacity to apply and, you know, to do the work. So, yeah, that's, we just, we have to leave some flexibility. We know, we all know that's important work to be working towards.

Is This is a question for city manager. Are committee members allowed to write grants and then help with the grant writing and then submit them to staff for review and potential submission?

It depends on the grant, but typically we'd like them to be staff or council initiated, so we're very careful about the commitment of local match as well as staffing resources. A lot of our challenge with Many of the things in this plan and all the work plans is really our staffing capacity because there are a lot of good grants we could be going for, but are we going to divert engineering resources from that challenge right there to do something that is important but is newly added to the work plan or maybe doesn't deal with as much life safety? That's the challenge.

Makes sense. Okay. Thank you.

And that's part of the prioritization that occurs. And, you know, part of this is a timing issue. This is a Herculean effort to get to this point on paper and in this conversation, but it just came at a time right before a really difficult budget discussion. So this is part of the process. But I just wanted to recognize that. But I don't want to always be the naysayer, but on June 8th, there's going to be a very difficult budget discussion.

Yep. Understood. I think we need to do a time check that's two minutes till 10, so I think we just need to say if we're going to be done by 11, and I'm sure we will be. I would like that. Me too. Hopefully not even that long. Okay.

And then just so, Christina, I just wanted to let you know that Pacifica does have some projects in, like for the TDA grant that's coming up that me and Greg are going to be scoring through BPAC. So there are definitely projects out there. Oh, awesome.

Yeah. And did Pacifica submit some? Great.

Yeah. So how does that get communicated? with all of us and with the committee to know what's happening.

Well, we haven't scored them yet. We're working on scoring all of them.

No, but just that we've applied. Right.

We've applied. I'm kidding. It's hard for us to keep that.

Yeah, we probably should have told you last meeting. Or maybe, I mean, this is something that staff would know and that they could tell the committee, right, the city has applied for this grant. Yeah, we probably should have announced it last meeting.

So I'll take responsibility for that. Are you allowed to reveal what?

Oh, yeah, you too. It's your fault, Greg.

We'll have staff follow up because they know what specifically has been applied for. Okay. So I think that's better.

All right. 2H. Moving on to 2H. Are we good? So the urban forestry?

Mm-hmm.

This is probably nothing new to most of you. You've kind of been talking about it for a while. You already adopted the 25%. We don't even need to talk about that. You already agreed to the adopted tree program. We're going to be supporting that. This one is already in motion, all of these things. The loophole language, that's the low-hanging fruit. Hopefully you can get that on your agenda in the next two months. That would be lovely. I think that's very low-hanging fruit. That's just updating language. We support the hiring of an ISA certified arborist. We're saying that. Those are our words. You're not the first. Yeah. So. And then, you know, just supporting the preservation enhancement of the urban forestry through policy outreach maintenance planning. So that just goes without saying through the CARP. And we recognize that city staff resources are are tapped. I am also working very closely with PB&R. You already know Gail, you know, is dedicated to the effort here, so her and I work closely on these issues, too.

Yeah. I mean, I think all these are, you know, council priorities. The arborist, it would sure be nice, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, we certainly can't commit to that right now. I love what you said at the meeting, though. Like, if we're hiring any public works person, they have those skills that's a nice bonus right to consider as opposed to hiring just an arborist and and just talking with a city manager I mean I don't I don't know that the loophole language seems very easy but it does it is going to need some staff analysis to see if there are implications you know beyond those two words in the document so I don't know I think we're committing to two months timeline right now.

But that's correct. It is a bit more complicated. And ordinance amendments, just by their process, take longer than that. But it is part of the strategic priorities. So we recognize we'll work on it. The other thing worth noting is the urban forestry plan, which we plan to kick off in the fall. And that one would engage this committee. And that event, once adopted, would become sort of the foundational policy document approved by council related to urban forestry. So that could have the 25%. And then as we update it every five years or so, we could amend that.

Yeah. So it'll be great to have you all working on that as we hire a consultant and bring that forward. Is there already funds for that?

Yes. We've budgeted for that, yes.

Great. Awesome. But one is not reliant on the other. The loophole language is not reliant on the urban forest plan. We already established that a couple meetings ago. Great. Okay, cool. So within a year, we'll be able to update that loophole language is what I'm hearing, correct? I hope so.

It's on our priority work plan.

Yes. Great.

So we'll be able to accomplish that.

We're currently viewing them as separate processes, but once we have a consultant, they may have some ideas for the ordinance as well that may filter into it.

But the consultant won't be on board for a while, though, right?

That's correct.

So we're going to wait until then?

No, we'd probably get started before then.

Okay, cool.

It's a larger process than just changing a couple of words.

Understood. Okay. Is that it? I think we're at the end.

Yeah.