Youth Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay. It's 06:35. I'd like to call the meeting to order. We'll start with roll call.

Okay. Commissioner Bu Benichek? Commissioner Kempisi? Commissioner Chabot? Here. Commissioner Chavez? Present. Did I say that properly? Cheeves. Cheeves, sorry. I'll get it one time.

No worries. Commissioner Cho?

Present. Commissioner Cunningham? Here. Commissioner Edwards?

Here. Commissioner Feldy? Present. Commissioner Flynn?

Here. Commissioner Reeds? Here. Commissioner Sorgan? Commissioner Steinberg?

Here.

Commissioner Van Pelt? Present. Commissioner Vice?

Here.

Ad hoc subcommittee members, looks like we just have Commissioner Robles here and Commissioner present. Thank you. Okay. So, we do have a quorum. I just want to note the absences of commissioners Bubeniczuk, Sorgan, Steinberg, and ad hoc subcommittee members Trone and McAuley. You can continue.

Okay. We'll begin our salute to the flag. If we could all rise for the pledge of allegiance. Ready? Oh, place your God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Okay. And can I get a motion to approve the order of the agenda?

Motion. Okay.

We've got a proper motion and a second.

Who is the second if I may?

Commissioner Cunningham.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Okay, and do we have any blue folder items tonight?

Before we go on to that, I just want to make sure we have a majority vote, so if we can do a vote for approving the order.

Okay, can we get for all those who approve, say aye. Any opposed? Okay. Any blue folder items? We don't

have any this evening. Okay.

Okay, are we approving

the consent calendar now?

Yes, we do have one item on the consent calendar. It's just the affidavit of posting for the meeting. So we just need a motion to approve.

Motion. Second. Okay, and can I have a vote? All those who approve,

say aye. Aye.

Any opposed, say nay.

Okay.

Is there any public comment? Okay. Let's see. Go ahead. We have Tim Mueller.

Thanks for the privilege to talk to your commission. It's good that our community has youth representatives in the city government, and I hope you make your voices heard. You have a substance abuse subcommittee, I believe. And I think it might be a good thing to also think of it as a substance awareness committee because awareness is the first defense of a young person to keep away from the danger of substance abuse. Sometimes danger is deceptive by making itself beautiful.

It hides behind an awesome storefront, colorful packaging, sugar coated product, and adds promising health, wealth, and happiness. And sometimes danger happens even as close as Redondo Beach. There are six shops selling habit forming smoking products between Aviation and Inglewood Boulevards on Artesia Boulevard. They are right in the neighborhoods where a lot of you and your friends and your families live and travel every day. And now the Redondo Beach City Council is about to license the sale of cannabis products in our city.

As a first step in your research and awareness about substances, I suggest you ask your parents how much sickness, how many deaths, and how many years it took to convince people that smoking tobacco was unhealthy and shouldn't be allowed in public. The state sued the pants off the big tobacco companies for all the medical costs the states incurred curing these, trying to cure these people. You may also ask, if we got rid of those things, why are smoke shops and all that still around? Maybe even more than ever. Well, here's the answer.

People know they can get rich by selling a habit forming product if customers are convinced they can't live without it. So here we are again with smoke shops all up and down Artesia Boulevard. The profiteers have learned to repackage the habit forming product. You don't have to smoke it anymore now. You can eat it, you can suck it on a vape.

You could put it in a hookah or a bong or take a pill. It's sweet and tasty. And what was at one time called weed, Mary Jane, or whatever you call it, is now legal and has a new name, cannabis. Expert scientists have been hired by the profiteers to say all that stuff is good for anxiety, sleeplessness, and disease, but here's where you youth commissioners can make a difference. Do some research.

Carefully evaluate the information. Look for backup, everything you hear and read, and when you're ready, tell the other kids what you found. And I suggest you Google something: Studies about cannabis effect on youth brain development. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there any other public comment? Not at this time. Okay.

My apologies. I showed up a little late here tonight. Good evening. My name is Jonathan Sverko. I'm a resident here in District 1. I'm also a former student here in Redondo High. I am really glad that I have this opportunity to come here for you tonight to share with you a little bit about my perspective similar to what you heard from the previous speaker. Professionally, I work in the cannabis industry. I end up lobbying on their behalf in Sacramento where we write a lot of the rules for it. When we started this, the rules were supposed to be responsible.

We ended up putting in taxes so we would have a large majority of those monies go towards drug prevention so we would protect children. The industry has made so many incredibly terrible mistakes. Our government has done a very poor job in making sure that we're keeping it safe. It's gotten so bad that the monies that we bring in no longer enough in order to support the youth prevention programs. Recently, it's been reported in the L.

A. Times that on top of us requiring testing for these products so that they would be safe from things such as pesticides, heavy metals, other toxins and poisons in there. The testing that the industry does has now been proven by the local newspapers by the L. A. Times, pardon me, to actually be false and that there's actually high levels of pesticides and high toxins in there and many other chemicals that the government forgot to even ban in the process of it.

I come here as a representative, someone that works in this industry. I'm incredibly embarrassed for what this industry has become. In our community here, we have been exploring how to potentially allow this in our city. And it has always been my goal that if we were to allow it here, would be a matter of how we do it responsibly. I no longer believe that we can do this responsibly in the city here.

Our government can't keep it safe. The funds there to keep our youth safe is not happening any longer. And I'm coming here to you tonight to hear that directly from me, to hear for the role that I've done in this industry apologize for that, and to say that I am going to do everything I can to make sure that this does not come into our community, and that I would ask for you and your support and your help to please research this. Reach out to your adults. Reach out to the city council because this information is going be coming soon later this month for them to make a decision. It's incredibly important that this is not something that we allow in our community. It is not safe. It is not responsible. Thank you for your help.

Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Melissa Deshaun. I'm a District 1 resident. And I want to thank each and every one of you. I'm looking around and I recognize names from PTA, from my elementary school my daughter went to, middle school and high school. So thank you. It's just really incredible to see you guys here and using your voice and being part of the process and kudos to you all. I know I have a 15 year old at the high school, and so I know how much is on your plate and how every little hour counts when you've got AP studying and finals coming, or midterms this week. I wrote a resolution for the California State PTA on cannabis. I honestly did not know a lot about cannabis other than that when I was growing up it wasn't something we really worried about in terms of safety.

And as I wrote this resolution, is basically it took me longer to write than my actual doctoral thesis because every single sentence had to be researched. And I learned quite a bit and I learned that cannabis is simply not good for youth. You know, teen years are this pivotal time for neurodevelopment. It's just not a good thing. There's also California grows high potency cannabis.

It's very different than certainly when I was your age. So there's a lot of risks associated with that. I want to share something kind of personal if you'll afford me this and that is I have a younger brother and sister that are twins. So my younger sister was accepted to Stanford. Her twin, who had a near perfect SAT score, went to a federal prison for buying, selling, and using cannabis.

And I spent this summer with him. He actually got ahold of medicinal cannabis laced with a little bit of fentanyl and had a series of psychotic episodes. So those are like the worst case scenarios, of course, the things we hate to hear. I've seen it happen, and this is something that happened after wrote this resolution which I'm going to share and put in the public record. Right now the data that we have, and I always tell people I'm a bench trained immunologist so I live by data.

I'm one of those people that loves to read peer reviewed research. And the only thing that's better than data is better data. And right now the data that we have that's hot off the presses two months old from our California Department of Public Health clearly shows that anywhere that we have storefront cannabis dispensaries, cannabis use increases for youth by at least twenty six percent, and that's a very modest estimate. We also know from data that's been collected here in Los Angeles that when you have storefront dispensaries, it normalizes the use for our youth. And it's just something I think we can do better for our city.

And I just want to urge you all, I'm going to leave this information on the public health report, the cannabis resolution I wrote, and another really interesting document that came from scientists talking about high potency cannabis in California. And I just urge you to reach out to your council members. I don't urge you to talk to adults because you guys are so much savvier than we ever were at your age, and I know you all do your own research. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for engaging in the process and supporting our city. You. Enter these Sure. Three

So this is the first time we've had someone from the public bring documents to provide to you. So we do have to do a motion and a second in order to put it into the public record. So if I can just get a motion for that.

I motion to put it into public record. I second.

I'm sorry, who? Second? Felty? Okay, great, thank you. And so we'll need a vote for that.

Okay, and all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed say nay.

Okay, so I do have it looks like it's all it's three documents here. What I'll do is I'll scan them and email them all to you so you each have a copy tomorrow. And then we'll also include it listed on the agenda on the website. Okay.

Is there any more public comment? Any online? Not at this time. Okay. Are there any items continued from previous agendas? We do not have any. Okay. Can we get Commission subcommittee and appointments updates? Sure.

I wanted to have an item for you guys. Ultimately what we'll do is this will most likely be a standing item on your agenda, and it's really an opportunity for any active subcommittees or some of our appointed groups to provide an update to you all on any work that's been done since the last Commission meeting. And so before we go into this, I do just want to say I know it took a few months for us to figure out what our goals and focus was and then create the subcommittees and then make sure it was all what you guys intended, and then the holidays hit. So we haven't really had a chance on our side, on staff side, to really organize the commissions to have our first kickoff meetings except for the team survey because that one is really gonna help inform the work of the rest of the subcommittees to a certain extent. It is our promise to you all that we will be reaching out and doing at least one kickoff meeting with each of the subcommittees just to get you guys organized, try and figure out what your direction will be, and how you're going to kind of organize yourselves.

And then from there you're free to meet as often as possible, or if you want us to continue to facilitate those we can do that. I just wanted to preface our report with that because there likely will be no updates for a majority of these subcommittees, but moving forward there likely will be some in the coming months. And then before I turn it over to you guys to see if there are any updates, I did just want to briefly mention that for the teen survey we are going to be getting that online. It has been uploaded into the online survey link. We will be sending you guys all the link for it.

The teen survey subcommittee has really been working hard behind the scenes to really finalize and refine the language of the survey, make sure the questions are as comprehensive as possible. So we'll be getting that out to you hopefully this week. We'll get the live link and hopefully then by the next meeting we'll have some data that we can start sharing with you all and really get some of the work moving forward. So really excited for that and I just survey subcommittee for all their hard work on that. And then I should say before I turn it over to you all, as we do start organizing the kickoff meetings, we will be communicating that via email.

So if you can just please keep an eye on your email so that we can get responses from you. We will want to make sure we have at least two of you available to meet, as many as possible of course, but at least two of you. So please just continue to check your email for that. And so with that, I will turn it over to you all. We don't have a PowerPoint presentation for this, but I'll turn it over to you if you would like to. You can either go through each of the subcommittees one by one, see if there's any updates, move on to the next, or you can just do a general statement and anyone can speak up if there's been any work on anything at this point so far. With So that I'll turn it over to you.

Okay, would you guys prefer if I just went through each subcommittee and asked for updates from each? Okay, I'll just go in the order that's on the website. So is there an update from the substance abuse subcommittee?

There has not been any meetings that I'm aware of. Don't know if there's, yeah.

Okay, moving on to the communications subcommittee. No formal meetings for that one. The teen survey subcommittee.

So I did provide that brief update but I don't know if any of the subcommittee members have anything else they wanted to add. Feel free to do so.

Okay, the Teen Center and Event Subcommittee. Can I make a suggestion for something they could consider now?

Yeah, of course.

Okay, I was thinking a majority of us go to Redondo and there's a winter Seahawk marketplace where it's mainly featuring young entrepreneurs. I So think if we had a citywide event that was open to beyond high schoolers and even innovative elementary and middle schoolers, if we can have a space for their businesses, and we have this rule at the Seahawk marketplace, it's under $10 so it's pretty accessible, and I think it could be cool to feature the innovations of the youth of Redondo. So if the events subcommittee could consider that I'd appreciate it. Moving on to the RUHS and Access Stakeholder Group. Is there any update from

No, I do know that there is a meeting upcoming for that but we're trying to figure out the scheduling to make sure that everyone is available. This Wednesday, yeah, thank you.

So it is upcoming. Okay. Also regarding subcommittees, I noticed that there's seven members currently in the substance abuse subcommittee, but I know that one of the members is an adult commissioner, so I was wondering if youth commissioners have priority over the adults in this case? No, I mean

it doesn't necessarily We go that placed everyone based on interest when we were forming the Commission.

Can move on to the

staff liaison report. Before we move on, I just want to make sure we don't have any public comments. Some of the general public comments were somewhat tied into one of our subcommittees here, but I just want to make sure we do public comment formally for this. So if anyone that hasn't spoken on any of subcommittee items has anything additional. It's different than what you spoke about previously. Okay, yes.

Thank you again for allowing me to speak. You mentioned what's called the Maker's Fair, I think. Yeah, that's what it's called. And I'm a member of the NRBBA, and we're quite interested in the Maker's Fair. Robin Garfield, who is our Vice President, has sponsored a number of Maker's Fair at the middle schools and I think at the high school as well.

So, on Artesia Boulevard, we're looking to try to develop a real neighborhood, family oriented type of community there, and there are some spaces that might be available to run a fair similar to the Makers' Fair for student entrepreneurs to present their goods. And so if anybody is interested in that, I could leave my email address and put you in contact with Robin and perhaps we could organize something along those lines.

Yeah, that'd be great, thank you.

Can I have a motion to refer that email to the events subcommittee?

Yeah, we can just do that. Okay, yeah, Yeah, we'll take care of that for you.

Now can we move on to the staff liaison report?

Okay. And actually I just want to make sure and we actually don't have anything for the staff liaison report. I just wanted to I forgot to mention a few items on the team surveys but this is more of a general statement anyway, so we'll just move on to that. On the desk in front of you is a flyer for the survey with the QR code link. We will be submitting or excuse me, we'll start distributing that.

If there is that flyer on our city web page. We are going to work on uploading the link as well so it's a quicker access to the survey. We are going to run a social media post on Instagram and our Instagram is RB Parks and Rec so we'll make sure to get that going. We would like to also start getting the teens in Redondo Beach or whatever we want to call it social media page as well going so we can use that as well, but we'll start we'll continue to post on our department one in the meantime. We will also be working with the administration at the high school to send out the survey link via the student emails.

We have already been in contact with the principal, so thank you for letting us know that that was an option. That's a really great outreach for us. Like I said, we will send you all the information, so if you want to forward it along to friends, family, youth organizations, anyone that you think would be interested or have an opportunity to share widely, please feel free to do so. So we'll get all of that out to you. So we're really excited to finally get the survey out and really get some data for you to really start sifting through as you start planning events and all of that as we move forward.

So that concludes that item. We also have the teen center, like I said, I know we have a teen center subcommittee, but just generally letting you know we are continuing to move forward with that. The construction and renovations in the interior is continuing. Some of the furnishings are being purchased and hopefully very soon we can start meeting with the subcommittee to start figuring out what type of amenities we want to start purchasing, games, activities, tables, that type of thing. So exciting things are coming. We're at a point now where I think we're really going to start to get the momentum on a lot of it. Thanks for bearing with us the last few months to get organized and we'll really hit the ground running as we get into the new year. That concludes the staff reports. Thank you.

Okay and are there any items that you guys would like to add to a future agenda? Okay, and can Okay. I get a second to adjourn this meeting? Motion to adjourn. Second. Okay, can we take a formal vote? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed say nay.

I didn't get who did the motion and the second for the adjournment. Did you do the motion? Motion and second. Okay, great. Thank you.

Okay, thank you all. Appreciate it. We'll see