City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here. Thanks, everyone, for being here for tonight's council meeting. I just want to let everyone know we are experiencing some slight technical difficulties, and we're just working on getting started. We'll get started shortly. Thank you.

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Alright, everyone. I think we have our audio back online. Good evening. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining our regular city council meeting of 04/13/2026. We hold meetings in a hybrid format with both in person and virtual participation. The city welcomes public comment on topics within the city's subject matter jurisdiction, and members of the public may provide comments as follows. In person speakers will be called first. Speaker cards are located at the back table in the council chambers and must be turned in to the city clerk here at the dais. And please be sure to indicate the agenda item number which you wish to speak on.

Attendees who have joined us by Zoom will be called to speak after the in person comments have been given. Detailed instructions for public comment will be provided on the screen when the time for public comment begins. If there is a high volume of public comment this evening, we may decrease the total time allotted for each comment or limit the total time for public comment. In the event this occurs, please feel free to send your full comments to the citycouncil@councilatredwoodcity.org. Written comments are not read aloud but will be made part of the final meeting record. And I will now turn it over to our city clerk to call the roll.

Good evening, and thank you everyone again for your patience. We'll start with council member Chu. Here. Council member G. Present. Council member Howard. Here. Council member Padilla. Present. Council member Stirkin. Here. Vice mayor Aiken. Here. Mayor Martinez Caballos. Here. Thank you.

Thank you everyone. With that we'll move on to the next item and we have all members of the council participating in person so we'll move on to the pledge. Councilmember Gee, could you lead us, please?

If you all rise and join me in saluting the flag of our country.

Thank you, council member. And with that, we will move on to item five, presentations and acknowledgments. For our presentation item this evening, Sam Trans will be giving an update on the Connect Bay Area local investment plan, And I'd like to welcome Sam Tran's government and community affairs director, Jessica Epstein, to the podium to give the presentation. Welcome, Jessica.

Hi. Thank you, council members. Thank you for the time this evening. So as you said, tonight, I am doing a presentation on the Connect Bay Area Act. My name is Jessica Epstein. I am the director of government and community affairs at Sam Trans. So, basically, I'm sharing information on a potential revenue measure that's working its way towards the November ballot as a citizens initiative. If it makes if it becomes successful, we're sharing what information on what that would mean for the community, for transit, and for SamTrans itself. So here's the agenda. The measure,

sorry.

So there's information in here on the measure as a whole, but just wanted to emphasize the real focus of tonight is San Mateo County, not the rest of the measure.

So a little bit of

history and, you know, snapshot of SamTrans, who we are. We provide bus and paratransit service throughout the county. It's an essential service, getting people to work, to school, to jobs and, or excuse me, appointments and other destinations. So you can see some of the bullet points on our service. Our riders really depend on us.

A kind of key point is that we are, our ridership is 94% low income, 68% extremely low income and 80% don't drive or have access to a car. So they really are highly dependent and you can see that we're basically at pre pandemic ridership levels. We have been very successful in getting people back on the bus at really robust levels. So transit agencies, though, around the Bay Area that carry millions of people are facing major operational deficits. These agencies are sharing this with the public.

You can read about it on each of their websites. Yes. Okay. That seems to be working. Yeah. No echo. Hello. Hello.

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Project.

Thank you all. We are having some more technical difficulties, and I'll pass things over to our city attorney to explain why exactly we're kind of in a holding pattern.

Thank

you. So as you heard, we are having technical difficulties. We can't get audio out. And a new law was passed by the legislature last year, Senate Bill seven zero seven, that requires two way audio and visual. So we cannot hold the meeting without establishing that again.

What we can do is recess for up to an hour trying to fix the technical difficulties. And if it is not fixed within that hour, we can reconvene. I don't know. It's up to the council and the pleasure of the mayor if you would like to just recess, or the law does allow the council to go into closed session during this time. We do have closed session scheduled for the end of the meeting, and so I'll leave it to the mayor to decide what you would like to do during this recess.

Think we'll give Sammy a few more minutes. We'll give Sammy a few more minutes, and then I think it makes sense for us to do a session so we can be productive while we take this off.

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Recording in progress.

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Testing. Testing. Can folks on Zoom help us confirm whether the audio is coming through on your end? Thank you, Sue.

Use this one and ask.

Testing. Testing one more time. If our friends on Zoom can please confirm whether you can hear this audio on your end. Thank

you.

And can somebody tell us if you hear an echo on your end? Feel free to unmute yourself and let us know.

There is no echo

on this side, Jessica.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Sue.

Sounds good. Thanks.

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Excuse me, everybody. We're going to bring it back. We are it sounds like our audio is back. There is going to be a bit of an echo, but we will soldier on. We've got some big items this evening. So Jessica, I'll pass it back to you.

Great. Thank you. Okay. So we as I said, the presentation today is primarily about San Mateo County. I do have some information on the next slide, though, about the other big transit agencies and a little background on the ballot measure. So there was legislation that passed last year, s b 63, the Connect Bay Area Act. It allowed for a ballot measure which is moving forward as a citizens initiative. They're doing signature gathering right now. If successful at a citizens initiative, it would be 50% plus one for passage of the measure. And we basically now have a new district.

The district is San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa. If it makes it to the ballot and is the voters in San Mateo and three of the other counties will be voting on a half cent sales tax, San Francisco is actually moving forward with a 1¢ sales tax for their portion of this measure because of the amount of funds that is needed for muni. But you can see that 63%, that is the majority of the funds, and that is going to prevent would go towards preventing major service cuts for Caltrain, BART, AC Transit, SF Bay Ferry, and some small operators. And is information on Caltrain just recently had a workshop on what it would mean for their service if the measure doesn't pass. Bart has also put on out information on that.

I'm not sure if Muni has yet, but they are in the process of doing that. So that's the majority, but on top of that, there would be funds that come back to San Mateo County to be administered by Sam Trans. This is sometimes referred to as return to source funds. So there are funds collected in this county that would then come back to this county for distribution. And that's why we're here today is to help guide the SamTrans board on if those funds came in, what should they do with it?

What should be the priority? So the amount we're talking about is roughly 50,000,000 a year. It is a fourteen year sales tax and so total will be about 700,000,000 in discretionary funds. The one critical element of it is that it has to be used for public transit in one way shape or form. It can't go outside of the supportive of public transit category.

But what you may find is there's a project that you would like to see funded, but it doesn't actually fit within public transit. The way I've been describing this is let's say you have a multimodal project that has a bike path and a bus stop. This measure can fund the bus stop and not the bike path. It has to be the public transit component. But we do have other funding sources here. We have Measure A and Measure W. You can see how much of that goes to different specific transportation categories. And they're very prescriptive. What is in the measure cannot be changed until the measure itself is changed. And measure A actually expires in 2033.

We're looking at taking it to the ballot in 2028, and that is an opportunity to rethink and modernize the entire measure. So things like the bike path funding, highway interchanges, those kinds of projects are well suited for Measure A as we look at how to approach that in the coming years. We're really seeing all of this as one long transportation continuum. So SamTrans is I do want a little bit of context on SamTrans. SamTrans is in better financial shape than many of the other transit agencies that are looking at operational deficits annually of $75,000,000 up to over $300,000,000 That is not the SamTrans situation.

However, starting in fiscal year 'twenty eight, we do reach an inflection point where expenses start outstripping revenue. And we are projecting that that will average in ten years out to about $30,000,000 a year. That would be much smaller at the beginning, but grow over time. So one of the elements that the board will be thinking about is how much of those the funds that come in makes sense to just keep our core service operational. We are already engaging in cost saving measures like cutting back on all discretionary operational funds, on use of consultants.

And there's it comes from a variety of places, energy costs, construction costs, all the things that all the cities are dealing with as well. And our transition to zero emission technology is a major cost driver for Samtrans. So what we're doing is building what we're calling a local investment plan. This is how the Samtrans board, this is the basis of what they will use for making a determination on these potentially $50,000,000 a year in new funds. We have a lot of existing documentation that we are building off of.

We have a strategic plan, reimagine SamTrans, which redesigned our bus network, which I think we finished implementation in 2022. We've also brought together an agency advisory group. Redwood City is very well represented by Malahat, who has been attending and is heavily participating in these meetings. We also have another group with stakeholders, business, labor, advocacy groups. And we're really working through the different concepts with them so that when the board gets the information from staff at the upcoming meeting, it will be driven both by a survey I'll tell you about in a moment, but also this direct feedback from our city partners and organizational partners.

So what we did is we looked at all of our past work and we created this list of 10 categories. This is the survey that's out right now. It is a pure ranking survey, and that can be hard. You may like two things the same, but we need the ranking so that the board can really see where priorities are landing. And it's all based on past work or existing work that we're doing, and we really need to hear from really everyone. I'll look over this way. We need to hear from everyone about the priorities that you have. This is on our website. And I've also left in the front, there are some handouts. It actually has a tear off that you can fill it out and mail it back to us.

We'll enter that in and make sure it gets entered into our overarching response rate. You'll probably see hopefully see some stuff on social media. But we really need to know how all this past work we've done at the end of the day at its highest level, what is the priority for the community. We are doing things on a very short timeframe. Normally, this would be like a year and a half and we're doing it more in about ten weeks.

But again, we do have that foundation. And the work we've done before is really driven with community outreach. We do community based organization partnerships all the time on our projects. So that top 10 list is really developed out of our work, which was heavily influenced by public input. And so we're taking an information item to the board in May with a hopeful adoption in June.

And again, what they're adopting, this isn't going to be part of the ballot language that goes to the voters. That is already essentially predetermined, but it will be essentially a commitment from the SamTrans board on how these funds will be spent if they do end up coming into our county. So we have a multi the survey is multilingual. I said printable mail version, but also online. Your staff has a toolkit for pushing this out.

Anyone who has any social media, we'd love to just echo this out as much as possible to get the most survey responses we can. And if you have questions after this, we have this email address, localfundingplansamtrans dot com. But I am also happy to answer any questions now or take any feedback. We are keeping a log of these council meetings so that the Board will see not just the general feedback, but specifically council member feedback from these presentations. So with that, I'm happy to take any feedback.

Thank you, Jessica. I really appreciate your time tonight. I know you're everywhere these days in the county, but I'll bring it back to my colleagues. Does anyone have any comments or questions? We'll start off with council member Chu.

So first of all, thank you so much for the presentation and the work you do. I actually ride the bus a lot. There's incredible bus service from my neighborhood, Friendly Acres, to downtown. And I have so many comments, but I'll try to keep them brief. The the first is, you know, kind of an anecdote. So I was in Sydney, Australia, and we were at the Opera House, and our friends had gotten really nice opera tickets. And so, you know, the fanciest seats were just in front of us. At the end of the opera, at 11:00 at night, there was a light rain. And we got out. And a woman, an elderly woman in a glittering gown with perfect hair, opened up her umbrella, walked five minutes, and got on the city bus to her neighborhood.

And it was striking because that doesn't you don't see that in The United States. That is not the population that you typically would associate you know, donors don't typically take the city bus home. But that's really the ideal. And I think, you know, one of the things I've thought about a lot is the bus is for everybody. And I think when it's viewed as something just for people who don't have other options, that's not to anyone's benefit. The bus is clean. It's efficient. It's safe. It's awesome. You can write.

You can read. You can stare out the window and get to your destination quickly and safely and efficiently. And so I think one thing to really emphasize and really go after is the bus is for everybody. It's for school children. It's for the middle class. It's the best it's often the best way to get where you're trying to go. Just in terms of your priorities, I mean and and for the record, I've collected about three packets of signatures for SB 63. So I'm I'm very in favor of that. I I would be really sad to see but transit money going to ride share in potholes. That is automobile the the chief competitor for transit is is automobiles, single occupancy vehicles.

And I don't think transit money should be diverted to single occupancy vehicles, even if it's rideshare. I mean, that's still an SOV. It's just have has a driver instead of owned by the individual. And then, you know, zero zero emissions buses. I I think it's very important that we go to solar. California is a leader in solar energy. You know, it's free. It comes from the sky. Hydrogen buses largely come from fracking. Most most hydrogen in The US comes from fracking.

That is not I mean, just because you reduce point emissions out of the tailpipe doesn't mean it's zero emissions. You have to look at the whole life cycle of that energy source. And so solar is orders of magnitude cleaner than hydrogen. And then I think if you're if you're thinking about attracting a middle class ridership, things like frequency and safety are are two of the most important things. And even the perception of safety. I mean, the bus is safe, much safer than driving. 20 I think 20 to 50 times safer than driving. But people are very vulnerable to perception. So overall, love the bus. Take it all the time.

Huge fan in anything I can do to help.

Thank you for your work.

Thank you, council member Chew. We'll go to council member Serkin.

Thank you, mayor. Thank you so much for your presentation, for hard work on this. Appreciate the return to source. Appreciate the prospect that some of the funding could go to roads that serve fixed route transit and hope that could also translate in part to bus rapid transit lanes exclusively used by buses. And finally, I missed the ECR rapid service. So if there's any way to bring back some rapid service for folks who can't afford Caltrain, that would be amazing. Thank you.

Thank you, council member. Any other comments? Council member Howard.

Thank you. I appreciate and agree with my colleague's comments. I did want to ask, would it be possible, would you have enough time, to do a couple of demos that you put out? Just put it out on the Internet and see if you can't get interest in someone who maybe hasn't taken a bus before to get on that bus. And then you tell your story while they're on the bus. They're a captive audience and it's a good opportunity to talk to them about the services that Sam Trans provides.

Thank you, council member. Anyone else? We'll go to council member Padilla and then council member Chi.

Thank you for your presentation. I actually disagree with council member Chu. I think that potholes need in road maintenance is very important. I think buses are heavy, and buses take specific paths over and over again, which means they contribute to the wear of those roads. I think if it's an effort, I I think our roads not having potholes and having a higher PCI index is better for everyone, whether you're on a bicycle, you're in a car or you're in a bus. And I don't think that I wouldn't want to see where all that that's not where I would take away from that part. I think maintaining our roads is important for everyone. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember. Go to Councilmember Gee.

Sure. Thank you, Mayor. Jessica, thank you for being here. I know it's a very aggressive schedule and you're probably going to be in meetings every night for the next four weeks. And what I would just encourage everyone to do is go to the link, fill out the survey.

There's a lot of stakeholder input coming in from electeds, from public works, from city managers, from writers, CKAG, TA. I mean there's just a lot of input coming in and this is a place where as a Samchans director and as a member of the ad hoc committee, we want more input. And the more we get, the better it's going to help inform the Samchans board on whatever expenditure plan. I will say there's no preconceived notions about what to do with the expenditure plan. My advocacy to Jessica and her colleagues, go out there and talk to people.

Go out there and listen and then bring back what you've heard. So there's no it's a white piece of paper right now that's gonna be shaped by input from as many people as we can hear from. And so it is short, but we wanna hear, and we wanna do the best we can for San Mateo County. So please provide feedback, take the survey, ride the bus, tell a story. Whatever you do, just provide that input to the entire team. So thank you.

Thank you, council member. We'll go to the vice mayor.

Thank you so much, Jessica. And I really appreciate all my colleagues' comments and expertise. I will keep it very short. I also support buses and public transit. We need to adopt our change our behavior.

One of the comments that Isabelle Chu made about the you know, that some types of technology involve fracking. And I would just say, and that that has to be accounted for. It isn't just is clean when the bus is going along, but how did it how did that energy happen and if it happened with fracking. And so I just wanna point out that for the purposes, just big picture, for the purposes of protecting against climate change, what needs to happen is carbon pricing. Everyone who works in the space of clean energy, of stopping climate change knows that carbon pricing and it's exactly what you're talking about.

You can't just look at the source. Oh, this bus right now isn't emitting any fumes. You have to price in everything. So I'm just giving a that's a bigger issue than our little city. That's a global issue, but I have a microphone, and it's very, very important. We already know the answer, and it's carbon pricing. And obviously, public transit is vital. The only other thing I would say is I agree with mister Sturkin. I had the privilege of attending several Grand Boulevard Initiative studies. I think you were on the board for a time, and Council Member Howard.

And just this beautiful, beautiful vision of making El Camino all the way from San Jose to San Francisco a grand boulevard like the European boulevards. And part of that vision is having a dedicated bike bus lane on both sides. I love that vision. Thank you, council member Stirkin, for for mentioning it, and I'll I'll leave it there. I will take that survey.

Thank you, vice mayor. Not seeing anyone else's hands up. Jessica, thank you. I just had a SCAG meeting on Thursday, so I got a version of the presentation then. And and I think it's it's so important for us to know, one, about the survey and two, to share it out with as many of our residents as we can.

Something that just kept coming up in that conversation at SCAG was people wanting to to see their local priorities reflected, and who's making that ultimate choice was one of those questions that came up. So this is really an opportunity for us to make sure that we're we're using our voice, and Redwood City is is translated into the final document here. I am such a big fan of Sam Trans. You know, I was I mean, so many of my colleagues know I've said this that, you know, I've lived in almost every part of Redwood City. Right?

And I feel like through each stage of life, I could always depend on Sam Trans and jumping on the two ninety six to take me to downtown or take me to school. And so I am thinking about the folks who are gonna really use Sam Trans. Right? And one of the priorities I saw was, you know, free and reduced service, making sure that that

Reduced fare.

Excuse me. Reduced fare, not service. That's the opposite of what we want. But reduced fares, right, so people can take advantage of it. You know, paramobility is something that Sam Trans is is doing every day that just kind of falls under the radar, so making sure that we can continue to fund that.

And, you know, Dumbarton reimagined is something that I see as such a huge opportunity because we can share services with other cities, with other communities, and it's all under one project. So I feel like those those opportunities, they're they're really exciting, and it's something that we should definitely think of as we review the return of source funding. So I'll leave it there. But, Jessica, thank you again for this great presentation, and we'll get the word out.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And that was item five a. So with that, we will now turn to public comments. We'll now turn to the public comments section of the agenda on our consents, matters of counsel interest, as well as items that are not listed on tonight's agenda. We welcome speakers providing public comments, but please be advised that this is a limited public forum.

And as such, speakers must address matters within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city. If speakers do not, they'll be warned, and if they continue to disregard city rules, their opportunity to speak will be limited. If you're attending in person, please fill out a speaker card and submit it to the city clerk here at the dais. If you're attending virtually, feel free to raise your hand on Zoom at this time or press 9 if you've joined by phone. Once we've gathered all the speaker cards and raised hands and have begun public comment, no additional speakers will be allowed to queue up to speak. And I will now turn it over to our city clerk to facilitate public comment.

Thank you, mayor. So again, we'll start with our in person speakers, and then we'll follow with our Zoom speakers. So as the mayor said, if you have joined us on Zoom, go ahead and raise your hand. Once we begin public comment, we will close the speakers' list. Everyone will have two minutes to speak. The timer will begin when you start speaking. And if you've joined us in person, there's a timer on the top of the podium. The orange blinking light is your thirty second warning, and the red light with the beep means your time is up. So with that, we'll start with Jenny Nube, who will be followed by Jana Jacobs. Welcome.

Good evening, mayor Martinez and city council. My name is Jennifer Nube, and I am here today representing the Youth Leadership Institute VOICE program. VOICE is a youth program that focuses on civics and identifying challenges that matter to youth in our communities. Over the past year, we have been training people how to build safe spaces for youth, as well as teaching youth how to use the faith in action rapid response hotline. I'm here today to invite you to our people panel on April 23 from five to 06:30PM at the Yard Coffee. The panel will focus on youth vision for Redwood City. Thank you, Mayor Martinez, for providing opening remarks for the youth panel, and we hope to see you there. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Jana Jacobs, who will be followed by Martin Elliott.

Good evening, City Council members. My name is Jana Jacobs, and I'm here to talk again today about the placement of the five gs wireless towers in and throughout Redwood City. I'm not sure how many are familiar with that here, but we have asked the council in the past for more cooperation on this issue, and we have received a lot of pushback. But I do want to say a thank you today to the city council and specifically the new city manager, Patrick, for actually meeting with us and starting to listen to our concerns, which is a good start. And we're hoping to make this the first step towards a better partnership on this issue.

However, the problem has not gone away. Crown Castle is still active. Crown Castle is the company that is hired by Verizon to basically place those put the applications out there and place the cell towers throughout Redwood City. And they have all in all submitted over 50 applications for those towers to be placed in the Mount Carmel area mainly, some Woodside Plaza and Downtown Redwood City, so really close to schools, homes, like one is right outside. My house will be and it has been approved, which there's no going back from that.

And they just recently added new applications as well, so they're not going to go anywhere anytime soon. They are a really bad player, and I really want to encourage the city to help us, especially with processes like the notification process for so the residents are actually informed what's going on because the way we found out about it is actually not through Crown Castle or any other official notification process. We found out through spam mail that usually ends up in recycling. And then when we talk to other residents that live close by those locations where the towers will be installed, they had zero idea this is happening. So this notification process that Crown Castle is talking about, it doesn't exist. For us, we

don't know nothing about it.

So thank you for your help on that.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Martin Elliott, who will be followed by Ronnie Ben David.

Hi. Good evening. I'm Martin Elliott, a Redwood City resident, and I think this is probably my third time before the council. So bear with me. And, yes, I have the same message. It's about Crown Castle and five g deployment across the town. I think this is really a big issue. It's a sleeping issue that's gonna rise up and become a problem for the council and for the citizens. I would definitely hit on the points that Jana made about notification. It's a deficient process.

The appeal process is not also up to speed. I'm very grateful for the meeting that we had with Patrick. I think he hired a good guy there, but he's gonna only be able to do what you good folks want to be done. And I think you should really get motivated. Look at the city of San Mateo, which is ten minutes away. They've done a good job. I would encourage you to take some learnings from what they've done and act upon it. If I could ask one thing, I would ask for some expediency on this issue. That said, I know the the difficulties you have and the concerns you have about litigation. But I'll tell you, the whole city is gonna be looking towards you once they figure out what's going on in this area, and we greatly appreciate some additional support.

And, again, thank you for adding Patrick. He's a good voice, and, we just hope we can get something across the finish line. So thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Ronnie Van David, who will be followed by Dylan Finch.

Hello. Thank you. It's good to be back here. So again, I'm also I've been coming to make public comments since 2024 to request that our city use the authority that congress gave us to regulate placement of these cell facilities. But I recently learned about a situation at a school in Redwood City that I felt important to share, which is why I'm here tonight, as a warning of what might happen down the pipeline if we continue to neglect this issue.

So Acton Academy is a small private school. I don't know if you know about this one. It's on Brewster near El Camino. It was based in a church and they recently moved to a location, this new location a couple years ago. And I happened to learn actually that families soon realized, there's a cell tower on top of a one story building that faces the school parking lot, is where the kids play their their yard.

And so a number of parents were concerned about the impact on their children's health and hired a building biologist to do an assessment. And this the resulting report recommended that people do not spend any amount of time in the parking lot due to radiation exposure from the tower. As a result, four families took their children out of Acton Academy, which is a sick significant impact on a school of their size. I was in touch with one of the mothers to learn more, and here's verbatim what she shared, a part of what she shared. Had it not been the cell tower issue, I would have enrolled all my kids there, but it worries me and cell signal penetration in kids' brains is way higher than that in adults' brains and I just couldn't risk their health.

I miss acting a lot and I do often think of going back, but I cannot with it being right next to a cell tower. There are currently, as she said, 54, cell tower applications that are under, review or approval. And so very quickly, our families are gonna see that these are going up in front of bedrooms. Next to daycares, there's Dissequoia Daycare near me, next to the high school, next to Stafford Park and Red Morton Park. We need to get on this. It's really, really important. And Crown Castle isn't going to stop because our ordinance is so permissive. So thank you.

Thank you, Ronnie. Our next speaker is Dylan Finch, who will be followed by Michael Arruza.

Hello, counsel. My name is Dylan Finch. I'm just speaking for myself today. Apologies, I wanted to speak on the presentation. I didn't realize there was not public comment on those. I should have known that after this all this time. But I just wanted to thank counsel for their strong support for public transit in Redwood City. So thank you.

Thank you, Dylan. Our final speaker is Michael Arruza. Welcome.

Hello, my name is Michael Arruza. Similar comment, just wanted to thank City Council for their support of transportation. When I first moved to California from San Juan, Puerto Rico, I could not bring my car with me, and I was reliant on public transportation. And being able to take the bus and Caltrain was a lifeline as I was establishing myself. And to this day, I still heavily use public transportation and fully support investing in ensuring that our bus routes are effective and frequent. Thank you.

Thank you, Michael. And seeing no Zoom attendees who wish to speak on general public comment, Mayor, that concludes public comment.

Great. Thank you, everyone, for holding on and providing public comment this evening. With that, we'll now go to the consent calendar. And items on the consent calendar are routine in nature and are approved by one motion. Are there any items on consent from which council members are recused? Not seeing any. Are there any items on consent that council members would like to pull for discussion? We'll go to we'll go to council member Chu.

I'd like to pull item seven e for discussion.

Seven e. Okay. That was seven e. And vice mayor?

Same. Seven e.

Okay. Perfect. Is there a motion for all of the items with the exception of item seven e?

So moved.

Second.

That was a motion from council member Howard and a second from council member G. Could we get a electronic vote, please?

Motion passes unanimously.

Great. Thank you, everyone. And we'll go to council member Chu for item 7E.

Great. Thank you. So just to kind of orient everyone, seven e is regarding the purchase of two new fire engines for an amount not to exceed $2,900,000, and this is not a project under CEQA. And just to preface my comments, I'm going to vote in favor of approving these two fire engines. But I think it's really important that we talk about the kind of vehicles that the city purchases, the cost of those vehicles, and how they interact with our city, the safety of our streets, and the priorities of the city, and how they evolve with the sort of needs of public safety.

And so if if we look at the the activities of police and fire, they've they've expanded well beyond the sort of way that these positions were originally envisioned. And so fire has come to encompass much more than just fighting fires. And in fact, you know, as things like sprinklers and, you know, firewalls and and all of the regulations that keep our buildings from burning down have improved. Thankfully, fires have become more and more rare, and other kinds of community needs have become more and more salient. And so although it it is certainly still a need to have fire engines, and we absolutely should, you know, support our fire department in their role as firefighters.

A very big part of their job is also emergency medical services, attending to car crashes, things like this. And so consistent pattern that emerges in cities is that the size of fire engines determines the width and the design of streets. And there's about two twenty five times as many crash injuries as there are fire injuries. There's about 10 to 12 times as many crash deaths as there are fire deaths. And so when we talk about public policy, I really want us to be mindful of trade offs.

And one thing I hope is that we can move towards smaller vehicles. There are, you know, for example, in The EU, fire engines are built on a standard chassis. They're much more maneuverable. They have longer you know, the the ladders can articulate. They even have higher reach relative to US fire engines.

And I realize we can't just go buy an EU fire engine. But where there's an opportunity to think about smaller, more compact vehicles, I think these both would potentially better meet the needs of a modern fire department as a huge part of their job is now attending to medical emergencies. And we can start to think about how to redesign our streets for smaller, lighter vehicles. And so again, I'm you know, I'm gonna approve these vehicles. I think that they're important and they're necessary, but they are expensive to buy, maintain. And my hope is in the future that that there can be more economical compact solutions. So I'll stop there.

Thank you, councilmember. Go to the vice mayor.

Thank you. I also am going to vote in favor of approving the purchase of these vehicles. And the reason I wanted to pull it I really take your comments, council member Chu, very well spoken, but my reason is different. My reason is that in 2025, major national news organizations sounded the alarm about private equity monopolizing the number of manufacturers of trucks nationwide, resulting in higher prices for cities throughout The United States. In September 2025, just seven months ago, the International Association of Firefighters warned the United States Senate that consolidation among fire apparatus manufacturers is raising prices and delaying deliveries, putting firefighters and the public at risk.

Redwood City does not have the luxury of being immune to forces outside its boundaries. I want the public to be aware of this harmful national trend and sir certainly hope that the antitrust division of the United States Department of Justice will stop this unlawful consolidation of manufacturers of fire trucks right away. Thank you.

Thank you, vice mayor, and thank you, council member Trio. I was trying to figure out what the name of our pilot program. I think it was squad nine where we had it was a different vehicle, and it was all about responding to the acute medical calls that the fire department was getting. So point well taken. But with that, if there's a motion for item seven e. So moved.

Perfect. Second.

That was a motion from council member Chu. A second from vice mayor Aiken. Could we get a electronic vote, please?

The motion passes unanimously.

Thank you, everyone. That was our consent calendar, and now we'll move on to our public hearings. Our first is a item eight a, a request from Stanford Health Care to initiate amendments to the Redwood City general plan and the Stanford in Redwood City precise plan for the Stanford Medicine Center Cancer Center, excuse me, located at 550 Broadway 550 575 to 585 Broadway and 1201 Douglas. And before we get started, I believe we have a couple of council members who may have some conflicts to share, so I will open it up to my colleagues. Go to council member chair.

I'm I both work for Stanford University in the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences, and I live within 500 feet of the project. So I will be recusing myself from this item.

Thank you, council member. Council Member G.

My affiliated company, Swinnerton Builders, does work for some of the Stanford entities. So I will be recusing myself from this item.

Thank you. And council member Serkan.

I also work for Stanford University at their Stanford health care facility in Tri Valley, so I also must recuse myself from this item.

Thank you, council members. And as our colleagues leave the dais, I will start off by saying that I met with the the applicants and had conversations on the the proposed project public prior, excuse me, to tonight's public hearing, and I'll open it up to my colleagues in case anyone else had conversations. Vice mayor?

I met with the applicant at 505 Broadway Cardinal Hall on 03/20/2026. I did not obtain information of specific of a specific nature other than what is in the staff report that I read as part of tonight's agenda.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Councilmember Howard?

Thank you. I would say the same. I met with the applicant at Cardinal Hall and was given a brief tour and shown the presentation we'll be seeing tonight. So I just wanted to be totally transparent. Thank you. Thank you both.

Council member Vidya.

I also met with the applicant on Tuesday, March 24 and had a presentation. Thank you.

Thank you so much, everybody. And with that, our community development director, Jeff Schwab, will introduce the item this evening, and our senior planning director, Ryan Kuching, will give the staff presentation.

Good evening, Mayor. Martinez Tobias, members of council. The purpose of tonight's meeting is simply to determine if the city should initiate study of Stanford's proposed cancer center on their Redwood City campus. Given that those amendments given that amendments would be necessary to both the city's general plan and the precise plan zoning for the property. The decision in favor of initiation would start a process of city led community engagement and project review, but to be clear, is not a guarantee of any specific commitment or outcome with regard to the proposed project.

Given the project details are still being refined by Stanford and the city led community engagement and project evaluation have yet to occur, there is no formal community benefit package to consider at this time. The discussion of community benefits will occur as more is known about the project details and as part of future community engagement. There will be many opportunities for all parties to shape, discuss and review the project in any associated community benefits during the process. I'll now turn it over to Ryan to give a more detailed presentation.

Okay. Good evening. Good evening, Mayor Sabalos, the City Council members. My name is Ryan Kuchnick, senior planner with the Community Development Department. This evening, I am here to discuss Stanford's request to consider the initiation of general plan and precise plan amendments.

Just for you this evening, I have a couple of questions for you, and I'll just list them off. Does the City Council support the study of amendments to the general plan in the Stanford and Redwood City Precise Plan? And are there specific direction for the applicant and staff? A little delay there. So just a brief overview of the topics I will be discussing.

First will be the initiation request summary, an existing precise plan area in development as well as a history or past approvals, including Phase one and Phase two, initiation request details followed by next steps and the recommendation. Okay. So the request before you today is to consider Stanford HealthCare's request to initiate amendments to the Redwood City General Plan and Stanford and Redwood City Precise Plan and to allow study of the Stanford Medicine Cancer Center located at 550 Broadway, 575 to 585 Broadway, as well as 1201 Douglas Avenue. As Jeff mentioned, today we'll not be discussing the development agreement or community benefits as part of this initiation process. However, there will be much more information on this topic as the formal application is developed.

Before we get to that, if initiation of the project if initiated, the project would undergo a thorough review, including city led community engagement, development of a precise plan, environmental impact report, and economic evaluation of the proposed community I'm sorry, proposed community benefits. It does not constitute approval of amendments or assure any particular action on the amendments. Just to point out, this is an image provided in Stanford's application material, and the vantage point you're seeing is from Broadway looking west towards the new cancer center that connects through a skybridge and research building to the North Side of Broadway. So upon conclusion, the Stanford or the applicant will be providing a presentation. Just an overview of the existing layout.

The subject site, as here is outlined in yellow, consists approximately eight acre site currently occupied by hospital, R and D, educational, administrative and medical office uses. It is bordered by the Bay Shore Freeway and U. S. 101 to the North Bay Road to the South Rawlison Road in the Fire Department Station No. Eleven and Spinas Park to the East Douglas Avenue to the West and to also point out that Broadway extends east and west through the center of the precise plan area, linking it directly to the downtown Redwood City, which is approximately one mile to the west.

And you see also it's little difficult to see on the screen, but outlined in blue is at the end of Douglas Avenue is the parcel that has been acquired by Stanford that would be included in this expanded development plan area. And this is the current block area plan or the block plan. It's what is what you see is what's on the ground today within the Stanford campus. Blocks A, B, C and F are built and in operation. And Block E is still under construction.

And then and also a little bit of a history of what's occurred over the past fourteen years or so or thirteen years. Stanford in Redwood City was the precise plan and development agreement was approved in 2013. It also included an EIR. And in 2016, Phase one, which included Blocks A, B and a portion of Block C were approved and the construction has been completed. This included about 570,000 square feet within four office buildings, approximately 293,000 square feet of net new building area.

Also in 2023 Phase two, which included Blocks C and E were approved. This was approximately 228,000 square feet of office and 26,000 square feet of amenity area within C. Also in Block E, 265000 square feet of medical office was constructed as well as a three level parking structure. Construction of Block C has been on hold. The proposed amendments would revise much of Block C.

And in 2023, the as you may recall, the extension of the development agreement was approved, a ten year extension. This was the first term extension of two possible for a total of thirty years. And also in 2025, just to note that Block E is currently under construction. So Stanford is requesting a general plan and land use with text amendments to accommodate the proposed cancer center. There's a bit more detail in the report but just to summarize the amendment would change additional area within the campus from commercial office professional technology to hospital and to recognize the additional hospital use and floor area allowance needed for the proposed facilities.

Additionally, Stanford envisions the cancer hospital will exceed the height limit prescribed in the general plan hospital designation and therefore change is necessitated in the text of that plan. And that would allow more than one building to exceed the five storey height limit. So here's a conceptual site plan. The proposal includes expanding the boundaries, as I mentioned, of the precise plan by approximately 0.35 acres and requesting modifications to the entitled development on Block C And E as well as future planned development on Block D. The primary hospital building would replace existing development and occur a majority within Block D and adjacent to the Stanford Healthcare Outpatient Center within the Stanford University campus.

Existing development on or at 550 Broadway on would also be demolished and replaced by two new medical research buildings and clinic buildings. And that's noted, if you can see the pale orange and pale purple on the screen. In place of the research and development office uses within the areas yet to be redeveloped, an increased development floor area would be devoted to hospital uses. A central utility plant is currently proposed at the corner of Bay And Douglas, and that you can see in yellow on the screen. So due to the increased parking needs of a larger campus and increased medical clinic use, three new parking garages are proposed to be constructed throughout the campus.

Two of these structures would be positioned along The U. S. 101 frontage and one is perpendicular to Bay Avenue. And these are illustrated in the dark gray on the screen. So a limited number of parking would still remain within the surface parking would remain on the campus.

And so here would be the new conceptual block plan as requested. It would incorporate the 0.35 acre parcel at 1201

Douglas,

would consolidate Block C And D and realign Hurlingame Avenue and maintain publicly accessible connections between Broadway and Bay Road. It would increase the allowable square footage and FAR limits for Block C, D, E and G. It would exceed the maximum 55% building footprint on Blocks C, D and F and increase the building height from five storeys to nine to 10 on Blocks C, D and G and allow building heights of up to nine to 10 storeys for multiple buildings on Block E. Increased building heights from another request would be to increase building heights from 20 feet within 200 feet of the 101 Freeway to nine to 10 storeys on Blocks E, G And F. Also to note some changes to the open space plan or requirements.

It would remove the requirement for courtyard open spaces for the hospital and associated research and development buildings. It would reduce the five acre minimum central campus Greenway requirement. And lastly, modify the central Greenway campus such that it would not connect directly through but pedestrian connections would be still maintained along Bay Road and Broadway as shown here. So in summary, staff recognizes that the proposed cancer center uniquely positions a vital medical field facility within an established research campus in Redwood City. However, staff would need to evaluate modifications to the existing general plan and precise plan as well as potential environmental impacts associated with these requests.

And finally, the project would require modifications to the development agreement or a new development agreement or establish a new development agreement. Block C And D represent the only feasible location for these necessary footprint and circulation that avoids disturbing the existing development. To accommodate the large footprint, the project would interrupt the established block pattern, including roadways and open space areas. And just to give a timeline of where we are and where we're going to go from here if approved, I'll state that it's Stanford HealthCare's request to expand and modify the plan as part of an overall project that's adopting this resolution, as I mentioned, does not constitute approval, but rather allows further study to undergo a thorough review, including environmental community engagement and economic evaluation of potential community benefits. So upon initiation, the next steps would include would be submittal of project details and scope, and that could happen in the next few months, community engagement, which will continue throughout the entire process.

And then later this year, it is understood that a formal application will be submitted, including general plan and precise plan amendments. Early to mid of next year, study sessions with the Architectural Advisory Committee, Planning Commissions, as well as check ins with City Council. And then we expect, based on this preliminary schedule, that the end of twenty twenty seven, the consideration of the entitlements, including amendments to the general plan, precise plan and development agreement. And then lastly, as listed here, the project will include final approval by the City Council. What is not noted here, though, I do want to point out that Stanford will also need to work closely with the county on certain infrastructure considerations, which could also impact this overall timeline.

And then lastly, staff's recommendation is to adopt a resolution initiating proceedings to consider amendments to the Redwood City General Plan and Stanford and Redwood City Precise Plan for the Stanford and Medicine Cancer Center. And then the questions again are up on the screen, as I introduced earlier. So that concludes staff's presentation. As I mentioned, applicant has a presentation as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Brian. Before we open the public hearing, we'll hear a presentation from Stanford Health Care. And I'd like to welcome assistant vice president of government affairs, Lucy Wicks, director of land use and licensing, Molly Swenson, and chief operating officer, Rick Schumway, to the podium, and you'll have about ten minutes for your presentation. Welcome.

Can you hear me okay? So it is excellent to be here tonight. We're grateful that we have four city councilors and mayor and vice mayor to listen to us tonight. This is a really exciting moment for us. We're really appreciative of the engagement that we've had so far.

Again, I'm Rick Shumway. I'm the executive vice president and chief operating officer at Stanford Healthcare. I'm joined by quite a few of my colleagues here as well. I'd also like to acknowledge Michael Hollis, who is my colleague as the Chief Operating Officer at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who is our core partner as we continue to develop this concept as we go forward. We're really excited tonight to talk just briefly about a couple of quick things and you heard a little bit about who's going to be speaking tonight.

Hopefully, this sort of rounds out the perspective. Lucy will have a pretty good insight into how we're going to engage the community, which will be an essential part of what we do over the course of the coming months and years. Molly is our our guru on the land use and licensing is really going to help us to think about more detail around the conceptual plan that will hopefully be useful for you. And my job tonight is really to kind of set the table to have a little bit of a conversation about the vision. What is this?

What do we intend to do with this? What impact will this have to this community and ultimately to the world? And we'll talk about that in just a moment here. I think the important piece is to ground in a couple of core facts. One of those is that this is not a disease, cancer, that is unknown to anybody in this room.

It's personal, but it's also aggregate. We see its impact significantly across every facet of our society. You can see some pretty daunting numbers here. Two point one million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer and more than six hundred and twenty five thousand will die in 2026. That's a pretty significant impact certainly globally, nationally, but locally as well.

This is really an important part of what happens around us. Now in the midst of all of this, one of the things that's important to us is that we are on the frontier to deal with this particular issue in ways that only Stanford Healthcare and Stanford Medicine can. And so what we've done over the course of time in the last decade, we've actually doubled the size of our cancer program, which will actually be a significant rate of growth that will lead into what you'll hear about tonight. I think that's an important part of what we're talking about here. So, you know, when you think about that problem, I have to tell you very specifically, I have the honor and the pleasure every single day to work with the people that are hard at work solving this problem minutely and acutely, but also generally and broadly.

And what we're really excited about is the notion of building this engine of what Stanford will deliver to this local community and to the world right here in Redwood City. And the opportunity to do that is unique and we'll be able to talk about that a lot over the course of the coming months and years. But at the end of the day, what this means is that we will set new standards for how cancer care is delivered, the research that is necessary to ultimately cure that disease, and it'll happen right here in Redwood City. And I think that's something that we're really excited about and we're really proud of. So I won't go through this in granularity.

I just want to point out a couple of things. It's important to note that we've thought a lot about this. This is a big significant investment that we intend to make over the course of many years into the future. And we have had to think really long and hard about where to do that. We are very grateful for the history that we have had as a health system and as a university here in this community.

And I think when you look at the many things that have happened over the course of time here in terms of Stanford and Redwood City, it's really exciting to think about what things were, what things are, and what things could be. I'm just gonna point out four quick things on this slide that I think are important. Number one, when you look at the campus that is as it exists today, for those of you who've been in the community for an extended period, this used to be the Midpoint Technology Park. It is now one of the core centers of how we deliver care and how we deliver our research within the entire Stanford ecosystem. One of the things that we're really grateful for is what we're here to talk about tonight and that's of course the general and the precise plans.

That was done through extensive community engagement. We're here today with what we have in Redwood City because of the engagement that we've had with the community. We expect to do the same thing as we go forward with this proposed next phase. The third thing that I will just point out on this slide is we've had all of this development over time is we've really made sure that we are trying to focus on what the needs are that this particular community has. And we still have opportunity and we continue to look for those opportunities to engage in a way where we can continue to deliver equitable care across the entire domain of this region and this community.

And then the last thing that I will just say, are very excited about the construction that is underway. It continues to progress every time I drive down 101. That will be unbelievable in terms of the type of service that will be available to this community across a broad domain of specialties that really can only be found at Stanford HealthCare and Stanford Medicine. So we're excited about that as well. Couple of closing comments that I just want to to make before I turn it over to Lucy.

The impact, I've said it a couple of times, I don't think can be overstated. You know your population numbers much better than I do, but this is a third of the citizens of Redwood City that are currently enrolled as patients at Stanford HealthCare. So a third. Twenty eight hundred, twenty nine hundred of those individuals are currently being treated for cancer care at Stanford HealthCare. What this is going to allow us to do is to develop a center that will be directly accessible to this community.

But I'll leave you with this and then I'll turn it over to Lucy. One of the taglines that we have at Stanford is that we believe that the work that we do is developed here and it's used everywhere. And we believe that this center will actually be something that Redwood City not only can be proud of, but will be very directly involved in that particular philosophy. We will develop the cures for cancer in Redwood City, and those will be deployed across the globe. And we are absolutely thrilled about the possibilities that has certainly for humanity at large, but definitively for the citizens here of Redwood City. So thank you, and I'll turn it over to my colleague Lucy.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and council members. It is an honor to be here with you tonight. My name is Lucy Wex. I'm with the Office of Government and Community Affairs at Stanford. And as you've just heard from Rick, advance at Stanford Medicine we and this proposed cancer center is not only about an investment of expanding care and research innovation, but we see it as an opportunity to deepen our relationship and our long standing partnership with Redwood City and San Mateo County.

At the core of our effort is a vision to expand care and discovery. We do this by being very informed by a collaborative community first approach, which will ultimately yield in a physical space that reflects our shared values. From the beginning, and as our leadership defined a vision for advancing innovation and care, we have simultaneously approached our external engagement with a community first mindset, One grounded in early engagement, transparency and deep collaboration with our neighbors. Over the past year, we have engaged extensively with stakeholders and local residents,

some of whom are in the audience here today. It's great

to see familiar faces. And we really wanted to be able to understand both their aspirations and their concerns as we developed our conceptual plans. These conversations have been invaluable. They've helped us more deeply understand the community priorities around health, neighborhood compatibility, environmental stewardship and what it means to be a good neighbor in Redwood City. One moment. Oh, here we go. We have conducted countless touch points with a variety of thought partners, neighbors, and stakeholders. We've hosted community open houses both in English and Spanish. We've conducted door to door outreach, mailed thousands of postcards to our neighbors. We've launched a website.

We've also been able to pull together a community advisory group. Thank you to the members who have joined us tonight or listening from home. All of this has been to ensure that information is easily accessible and that feedback can be shared with us at any point. The insights we have gathered through surveys and conversations and public events are shaping our future plans. Throughout our engagement, you'll often hear us ask, what should we be sensitive towards here? And who else do we need to be speaking with? And while those seem like such simple questions, they yield great input and really help lead us towards deeper connection within the fabric of the community. Oh, is that me? Was that you? Do I keep going?

Okay. Thank you. Okay. As we continue to advance this project, our goal remains the same, to create a cancer center that reflects shared values, supports the city's long term vision, and serves as a resource for the broader community. We are committed to maintaining open lines of communication with the council, city staff, and the community throughout the development and review of this process and project. We appreciate your leadership and your partnership, and we look forward to continuing this work together to ensure that a cancer center becomes an asset that both benefits the city of Redwood City, the community, and our patients for many years to come. Thank you. I'm gonna turn it over to Molly for some comments.

Thanks, Lucy, and good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council members. Just a few more slides, if you can humor us. So I'm Molly Swenson, Director of Land Use and Licensing for Stanford Medicine, and on behalf of the entire project team here tonight, I'd like to thank you for your time. So as Rick noted in his opening remarks, the adoption of the Stanford and Redwood City Precise Plan was a key milestone for both Stanford and the community. And the proposal we're now bringing forward presents an opportunity to really evolve that vision in a way that meets not only the essential requirements of a modern cancer hospital, but also the needs of the community today.

We're not seeking to change the core principles of the PRECISE plan. Instead, we're proposing targeted amendments that would allow us to deliver a state of the art cancer center while remaining aligned with the plan's original intent. In the city's presentation and in our submittal materials, you've seen our conceptual site plan, proposed general plan amendments, and selected conceptual amendments to the precise plan. As noted in our submittal, additional precise plan amendments likely will be required to enable the cancer center. I'd now like to focus on the site planning principles and concepts that have informed our plan and proposed amendments.

The planning principles shown here represent the shared values we're carrying forward as we look toward the next phase of our campus. They include designing for resilience and future flexibility and creating a connected, integrated, and cohesive campus aligned with the precise plan. We're also prioritizing a strong first impression, community integration, and a connected network of green spaces. Together, these principles help ensure that as the campus evolves, it continues to meet community needs, remains environmentally responsive, and can adapt to the realities of changing health care delivery. Outpatient services are currently the foundation of Stanford Health Care's presence in Redwood City, and demand for these services continues to grow.

What you see here is a concept showing how outpatient programs could expand westward on the North Side Of Broadway, building on existing strengths while not interrupting ongoing patient care. And here we see the clinic placement adjacent to existing outpatient services, maintaining a seamless patient experience. And the proposed location for the future cancer hospital has been identified with site access and circulation in mind, as well as the available land area. A hospital's footprint is inherently large, reflecting the extensive diagnostic and treatment infrastructure and large equipment needed for its core functions. And the location we're proposing can accommodate this footprint.

One of the most transformative aspects of this plan is making research the cornerstone of this cancer center. By placing research within immediate proximity to clinical functions, we strengthen the bench to bedside connection, bringing discoveries more quickly into patient especially for cancer. A key theme in these concepts is connectivity. We're proposing a series of linkages that ensure patients, clinicians and researchers can move through the campus safely and efficiently. Elevated Level connections and breezeways reduce travel time and improve clinical coordination while ground level spaces remain open and welcoming to the community.

Our parking strategy is intentionally distributed and aligns with the parking locations envisioned in the precise plan along 101 And Bay Road. This plan also identifies a central utility plant, which is required to support the hospital and which is being conceived with sustainability principles in mind. One of the key public facing elements of the plan is the extension of the campus greenway. This open space corridor enhances the pedestrian network while adding greenery, shade and stormwater benefits. It also supports a more walkable connected environment for employees, visitors and neighbors.

This slide highlights circulation, both within the campus and in relation to surrounding streets. You'll see the conceptual extension of Hurlingame Avenue, which was envisioned in the precise plan to create better connectivity. We're proposing to maintain that connection but alter the alignment to accommodate the placement of the hospital as well as a patient drop off area at the front entrance. We envision welcoming green space in the approach to the entry with an amenity space that would help activate the campus. Bringing all of these components together, this conceptual site plan shows how the major program elements clinical, research, parking, utilities, green space could relate to one another.

It is with this framework in mind that we are seeking to explore amendments to the existing PRECISE plan. And finally, these conceptual images have helped people visualize height, scale and layout before any architectural design work begins. While the images here are only conceptual, they've been invaluable for gathering feedback early. We are only at the beginning of our journey together, and in these early stages, we've been met with genuine enthusiasm and curiosity from the community and a shared sense of purpose. I've personally heard from cancer survivors, patients who are treated at Stanford, neighbors who live or work in the area and use our facilities, and I'm energized by the perspectives and input that they all bring and the opportunity we have to envision our future together here.

In closing, we appreciate the city's partnership as we continue exploring these early concepts. We remain committed to creating a campus that supports exceptional care, advances research, strengthens community connections and reflects Redwood City's priorities. We look forward to working with you and the community as we take our next steps.

Thank you.

Thank you, Molly, for the presentation. And we'll now open the public hearing, and I'll turn it over to our city clerk to facilitate public comment.

Thank you, mayor. We have four speakers in person this evening on this item. And if you've joined us on Zoom, feel free to raise your hand at this time. Again, once we start public comment, we will close the speakers list. Okay. I don't see any raised hands on Zoom, so we'll proceed with our in person speakers. We'll start with Mike Morris. Mike will be followed by former mayor Danny Gasparini.

Good evening. My name is Mike Morris, and I live about half a mile from the project. The Stanford project will be a burden to the community. The roads are already gummed up and will not be able to support more traffic in the area. Woodside Road, U.

S. 101 interchange, with Broadway, Bay Road, Marshall Road, Florence are already gridlocked as it is. Stanford will be adding over 1,000,000 square feet of medical offices and hospital. How will emergency vehicles and fire be able to get through the neighborhood? Stanford University in Palo Alto has plenty of land that could they could build on.

Why they already chose a family oriented neighborhood for such a large massive medical complex is ridiculous. At the community engagement presentation, they had no answers as to traffic studies. Seems to me that would be one of the beyond the top of their list. This is the wrong neighborhood for such a massive project. Also, it will increase air pollution, noise pollution, increase accidents, motor vehicle accidents, pedestrian and bicycle accidents.

I mean, I'm all for curing cancer. The project is just too big for a small compressed area. In regards to Woodside Road, Redwood City should fix the interchange before they do any more development. There should be a moratorium on that. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Danny Gasparini, who will be followed by Larry Moody.

Mayor, Vice Mayor and our two city council members. What I'd like to say in five words or less is F cancer, initiate the study. Any of us in this room that have been touched by cancer personally or by friends, family, colleagues or even worked in the space as I did for 12 nearly twelve years with the Adario Lung Cancer Foundation. We know that we couldn't move fast enough to bring a comprehensive cancer center to our community. I see this as world class care in our community, serving our community.

Think about that. So I hope that we do initiate the study tonight so we can look at things like traffic and environmental impacts and housing impacts. But without that study, we can't unite these communities to think about those kinds of studies and to think about those kinds of impacts. But for me, in the lung cancer space for twelve years, it broke my heart to meet someone new, a new patient, that I knew their survival rate past five years was less than thirty percent. And that for that Hail Mary, we would send them to MD Anderson or maybe John Hopkins or maybe on the East Coast, because there was a physician that was doing some world class research and some cutting edge research.

We have great cancer facilities here. I don't disparage what Stanford's already doing and what UCSF is doing, But I'm talking about comprehensive care, when we start looking at early diagnosis and research. Because if we can get to this place in early diagnosis and in looking at how we make cancer a chronically managed disease, much like heart disease, we can't do this without a campus, a comprehensive campus to look at this. Not a medical clinic, not a hospital, but a comprehensive center. So I look forward to the discussions that we'll have, no doubt, as Lucy has been part of our community for so long, about all of these essential things that come with a large development.

But please think at the end of the day what this potential means economically and for our health and our community. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Larry Moody, who will be followed by Chris Johnson.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the council. Larry Moody. I serve as the government affairs community liaison for JobTrain. JobTrain is here tonight to support the staff resolution recommendation. We understand once proceedings are initiated, the city may move forward with the environmental review and public outreach process for the proposed project.

Tonight's decision is an important step towards a very important new opportunity possible tenant in Redwood City. This step will allow for thoughtful evaluation, transparency, and meaningful community engagement as discussions continue. Redwood City and Stanford and JobTrain share a commitment to build strong partnerships that create opportunities, advance economic mobility, and deliver long term community benefits for local residents. For more than sixty years, JobTrain has served as the county's leading workforce development nonprofit, providing training in culinary arts, building, carpentry, facility maintenance, medical assistance, and certified nursing assistants. Over the past five years, Stanford Hospital has supported 74 job placements.

And over the past six years, Stanford University has supported 94 placements. These placements means an individual that came to our program, graduated, and achieved a job that will lead towards economic mobility. We all know Stanford has been a valued partner for Redwood City and certainly The Peninsula, whose role will only expand with the approval of the cancer center this community. This week, Thursday, Stanford will be recognized at JobTrain's Breakfast of Champions as the employer partner of the year for continued investment and partnerships and community advancement. These efforts demonstrate what is possible when training, employment, professional development are aligned, providing individual with the confidence, career pathway, and economic stability needed to support their families and compete for affordable housing opportunities.

At JobTrain, we believe economic mobility is the North Star. We look forward to continued collaboration with Stanford as Redwood City evaluates the next steps as we collectively work to ensure future development that translates into shared community benefits. Thank you. Thank

you. Our final speaker is Chris Johnson.

Good evening. My name is Chris Johnson. I'm a proud resident of Redwood City. I want to begin by saying Stanford's desire to revisit and expand their development agreement is genuinely exciting. This represents a meaningful investment in health care, in our community, and in the countless patients and families who will one day depend on world class cancer care right here in our city.

I support moving this forward. But tonight, I ask this council to consider two things. The first one is my appeal. For those newer to this issue, in 2013, I appealed the approval of Stanford's precise plan on three grounds: one, the use of outdated traffic data two, no provisions to address housing impacts and three, community benefits that were disproportionate to the scale of this project. Stanford holds over 48 acres of tax exempt land in Redwood City and as a nonprofit, pays no property taxes and no business license fees.

Yet the community benefits negotiated at the time totaled just $15,000,000 over thirty years. To put that in perspective, when Stanford expanded its children's hospital and Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, that city negotiated $173,000,000 in community benefits for a comparable project, dollars 173,000,000. Redwood City, for a larger footprint, received less than one tenth of that amount. Three years ago, when the Stanford precise plan came up for renewal and some council members sitting here today attempted to revisit those benefits, Stanford made it clear that they would, and I'll paraphrase, only honor the terms of the original agreement. That was then, this is now.

And the landscape has changed entirely, which leads me to the second thing to consider, and that is my ask. My ask is simple: Vote to begin implementing the proposed changes to the Stanford precise plan, but at the same time, it clear to Stanford that this is the moment to reconsider community benefits that are proportional, equitable and worthy of our community. It's never too late for Stanford to do the right thing. Thank you.

Thank you. And with no speakers on Zoom, that concludes public comment, Mayor.

Thank you, city clerk, and thank you to everybody who made public comments. It's very appreciated. I will now close the public hearing and bring back the council discussion to my colleagues here at the dais. Does anyone have any questions or comments you'd like to start with? Councilmember Howard.

We're down to three. I know it's temporary. Should we wait a second or should we just keep

Let's go ahead

and get started.

Thank you. Thank you, mayor. Okay. Thought a little laugh wouldn't hurt anybody right now. I want to thank Stanford for being here this evening, for coming with your preliminary request that the council approve a general plan and precise plan amendment initiation for the Stanford Medicine Cancer Center.

I have worked in the medical field and around hospitals for decades, and I have firsthand knowledge of the needs of patients and families during their care and their discharge. So I would like to request that before a shovel goes into the ground, I would encourage you to take a field trip to MD Anderson in Houston, Texas. It would not be to learn how to treat cancer, but how they handle ancillary issues. As I understand it, the cancer center will be a regional center, so the expectation is that you will attract patients and families from thousands and I think thousands, but more than hundreds and hundreds of miles away. This will bring up issues such as where patients and their families will stay.

MD Anderson has an arrangement with a three thirty room hotel to house people at reduced rates. Will you have a skilled nursing unit or a hospice unit on-site? You will need to have these issues resolved before you bring us your plans. Otherwise, my colleagues and I will ask you, where are you going to house the patients and their families? Where will patients who require skilled nursing or hospice go? The answer cannot be. It's up to the patient to work that out. I only say that because I heard that in another hospital when I asked for a family. That was the answer I was given. Very disappointing.

I don't expect that Stanford would do that. It needs to be part of your comprehensive care plan that you include and you plan going forward. I'd like to thank you for starting your neighborhood outreach so early in the process. I heard some of the outreach was door to door, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I hope that the citizen engagement will continue throughout the process to ensure your surrounding neighbors' voices will be heard.

Finally, I know we will not be deciding on or voting on community benefits this evening. Certainly, those issues should be included as you work with the city on a development agreement. But I would like to suggest that thought be given now to your surrounding area and some of the big picture concerns our community will need to resolve for the sustainability and future of Redwood City, such as sea level rise and flooding, to give you examples. I look forward to a healthy collaboration with Stanford going forward. I will be supporting initiating this process. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Howard. Any other Council Members? Any thoughts, questions? Go to Council Member Piedia.

Sure. Thank you for your presentation, and I appreciated everyone who made public comment as well. I think it's very exciting. I went down for the visit, and it's a neighborhood that I have a lot of family and friends that I've spent a lot of time growing up in as well. And if done right, I think it could be something very wonderful. And I'm looking forward to Stanford. I I wrote down some words, being a good neighbor. And I think that if that stays the focus and at the heart of everything, I'm really looking forward to that. I think we have an opportunity here. I will admit, I I I am I'm never fond of losing green space.

You can say it different kinds of ways, but I would I I'm always I I think when we're giving back to the community and there's going to be all sorts of inconveniences, I think to focus on community benefits that are helpful and beautiful and vibrant and make the community feel welcome and connected. I hope that the re everything that re envisions this doesn't make this so this is this exclusive campus that isn't welcoming. I hope that it is interconnected and welcoming and is viewed as a public space. I know that I am new to council, but I am not new to Redwood City. I am born and raised here.

So I appreciate the public comments, and I, too, want to make sure that our community, our neighbors, and our residents feel like they are getting just as much as they deserve because oftentimes we carry so much in this neighborhood, in this community, in our county, and there are other cities that seem to reap such rewards that we are equally deserving of. I just want to make sure that we always focus on community. I truly appreciate the community outreach. I like that it is continuing on. I appreciate, as some of my colleagues have mentioned, the kind of old school door to door because I think it's that kind of high touch that will really make the difference.

And I applaud your efforts, and I want you to just keep going out and meeting with people. And I appreciate it, but just want to make sure that the community is always in mind. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Padilla, we'll go to the vice mayor.

So thank you all for being here tonight. And my goodness that the head of a lot of heads of important departments that are here. Thank you all for being here and very, very important work. My colleague is a nurse. I am not.

But I just want to say that prevention is also really, really important. And with insurance and a lot of people not being able to access care. I just think it's really important to I'm not a medical person, but let's not forget about prevention. But very, very much respect the professionalism here and the mission and the goal. I have some questions.

So my first question is between 2023 and 2026, Stanford changed its idea of what it wanted, to do with the two office buildings in Block C. I I'm wondering what what what changed between 2023 and 2026. I'm just interested in learning a little bit more about

that. Yes. So initially in 2019 when Stanford University submitted its application for two administrative office buildings on Block C, the intent was that one building would provide faculty offices for clinicians who will be working in the medical office building under construction at 500 Broadway, and the other was intended for administrative use for Stanford University. And what has changed is that since the time of original submittal and approval we are accommodating those faculty offices for clinicians in an existing building across the street on Block B. And in terms of Stanford's administrative office needs that has changed quite a bit due to the pandemic and shifts in hybrid work and that area continues to evolve.

So there was not a need to develop Block C in the way that was originally proposed.

So I just thank you. That's really helpful. And I'll just so one of the things you're saying is we let people do remote work now that used to always be in the office, and we don't need as much office now. Is that

There's more of a hybrid environment for administrative staff, and like I said, continues to evolve in the post pandemic years. But so that's one component of the original Block C proposal, and the other being faculty offices. I just want

to point out that things continue to evolve and will whenever whether this comes back to us in one year or two years, it will be a different world. And so I just want us all to be mindful of that. So but thank you for that explanation. Thanks. A second question that I have is, I know there's going to be when I first read the staff report, I thought there were going to be hospitals all over the place.

But now I understand there's going to be one new hospital, but what I want to know is how many beds you can give me a range, but I how many beds are we talking? And I also want to know a comparison between how many beds there are now and how many more beds there will be after everything gets built, if it gets built. And I I know that's pretty specific, but if you could give a range.

Sure. So just to clarify, in current state, in blocks A through G, we do not have any inpatient hospital beds.

Okay, that's so when you say inpatient, you're talking about people that sleep in a hospital bed overnight.

Right, but no hospital beds at all.

Okay, but you do have, like you do surgeries, right? You have people that are in beds that like stay in bed all day and then they get driven home at night right now?

These would be outpatient surgeries in

Okay. Permanent So how many outpatient surgery beds do you currently like beds, just people who are sick and so they have to be in bed. Like, how many right now do you have?

Off the top, I don't know. I yeah.

Yeah. More than a thousand? Less than 10? If you can give me that kind of a range.

Yeah. So so just for clarity, so outpatients are never here at night. So this is something that happens just during the day. They could

be stand.

In the clinic or they could be in surgery or otherwise. So after 05:00 in the afternoon, most of the campus has started to wind down. So in terms of total numbers, we can absolutely get you that information, but it's it's in the it's in the hundreds of patients per day.

Okay. And that's because you have operating rooms and you do surgery, and then people are recovering in beds, but they go home by 05:00.

Right.

But again, I'm just trying what I'm trying to get at here is not a definition of 05:00 or 02:00 or outpatient or inpatient. I'm trying to get a definition of scale. So I'm trying to understand like, okay, it's a 100 beds now or like maybe a 100 patients a day that have outpatient surgeries and when the new hospital that is different, so people will stay overnight, but again, I'm trying to get the scale so like beds. So if it's a 100 now, is it gonna be between a 5,000 when we're done or between 500 and a I mean

Yeah. So so there I know it's the word getting into mechanics here, but there are no beds on the campus as it exists today. So when we build the campus that we're talking about here, there will be it depends on how the studies are done, what the phasing of the construction looks like, but it could be hundreds of additional beds over the course of a ten to fifteen year time frame. So that's there are no inpatient beds on this campus right now.

Right now, I understand. But you're you're building a hospital where people will be spending the night. Is that correct?

Correct.

Okay. And it's going to be lots of stories high.

Mhmm.

And how many hospital rooms, how many hospital beds range?

So on that particular hospital will probably be a range from about 180 to three twenty, depending on how the how the planning phases go.

Okay. And that's

hospital That's just inpatient hospital beds.

Got it.

That does not include the outpatients that will be taken care of in the new building across Broadway. That doesn't include additional patients that are going to be in the new building that's going up right now. So that's just the ex explicit inpatient beds in that hospital.

I understand. Thank you. I appreciate that clarification. So the hospital will be between one hundred and eighty and three twenty beds, maybe. And and I'm not holding it I to know this is all evolving.

Yep.

But then and I'm also not talking about the building that is currently being built because it's already been approved. Mhmm. So I'm asking how many aside from the overnight, how many additional beds or or patient seeing rooms where someone's coming in because they need to be seen by a doctor, how many additional ones of those?

A 100 to 200 new clinic rooms, a 180 to 320 new inpatient beds, and then a large scale research facility in that complex.

And and the research facility is where scientists sit at desks at a lab and look at test tubes and don't look at patients.

Is And that

many other things, yes. Yes.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah.

So thank you. Thank you.

Sure.

That's really helpful. These beds I'm sorry. We're done with beds. We're completely done with beds. These buildings are and I know we're studying, and, you know, we're talking like this is absolute, but we're studying. That's what we're maybe going to agree to do tonight. So when we study these buildings, are we going to study the possibility of them being net zero buildings?

We can consider the possibility. That is net zero is not something that we had contemplated as part of this project to date. Though we are focused on sustainability principles at Stanford Health Care.

Why weren't you considering NetSerah, if you don't mind my asking? And maybe that's too intrusive

It and you don't want to would be very challenging for a hospital facility. Why? Because of the energy demands typically associated with the equipment used in a hospital.

Fair enough. I'm not a science person, so I take you at your word. But studying it?

I think that we can consider that as we we move forward studying.

So let me just make one quick So we will absolutely be looking explicitly at a variety of sustainability principles. I think you saw in the presentation that's a very important part of what we do. In fact, just this week, we were recognized by the Joint Commission, which is our accrediting body as one of the top and leading sustainability performers in US healthcare. So this is something that's a core value of ours. And so we will absolutely be studying a wide array of how we make these buildings sustainable and how they fit into that particular net zero. That's something that we'll have to have to have a conversation about. But as as Molly said, that's not typically something that you see in large scale health care.

I I wouldn't know. Yeah. So I appreciate your your clarifying that.

Mhmm.

So I I take you at your word and and it's always good to study. Right? You're a Sure. University that studies things.

We do do that. Yes.

So thank you. So the the power plant, you're building a new power plant. There is not currently a power plant on your Broadway in your on your Redwood City campus. Is that correct?

There is currently a central energy hub on the campus that serves the existing administrative buildings as well as the medical office building currently under construction. However, a hospital does require its own separate central utility plant, so we're proposing to include that as part of this project.

Okay. And okay. So here's my question. It's a little bit lengthy, but you'll get the gist of it. With the new central utility plant, will the new central utility plant be coal powered, gas powered, electric powered, nuclear powered, solar powered, wind powered, or other powered, and will these modalities be studied?

And why is a new utility plant needed?

So I think going back to the energy needs for a hospital, they do require a central plant. In terms of the energy source, it won't be coal fired, but I believe the energy sources are currently being studied, and I don't know that the exact mix of sources have been settled upon at this point. We're still in the very conceptual early stages.

If I might just and that makes total sense to me. Don't forget about wind, I say, because I just think we I feel that we discount windmills, and this is a really windy area. Particularly, the further out you get into the bay, gets because you're kind of at sea. And so I know you don't own the land out at the bay, but I just throw it out there because I have a microphone. And you're a great research university, so don't forget about wind.

And then and I know you will study this very carefully. And then I wanted to, what is the estimated increase in need for power in gigawatt hours approximately and arrange, and will this be studied?

I don't have those figures at my fingertips, but it will certainly be studied as part of this scope should we move forward.

Yeah, I'd like us to look at that exactly in during this study phase that we'll be in because, again, it's a way for maybe not someone like me because I don't know gigawatt hours from anything, but other members of the community do. And I won't that it's another way to define scale. It's another way to express scale. And I think it's really important for our community to, in many different measurements, understand the change in scale here just so that we know what we're in for. So I really would like that gigawatt number or however you measure power.

I don't know. I'd also like to well, I'll get back to that one. Let's see. I have nine questions, and I've already asked five of them. So just let's see.

Oh, so this goes I'm I'm really excited about the scoping. As I understand it, we don't always do scoping, but Redwood City always does, and I'm thrilled that we're gonna do a scoping. And, again, this gets to scale, and it'll be the first thing we do. So I'm really excited about that. I have a question.

I guess this isn't a question. I wanna make sure because this is this again, we're talking about scale here, and this is a big scale. And I know that you will be reimbursing the Redwood City for the cost of the consultants that will be necessary to analyze and do public outreach and inform and community and everything. But when sometimes when something is so big, it can take over a city so that, sure, for this specific thing, yes, there's the consultant, but things like the receptionist fielding calls, the so I guess this is more a comment to staff. I really want staff to be to give us feedback.

Hey, Are are you guys overwhelmed? Are you needing to that that employee who was gonna be working on sewers out, you know, in Redwood Shores? Did you did you bring them in? And now they're having to field community questions about some you know, the Stanford thing. I just this is a comment to staff.

Please keep us posted. Are, you know, is it bleeding into the many, many, many other projects that are really important as well to our 80,000 residents? And because we do a lot, and so that's that's a comment to staff. And and I guess I have an additional question for staff about that, and that is you're already being approached by various organizations

requesting a better understanding of the existing Stanford obligations,

including You're what is already approved, what is in the works, and what might be needed or desired in the future. So you're already being being approached. Are you being reimbursed for handling those approaches? And tell me more about that.

So the approach has been somewhat limited, you know, stimulated by tonight's agenda item and noticing, I suspect. And Stanford has put down a deposit already to for this preliminary work, and so we can charge our time to, you know, respond to any questions.

Tell me about that, You're charging your time, but does it mean that other projects sit on a shelf because this one is so big? Talk a little bit about that, Donna. And I'm not trying to be dismissive or pejorative or I'm just trying to understand.

Yeah. Well, you know, we've come through a period of a time where projects have been somewhat slow in coming. You know, there are a few that are coming in the pipeline right now. I'm pleased to say that last week, we brought on board two additional planners that were budgeted in last year's budget. I finally got them on board.

So, you know, we're in a pretty good staffing position as far as planning is concerned. You know, engineering is still filling some vacancies. They're probably next in line for, you know, the amount of work that needs to be done at least in the early stages of of a development project. And then you know ultimately it pushes through to the building division where you know they have to review the plans and inspect. But you know we're seeing right now that I think our workload is okay. We have reduced our reliance on consultants. We have the ability through contracts that the city councils approve to expand and scale our operations. So I think we're okay for now.

So is part of that Stanford put down a deposit. Do you mind my asking the amount or is that

I don't know, actually. Okay. What typically happens is that the city establishes what we call an evergreen account. There's a large chunk of money that's put into that account, and then they need to replenish it along the way if it's depleted or, you know, nearing depletion.

Okay. And so some of that money you use to hire consulting firms of your choice. Is that correct?

Yes. For example, an environmental review consultant, and they may have consultants as part of their team.

And you'll choose who that environmental consultant is?

That is correct.

Okay. And then some of that work will be your staff. Is that right? And then they'll get reimbursed for their time. Is that correct?

That's correct. All all of the development review staff bills against the sort of the project number, if you will, and then the applicant gets a bill, and that those charges also include some of the overhead costs the city has. So you were mentioning like the receptionist. While the receptionist doesn't bill, there's some money built into the the overhead rates to cover those costs.

And and so thank you. That's helpful. I I wasn't quite sure how all that worked, I appreciate learning a little bit more. And So please do keep us advised. I know Stanford will do a really good job of fulfilling the Evergreen account, we just thank you.

That's helpful. When actually, Mr. Schwab, if you would stay up there. When but I'm on question eight, so and I just have nine. When so the scoping, it's the scoping, it's like a meeting at a at a at a point in time where everyone who would ever want to can come and be at that meeting. Is that correct?

Yes. And just for clarity, you're referring to the environmental review scoping meeting. Correct?

Yes.

Yes. So initially, after and assuming the council initiates, Stanford will work to refine their project and figure out what the maximum scope of their proposed development project is. That will then the city will then issue what's called a notice of preparation saying this is the project. It's, you know, this big, this many square feet, know, that type of thing. And then we will send that out to all of the outside agencies and all the city departments and the public, and they will have the opportunity to submit written comments on what should be covered in the environmental impact report.

And they can submit those comments in writing, and then the Planning Commission will hold the scoping session or public meeting to receive any verbal comments. And we typically do that sort of the middle end of the of this the that thirty day period so that people can hear other people's comments and either chime in and say, yes, that makes sense, or don't forget to do this. I didn't hear anybody mention that. So it gives everybody the opportunity, then the environmental consultant takes all of those comments into consideration and prepares the draft environmental impact report. There's another public meeting on that document, and then there is a response to all the comments received at that hearing on the draft environmental impact report.

And that becomes the final environmental impact report, which the council gets to decide if it's adequate and completely addresses all of the issues. And if you do agree, then you certify that environmental document, and then it becomes the basis for project consideration. Know, if you want to approve it, there'll probably be a number of measures that come out of that mitigation measures that the development would have to adhere to as it goes through the construction review and development actual physical development process.

Thank you. That's really helpful. I just wanted to flesh out a little bit for folks in the community and for us too to under and so and then will part of the study this is my last question. Will part of

the

study look at traffic patterns and transportation patterns, modes of transportation, impacts of transportation y things?

So there's two components to the studies that we will do. One of them is the environmental review studies. Those are the ones that are going to look at vehicle miles traveled because that's how it's measured under the California Environmental Quality Act. And then the city's general plan requires there'd be a local transportation analysis that will look at all of those types of modes of transportation and look at the sort of operational needs. So it might require a signal or turn lane or some other physical improvement bike lane be installed in order to address the congestion, if you would, that would potentially occur.

And you will hire the consultant that does these traffic studies and looks at all that, or it'll be part of the

So for the for the vehicle miles traveled analysis, it would be the city's chosen consultant. My understanding, and this is very common, that a lot of applicants will have their own transportation analysis, or they will prepare it under the guidance of the city, and then the city will review it and peer review it to make sure that it's it's adequate.

Well, I just want to say, and I'm not an expert and would never pretend to be one, but, you know, they're kind of like two well, more than two aspects of commuting. But I really want us to look at the you know, you've got, like, controlling behaviour of the drivers or the bicyclists or the and like police arresting people or telling them to slow down and, you know, making people follow the rules. And then the other side of it is building roads and pathways and building infrastructure that is most conducive to nice quality of life for everybody. And of course, the it's really expensive to have a nice quality of life for everybody with transportation, but I really would encourage the applicant and the city staff to really dig down deep and don't give short shrift to like, oh, this this will do, but really dig deep into how can this be a really great quality of life so that we don't get more cancer patients because they ingested all those fumes from all that extra traffic. And so let's do a really good built environment, the best possible for the money available.

And I'll leave it there. Oh, hold on. I do plan to vote in favor of beginning this study, and I'm really looking forward to it and really appreciate Stanford's legacy and future.

Thank you, vice mayor. Thank you, Jeff. I do have one quick question for the applicants. I I thought the the number of Redwood City residents was really compelling. I I was just curious. 23,704 folks from Redwood City are receiving care. I was just wondering how you quantified that and if that includes North Fair Oaks as well.

Yeah. So I don't know the North Fair Oaks question, but the 23,000 are actual patients that are currently being treated at Stanford HealthCare that originate from the Redwood City ZIP codes. So we actually look at where our patients come from, and that certainly informs a lot of what we do and where we are and how we build and so on and so forth. And so that number does incorporate actual number of individuals that are currently being treated for anything at Stanford Health Care, and then that 3,000 or so number was specific to actual cancer patients from Redwood City that currently have to go elsewhere to other Palo Alto campuses and otherwise.

Great. Thank you. That's super helpful. And, you know, I I agree with my colleagues who have expressed their excitement at this prospect. I think it is it is so incredibly rare to meet folks these days who haven't had their lives touched by cancer in some way. Right? And I can think of personal examples of folks who we I've lost far too soon because of cancer. Right? So although cities don't typically get to work on on health as an issue. Right?

This is a really exciting ability for us to build a path forward that's not only going to to heal people who actively need treatment, but also to discover and prevent, you know, future diseases that that our community faces risk of right now. So really excited just to hear the ways that Stanford has also been in the community. Right? I've heard from my neighbors who have made it to an open house or who have received a survey in their email inbox. Right?

So it's really exciting to hear just to hear the amount of work that's happened leading up to this meeting. And I thought something that one of the presenters mentioned about who else needs to be at this table, what else what other concerns do we need to be hearing about because, you know, that is always a part of this process. Right? And I know I hear from the community that projects of this scale absolutely need to work for the community. Right?

So I thought it was really important that we had, I think he's still here, former mayor Moody from East Palo Alto and JobTrain, who was speaking to the ways that economic mobility has built built in for so many folks through partnerships. Right? So there are impacts, and I think this is absolutely a project that is is worth going through the initiation so that we could start looking and studying for what those concerns might be and also what the benefits of this project are because it's this is just an incredibly this is an incredible opportunity to do good. And so I agree with my colleagues. I would love for us to study this thoughtfully and strategically and shape the final project that's gonna help our global community, but also has to help our community here at home.

So with that, I will move staff's recommendation to

I forgot.

I have

one more thing I wanted to say.

I

I think we keep talk I just when I heard you mention job training, I wanted to say something that when I was on a tour that really excited me is the whole notion that we don't really have this year is the whole idea of bench to bedside and just how really incredible that is. I know we've been talking a lot about beds, but just the ability for the people there to actually just have this physical connection for researchers and patients and doc for everyone to be in this one ecosystem where you're not waiting, you know, turnaround for an email. They you they could walk and go and talk to each other and communicate. And I just think what that fosters and facilitates in just the opportunity for our youth in that neighborhood to begin to see new careers, new not maybe they're not not just to build these these buildings, but to work in them, to be the doctors, to be the researchers. I just I see so much opportunity, and I just wanna express my excitement for for the bench to bedside and how exciting this is for our youth.

Thank you.

Thank you, council member. It's absolutely about the physical health of the community and the economic health of the community. So I'll move staff's recommendation to initiate the process. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you. Council member Howard, that was a motion from the mayor, second from the council member Howard. Could we get an electronic vote?

Thank you. The motion passes with four votes. Council members Chu, g, and Sterkin are recused. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, and we'll invite our colleagues back in from the study. Thank you, everyone. We'll now move on to our next item, our staff reports beginning with nine a. Chief of police, Christina Bell, will introduce the item, and lieutenant Jesse Castro and sergeant Jeff Boyce will give the presentation.

Welcome, everyone.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, city council, city staff, and the community. My name is Christina Bell, and I am your chief of police. This presentation is organized into two main parts. First, policy and compliance. We will begin with an overview of the annual military equipment use report which is required under state law AB four eighty one and seek counsel review and readoption of the military equipment use policy to maintain compliance.

This portion of the presentation will include a summary of authorized equipment categories, how that equipment was used in 2025, the department's oversight and community engagement efforts, and updates on previously approved equipment, including the armored rescue vehicle, also known as our Bearcat, and the unmanned aerial systems, also known as our drone program. Second is the proposed Axon agreement. We will then conclude with the proposed Axon agreement which supports continuation of the body worn camera program and expansion of integrated public safety technology systems to enhance operations, transparency, and evidence management. Lieutenant Jesse Castro will present the first portion, and sergeant Jeff Boyce will present the second portion. We have representatives from Axon via Zoom, Kyle Panacevic and Alex Edinger.

And in person, we have a representative from Skydio, Ryan Cowell. They will be available for any questions at the end of the presentation. I would now like to call Lieutenant Jesse Castro to the podium.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, members of city council, and members of the community. My name is Jesse Castro. I'm a lieutenant with the Redwood City Police Department. Tonight's staff is here to offer a brief overview of the Redwood City Police Department's military equipment as detailed in the 2025 military equipment news report. The report covers period of January 1

report

that the track the COVID-nineteen COVID-nineteen and the expansion COVID-nineteen of integrated public safety technology. The questions before council tonight are as follow. Do you have any questions regarding the department's use of equipment and compliance with a b four eighty one requirements? Are there questions or feedback on equipment usage and safeguards? And lastly, are there any questions regarding the proposed technology investments and associated fiscal impact?

The military equipment use report aligns with California Assembly Bill four eighty one signed into law in 2021. The bill mandates that law enforcement agencies owning or authorized to use designated military equipment adhere to specific guidelines. These include maintaining a military equipment use policy outlining authorized uses, seeking annual review and readoption of the ordinance by our governing body, publicly sharing proposed or final military equipment use policy on the agency's website, releasing an annual military equipment report, and hosting an annual community engagement meeting to gather feedback on the equipment's usage. The department's equipment inventory is diverse and provides officers with a wide variety of tools to resolve a critical incident. Nearly all of these tools improve the department's ability to deescalate critical incidents and resolve them, typically with little or no use of force.

Own equipment by the Redwood City Police Department includes specialized firearms, mobile command vehicles, breaching devices, The

The

law law defines defines the 14 separate specific categories of military equipment. The department is currently authorized to use equipment in nine of these categories. These tools were not merely acquisitions. They represent our dedication to enhancing de escalation techniques, supporting officer and community safety, and leveraging technological advancements to improve overall operational effectiveness. Items also highlight the department's commitment to evolving and adapting law enforcement and community needs.

As stated last year, it is imperative that department remain equipped with the necessary resources and tools to address critical incidents swiftly and effectively while prioritizing the safety of both our officers and the community we serve. Skip ahead. Last year's acquisition requests were unmanned aerial systems, also known as drones, and the armored rescue vehicle, the ARV. The armored rescue vehicle, ARV, was approved for use and purchased by council in May 2023. The ARV was funded through a federal grant awarded to the Port Of Redwood City.

The ARV finally arrived in July 2025, and it has been deployed on two occasions. I'll provide more information about the deployments later in the presentation. It's great to finally have this vehicle as a tool. At this point, sergeant sergeant Boyce will provide information regarding the drill program.

Good evening. I'm sergeant Jeff Boyce. I'm the supervisor of the department's UAS team, unmanned aerial systems, which I'll refer to as this present in this presentation as drones. I'll be discussing the department's use of drones currently, presenting some statistics, and then later I'll talk about the proposed expansion of the drone program and how that fits in with the proposed Axon body worn camera contract. Council previously approved the Department's Drone Program in 2024, and it became operational in 2025.

Since then, it's quickly evolved into a core public safety tool supporting patrol, investigations, and real time situational awareness. Today, our fleet includes four patrol deployed Skydio X10s, one docked as a first responder platform, and several smaller DJI systems that are used for interior and specialized operations. This program was implemented with a relatively modest start up cost, just over $115,000 in equipment and under $10,000 in training costs, while delivering significant operational value. Importantly, this program operates under established department policy, FAA regulations, and AB four eighty one transparency requirements, ensuring accountability, privacy protections, and proper oversight. In just seven months of operation in 2025, the department deployed drones on 608 incidents with over 1,700 flights.

The vast majority of these were DFR, dronus first responder flights. This was across a wide range of real world calls for service, including disturbances, welfare checks, suspicious activity, collisions, violent property crimes, and missing persons. DFR specifically represents a major shift in public safety for both police calls and fire and rescue operations. It allows us to get eyes on the scene faster, significantly improving response times. For example, a 76% response time reduction for alarms and 68% reduction for disturbances and fights.

DFR provides officers with critical intelligence before they put themselves into positions that could lead to confrontation. That time to assess, coordinate, and plan directly enhances officer safety and helps reduce the likelihood of force being used.

There were a total of two special response team activations during 2025. Here you'll see the two activations, and you'll see the military equipment that was brought and available for each activation for the special response teams to use if needed. The SRT warrant service was a high risk warrant service in East Palo Alto and Foster City. The suspect involved had previously discharged a firearm and multiple victims. In May 2025, SRT provided support for an executive protection detail for vice president Vance during an event held at a private residence in Atherton.

The SRT team is a multi jurisdictional team comprised of members from the Redwood City Police Department, Menlo Park PD, and Atherton PD. On this slide, you'll see where military equipment was used by officers in the patrol division. In November 2025, there was an officer involved shooting incident that occurred in Redwood City. During this incident, the suspect produced a firearm and pointed it towards officers. Both lethal and less lethal options were fired by officers.

The suspect was struck, subdued, and was ultimately provided medical aid. He was transported to a nearby hospital for treatment of gunshot wounds and ultimately pronounced deceased. The department also deployed the ARV, the armored rescue vehicle, during patrol operations on two occasions in 2025. In one incident, the ARV was used to safely approach a vehicle in Menlo Park, where a subject was reported to be armed. A loaded firearm was located on the subject's lap.

In the other incident, the ARV was used to assist officers in safely detaining individuals following following a high risk situation involving a reported firearm. On 03/18/2026, the department presented the draft annual military equipment use report to the police advisory committee. The meeting was also livestreamed to allow community members to observe the meeting. During the presentation, the Police Advisory Committee was generally supportive of the department's ongoing efforts and practices. The Police Advisory Committee again reiterated the importance of using any new equipment responsibly, remaining proactive in policing efforts, ensuring it meets community expectations, and maintains trust and transparency in law enforcement practices.

In addition to the Police Advisory Committee meeting, the RCPD's community show their equipment at various community events. Through the English and Spanish community academies, the youth academy, the community builders academy, the special response team will continue to provide community members with firsthand exposure to their equipment. The SRT team also showed the equipment to the community at one of the Rock the Dock events last year. Despite the potential for community concerns, there were no complaints related to the use of military equipment by the Redwood City Police Department during this reporting period. And the department also completed its internal review of all uses of military equipment that occurred during the reporting period and did not find any policy violations.

The safe and proficient use of the equipment outlined by Assembly Bill four eighty one requires countless hours of initial and ongoing training. Most training for department personnel is conducted internally by certified department personnel. There are times when department personnel are sent to external training courses to enhance and supplement internal training. This chart illustrates funds that were spent related to military equipment for this reporting period. Funds were spent on consumable items, vehicle maintenance, new equipment purchases, the initial drone purchases and training, and overtime for the special response team.

Training and equipment costs related to all military equipment represented point 6% of the total police budget. At this point, sergeant Boyce will now transition to the second component of tonight's item, which is the proposed amendment to the agreement with Axon. While military equipment use report focuses on compliance, oversight, and past use, the proposed agreement is forward looking and is intended to maintain and enhance the department's existing technology systems, including body worn cameras and the drone program. Please note that not all components of the Axon agreement are classified as military equipment under AB four eighty one. However, the systems are integrated and support overall public safety operations.

Next, I'll present the proposed Axon Body worn camera contract amendment, which goes beyond the standard renewal. This agreement includes expanded capabilities, additional services and the continued development of key programs, including our drone and DFR program. The department has utilized Axon's body worn cameras since 2020 as a core component of transparency, accountability and evidence collection. The existing agreement expired in December 2025, and the department is currently out of contract. The body worn camera program is supported by Axon's evidence.com platform, which has become central to managing the increasing volume of digital evidence.

And not just from body cams, this includes the department's in car camera footage, cell phone videos, privately owned security camera footage, drone videos and a huge list of other types of digital evidence. The proposed agreement continues and modernizes this program through full hardware replacement and life cycle coverage, unlimited evidence storage, automated transcription, video redaction tools and policy compliance analytics. It's important to note, body worn cameras are not classified as military equipment under AB 41, as Lieutenant Castro pointed out, but they are included here as part of the Axon technology contract. Also important to note is failure to renew this program would eliminate a key accountability and evidentiary system relied upon by officers, prosecutors, and the public. The department's proposed drone program expansion builds upon a program that is already working and allows us to extend those benefits to the entire community.

First, expanding the number of docks allows us to strategically place them throughout the city, ensuring more equitable coverage and significantly faster response times across all neighborhoods. It also enables continuous operations during extended incidents by rotating drones instead of pulling them offline for battery swaps. Second, adding interior drones gives us the ability to safely search buildings in hazardous environments without immediately putting officers at risk. Just as important, these systems provide real time video and two way communication in barricaded or high risk situations, allowing crisis negotiators and mental health clinicians to engage more effectively in helping deescalate incidents. Third, ongoing safety plans ensure these systems remain reliable, up to date and operationally ready, protecting the city's investment and supporting long term sustainability of the program.

From an operational standpoint, this expansion improves response time, situational awareness, officer and community safety, and overall efficiency. As outlined in the staff report, this is about making faster, better informed decisions while reducing risk in dynamic and potentially dangerous situations. This slide represents how these systems begin to work together as a unified platform. The Physis Pro Plus system creates the foundation for a future real time information center, integrating body worn and in car camera feeds, drone feeds, privately owned and shared video feeds such as those at Sequoia Station, and other data sources into a single operational view or a single pane of glass. This allows supervisors and officers to monitor incidents in real time and coordinate more effectively.

On the airspace side, d drone provides detection and tracking of unauthorized drones, which is increasingly important during large events such as downtown festivals and the fourth of July parades as well as at critical incidents. As we've seen around the world, drones operated by bad actors are quickly emerging as one of the most significant threats to public safety, and we currently have no infrastructure to detect or respond to this. D drone would not only enable detection, but accurately identifies the location of a pirate pilot operating an unauthorized drone so that action can be taken quickly if necessary. D drone also provides a detect and avoid radar system, hugely improving safety in our drone as first responder operations. Our local airspace is quite busy between the San Carlos Airport, SFO, Moffett Field, and Stanford Hospital.

We frequently have airplanes and helicopters flying at low altitudes over our city. And the radar system is a giant leap forward in airspace deconfliction capabilities. It also enables us to receive FAA authorization to operate DFR flights at higher altitudes, which makes DFR more effective by being less easily detected by suspects and less likely to disturb resonance with noise or flashing lights. This slide outlines what's included today versus what's being added under the proposed contract. There's a huge amount included in Axon's bundle, including dozens of valuable tools that improve our current workflows, and this is just a high level overview.

Currently, we maintain our core systems, body worn cameras, evidence.com, and a basic drone program. That's a single DFR drone and dock, which can cover only part of the city and has limited on scene time, and several patrol deployed interior and exterior drones, which require an operator in the field and take away from the limited staffing we have when handling a critical incident. Under the proposed agreement, we are expanding beyond those baseline services. This includes scaling our drone as first responder program with coverage for the entire city and enabling continuous operations because we've learned over and over again the battery always runs out at the worst time possible. This also includes interior r 10 drones that can be piloted remotely by the same remote operators flying the DFR drones, freeing up officers at the scene to more efficiently utilize our resources.

Additionally, this adds detect and avoid radar for safer operations, implementing drone and detection drone detection and airspace monitoring to address unauthorized drone activity. Adding FUSYS Pro Plus integrates real integration supports real time information center capabilities And a suite of enhanced evidence tools such as auto transcription, redaction assistant, and compliance monitoring improve efficiency, reduce manual workload, and strengthen consistency in policy compliance. Overall, this is a transition from maintaining individual systems into a more integrated real time public safety ecosystem. This slide breaks down the estimated costs of the amendment by component. The body worn camera package represents the majority of the investment.

It's structured as a comprehensive platform, which includes not only the cameras themselves, but also the core digital evidence system, the foundational DFR platform and FUSIS integration that supports real time information sharing. The remaining items are more discrete additions, including additional DFR docs and drones, interior drone platforms, data subscription and enhanced tools such as automated transcription. Overall, the cost is primarily concentrated in the body worn camera platform with other components representing targeted enhancements built on top of that foundation. The total cost of the contract is approximately $3,560,000 not to exceed $3,700,000 to account for potential tax, equipment or implementation adjustments over the five year term. Almost twothree, approximately $2,100,000 of the total cost has already been identified within the department's existing budget, including prior allocations for body worn cameras and salary savings.

For context, the services being consolidated under this agreement, including drones, policy and compliance monitoring tools and body worn cameras, have historically cost the department about $231,000 per year when combined. When compared to that baseline, accounting for the funding already located, the net increase is only about $89,000 per year over the five year term, while significantly expanding capabilities and consolidating multiple systems into a single platform. In terms of timing, the first two years are fully funded. Year three is partially funded and will require an additional appropriation along with years four and five. Overall, this approach leverages existing funding, limits the immediate budget impact and phases in the remaining costs over time while delivering a substantial increase in capability.

I'll end with a real DFR case study from Redwood City that occurred on January 17. It illustrates both the operational and financial impact of the program, which is something that's much harder to measure. In this incident, a drone was deployed to an in progress residential prowler call and arrived within minutes in pitch black conditions. Using thermal imaging, officers were able to maintain continuous overwatch of the residence, and when the suspect fled out the back door, the DFR drone easily tracked the suspect as he fled through the neighborhood jumping from yard to yard. He was apprehended only minutes later as he changed clothing and casually walked away.

This individual ended up being a serial home invasion suspect involved in recent armed confrontations in nearby neighborhoods. The real time awareness DFR provided on this call allowed officers to resolve the incident quickly and safely without the need for a prolonged search or escalation. From an outcomes perspective, not only did this immediately increase officer and public safety, it avoided extensive investigative follow-up and provided immediate reassurance to the community. From a cost standpoint, this single incident is estimated to have avoided approximately 50,000 to $90,000 in personnel and overtime costs by resolving the case immediately. It likely prevented weeks of investigation by detectives, reduced the likelihood of a more resource intensive response such as an SRT activation and warrant service, which would have required a large deployment of military equipment covered earlier in this presentation.

In practical terms, this demonstrates that DFR not only improves outcomes but can reduce costs, limit higher risk deployments, and decrease the likelihood of force being used during apprehension.

Alright. Before we conclude, again, the questions before counsel tonight are, do you have any questions regarding the department's use of equipment and compliance with AB 41 requirements? Are there questions or feedback on equipment usage and safeguards? And lastly, are there any questions regarding the proposed technology investments and associated fiscal impact? In conclusion, staff recommends council receive and review the annual military equipment use report, waive the first reading, and introduce an ordinance adopting the military equipment use policy, and contingent upon adoption of the military equipment use policy, approve and authorize the city manager to execute a five year first amendment to the purchase agreement for goods, commodities, and services with Axon.

Lastly, we appreciate council support in making this a safer community for all. I want to express my sincere appreciation for your continuous support. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Lieutenant Castro and the team. We greatly appreciate the presentation this evening. Before we open up the public hearing, we'll go to public comment on this item. So I'll pass things over to our city clerk.

Thank you, mayor. We do have one in person speaker and one speaker on Zoom so far. So last call to the audience. Okay. And we'll proceed. We'll call up Ernie Schmidt to the podium, and then we'll move to Zoom comments.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council members. Public safety is one of the most important responsibilities we have to our community. Every day, our police officers are asked to respond quickly, make difficult decisions and protect lives. To do that effectively, they need the best tools available. We all know that drones can help officers locate missing persons faster, monitor dangerous situations from a safe distance and provide critical information during emergencies.

They can improve response times, increase officer safety and help law enforcement stop a situation before it becomes even more dangerous. Criminals are always changing the way they operate. If we expect our police officers to stay one step ahead of them, then we need to make sure that they have access to modern technology and the resources they need to do their jobs. It is also the responsibility of all of you as council members to ensure that our community always feels safe. That means supporting our police department, investing in the right tools and making smart decisions to protect both residents and the officers.

I applaud Chief Bell for continuing to find ways to make safety of our community a priority within her department and as well as the priority of this council. Remember, when we equip our police officers with technology they need, we are investing in a safer future for everyone. So I urge you to please renew the military equipment ordinance and amendment agreement with the Axon Enterprise. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Ernie. We'll move now to our Zoom speakers, and I'll welcome Clara Jekyll to unmute yourself and begin your comments. Welcome, Clara.

Thank you so much. Just to start with a disclaimer, I am a member of the police advisory committee, but I'm making this comment solely as an individual resident. I appreciate the transparency in publishing the military equipment use report and proposed policy, but I do have concerns about the proposal to invest our limited city funds in this way. Some of my concerns are specifically about the expansion of the Exxon contract. The threat that these technologies pose to people's privacy lies in the accumulation of data building up to reveal more about patterns in people's lives and actions than any individually observed incident would.

And the more types of data gathering devices you have, especially the more devices that are deliberately designed to interlock and centralize their data, the greater the risk that that data will be misused. At a minimum, we need regular and robust reporting and review of both the deployment of drones and back end access to their data to watch for misuse like stalking, political profiling, or worse. And even then, we have seen more and more cases recently showing us that the best written policies about public camera installations are not a full safeguard against such abuse. Beyond all of that, the most fundamental thing to remember when looking at an equipment report like this is that we have more to gain by improving the material conditions of each other's lives than by building up an arsenal against each other. I urge you to put our budget into services that go to the root of residents' needs, including housing, mental health support, youth programs, and job development.

Those are the investments that will get us long term community stability and public safety.

Thank you.

Thank you, Clara. And that concludes public comment, mayor. Thank

you to our city clerk and to two members of the public for making public comment this evening. We will now turn it over to the city council for our public hearing on the item. So who would like to get us started with any comments or questions? Councilmember Howard, thank you.

Silence is crazy. I wanted to thank the member of the audience, Ernie Schmidt. Thank you for your comments. Ernie, I totally agree with what you've said, and thank you. You're in the downtown, operating a business downtown. Your presence is very important, and you see day to day the operations of the police department, and you see the benefit of a lot of the equipment that has been ordered and is in use for the police department. So thank you again for your comments. I don't think we often enough say thank you to our police department, so I appreciate it very much. On behalf of the police department, I want to thank you. And, Chief Bell, thank you.

You do always look for ways to keep our communities safe as well as keep our offices. They have the tools that they have the tools they need to do the job right. I can't believe the positive impact of drones at this time. Could you would someone be willing to share another story? Because I think it's important for people to know. I do know the one thing that I'm very excited about is that the use of drones has really cut down on the need for car chases throughout our community and up and down our peninsula. So could you address that? Because that's really important. A lot of bad things happen when we have car chases.

It's actually really hard to pick one because there's been so many. I'm trying to think of a good one off the top of my head. One of the early ones we had was a robbery that occurred over in the area of Spruce And Chew. And the call came out as a fight among four or five individuals. And the way this call would normally play out would be the officers would get there and everyone would either be gone or they would see some people walking away, but they wouldn't see any fight and there would be no necessary reason to detain them, or if they did they may not be able to prove anything.

In this case, the DFR drone was able to arrive on scene within about twenty to thirty seconds of the time of call before officers actually knew that the call existed and were even dispatched to it because the pilot saw a pop up on the screen before it was dispatched. In this case, when the drone arrived on scene, it saw the victim being surrounded by five masked men, actually some were juveniles, all around 18. And this was right after they had physically assaulted him, and they were currently rummaging through his vehicle next to him and stealing his items. They walked away within about another thirty seconds after that, And this information was relayed to officers in the field in real time. And as officers arrived, the group of four or five suspects that were walking down the sidewalk see the patrol cars turn around the corner, and they all take the stolen property.

They stole the the victim's cell phone, things from his car, his keys, threw it over a fence very discreetly where the officers would never have noticed because they were in their cars down the street. They contact them. The kids and young adults deny any involvement or anything at all. The victim had actually walked home already, he was no longer at the scene, so they wouldn't have even known where he was. But we knew because of the drone that they were involved.

We knew that they threw these things over the fence, which were the evidence and the victim's property that would never have been recovered. And we knew that the vehicle was associated to the victim, and we found that it was registered to him, which let us go to his house and find out that he wasn't gonna call us to report this. And this case went all the way through the court system and was recently resolved, and it was just an amazing story of, you know, something that would have never been resolved had it not been for this. It would have been a victim who never would have called us for whatever reason that may have been. And these individuals who were the suspects in this had been involved in multiple of these before. So that'd be one that comes to mind, one of many.

Also,

haven't you been able to utilize drones for locating people who may wander from their homes? They may have some mental illness or they're just not feeling stable. They wander away. Haven't you utilized drones for scoping areas and finding rather than using many police cars or people to to do that kind of work?

Yes. We have. And also recently, I think you guys saw the next alert with the 11 year old that had walked away from Target and was missing. We And utilized our drone to cover more area to see if they were walking in that area. So that helped relieve the areas or our officers to go check a further footprint of where that individual may be.

I also understand that the drones are being very helpful for our community around the fourth of July and around fireworks. Could you address that? I'm not sure that everyone understands that.

Yes. So actually, I told sergeant Boyce around January 2025 that I wanted a DFR up and running before or before the fourth of July because of the massive complaints that we received for the the fireworks, the illegal fireworks that were going off. So we were able to reduce the calls for fireworks in 2025 from 2024. I believe we had over 300 calls for service for fireworks in '24, and then there were only 70 I think I'm gonna misspeak. I need to find it.

But either way, was it was a large reduction, and we were able to actually recover a lot of fireworks on Rawlison Road and recover a firearm because of our DFR deployments. And it was all based on calls for service that we got from our community that, hey, someone's lighting off fireworks in this area, and then we deployed the DFR and we were able to find the individuals that were responsible.

Again, I I just think the value is is incredible, and we just don't have enough police officers to put on every corner of Redwood City. And this has been and I'm so glad we're getting more because I understand they need to be charged and they can't stay up indefinitely. So you always have replenishment when you have additional drones, and that's good to know. And it's only point six of your 6% of your budget?

So that number is reported based on what we spent in 2025. So it is a little bit higher because it is a little but it's still around like one percent of our budget for the

1%. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned. I bet many would agree with me. But and the body worn cameras, there haven't been any complaints from what I've seen. You haven't brought anything where we have found out that the public was unhappy with the way the body worn camera was used or it sounds like it's been received pretty well and it's used pretty well?

Yes. It's we have a policy that dictates when we use it generally if we're about to take enforcement action or if the officer believes that this needs to be documented. Not every conversation is documented because we do engage with the public a lot. So we're not recording conversations all the time. So that has been very helpful not us not only for us with our report writing, but also just in general, especially when we get complaints. We're actually able to pull that footage and compare what is being said by both parties, and then we we have the evidence there to support.

Could you remind me the evidence? How long do you keep that?

So the evidence retention schedule is different for any type of crime. So that's all out in our body worn camera policy. Generally, so if there's no association for evidence, it stays in the system to ninety days and then it is purged. Some is there forever if it's like a a murder investigation. So there's a threshold.

And when you go to court, and I spend you spend a lot of time in court, I know that. Has this helped expedite the process because you've had this information available to present? Has it been very helpful in moving things along as far as when you have to take it to court? Yes. That's all you okay.

Well, answered all my questions. I really appreciate it. And thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. I really find it hard to why we call a lot of this military equipment. I mean, this to me seems so essential and necessary to keep a community safe, but it is what it is, and I'm glad that you're in compliance with everything that's being required. Thank

you.

Thank you for getting us started council member. Go to council member circle next.

Thank you, mayor. Thank you so much very much for your presentation and all your hard work. I wanna appreciate the members of the public as well and those online who participated. Few things I wanna appreciate is with the radio system and bringing that up to par and enhancing our communication and safety. Appreciate the negotiation of the Metro mobile agreement and some of the efficiencies you worked into that there, as well as some of the discounts that we received with the Kenwood products.

So there's just a number of items there I wanna highlight. Thank you. Moving forward to the drones here. I had no idea just how many flights had been conducted. That is amazing. I and they're responding to 608 incidents. Very impressive. I appreciate the value of them. Yeah. And let's see here.

Moving on to the body worn cameras, the Axon agreements. I wanted to just ask a quick question and as a follow-up to council member Howard. It's helpful to hear that the, you know, footage, if it's no longer necessary, is per receptor. Was it ninety days, you said?

Yes.

Thank you. And then who reviews it? Is it does it go to the DA? Does it

So for the evidence, it is everything is transferred to them digitally through evidence.com Mhmm. And standard practice in our county. And so that is reviewed by the prosecutor, also made available to defense, and obviously we review as well. So that's kind of how it goes. It's just piece of evidence that they introduced. The DA will like look at the whole file and that includes all digital evidence.

Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate, you know, there being a third party who does that, you know, review. As I find myself in this position, I feel like I'm experiencing a little bit of here since the tasers agreement that we approved last year. You know, with them, you know, tenant protection ordinances, for example, we'll hear from tenants and landlords.

With development projects, we'll hear from developers and the community, like the neighbors, you know, around that project. But oftentimes, when it comes to significant purchases of equipment such as what were is before us tonight, We we do hear from the police advisory committee, which is excellent. And wanna appreciate and recognize Claire Jekyll who spoke as a member of the not as a member of the police advisory committee, but who is part of it, and the rest of the committee as well for their service. I wanna thank them for their service. But we didn't hear from, you know, fixing San Mateo County or ACLU or any of the other organizations in the community that may represent an opposing view that enriches the conversation.

So that is something that comes up for me when we when these kind of agreements come before us that I just want to raise and for us and for us consider and keep in mind. And so going back to the the drones actually, you know, committee member Jekyll had raised the question. I think it was during the police advisory committee meeting. I I watched the the recording about the data. And so, you know, to paraphrase her question, it was something about how do we protect from abuse of the data?

Not not not assuming anyone will, but just, you know, as common practice, what what protections are on the books, so to speak?

So it's the same concept that we have for any system or anything that we use. Like, we have systems in place that will audit things, but also, you know, because it is digital evidence, like we have an opportunity by using Axon performance just in general speaking of evidence that we can get early alerts on certain things for the body worn cameras and just, you know, we have a policy in place for our drones and to ensure that it is being utilized appropriately, and it's in there. It's in the cloud. So the only person that can ultimately delete it out of the system or scrub it is the Butteroom camera. I'm I'm sorry. Is sergeant Boise as our UAS administrator.

A UAS oh, yes. Drums. Drums. Right. You're right. Thank you. Thank you. And to a question that was raised in public comment about back end access. I think you just answered the question, but so there aside from the UAS administrator, there's no other person who has back end access. Thank you.

Sergeant Boyce can help with that.

So are you referring to the drone video itself?

Yeah. Footage.

So, yeah, it's it's encrypted end to end from the time it's recorded. It's encrypted on the SD card in transit at rest. It's encrypted in the cloud, whether it's on Skydio system or once it's transferred to evidence.com. Skydio does not have access to see or view our data. The only thing they have access to is anonymized telemetrics from the flight itself to analyze performance of the actual hardware, but not the video that it recorded. They have access to sort of de identified, anonymized data that couldn't be used to actually, like, identify somebody or see what we recorded, but just for the performance of the software and and hardware and to improve their products.

Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. Thank you. Okay. And then to close, just looking at the and I appreciate you mapping out what it will cost over the next, you know, five years and how we plan to, you know, cover the cost.

Right? But what struck me is that only about 60% of this agreement is funded. That that was at the 2,100,000. And then 1,600,000 remains for 40% starting in year '3, '4, and '5. And that's if I remember correctly, it seems to coincide with when we have a looming deficit in this city.

So I'm a little concerned about making such a commitment right now, not knowing how we're going to pay for it all in the next in the coming years. And we have a tendency to make these really large purchases anticipating that our revenue will keep pace, and that's just not the case. And also I considered the cost of hiring our clinician. Right? Our, you know, formerly crisis wellness response team.

I always get the name wrong. Apologies. Anyway, doctor Baker. Right. And if I remember quickly looking on page, you know, 17 was it 17?

The budget for this current year, page three forty one, that's what it was. It's 235,000 for that position. And reading today how much this agreement will cost us, I I'm only I can't help but wonder, you know, what other positions or or needs could we meet with the with the total cost of this agreement, you know, much to committee member Jekyll's line of questioning. And just to kind of close out here, And I remember I was calling after, I think it was a committee meeting here at City Hall during regular business hours. I called the nonemergency line, and they're always super quick.

Really appreciate our dispatchers. And I asked if they could respond to someone who seemed to be in distress right next to the museum across the street. And they and I requested doctor Baker, and they said that doctor Baker was not available And that our officers could be dispatched instead and that they are trained. And in reviewing the budget, I am really proud of the fact that 90% of our sworn officers have been trained in crisis intervention. So that is excellent and something to be proud of for sure.

But that's not your number one job. Right? Your number one job is to be enforcing the red zone, to be catching, you know, folks who are running our red lights and driving under the influence and all those, know, top three reasons why we are experiencing fatalities and injuries in our city, among many other things. And I again, it makes me wonder, could we couldn't we afford another clinician or more than one clinician to help us respond to mental health crisis, people in men people in crisis. So this is just these are some of the questions that come up for me and that I, you know, think we should be mindful of going forward.

You know, I'm supportive of the agreement and renewing the ordinance as well as receiving the report. I think I caught all three right there, Ray. I think I got it. Okay. Tonight. But going forward, I think it is important that we are mindful of our budget, of our of living within our means, so to speak, and responding to the needs of the community with regards to mental health. So I just wanna put it out there, but I very much appreciate all the hard work you do and your presentation tonight.

Thank you.

Thank you, council member Serkan. Who would like to go next? Council member chief.

Thank you mayor chief lieutenant sergeant. Thank you for spending your evening with us at 09:30 and presenting the report today. I wanna kind of ask some questions, clarifying questions before I had my comments. And there's been a lot of questions about security and storage. And I think for the normal, whether it be ninety days or forever encrypted data and things like that.

But I believe there's Axon representatives online. As we have experienced and know there are a lot of individuals that are out there that have a lot of free time or like to do intentional things like hacking into systems. And so perhaps the Axon representatives can talk about how secure data is from those that really want to penetrate data storage.

So that question will go to Kyle or Alex, who's online.

Sure. I can take that. Thank you. This is something that's of of the utmost importance to us because we have a majority of the agencies, law enforcement agencies within the country that trust us to protect their data. And so we are constantly spending time making sure that everything is secure. We are doing tests on a regular basis with all of our systems, and we have yet to have any sort of, you know, hacking attack be effective on us. And this is something that we are constantly investing the resources to make sure that all of the data is secure.

Kyle, thank thank you for that. Do you or or your firm have, like, a plan b in case there is a a breach that you can flip to your plan b?

I'm I'm not sure exactly. I'm I'm not a a technical expert when it comes to, exactly how it's protected. I I'm not sure of a a plan b, but we do have the the data housed in several locations secure in the cloud.

Okay. Very good. Thank you, Kyle. Chief and the team, as we look to all of our public safety acquiring more technology, how do you coordinate with SO and neighboring agencies that may have a fleet of their own so that we're not, you know, flying drones into each other or airplanes like the SO has and things like that?

There's feedback when I turn on my mic. Oh, we're good? Alright. So we work with our partnering agencies a lot, especially as with normal patrol operations, but also if we're on scene for a critical incident. So generally we switch to the same channel. It's called a tac one, tac two, tac three or the green. And we're able to communicate what we have and what's going on. So there occurs during that time. Our dispatchers are highly trained to listen to other neighboring agencies. So if there is something happening that goes into our jurisdiction then we have that information readily available to us. So then we can deploy our resources necessarily.

And the sheriff's office is part of that coordination and

Yes.

Thanks. Because I know they have a bigger budget and the way I shared with former sheriff Milano's. They have a lot of toys that they can deploy.

Speaking from experience, yes they do.

You

know, one of the important things is we increase technology. I think you mentioned it in one of your comments is training and auditing of how the tools are deployed, but also making sure that the information isn't abused or used for non intended purposes. So can you spend more a little bit about training, but more about the auditing because with technology, get these mean, we get these things on our iPhone or SmartThings, you know, update tonight. And some of these updates reset everything. And you have to go back and reset your settings on your iPhone.

So that auditing is gonna be very important with regard to technology. So maybe a little bit more on training, but even more so on the auditing of these software systems that kind of update and then perhaps sometimes reset some of the settings.

So generally when Axon goes through an upgrade or something they will push out information to us and if there's something that we need to retrain our officers on because something's different then we will do that. But that is the forefront because we want to make sure that people know how to use it especially under stressful situations that it's autopilot for them to do so. And then with respect to auditing, so our reports are reviewed by sergeants on a daily basis. And with that, like they may not always look at the whole video, but they're looking at parts of the video that is necessary to understand that the report was written accurately. So that happens on a daily basis. And then just again the policy trainings of like if you do this then this will happen you know up to losing your job.

With regard to that last point chief, is there any auditing to make sure someone not involved from your team is not looking at data that is not involved in the incident or not part of the chain of command?

Are you talking about videos?

Yes.

Yes. So for body worn cameras, generally it's restricted just to the officer that is going on there, but through the chain of command, then sergeants and lieutenants, so especially if we have a use of force, then it goes up to where it's all reviewed, so then we have that access. So the sergeants have access to the body worn camera footage of officers but officers do not have access to other videos.

And that's checked on a regular basis so in case whatever happens you can identify it?

They physically can't.

They physically cannot. Okay.

Correct.

Very good. I think one of the important things as we look to leverage technology and that was one of my interview questions when Chief Mulholland was being considered about use of technology and how to leverage technology. And as we adopt more technology, one of the things that goes with it is just increased costs, software updates, useful life of the device, whether it be a drone or body worn camera. And so as I've talked at this day is about looking at lifespan of equipment or software and the plan for it, we're gonna have to do that here because these devices have a useful life that we need to plan ahead of time so that we're not surprised by budget situations that we can plan financially for it. And that's just the way it is.

Number one is the devices, but we all get these software updates all the time and they're not free or we wind up missing an update, which is sometimes even more problematic. So we just need to plan better as well, understand the dynamics that Axon agreement expired. So we're not under contract now and it is are we April, four months later. And earlier in the agenda, I think we probably should have replaced our radios not this year, but several years ago. So planning for that equipment replacement like a fire truck, like our equipment, we need to probably do a better job of that and planning financially for it.

I'm full in support of this because we need to leverage technology to make our community safer. And not only PD and our community, but fire too. You need to know to the best you can what situation you're walking into so you can prepare. And I think one of the bullets items in the PowerPoint presentation lieutenant that is wasn't emphasized enough for me was protecting our staff and our community through the deployment and use of these tools Because that's what it does. As you shared with the stories with council member Howard, time, resources, we can do more with less with appropriate tools and appropriate oversight to make sure we use these things properly.

And I'm very supportive of this. I have always been supportive of using technology to help enhance the safety in our community. And I think that these are steps continued steps in the right direction. I'm just amazed at how many drone flights there were, but more importantly, how quickly everyone can respond to a situation and resolve it in the best way possible. So thank you for the update. Thank you everyone in the PAC for reviewing the data. But at the core, at the end of the day, if we have to prioritize what we do as a council, it has to be public safety. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Council member g. We'll go to council member Padilla.

Thank you for your presentation. I agree with many of the sentiments that my colleagues have shared. When we get a little alerts about how a drone has been activated, I'm I'm always really impressed because for me, it it is about community safety and our officer safety, and our officers are an extension of our community. They are our friends. They're colleagues.

They're people that we know. So I think anytime that we can invest in technology that is making making someone's job more efficient and safer and bringing just a peace of mind to our entire community, I I feel better knowing I think that when I think about that Sherry that so I'm sorry. The story that one of the officers shared about helping a victim that wasn't even going to come forward, I actually see where this could be potentially be helpful in so many issues with mental illness, with domestic violence, where you have people who will not admit that they are victims, but now with this technology. So I I actually see it as a way to empower some of our marginalized members of our community, and I'm just glad that we have the leadership and the direction to use these tools in the right way and to make our community safer. I I think that it's it's it helps with our transparency, our effectiveness, and I wanna make sure that we invest in our officers, our community, and our modern policing.

So I'm all for it. Thank you.

Thank you.

You, council member Padilla. Go to council member Chu.

Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciated it. And I did have a few clarifying questions, and then I'll make my comments. The first is, so I was doing a back of the envelope, and each of the body worn cameras is about $19,000 Is that is that about right? Really That's for the duration of the contract. And just help me understand, does that I mean, I'm assuming it's not just the device. Is that bundled with, the the tech, the monitoring, the data systems, the whole shebang? Or is that just the device?

Oh, it's everything. Okay. And it includes the updates. So if passed, then we get new ones right away. And then two and a half years, and I believe at the five year mark, we get a third replacement for them in this cycle.

Okay. So that was my second question. Like, what is the shelf life of these devices? So it's about two and a half years?

I might wanna ask Kyle for that if he has that information of the shelf life.

That's correct. We we put a shelf life of approximately three years on the equipment. Okay. It does constantly get updates, but we also build in the hardware upgrades every two and a half years so that we are constantly on the latest version of the body camera. So the the body camera that the that Redwood City PD will start with, the body four camera.

By the time the two and a half year mark hits, we will likely have the next generation, which would be the body five camera. And so they will automatically update to that. But we also build in warranty protection there, and some spares. So if a device does go down, we there's coverage to have it automatically replaced.

Okay. And and similar Does

that answer the question?