City Council - Special Meeting

Awesome.

All right, we are going to call this meeting to order. For today, we have a hard stop at seven o'clock, so I wanted to give a little bit of context before we start this really loud. So on June 9th, Council received a presentation, which you'll hear. You'll hear most of that today. During that meeting, council requested a workshop on a potential ordinance, which is scheduled to take place. In the meantime, I wanted to share that same information that we heard on June 9th in a different context. So again, that's what you are going to hear today. what the sheriff is able to enforce as of now and what that enforcement has looked like. So thank you for your patience with the location change. We wanted to accommodate technology. I know we have some folks on Zoom and the interest of council is this is deeply concerning to all of us. There are some state laws that we had to follow to officially notice this meeting. I do want to thank the school districts for attending today. This is part of that conversation that we need to have to find a solution together. Again, direction is given for a workshop, and this is part of that to give residents more information. before the formal conversation takes place. So no formal action will be taken today. This is purely informational. As I mentioned, this meeting is scheduled until seven. We will be accepting public comments today after the presentation, but only as it relates to this presentation and as time permits. So I'll be giving you a reminder about that afterwards. And we have our presentation.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Tonight I plan to give you a presentation on bicycle safety, recent events within our community, what the laws are surrounding bicycle enforcement, and what the future brings us. All right, so while we're here, tonight is provide the update that I just spoke about and also talk about what the difference is between the different types of bicycles, because it seems like there's a lot of confusion between what a bicycle is, e-bicycle and an e-motorcycle. We continue to see a large amount of increased calls for service regarding juveniles and young adults riding recklessly and intentionally swerving towards cars and parked cars, causing safety issues for our community. Some of these events have even led to what they call street takeovers or events organized and they come in and they intentionally take over streets. Unfortunately, these activities have endangered the lives and property of community members. The power of social media is very powerful. It's how we communicate to the public. It's how the public communicates to us. And we've seen the comments from our community. It's how concerning this topic is for them and what their perceptions, their experience they've had where someone swerved at them and the danger they feel. The same time social media, the groups that are doing some of these activities is using social media to be their voice, their power to distribute their type of activity they're doing and organize the events. We've integrated several crimes and traffic, investigated, sorry, several crimes or traffic collisions involving these groups. Just recently, I'll speak about it a little bit more about a recent event we had. Property damage did occur from that one, and we've also had traffic collisions in the community as a result of this. This safety not only affects the safety of our community, but also the property of those that are already struggling financially in our community. I think it's important to talk about what a bicycle is and the different types. The basic way to understand a bicycle, I think we all pretty much know what a bicycle is, but the key term to that, that it's human powered, right? It has pedals, it's powered by a human. And then you go into your e-bicycles. So as you can see in this slide, it has three different classes, and then it has also has e-motorcycles. The important key factor in here is that they do have pedals, right? They can be power assisted in one of the classes, but they're also limited to their max speeds. As you see as a class one and two have that 20 mile an hour assist, where a class three can go to 28. With that 28 mile an hour increase, it does require that you be a 16 year older to operate that particular bicycle. Lastly is what we call e-motorcycles. This is a picture of a common one that we see around town. These are electric motorcycles, no different than a Tesla's electric car. This is an electric motorcycle. They are not allowed on our roadways unless they have all the safety equipment required on a regular motorcycle. The operator has to have a motorcycle endorsement or the driver's license to operate one of these. We have sighted, towed, and impounded several of these within the community because they're illegally being operated by juveniles in our community, riding on sidewalks across our parks, doing wheelies down the street, not obeying traffic laws. But either way, they can't be on the road, so these are pretty easy to take enforcement action on. But we need parents to understand that these are, again, electric motorcycles. It'd be no different than handing the keys of your Tesla to your child and saying, go have fun in the community. For some reason, the fact that it's electric and quiet, people seem to think they're toys. If they were on a dirt bike, you hardly see kids ride dirt bikes because it makes a lot of noise. It seems like we know that's not legal to go on the road. This is the same exact thing with the electric motor. So a recent incident that happened that gained a lot of attention, and rightfully so, was on Sunday, July 12th. We received a report of juveniles riding recklessly in the River Cove area and Riverbank. That was the initial call that our deputies received. We had our two deputies that were working during the time this came out. They did locate these riders, about 30 of them at this point. It was reported there was 50 or 60 of them originally. And they found them near the area of Patterson and Oakdale Roads. Our deputies attempted an enforcement stop on them, activated their lights and emergency siren. The group rode in the middle of the roadway, blocking traffic, doing wheelies, and kept going. And for lack of better terms, a pursuit ensued, right? You're not stopping. Whenever that happens in our work is that immediately triggers a response of a supervisor to listen. Hey, there's a pursuit, whether it's whatever it is, vehicle, bicycle, car, whatever it may be. And immediately they are going to take action of like a risk versus gain scenario, right, of this. Do we continue to pursue? Do we know who the responsible is? What is the danger that can inflict upon the public if we continue to pursue? Well, with this being bicycles, kids riding wheelies, at the time, the information we had immediately to us, it was decided to discontinue the pursuit. At this time, the kids were also breaking up in different directions and going different areas along the area of Jackson Avenue. And again, we only had the two units in the immediate area that could have taken enforcement action. Unfortunately, later on, we learned that this type of activity, as you see in here on the top picture, the kids were actually intentionally swerving towards parked cars and hitting the car on purpose, creating a vandalism call. We learned about that afterwards. We did identify some groups out of this by watching the videos that came out of social media and from the public and even the group themselves to identify at least one responsible so far in this incident. And we're working with our district attorney's office on that, and they are willing to prosecute in that case. So we will be presenting a case to them as well.

And just for clarity, the investigation is still ongoing, I'm assuming?

It is still ongoing. Okay. The picture you see at the bottom is the other swerving where people will swerve towards a moving vehicle. Some of these images actually came off of a local news report that came out and the kids were actually interviewed and they were actually talking about how they were intentionally trying to do this. I believe the term they used for this was like the suicide riders. And I think they call the other one the bumper buddies or something along those lines. They hit the cars, right? And there's certain kids in their group that do that. And unfortunately, they're building upon each other or off of each other to this type of activity, right? But it's very important to realize what they're doing is super dangerous and causing a financial burden to our community. One important thing to note here, though, even without a current ordinance in this case, right, we don't have an ordinance specifically related to bicycle. We still have other laws that talk about bicycle enforcement, and I'll go over those. We would have the same response, right? Whether we had an ordinance in place or not, the result of this particular instance would have been a very similar response. That's what I'm going to go into a little further about what we're doing since then, and that will kind of bring light to exactly how we would enforce this and what we would do in the future. So since this has happened, we identified the group and learned that they had other planned events coming over in Modesto and Ceres in the near future. We reached out to those agencies that didn't know about that and said, hey, we found this information. This was gonna happen. They just came to our community. So we developed a plan, right? Just like we would do if we learned something like this was gonna happen again. We sent units, we sent detectives, traffic deputies to then assist both Modesto and Ceres. During both of those organized events, That we were able to make multiple stops issue citations and impound bicycles and those communities now the impounding the bicycles i'll talk about a little bit later, but those ordinance didn't allow the impounding of them versus just a citation. We continue to actually monitor those groups. And if we were to learn they were come to Riverbank, we would do the same thing. We maximum enforcement, we would bring out a multiple tool of tools, right? We have air from a helicopter, we have drones, we have unmarked vehicles, we have detectives, things that we would go to do this because if the kids take off again, again, we're not gonna just chase them, right? Or we can cause injury to the kids or the public, right? So we would think of other ways to get them where they don't think we're there and then hopefully be able to take some enforcement, video them, figure who they are. Or hopefully even before this happens, we can contact them and give them a little education, identify who they are. And then now if they do something going forward, at least know who they are. One last thing I wanted to add to that previous part is recently Modesto was bringing up the conversation and we are as well as talking about creating like a community task force where we partner with them just like we did, right? But creating a formal task force, right? So we formally work together because we have the same groups in both of our communities. This is the same kids and this is not unique to Riverbank. This is something we're seeing across the country, across the state. So I think we work collaboratively. We'll have the best enforcement efforts.

Are there regional discussions that you guys have within each other, within the jurisdictions, not just for like this, but for other things that may come up? Do you guys kind of already do that? Or is this kind of forming as we're going through this?

We meet together on a variety of issues throughout the community. We have things like Project Resolve. We have monthly Lex meetings where all law enforcement executives get together and we talk about issues going on in our community and how we can collaborate together and look forward. This is just focusing a team specifically to deal with this particular issue. Okay. So this is a slide to talk about what current tools we currently have right now, how we would take enforcement against this type of activity. A bicycle license. The city of Riverbank does have a bicycle license ordinance, which requires the person to register their bicycle with the city of Riverbank to give a bicycle license. You've probably seen them before. Little stickers you put on the bicycles. We give them out free every year during our bicycle rodeo. We do have several people that come in and they get that bicycle license. That is a requirement. But the important thing about that, that provides us the authority to stop a bicycle and check it to see if it has this license, which then leads to that potential education component if we can't, right? The potential of making sure they have the equipment they're supposed to have. Remind them, hey, these are not going to be tolerated in our community. We want you to go ride your bike and have fun, but you can't be doing willies and endangering the lives of others or property. The California vehicle code because a bicycle is a vehicle.

We are going to call this meeting to order. For today, we have a hard stop at seven o'clock. So I wanted to give a little bit of context before we started this. We're good.

Okay. That's okay.

That's okay.

So yeah, the vehicle license that includes, right, you know, the basic rules, helmet laws, rules of the road, equipment requirements, clinging to moving vehicles, you may see carrying passengers. And then again, bicycles are restricted to the same laws as motor vehicles, including have the proper safety equipment and following the rules of the road, right? Stopping at stop signs, red lights, signaling when they turn, those types of things. Reckless and dangerous driving. This is a little different, right? But if you can remember, a bicycle is a vehicle. So no different if you were in your vehicle and you swerve at another car intentionally, that's reckless driving. It's a misdemeanor per the California vehicle code, right? If you swerve towards a person, you're looking at a possible assault and reckless driving, right? So those are things we can take action on now. And then we have hit and run. Hit and run would be if you get involved in the collision and you leave the scene without attempting to notify the owner or notify of the collision. Depending on the amount of damage or that someone's actually hurt out of that incident, that could be a misdemeanor or a felony. And then lastly, vandalism, right? Hitting a car intentionally is vandalism. If the damage is $400 or more, it's a felony. And if it's less than that, it's a misdemeanor. So again, the top one, the bicycle license, that's a current city ordinance, which is administrative fee. Vehicle codes, that would be citations issued to the court for vehicle violations. And then the last three are all criminal violations that would be handled through the court system.

And I'm assuming the impound authority falls within the bottom three only, correct?

So impound authority right now, we don't really have impound authority. The only way we can take a bicycle now would be to say it's evidence of some type of crime. And you have to show what kind of evidentiary factor would you be looking at. Maybe it was involved in the collision. You have to make sure the brakes are operating correctly, things like that. That's why we would take a vehicle in a hit and run type of collision. So that's one thing we do. We do not have the ability without the current ordinance is the ability to impound bicycles right now.

Thank you.

And also, we don't have the ability for just stopping somebody simply for stunt riding, right? So if someone wants to ride a wheelie down the street on the side, as long as they're not going towards somebody else or a vehicle, that is not against the law currently. All right, so where we are now, we are collaborating with our neighbor agencies like I spoke about earlier. But part of that is I've been reviewing the ordinances from each of our communities. So Ceres, Modesto, and Oto PD have all recently, I think Modesto was the first adopting ordinance specifically to bicycles. But the important thing is what worked, what could be better? I know Modesto is looking at doing some tweaks to their ordinance because they need to make some amendments to them because they don't like exactly how it's worked out. But important is that we want to make sure it's the right fit for our community. We want to make sure we do this right the first time and that it has meaningful impact behind it. We plan to bring an ordinance to council to assist with our enforcement efforts sometime here in the near future that would be, again, a right fit for our community. And I went through a lot of stuff really quickly, so I'll bring it back for additional questions anybody may have.

Thank you so much. As you mentioned, this is all part of the ongoing conversation and finding that right fit. So thank you for having that conversation with us. Again, today, we're not gonna discuss, this is scheduled, but we're not gonna discuss a future ordinance. So I will go to public comment, but is there anything first from council as it relates to this presentation? All right. We will thank you. We'll pause for public comment for just a moment.

Do you want to start in the chamber?

Yeah, we can do that. Is there anyone in chambers that would like to ask a question about this presentation or make a comment? I'll come back. Yeah.

Hello, I'm Vivian. I'm just curious as to what you found out through social media about the incident that was going to happen in Ceres. How did you find out and how would you be able to find out that that's occurring?

I can answer that. So once we identified who the group was, we were able to use, we have a crime analyst group within the sheriff's office as part of the threat assessment center where they analyze a variety of threats to our community. These are folks that are very good digitally with social media and other platforms, and they're able to scour the internet based upon search words and things like that. And then they locate these groups. And now that we know who they are, we look for like terms and we continue to set like reminders, like, hey, if you hear this, let them know, they review it. And then they send that information our way.

Anyone else in chamber?

Good evening. I'm Mike. I rode my level two e-bike to this meeting this evening. And if we're going to go towards adopting ordinances, new ordinances, one of the things I'd like You know, put a little beat in somebody's head about is that. You know bikes need to follow the rules of the road that's that's obvious. And there's a there's a state law says that bikes can't ride on sidewalks unless there's a city ordinance permitting it okay now i'm unclear on what the rules are here in riverbank. But I do know that there are some very specific places where it is appropriate for bicycles to be on a sidewalk. I'm thinking specifically of Clarabelle between Squire Wells and Oakdale, and then Oakdale between Clarabelle and Patterson. Nice wide sidewalk, really dangerous place to ride if you're in the street. So I just did a quick internet search asking what the bicycle riding rules on sidewalks in Riverbank was. Google Gemini told me that it's permitted anywhere that there's a sign that says it's not permitted. Now, I've ridden thousands of miles around Riverbank, literally. I mean, I'm up to 1,600 miles this year alone. And I don't think I've ever seen a sign that said no bicycle anywhere. It would be good to get some clarity on those that issue because I do don't feel safe riding on some of the streets here and avoid them completely and others I feel very comfortable riding on. So anyway, there's that my two cents here. Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm Marilyn McRitchie from Riverbank. My kids were harassed by the kids as they were coming to my house. And my question is, what can they do? If they're riding at them, do they just have to stop their car? I mean, what's their responsibility when this happens? Or if you can address it, it would be nice to know in case it happens again. Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah, we want the community to know that anytime they see anything dangerous or illegal, to please call. Obviously, if it's emergency 911, right? If it's after the fact, later on, you can call a non-emergency number. That number is 209-552-2468. But as far as the particular incident she just talked about, it would be no different if your kids are being bullied on the way home, right? You want to call that into us, right? So it's the same thing. If this happens to their kids, obviously call us. Hopefully we can get there, be a good witness, right? Don't try to argue with anybody. Give a good description, and hopefully we can locate those responsible and deal with them accordingly.

Good evening. My name is Ann Ditko. I was out and about that Sunday that I believe we're talking about, and I encountered the boys on Westgate, then at Target. And at Target, they were doing wheelies around people walking to and from the cars, at which point I decided I was driving home. Just told my husband, we're not going to the store today. And that's not why I come to Riverbank. I live in Riverbank. I usually go to Modesto to go shopping because the parking area at Riverbank has become so horrendous. But in the last, what, two weeks now or a week, it's been really nice. And I've really enjoyed being in Riverbank, even though we've been talking about leaving. But I think those boys learned something when they went to Ceres. And my son is a police officer in Sunnyvale. He's out of state right now. And I just said, what do you guys do? And he says, we confiscate their bikes and never get them back. But... I don't think that's the ultimate way to deal with it. I just know that if they think it's going to happen, it might possibly deter some of the behaviors. Thank you.

Anyone else in person?

Hello, Council.

Hello, Mayor. just want to say as well that in the parking target parking lot the same thing happened to me i actually had one of the kids actually go directly at my car and almost hit him um i did go park and talk to the kid obviously one of the kids apologized the other one was very rude and inappropriate i think one of the biggest things that i see living in crossroads too there is a large amount of kids the same type of kids that she's talking about as well that are bullying a lot of the younger kids. It's happened to my son on numerous occasions, but I just tell him to come tell us, don't talk back to them, don't say anything. I had a situation talking to one of my neighbors where they pulled my trash can out in the middle of the road and were going directly towards my trash can and he went out and pulled it away and obviously they spoke to him very inappropriately. I think one of the biggest things, too, that I think we can really work on community as well as there's a lot of these kids that are very young that are not wearing helmets. And that's, I think, is a huge thing as well, because God forbid one of them gets hit by a car, then what? You know, that's just some of the things that I've seen as well. I think, obviously, the sheriff's done a really good job in explaining, you know, different things that they're looking forward of doing and, you know, kind of answered some questions for me. I mean, obviously, this is going to take time, I'm sure, as a community to address some of the issues that... are going on, but I am happy to see that the city now is really looking at it and saying that this is a real issue in the community. I mean, I know some of the kids say, well, we're just out here riding our bikes. We're just trying to have fun. I mean, some of these kids really don't see what they're doing is wrong because they're just riding their bikes. But I mean, obviously it's something that, you know, we can continue to work on as a community and basically find something that actually is going to work for the city of Riverbank. Thank you.

Are there any comments online?

Mayor, I don't see anyone online wishing to speak.

Yes.

So what is the current code in regards to helmets to address his question? And then what's the penalty for not having a helmet on currently?

So right now you have to be 18 and over not to have a helmet. So as far as the penalty goes, right, that's going to be up to the court system to give you the exact dollar amount. Deputy Orton may know that off the top of his head. You can come up here.

Yeah. So first time offense for a youth in violation of a helmet is essentially, I don't want to say a slap on the wrist, but it basically goes on their record as a, Hey, this is a prior helmet violation with this child. If it is brought to the court's attention a second time at that point, then the commissioner will dish out whether it be a monetary fine for punitive action or depending on age may refer them to community service. So first time offense is kind of just a, a notch on the record to keep track of, second time would escalate to potential punitive actions.

And something I think I forgot to mention earlier is some of the plans we have is when school gets back in session is between our school resource deputy, our community resource deputy, and our traffic deputies is to work with the schools to give some presentations to the kids. Basically, hey, we want you to go out and enjoy your bike. We want you to ride your bike to school. Here's how to do it safely. Need a helmet? We'll give you a free helmet. We have grants. We get helmets all the time. And to try to make it where they feel safe, because like being bullied, like what's been brought up this evening, that's not okay, right? We want kids to feel safe riding around our community. We want people to go out and enjoy the outdoors and ride their bicycles. But the groups that are choosing to victimize others or victimize the community, that's not okay. And we're going to have maximum enforcement against them. So let's want to make sure I added that too.

Thank you. I'll bring you back to council. Any other questions, comments on today's presentation?

I just want to thank you guys for all the work that you're doing in the community to help prevent this from further escalating. And I know Deputy Orr has kind of been across the whole county working on this enforcement. So I just want to say thank you for that as well.

All right. Yeah, I think we are good. Thank you all for being part of this conversation. All of our lines are open. As we approach our next workshop, we do have a regular city council meeting tomorrow at 6 p.m. This meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.