Airport Commission - Regular Meeting

It's 01:30, so we will call today's meeting of Transportation Environment Committee to order. Let's start with roll call, please.

Council member Tordillos? Here. Campos? Present. Ortiz? Present. Foley? And chair Cohen?

Here. Thank you.

All right. We are going to start our agenda with item one, D1, which is a parking enforcement status report. So I'll turn this over to John.

Thank you, Chair Cohen and committee members. I'm John Ristow, Director of Department of Transportation. And with me today are my colleagues, Heather Hoshia, Deputy Director and Erin Collins, Division Manager. Today is actually the first time we were actually before the committee to present a comprehensive status update on all of DOT's parking enforcement programs. Our update today will provide an overview of the parking

Can I just interrupt? I'm sorry to interrupt you. One second. Our our screens are not projecting what's up there. Do we have okay. They'll work on that. Just wanna make sure they knew. So go ahead

and continue.

Well, let me jump right into it. The what we're gonna be doing today, we're gonna provide some data on all of our parking compliance activities with staffing levels and our deployment strategy as well as the outcomes from fiscal year 2024, 2025. And then also talk about what the new programs in 2025, '26 fiscal year will look like. I'll hand it over to Transportation Safety Operations and Parking Deputy Director, Heather Hoshi, to kick off the presentation.

Heather? Sure. Before I start, are you guys good? Can you see now? Okay. Great. Thank you, John. The Department of Transportation's parking compliance unit or PCU operates 20 fourseventhree 65, providing a broad range of parking enforcement and service functions. The unit uses a combination of proactive and reactive patrols to ensure safe access to public right of way for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. To accomplish this, the PCU relies on 11 specialized teams to enforce provisions of the California Vehicle Code and the San Jose Municipal Code.

The parking compliance unit staffing model is built upon a layered service delivery approach designed to maximize efficiency and coverage across our large and complex city. Work is organized and assigned across multi specialized teams with its own each with its own focus, technology, and schedule. This approach allows the unit to provide more frequent patrols and increases the number of enforcement touches on every street. When multiple teams cycle through the same area, we improve the likelihood of identifying violations and reinforcing compliance. By coordinating these layered patrols, we make better use of staff time, reduce gaps in coverage, and strengthen the accountability and reliability of our programs.

Ultimately, this model helps ensure that every San Jose neighborhood receives consistent enforcement. This slide highlights the six service delivery teams active during fiscal year twenty four-twenty five that were responsible for enforcing general safety and illegal parking violations, primarily through the issuance of parking citations. Proactive citywide parking patrols conduct rotational patrols of every city street approximately every fourteen days. These teams enforce a range of parking violations including red curbs, street sweeping restrictions, blocked crosswalks, bike lanes, sidewalks, and they patrol school zones during drop off and pickup times. Evening and overnight patrols provide citywide enforcement of overnight parking restrictions including no parking between 10PM and 6AM along with broader illegal parking enforcement during evening and overnight hours.

Downtown and parking meter enforcement focuses on proactive patrols throughout the greater downtown and meter district areas. These officers enforce parking meters, freight and passenger loading zones, and a wide array of other general safety related violations. Residential permit parking or RPP enforcement is responsible for enforcement within the city's 22 designated RPP zones. Permit holders are issued virtual permits tied to their license plates and enforcement is carried out using vehicle mounted automated license plate reader technology. Time limited parking enforcement was designed to encourage vehicle turnover in areas outside of downtown meter districts.

Enforcing time limited parking like one and two hour zones has traditionally been labor intensive and produced minimal outcomes, only about 6,500 citations annually. For these reasons, the enforcement of time limited parking areas outside of designated meter districts was identified to be phased out as part of fiscal year twenty five-twenty six budget process. As outlined in MBA four, staffing resources have been reassigned to support new enforcement priorities resulting in more impactful outcomes. The final team supporting safety and illegal parking enforcement responds to special event and construction tow away permits and blocked driveways. This team verifies temporary tow permit signage and responds to enforcement requests from permit holders.

They also respond to blocked driver reports submitted through SJPD's non emergency line. This next slide highlights the five service delivery teams also active during fiscal twenty four-twenty five that were responsible for providing vehicle abatement and tow enforcement service deliveries. The proactive vehicle abatement team conducts citywide patrols to identify vehicles for investigation that exhibit specific criteria such as missing wheels or flat tires, broken or missing windows, fire damage, deployed airbags, or other indicators that the vehicle is inoperable or potentially abandoned. The team's goal is to proactively patrol each city street approximately every fourteen days. Complementing this effort, the hotspot vehicle abatement team conducts vehicle investigations in locations identified through data trends that may benefit from additional enforcement efforts.

Focus is placed on locations falling within equity atlas areas seven, eight, nine and ten where vehicles routinely impact right of way safety such as around auto related businesses and schools. The reactive vehicle abatement team investigates San Jose three eleven service requests related to vehicles displaying specific characteristics that may suggest the vehicle is inoperable or abandoned. To support caseload management, two full time contract staff supplement the in house PCU team by conducting initial field visits. The PCU's goal is to resolve these cases within a fourteen day closeout window. The DOT pavement maintenance tow support team enforces temporary towway zones established to facilitate DOT's citywide pavement maintenance projects.

When possible, these officers also conduct direct engagement with vehicle owners to help reduce and minimize enforcement impacts. The Oversized and Lived in Vehicle Enforcement or OLIVE program launched in January 2025 and works to help address impacts associated with congregations of oversized and lived in vehicles parked on city streets by encouraging vehicle circulation and facilitating cleanup including street sweeping. The extended parking stay EPS program was a reactive service delivery designed to investigate San Jose three eleven reports of vehicles remaining parked for extended periods of time, commonly referred to as nuisance complaints. Due to minimal enforcement outcomes and low overall impact, the EPS program was identified to be phased out as part of the fiscal year twenty five-twenty six budget process. In July, DOT coordinated with the information technology department to update the San Jose three-one-one intake processes and system communications.

Customers are notified that the extended parking stay enforcement program was ended and officers were reassigned to efforts that have been more successful at sighting and removing inoperable and abandoned vehicles from city streets. In fiscal year twenty four-twenty five, the parking compliance unit was budgeted for 48.5 parking and traffic control full time equivalents. With new programs launching in fiscal year twenty five-twenty six, that staffing level will increase to 55.5 FTE. This represents more than a 14% increase in personnel, but even with this growth, the PCU continues to operate at a very lean level. Given the geographical size of San Jose, this limited staffing significantly affects the unit's ability to provide on demand, frequent and extensive enforcement citywide.

At the fiscal twenty five-twenty six staffing level of 55.5 officers, we are operating at roughly 0.31 officers per square mile. To put that into perspective, Oakland operates at about 1.25 officers per square mile, Berkeley at two, and San Francisco at 7.32. Even though our team is small, it is incredibly effective. Through strategic deployment and refined layered service delivery approach, we're able to maximize coverage and focus on the outcomes that matter most. With that, I'd like to hand the presentation over to DOT division manager, Aaron Collin, who will walk us through those outcomes.

Thank you. The parking compliance unit is a data driven operation, and this slide highlights six key program metrics and outcomes from fiscal year twenty twenty four-twenty five, including over 217,000 parking citations were issued, consisting of more than 60,000 street sweeping violations, nearly 50,000 parking meter violations, roughly 50,000 no parking, no stopping and red curb violations and approximately 40,000 miscellaneous safety and illegal parking violations. Over 3,200 vehicles were towed across proactive and reactive vehicle abatement operations, pavement maintenance enforcement, and the Olive program. Nearly 300 school zones were visited across all 10 council districts where staff engaged with school personnel and enforced parking regulations during peak morning drop off and afternoon pickup periods. 7,400 proactive vehicle abatement investigations were identified through systematic citywide patrols.

Approximately 32,000 San Jose three eleven vehicle concerns investigations were received from the public, investigated and closed out by the unit. 34 Olive temporary towway zones were established, enforced and cleaned, spanning nine council districts as part of the oversize and lived in vehicle enforcement program. Moving into fiscal year twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six, the parking compliance unit saw budgeted staffing increased from 48.5 to 55.5 full time equivalent parking and traffic control officers. This expanded capacity will support the unit's two new programs, the Expired Registration Enforcement Program and the Olive Supportive Enforcement or OSEP program and continue the units core service deliveries most of which carry forward from prior years with the exception of the time limited parking enforcement and EPS programs which have been phased out. The Olive program operates through a process that includes six distinct components.

With limited staffing resource, the team prioritizes addressing the most impacted areas to encourage vehicle circulation, which allows sites to be cleaned and provides temporary relief. The Olive program follows a life cycle that includes a citywide inventory where staff drive every city street to identify the locations of oversized and lived in vehicles parked on public streets, documenting each vehicle's condition and any associated blight. Data analysis and site prioritization, where inventory data is mapped and analyzed to identify the most impacted areas, with emphasis on proximity to waterways, schools, parks, EIH locations, and safe parking sites. Additional factors include impacts to safety corridors, bike lanes, as well as looking at area crime and fire data. Using this analysis, the team identifies approximately 50 annual sites for targeted enforcement.

Site establishment engagement. Once sites are selected, a schedule is created to address approximately one to two sites per week. Temporary towway signage is posted, vehicles are again inventoried, warnings and informational flyers are distributed, and Beautify San Jose staff engage with vehicle inhabitants. Enforcement. Following site establishment, warning, and outreach, the temporary towway zone is enforced, and vehicles remaining within the zone are towed.

Cleanup and maintenance period. After all vehicles have been cleared, the towway zone remains active for approximately thirty days, allowing DOT and Beautify San Jose teams to remove debris, conduct cleanups, and sweep the street. And post enforcement monitoring. At the end of the thirty day restriction, the curb is returned to its previous parking makeup, and the Olive team conducts follow-up inventories at thirty, sixty, and ninety day intervals. In the '6, the Olive team completed enforcement at 12 sites, resulting in the towing of 22 vehicles.

A third citywide inventory is now underway and will guide the selection of approximately 25 additional all of sites to be addressed in the third and fourth quarters of this fiscal year. DOT engineers are also reviewing post enforcement data and evaluating a limited number of sites for potential permanent parking restrictions, which if recommended will be reviewed with the relevant council offices to support community engagement and next steps, and if required bring municipal code update recommendations back to city council. To address the growing number of vehicles with expired registration parked on city streets, DOT proposed and it was approved within the twenty five-twenty six budget, the creation of a dedicated team focused on systematically patrolling every city street to identify, verify, and enforce expired registration violations. DoT launched this focused expired registration enforcement program in July, beginning with initial citywide patrols throughout July and early August to issue warnings and educate drivers on upcoming enforcement efforts and how to avoid citations or towing. During this warning phase, the team issued more than 3,000 warning notices.

DUT also led a comprehensive communications campaign that included news releases, multilingual flyers, and coverage from local media outlets such as San Jose Spotlight, ABC seven News, Telemundo, and Univision. Citation and towing enforcement began on August 18. During the first twelve weeks, the three officer team patrolled approximately 30% of the city as shown on the accompanying map. Initial enforcement efforts were concentrated in patrol zones near former Olive sites, emergency interim housing sites and supportive parking locations. Patrol coverage and frequency are expected to increase with the addition of three budgeted PTCL positions effective January 2026.

Although the California Vehicle Code authorizes agencies to site or initiate a tow for vehicles with registration expired longer than six months, DOT recommended a tiered enforcement model to effectively manage the anticipated high volume of violations. Under this approach, DOT has prioritized the towing of vehicles with registration expired for more than one year and citing vehicles with registration expired for six months up to one year. Hard enforcement began on August 18. This slide summarizes enforcement outcomes from the first twelve weeks during which the team towed five twenty seven vehicles and issued five fifty two citations. On the towing side, nearly 94% of vehicles towed were personal vehicles such as cars, trucks, SUVs and minivans.

Approximately 4% of tows involved RVs and trailers, including some potentially inhabited vehicles. When an inhabited vehicle is tow eligible, it is logged and scheduled for enforcement at a later date when the police department is able to provide support. Citation activity closely mirrors the towing distribution across vehicle types. Of the citations issued, 93% were issued to personal vehicles, 4% to commercial semi trucks or box trucks, 2% to RVs or trailers and less than 1% to utility trailers or buses. This slide provides an overview of several key program objectives for the remainder of this fiscal year.

These include the completion of the third citywide all of inventory, which is currently underway. The previously noted expansion of the expired registration enforcement team by three additional staff in January and continued site analysis and engineering review of all of locations for potential permanent parking restrictions. Additionally, it's important to highlight the Olive Supplemental Enforcement Program or OSEP will expand the city's approach to circulate lived in vehicles parked on city streets and is scheduled to launch in January 2026. This new initiative will address additional sites that fall outside the 50 Olive program locations identified during the biannual vehicle inventory. The OSEP team will investigate lived in vehicles at lower priority all of inventoried locations and may respond to hotspot areas identified through data analysis in San Jose three eleven community reports.

It is estimated that these teams will have the capacity to investigate 1,500 to 2,000 vehicles annually. They will use seventy two hour parking restrictions as the enforcement mechanism, placing warning notices on vehicles rather than directly engaging with vehicle owners. Finally, as outlined in the fiscal year twenty five-twenty six managers' budget addendum number four, DOT will pilot a temporary tow way program in the third or fourth quarter of this fiscal year at two street sweeping locations within posted restrictions that currently experience low compliance under citation only enforcement. And this concludes the presentation, and staff is available for questions.

Alright. Thank you for the very thorough update. It's been a while since I've seen a lot of this, so it's great to to to, get that report. Let's start with public comment, please.

Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Hi. Jordan Muldau, district three, speaking on my own behalf today. Couple points. One, about a year ago, council voted to increase fines on parking and bike lanes and some other offenses, and I'm wondering if there's any data from staff about whether that has been impactful at all. I'd also ask that we focus on repeat businesses repeat business offenders if possible.

I know there's businesses, for example, on Monterey Road that sell cars and sometimes park some of their stock in the bike lane or on the sidewalk. And I think I've seen other businesses before, for example, on 13th Street, that, at least in the past, have routinely parked on the sidewalk. And so I wonder if we've identified places where we could send officers every day or every week until we start to see some compliance. Similarly, schools are definitely a hotspot for illegal parking, especially in bike lanes. And two seventy three site visits is less than two a day, so I wonder if we can spare some officers during those peak periods to go to schools every day, multiple schools.

I just want to remind counsel that the parking the vehicle concerns app in three one one is very hard to use. It has multiple screens with multiple required questions, and especially for reporting parking and bike lanes where parking enforcement doesn't respond to those in real time. So if it's not easy to fill out, no one's gonna bother filling it out, and then we don't have that data being collected. Finally, I just want to repeat what I think I've said in the past, that I don't think that the Olive program is a good use of our funds just to chase people around the city and reduce the trust that we have between the city and our residents. If we could do some sort of cleaning while the vehicles are there, think that would be better.

Back to the committee.

Alright. Thank you. We'll start with council member Ortiz.

Thank you, director Ristow and and staff for the presentation. Know, parking enforcement is an area of concern that I continue to hear raised by my constituents. I'm sure my colleagues hear this as well. But I do wanna just appreciate the work that the department is doing every day regarding enforcement. I know that this is tough work, especially a major city like San Jose and, you know, just our funding gaps in regards to being able to address this major concern head on.

And so I just want to acknowledge that there has been progress in my district to address the abandoned vehicles, the lived in vehicles and of course our unregistered vehicles. That being said, I still believe and I will always push for us to do more and to provide greater relief to our our neighborhoods, that are impacted by the overconcentration of these, blighted vehicles. I say this number not as an exaggeration, but in my district, it's safe to say on any given week, we have around 10 of these blighted cars per neighborhood. Right, not district, but per neighborhood. Whether it's Capital Park, Mount Pleasant, Mayfair, you drive the streets.

And that's actually a conservative take. There's probably a lot more than that. And I know this because I have my staff drive around my district and document document the the vehicles, and we we see that in in real real time. So my constituents are raising these frustrations, and especially in regards to the process for reporting these abandoned vehicles. And I know we're not doing that right now, but I just want mention in the past, my residents have felt that they feel the city does more to come up with reasons not to tow vehicles than instead of being more user focused or solutions oriented in order to get these vehicles towed, right?

Which I think at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we're serving our residents entirely. And if a vehicle is blighted, if it is causing a hardship to the neighborhood, especially areas like District 5 where if it's one neighborhood and you have one of these vehicles or two of these vehicles, that may be not a big issue. But when almost every single street has them and then they begin to get concentrated together, like in Old Oakland Road on my, not Old Oakland Road, Oakland Avenue in my district, Old Oakland Road's in District 4. Then we just feel like residents are just living amongst blight and trash. And our families aren't trash, and so they shouldn't have to live amongst Trash.

And in many many situations I've been forced to reach out to my police captain because I just don't want to deal with unfortunately excuses to why these cars cannot get towed. And for some reason in many cases our police captain is able to get these vehicles towed. That unfortunately takes him away from doing his major focus which is making sure the city of San Jose is safe. And you know, I don't want to just be doom and gloom, but I do you know, it's my job to advocate. And whenever I'm on the record, I'm going to elevate, you know, the concerns of my residents.

But I do want to just say that I am optimistic about our new approach to these unregistered vehicles. I am encouraged by the new strategies, the new hiring that is going to be starting in the new year to improve this function. But I just want to make it a point that in the short amount of time that you know, I'm gonna be here, I wanna make sure that, areas like District 5, District 3, District 7, and and their residents see relief of of this overconcentration because it's not it's not sustainable. And at the end of the day, when the public's mad, you know, I can't go to them and say like, oh, well, your card doesn't fit into this rubric. They just say, you're my council member.

Get it done. And I don't care why staff is is not doing it. And so you guys don't feel that pressure. We do. And so I just wanted to put that in words and put it on the record. Thank you.

Alright, thank you councilmember. Next, councilmember Campos.

Thank you chair and thank you to Ariane and Heather for the presentation. I also want to echo council member Ortiz's thanks to the parking compliance unit for their work out in the community being proactive and patrolling and responding to vehicle concerns. Definitely opportunities to do more and do better. I know that this is a topic that each council office hears from their neighbors about and it's a tough issue. So I hope that we can learn more about how you know our council office especially in the district two council office what we can be doing to support your team and provide quality service for our constituents.

So related to customer service and it was brought up that the three one one app can be a bit difficult to navigate at times. More recently though our neighbors have begun receiving auto responses to requests for abatement of vehicles. It informs them that the department has shifted resources towards expired registration violations and in some cases our neighbors are reporting vehicles with expired registrations or no registration at all and are still receiving this auto response message. So the staff memo alludes to changes on the back end system that reflect the shift towards the extended registrations. Can you please share how the department is thinking about its customer service best practices to ensure that concerns are addressed accurately and in a timely manner?

Thank you, council member. John Ristow again. I I think we can answer the questions on the the enforcement and the field side, but if there's some questions as regard to how San Jose 3.1 app is actually configured and working, Khaled with ITD is here if you happen to have a question about that. But we can talk about what our operations on the field side is related to.

More on the field side.

So,

you're asking a question about when in one instance you were talking to about that someone was reporting that expired registration was seen by people in neighborhood and stuff. So we're actually doing that on a proactive basis right now and that was reported by Arian. We don't actually go and have a reactive program for expired registration because we have put together the proactive one and he reported that we're about 30% complete through the city. So ultimately, I believe we're going to capture those vehicles and then be able to investigate them. Quite often, just because a car doesn't have a tag that's the right date doesn't necessarily mean that the registration has expired.

When we visit those sites where we're going through the city, we actually have to query the DMV database to ensure that there's actually an expired registration. So we can't necessarily go by. It's a good indicator to start, but we're actually out there actually querying database from DMV with that information. So I think the reporting part of it does need to be corrected on San Jose 311 with regard to I believe it did or does still have a place you can actually apparently report that there's an expired registration vehicle. The problem is we're actually not on the enforcement side doing that because we actually have started the proactive patrols.

So that in itself is probably a confusion part and that's to be corrected within San Jose Three Eleven app. Again, if there's questions I'm sure Khaled could provide some information

One on quick question.

I guess it has been removed now. So that's been corrected.

Okay. Thank you. So how can our offices be helpful in facilitating these types of cases or sharing this information? Because I know when I attend neighborhood association meetings, this is one of those questions that gets brought up each and every time.

So let me try and then I'll hand over to Hope. If you have community meetings that you'd like one of our staff to actually attend, either one of our parking compliance office seniors, we do this quite often at many neighborhood areas, so we'll explain the service levels. But in addition to that, what we just presented is on the date on our website and the database and what do you call that? Dashboards. The dashboards, yes.

The dashboard is both on San Jose three eleven and on our site. So it's available. Again, it's probably not as easily accessible or understandable unless you can have someone explain the different service levels, what we are doing currently, what we did discontinue, which has been a confusion. And then the new programs that we're gonna start that hopefully fills in those areas that may be some of the problem.

Thank you for that. I always welcome city staff coming into District two, and so when there's an opportunity, I'll definitely let you all know. I just have a couple more quick questions about the vehicle buyback information. In the staff memo your team shared that the Columbus Park abatement led to the purchase of 69 vehicles through the buyback program leveraging funds from various sources. Can you please help us break down the funding that we've already distributed to the buyback program?

We'll try to dig that information up to you. Do we have it handy? Oh, so we're we actually didn't do that. That was police department that actually did that during in housing during the abatement of Columbus Park. That was an area that they took on because it was a special service to that. We can get that information where the funding came from, but I think that number was accurate about 69 vehicles were received through that buyback incentive program. So that was a it was a good thing, would think very successful, but we don't have that data down to the degree that you need it, we'll get that for you.

The reason that I ask is to better understand because as I read it, it looks like we've allocated a significant portion of the funding that we had over the last two years for Olive towards this Columbus Park abatement. And so my question is, do we anticipate a shortfall prior to the end of the fiscal year?

I think Heather can answer that and no.

So as part of the Olive program, we identified in our MBA and asked for a specific line item of funding to buy back RVs or explore a program to buy back RVs. That program met research posed challenges. And so when Beautify and Housing abated Columbus Park and there was an opportunity, we did say we have funding that we've allocated for this purpose and we shared that funding so those vehicles could be purchased back. There is ongoing funding in Olive program to continue that effort each year. So don't anticipate that there will be a shortfall of funding for this fiscal year.

There is still some in there. And each year we will get additional allocation of funding that we feel will probably cover. In addition, as part of the new recent amendments to the tow agreements or to the tow management agreement, we will be reimbursing tow companies for the disposal of vehicles. So RVs do not return in circulation, which is also a second portion of the buyback program that we've organized.

I saw that that's the dismantling of the RVs. Well thank you. Those were all my questions.

Thank you. And I want to thank you again for the report. This is a far more thorough set of information than we've seen before, but also I think it's because there's a lot more work happening. And so I'm glad to see that. I do have some questions I want to ask. I want to start on the citation side. You know, what did I saw the number 270,000 citations or something like that per year. That means there's some fee income associated with it. Do we have data about how many fees we collected? Presumably not everybody pays their citations, but there's you can do kind of some math and figure out the order of magnitude of what fees we expect to collect. If not, maybe we can get that.

Roughly $12,000,000 and yes, you're right, not everybody is paying.

So that's $12,000,000 is what

What goes into the general fund?

That goes into the general fund, but presumably there's that money in theory can be used to enhance this program, right? I mean, so it's necessarily a cost recovery program, right? It goes into the general fund?

Go ahead. Yes. And we of course, the parking compliance unit receives money to actually operate from that those funds.

From the general funds, goes goes to we have maybe you don't have it now, but can we given the enhanced patrols and everything that we're doing, do we can we see an increase in fee collection over time?

We're going to provide that. We don't have it yet, but that is something that are definitely going to as a result of particularly the expired registration program is pretty dramatic in terms of the citations and toes, but we hope that it's actually gonna be on the other side which is when people find out that we're actually enforcing that more regularly and rigorously that people that are not have their cars unregistered now are going to register their vehicles, which is that's the whole point.

Right. So presumably, I they'll think we're going to try to get followed by a decrease in but maybe an annual some data of annual fees over time would be useful for

That us to would be something in a budget season I think we'd probably like to see, but we're just too new with that particular program right now to have much of that put together yet, but we intend to do that.

Okay, thank you. The proactive citywide patrols are interesting to me. You're saying that every street is every 14, in theory, street is driven by somebody in the department looking to see if there's violations. I also saw that Olive does the plan is that Olive does periodic inventory. Is there is there a way to sort of take advantage of the people who are doing the fourteen day patrol to help keep more current our oversized vehicle data also?

Yes, I guess it's not wholly out of the question. We utilize the semiannual all of inventory as a base set of data to analyze for the selection of the sites. So we try to get it as close to the period in time in which we're going to analyze as opposed to some aggregate data that likely is out of alignment in terms of timing with doing that analysis to identify the specific sites.

And I'm kind of wondering about the technical the technology behind this. As people are driving and they're are they collecting data and putting into some database? I mean is it so is it possible that if we had a database, we'd have more real time information about where vehicles are? And these days, vehicles are moving, especially oversized vehicles and RVs are moving more frequently. It might give us a more real time idea about that migration of vehicles if we have a database and the proactive patrols are utilizing it.

Yes, we're currently doing it manually. It isn't using AI or anything like that. I mean it really does take a sense of an officer identifying the vehicle and then doing the data points around the condition of the vehicle, the level of blight that we have kind of a metric around what it looks like so that we can put some scores into that system.

So that's a when you say manually, I mean is it going into a central database? So it's manual entry into a device that collects Correct.

Takes about six weeks for officers to complete that entire inventory. We should be done for this next one in maybe two weeks.

The Olive inventory.

The idea that maybe since we have the I think what your point is the proactive patrols, could they not also do that to cover it? It's certainly something that we can think about if Olive continues many quarters in the future to see if that's a more efficient way to do it. But right now dedicated team just going and hitting all of the streets. Maybe.

Yes, I'm just wondering if there's some efficiencies to be gained and also some more real time information to be gained because as I said, was pointing out, I think vehicles are moving around a lot more and we don't necessarily we get into snapshot in time and it's possible that the street that was identified is cleared by the naturally by the time even the enforcement action comes.

And we know that happens in every district that we're doing that. And I think what might be something that when we start the supplemental program with Olive after the first of the year when they're going to be directed out into those areas to actually as Erin reported, that new team is going to be looking for those vehicles that are coming back into Olive sites that have just been abated as well as and maybe reactively going around looking at that for those vehicles, which I think is getting to where you're really getting to. So that's a program resource that's going to get started up to the first of the year. So it might pick up again that area that needs some attention.

Okay. Thank you. On the evening and overnight patrol piece, does so is it done in a way that we have a list of every location that has a posted no parking overnight and that we're trying to get around to all those sites over time across the city?

Yes, we do have that information on where those sites exist and the challenges getting to those in some kind of a cadence that is impactful. And the reality is with such a small team doing that overnight enforcement is that we're just not in these areas more frequently than probably once a month maybe.

But it's still encouraging that there are some attention to every one of those sites, which we hear from people say there's a sign that says no parking and yet there's vehicles there. That it feels like there's more being done for that now than there used to be. I'm

Yeah, think it's just more coordinated, organized, and the teams are specifically directed into where they're to be working. And then we use that information to redirect the officers into hot, as they were reporting. There's hotspots and we know when we get some of these reports we're redirecting or highlighting for officers to be on the lookout for certain activities that might be recurring. So that we have that as well. We're putting that into our work scopes.

All right. And to Jordan's question about types of infractions, I assume we have the data about types of infractions. And it's not just about for me bike lanes, but it could be about all the different types of things that we're ticketing for blocked driveways. You mentioned blocked driveways, I was curious how often does that happen and do we have data about that? And I'm just maybe in the future, would be interesting for us to see that information.

We did look it up while Jordan was So we did look up the bike lane citations and I think Ariane can talk to both those things that you requested.

Yes, we issued a little over 2,000 violations for blocked bike lanes last fiscal year And in the first quarter, we issued a little over 500. So we're on pace for that same. We did increase the fine amount. So I think the question was, have we seen a noticeable difference based on that fine amount? And based on the numbers so far, no. We're still on target to hit a little over 2,000.

Okay. Thank you. Then the last thing I was going ask about is 11 versus the non emergency line for SJPD. You mentioned for block driveways, people should be calling the non emergency line for SJPD because that's almost an emergency. Our driveway's blocked. We have a car in front of it. I didn't mean, it's something I hadn't really thought about is how to get information out to the public about what the right avenue is to report certain types of things happening. Is Is a fire hydrant violation an SJPD call? Is that of SJ-three 11 report?

The block fire hydrant is what we consider illegal parking. It can be reported on SJ-three eleven as such. It doesn't result in an on demand service delivery. So we're not running out

of only one on demand right now is blocked driveway?

Blocked driveways and then the vehicle abatement service delivery. So any of the reported vehicles with the conditions that meet the criteria and have the supporting photos and everything.

And how quickly when somebody reports something through SJ-three 11, how quickly is the is somebody deployed to that specific site on average?

We attempt to close them out within fourteen days. So the initial site visit is within a week or less even sometimes. And then the secondary visit and then follow-up enforcement.

Okay. And I'm just while that conversation was happening, while you were presenting and I thought saw three, oh, sorry, did you

And I don't know if you were talking specifically about the block driveway piece.

Well, I was kind of asking about.

That is that's like an quasi emergency. So it goes through the PD non emergency line and then it's farmed out to police officers, community service officers or parking compliance officers, kind of whoever is available to address that as quickly as possible.

Thank you. As the presentation was happening and I saw the mention of way to report, I I actually opened the s j three one one app and went into the vehicle concern. And I think I mean, this is a comment for, Caleb's team as well. It's not obvious upfront what kinds of things to be reported in there. You have to click through.

You have to first submit the photo of the vehicle, and then you click through and you see what the different categories are. It might be helpful to be able to, upfront, have a person who's a user say, here's the types of violations that we should report here. And by the way, if you have this type of violation, you should report it elsewhere so that it's right up front and for people to see when they first open the app. Because I think it is difficult. It's, eight pages of clicking through to see all the different steps of reporting a vehicle, and might be helpful to have some more up front information. Alright. I'll, turn to Vice Mayor Foley now.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation and I just clicked through San Jose 3112 just to confirm what Jordan said, which I knew was accurate, but I had to do it myself and it took a long time to get where I wanted to go and I'm not sure I ever really got where I wanted to go. So for someone who's not all that comfortable with that kind of technology or apps, it makes it difficult and I get frustrated really easily. I have a question about the fines though. You mentioned that we fined people who had parked in bike lanes 2,000 times in the last fiscal year or there were 2,000 fines. How do we collect those fines?

Folks are encouraged to pay their citation online or in person at our office of parking violations. If they don't, they can go through collections, go through the DMV franchise tax board, kind of the final steps.

Okay. So it starts off as a bill that we just send them a bill and say you owe us this amount of money. Is there a late charge or anything like penalty applied? Yeah. And and at what point what what is the fine? How much do we charge?

For a bike lane? I believe it's $60. I was pulling that up. Sorry. I don't have it right in front of me.

So I'd I'd be curious if we're actually collecting

and $15.

115. Okay. And so we're not really attaching it to their license. We we just send them a bill and hope that they pay.

Yeah. It's not a moving violation.

Okay. So I don't know if you have this number now, but you can can you tell me how many fee fines we've actually collected in the last fiscal year?

Specific to bike lanes or just in total?

Bike lanes.

Oh, I don't

have that in front of me.

Okay. In total then. However you have it.

Well, that would be the roughly $12,000,000 in citation revenue we got, but not necessarily the specific number of

citation.

Then I need to know bike lanes because that's that's what I'm concerned with. I'm concerned that there's repeat offenders who continually park in the bike lanes. They get a bill for a $115. They take it, throw it in the trash or recycling, and and don't care and continue to recite continue to park in the bike lanes. So how are at what point do we step up the collection process?

The let me just walk you really quick through the collection.

So Please.

Thank you receive you. A citation. If you do not pay it, you will receive a secondary courtesy notice. If you do not respond to that, there is a late fee and I believe it's a $35 late fee. If you do not respond and pay then, you can and will be sent to DMV hold for your registration.

You will not be able to register your car if you have an outstanding violation that we have sent to the DMV. DMV will collect that fee for us and send it to us if somebody on-site wants to clear that up. If for some reason you do not register your car or there's a loophole and you are ready to register and not pay that ticket, that happens occasionally, we do send scofflaws to the Franchise Tax Board. So if you have any lottery winnings that are owed to you and or a tax refund, we will garnish that and receive payment from Franchise Tax Board for the fines that you owe.

Okay. Thank you for walking us through that process. I wasn't aware of that. And, you know, it's it's nice to know there's a little hook to collect, and it is because it does go against their license.

Right. And not a license to a car because it's not a moving violation.

I understand. Yeah. Yeah. I understand. Thank you. That's that's very helpful. That that's the only question I had, and I move to accept the report.

Alright. Alright. We have a motion and a second. I think we're done with comments, so let's vote. Okay. That motion carries, five zero. Thank you so much for the report. And now we're going to hear from the airport. Great to have a report about what's happening there. We have a status report on our potential on our asset preservation and potential future expansion plans. So Mookie.

Good afternoon committee chair, members of the committee. My name is Mookie Patel. I'm the director of aviation at San Jose Moneta International Airport. We're here today to, I'm accompanied by Fai Ali, our Deputy Director of Planning and Development for the airport. And today we're going to present to you a presentation on the airport's asset preservation and expansion status report. I'll lead the first few slides and then turn it over to my colleague. So the master plan update here is just a kind of a reflection. Let me go back. There we go. A reflection of what came out of the master plan in a visual depiction.

The master plan called out obviously for the eventual build out of Concourse C or some call it B expansion. It's basically the filling out of the gate facilities to the south of the current Terminal B. What you see on this map included building a new Lot 4, moving our waste disposal, belly freight, PD's hangars, fuel stations, fire station and then an ultimate new hangar. All of that obviously was predicated on, a sustainable growth cycle for the airport. And as you can see, this is a twenty year chart of our passengers at, San Jose Moneta.

We've gone through the .com bust, boom, post nineeleven, SARS, the Great Recession. We saw about a six year cycle where the passenger trends stayed at about 10,500,000, total passengers, at which time we did start on Terminal B and we, obviously, seismic reasons and for end of useful life of the original Terminal C, to build a new terminal. Unfortunately, that started in 2006 and was completed, right around the Great Recession timeframe. But if it wasn't for that, we wouldn't have been able to accommodate the expansive growth that was there for seven years. One could argue it was the largest expansion phase in The U.

S. Economy from about 2012, what we saw all the way through 2019. We also built and Fai can talk a little bit about the interim facility and how we started that and completed that project. Let's see. So I'll turn the floor over to Fai to talk about that.

All right. Thank you. Good afternoon, chair and committee members. I'm Fai Ali, deputy director of planning and development at the airport. So just to provide a quick update on the master plan.

So the first out of the gate in the execution of a master plan program was the interim six gate facility. This was around 2018 when we were experiencing a huge amount passenger growth and demand. And the expansion of the Terminal C and Terminal B was kind of in the horizon, but at the same time, we needed kind of a stop gap measure to accommodate the growing demand. And at that point, the airport had kind of made the decision to construct some interim gates, six temporary gates to bridge the gap while we start planning and developing the expansion of the major terminal. This project was completed in June 2019 at a cost of $58,000,000 We could say this was one of the first enabling projects in our master plan at the cost of about $58,000,000 and accommodate the Southwest expansion of about six gates.

And it was really full at the time of completion. But at this point, currently right now, this terminal, when it was constructed, it was envisioned to be there for temporarily about a few years, maybe three, four years while we're going to build the expansion. But at this point, it's going to be there for a little bit longer while we are navigating and kind of recalculating our passenger growth and projections and kind of focusing on when the new next expansion is going to be. Another of the enabling projects that we had, and all these projects we call them enabling because these were kind of within the footprint of the terminal expansion. So our goal was to greenfield the footprint so we're ready to expand the terminal when the time is right.

Another one of these was the construction of a new art facility for the airport. This was unique, state of the art, because it also includes a land site apparatus for community services out there too. So we had ARF capability, but also capability for the community. This was partly also federally funded and also funded using Measure T funds. And this was a pretty massive upgrade from the existing fire facility that we had that was built in the 1950s.

The next project that we kind of took on as part of the enabling projects was the relocation and the construction of new facilities and engineering campus. So the scope for this project included the construction of a new facilities division site, the whole entire campus, which had an administration building, a two story administration building, and also a fleet maintenance building where we would maintain our equipment with the buses, the city fleet. That was also a project that we completed last year and we're doing some final touches, but our facilities and engineering team have already moved into this building and occupied it. Another project that we executed as part of the master plan was the new Police Department Air Support Unit Hanger. This project is fully funded using Measure T funds by the city.

This is also construction of a single story 7,500 plus or minus square foot hangar for a helicopter and a fixed wing unit aircraft for PD. This is anticipated to be completed. The construction is I've a picture up there of partial completion somewhere around early twenty twenty six. So a long time, 2026, we should be completed with that project. Those are the lists of the projects that we've been executed so far as part of the master plan.

The next project I want to talk about is the belly cargo facility, which was also envisioned to be construction to be started a year ago. We did went through the procurement cycle. We did have bids in hand, but we had to make the strategic decision to postpone this project after evaluating the current market and passenger growth that we're experiencing post COVID. And at that point, I think we had to strategically, after consultation with the airlines, to pause this project until at some point we were able to validate, project our passenger growth to a point we're able to complete this project. So this is still within our master plan, and it is still a project that we will continue to look out for and complete at an appropriate time.

Another project that's still contemplated in our master plan that we're kind of working towards is also an on-site hotel, a developer led project. So this is also something that we have been doing some market research on the viability of this project. And again, on the same note, we're still evaluating passenger growth and our traffic. And once we're at a point where we could steadily are able to accommodate the passenger traffic, we will start looking into the development of a hotel on the airport. Another major project in our master plan is our future terminal parking. This is kind of across from Terminal B south of the Conrad Garage, if you may.

And

this is kind of expanding capacity of our short term parking. The whole logic behind this was once we developed the terminal expansion, we would lose a lot of parking spaces. And this would kind of provide us with an accommodating and give us about 3,000 to 5,000 square spaces of a new terminal parking structure that kind of offsets the parking that we lose as part of the expansion. So this is also in our master plan. And again, this is still on the horizon for us, and we're evaluating all the outcomes for a time that we could execute this project.

And finally, we're talking about the big project here, which is the C, the future terminal C expansion, which is in the master plan. And all of the enabling projects that we've been doing and executing so far is all in support of the construction of a new terminal. And this would kind of take our gate count to 42, an estimate of $1,800,000,000 in 2023. So again, and then Mookie will probably talk about it a little bit later, but we're still evaluating passengers or growth and find a time of where we have a sustained passenger of probably about $14,000,000 a year is that when we'll start looking into contemplating and planning. We have approved the federal NEPA approval for this project, and it's just a matter of now us navigating through the projection of our growth and finding a suitable time to execute this project.

And it's still very valid within our master plan. Another project I wanted to highlight is the new air traffic control tower. This is a fully federally funded project. The FAA is replacing our existing control tower and the new base building. And this project has completed the design and this is fully managed by the FAA.

And we're anticipating that they will start construction on it in 2026 pending allocation of federal funds towards this project. So in the near future, we would be able to see a new control tower, which would be double the size and height of the existing tower. So all in all, we have kind of a snapshot of what the actual master plan project is going to look like and how it changes from what it was initially. The reds are the future projects contemplated within our master plan that we are kind of focused as well on working towards. The blues are the ones that we've completed so far.

And we move forward to getting all the other projects completed based on the evaluation of our current passenger growth and transport. I'll hand it over to Mookie.

So I started here about twenty months ago. And during that time, you can go to the next slide if you like. We had in our budget for FY24 an estimated plan of somewhere around 12,000,000 passengers, 12,100,000, 11,900,000, somewhere in that number. We didn't hit that target. Obviously, we've seen travel demand sort of recover from COVID, but now stabilize.

And then this year, we've seen actually a deterioration of that basis. We know that tech travel has all but dried up. We don't see tech, traveling as much. Disposable income is really one of the key drivers of travel and propensity to travel in our community for the origination and destination customer, the people who live here in our community. And that is being challenged with housing and, inflation and, all sorts of other exterior issues.

So, for our budget year, while we anticipated to hit $11,900,000 we'll probably, hit about $10,500,000 And then going into FY 2026, 2027, I'm projecting about 9,900,000.0 as a more recession proof number. It's a little bit of crystal balling the future, but I don't see some strong economic tailwinds at this point that will drive those numbers higher. So as we transition to more just managing and maintaining, I see the small box on the far right side of your screen to kind of mimic what we saw from 2002 to 2010 sort of just floating somewhere between 9.9 and somewhere between 11,000,000 passengers, for quite some time. And so as we do that, we are looking more so at asset preservation rather than building new. So I will I'll let Fai go before Fai starts, mostly if I haven't gone through and explained how the airport is funded, it is an enterprise fund of the city.

And so most of our revenue, about 30% of it comes from parking revenues and ground transportation fees from Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Turo, and then all the shuttle bus providers that bring shuttles in from around the community. The remaining revenues that are nonairline are land leases, tenant leases that we have on the airport, concession leases and concession revenue. And then that is loaded with, landing fees, fees generated by the airfield, from fixed based operators and those commercial operators, along with the rents that the airlines pay. And combined together, that's what funds the airport budget. So I'm really proud to not be a burden for the general fund, but that also puts a lot of pressure on the airport to manage its revenue streams and manage its expenses as tightly as possible.

So as we move to more of an asset preservation plan, even that plan may extended or prioritized differently, as infrastructure starts to age. So Terminal A is now over three and a half decades old. It's more than 35 years old. It is showing its signs of life support and hospice care. And then Terminal B is mid cycle, so it's about 15 years old.

Most airport restrooms are renovated every seven years, and they're the most expensive, per square foot improvement that you ever make, but it's also your top priority in terms customer experience. Our bathrooms have gone fifteen years without a renovation. So these are the types of things we need to do to elevate our experience and maintain some customer scores. So I'll let Fai go into the asset preservation plan.

Thanks, Mookie. So here we go. So like Mookie mentioned, I was kind of alluding earlier, while we await for the opportune time for the expansion of the new terminal when we build them, we also have to kind of focus on the existing infrastructure and utilities that we have. And some of our terminals are pretty old, thirty five year plus. Terminal A plus, if you've gone through them in Terminal A, they're the oldest.

The new Terminal B is 15 years old also and there's kind of in our industry, it's a little bit long to go without doing any major renovation to it. But in the meantime, as we strategize to see what how we get to the expansion of the new terminal, our focus is to kind of preserve our terminal infrastructure so that we make it more sustained and resilient and this kind of performance is up to par with our utilities. So while we're waiting for the next seven, eight years to contemplate building the expansion of the terminal, we're also taking care of the immediate core infrastructure needs that we have. And with that focus, we kind of started an asset preservation approach. We had a consultant come on and assist us with evaluating the existing infrastructure and systems.

This was more of a visual analysis based on what they saw in the field, based on lifecycle of our equipment and systems, including our staff as well. What we did was basically kind of develop a comprehensive plan that we could use for the next five years as part of a CIP to invest into the critical infrastructure and utilities to make it more sustainable and bring it kind of up to speed, if you may call it a like for like replacement the immediate need. The approach we talked about is we broke it down into two phases, phase one and phase two. And Phase A was kind of what we call it, Phase one. This is more of just asset preservation and focusing on the resilience of co infrastructure.

So we went through our terminal infrastructure and looked at what are the areas and utilities that we need to bring up to speed to make sure that it is kind of working resiliently and have a plan for sustained performance. Phase two is something that we'll get into a little bit later after we've addressed all the immediate concerns from Phase one. Phase two, we'll be looking at what Mookie was talking about cosmetic enhancements, some efficiency upgrades. We're looking at systems that we're replacing because of end of life cycle. We want to replace them with the newer, more efficient systems for a little bit longer sustained performance.

And also includes things such as elevation of guest experiences. So every system or infrastructure that we implement and execute, we want to make sure that it comes in with an elevated get experience, and it also kind of brings in more engagement with our passengers. In terms of the level of effort that we took, our facilities, we have about 1,000,000 square foot of terminal facilities between Terminal A Plus and all the way to a central utility plant. So we assessed all the facilities and all the square footage. We also looked at all the systems including conveyances, electrical systems, fire life safety, mechanical and plumbing.

We're about almost 1,600 asset types that were assessed as part of this evaluation. There were certain exclusions that we didn't include in this because these were all kind of handed separately as part of specialized systems. In terms of schedule, just a quick note of where we are and where we plan to go. So we've completed the Phase one assessment reporting and now we're kind of getting into the capital project execution. And in future slides, I'll share what that looks like in terms of the next three years spend in capital of what the need is to basically address our core infrastructure need.

And then once that is taken care of, we'll move into a Phase two. We've started the development of a Phase two RFP to get some specialized consultant on board to help us with customer engagement and efficient enhancement of our systems. And we plan to have that completed with the assessment and reporting sometime in FY 'twenty seven. And at that point, we will have a complete picture of how much do we need to spend and how much that we need to invest into the airport to bring it up to great level. A quick outcomes on what the assessment looked like, just some infographics here.

And basically between Terminal A Plus and the different terminals, we have the Innoyne facility and the central utility plant. Majority of them, if you look through the graph, you can see they're in a fair condition. There's a percentage of the failed components. So you see them mostly in Terminal A Plus and Terminal A because these are the most older terminals. And then also marginal efforts that we need in terms of condition of our facility.

So our focus within the next three years will be mostly to address the reds and the orange. These are the current coal infrastructure needs that we have. And then when we get into the fair and kind of the good, this is the plan for the phase two where we're trying to replace end of life systems with some enhanced and guest experience systems within the terminal. In terms of what the needs would be, our current forecasted needs between the terminals and the current need, if you look at the first bar, the current need, a majority of them is needed in Terminal A, about 49%, followed by Terminal A, was 22%, and then the FIs in Terminal B are falling by the 1710%. So that's how we will prioritize the capital spend between the terminals where majority of our capital spend is going to go towards the rehabilitation of infrastructure and systems in Terminal E and Terminal E Plus and we go forward and we've done some more forecast needs for the three years and the five year needs.

And this is kind of based on as we spend more money, the dynamic shifting a little bit. We've provided some kind of infographics to forecast that. In terms of development need and cost and how much do we need to spend, we're kind of looking at a cumulative total of about $30,000,000 over the next five years in terms of spending to address, like I mentioned, all the red and the orange needs. These are the failed and also the marginal needs. And we've also prioritized the system.

We've collectively worked between the different departments the different sorry, different divisions within the airport in terms of what priorities we need to address. Sanitary and drainage piping has been a bigger concern for us, especially in older terminals. Some leaking pipes, so we're prioritizing replacement of those. Passenger boarding bridges, too, is also something that we've tried to prioritize. And then electrical and conveyances because these are something that's really close to the customer experiences in terms of conveyances.

First year, we're looking at about a 1,800,000.0 to $2,400,000 spend, including all the delivery cost. But yes, like a cumulative five years, twenty eight million, this is only for the Phase A, which would be kind of addressing the immediate core infrastructure needs. We've also developed a whole elaborate infrastructure for the next ten years of what we need, and that's somewhere around almost $200,000,000 But right now, the focus is this. And as part of Phase two, we validate everything else that we need to take care of. A quick slide about the next steps and the future effort of the Phase two.

We've started developing the RFP for Phase two, which will basically look into investment opportunities to in the enhancement of operational performance of the utility and infrastructure. A lot of would be efficiency upgrades, cosmetic upgrades, but the key focus will always be in elevating the guest experience at the airport. But once we get to that point, we hope to complete all the assessment and reporting by the 2027. And at that point, we plan to come back to the committee to provide an update. And that's all I have, and I'll hand it over to Mickey.

With that, we'll take some questions.

Okay. Thank you so much. Do we have any public comment?

Yes. Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

Hello? There we go. Jordan Moldow, District 3 speaking on behalf of myself. I appreciate that the airport is able to maintain operations without, taking money from the general fund. I really appreciate that.

At the same time, I am concerned about the potential reliance on, revenue from the short and long term parking facilities in order to maintain, the airport's budget. I'm not sure to what degree that might be true, but something anecdotally I feel might be the case. And we know for our various climate and transportation goals, we really need to encourage folks to take mass transit in order to get to the airport. And it's it's difficult right now because the light rail doesn't go there. And it is served by the 61 bus, but it's not a terribly frequent bus.

So we need to do more to make sure that we are getting people in through the light rail and the other modes of transit there. I know there's plans for the airport connector, which wasn't in this presentation, and I'd prefer that to be more of a mass transit option, but that's a that's a topic for another day. But even without the Airport Connector, I feel like we need to do a better job of getting, people in via transit. And one of the other assets that the airport has that I don't think was covered in the presentation was the buses that we have to shuttle people between the parking lots and the terminals. And that's actually the best transportation that I'm aware of in the county.

It runs twenty four seven and it's free. And I feel like we should experiment with using those assets to get more people in and out of the airport. For example, we've got the Super Bowl coming up and the World Cup, and maybe we could trial using those buses to get people between the terminals and the light rail to supplement 61 service. Thank you.

Back to the committee.

Okay. Thank you. We'll start with vice mayor Foley.

Thank you for the presentation and for, actually the explanation of the various income streams related to the airport and that it's not dependent on the general fund, that's really important. I also want to thank you, there was a letter to editor a week or so ago complaining about the bathrooms. And I appreciate your response that was in the paper yesterday taking ownership of the issue and working to resolve it. So I just wanted to recognize your response and thank you for that, Mookie. Regarding the asset funds that are needed to do the phase one, does that come from a reserve capital improvement pot that you have within the enterprise fund?

That's correct. So we appropriate funds from our capital reserves each year. So the profit that is generated at the end of the year is split between the airlines and the airport. And so there's always there's a use and lease agreement between the airports and the airlines that dictate how revenue is shared to offset rents that the airlines pay. At the end of the day, the airlines are always responsible for our debt if we can't make our debt mortgage payment, which is about $70,000,000 a year.

And so we have reserve funds that reserve language in the agreement that says the airlines will cover that if we don't generate enough revenue. To create the benefit, we also share our net remaining revenues with them. And so the net remaining revenues that the airport keeps goes into a capital fund which is used to fund these kinds of improvements. So not all airline not all improvements on the airport are paid for by the airlines. They're split.

It's a complex matrix of square footage that is rentable, non rentable and then concession related. So to answer your question, yes, there's reserve funds. Every year we have funds that we allocate from our capital reserve to pay for these kinds of things. Everything that Fai talked about which is elevators, escalators, the sanitary drains and the jet bridges are all covered by the funds that we collect from the airlines and the revenue that we generate on the airport.

Okay, so what you're saying is there's a revenue sharing agreement with the carriers. Yes. And it's mutually beneficial to them to have these improvements done because it's gonna bring theoretically more passengers in. And it's beneficial to us because it's gonna keep the carrier here.

Yes. So council member or vice mayor, what we'd also do every year, we come to council with a capital program for approval, but we also take the same budget and the capital projects to the airlines. We meet with them quarterly to go through trends that we're seeing in expenses, what we're doing to manage our expenses and then all the revenues that are coming in. So we brief them very frequently on the transactions that are happening at the airport. We also take to them a capital program that we would like to invest in.

And if it's not in our five year CIP or something that council has approved that we need to do fairly quickly, we do seek guidance from the carriers and they do approve projects. So we've taken some of this asset preservation plan and we've already presented it to Southwest Airlines. They're 60% of our market share. And so to get their blessing on carpet replacement, hold room seating replacement, once we get good estimates on the baggage system, take that back to them and we periodically get their approvals to do that. So there's no resistance in the relationship. We're just very careful with how we program that out.

Okay, thank you. Your passenger projections for the next couple years shows a decrease in number of passengers, but 2026 is coming so are you not projecting an increase in passengers? And and if so, why if if not, why not? And how do we ensure that we get a bitter bigger piece of the airline traffic coming in to the Bay Area for the World Cup, NCAA, Super Bowl?

It's great question. I think in years past when the NFL team locally was doing pretty well and going to the Super Bowl, you saw spikes for the NFC championship game. You saw different events that would spike. A Taylor Swift concert would spike. But they're very short lived.

And when we average out over a full three sixty five days the total number of seats that we're going to see in the market, it doesn't factor in just normal cycles of retraction of carriers seat capacity in the market. So for summer seasonal activity, they may draw back. What we saw after the inauguration was a fear in consumer demand for travel because people thought tariffs were going to be very impactful. And so that has played out for San Jose. We've seen anywhere from 10% to 14% the number of seats that fly in here.

So forget about the number of airlines, but just the total seats has gone down quite a bit. We've been able to fill all the remaining seats that we have and we're doing well at what we call load factor, which is the number of seats per aircraft. But there still has been a draw out of the market. What airlines do with their metal, they move it to different markets, they're very flexible. And so that's been a challenge for us. So we will see an influx of seat capacity and metal for the games, but people, it doesn't account for just normal consumption of seats and travel as airfares continue to climb, which we'll see throughout next year.

Okay. That makes sense to me. I love flying in and out of San Jose, but sadly, San Jose, I can't fly direct to many of the places I like to

go. That's correct.

So is there do we I think this is a chicken over the egg kind of question. Is there a risk that we might lose airlines because they're not filling to capacity at this moment? And if we are, I'm sure you can't share who those might be. And on the other side of that, the flip side of that, are we in negotiations or discussions with areas, international travel areas that are high destinations right now, for example Japan? So are we looking at a contraction of airlines in our airport and is there any potential of increase in international flights Very or opportunities

good questions. Happy to either bring my air service development manager in for a deeper dive with you or bring him to this body for a presentation on airline economics, a little bit of how seat capacity and growth happens. What we've seen more recently as airlines have shifted away from what they used to look at as business travel versus leisure travel, now they look at it as premium economy, premium travelers versus economy premium customers. So it's all about the revenue. It's all about the ancillary revenues and the upcharging that they do for seat assignments and for premium boarding positions.

All of that creates a lot of challenges for us as a community. The ultra low cost carriers when I first started, we were able to bolster we brought in Frontier Airlines. We added we doubled the capacity of Spirit Airlines. My goal, my first six months was to make sure travel was affordable for all in our community and that just appropriations of seats here was mostly focused on business travel. And I wanted to make sure that travelers in all of our community could travel.

So we did that. However, with basic economy seats now on the major carriers they put out Spirit into probably they've left our market. Air Canada never came back in after COVID. And then we've seen some shifting between Hawaiian and Alaska too in terms of consolidating of seats and Hawaiian not flying as much and maybe Alaska filling in the gap. To answer your question about international growth, it really depends on Big Brother up the road.

In about 2035 or February, Phi is leading an update to our passenger forecasting numbers for our master plan. And in that it shows about 2037 if all things continue to rise, San Francisco won't have the capacity to support some of the Transpacific flights that come in. So, we meet twice a year with international carriers at roundtables. We do speed dating with them. And so, we had a representative in Hong Kong earlier this year.

We'll have somebody representing us in Rio De Janeiro later in the springtime here. And so these constant communications take five to seven years. So for this one carrier, it's not until Boeing and Airbus can deliver the fleet of aircraft that they need which is another supply chain constraint. So they're talking 2032, 2035. They're talking about runway capacity in Southeast Asia, when it will come online, and then how many gates can they get for simultaneous activity into San Francisco.

So all of those dynamics are really broad and they change every year. So we're constantly in their faces explaining the benefits that we have. We have the sixth most on time performance airport in the country. I flew home last night through Denver. All the flights into the other airport were delayed.

My flight was on time. And I'm really proud to admit that we don't have Carl the Fog. So with all of that said, it still requires a strong chamber of commerce. It requires a strong destination marketing organization and some level of economic foundation that can generate grants that the council and the city cannot provide to support the startup of some of these new airlines. So Aer Lingus went into Indianapolis with a $7,000,000 stipend from the state and the community.

British Airways went into St. Louis recently with a multi million dollar guarantee. Those funds have to come from the corporate partnerships which are a challenge here in our community.

Thank you for that explanation and the detail and I appreciate all of the background. I would love to fly direct from San Jose to Japan, for instance, but I know that's not gonna happen. And I I know that you're looking into that and and, hopefully, the big brother north of us reaches capacity really quickly so that we can attract more airlines here.

We do have

So I wish them success.

Thank you. We just for for the record, we do have Zip Air that flies seven eights. Yeah. But Japan Airlines is the parent company for them. Yes. And so we're working with them to

Yes.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. That's of my questions, but I will move for acceptance of the report.

Second.

Alright. Well, thank you for the thorough discussion of airline economics. Actually, it's really an interesting topic, and we don't hear from the airport very often in this committee, so it was it was helpful. I wish I were flying tomorrow night to Palm Springs from San Jose, but I can't, so I have to fly to go to San Francisco. But people should understand security lines are shorter here, in and out is faster, parking is closer.

I mean every element of travel is so much more convenient in San Jose. I just it's hard for me to understand why we don't have more traffic here. Assume the airlines in their marketing studies are trying to figure out where passengers are from, right? So they must figure out how many of the passengers flying out of San Francisco are from are actually San Jose or Greater South Bay so they can sort of figure out what how where they might be able to offer some convenience for those passengers. Is that right?

That's right. And some of that data is held very tightly by the carriers. Mostly if you've watched in the last three years or so, we've moved from credit card companies giving buying points from the airlines in exchange for loyalty. And so those passengers that fly on credit card loyalty will bypass San Jose. If they're a United Explorer credit card holder, They'll go to San Francisco.

They'll pay the Uber charge because their clients are paying for it or they can get that amenity there. We are working you'll hear me come to counsel sometime next year with a plan for an RFP for lounge redevelopment program. We need to expand our lounges. We need to have either credit card sponsored lounges here that will attract those users of those credit cards if not an airline specific lounge.

Okay. Yes, that's a good point. I do want to thank you for the work that you're doing to try to grow San Jose Airport. And I was going to mention the letter yesterday in the paper as well. I'm glad that you are responsive to some of the needs. It's definitely true that that's an important part of the airport experience. And San Jose is not unique in the fact that restrooms are not a great place in many airports, but certainly appreciate the focus on that. Just a couple of quick questions on a couple of the items. On the hotel analysis, the question about whether a hotel should be on-site or not. Obviously, you know, hotels, particularly that are hub hotels have them because people might spend a night on in between flights.

San Jose is not a hub hotel. When we're doing this analysis, are we looking at potential cannibalization of our other hotel properties in the city because our hotels are somewhat struggling? I would I just want to understand how that analysis is being done.

Yes, that's a great question. It would have been a land lease or it will still be a land lease. So the land is still FAA obligated properties so we can't sell the land. So the cost of the hotel, it's about a two fifty five room property, 40,000 to 50,000 square feet of meeting room space, infinity pool, fire pits up on the Top Floor. The cost per key to construct is about $600,000 but we were looking at a category where we wouldn't be cannibalizing any of the hotels in and around the airport.

So more of your transient properties are brand names like Courtyards, Hampton Inn's, Hilton properties are more business focused. This is a 4.5 star type market. So think of autograph collection tribute collections or your Kimpton hotels in your IHG group. That's where we would be in the more 400 to $4.50 a night range. We don't have that type of property here in town and so that's the target market.

Okay. And I know we're still a while off from something like that.

We would need some strong tax abatements or some kind of incentive for a developer to actually we've gotten interest but at the cost is where it scared some investors off and the current climate is really expensive. So if interest rates drop, if there is some county property tax abatements that could come through, then something might look more appealing, but that's up to developers.

Okay. And since you're here at the risk of bringing up a source subject for some people, you were talking about revenue sources at the airport. What is the status of the parking garage billboards?

That's perfect. That is coming January 5, I believe, to counsel.

It's coming back because there had to be some amendments.

We've we've done the selection.

Oh, so the RFP

The RFP's We've made a selection and the memo is being written this week.

All right. Well, thank you. We have a motion and a second. I don't see any other hands. So let's, vote to accept the report. Motion carries, five-zero. You. Could be. All right. Well, you. And now, John, I think you're back in the box for the next couple of items.

Thank you, Chair.

Have John Ristow. Regional Transportation Activities Annual Report.

As the team is coming down, let me just introduce them. We have some guests here from VTA to do a presentation. That's Ben Prasad, project manager for VTA for the Light Rail project out to East Ridge. Gretchen Bysa is also here from VTA in case there's questions on business outreach. And then Florian LaPoustiers, our division manager for regional projects along with Neil Ong, senior engineer. And I think I'm turning it right over to Venn.

Good afternoon, Chair Cohen and members of the committee. My name is Ved Persad. I'm a project manager for East H. Robart Regional Connector Project, also called EBRC in short. I also have Gretchen here, Gretchen Paisa, Community Relations Manager. So we both are from VTA. So, today, I would like to present the status on where we are on the project. Just for people who are not familiar with the project, this is a 2.4 mile long extension of light rail from existing Alamrock Station to East Ridge. This is aerial guideway in the median of Capital Expressway. We have some minor roadway widening that we did already for the project.

So the next thing is we are building the bridge, which is 2.4 mile long. We have two stations, one at Storey Road and one at East Ridge. The Storey Road station is aerial station. And the other one is at the street level at East Ridge Transit Center. We also have a pedestrian over crossing at Storey Station that connects the mezzanine level to the platform level.

And we have two traction power substations that power the light rail system. We have already completed major utilities along the corridor. The big one was the PG and E transmission line. Next slide, please. The construction itself, if you have driven by capital expenditure, you will see a lot of progress there in the last one year, a little over one year now.

So we have completed over one mile of bridge structure. The foundation pile driving is complete. So, we have the bridge construction at Ocala, Cunningham And Storey Intersections are underway. So, we have about 50% of the project is complete currently. The project obviously it's in a very dense urban area there with a lot of challenges.

As like any mega projects, we have challenges here. The project is going be complete by 2027, and we expect the revenue operations in the 2028. One of the things we did for this project procurement was to have the contractors bid competitively on the cost and the schedule element of the project. The incentive there for us was to get this project as quickly as possible. So the contractor had to bid even the number of days this project can be built.

So the benefit there for us was to minimize the construction impacts to the public. So I want to focus on work within the city of San Jose right of way. This is along Capital Avenue. The remaining work is along the expressway within the county right of way. So, in the Capital Avenue area itself, all the roadway widening is complete.

We had tail tracks. This is to the south of Alum Rock Station. That has been removed right now. And we'll be as soon as the bridge is built, we'll connect the tracks tail tracks the tracks from the Alum Rock Station to the new tracks. The bridge foundation work is complete along Capitol Avenue.

We also one of the things we did was since the because of Narrow Street there, we changed the type of foundation that we can have there so that we have minimized to minimize the noise and vibration in that area so that the foundation work is complete now. We continuously inform the businesses and the residents about the construction activities there. And next slide, please. So this is the aerial view of Capital Expressway between Ocala Avenue and Storey Road. So you will see in the median or the middle of Capital Expressway the bridge structure that's been complete.

And the next slide here shows the aerial view of Capital Expressway between Cunningham Avenue and Tully Road. So you will see on the left slide the bridge alignment itself transitions from middle of the Capital Expressway to the west of Capital Expressway, which is in front of the airport, and then it transitions down to the street level at East Ridge Transit Center. On the right photo the right bottom photo is the intersection at Cunningham Avenue. We already have started building the bridge over the Cunningham Avenue there. Next slide.

So this is the bridge at Tully Road. So this is a precast girders that was installed overnight over Tully Road. To the left of this photo on the left side would be where it is transitions from the Tully area level to the street level level and connecting to the transit center East Ridge Transit Center. So the other one is construction at Storey Road, which is you will see on the left side is the bridge faults work that's being getting it's getting ready for construction for bridge over the intersection. So that's one of the things we're focusing right now at Storey Road.

I want to mention this is one of the important intersection with a lot of construction that's going be happening because of the Storey Station there. You will see a lot of activities in that area. And so there will be at the Storey Station itself, we have three elevator towers and then we have the stairs and the pedestrian over crossing, which is a double arched bridge over crossing at Storey Station. So there's going to be a lot of activities in the next year to year and a half in this intersection at Storey Road. So the activities for the next six months, going from segment to segment, starting from the north, from Wilbur Avenue to Storey Road.

We continue to build the foundation and the bridge construction. Traffic lane closures are needed as needed. We have during off peak hours. We make sure that we minimize the traffic interruptions there traffic impacts. Story between Story, Ocala and Cunningham Intersections, now that we have built the bridge between the intersections, now we're focusing on building the bridge over the intersection.

So, that's happening at Storey, Ocala And Cunningham Intersections. And then between Storey to Ocala, we have the bridge complete and we have the track work we have started to build the tracks on the bridge itself. You'll see one of the photos on the bottom right are related to the traffic I'm sorry, the track work that's happening right now. So at Ocala Avenue to East Ridge, we are completing the bridge section. And then once the bridge is complete, we're building the track work there.

So one of the things on I mean, for a project of this size is traffic mitigation. This is one of the mitigations. So we have recruited many off duty police officers here, whether it's working at intersections during the day or at night. We have extensive planning, including real time monitoring of the traffic. We have regular traffic advisories related to the project.

It could be through media or through other sources from outreach group. So we're working closely with City of San Jose on traffic calming on the side streets. We have about four streets we have identified and we're working closely on that to get that done soon. So we have reduced the speed limit in the construction zone to 35 miles per hour. And we have crossing guards at Ocala.

Ocala is one of the intersections where we have schools there. And so we have coordinated with the schools along with other nearby agencies there for coordination. Like I said, we have extensive planning for traffic mitigation in this area. Some of the samples of traffic calming features are located here. You will see some of the ones done in District 1, District 9 and District 8.

For us, we are focusing at Storey and Hopkins, Storey and Adrian and Storey and Leaward are one of the things one of the locations that we are looking at. So the total of four intersections we're focusing on traffic calming in this area and a total of seven corners. So we're working closely with the DOT and get this work done as soon as possible. So one of the focus of the next slide, please, is regarding environmental mitigation. So this is like I said, there are many of the this is one of the many mitigations on this project of this size.

So in this case, we are working closely with partnering with our City Forest. So we have committed to planting two forty nine trees within the two mile radius of the project, free trees for residents who are interested. So, we have you can see it from the map, we have so far we have about 70 trees already planted. People have adopted these plants. And so we are working closely with them.

It's going be a three year coordination with the homeowners trying to establish these plants. And we are ahead of the plan to meet our commitment to plant the two forty nine trees. The project is financing the planting on this one. All are California native trees and drought tolerant. And like I mentioned, we have a three year stewardship on that for maintenance and assessments of the plant health and reporting and databasing. So those are the things we do as part of this program. So I'm gonna give to hand over to community to Gretchen for community outreach events.

Thank you very much for having us today. For the East Ridge Chabart Regional Connector project, we have a very, robust investment into community outreach, for this project. We have four staff, dedicated to the project, four VTA staff dedicated to the project, bilingual staff. Some of my staff actually live in that neighborhood. In addition, we have, assistance from the contractors community, relations staff, so they are in the corridor daily.

We also have a commitment from VTA for back office marketing and outreach staff to help on things like graphics and social media. And so what we do with that outreach staff is we have a very regular cadence of communication. We have weekly emails that go out. We have monthly construction updates that are very detailed that are mailed out. We have quarterly newsletters that are mailed out.

We reach over 14,000 residents along the corridor. We have made 500, over 500 home visits, so far since the start of construction. We focus many of our home visits, adjacent to on residents that are adjacent to the corridor. We have participated or held over 80 events since January 2024, and we are committed to talking with and informing our residents. You'll note there's bullet points for marketing.

In order to assist our businesses, we understand that this is construction is challenging. There are multiple construction projects in the area, not just VTA construction projects. PG and E also has projects on the crossing roadways. And in general, it's a difficult time for businesses. So we launched a shop capital campaign in December for the holiday season.

We are re upping it for this holiday season. That campaign had web and social posts, bus shelter posters, media buys, and we did create a dedicated website as a repository hosted by VTA. In addition to that business and community outreach, we did receive a referral from our board to focus on additional home and business support. Our staff is diligently working on this plan. We anticipate bringing it to our full board in early twenty twenty four, and our team is grateful for any tools that we may get to do additional community outreach from that board referral once and if approved.

So moving on to the Eastridge Station artwork. One of the highlights of the project is the artwork at Eastridge and Story Station. So the art of the Eastridge Station will be a sculpture installation on the transit plaza. The art is centrally located at the nexus of train station, bus terminal and park and ride. The Lower Arbor is it has sixteen two inches diameter curving stainless steel pipes that rise out of the ground to form a welcoming portal, shaped to suggest a soft heart and or moon.

The upper matrix is the crowning the arbor is an organic composition of shining branch like rods, refractive prisms and luminous colored discs suggest flowers and fruit creating a halo of color and light over the arbor. And there is a connective paving. The paving element at the base of the sculpture connects its two sides and forms a welcome mat. The pattern created with stainless steel inlay are set flush with plaza paving. So at Storey Station, the concept is interwoven.

It portrays San Jose's diverse patchwork of people, cultures and landscape. The concept transforms the three elevator towers and the pedestrian ore crossing into a feature gateway over Capital Expressway. Collaborating with the architects, the original metal panel design was reimagined in a custom purple color palette to create contrast between light boxes and elevator towers. We have 16 glass light boxes of various sizes. The light box elements includes pictures and patterning from cultures making up the tapestry of San Jose, including indigenous, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian and Persian.

On the light boxes are the lines of poetry from four San Jose poets. That will be a central component of the art. The poets were prompted to respond to themes of travel, journey, voyage and wandering. So the next slide is the budget and schedule. So this is a 652 point

I'm so sorry, Ben.

I missed your story, but

I'm sorry. Oh, it's okay, sorry. So on the budget and schedule, so it's $652,900,000 So the project is on schedule for completion, and the project is trending to complete on budget at this time. We expect the construction to be complete by 2027 and revenue service in early twenty twenty eight. So with that, I'd be happy to take any questions.

Okay. Thank you. Do we have any members of the public on

this item?

No public comment.

Okay. Let's turn it over to Ortiz.

How's it going, you guys? Good to see you. I want to thank VTA for their report. Really appreciate that update. But I'm very aware of EBRC and what's going on in my district.

Good to hear about some of the progress in regards to the traffic safety. I'll touch on that. But I just want to provide my colleagues just with some background information in regards to what some of my residents have been experiencing due to the EBRC project, which is something I'm supportive of. It's a project that is going to bring transportation infrastructure to East San Jose, which has the largest ridership of VTA and public transportation in the county. So I want to note that and say that at the end of this process, this will be a great addition to our residents, especially those in District 5.

That being said, there has been a great impact to both my residents and my entrepreneurs in District 5, especially those in the Capital And Capital Crossroads Shopping Center. And, you know, I know it was touched on that there was a referral that was introduced to the VTA board. But I had been working, I've been trying to talk to VTA staff honestly for about a year, I'll say a couple months before then, trying to get some help for these small businesses because a lot of those businesses are immigrant owned. And once they're gone, we're going to get more corporate styled businesses to enter and then we'll lose the taquerias, we'll lose the nail salons, we'll lose the pho places and we'll get subways and Jamba Juices, which for some individuals that that may be fine. But me as a small business advocate, especially an advocate for immigrants, I wanna make sure that we remain a place where immigrants can obtain the the American the American dream.

So many many businesses have reported to me of losing up to 40 to 50% of their overall clientele. And I know that Vitan mentioned that there has been outreach and there has been outreach, but sending people to stop by your business with flyers when what you really need is financial compensation or construction disruption support is another thing. We've come to the point where residents in the morning, they don't or even during lunchtime, they don't want to go to Capitol Expressway for their restaurants or to do their dry cleaning because they'd rather go somewhere else, which is which provides a a major hardship for my for my for my district. And so I'm glad the referral went through, the initial portion of the referral. Looking forward to early next year.

Hope honestly, because every month we go is another major hit to these businesses. You know, I would have liked for this to be mitigated before the holidays because this is also going to be a major time where small businesses in the Eastside San Jose are going to make a large amount of their funds, yet they're going to continue to be impacted. And so I know that you're mentioning the beginning of next year. Do we have an idea of what month in the beginning of next year?

We do not have anything solidified right now, but we are hoping to meet the February board meeting.

Okay. February board meeting. All right. That seems honestly, I'll be honest with you, that seems like a lot of time taken. I understand you guys have to do your work, but a lot of this stuff is a day by day case, especially the holiday season. Would have liked for this to be done earlier, especially because I've been raising this during VTA board meetings or meetings with Aaron Quigley or Manolo for months. And actually going to VTA to speak to the communications team and to Manolo for months now. Okay. I just want to just a few more comments. Dollars 500,000, which is initially tentatively approved, I appreciate that.

However, these funds are both for homes and for small businesses who are impacted by the construction. And there are several homeowners who are coming to me saying that there are cracks in their infrastructure, whether it's their driveways, the sides of their homes. And we know that in reality those impacts can easily rise to, gosh, who knows 50,000 per home. And I understand that this is not meant to be a one v one match, We're not matching the entire impact. But to me, 500,000 is not enough.

I appreciate the board referral, but I've been working with those VTA board members who introduced it. And there's still multiple years left in this project. And so I do in no way do I feel $500,000 is going to meet the needs of my residents. And I will be coming back in brutal honesty for more of those funds because it. They're going to Finally, in regards to the traffic, recruitment for I think you mentioned in one of your slides, recruitment of city police officers for support with traffic support.

How is that looking? What are the conversations looking? Do we have a headcount? Do we have a timeline for any of this to be done?

So we do have regular communications with off duty police officers. I mean we have a liaison with San Jose Police, so we work with. So, whenever we need resources, we talk to the captain of the police department.

And how often are you obtaining those resources?

Regularly. Let's say if there is a construction happening at an intersection. As recently at Ocala, we had issues with accidents there and people not obeying the rules there. So, had police there every day. Police presence was there at the intersection. But the good thing is we have opened the lanes. You probably have noticed we have opened the lane at left turn at Ocala. So we don't need a police presence at the intersection at this time. But for any intersection work, whether it's daytime or nighttime, we ask for San Jose police to help us. It's not easy. Many a times they're not available.

What about crossing guards? You mentioned crossing guards.

How So, long we do have crossing guards at Ocala, especially because of the school that's there. So, at Storey, what we have done right now is we have a protected crosswalk at Storey Station. It's fully encased and enclosed, I should say, enclosed pathway for protection for pedestrians. And so that was sorry, the structure was installed about two to three weeks ago.

Oh, really? So this is three so this was post that town hall that we had in partnership together at the Hillview Community Center? Hank Lopez. Hank Lopez Community Center. Okay.

That was going be my next question is after our meeting that we had in partnership with my constituents, what updates have you made in regards to traffic impact? So okay, so that was one addition that you made. Alright. I continue to hear that Story Road is just an area that has increased transportation hazard for those who are walking, crossing the street. And so I just ask that you maintain channels with the community and if we do need crosswalks, cross crossing guards in that area, that we we explore that as well.

And then finally, in regards to our community outreach and our small business support, how are we quantifying those efforts?

We are still developing the program for the board referral itself. But for the programs that

Until now. Yeah. Previously. How

are quantifying? So we did go business by business to see if they wanted to participate, by offering a discount, etcetera. None of the businesses at Crossroad, wanted to participate with us, on that. So it was difficult for us to quantify from, like, a sales perspective, because we didn't have that business participation. So we looked at social media impressions, website visits, etcetera, etcetera.

Currently, we do have large banners at print. We're trying to work with the property owner at Crossroads to hang that banner to stay open for business. And we're also identifying areas that we control along the corridor, construction fencing, etcetera, etcetera, to have a very visible reminder for motorists along the corridor. For the upcoming board referral, what I would like to do is hire an external firm that may be more familiar with marketing kind of smaller immigrant businesses. And that way they can we've got kind of a discrete amount of money that we're spending.

They can measure the metrics on it, and they're specialized very specifically in marketing those types of businesses. Not to mention that our marketing team is going to be busy with the Super Bowl.

So

Okay. Appreciate I got my mic is blinking, but just to comment really quickly on that. Think it's very important that we're quantifying this because like you said, VTA made a website to highlight the small businesses on capital and capital. But it's like who before they go out to eat is thinking, oh let's look on the VTA website for where we should have dinner, right? And so it's like are we doing busy work or are we doing work that will actually help business owners and District 5 residents, right.

That's what I hope VTA staff is taking into consideration during these discussions. And then same thing with like these large banners, right. Okay, you're going to get a billboard, well that's a couple thousand dollars, well you could have easily purchased food at one of the restaurants and did like an event to bring people to Capital on Capital by directly investing those funds into a restaurant or into the pizza place or into one of those businesses instead of putting together a billboard that in which we don't even know if the money is if there's even going to be a return on investment. So that's just two examples that I'd like to point at. And then I appreciate that VTA has been in places.

One of the been places to raise awareness about this project. One experience I had was I was invited to the Taylor Oaks Apartments for a ice cream social and then VTA asked my staff to pay for the ice cream for the ice cream social to connect with my residents. And so it just kind of it just makes me feel like, okay, how much skin is VTA willing to put in the game in order to reach my constituents? And then how much is just focused on on this busy work?

We do see in other large infrastructure projects partnerships between cities, council offices, supervisors, etcetera. So we do know that there are resources that we can leverage. I just met with OED the other day. Thank you for referring them over to Jessica Munoz. We know that the city has a very robust technical assistance program that they run through OED, which we're going to try to help amplify as well as part of the business assistance program because these resources are in place and folks don't know about it.

So wherever we can partner because we are trying to build this project on time and on budget, we would like that. If folks would prefer to have VTA handle it, that's fine. We just but we're happy to partner. And we're happy for these suggestions, too. We're trying to be responsive to your requests.

Well, mean I have a history with VTA, especially on the BRT project and the same people who made a big mess of the BRT project are the same ones working on this project. And so it makes me feel like there's no accountability within the organization. So I hear what you're saying about partnering. But even when I started having these issues in my district, going to Ken, his response to me was, oh, VTA has no obligation to provide funds to the public for construction disruption, which may be true. I'm sure it is true. But that's not the attitude that VTA should have to communities of color and immigrant and working class neighborhoods when they cause impacts. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you, council member. I will entertain a motion to accept the transportation activities report.

Move to accept the report. Second.

Alright. We have a motion and a second. I don't see any other comment requests, so let's, vote on this one. Okay. That motion carries five zero. And thank you very much for being here and giving us the the report on this very important project. Okay. Finally, our city street sweeping performance status report.

Thank you again, chair. John Ristow, director of transportation. While the team's coming down, I'm gonna introduce them and ask them to speed it up. We know we're a little bit late. With me here in the box is Jennifer Sagan, Deputy Director of our Infrastructure Maintenance Division, Ben Tran, Division Manager and Arianne Collin, Division Manager for Parking. Jennifer?

Thank you, John. Jennifer Sagan, Deputy Director for Infrastructure Maintenance. So just as we begin I want to start by again saying kind of what the purpose of street swooping is. A lot of people think it's cleaning the roads, but really what it is to it's a best practice under the storm water permit for removing pollutants that could get into the storm drains and ultimately in the waterways. Some examples of that are sediment and nutrients from fertilizers and animal toxic metals such as copper and mercury and organic material.

So, the street surfers go along the curb line to try and remove the small collections of litter and debris that build up and that where the sediment with these pollutants can collect. And again, a friendly reminder, our street sweeping program is delivered as a hybrid model. The in house program is operated by DOT staff driving city owned vehicles and they sweep the arterial roads, connectors, bikeways and business districts and approximately 46% of the curve miles swept per year are, swept by the in house program. And the other side of the house, the residential streets are swept once a month by a contractor, and their contractor green waste is managed jointly by DOT and ESD as part of the green waste waste management contract. The hybrid model allows DOT the flexibility to send out a sweeper whenever needed 20 fourseven and it gives us a resource deployed as needed.

So this is a slide that we haven't included in the past and there is a lot of information on the slide. So I'm going to just summarize a little bit. What we did was we broke down if you're I'm going to direct you to the yellow part of the presentation on the slide. ACB is our arterials connectors and bikeways. So you're going to see in each council district how many miles of arterial connector and bikeway curve miles are in the district.

NBD is our neighborhood business districts. CBD is the central business district or basically the downtown area and RSS is residential street swooping. And so I pulled some numbers together. If you total everything down the bottom, you'll see the total number of curb miles swept per district or and the total number of signed miles per district. And then going across, you'll see the total number of miles for each of the different programs.

Hopefully everybody knows, but an arterial is a high capacity urban road that sits below a highway on the road hierarchy and a connector is a smaller road designated to connect between different areas from major roads to highways. So these are some of the bigger streets as opposed to the residential areas. And the number of curb miles per council district varies from about 6% of the city's total miles swept to and that's in District 7 to about 13% in District 10. And I think that's mostly just based on geography and how much of the city area is in each of the districts. But then the percent of curb miles per signed curb miles per council district is not as equitably distributed.

So we've got about 1.4% of those signed curb miles, which prevent people from parking during sweeping hours. 1.4% is District 9 and that goes up to about 52% in District 3. So that means in District 3, fifty 2% of all the curb miles are signed for prohibiting parking. And so you'll see in the areas that are denser, we have more signs prohibiting parking during sweeping hours. Moving forward.

Got a chart here showing the consolidated view of route completion for both sweeping programs together over the past ten years. City sweepers use system which tracks the sweeper location and the speed. The tool is useful in verifying completion of the sweeper route. So we often get requests in or concerns in that, hey, my street didn't get swept and we can go back and look at the geo tab to see, yes, the sweeper did pass by. And then the next step is what did the parking situation look like because it's often unable to get to the curb because of parking or large piles of debris.

And then our in the last two years, our two fiscal years, so fiscal year 2023, 2024, we were approximately 91% complete on routes and the same thing in 2425. We're looking to get closer to 100% this fiscal year. And then on residential streets, DOT has inspectors that follow the sweepers to assess the effectiveness of the street sweeping. Green waste, the contractor also has some route verification system in their sweepers that are similar to Geotab. So again, if we ask them, we can they'll be able to respond to verify that the sweeper had gone by at what time and at what speed.

Sometimes the speed indicates how effective they were to. If they're going too fast, we know that they may needed to slow down to get a little bit better sweep. The residential street sweeping program also relies on city inspection staff, who in real time assess the sweeping performance and can identify other issues such as obstructions or parked vehicles. Greenwaste also has two supervisors out monitoring their team and they often handle customer service issues directly. So they're very responsive if we call and ask them to do a re sweep or check something out.

So moving on to some of our core service measurements for the street sweeping effectiveness, you're going to see two different bars there and the chart on the blue chart depicts the sweeping effectiveness as observed by the DOT inspection staff. So we are evaluating our own effectiveness and they use a five point scale to measure the effectiveness and a copy of the chart that they use was included in the memo as Attachment A. Five points equals there was no debris left behind and one point rating indicating there was an issue that resulted in some significant debris left behind. Switching to the orange bar that represents resident feedback through the city's customer focused survey. It's question 14F, which is conducted quarterly.

The most recent survey was completed in quarter one of the fiscal year. And DOT intends to work with the city manager's office to update the performance measure to see if we can get a little bit better alignment between what we're seeing out there and what residents are experiencing as well. Some of the barriers and challenges to sweeping are probably nothing new to any of you, but this slide shows the most common barriers that we have. The picture on the left is showing debris at the curb line. Large debris piles are often avoided by sweeper operators because inside the pile might be hidden something that could fly out or damage the vehicle as they go through it.

Although I have seen sweepers operators slowly go through a large pile and pick it up. So it's kind of at their discretion whether they think that they can successfully and safely pick up the pile. When there are large debris piles out there, first of all, a lot of residents don't realize that it's the property owners responsibility to make sure that the curb line is clear and leafy debris and we're in the middle of leafy leaf drop season now should be put in piles at the curb about a foot away from the curb to allow storm water to flow past it, but it shouldn't be set out until the day before the collection. But we often see early set outs or late set outs. But if there are large piles out there of just any type of debris, they can contact our dispatch office to have us evaluate whether it needs to get removed.

And we can either have staff follow-up or call on one of our programs to take care of that. Another common sweeping issue are trees with branches that hang below 14 feet over the street. So the picture at the top right, you could see the sweeper, or garbage truck actually trying to get to the curb. And, if branches are low, we've had some of our vehicles hit the branch and damage the vehicle slightly or, they have to swerve away from the curb to avoid the the branch, and we do, proactively, look for these obstacles. The middle picture shows the impact of parked vehicles.

And as a reminder, if there's one car at the curb, the sweeper to avoid it has misses about three car lengths of curb to avoid that. Their parked cars are probably the greatest impediment to street sweeping. One, street sweeping signage is one way to address it, although it's very expensive, and, we are only able to install it when funding is available. Another way to address issues is our enhanced sweeps. And we have done a number of sweeps this year, many more than we thought we could.

So we're getting better at being able to deliver that surface. Moving on, I'm gonna pass to Bin.

Thank you, Jennifer. As Jennifer mentioned earlier, the hybrid program really help us ensure the efficiency of our swooping program. And in the next few slides, I'll be going over, the differences between the Citi in house swooping program and the contractual program as well as, pointing out some of the approach that we came up with to in order to resolve some of the challenges that Jennifer also mentioned in the previous slides. For the Citi in house crew, employ the sweeper operators, and we also own the the equipment to to sweep the bike routes and the downtown areas. On a typical day, we would have about four sweepers and one operators to deploy and recollect all the waste bin that we put out in the street to ensure the safety and, the cleanliness of the street.

Friday, we would typically use that day for catching up with any missed route, or any special projects that being assigned by, the city council. And on top of that, our team also helped, with some of the requests from San Jose Police Department and Fire Department. Our crews operate during nighttime, typically during great shift from twelve to 08:30 in the morning. And hours can extend longer than that, if we have any special request.

Just just for the sake of time, I know that, for for example, vice mayor has to go and wants to ask a couple questions. So we're gonna put a pause on this for a second, let her ask answer ask her questions, and then try to move through the rest of it very quickly.

Thank you. I I appreciate that. I didn't think this meeting was gonna go so long and I have a meeting I have to get back to my office for. Turns out that today is the day that I had street sweeping in my neighborhood. And I also noticed that it didn't get sweat pretty very well because there are a lot of, not a lot of cars, but a lot of piles of leaves. So how do we encourage yard waste, not and and my trash pickup was Saturday by the way. How do we encourage or discourage yard waste from being put out too early?

Thank you for the question. That's a great question. We're working in coordination with, the environmental services department to communicate that out to the residents. And that is one of the biggest challenges, especially if you're my sweep day is on Friday and then a lot of people in my neighborhood have their gardening done on Saturday and they want to set it out on the curb on Monday and have it wait till the next Friday. So that's some messaging that's going to be going out in partnership with the Environmental Services Department. But that's one of the biggest challenges that we face. We can do better.

I've said this before every time this report comes up and I'm going to say it again. I would love us to investigate the cost of providing yard waste bins for everyone so that this situation is avoided. That's what I have in my house because I don't like it out on on the street and my gardener comes on Friday and puts it in the yard waste. So a yard bin. I know everyone can afford that so I'd like to see us figure out how we might be able to do it, make sure we have that at low cost and also would eliminate what Jordan's gonna come and talk about is yard waste in bike lanes because people are putting out their yard waste in bike lanes.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I noticed a sweeper, not the one in my neighborhood today, but a few weeks ago, really speeding through a neighborhood. Going beyond the speed limit and actually running a stop sign. As a Vision Zero person, I'm very sensitive to speed in the residential neighborhoods, and I'm glad to hear that we have geotabs, but how often are we checking with green waste to confirm the speed of their vehicles?

That is a really great question. First of all, let me say if you do notice that, please call us. You can call the dispatch line, the (408) 794-1900 number and just say you notice that and we'll definitely investigate it. And I will say, I know we are looking at our in house program. We get alerts regularly if somebody speeds or if they're not wearing a seat belt, any safety issues, but I'm not sure about the contractor. So I will look into that.

Okay. Really, it's they're going through residential areas with children who are walking, people who are walking. It's extremely dangerous. I was shocked at the speed that they were driving, and I'll be happy to give you the neighborhood. It wasn't my neighborhood. It was the one right next to my neighborhood who has a different sweep street sweeping day than I

Yeah. I do. Do.

I will. Thank you. And thank you, chair, for letting me go first. I will move acceptance of the report.

Well, just let's let's quickly see if there's some stuff we wanna see on these last few slides. We'll go through them fast, then we'll move on.

Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to move next to, the residential stripping program being run by, our contractors, GreenWaste. So GreenWaste actually, have their own employees, provide their own equipments. But our inspectors, we do oversee their operations.

And our inspector, like Jennifer mentioned earlier, we're going after them, making sure that they're sweeping all the way to the curb, up against the curb and they're not going too fast and not leaving any debris behind. And on top of that, our inspector would be in communication with the residents just to make sure that the resident understand that street need to be clear, tree need to be pruned. And we do communicate proactively with the residents, especially in those areas that we see the problem keep coming back.

And

in order to fight some of the common troubles, our inspectors actually keep track keep track of a list of, common trouble spots. Two of the major issues that we've been having with tree sweeping is our parked cars and tree clearance. For these cases, our inspector would be leaving door hangers and notice on the vehicles just to make sure that the residents understand the importance of leaving the street clear. On top of that, we also inspect the street and make sure that the streets are free of obstructions. And if there's any obstruction in the street, cars are not moving, we'd be in coordination with our parking compliance team to make sure we can do advanced notice so that we can move the car out of the way for the upcoming sweeping.

And this slide showcase a response to a very common question we've been getting over the last few years. What would be the cost to install signs and enforce streets around the city to make sure that we can sweep effectively. So this is the cost at about 100 miles of street sweeping with signage. From the top table, that is onetime cost would be including the fabrications and installations of the signs. It also includes three vehicles for parking compliance officer and some equipments for the operations.

And the table below highlight the ongoing costs ongoing annual costs to operate this program. So onetime cut is about $1,000,000 and annually it will cost us about another $1,000,000 to add about 100 miles of

DOT parking compliance officers are responsible for the enforcement of posted parking restrictions in street sweeping zones and do so through the issuance of parking citations. Citywide parking compliance officers are called upon to enforce over 500 miles of street sweeping restriction or roughly 13% of curb miles. In fiscal year 2425, over 66,000 citations were issued to 45,000 vehicles. Approximately 90% of vehicles cited during the year received one or two citations indicating that these vehicles may have simply forgotten to move their car on the street sweeping day. A low volume of habitual offenders noted at 1.3% of vehicles cited suggests that citations are an effective enforcement tool in most cases.

When looking at where the street sweeping citations were issued, approximately 72% were issued in areas with Equity Atlas scores eight, nine, and 10, which represent neighborhoods with a high concentration of low income and communities of color. To assist our communities with understanding more about specific street sweeping activities in their area, the city has an online street sweeping lookup tool. The interactive map can be assessed via multiple paths on the city's website, including DOT and ESD pages. Additionally, in January 2024, ITD introduced a street sweeping lookup feature within SJ three eleven, which also offers an option to subscribe to email notifications about upcoming sweep schedules for your address the day before a sweep. Next.

Okay. And to conclude, our action items for the fiscal year this year, we were able to, complete 19 enhanced sweeps last year, and we're hoping to, do the same thing this year. We're going to be drafting a budget proposal to add signed mileage to our inventory. We've got a backlog of about 14 different locations that people have been requesting signs for. And we're going to just put forward something that says, okay, if we're going to do all of that, here's how much it costs, and we'll see if the funding is made available or not.

We're also going to consider use of new technology to prove the effectiveness and efficiency. I'm hoping that we could come up with something like a Roomba or something that we can set out in the bike lanes. And we're looking at companies that have some unique solutions to see what we can employ. And then we also want to develop a condition rating tool that can be used by the public to help identify trouble spots and let that data be used to help enhance our maintenance plan. And then as Councilmember Foley mentioned, we will look into working with ESD to price out how much it would cost to provide the sweep waste bins to prevent, sweep waste from being an obstacle that, prevents us from getting a clean sweep.

And with that, we're that concludes our presentation.

Alright. Let's go with public comment. We'll have, we'll cut it down to one minute since we're running so late.

Jordan, make your way down to the podium, please.

Okay. Yeah. So certainly yard waste in bike lanes is still an issue. I wasn't really gonna talk about that. I've heard complaints of, like, glass and other small debris, that doesn't get swept often enough.

Bird Ave being an example that is cited to me very frequently, but, you know, things where there's truck routes and other things that scatter a lot of glass. In the slide where you talked about the citation giving, I think it would be useful to break it down, like how many cars get exactly one citation and how many cars get exactly two citations. I think breaking it down more would make it more effective to understand what's the potential benefits of deploying more signs. I am, in general, supportive of deploying more signs equitably and just making sure people know. Because maybe, you know, if we could do a comparison and contract between violations on on streets with signs versus without to understand, like, maybe, like, 50% of violations won't happen if people just know about it.

And I think last year, we talked about maybe email notification.

Back to the committee.

Thank you. Okay. Council member Campos is next.

Thank you, chair. And I wanna start off by thanking staff for this presentation. You called out attachment a which is especially helpful in visualizing and understanding the effectiveness of street sweeping and the concerns that we hear from neighbors when the street sweeping is falling short of the standard and the possible corrective actions that we can take. In my district I've heard directly from neighbors about street sweeping that lands in the unacceptable and the not good category. And this could be for a variety of reasons, some that we heard during the presentation today.

So to that end, I do have just a few questions I want to go through first on data inquiry. Do we have data on customer satisfaction both for in house and contracted services?

Thank you for the question. I believe the performance measures that we're tracking are the effectiveness that I mentioned, but I don't think we have satisfaction. So the question that's in the community focus survey focuses on how clean do you feel the sweep streets are, so that quasi satisfaction.

Okay. And so that is helping us to assess the quality of the sweeping that's performed by both entities?

Correct.

Okay. And so what is it that we're learning from the information?

We need to do better.

Thank you for those responses. I also wanted to get some more information on the expansion of parking prohibition signs throughout the neighborhoods, and I appreciate the work that your team has done to provide us with the cost estimate. At a million dollars in upfront costs and a million dollars in ongoing costs, I think it's incredibly important that we identify sustainable funding for this work, especially as we approach what will likely be a difficult budget season for our city. So has staff identified a funding source, and will there be more details about program design and implementation through an MBA in the future?

Thank you for the question. The street sweeping program is currently funded through the Stormwater Fund. And you're probably aware the Stormwater Fund is facing some challenges with sustainability. And so we're bringing the budget proposal forward to kind of start to evaluate where funding might come from, and it might have to point to the general fund.

Okay. And so to the best of your knowledge, will adding a 100 miles of street sweeping parking prohibitions to play a dual purpose? So for example, we have a large district, I think the largest in terms of land mass, with many residential areas. And I'm thinking about neighbors who have a desire for more vehicle turnover as other council districts have in their neighborhoods with chronic parking compliance issues. So can these street sweepings, and and the postings help us tackle other forms of parking compliance issues?

It

can. If that street is signed, then those residents that are on those signed streets do have to move their cars once per month. That's not a lot, but it does have some turnover. We are also and I think this was reported in the parking item that was first. We had a MBA four item that was added to that direction for us to actually investigate a pilot project to use tow way, this is going be a pilot in one or two zones where we would use actually tow way signs for street sweeping days.

We haven't completed that work. We're still trying to identify what areas we want to do that in. That pilot project may inform a lot in terms of if that enhanced enforcement creates more turnover of the vehicles around the street sweeping, which gets to the parking issue of compliance too. So maybe both of these put together might do some of that, but it really would we think it would be helpful on a number of reasons to get more signed curb lines, curb areas just because the effectiveness of street sweeping goes way up and obviously the vehicles would then move during at least that one time period in the month.

Thank you for that response. I know that this work is incredibly important not just to my Residents but throughout the city we have a high need for for cleaner streets, especially in high density Living areas and my last question given the funding is coming from the storm water adoption program and our last council meeting we heard from council member Kamay about the opportunity that we have by promoting that program. So how can this work overlap with ESD for example with the storm water adoption program with the school cities collaborative because I think that those are very important opportunities for information sharing and there has been I know probably less funding for information campaigns as there used to be previously. So in addition to the work that you're doing to explore putting up signs, what opportunities are there that we can leverage? Fact that so many of our families especially our immigrant families see schools as a place for information and resources and strengthening that partnership and that opportunity to excite young learners about keeping their streets clean, which will then inform their parents about the work that they also have to do to keep the streets clean.

Thank you for that question. I love to think big picture about how different things connect to each other. And so we've got the Adopt A Storm Drain program that you've mentioned, And the Department of Transportation does a lot of the walk and roll outreach to schools. And we have coordinated with the walk and roll program to have them also give information out about storm water pollution while they're out there. And so that's an opportunity for them also to promote the Adopt a Storm Drain program communications that we sent out with the ESD, our ESD partners, we can pull all of that messaging together to make sure that we're capitalizing on every opportunity to encourage people to adopt to their street, their storm drain, and through that program, make them aware of what they could be doing in front of their own home.

And I'll just end my questions with this last comment because big picture, right? Twenty twenty six, a lot of people, lot of eyes on the city. We talk about that as an opportunity for civic pride engagement. And what better way to promote civic pride than, you know, that personal responsibility of caring for your neighborhood, keeping a clean neighborhood, safe neighborhood for all. And so I think that there is a lot of opportunity with twenty twenty six around the corner to even think about you know some of the sports and entertainment work that we're doing.

How can that come into our neighborhoods directly promote that sense of civic pride through programs like this that encourage neighbors to adopt storm drains, neighbors to clean up and follow the rules and make sure that we're creating a safe clean San Jose for all. So thank you again for all the work that you do.

You bet. Thanks for the ideas.

Alright. We'll move on to council member Ortiz.

Thank you. I'll try to keep my comments short. Know, street sweeping is also an essential city service that District 5 and my residents feel we just haven't been seen the proper or have had their expectations met by by the city of San Jose. I think it's a lot of it's connected due to the large amount of whether it's abandoned vehicles or lived in vehicles that are in the district Because then that as well as individuals living multiple families in one home. And so that makes it a lot harder for people to move out of the area when it's street sweeping day, which in turn reduces the quality of the street sweeping job.

Even though, you know, despite a lot of these violations occurring in my district, and I know my district has a lot of the signs, I think by work done by previous council members to advocate to have those signs put in, District 5 unfortunately just doesn't see the quality of street sweeping that we'd like to see. And so I would just like to ask, in regards to the contract that we have with street sweeping provider, how often is that reevaluated?

So the Environmental Services Department manages the contract. I believe that it's a fifteen year contract.

Fifteen year contract.

Yeah, so it's a long term contract. And the street sweeping, the contract is with the yard waste contractor. And then as we've talked about, yard waste gets set out on collection day and then the street sweeping comes in the next day to try and capture the residual that's left on the street from that. So they're put together in the same contract. And there's an advantage to the city to have long term contracts with the haulers so that they can invest in infrastructure for their own operations. And it guarantees them work for a number of years. So I believe it's about every fifteen years.

How long have you been in this contract with this service provider? If I remember correctly, we're 2035 is the next kind of contract.

Exactly. 2035 is the next contract.

So But but is this our first

time in this contract, or was it

the same one that we just carried over into a new contract, the same service provider? When do we start with this service provider, this street sweeper? 2020. Alright. I just to brutally honest, I'm just not seeing the quality.

I don't know what my other colleagues, you know, what their type of concerns are. My district, almost every single neighborhood, I'm having residents reach out. I understand that there's sometimes the expectation is that they're gonna clean up all the trash on the street, which as you mentioned earlier in this conversation, that's not the point. But I get photos from neighborhood leaders just showing me streets in District 5 neighborhoods that just, in my opinion, aren't swept. I've personally heard stories of the Street Sweeper just avoiding streets altogether.

And it may be because of the over concentration of vehicles. And so they feel like they're unable to sweep those streets. But I'm glad that we have long contracts with these service providers, but as you said, it should be for the benefit of the city. But I, for one, as the council member from District 5, have not seen the benefit for my residents. You.

Councilmember, and for anyone, if you do receive complaints of the quality or you see it yourself or your staff, the best thing to do is actually report it. I think that many of those are not related to street sweeping, but perhaps just the debris that's been placed in the street. And then as we reported, street sweepers can't take that sort of thing. But if we get those reports, we can certainly work with ESD on those and us. So the best thing is to report it.

And if there's a belief that a street sweeper is not hitting a certain street, let us know that too because again we track all those and we would be able to provide record of when and where those street sweeper are hitting all those locations. So it's really helpful working with your office to get that information and then we can actually act on it. For anyone

And I have in the past, we went to Arbuckle, the Arbuckle neighborhood with We've Arono's

been out

there for that one, right?

You, me personally with DOT staff have looked at the issues. But when it just comes down, I mean I can't do that every single month in every single neighborhood of my district. And so I just wanted to elevate that. I have concerns about it, and, you know, I'm not sure what my colleagues think. Thank you.

Well, thank you. And I I wanna say this is one of those topics that's frustrating, but also really hard to solve. We've we've we've you know, is not this we've annually had this almost exact same conversation at this meeting. So I just want to ask a few questions based on some new things I've thought of since during your presentation. I'm still a little confused about the what I understand to be that there's a monitor who follows the street sweeper. That's true for our contractor, right? Is it one of their employees or one of our employees?

Thank you for the question. So it's a combination of both. So we have in DOT inspection staff that follow the residential street sweepers and they Green Waste also has a couple supervisors that do the same thing.

So that 91% street completion number, does that just mean they've driven down the street because they it doesn't mean that they've gotten 91% of curb length.

Is that correct? That's correct.

And and our monitors are the ones who are who are tracking that on for those residential street sweeping?

Correct. And there are, again, directing you to attachment a in the memo, using that as an effectiveness, score. So as they're following, they're scoring what they see as they go.

It just feels like there's a better way to do this. Similar to what I mentioned before about utilizing our proactive abandoned vehicle patrols, that this person there's a lot more we can get out of this individual who's following the vehicles. But I mean, I'm not sure we're going to solve that now. I'm kind of throwing that out there that if that there is a person following them, and yet we're getting reports of things that aren't complete, I wonder, you know, if we if we if we have a better way of collecting data to understand what's happening on all of our streets with a person who's monitoring what's what's going on. If we if they bypass a cul de sac because there's too many cars in the cul de sac, I assume we we know that because the person's following, and we should be able to quickly say, yes.

We didn't get to that street because of this reason. Also, I'm thinking of of, you know, some kind of visual monitoring that record or something that shows a before and after pictures now and then, because being able to show our residents, well, yeah, it's not perfect, but here are pictures of what the street looked like before the street sweeper came down, and here's one after. Yes, it doesn't always happen because there's sometimes a car in the way, but it does actually make a difference. If we can't show visually that there's an improvement when the street sweeper goes by, I wonder if the street sweeping service itself is the right service to be providing to the city. And I'm I'm not I haven't been convinced of that.

Although, I mean, I certainly have seen them come to my street, there's a little it it you know, you can see the the water on the where they've got things gone by, and maybe some there's a little bit less debris there. But, you know, I I wanna understand, is this really having an impact? And then, you know, in fact there's a question of putting up signage and the ongoing cost of a million dollars a year to cover that signage I mean, to patrol and ticket based on that signage, That person who's I mean, aren't there other ways to do this? In fact, we have that individual, the monitor, who's following the street sweeper who could be, you know, deputized in another way to actually do that work at streets that are signed. It seems to me that we don't that there's there's an in between solution, is putting up the signs, not necessarily patrolling, sending out parking enforcement.

But the the presence of the sign themselves is a key thing. And what I think is the biggest gap in the success here is whether our residents know what day their street sweeping is. If I go outside every week and I see that thing, oh, yeah, yeah, it's tomorrow. Honestly, I don't ever remember the day that my street sweeping is supposed to be. I know it's a Monday. I forget. It the second Monday or the third Monday? I don't remember. If there were a sign there, I would know, and I would make sure that the cars were moved. I do think that there's a huge benefit to that, and that investing in the signs is key and not necessarily the enforcement. So, we might want to separate those things.

Yeah, we agree. We'd like to see more signs.

Okay. And then, I was just going to ask, I know that there's a question about budget for the 100 miles of signs, but maybe if we could break it down into, like, units of per block, how much does signs cost? Individual council offices could submit individual budget documents for small stretches of street that are important to us in our council districts as well, break it down into smaller elements. And then the last thing I was gonna mention, the picture on page seven that showed the leaves, I don't necessarily need put it up, it showed leaves, but that picture, maybe it was just meant to be somewhat illustrative, that didn't look to me like a pile put out by a resident who was doing yard waste. That looked like that there's trees on the street and the leaves build up in the in the area along the curb.

That's not necessarily a case where I don't know whether our yard waste folks are supposed to be trying to clear those when they're up against the curb. Or I always thought that was the kind of case that we have street sweeping for. So I'm trying to understand, was that picture

That picture is actually maybe not doing it well enough, but that's supposed to illustrate that the overhang trees are are not allowing the street sweeper

to No. The get one the one on

the left side was I thought it was about leaves in the gutter.

It's the trees that the street sweeper can't get to the street to pick those up. Otherwise, they could.

This was an acceptable if level. There's leaves that are built up in the gutter that are just kind of or along the curb that are could be a few couple inches high, is that something that a street sweeper should be collecting? Or is that

Oh, it's too too much, then they'll avoid it. But that picture was supposed to illustrate that the trees were impeding the street sweeper. Okay. We can Slide provide

seven. Just to quickly, I want to understand what we can expect from this

Probably some more examples would be helpful as well.

Yeah. So just on this this picture on the left Yeah. Is that about tree overhang or about leaves

in the overhang.

So that is an example of tree overhang, but at the same time, the green waste contractors should be trying to scrape those up at the curb if they couldn't with the Okay.

But that's not the responsibility of any individual because that wasn't put out by someone. That was probably leaves that fell off trees and built up in the gutter.

And it looks like not a residential area, but the local the property owner that's adjacent should be responsible for making sure the curb line is clear. But we know a lot of people don't realize that.

Alright. Thank you. I I think we've gone past time, but I I just wanted to kinda raise a few questions of things that I thought about during this. I think we we had a motion and a second already, so let's vote on this item.

Can I confirm the seconder on the motion?

Oh, it was it was Campos.

Thank you.

Alright. That motion carries four zero with one absent, and we are on to public I mean, to open forum.

Jordan, please make your way down to the podium.

I won't be able to make it to council tomorrow, so I wanted to express my support for the group memo on item 6.2, the clean energy pilot from chair Cohen and council member Tordios and some others. A few weeks ago, we also talked about the zero waste element, and I gave the example of textile waste. So went to the turkey trot on Thursday, got my mandatory t shirt. There's no option to opt out of getting a t shirt. I already have, like, three or four of these.

So that's just an example of something that we could, you know, at least start out with voluntarily encouraging our partners, hey. Maybe think about allowing people to opt out of these textiles, you know, maybe eventually go further with city or statewide legislation to say, hey. You know, you need to unbundle T shirts so that you have to opt in to getting a T shirt rather than it being forced upon you. So thanks a lot.

Although that's the only wicked color wicked themed color shirt that you have. Alright. We are adjourned at 04:23.