City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to call this meeting to order. Tony, could you take the roll, please? Kamei?

Here.

Campos? Tordillos? Here. Cohen?

Here.

Ortiz? Present. Mulcahy? Here. Duan? Here. Candelas?

Here.

Casey? Here. Foley? Here. Mahan, you have a quorum.

Thank you. Now, if you are able, please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

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

Thank you. Today's invocation will be provided by Nguyen Thi Ngoc Bich, former president of the Association of the Vietnamese Elderly of the Bay Area. And Councilmember Ortiz, please tell us more.

Thank you so much, Vice Mayor. Today's invocation recognizes May as an important month of remembrance, resilience, and reflection for our Vietnamese refugee community. This month marks 51 years since the first group of Vietnamese refugees were officially welcomed to the city of San Jose and to the United States. Their strength and perseverance helped shape the vibrant Vietnamese American community that continues to enrich our city today. To help lead us in this moment of reflection, I am honored to introduce Ms. Nguyen Thi Nguoc Bich, former president of the Vietnamese Senior Association of San Jose. Since arriving in California in 1971, Ms. Bich has dedicated herself to uplifting the Vietnamese community through decades of advocacy, service, and leadership. And she is also a District 5 resident. Her lifelong commitment to community, remembrance, and service makes her especially fitting to lead us in today's invocation. And now it is my honor to invite Ms. Nguyen Thi Nguoc Bich to please share a few words. Thank you so much, counsel.

Hello. Can anybody hear me? First, thank you for my English because actually it's not my native language. I speak Vietnamese very, very well. So I hope everybody hear me and please forgive me, understand me and forgive me, please. Of course. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ngoc Bich. I would like to thank Council Member Peter Ortiz and Ms. Hang Giao Nguyen. I'm honored to be here today as we celebrate and reaffirm May as a Vietnamese Refugee Arrival Heritage Month. I come here in America in 1971 as an educator to teach Vietnamese language and culture and defend language, Foreign Language Center at the CEDAW of Monterey. At the time, I was simply of foreign teaching, living, and working in America. But on April 30, 1975, the fall of Saigon, Vietnam, I was no longer be able to return to my home. Overnight, my life changed. and I become one of the first Vietnamese refugees in America. Everything changed from that day forward. Yes, we remain deeply grateful to America for welcoming us, allowing us to stay and helping us to adapt to a new life. Like so many Vietnamese, with the kindness, compassion, support of American friends and neighbor, we also slowly rebuild our life. We become proud American citizens and have contributed to this country in many, many ways, economically, culturally, financially, educationally, and through public service. Today, Vietnamese Americans serve as a lead in every field, in business, education, science, medicine, public service, and military. We have raised a generation to continue to strengthen and protect this country. leader of such as acting United States Secretary of Navy as Hung Cao, General Luong Son Viet, and Admiral Huynh Nguyen, and many, many others, reflect the enduring spirit of the United States. and patrician of the Vietnamese refugee community. Our story is not only a story of survival, it is a story of residing, gratitude, and enduring promise of America, a national where those who arrive with nothing can still build a life of proposed freedom and service. Today, as we honor Vietnamese refugee arrival, Heritage Month is May. We also honor to sacrifice of those who come before us, the chorus of those who rebuild their life, and the responsibility we all share, preserve this country for future generations. Thank you, thank you to America. to giving so many, many of us, not only refugee, but also hope, opportunity, and a place to call home. Thank you.

Thank you so much, and again, that was Nguyen Thi Ngoc Bich, former president of the Association of Vietnamese Elderly of the Bay Area, and I think we can safely say America got more, received more than it gave in welcoming Vietnamese immigrants, refugees. We are on to our ceremonial items. We'll start with Councilor Casey. If you join me at the podium, we will recognize and proclaim World Neurofibromatosis Awareness Day.

Good afternoon. Neurofibromatosis or NF is a genetic condition that causes tumors to grow on nerves throughout the body. It can affect multiple systems including the brain, spine and other organs and can lead to serious challenges such as chronic pain, vision or hearing loss, learning disabilities and other complications. Today we are recognizing World Neurofibromatosis Awareness Day to help raise awareness for NF and to support the individuals and the families impacted by it, and to highlight the importance of continued research and early diagnosis. Summer, who is here with us today with Miles, who I would also be a little upset about being here as a kid, is a constituent in our district, and last year we had the opportunity to share in NF Shine, a light walk, and it was a wonderful event. It put this Condition on our radar and we're fortunate to have her as a constituent and miles here today And so we're gonna give summer a few minutes to share her thoughts Good afternoon, thank you again to councilmember Casey and the city of San Jose.

We're slowly melting down I'm a mom of four And this is Miles. Miles was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, or NF1, in July of 2024. He lives with NF every single day. It's a genetic condition that causes tumors to grow throughout the nerves of your body. Like many families, a few that are here today that are affected by NF, we live with a lot of challenges. We live with a lot of doctor visits. We live with a lot of uncertainty. But we also live with a lot of hope. And so I've become very determined to raise awareness and support and fundraise so that families like ours and others that are here today can have access to better treatments and more resources and really just hopefully one day find a cure. Many people have never heard of NF1, even though it affects many worldwide. That's why moments like today really matter and support from leadership like you really matter. Awareness leads to understanding, it leads to research, and it leads to action. So thank you again to the city of San Jose for allowing us to help shine a light on NF and our NF community and families like mine and for Miles.

Thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate you raising your hand. Thank you so much. You're welcome.

Can you say hi? How's it going? Can you smile now? Can you take one picture? Let's take a picture. There it is. We got it.

All right. Have a good one, Miles. Vice Mayor Foley, if you would join me at the podium, we will recognize and proclaim May as Older Americans Month.

So this is not a statement because I'm an older American, but I am. And May is my birthday month, so it's even more doubly important. Today I'm here to proclaim May as Older American Month in the city of San Jose. First established in 1963, Older Americans Month is celebrated each year to recognize older Americans' contributions, highlight aging trends, and reaffirm our commitment to serving our vital and increasing community of older adults. This year's theme is Champion Your Health. Reminds us that healthy aging is about staying active, connected, informed, and empowered at every stage of life. It reminds us that our well-being and health should be at the forefront of our life, prioritizing prevention, Wellness and self-advocacy is at the cornerstone of healthy aging and independence. This month is about celebrating the active, engaged lives older adults are living every day. Older adults are at the heart of our communities. You know, we have to change that term from older adults, don't you think? It just sounds so old. And it should be vibrant adults. I'm going to call it that. Vibrant adults are at the heart of our communities. They're stepping up by volunteering at libraries, leading community meetings, and participating in citywide wellness and recreation programs.

You'll find them just about everywhere you look.

We see them walking our trails and playing pickleball and doing Tai Chi at community centers and parks. We recognize the tremendous impact older Americans have had in building the strong and vibrant San Jose we know today. Champion Your Health is not just about physical health. It's about mental wellness, social connection, access to resources and support. Aging is not always about slowing down. Many older Americans are busier than the younger community and somehow still wake up earlier too. You heard that from our invocation speaker earlier today. This month also reminds us of the importance of creating an age-friendly city where older adults feel valued, included, respected, and connected. San Jose is home to a growing population of older adults who enrich our community with their diverse experiences, talents, and ongoing contributions to civic, cultural, and economic life. Today, the city of San Jose proudly reaffirms our commitment to ensuring that older adults have access to the resources, support and opportunities they need to thrive and live meaningful lives. As a city, we must also continue continue our commitment to providing affordable housing and resources to health care that enables residents to age with dignity and independence in the communities they helped build. Our entire city thrives when people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds can actively participate and engage in their community. I serve as the council liaison to the Senior Citizens Commission. Joining us today are commissioners from the Senior Citizens Commission and staff from our citywide older adults program and recreation division. To accept today's proclamation, I'd like to welcome Maria de Leon from the Senior Citizens Commission. The San Jose Senior Citizens Commission plays a vital role in advocating for older adults, advising the council on issues affecting our aging residents, and helping ensure that San Jose remains a city where people can age with dignity and purpose. And believe me, they're not afraid to offer their input and advice on what we should be doing to help all those around them, particularly our seniors. With that, Maria, I'd like to invite you to come forward and say a few words before Mayor Mahan presents the proclamation.

Thank you. Maria De Leon, Deputy Director with PRNS, and I'm going to follow your cue. And every May is annual Vibrant American Month, where we celebrate the contributions of our vibrant adults and our commitment to serving them. The theme this year is Champion Your Health, where it invites our vibrant adults to move daily by participating in activities that invites our vibrant adults to move daily, to support them in strength and balance, in eating well, and in addition to staying socially connected to help promote lifelong health. We invite our vibrant adults to champion their health at one of our PRNS's 14 adult program sites where we offer classes, programs, events, and lunch activities. This Vibrant Americans Month and Beyond Champion our health by staying active and engaged in our community. PRNS wants to invite all of you to attend our upcoming annual color walk, which is set for Friday, June 5th at Lake Cunningham, and it'll be at 10 o'clock, and for $15, you will get to walk an easy trail, and you'll get to enjoy some great food, nutritious lunch, a lot of community booths, fun music, and you'll also, I'll have a, you'll be enjoying a warm-up by me. I'll be warming everybody up. So thank you for today for acknowledging our vibrant adults. And please join PRNS in honoring our beloved vibrant adults this month and every month. Always. Thank you.

Thanks for the good work you do in the community. We appreciate it. There you go. Let's put you in the middle. Let's all scoot in.

You can't see it, they can't see you. Thanks Mary.

All right, and on to our final ceremonial item. Councilor Acampos, if you would join me at the podium, we will recognize and proclaim May as Affordable Housing Month.

Okay, we are last but certainly not least. Today, I am joined by housing advocates in support of this proclamation for Affordable Housing Month. Together, we recognize the importance and value of providing housing in San Jose for residents of all income levels. Affordable housing is what keeps our communities together. It is a means to avoid displacement, keep families united, and improve the quality of life for those dealing with Silicon Valley's relentless affordability crisis. According to our city housing data, more than 90,000 low-income households in San Jose are considered cost burdened. This is by the cost of housing, making more than 30% of their income and puts them in a crunch to pay for other needs, including food and childcare. Our success in building more affordable housing hinges on partnerships, including market rate and nonprofit housing developers, state and county agencies that can help with the necessary funding to increase the supply of homes, because that's what housing is. Housing should provide a safe place to call home. It also depends on policy experts and advocacy work, including those joining me today that help us craft the right policies to make affordable housing viable in our city. I believe strongly that this is a collaborative effort and together we are aligned in making our goals to make San Jose a city for all. Now I'd like to welcome Regina Celestin Williams, the executive director at SB at Home for a few words before the mayor provides a proclamation. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you to the city of San Jose, the mayor, the council members and city staff. A special thanks to Council Member Campos for inviting me to do this affordable housing proclamation today. My name is Regina Celestin Williams and I am the Executive Director of SV at Home. Thank you for recognizing Affordable Housing Month and for continuing to elevate housing as one of the defining issues of our time. This year, our theme is all in for housing. And for me, that theme is about more than policy. It is about people. It is about deciding together what kind of city we want San Jose to be. Because housing is not just about buildings. It is about belonging. It is about whether families can stay rooted in the communities they helped build. Whether seniors can age with dignity. whether young people can imagine a future for themselves here, whether teachers, childcare workers, nonprofit staff, artists, service workers, and first responders can afford to live in the city that they serve every day. And yes, we need to keep building housing, We definitely need to keep building housing, deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, family housing, mixed income housing. We need to preserve the affordable homes we already have and protect residents from displacement and instability. That work matters deeply. But we also have to build something else at the same time. We have to build a movement, a movement strong enough to reject the idea that housing insecurity is normal. A movement courageous enough to say that in one of the wealthiest regions in the world, homelessness and displacement are not inevitable. A movement grounded in the belief that everyone deserves a safe, stable, affordable place to call home. And a movement building requires all of us. government, advocates, developers, labor, community-based organizations, philanthropy, residents, people who have experience with housing instability firsthand, it requires us to stay in relationship with one another, even when the work is hard, especially when the work is hard, because this work is for the long haul. It is about the long-term health, stability, and prosperity of our residents and communities. If we are going to build this future together, we must remember that unity is more powerful than division. Alignment is more critical than proving who is right and who is wrong. The stakes for our communities are simply too high for us to lose sight of our shared purpose. Because the truth is, affordable housing is not simply an expenditure. It is infrastructure for human possibility. It is the foundation that allows people to thrive, children to succeed, communities to stabilize, and local economies to grow. So, during this Affordable Housing Month, I invite all of us to think bigger than a single project or policy debate. Let us continue building the homes our communities need, and let us also continue building the collective will to create a city where everyone has the opportunity to live with stability and good health and safety. Thank you for your partnership, your leadership, and for being all in on housing.

Right that concludes ceremonial items. We're on to orders of the day Does anyone on the council have any requested changes to the printed agenda? I'm not aware of any We'll get to that on consent We do have an adjournment today today's meeting will be adjourned in memory of Tony Alan Santos who passed away on March 30th 2026 A Vietnam War veteran and proud resident of Alviso, Tony dedicated countless hours to neighborhood events and initiatives, including Santa Visits Alviso and the Santos Family Car Show. I remember talking to Tony multiple times at the car show over the years. His kindness, volunteer spirit, and devotion to community has left a lasting mark on Alviso and the city of San Jose, and Council Member Cohen will tell us more.

Thank you. Today we honor the life of Tony Allen Santos, a man whose roots in Alviso ran as deep as the history of the community itself. Born in 1948 and raised here, Tony embodied the spirit of Alviso, resilient, generous, and fiercely devoted to the people around him. His life was shaped by service, from his time in Vietnam to the decades he spent giving back at home, even as he faced the long-term effects of Agent Orange exposure with courage and quiet strength. Tony's impact on this community is woven in nearly every corner of Alviso. He poured his energy into local organizations, from Santa Visits Alviso to the South Bay Yacht Club, and played a vital role in shaping the District 4 Master Plan. And of course, the beloved Santos Family Car Show, now celebrating its 20th year, stands as a joyful testament to his creativity, dedication, and love for bringing people together. Above all, Tony was a family man, devoted to his wife, Roline, his children and stepchildren, his grandchildren, and his siblings. He will be remembered for his kindness, his humor, and the generosity that defined his life. Today, as we celebrate his legacy, we honor not only what he built, but the way he made people feel, welcomed, supported, and part of something larger than themselves. I'd like to welcome Tony's brother, another Alviso advocate, and Valley Water Board of Directors member Richard Santos to tell us more about his brother Tony.

Good afternoon to the mayor, city council members, But I'm about to say a few things that you'll have a better understanding where I come from. It was a great ceremony hearing everybody's happy times, but for me it's not a happy time right now. But I do thank you all. I want to introduce my family is here, my sister-in-law, my sister, and my niece, Tony's daughter. My family and I love my brother. It is very hard to condense 78 years into a few minutes when he gave 58 years of himself to the Alviso community as well as the city of San Jose. I thank Mayor Mahan because he's one of the first to make condolences. Very appreciative of that for me and my family. And to David Cohen's office, Eric Osborne, very sensitive, really appreciate that. My brother served this country But his country did not serve him, nor this city. My father bought land that nobody wanted in 1948. My brother was born. He built a little house with used lumber. We were on Moffett Street. There was ditches, dirt roads, basically nothing. Move on 20 years. My brother's 20 years old and I'm with him in 1968. We meet with the city of San Jose City Manager Council members, our Council from my visa and we sat right there and he said. Consolidate with us. And you'll have storm drains, streets and sidewalks. Move on 58 years later. We don't have no sidewalks, don't have no storm drains. There's trash and there's homeless. Like the song states, I'm no senator's son. 1968, my brother went to Vietnam. He came back and he served on the block grant committee to help get streets for Alviso. The city of San Jose removed him. Said you can't because you own property, yet the Marin City Council can vote on improvements where they live is no problem. So you have to understand where I come from for 58 years. About eight months ago, we came here to address this new potential high-rise residential in Alviso. My brother gave five years of his life on the Alviso master plan. My sister-in-law had to get him out of his wheelchair. Motorized brought him in here. He couldn't stand. Of course, eight months later, he passed, but he couldn't even hardly speak. There wasn't much respect to that planning commission. And my brother spoke, deaf ears. Yeah, I understand the builder's code. Well, if it wasn't for Alviso and he didn't like it, take it to court. That's not constitutional. Alviso will never be the same if this goes in, that environmental protected community will be destroyed and will never exist again. Back in 2003, somewhere in there, my brother was on the committee with myself. We did protect the land out there in 2,600 acres. We fought hard to make sure it's preserved, protected for the wildlife, and making sure that San Jose has a good treatment service there today, which they do. In 1983, after a devastating flood, we didn't get government help, but my brother and I, but my brother, took our truck and tractors, we brought people back to their homes, and put them back to live their life again. Devastating flood. Much appreciation to David Cohen, named, selected my brother as the Volunteer of the Year. Well, you should. We pay for it. It's the Alviso Santa program. We have to take care of it. And for 20 years, we've had nothing but thousands of people, 700 cars, when we started with 37 cars in a parking lot. It's very popular, diverse, inclusion. Everybody comes. I want to take the time to say much appreciation to the San Jose PD, who for 20 years came. We've never had an incident. It's run orderly, and we really appreciate that. We'll probably be our last one. We're pretty tired of fighting with this city on every issue when we spend our own money. You can honor my brother by recognizing him, but you, the city council, if you can all get together and stand up and say, let's make sure after 58 years that community in Alviso is respected and they have equal city services, because we do not. And that car show will be in his honor. When you have this $50 million shortfall, Alviso never catches up. We just keep on going backwards. We've been neglected. So in his honor, let's make it quality. Let's be sensitive. I can't go on forever. When my brother was in Vietnam, he sucked up napalm, and Agent Orange killed him. Yet in our neighborhood, for 20 years they're celebrating, not everybody, this one convicted felon who puts the biggest illegal fireworks in Santa Clara County. Now, some of you are going to say, oh, no, we get fireworks, too. No, you don't. They come with a folding chair and a six-pack to watch the town burn down. People call, cry, dogs barking all night, stress, fires, grassland fires, trash. We gave this all to the city, yet this person continues operating. And my brother, for 20 years at the end of his life, had to suck that crap up. That's not being hospitable. I watched my brother, my dad, and my uncle, where I'm the last of the consolidation, where everybody's gone. I watched them walk the boulevard of broken dreams, retired. For me, I'm always for service for you. If you need something, I'm there to help. That's what it's all about, working together. And that's my word. Bitter or not, I still help. That's what it's about. Veteran soldiers do die. But my memory of my brother will never fade away. I want to thank you all for recognizing him today. Thank you.

Director Santos, Dick, thank you for being here. Thank you for honoring Tony's memory, for you and your family. Tony included all the advocacy for the community in El Viso. I know Tony will be missed at the car show and year-round by many of us. So we're glad that you're here with us today to honor his memory, and our hearts are with you, and we extend our condolences during this difficult time. We are... Going to move now to the closed session report. Susana?

Yes. Mayor and council met in closed session with their labor negotiators to get a status update on the status of the labor negotiations as agendas on the city council agenda, but there's nothing to report at this time.

Okay. Thank you, Susana. Okay, we are then on to the consent calendar. I understand council member Mulcahy has a quick item, item 2.9 is a recusal, is that right?

Yes, thanks, Mayor. Yes. So I have to recuse myself from 2.9 on today's consent due to my longstanding business relationship with Mrs. Brandenburg and Um, super big source of pride to be connected with such a great matriarch of our community and evidenced again by your gift of love and peace to the city of San Jose.

Thank you, council member. So we'll, um, take up item 2.9 first, then, if we can, colleagues, and then allow Council Member Mulcahy to participate in the rest of the consent calendar discussion and vote, if that's okay. Does anyone have comments or a motion on item 2.9? Move approval. Second. Great. Okay, I am NOT seeing Any other hands I have cards for this. We have cards though. Yeah, I was just gonna ask public comment So let's let's take public comment and then we'll vote on item 2.9. Specifically.

I have Matt Diane and Kimberly come on down

I actually sit here in gratitude today to the city council, the city staff, for helping a dream that started back last October and has now developed and is almost completed. And it's called the Seeds of Peace Monument, which I know most of you are familiar with, and it will be installed the end of this year in the month of peace, which is December 2026. Mainly, I'm here because we've started a wave, and we want the wave to start bigger and get more support. And what we need to do is pay attention to what's going to be happening the end of this year, but more meaningful. The city of San Jose, California, to be recognized for the city of peace, And in this wave that we're trying to get, not trying, that we've started, contains seeds. And each of these seeds has a definition, and the definition is peace, not war. Thank you. Thank you for all you've done to help us along the way make this happen. And as you all know, it is happening. And we are going to bring peace to our nation and to our world. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor and City Council. I'm Kimberly Mulcahy and I'm here to share a few words on the Seeds of Peace Rotary Club of San Jose Monument. It has truly been an honor to be a part of this project and to support Diane Brandenburg in helping bring this vision FORWARD FOR THE CITY OF SAN JOSE. WE WANT TO EXPRESS OUR SINCERE GRATITUDE TO THE CITY STAFF WHO HAVE WORKED ALONGSIDE OF US TO BRING THIS PROJECT TO THIS POINT. A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO OCA'S CARRIE ADAMS-HAPPNER, CYNTHIA KAU, JEN LAVORNE, AND ANNETTE BRENNAN IN THE CITY ATTORNEY'S OFFICE. This has been a long process and many moving parts and their thoughtfulness, guidance, patience and commitment have helped us navigate it every step of the way. We also want to really recognize our partnership with the Rotary Club of San Jose whose leadership and commitment to service and community have helped strengthen and this effort and expand its reach and I do want to just comment that we've got fellow Rotarians, we have the Executive Director of Rotary, we have the Rotary Foundation Board President, we have the past, the current, and the future Rotary Board Presidents here. So full support and steam ahead. I'm deeply grateful for everyone who has helped bring us to this moment. I often remind myself Build it strong and it will stand and that is exactly what this private-public partnership has done. Together we are creating more than a monument. We are creating a lasting civic legacy, a place for reflection and connection and the beginning of a peace wave that begins here in San Jose and will reach far out into our nation. Thank you.

Thank you, next speaker.

Mayor Mahan and council members, good afternoon. My name is Matt Breaker and I have the honor of serving as president of the Rotary Club of San Jose. And on behalf of the Rotary Club of San Jose, I want to express how proud we are to be joining Diane Brandenburg in bringing the Seeds of Peace Monument to San Jose. This monument represents far more than a piece of artwork. It represents the belief that peace is something that we must actively build together. Rotary's motto is service above self. We believe in bringing people together, in creating understanding across communities and cultures. This monument represents those values beautifully. We are particularly honored and proud to know that the Rotary Club of San Jose's name will be on this monument and a part of it. So thank you. Thank you to the city of San Jose for embracing this monument and for joining us in what we hope will be a lasting movement towards peace, service, and community. Thank you.

Back to council.

Thank you. I just want to express my gratitude to Diane, Mrs. Brandenburg, for your vision and gift to the city. It's a beautiful legacy for generations to come, to Rotary for being stewards of this gift and this public space. It makes so much sense to be a city of peace. We are simultaneously one of the most diverse cities on earth and one of the safest. big cities on Earth. And it's a beautiful symbol of what's possible for humanity when we really see and respect one another and support each other. And hopefully we as a city can be a beacon for the rest of the world and keep striving to live up to our highest ideals. And I think this beautiful gift and monument will help inspire all of us and generations to come. So thank you. I saw Vice Mayor also had wanted to offer some brief comments.

Thank you. As a Rotarian, I am very proud of the work that Rotary does. But Diane, I am so honored and privileged to know you and have you have brought this Seeds of Peace to the city of San Jose and enlisted the partnership of Rotary to make sure that it gets done. This is your vision and inspiration is really making sure that this comes to fruition and that we have this beautiful monument to peace, something we all must remind ourselves to continue to strive for and work for. And for generations, we will be thinking of this monument, we will be observing it, But all thanks to you, we will pay tribute to you and the legacy that you are leaving in the city of San Jose. So thank you so much. Thank you to Rotary. Thank you, Diane.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right. Tony, I think we're ready to vote on item 2.19. I'm sorry, 2.9. Apologies. 2.9. motion passes unanimously wonderful congratulations great okay we are back to the rest of the consent calendar. I actually wanted to briefly pull in comment on item 2.16, and then I'll turn to colleagues. Just quickly, I'll be very brief. This is the Youth Conservation Corps, and I want to thank our state government, Governor Newsom, State Service Director Josh Friday and others, California Volunteers is supporting youth in San Jose with a $4.5 million grant. I just wanted to highlight how impactful this grant and the Youth Service Corps is in in our city the resilience core which is what we call our version of our youth service corps here locally was established by the mayor's office in 2021 since then hundreds of san jose youth have cleaned our parks and waterways supported students in our libraries and after-school programs and gained the skills they need to thrive this particular grant the 4.5 million dollar grant that we're receiving from california volunteers in our state government will support two key work streams. One will be through the San Jose Public Library Foundation implementing our learning pathway, which aims to support K through 12 learning outcomes of high need youth through expanded learning programming. And this funding will allow 38 young people in our community to provide that work and that service to younger folks and get paid for it and gain skills. PRNS will continue to use a portion of this funding to partner with the San Jose Conservation Corps to implement the climate change pathway, which supports the cleanup of parks, trails, and watersheds, and we will be serving, meaning employing, 52 young people. Importantly, for many of the young people employed through the Resilience Corps, this is their first full-time paid job. And 90% of program participants have moved on to paid employment or higher education after completing the program, a testament to the power of investing in our youth and creating opportunities for them. And in this case, one that we couldn't do through our general fund, but thank you again to the governor's office in Sacramento for having the foresight to enable cities to provide these kinds of work opportunities. With that, let me turn to colleagues if you have any other comments on consent or a motion.

Move for approval. Second.

Great. I don't see any other hands. Tony? Do we have public comment on the rest of consent?

We do not.

All right, then let's vote.

Motion passes unanimously.

Great. Thank you all so much. We are now turning to our city manager. Do we have a report today? We do. We do. Yes.

Thank you very much, Mayor and City Council. So May is National Wildfire Awareness Month, and we are focusing on preparation, prevention, and communication community education. Wildfire risk is a significant concern in our wildland urban interface areas, primarily in our south and east San Jose foothills, including the neighborhoods of Berryessa, Alum Rock, Evergreen, Santa Teresa, Almaden Valley, and more, where homes and open spaces meet. That is why the San Jose Fire Department continues to take proactive steps to keep our community safe. In 2025, the fire department launched a public education campaign made possible through a FEMA fire prevention and safety grant. The fire department worked to ensure that critical safety information was accessible with a focus on reaching residents in the wildland urban interface neighborhoods through digital advertising, social media, multilingual brochures, banners, and community presentations. Firefighters also conducted direct door-to-door outreach to nearly 7,000 homes in these areas. With the use of door hangers, firefighters provided visual risk assessments to residents, identifying immediate concerns and offering clear, consistent guidance on defensible space, home hardening, and evacuation preparedness. In addition, the city launched the Genesis Protect app in 2025, which provides neighborhood-specific emergency alerts, giving residents timely, reliable information where it matters most. Anyone can download that app for free. We encourage everyone to incorporate it into their emergency preparedness plan. We continue to build on the progress the fire department made by relaunching and expanding the 2025 public education campaign ahead of wildfire season in 2026. Efforts will include increased social media engagement, additional community safety meetings in high-risk wildland urban interface areas, and direct outreach to additional 3,500 homes. These actions help us meet our public safety city service area goal to build resilient communities that are ready to respond to emergencies. This effort was also recently recognized by the California Association of Public Information Officials, otherwise known as CIPIO, with an award of distinction honoring it as the second highest rated in-house communications or marketing campaign among all public sector agencies in California in 2025. I want to thank Fire Chief Robert Sapien and the dedicated firefighters and staff who worked tirelessly to protect our city. Would you all please stand to be recognized? And we will give you a round of applause. Amazing employees we have up there. Thank you so much. And that's the end of my report.

Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, San Jose Fire Department. Appreciate you all. Stay safe out there. Grateful for your service. All right, we are on to item 3.3. This is our citywide customer experience transformation. Our city manager has some opening remarks and then we'll turn it over to staff.

Yes, I get into position. I'll just kick it off. As you all know, since becoming city manager, I have prioritized improving how residents and businesses experience city services and advancing a more coordinated, customer-centered approach across our organization. Today's presentation provides an overview and status update on our citywide customer experience transformation, a multi-year effort that builds on the council-approved customer service vision and standards that you all adopted in 2023. Over the last several years, we have focused on strengthening our customer service foundation, building organizational readiness, and developing the operational and technology capabilities needed to support long-term service delivery transformation. This work also aligns closely with our foundational strategic support focus area of driving organizational performance efforts by improving operational effectiveness, strengthening governance and accountability, and using data and performance insights to continuously improve service delivery across departments. Together, these efforts move beyond individual customer interactions to improve how services are designed, coordinated, delivered, and followed through across departments so residents experience San Jose as one city. I'm very excited for this phase of the work, and Assistant City Manager Lee Wilcox and the team will tell you a lot more about it in their forthcoming presentation. Over to you, Lee.

Thanks, Jen. Lee Wilcox is the city manager, and all of us will introduce ourselves when we get to our slides, but we're excited to present the customer experience transformation work plan to you all. San Jose is a smart city. We invest in technology, digital tools, and innovation. But much of our internal service coordination still relies on manual communication. Email, Microsoft Teams, phone calls, because that is what moves fastest through the organization at this very moment. I do want to start with a scenario that our residents, our staff, and all of you on the dais will find all too familiar. A resident of San Jose submits a service request through SJ311. It's entered correctly and routed to the appropriate department. But the issue involves coordination across multiple teams. One team needs clarification, so an email goes out. Another division and another department responds via Microsoft Teams. Photos are forwarded manually. Ownership ultimately gets clarified through the organization. However, the resident hasn't received a clear status update and reaches out to their council member. One of you reaches out to the city manager's office. So we begin the process of searching inboxes, message threads through Microsoft Teams, and ultimately engaging staff to better understand or reconstruct what happened and where this request is in the organization. In this specific request, it's a junk pickup item. So in addition to our own organization, the hauler has information outside of the city system. and another team has related data on a separate system. Now I want to be clear in this scenario, no one has actually done anything wrong. But the process required multiple handoffs, duplicate communication, and informal escalation that required time and energy from city staff and ultimately the resident. This issue eventually gets resolved, but slower than it should have. The resident experiences uncertainty, staff loses time that they could have spent on other important work or strategic work, and leadership lacked visibility into where the bottleneck occurred, having trouble responding, and having any visible insight on how this was working. Again, this is not a customer service failure. It's a system design problem, and one that we intend to fix with this initiative. This afternoon we're going to be going over exactly what our work plan is, kind of the why and what we'll be doing, and start to begin on the how we'll be moving forward. You'll hear from me, you'll hear from Nicole and Jeff on our approach to service improvement throughout the organization, and Colette on the technology as well. Historically, much of the city's involvement Improvement work has focused on customer services focused on interactions or specific interactions with our residents or customer. This initiative expands the focus to include service delivery operations including how work moves from intake to fulfillment to resolution across departments and offices. This effort goes beyond individual touch points to improve the full customer service journey end to end. Helping and reliance on manual coordination, creating friction for employees and inconsistent experiences for residents is at the core of this work. If we want to continually improve our service delivery, we need a system that dynamically recognizes the status of residents' requests across departments and throughout the organization. This is a step forward in designing that system. San Jose delivers 74 core services across 259 programs in more than 20 departments. However, our residents don't see 20 separate departments. They see one city. Customers don't think of terms of programs or divisions and or how our system today doesn't consistently operate, I'm sorry, our system today doesn't continually operate in this context around a resident's journey from end to end. Instead, it is largely built around internal efficiencies, designed to help staff manage large volumes of intake using the tools that are available to them today. As a result, service pathways are not always clear. Different departments use different systems, and staff often coordinate manually behind the scenes because that is what moves fastest. From a resident's perspective, this can feel bumpy. Multiple handoffs, duplicative intake, inconsistent status updates, and uncertainty about where the request stands, which is when all of you get involved. Even when individual departments perform very well within their own responsibilities, the overall experience depends on how well those handoffs and communications worked across multiple groups and divisions. From an employee perspective, it means additional coordination work that is largely invisible but consumes a lot of time and drives slow responses throughout the organization. Operationally, staff often lack unified tools, shared data, and clearly defined cross-departmental processes. This time to coordinate on handoff isn't a failure of any one person or team. It's a structural, historical, and organizational problem that has persisted over time. As many of you heard, San Jose operates one of the lowest employee-to-resident ratios among any large city throughout the United States, with approximately seven employees for every 1,000 residents. I do want to be clear, this lean staffing model is actually a strength. It drives discipline and efficiency and fiscal responsibility. but it also creates structural pressures that affect how we design and deliver services. One example is that the staff frequently operate in blended roles. In many other cities, policy staff, customer service staff, operations managers, and analysts are separate functions. In San Jose, managers and analysts are often performing all of these roles simultaneously. that limits the time and capacity the organization has available for structured end-to-end service design, which is what we are trying to solve for here. Second, lean staffing naturally creates an efficiency-driven design bias. When resources are tight, services are built to manage intake volume and maintain throughput. Internal efficiency dominates decision-making because it must. Efficiency is necessary, but efficiency alone doesn't reliably produce clarity, predictability, or transparency for our residents, especially when requests cross departments or require coordinated handoffs. In a lean organization, structure matters more. Without clear governance, shared tools, and standardized workflow, coordination becomes manual, inconsistent, and time consuming. Customer Experience Transformation Work Plan provides a structure that a lean organization needs to operate coherently. So residents experience San Jose as one city, even when work is distributed across many teams or departments. We intend to address these challenges through coordinated improvements around our own culture, our operations, and new technology. First, Honor Culture, supported by dedicated organizational management resources, the transformation equips staff to support customers across the full journey by centralling customer experience, governance, creating clear communication resources, and providing training throughout the organization. On our service operations will be reimagined and designed to eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies, improve coordination across departments and teams and with contractors. The city is also investing in modernizing its technology platform which will allow more services to be connected under the same umbrella and allow customers and staff to experience one connected city. It's important to call out that this isn't a technology or just a customer satisfaction initiative. It's something to move the organization forward to deal with the tension that has existed all too long. The technology challenge is real, and it'll be difficult, and you'll hear about that more from Colette today, but it is tightly linked to process and government fragmentation. This effort will try to resolve that. in a vision that you see before you today, as our residents and businesses deserve services that are more clear, predictable, and coordinated behind the scenes. Our future vision is a coordinated front door where residents and businesses can access city services more simply and transparent. Behind the front door sits a shared technology platform supported by clear city operations. In this future state, residents will experience clearer entry points, more consistent communication, greater visibility into status updates, and fewer avoidable handoffs. Behind the scenes, staff will operate with better defined roles and standardized workflows, structured cross-departmental routing, real-time visibility into service requests, And finally, shared data to reduce duplication and reworking of solutions and problems. Leadership will have clearer dashboards, stronger escalation oversight, and hopefully fewer escalations, and a digital line of sight into service performance trends. At its core, it is about reliability and making service delivery more predictable, reducing friction, and building trust through consistent follow through. This process is designed to make city services easier to navigate for residents and businesses, and easier for staff, as I mentioned. No matter how someone chooses to engage the city, whether it's by phone, in person, online, or through community meetings, they should receive the same reliable outcome and consistent follow through and messaging throughout that experience. For staff and council, this means better visibility into status updates, clearer accountability, and stronger coordination throughout departments as well as our governing body and the city manager's office. Consistent integration of language access and communication standards is also extremely critical. Unclear pathways and inconsistent communication disproportionately affects residents with limited English proficiency, lower digital literacy, or limited familiarity with how City Hall works and how they're organized. We're often providing services to our residents that are in stress, navigating many barriers, or facing urgent needs. We need to design a system that works for them, that is clear, accessible, and coordinated, because it'll work for everyone else as well. Why now? The city actually sits at a really unique opportunity and point in time. I know Jennifer started this conversation with the importance of customer experience and customer service for her as a city manager one of the other things that she's one of her other focus areas is driving organizational performance and that started when she became city manager and this is one of the foundational areas where we house a lot of important work that important work includes Our City Council focus area implementation how we're constantly driving towards execution and learning and coming back to you guys It also includes all of our service delivery Optimization and realignment work and it also has been a journey over the last three years as we've modernized all new performance metrics around our city service area in the budget The customer experience transformation directly aligns with this work and overlaps. Driving organization performance asks a fundamental question. Are we delivering city council outcomes efficiently and sustainably? While customer experience asks a complimentary question of does our residents experience that performance as seamless and as reliable? Those efforts reinforce one another as driving organizational performance strengthens our governance, accountability, and performance optimization within departments. It improves how the city runs while the customer experience transformation strengthens how services connect, function across departments from the customer's experience. It improves how residents experience how the city runs for them. This overlap is strongest where both efforts reinforce the same fundamentals of data visibility, performance monitoring, clear ownership, and structured handoff and disciplined escalated pathways. Together, they strengthen accountability, reliability, and public trust. For the next section, I'm going to hand it off to Nicole.

Great. Thanks, Lee. Hi, everyone. Nicole Eiderer. I am a deputy director within the city manager's office, and this is my second week with the city, so I'm really excited to be here. All right. I'm going to talk about our approach to service improvement. This section explains the repeatable approach the city is using to improve service reliability and customer experience. As part of the transformation, the city is conducting service-level analysis across services on SJ311 today to understand the current process and improvement opportunities across the full lifecycle. The goal is to improve outcomes that customers actually feel. Clearer expectations at intake, fewer avoidable handoffs, more consistent status, visibility, and reliable follow-through. So the service delivery life cycle is we are evaluating each city service through a standard service delivery life cycle. From information seeking and intake through fulfillment, escalation and expectations, and follow up and closure. This matters because customer frustration usually doesn't come from one touch point. It comes from what happens between steps. Unclear expectations, inconsistent communication, and gaps in follow through. Early stages are about helping customers understand availability and setting expectations accurately at first contact. Later stages are about executing work transparently and closing the loop to reinforce trust. The lifecycle lens gives staff a shared way to diagnose where breakdowns occur and then target improvements where they will have the biggest impact on reliability and customer confidence. Building on our service delivery lifecycle, our service improvement approach is designed to scale. Taking each city service through an end-to-end improvement process across operations, technology, and culture. Step one is evaluate, where we work to understand and assess current workflows, systems, and pain points. Step two is re-engineer. We are working with department leadership and staff to co-develop the future state, clarifying ownership, handoffs, and expectations so the service works end to end. Step three is enact. Here is where we're working with departments to implement both short and long term recommendations. These recommendations are prioritized by impact and effort. This allows us to deliver value incrementally while building towards modernization. Step four is sustain, where we are monitoring performance and using this data to support continuous improvements. Junk pickup is one example where we have applied this approach. It was chosen because it is high volume, resident-facing, requires coordination across city departments and external vendors, and historically has had a lower SJ311 customer satisfaction score, making it a strong candidate for the end-to-end CX improvements. And now I'll hand it over to Jeff, and he'll walk you through our findings and progress to date for junk pickup.

Thank you, Nicole. Jeff Provenzano, Director, Environmental Services Department. This section spotlights junk pickup as a concrete example of how our city's customer experience transformation is improving service reliability and accountability. Junk pickup is an unlimited, no additional cost, curbside service provided by the Environmental Services Department and delivered through two contracted haulers, California Waste Solutions and Green Team. Both of those haulers have their own customer service modules in addition to our own San Jose 311. Just through our San Jose 311 platform, we receive about 10,000 service requests a month for junk pickup. Over the past six months, we have made some improvements in customer service satisfaction. You can see on the left increasing from about 57% to 68%, but we're still below our target. Now this slide is important. This is one of the key assessments that comes out of our customer experience transformation assessment. It's going across the top on the columns are the five stages that every customer or resident goes through when requesting a service. These were mentioned before. Information seeking, intake and onboarding, service fulfillment, escalation and exceptions, and follow up and closure. As we evaluate the customer's journey across these, we're also looking through four different lenses for each one of these stages. Customer experience, this is going down the left-hand side column, process and governance, how well are each of these stages working, technology for each of these stages, and the data and measurement that we're collecting as we go. This assessment is fundamentally valuable when we're looking at improvements to junk pickup over the long term. While the program has expanded in popularity, there are many things that we're doing right. There's a lot of fours. That is a good score here on the map. And I'd like to spend the rest of the day talking about those fours, but instead I'm going to jump to the ones. These are areas where we have identified through this customer experience valuation that we need to be focusing our resources. Before I move on to the next slide, I've been here many years, and it's always been a challenge to connect with residents, to build strong programs. Many of the situations we're responding reactively, trying to fix a problem when it comes our way. By laying out junk pickup and other services in this format, we're able to strategize on a roadmap, focusing on the areas that need the most improvement first, which I'll go through, and next steps. Some of the recommendations that came out of that assessment are the four recommendations in the near term are to align our service outcomes, which we'll talk about in a minute, standardize our messaging and customer expectations, provide real-time feedback on missed collections, which is a big one, and establish performance measurements and collect data that goes with it. Now, I enjoy this slide because there's a nice pie chart on it. In beginning of this calendar year, we engaged with one of our haulers to begin collecting information on why items were not being collected. In February of 2026, the hauler's data showed that there were about 11,000 service requests to pick up free junk pickup items. 76% of those requests were completed on time. 24 were not completed. The pie chart to the right breaks out that 24%. You can see there 60% or over half of that 24% was because the item was not set out when the hauler came by to pick it up. The other breakouts that they noticed were the items were not set out by following directions or they had been canceled by customers. The other two main causes for an item not being picked up. Currently, we're working with our second hauler to also collect this type of data. This information is important for us as we get into the next slides, but we talk about expectations, communication, and any improvements that can be done on the short and long term. Second recommendation that we are working on now is to standardize our customer expectations and messaging. The haulers each send out emails and notification to anyone scheduling a free junk pickup. In addition to that, we are also updating SJ311, staff outreach and communication material through our call center and staff in the environmental services department, as well as coordinating and standardizing our messaging on outreach materials to community events, news organizations, to kind of standardize, simplify, and be consistent across all channels of outreach. The two graphics there I know are small print. The graphics on the left are the current letters that the haulers sent out to residents. We have heard some complaints that the letters are hard to follow, the data isn't readily available, the instructions aren't clear. And we're working with the haulers and they're very open and willing to try to restructure their letters and their emails to provide a consistent, clear message to improve that customer experience. The third item, the third recommendation we are working on is to provide real time missed collection feedback. You can see on the pie chart on the right, 60% of the items that aren't collected are because they're not out. But the other 27, there's some reason why they're not picked up. Right now we're working with the haulers to standardize a leave behind notice. Anytime an item is set out and the hauler does not pick it up, they will leave a notice to identify the reason why. This is important for us because it can help to proactively educate residents on non-collection reasons at the point of service. The benefit of this is it'll set clear expectations going forward. It'll educate residents on the proper method for setting out to reduce confusion and dissatisfaction. That'll help improve our customer satisfaction scores. It'll also decrease follow-up calls to 311 and miscellaneous returns or operational redundancies going out to the same address to pick up an item. It'll also enable customers to correct issues and prepare for successful service on future pickups. And the fourth item that we're working on, of course, is data. Without good data and good tracking of data, it's hard to make good decisions to know what is the most effective use of our resources. These slides here are still in draft. These are some dashboards that are being created to track performance of junk pickup as we go through the year. Some of these items include the number of tickets that are open, the number that were closed, customer satisfaction scores, the varying frequency of tickets per day throughout a month, and at the bottom too, of course, is the reasons why an item weren't picked up, because we'd like to track that as we do improvements to see what kind of success we are getting on better participation, better communication, and better understanding to residents on how to successfully order this service. The project team, in addition to those near-term recommendations, we've also highlighted several longer-term improvements that could benefit this program. I'll just note here at the bottom there, there is a note that each hauler, I mentioned before, has their own databases, their own customer service modules, and one of the limitations for right now is how our city applications can connect or integrate with their systems. That is something that we need to work on going forward to support some of these longer-term recommendations. The first two you can see there are staff-related. These are to use real-time data and visibility to improve our illegal dumping and rapid teams work in conjunction with junk pickup. Also to improve our ability as staff to see new and updated requests that are added or adjusted by haulers to know which services, which addresses are being picked up. That'll help sync up our city efforts with those of the haulers implementing this program. The third and fourth bullet there, those are more customer-related improvements to add technology where customers can view expected service dates, updates on their pickup, and a reason for non-collection. Also, a faster and easier way for customers to modify or cancel existing service requests. And the last two items there are on escalation and broader customer service, including looking at existing tickets, tracking escalations, finding improvements within the New England system for how we can deliver the service more effectively, and also definitely working on closeout, communication to the resident when an item is picked up or if it hasn't been picked up, why, that closeout communication we have learned through our assessment that is fundamental in the overall customer's experience satisfaction.

Thank you, Jeff. Khaled Talbik, Chief Information Officer and IT Director. Lee presented this slide earlier, but I wanted to bring it back to help connect the CX work to the broader vision behind the CX transformation. The goal is to implement effective technologies that streamline the process for requesting services through a one city front door, supported by integrated workflows, coordinated operations, and enhanced collaboration across department, ultimately delivering seamless services from start to finish for our residents. The next slide explains the system architecture in more detail. highlighting the complexity of the system and operational infrastructure that is needed to support the customer experience and seamless service delivery across departments. This slide illustrates the city's high-level future state for customer experience architecture and highlights how we are building a connected enterprise approach to enable seamless service delivery. On the left, are options for residents that can engage with the city through multiple channels, including the contact call center, city website, and the 311 application. In addition, AI enabled tools are included as a source for proactive engagement as we continue to explore automated reporting capabilities to take a proactive stance on identifying issues that need to be addressed. At the center, is the core infrastructure that supports the entire ecosystem. While the term enterprise CRM was previously used to describe it, the reality is much more complex. It includes service request management, system integration, identity management, notification, data sharing, and much more. The integrated data and the routing engine are key components that allow requests and workflows to move across departments more seamlessly and consistently. On the right is how services are managed and delivered by departments through different systems, depending on the service type and operational needs. Some work orders managed by systems that might be managed by city staff, while others may continue to leverage vendor-operated solutions when appropriate. The architecture also supports enterprise performance management and transparency dashboards. Importantly, this is not just a technology diagram. It reflects the operational foundation needed to support more coordinated, responsive, and customer-centered service delivery across the city. This approach also allowed the city to modernize incrementally, leveraging existing systems when appropriate, and advance toward long-term capabilities and strategic goals. And with that, I'll turn it over to Nicole.

Thanks, Colin. All right, looking ahead. What can we learn from others? Peer-City benchmarking reinforces that organization and governance matters as much as technology. Our team evaluated insights from six Peer-Cities to understand how customer experience can be organized and managed at scale. Effective CX models consistently show strong executive sponsorship, clear departmental accountability, use of data to manage services end-to-end, enterprise coordination to drive consistency, and dedicated roles and escalation paths to sustain improvements. One of the key lessons learned is that many cities rely heavily on large consulting engagements or outsourced operational support to sustain these programs. San Jose is taking a hybrid and leaner approach by building internal city capacity and leveraging existing staff expertise with limited consulting support to lead and sustain the transformation over time. This approach allows the city to reduce long-term dependency on external vendors while embedding operational knowledge, accountability, and continuous improvement capabilities within the city. The city is taking these lessons learned under advisement as we move forward in building the internal structure needed to successfully execute on this vision. So how are we getting there? The CX transformation is delivered through a phased multi-year roadmap designed to manage risk and deliver value incrementally. We are intentionally sequencing the work so we build a strong foundation first, then scale sustainably. The city is currently in the plan and mobilize phase, which focuses on establishing governance, building internal capacity, and evaluating existing SJ311 services and related business processes. The next phase, build foundation, will focus on enabling these initial services on the new platform, improving customer communications and business processes, and preparing staff to successfully adopt new tools and workflows. Once the initial rollout is complete, the city will move into the stabilize and enhance and scale phase to refine the customer experience, improve platform performance, and gradually expand additional services onto the new platform. The sustained and continuously improved phase will be the steady-state phase. This includes using performance data and customer feedback to continuously optimize services and processes over time. Overall, this roadmap reflects a deliberate and sustainable approach to transformation, one that balances innovation with operational readiness, minimizes disruption, and positions the city for a long-term success.

Thank you, Nicole. This work is not about launching a new program. It's about strengthening how the city operates. As I said before, San Jose delivers hundreds of services across more than 20 departments. When those services operate in disconnected systems, staff compensate manually. That manual coordination creates friction, slow response time, and limits visibility into performance. This initiative addresses that structural issue. It strengthens how services work across departments. It clarifies accountability, improves transparency, and reduces reliance on informal manual workarounds that are highly inefficient. As we mentioned before, this effort also closely aligns with driving organizational performance. One strengthens internal discipline, the other strengthens external cohesion. Together they form a complete performance and service excellence system, which we are excited, which we have been excited to show you today. With this foundation, we remain dependent, without this foundation, we remain dependent on fragmented systems and manual escalation processes that dominate way too many conversations between this council and senior leadership in the city while we have so many vast problems to address for our community that limits our ability to manage performance at scale and provide real-time visibility to senior leadership in the organization as well as council as we make difficult decisions. This is about infrastructure for accountability for our staff and our residents. We're seeking to sequence this work deliberately, stabilizing existing services on 311 now, piloting new improvements as you've seen today, and scaling responsibly. We are not moving faster than operational readiness would allow, also allowing us to make minimal investments as we go forward. If successful, this transformation will provide residents clear service pathways, equip staff with coordinated tools, and give council real-time insight into service performance. It's about building a city or a system that is for one city. And with that, we welcome your questions.

Thank you for the extensive presentation. Tony, do we have public comment?

No cards for this item.

Okay. Going back to the council, Council Member Ortiz, start with you.

Thank you, Mayor.

I want to thank the city manager's office and staff for the status report and all the great, excellent work that's gone into it. I appreciate this report's findings. At the end of the day, residents are not thinking about city departments, organizational charts, or internal structures. They simply want to be able to contact the city, report an issue, and trust that it will be handled clearly, efficiently, and that it'll have follow-through. So I believe the vision of moving towards a more unified end-to-end customer experience and creating a true digital front door for city services. That's the absolute right approach. I also want to thank you for highlighting junk pickup as a case study. In my district, and I know many of my colleagues, this service is a critical tool in addressing chronic illegal dumping. When junk pickup works well, it gives residents a clear, accessible alternative to dumping and helps keep our neighborhoods cleaner. So improving reliability, communication, and follow-through in this service can have a real impact on reducing blight and improving quality of life for our residents. I do have a couple questions as we think about where this goes next. First, residents consistently share that the non-emergency line is not responsive for issues like major noise disturbances or other quality of life concerns. As we build out this digital front door, has staff considered evaluating whether certain non-emergency, non-police priority disturbances could be integrated into 311 as a part of the city's broader escalation and follow-up framework so that residents have a reliable place to report concerns and hopefully receive updates, even if enforcement is not immediate?

So the short answer to that is yes. The next phase of this, obviously we're going through the city services that are on 311 right now and going through what you just saw with Jeff today and all the other departments. Over the next few weeks, we'll be identifying the next 25 services that we intend to do that with over the next few months. I will say, I do think a, you know, not that phase, but a future, future state is that non-emergency could definitely go into that bucket. You know, one of the things that I think, you know, that we didn't want to go into too much today, you know, especially for me, because I wouldn't understand at all the level of programming needed, but that, you know, we kind of glossed over the technology part of it in a way, and the CRM, and the really great thing about that is how the that how that technology is going to connect to all these different systems so that there's just continual feedback. And with some of the non-emergency stuff or some of the stuff that I think we'd really like to be able to report, it requires county assistance. And so that's going to be an additional thing that we really need to go through and think about how those systems communicate. But it is part of a work plan that we would ultimately like to see kind of tested and put on 311 for sure.

Awesome. That'd be great because, you know, there's a A lot of concerns don't necessarily equate to the need of a direct police response at that moment due to priority concerns, whether it's like loud parties or other types of things, especially like if there's properties that continue to do these type of things. And so I know that residents call the police department, and given it's not that serious of an issue, it kind of gets lost in the sauce, or however we want to say it. And so having some way to document it would be great.

Absolutely. And one of the things, too, I think, that'll, you know, residents are actually pretty happy when you give them upfront communication, even if it's something they don't want to hear. And I think one of the things that we'll be doing over the next few months with 311 is just say what the services we're providing. Like we just went live with encampment management or report an encampment. We have the ability now to actually say, oh, here's what we're equipped to do. Like, this will look five days out and, you know, that's not something that we do now. And it's definitely not something that's built into the non-emergency line. So it might not be the most important thing for us, but it's very top of mind for that individual. And clear communication up front, I think, is going to be really important.

Awesome. Great. Thank you so much for that response. Second, you know, while 311 does collect user feedback, many residents don't engage with tools like this because they feel like they're not confident that it will lead to a resolution or having their issue solved. What sort of proactive community engagement strategies are we using to ensure residents are actively helping shape these systems? I think about when I was in the tech industry and we used to do user experience testing, putting together individuals and actually walking them through scenarios and you know, getting feedback on their experience, planning workshops, focus groups, or partnering with community-based organizations. I think about, you know, the Spanish-speaking community or the Vietnamese community. All of them may engage with the app differently. And so what are we doing to make sure that we're being creative with gathering that feedback and then making sure it's incorporated in how we change the future of 311?

Well, the customer vision and standards really started with residents. So... you know, the foundation of that, which is, you know, this project is really laid on that, was built through community engagement. You know, through the existing services on 311 that we're going through right now, obviously we know some of the, we know the ones where they broke down in communication and we're able to reach out to them and have those conversations. We're also aware of the you know, the folks that use SJ311 on a very regular basis with the ability to outreach to them. But also, quite honestly, the, you know, Joe's report, the annual services report and kind of the survey methodology paints a very clear picture for us. of where we need to go. And so I think as we go to the next software package, the ability to involve smaller groups and even beta test some of the new features I think will be really helpful. But that survey actually provides us a very clear north star on what residents want to see thus far.

Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And thank you for mentioning how this project started, actually out of these conversations from the community. I just hope that we loop back with the community once we get, whether it's a prototype or some sort of beta version, to then get the feedback from those same uh... individuals cuz you're right we may have super users who use it all the time and they just some of that stuff's intuitive you know to them but to others you know they may just look at that and look at an app and they get analysis paralysis and so i just want to make sure that uh... uh... we're putting our user at the center of the design thank you so much thanks council member let's go to council member comey

Thank you so much for the presentation. And thank you for doing something that is a really big lift. I have seen many different transformational processes. And this is very, very big. And trying to shift from where we are to where we want to be, it is going to take some time. I always say it takes three years. The fact that in your timeline, It seems to go a little bit fast. I know some people would say, oh, not fast enough. But I do know that it's a lot of work. So thank you for creating that one city digital front door. I always know that in these types of things, there are early adopters. And as you think about how you create that roadmap of who goes first and how does it go first, because you don't move from, something like this, everybody all together. So I think that it'd be good to understand how you are going to do that so that when you do a rollout of information, you can better manage expectations. I know that there's a lot of uh... things in place that uh... you know the community always questions well you know it's in the muni code it's in this and when you have these laws and and we're not able to uh... get to everything simply because we don't have the resources So I think that managing expectation is something that I'm going to be looking at closely because I think that when you do do the rollout to the community, given Council Member Ortiz, what he mentioned in terms of community engagement, I think it's going to be important to really be more upfront to say, these are the things we're going to tackle first. This is what we're going to do second. And you know what? There's a bunch of stuff that's not going to get done. And just be honest about it. Because I think that sometimes what I have found is that The expectation is that you do everything and it's like you city, I pay taxes to you and you do it all. I think that there's a role for our community to also participate in this. I think that it would be helpful to figure out how that is. On your slide 23, where you have your customers, the technology infrastructure, and the city departments, I'm assuming that part of the city department is the mayor and council on that side. I'm just wondering where do we land

Honestly, I think you land throughout this just as you know, like the city manager's office does in a way We're good We're always going to be a city where some residents choose to communicate with City Hall either through elected leadership or directly with the manager's office So you guys are involved on the left side in my mind the left side of that and taking in, you know either a customer, you know request in some way at the very beginning or you know, someone asking, you know, the new system will be sending out updates, but maybe someone doesn't see an update. Your staff may get an email, hey, I submitted this ticket, where is it? And so, you know, you'll get folks engaging with you on the left side, but obviously as a city department and your own CRMs will have visibility into those requests so you can serve. So I think you're kind of like the rest of the city on all areas of this workflow.

Okay, that sounds reasonable. And then in terms of how you roll this out in terms of information to the community, are you going to say, oh, these are all the things that you can report on 311, or you're going to wait until you add, or you can say, oh, this is going to be continuous all the way? I'm just wondering how you, like, what is your plan to roll this out to the community?

So I'd say from a communication strategy standpoint, I think that is in development. This is a super helpful conversation to kind of help us think through some of that. And I would say the 11 of you will also have a big hand in the rollout of that with your own constituencies. The new 311 will go live next year. There will be a group of services that are attached to that and that's what we will move forward with and be will need to clearly articulate to residents what isn't on 311 yet and kind of what that looks like almost you know like. Apple does with iOS 26 and 27. We plan on having a much more regular cadence of what's on and what's to come. And so that's where we want to be more intentionable and kind of more accountable for us delivering and going through those processes of constantly adding to the app.

OK, so that's for the customer for next year to roll out to the community. How is the internal department rollout going to be? Because, I mean, obviously you need to have our Are people either trained differently or this is going to be the way it is? What level of engagement is with the staff?

Sure. I would say it looks like we like to say a horizontal slice of the organization and the senior leadership is very involved and frontline staff will be involved in this. There is a steering committee within the city of senior staff and city manager's office. that Nicole drives on our behalf. It's going to be a case-by-case basis for each service, honestly, about how that department and how that team are involved. There's probably some services and some departments that have newer systems that are going to be much more compatible. And there's obviously some cultural change that needs to go through. There's some training that needs to go through. There's systems that have very clear, more up-to-date APIs, which would be very easy for us to plug into. And so the technology solution will be much more ready. There's going to be other departments that have antiquated systems that are heavily reliant on that manual coordination that is going to take a much deeper time commitment from the staff here as well as those that are not in the box today as well as training for those employees to use a new tool so that we don't slip back into I'm going to send a Teams message or I'm going to send an email. So I think it's gonna be a case by case basis as we go in to those individual departments. So some are gonna be a very deep dive and time intensive, others will be much more straightforward.

Yes. And why is it by service and not by department?

There's multiple services within the department, and we're going through a process right now where we're working with program managers, service delivery experts, and mapping out what their current state process looks like, and then working with them to design the future state. So it's not something we're doing in a vacuum without city employees. They understand the process. They understand how it works today, where their pain points are. what they're hearing from their customers and what needs to be fixed, and then we are working with them to design that future state, come up with what those short-term recommendations could be, so things that we can implement today, and then what some of those longer-term ones are that might require changes to technology or, you know, a much larger lift.

Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you. I know my time is short here, but I would just put a caution out there, since you are going service in departments. Sometimes, you know, I know how difficult change is, and there's an avoidance factor, and so I would just caution on, you know, sort of like only services and not departments, because then it doesn't integrate the whole department. So thank you very much.

Thanks, Councilmember. We'll go now to Councilmember DeJuan.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, staff, for the report. I know it's difficult to apply the modern technology to meet everyone's needs. It'll be a while. It's a trial and tribulation. But in the meantime, I think it has helped our citizens to communicate their needs and their wants and the services that we provide. I HAVE A QUESTION FOR YOU. WILL FUTURE OF THE 311 SYSTEM UPDATES INCLUDE STRONGER VERIFICATION, ACCOUNTABILITY MEASURE TO ENSURE THE REPORT ARE ACTUALLY COMPLETED BEFORE THEY ARE CLOSED? YES. FAIR ENOUGH. AND THE OTHER SUGGESTION THAT I HAVE IS, FOR EXAMPLE, IF EITHER THE VENDOR OR THE CITY EMPLOYEE WENT OUT TO PICK UP SOME OF THESE JUNK, IF YOU WILL, CAN THEY JUST TAKE A QUICK PICTURE AND THEN, YOU KNOW, IT SHOULD GO RIGHT BACK TO THE CONSTITUENT WHO PUT IN THE REQUEST AND SAY LOOK, BEFORE, AFTER.

Thank you for the question. That is one of our items to work with the haulers on that may require upgrades to their current customer modules, customer service modules, but we'll talk to them about that and see if that's an option.

I appreciate that. Well, thank you very much. I yield my time.

Thanks, Councilmember. I had just a couple of quick questions. So number one, I see if I have the memo correct that we are creating four roles to help deliver the work I think spread between IT and city manager's office. Just curious if you can share a little more about what those new hires will be driving and how it's distinct from consulting services. Is there a handoff from consultants to an in-house team? Is that in-house team continuous or primarily for project implementation? Just kind of would love to get a little more context on that. Sure.

So obviously the positions in IT are very much focused the 311 and the CRM integration and how those systems speak to one another and also all the other systems that we have in the city. Within the city manager's office, we have a new deputy director who introduced herself today as well as an assistant to the city manager and senior executive analyst that are really going to help do two things along with consulting services. So the process that Jeff outlined for you today as well as kind of project management as a whole initiative It's additional bandwidth for the organization to help look with existing city staff who are in departments as well as these new staff and consultants on that end-to-end experience. So we've got the consulting services where we need it, but we're building in-house expertise. The resources that we've added, I do want to note, are all one-time. So these positions are over a two-year period. So it is the hope and wish of the administration at this point that we build this into the muscle of City Hall so that we capture this and build in that capacity to continue to do it. Okay.

And I'll add that I think that we will figure out what kind of staffing needs we need long term, but we want to, again, give ourselves some space to evaluate that because this, again, is something that we're trying to embed across all of our departments and our services. It is a a cultural transformation just as much as a technology transformation.

Yeah. That makes sense to me. I'm thinking about it more from just the lens of our tight budget. Are we able to then ramp down some of the consulting costs as we have more in-house capacity?

We have quite a bit. I would just say in the fall, we've obviously spent, we kind of glossed over it today. Nicole mentioned some of the peer city review. We've looked at just shy of 10 other cities that are known for their customer experience or customer satisfaction numbers. So we've even brought this budget number down, what you see in the proposed budget. It was much closer to $15 or $16 million, with other cities really spending quite a bit of money. So we feel the balance between consulting services and the in-house staff, as well as kind of a reprioritization with Jennifer's directions just on two department staff on how to engage in this kind of gives us the perfect model to move forward.

Sounds good. You referenced other cities, which sparked a question I didn't have, but it would be interesting maybe in future conversations to understand how other cities, what they're investing, less the dollar amount, because that's going to vary wildly by city, but just what their workflows are, what their tech stack looks like, and just understanding best practices. In some cases, we're literally inventing and defining the latest and greatest, which is awesome, but there are plenty of places where we can learn from whoever's already best in class. I don't know if there are particular cities that come to mind or if we want to save that for a future presentation.

Honestly, we as a team, a lot of political science majors love the best practices research, right? So it's actually pretty fun to do. I would say Boston is known for very good customer service. I would say I think where we're going, we will leapfrog them if successful. I think the aha moment when we look at some of those other cities right now is a lot of those other cities have solved customer service or customer experience by creating a whole new department that is solely focused on that. And then adding layers within a bureaucracy of additional staff. As we've said, through the budget process, our own local context of our budget and why the county gets a certain amount and then VTA and us, that's sort of a fixed problem. And so we need to actually tackle it differently because we don't have money to add a whole new department or add layers. So it is a combination of a change in culture and a new technology solution where we just really need to be very disciplined and aggressive with the innovation of that technology. Because even what we're talking to you about today, within two years, we're going to need to create a system that can innovate on itself again and again.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I appreciate that. And I prefer that we're taking a holistic approach and kind of hopefully transforming overall workflows and integrating departments rather than creating a new office or department or function focused on customer service. The whole organization is serving customers and needs to have those seamless handoffs. So I'm certainly, as the former chair of our Smart Cities Committee, very bought in on the long-term vision. So that gets, though, to my, I guess, my final and probably most important point, question or line of questioning, which is in the memo, it stated that the customer experience transformation is not a customer satisfaction initiative in and of itself, nor is it limited to expanding the city's 311 platform. Okay, fair enough. Rather, it represents a structural modernization effort that integrates culture, operations, technology to improve reliability, transparency, and long-term service performance, and so forth. Okay, so that's fine and all, but if we're not At the end of the day, though, it is somewhat about customer satisfaction. And I get it that the customer or the resident may not be satisfied with the answer they get. I appreciate that. But what can we say at this point? What can we baseline today? that we expect to be significantly better after we've invested all of this time, effort, we're making hires, we're transforming the tech stack, we're putting millions of dollars, thousands of hours of staff time into transforming the system. I hope we're gonna have more satisfied customers. So what's the current, what are the key metrics, what's the baseline today so that in a year, two years, three years, we can look back and say, oh, wow, that indicator really started moving in a better direction. And do we have a set of those? Because I didn't see it.

Yeah, I would. I would say two things and ask Nicole to jump in if she has anything. First, I think it's important for us, we are trying to get away from, and we mentioned in the presentation, we are drastically trying to get away from just measuring ourself on the one customer interaction and taking a more holistic approach to what's the experience for everyone? Resident A, did they have a great experience or are they satisfied with the service? I think we're trying to actually take a step back and look at it with a much greater degree of intentionality around everyone's interactions. I would say second, and you and I have been able to talk about that word satisfaction a few times, Mayor, a lot of times in the organization, I don't want to harp on how lean we are, but it goes to, you know, Someone puts in a request, and quite frankly, the request is something that we don't actually provide. And there's a lot of tension there between that resident and the city, and then ultimately you guys get involved, and we stretch the organization to try and say yes, even if we don't have a solution for them. And that seems like if we have that on top of mind, it seems like designing for something we don't have yet versus let's be very intentional about fixing the things that we do have And so I think that word satisfaction, to say that it isn't about satisfaction, is probably a mistake. And that's my language in the memo, quite frankly. But it is intentional to the rest of the organization to say, no, no, no, we need some time to look at what we do really well first before we try and solve this new thing. Because that new thing is sometimes an expansion of services that we don't have resources for and actual time with you to discuss. And so that's probably me over-rotating a bit and being more intentional about it. But that's why that word is in there.

And I just want to add that, but we do have a bunch of performance measures in our budget book about different areas of customer satisfaction that we will be monitoring along this way, no matter how that resident or business interprets their own satisfaction. So we do have those splattered throughout our performance measures as well. So we have those baselines and we're trying to obviously improve those. You see them also in how fast we are and efficiently we respond to certain services if we're meeting deadlines and things like that. And this will help us in that regard as well.

Totally. Okay, I still have a comment on that, though. So it makes sense. Nicole, did you want to... And welcome to the team, by the way.

Thank you. I was just going to add something, if that's okay. Please. Yeah, I mean, I think just building off of what both Jennifer and Lee said, you know, customer satisfaction isn't the only measure for success, right? So I think some of the other measures that we're going to be looking at to measure our success for this transformation are things like faster response and resolution times, improved visibility and to service performance, Better cross-department coordination, increased digital self-service adoption, higher resident trust and confidence in service delivery. And these are some of the metrics that like when we did our benchmarking, things that they looked at to kind of measure their success for their CX transformations. So hopefully that helps a little bit.

It does, and it makes sense. I get the point, and yet I still want to push. When will this come back to council? Do we have any sense? How long until we see an update on this again? Could be a year, could be six months.

No, no, I think sometime in the fall, like late fall, I think we're scheduled to come back in November is what we had talked about as a team.

Okay, so I don't know that we have a motion yet, but I just want to ask whether it's part of the motion, whether it's an info memo, whether it's part of our final budget discussions next month, or whether it's in the fall when you come back. I'm not pushing on this needing to be here today or tomorrow, but just in the relatively short time. I think it's important for us to take what you all just said and actually boil it down rather than it being kind of a, what did you say, smattering, splattering of these metrics across the budget book or things like that list. So I agree that this work, if successful, over the coming years is this big transformation of our tech stack, our culture, how we serve customers. that's gonna lead to some efficiency gains, It's going to hopefully lead to fewer complaints about things being dropped. It's going to lead to an increase in overall satisfaction when people think about how the city serves them, in part by how we say no. How we say no matters. If we say no through silence and ignoring people, they're going to feel really bad about that. Or if we're rude, they're not going to like it. But if we set really good expectations on the front end and guide them to the place that can help them, they may feel great about us saying no. whether it's net promoter score. And so I would like to ask that when we come back to this, I'll leave it up to the administration, assuming the maker of the motion is comfortable with what I'm describing here. I just would like to know whether it's efficiency and customer satisfaction or whatever you want to call it. What are the metrics? And I ask that because I'd actually like to start baselining today. If it needs to go on the customer service, sorry, the annual resident survey we do or get captured with people interacting with 311, I'd like to start baselining now because that's how we learn over time.

I don't think we need a motion for that. That's part of the work we would like to do and we're happy to do that.

Okay, so we're all bought in. You're going there anyway. Okay, great. I'd still like the record to reflect that, but great. Okay. Sounds good. So I am going to shut up and turn to my colleagues. Does anyone want to make a motion here?

So accept the report. Second.

Okay, great. All right. And you're going to work, we're going to have some baseline metrics. Yes.

Okay.

Look forward to coming back in the fall on this. Any other comments, questions? Okay. Tony, let's vote.

Motion passes unanimously.

Okay. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it. Okay. We are on to item 6.1, San Jose Clean Energy Program's Roadmap Status Report, and we have a staff presentation. We'll turn it over to Lori as soon as she's ready.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I'm Lori Mitchell. I'm the Director of the Energy Department and very pleased today to be joined by Kate Ziemba. She's our Deputy Director over Account Management, Marketing, and Customer Programs. So today we're gonna give you a little bit of a background on our current programs, which we've had since we started San Jose Clean Energy. Recommendations for additional programs in this fiscal year, as well as an update to our programs roadmap for the next five years. And just as a reminder, the city council adopted back in 2021 guiding principles that really guide how we update our customer programs. And those guiding principles are number one, that we're reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that we're promoting equity, increasing affordability and supporting environmental justice communities. that we're benefiting all of our customers and the community, we're maintaining or improving the financial status of San Jose Clean Energy, and that we are aligning with our city's climate smart goals. Just as a reminder, the power charge and difference adjustment is a fee that PG&E charges our customers for legacy resources that they procured before the CCA started. And in 2026, that fee is very high. You can see that in this bar chart. where it's currently about 35, actually about $36 per megawatt hour versus last year it was just $6. And so this means that our customers are paying in total about $132 million in this fee to PG&E. We are using about 108 million in our reserves to cover that charge for our customers so that they're still seeing a discount by being a San Jose Clean Energy customer. But unfortunately, into 2027, there is cause to remain cautious about the PCIA. We think it will continue to be high. So because of that, we are really recommending that we keep our customer programs funded at existing levels instead of increasing them so that we still have reserves available to offset this fee for customers. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kate.

Good afternoon, Kate Siemba, Deputy Director with the Energy Department. So we currently offer 12 programs across four main areas, residential electrification incentives and financing, EV charging and transportation programs, customer support, including bill assistance and education, and finally, demand flexibility. And in addition, we also have three workforce development programs. Through the end of 2025, we estimate our programs will save customers 29.4 million in lifetime savings, avoid 46,500 metric tons of CO2, and have saved 35 million kilowatt hours. Through SJCE programs, customers have installed more than 300 chargers, bought more than 100 EVs, installed more than 1,100 heat pumps, and 107 battery storage systems, and together have created nearly two megawatts of flexible load to help stabilize the grid on high usage days. So now we'll talk about our recommended programs for next fiscal year. but first start with how we arrived at our recommendations. So we wanna create energy programs that our community wants and needs. So we have a staff member who's dedicated to community engagement and conducting needs assessments. We also receive input from the Climate Advisory Commission and collaborate with other CCAs and utilities to understand their most impactful programs. And we put program ideas through our scoring framework to help prioritize. So first we calculate scores for program ideas using the five metrics that map to our council approved guiding principles. Greenhouse gas reductions, prioritizing electrification in areas with low adoption, and customer savings. These all carry the greatest weight. And our recommendations for next fiscal year reflect the highest scoring programs. For fiscal year 26-27, we recommend spending a maximum of 10 million on programs given the PCIA, and 10 million is what we expect to spend this current fiscal year. We recommend continuing to offer the 12 programs on the previous slide. We continually iterate these programs and learn from what we were seeing and from other programs to improve. But we propose to add two new programs to fill gaps. The first is providing free technical assistance to our commercial customers to help them electrify their buildings and implement energy efficiency projects with a special track for restaurants and food service. The second is a pilot program for renters that offers a low or no cost portable heat pump. This can provide cooling to units that don't have it as well as efficient heating. And we estimate that implementing these programs next fiscal year will result in 16 million in lifetime savings for customers and avoid more than 33,000 metric tons of CO2. In 2021, Energy Department published the first programs roadmap that outlines the types of programs SJC may pursue over the coming years. We committed to updating the program's roadmap every five years, so we're here today to present another recommended update covering 2026 through 2031. The roadmap provides strategic direction and options for programs, and we will continue to conduct detailed prioritization and program design and bring those recommendations annually to the city council. For this roadmap update, we conducted two residential surveys in multiple languages, one to understand energy needs and barriers, and one at the end of the engagement process to make sure we heard the community right and hear reactions to our proposed programs. We also conducted three residential listening sessions in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. And then finally, we reached out to more than 80 stakeholders across multiple fields, business, community-based organizations, labor, environmental group, and city departments. We value our stakeholders, and their input is reflected here. So a little about what we heard. It's no surprise that affordability was top of mind. Customers want to adopt clean energy technologies to unlock lower bills, but the upfront cost of the technology is a barrier. We heard that housing constraints are also a barrier to participate in programs, particularly for renters and multifamily customers. And while we heard broad support for energy programs, customers emphasize strong desire for bill savings, renter options, and simple participation. Our programs roadmap contains a list of 23 potential programs to explore over the next five years. These programs are focused on affordability, accelerating adoption, expanding access to charging, and using demand flexibility to reduce costs and support the grid. Before wrapping up, we wanted to take a moment to thank the stakeholders who informed the roadmap for their time, expertise, and feedback. Our recommendation today is to accept the status report on our San Jose Clean Energy Programs roadmap and adopt a resolution approving the programs and authorizing the city manager to execute two contracts to help us implement the two new programs. Thank you, and with that, we'll take questions.

Great, thanks, Lori and Kate, appreciate that. Tony, do we have public comment? I have no cards. Okay, coming back to the council, we'll start with Councilmember Cohen.

Thank you, and thank you for the annual update. These programs are still exciting, and I just wanted to ask a question about the current programs that we're renewing. Can you talk a little bit about how often they're used, how much utilization there is? Are we using the full amount? Is there excess in it? Are we running out of money? Can you just talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, I'll pass it to Kate to talk a little bit about the details, but you might recall last year council did approve over 12 million in customer programs. We're tracking to spend about 10 million this year, which is great progress. There are a couple programs that, you know, we're not seeing as much uptake as we anticipated. And so that's why we're targeting this year to keep that program spend the same as this fiscal year so that we have a stable, funding stream for our customer programs that were not going up and down and running out of funds for certain programs while also maintaining enough reserve to help buffer the PCIA in the future. But I'll let Kate talk a little bit more specifically about those programs.

Thank you for the question, Councilmember. I would say our most popular programs are related to our heat pump rebates and payment plans. So we have provided rebates to date for more than 1,500 heat pump systems, about 80% of which are heat pump HVAC and 20% are heat pump water heater. We also, one of our programs that is popular with customers but less than we had anticipated are our EV rebates for income qualified customers. When we launched it and forecasted the budget last year, we did not know that the federal tax credit would be sunset and so we are seeing lower uptake in that. Also due to higher prices of cars due to tariffs and then other economic factors too. We are also seeing strong participation in our peak rewards virtual power plant, which allows customers to participate by making behavioral reductions, what we call a peak event when the grid is in need, or through smart home devices. So we're seeing a lot of smart thermostats being enrolled in that program. And so they receive an incentive upon enrollment and then quarterly incentives as well. And then the last program I'll mention is our electricity bill relief program, which we're very proud of. It's a partnership with this county's homelessness prevention program. and we are actually using about half of the funding than we had forecasted, but we're still not turning down any families in need of assistance, so we see that as positive.

Okay, is each category set with a fixed amount of money, or is that fungible during the year as we see different levels of usage in different programs?

It is fungible, and so we have had to shift more funding, for example, to our heat pump program and been able to meet that demand.

So we had $1,500, and that's about $3.5 million just spent on the heat pump rebates, and we think we have some buffer in case that uptake continues to climb?

That's correct.

Okay. The new programs... The one on the commercial side, do we have a feeling of what kind of demand there is, what kind of use there would be of that program?

Yes, we have CCAs, our partner CCAs, Peninsula Clean Energy and Silicon Valley Clean Energy that also offer this program. And so we are able to, we think we'll be able to serve about 25 businesses, but it will be part of our strategy as we reach out to commercial customers to let them know that this assistance is available.

So we're going to try to recruit businesses specifically that we think will benefit from this?

yes we are and i would just add you know one opportunity might be with the building performance ordinance that we have and so using that technical assistance to move from audits to actually a retrofits could help there as well as really proud to um offer that technical assistance to some of our municipal accounts as well i love the idea of the portable

heat pump for renters. What kind of outreach can we or will we do to make people aware that this is an option that might be good for them?

We plan to work with community-based organizations, potentially even to help deliver the units directly to renters. And so they will be a very important part of the engagement strategy. We also hope to partner with council offices to, as we do with other programs, giving offices a toolkit to promote through your channels to make sure that renters in your districts are aware as well.

And is this income-based, or is it for any renter?

It will be income based.

I mean it's great that the idea of a free heat pump that then will offer not just more efficient heating but air conditioning services is really great and great for all of us to promote that opportunity for people who qualify.

Yeah, and I'll just mention we're also partnering with the Housing Department to reach these renters, and we agree this is a great opportunity to make sure that some of those facilities have air conditioning as well as heating to make them more comfortable in the summer.

Okay. Thank you. I'll move adoption of the resolution.

Thanks, Council Member. We'll go to Council Member Comey.

I wanted to thank you so much for the update as well as the briefings. I always find them very, very helpful and really want to say an extra thank you for what you've kind of come up with for the renters. Because I know that, you know, in the past we haven't really done a lot in that arena. And I think that that's a good possibility to help others. And I think that there are probably many avenues of those who might be interested in this. I mean, you have seniors. You have the rental community. I mean, you have a whole scope of different areas that we can help you with getting the word out. because I think that that's going to be pretty popular, especially now since everything is increasingly more expensive. So thank you so much for that.

Thanks, Councilmember. Okay, I don't see any other questions or comments from colleagues. Toni, let's vote.

Motion passes 11-0. Great.

All right. Thank you all. We are on to land use, item 10.2, environmental review policy, and we do have a staff presentation.

Good afternoon, honorable mayor and council members. Manira Senth here, deputy director of planning, joined by Chris Burton, director of planning, building, and code enforcement, and David Keon, our principal planner and in-house CEQA expert. Very excited to bring this item before council today. This is a longstanding effort to further streamline and consolidate. our CEQA and NEPA process into one document and provide certainty to our consultants, to our applicants, and to staff, and also memorialize standard permit conditions that reduces the need for technical analysis up front so that projects can move faster through the process. So with that, I'll turn it over to David Keon to walk you through the policy and the changes we are proposing today. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Honorable Mayor and City Council. David Keon, Principal Planner on the City's Environmental Review Team. Do I have a presentation? I don't know. Just a second. There, it comes up. Thank you. So good afternoon console, so this is about the city's environmental review policy, this is accumulation of work that we've been doing over the past several years in response to the 2022 audit. And just do a quick overview of what i'm going to discuss first about the background of why we're doing this policy. And then i'm going to discuss about what is actually entailed the environment review policy, including the environment review handbook and the environmental standard permit conditions. I'm also gonna touch briefly about a proposed amendment to Title 21 of the Municipal Code. So just as a background, California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA for short, requires the city to disclose the environmental impacts and identify mitigation measures to reduce those impacts as part of any discretionary action that it takes. In addition, there is the National Environmental Policy Act otherwise known as NEPA. This is similar to CEQA, however, federal projects require either federal funding or a federal decision. The city interacts with both of these laws quite frequently. CEQA is the most dominant. However, NEPA does apply to projects that come forward, for example, affordable housing projects that require federal funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Both of these laws require oftentimes significant analysis. and studies in order to support findings. This can be costly and often adds time and cost to these project reviews. And as I mentioned, the city auditor's office conducted a very thorough analysis of the city's environment review process and in March 22 published a report with 12 recommendations on how to improve the city's environment review process. So among these 12 recommendations, we're establishing guidelines for people that do the environmental reviews and also establishing thresholds, establishing or clarifying thresholds of significance and developing environmental standard permit conditions. So what's before you today is implementing several of these recommendations as part of this 2022 audit. The first I want to discuss is the environment review handbook. So this is essentially clarification of the city's environment review process. It is designed for consultants and for city staff that are preparing these. The goal is for consultants when they're preparing scopes of work or for city staff when they are writing documents to have a consistent approach and also ensuring that when the documents are prepared that they more closely meet our standards, and this reduces review time because it will also reduce rounds of review. This is not intended, this handbook is not intended to replace existing guidelines, for example, the CEQA guidelines or the Department of Housing and Urban Development's guidelines for implementation of MEPA. However, it is designed to supplement that specifically for how the City of San Jose will implement these laws. It also, as I mentioned, will provide clarification on thresholds of significance. So thresholds of significance, we are not adopting any new thresholds of significance as part of this policy, but we are clarifying existing thresholds of significance, including approaches to analysis to be more consistent across the board. In addition, a very key component of the environmental review policy and implementation of the auto recommendations is the environmental standard permit conditions. Environmental standard permit conditions, you know, we've looked at what are the most common types of environmental impacts we see of urban development in the city of San Jose and developed with a consultant standard conditions that would address these. This will also implement general plan policies for the purpose of protecting residents and habitat. So first of all, the city of San Jose, the most common types of development that we see within developed areas, these are areas that are already surrounded by existing development and not outside in undisturbed areas. they often have the same types of environmental impacts. We've seen this year over year. We see the same type of impact and the same type of mitigation measures or conditions to address these impacts. This is consistent, and these are commonly, the most common impacts are associated with construction. Typically, this would be construction air quality, construction noise, and also soil, hazardous soils or issues related to migratory birds or roosting bats. So we see these over and over again. So our goal with this was to develop standard permit conditions based on criteria that were developed with the help of a consultant and technical experts, including air quality consultant, noise consultant, and biologists, in order to come up with conditions that they could then mitigate these impacts without the need for additional technical studies, in many cases, or at least reducing the amount of technical studies that are needed. I also want to mention that it may not apply to all projects. There are projects that may not meet the criteria that maybe need additional analysis or in some cases there are projects that would be unique circumstances that would require additional analysis. However, the goal was to meet most common of 80% type of projects that we see in the city. Just a quick kind of overview of how this standard perfect conditions work. So this is an example of a project that is a very common type of urban infill project in the city. It's actually on appeal, so it will be coming to the city council. However, I just want to use that as an example of a type of project, how, if these environmental standard perfect conditions were in effect, how it would apply to a project that is a typical type of project. So this is a 14-unit project on an urban site and no underground parking, very common, typical townhouse condo project. They had prepared an infill exemption and included air quality studies for construction air quality and construction noise. However, looking at the criteria from the environmental standard permit conditions, it fully complies with these criteria. Therefore, if this project were to come in with these standard permit conditions in place, they would just have to satisfy those standard permit conditions regarding construction equipment, including heightened standards for certain types of construction equipment, which means Tier 4 equipment. And also, as construction noise management plan, we would not have to do technical studies because we know these type of impacts would be mitigated to less than significant with implementation of these conditions. I DO WANT TO MENTION THERE ARE CERTAIN AREAS WHERE STILL REPORTS WILL BE REQUIRED. TO MAKE FINDINGS, WE WILL CONTINUE TO REQUIRE THAT THERE BE A TREE SURVEY DONE. THIS IS AS PART OF THE DEVELOPMENT REVIEW PROCESS IN ORDER TO DETERMINE HOW MANY REPLACEMENT TREES WILL BE NEEDED. THIS IS STILL CONTINUING. IN ADDITION, PROJECTS DISTURBING SOIL REQUIRE PHASE ONE ENVIRONMENTAL SITE ASSESSMENTS. in order to evaluate in case there's any residual pesticide, particularly in areas with agricultural use. However, the standard permit conditions will still significantly reduce the amount of technical work needed for the most common types of projects. Lastly, I just want to briefly touch that we are proposing a Title 21 amendment. This is essentially updating environmental appeal noticing requirements. Currently, there's a requirement to send the mail, the hard copy of the city council memo to neighbors and the appellant and applicant. This is redundant and very time-consuming, so we will continue the normal noticing process via mailings and also via noticing to these parties, but we will not be mailing hard copies of the staff report. Instead, we will be linking it to linking a copy of the staff report to the internet so that then people who are interested can view it. Also, if anybody has a request that they want a hard copy, we can mail like anything else. However, this will be removing a major impediment to our noticing process. In terms of outreach, so we posted this in March, the draft handbook and draft environmental permit conditions. We also presented to the developers and construction roundtable and notified them of these new proposed conditions and handbook. We also presented to the environmental consultants roundtable and also notified environmental groups on our notification list. We did receive input from a couple of environmental consultant firms, some applicant representatives, and also from environmental groups. We have updated, revised a few modifications to the handbook and to the environmental standard conditions, and that is in strike underline posted on the website. I will mention that some of the comments were related to parts of the analysis were related to topics that are beyond the scope of this effort, mainly because it would involve changing thresholds of significance. This includes concerns that were raised related to construction vibration, construction, length of construction for noise, and also for common operational noise issues such as those related to day cares. These concerns we have received and we'll be incorporating these into the environmental review that we're going to be conducting for the four-year review. So with that, the Planning Commission will recommend that City Council consider the determination consistency of the environmental impact report for the general plan EIR and downtown strategy 2040 EIR according to CEQA and also adopt a resolution approving the environment review policy which adopts the environment review handbook and environmental standard permit conditions. And third, approve an amendment to title 21 of the municipal code regarding environmental appeals. And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you. Great. Thank you, David. Appreciate that. Manera, Chris, thank you for the presentation and the good work on this. I'll have a couple more comments, but let's go to public comment first if we have any.

I have no cards for this item.

Okay, great. Coming back to the council, I just want to thank team for the work here, especially David Kuhn and the sequel team this Policy change evolution is a long time coming. I know it's been discussed for many years There was a very insightful City Auditor report back in 2022 that outlined how we can improve the sequel process that I know this builds on we also had added some resources in the budget through I believe the the March message last year, and I'm grateful to see the follow through. I think the basic idea of taking environmental issues that we see occur over and over again and standardizing the conditions is really straight, makes sense, it's a common sense way to provide predictability, be more efficient. Doesn't mean lowering standards, but just means enforcing our standards in a consistent way for conforming projects also want to thank my Brown Act for the collaboration on Our memo and I'm gonna start by turning to Council or a compost to say a little more about that and where we're hoping to go with this so councilmember. Thanks for the collaboration

Thank you, Mayor. I also want to begin my remarks by thanking staff, specifically David Keon and Court Hitchens, who have been working on this for quite some time, as the Mayor said, in addition to the day-to-day project work that the Environmental Review Team handles. Thank you. Thank you to PBC ease leadership team for answering our questions and helping us refine a scope of work that Facilitates next steps on this important topic. I'm also grateful to the mayor vice mayor Foley and council members toward EOS and Casey for their collaboration on the joint memo that we've submitted the handbook Standard and standard permit conditions as written are a valuable resource as they provide transparency and clarity on the city's requirements for mitigating project impacts, but to fully respond to the city auditor's findings and recommendations for streamlining environmental review. I think we can all agree that there's more work to do. So we are proposing furthering reducing requirements like technical studies that cost tens of thousands of dollars and extend review timelines. Project specific analysis like this can sometimes feel like reinventing the wheel and it can act as a deterrent to building or doing business in San Jose and we really want to improve that perception and that work stream for businesses now and in the future. So as PBCE, works on the four year review of the general plan. I believe now is the ideal time for us as a council to consider other methods of streamlining environmental review and making it easier for the projects that advance our community goals. We can consider options for broadly scoped city initiated environmental review that can clear the way for small projects and small businesses. We can reevaluate thresholds for significance that we impose on developers and ask ourselves if they need to be so stringent. There's broad agreement that construction noise in excess of one year is an unusual and generally unreasonable benchmark of significant impact. And we may also want to consider new exemptions. For example, as was mentioned, the city could determine that children playing at a child care facility is not subject to noise thresholds of significance because these are the sounds that we expect to hear in a healthy and thriving environment. The SPCs and the handbook are a great start together. They provide a baseline level of information to developers, business owners, environmental consultants, and the public for things like air quality and construction noise. We have a good handle on what mitigations will be needed and developers hoping to build in San Jose can go in with clear expectations. What we're doing with this memo is looking to take the next step and ensure that the city auditor's recommendations are addressed in a holistic way. And so that's what our joint memo provides PBCE with, the flexibility to determine which options to take, but the endpoint should be quicker and easier environmental review for projects that do not pose a significant environmental concern. small infill projects repurposed buildings and modest multifamily construction should be easy easier to get across the finish line and so with that I move to approve the joint memo from the mayor vice mayor councilmember Tordillo's Casey and myself thank you awesome thanks counselor appreciate that vice mayor

Thank you. So it's been eight years since I proposed streamlining CEQA as a priority. We've come a long way, and I'm really glad to see this come through in my final years as a council member. It's not that the environmental review isn't important. It is important, but the streamlining allows us to address situations that come up on a regular basis in a quicker, more timely manner and give the developer a handbook and a guide to go through that gives them more understanding and comfort in knowing where they can go with a particular development. I really am so happy to see the handbook. I'm so happy to see the streamline. And I can check off that one thing that I proposed way back when as finally getting done. But this isn't the end. This is just the beginning of continuing to streamline. So we have to keep looking at ways to streamline the process and make it more effective and efficient, all, of course, being concerned about the environmental impacts. So I think I truly am grateful to Councilmember Campos and Mayor Mahan, Tordillos, and Casey for allowing me to participate in this Brown Act. We have a good memo, and I'm very proud to be part of it. would like to ask about follow-up reports in relation to this this seems that it would be appropriate to come to CED at some point and I'm wondering if there is an opportunity for us and what time what that might look like for a report a status report to come to CED and what the timing might be on that any thoughts on how we could accomplish that what's the best vehicle

Thank you, Vice Mayor Chris Burton, Director of Planning, Building, Code Enforcement. Absolutely always happy to bring back updates. I'm just thinking whether this would be a standalone item or maybe we'd bring it back on the broader conversation around process improvements, which I think we have coming back in the fall. I'd have to check the work plan to take a look.

Okay, that sounds great. I wonder if I could include that or ask Council Member Campos to include that as a friendly amendment that it come back to CED incorporated with the updated report that you'll be giving us in the fall.

Yeah, I believe that's October.

Okay, great. Thank you. I'm grateful of that. As that will be one of my last CED meetings, I look forward to that report as well. Thank you for the work. Thank you for the report today and for the handbook. I'm really happy to see it all go forward. Thank you.

Thanks, Vice Mayor. Appreciate your advocacy over the years for this reform. Makes a lot of sense, especially at a time with soaring housing costs and a real affordability crisis for people. Council Member Tordillos.

Thank you, Mayor. Very excited to see this work moving forward. I think, as others have said, a great way to reduce some redundant work, you know, not reinvent the wheel so much with some of our project-specific analysis and provide overall just more predictability in the process for some of the most common impacts that projects face. The only clarifying question I wanted to make, I wanted to ensure that the memo to accept the, or the motion to include the staff recommendation alongside the joint memo also was inclusive of the supplemental memo from PPC yesterday. I just wanted to clarify.

Correct. That is the recommendation to include the edits in the supplemental.

Perfect. Thank you. Beyond that, we just want to thank Councilmember Campos for her leadership here and all of the members of the Brown Act for the partnership. Thank you.

Thanks, Councilmember. Appreciate it. Okay. I don't see any other hands. Tony, let's vote.

Motion passes unanimously.

Thank you. All right, folks, we are on to open forum, which is an opportunity for members of the public to comment on city business that was not on today's agenda. Tony?

Yes, I have seven cards. I'm going to call the first few names. Michael, come on down. Elena. And Ray, we'll start with the three of you, and then I'll move on to the next group of cards. Please come down to the microphone, no particular order. First person on the microphone, go ahead and speak. Again, that was Michael, Elena, and Ray.

Good afternoon. Mayor, city council members, city manager, my name is Ray Carrillo. I was here last week. I'm here to talk about 510 East Santa Clara, the Arco gas station on the corner of Santa Clara Street and 11th Street, downtown San Jose, five blocks away. It's now been two months since the city has closed the property and still no fence. When you return to your offices, you can look out the window at the station and see the illegal dumping with two discarded soil mattresses and an open dumpster. Gateway to the downtown. I hope you're not going to wait until World Cup to get a fence up. The overgrown trees and the branches will make it unable to get the flags up from Office of Economic Development. We also need a designation as a gas station as an abandoned station. There's no need for elaborate review. Sometimes I understand things like that take time and it could be a slippery slope. This is a flat line. It says what An abandoned gas station is, in the code, more than 30 days not used in 140 days. It's a clock. It's been years since it's been used as a gas station. It should have been designated a long time ago. That designation allows the city to begin to address the contamination on the whole property, both above the property and below. The gas has been leaking for years. It's clearly leaking now. Bay Area Air Quality Management has two ongoing investigations. Please help. Every district is dependent upon the downtown as a successful economic engine. This long festering problem was not made by my council member, he inherited it, and while it might not be your job, it is your responsibility, all of yours. Get a fence up now, get the abandoned designation now, begin abatement immediately for everyone's health and safety, which should be your number one priority, and cover up this eyesore before the rest of the world sees it in a few weeks, Economic Development, your second priority. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next speaker. Also, I'd like to call down Ha Tru and Song Nguyen Tran to come on down. Go ahead.

Hi, my name is Elina Churchill. I'm a resident in San Jose District 9, Pam Foley's district. I come to you because I have a warrant I've been trying to take care of for quite some time, and I'm having difficulties getting a hold of the Sheriff's Department and the police department in handling this appropriately. I received a letter. I was booked into the San Jose main jail and then taken to Elmwood for six days. Never saw a judge. I'm not being given the proper opportunity to due process. So money was taken off my books for a commissary purchase I never received because I was discharged from Elmwood in the middle of the night. I'm trying to get the funds back from that purchase because the items were never received, and I'm asking for your help, a call to action in facilitating that for me. I'd like to focus on what's important. I helped take care of a disabled Vietnam veteran and his disabled wife. They're two German shepherds and my two chihuahuas. It's a very busy household, and I just appreciate the common courtesy of having somebody get back to me in a timely manner. Can I give the letter to the clerk?

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker, also Lan Fong Ngo, come on down, Van Lee and Ha Phan.

I am here today not on behalf of the democracy or the Republic, but on behalf of the Most High God. I am a daughter of the Most High God. I am a child of the Most High God, the daughter of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the daughter of the God that delivers, restores, redeems, and destroys the chains of bondage. I am here today not to acknowledge your authority, but to help you recognize the one who has authority above everyone and everything. And that is Jesus, Yeshua, Almighty God, Yah, Abba Father, Jehovah Jireh. I come here not to beg or plead, but to declare command and demand under the authority that has been given to me by the Most High God, that you will give up your seats, your titles, and positions as board, city council, mayor, governor, president, chair, leader, assistant, helper, and any other position of authority, if you use your position to steal, kill, and destroy, if your position has caused evil and vile wickedness in this city, neighborhood, county, state, and nation for inhumane and unjust causes, your demons must give up their place in the mighty matchless name of Jesus. Amen. Now I will read scripture from the word of God. From the book of Isaiah, the lofty looks of man shall be humbled and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. For the day of the Lord hosts shall be upon everyone that is proud and lofty and upon everyone that is lifted up, he shall be brought low. And I will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity. And I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. Judgment also will I lay to the line and righteousness to the plummet. And the hail shall sweep the refuge of lies.

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker. I'm sorry, your time is up.

I'm sorry. Your time is up, ma'am. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Your time is up.

No, I'm sorry. Your time is up. Excuse me.

Your time is up. Thank you.

Next speaker.

I'm sorry, ma'am. Your time is up. All right, we're on to our next speaker, and I just want to remind speakers to address comments to the council as a whole, not to individual council members. Okay.

Thank you. Dear Mayor, council member, and everyone present today, my name Hachio. residents and taxpayers who are deeply concerned about transparency, accountability, and people's use of public resources by our city government. I would like to ask a very clear question. Why are taxpayers' dollars and resources of the city attorney's office being used to defend council member Bia Doan in personal lawsuits when the city of the San Jose itself is not a defendant in this case? Taxpayer funds should be used to serve a community for public safety, infrastructure, parks, and existing city services, not to finance the personal legal defense of politicians facing defamation allegations brought by private citizens. What raised even great concern in that court denied Mr. Doan an anti-slap motion including the case has sufficient legal merit to proceed and not merely protect political speech even from legal accountability. Therefore, the public has right to know who authorized the youth's official legal resource in this matter. Where is the line between official duty and personal defamability? And how can the public continue to judge in a government transparent if taxpayer money is being used to protest the personal interest and elected official? This is not about politics. or personal conflicts. This is about public accountability, transparency, and maintaining the public trust in the city government. Thank you for your listening.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the San Jose City Council, as well as all of you present today, my name is Lan Phuong. I would like to ask a very clear question. Why is the tax of the people and the power of the city attorney's office used to protect the members of the delegation in an incident of personal character, while the city of San Jose is not an individual Bị thưa, trong vụ việc này, tiền thuế của người dân đã được dùng để phục vụ cộng đồng, cho an toàn công cộng, cơ sở hạ tầng, công viên và các vụ thiết yếu, chứ không phải để tài trợ cho việc bào chữa cá nhân của một chính trị gia. Trước các cáo buộc phỉ bán đối với gia đình tôi, điều khiến nhiều người quan ngại hơn nữa là

What worries many people even more is that the court rejected the application, reject the anti-complaint, eating fries at the club. This is not simply a political statement that is exempt from accountability. Therefore, the public has the right to know who approved the use of public legal resources in this case. Where does the line lie between official responsibility and personal responsibility? Globally, and how can people continue to place their trust in government transparency? if tax money is used to protect the personal interests of elected officials. This is not a political or personal issue. It's a matter of public responsibility, transparency, and children's trust.

Honorable Mayor and Council Member, my name is Van Le. I'm a District 7 resident and candidate of San Jose City Council D7 and former Vice President of Little Saigon San Jose Foundation. On behalf of some Vietnamese community members, organization and District 7 residents, to respectfully ask for transparency and clarification regarding the recent banner change in the Little Saigon District. Little Saigon was officially recognized in 2008 After many years of advocacy, sacrifice, and contribution by the Vietnamese refugee community in Bay Area, for many residents, the banner and public symbol along Story Road are not simply decorations. They represent our refugee journey, our history, and our identity. Recently, long-time banner in Little Saigon were replaced with new designs. Many community members were surprised because there was no public notice No visible community consultation and no communication provided to many District 7 residents and Vietnamese community regarding these changes. As residents, we are trying to understand who was responsible for approving and coordinating the new banner installation. There are also questions because District 7 representative previously indicates there are no dedicated city budget for maintaining this banner and Little Saigon project. HOWEVER, THE COMMUNITY UNDERSTOOD THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION MAY STILL HAVE APPROXIMATELY 15 EXISTING BANNER IN STORAGE ALONG WITH REMAINING MAINTENANCE FUNDS REPORTLY ASSOCIATED WITH BLUE OF SAIGON BANNER PURPOSES. THEREFORE, I RESPECTFULLY REQUEST CLARIFICATION IN MY EMAILS ALREADY SENT TO ALL OF YOU AND LAST MONDAY REGARDING THE AUTHORIZATION OF BANNER CHANGE, FUNDING SOURCE WERE NOT USED the status of previous banners, the disposition of any remaining maintenance funds, and the new rule about banners. Because this matter directly affected the Little Saigon. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon, Mayor Hamahan and city council members. I'm here to represent a case of disrespect to our culture. We came here for freedom. We came here because we, to us, this country is like second country to us. There is a case of the banners being replaced by the city without our consent. This is not just a regular banner. This is a banner that represents our culture. In 2012, there was an agreement between the culture of Vietnam, Vietnamese people, Vietnamese community, with the city to use this type of banner. We gave to the city 15 banners for replacement purpose. And we know for a fact that there is no city funding, no city budget for this replacement. That's why we gave 15 banners to the city of San Jose for replacement. But today the banner was replaced without our consent. Today the banner would change another totally different format of banner. The banner, the new banner, doesn't have our yellow flag, which represent our South Republic of Vietnam. So there must be a reason that we would like to know, and the city please reply to our questions. Question two, there is no city budget for the replacement of the banner, so where do you get this funding? Second, there was an agreement between the city and our.

Thank you, that's your time, next speaker.

Thank you. We'll go to our next speaker.

And I have called all names.

My name is Nguyen Tran. I live in San Jose. Today, I have a few concerns and I want to share with everyone. First, the yellow flag is the name of the Vietnamese nation.

honor of the Vietnamese national community. Uncle Kelly has been removed from the Maple Leaf. It was hung on the street right in the Little Saigon area, where we were. Continuous struggle.

I don't know.

Throughout 2007 and 2008, in order to get the city's approval to display the flags on the driveway to symbolize the success of the Vietnamese community in Northern California, we had to take down the image of our sacred flag, which was removed. And our question is... Who ordered the removal of that flag?

Okay, going back to the council. Thank you all. We are adjourned.