Community & Economic Development Committee (ced) - Regular Meeting

You take the role, please. Casey?

Here. Mulcahy? Here.

Ortiz?

Present.

Vice chair Camaine? Here. And chair Foley? Here. You have a quorum.

Thank you. We're all here. How about that? We don't have anything to review on the work plan. No consent. So we're gonna just jump right into the committee reports on citywide planning activities, semiannual status report. And here here one of the presenters is running down the steps. Please do not trip and fall.

Hi, good afternoon Weismara and committee members. Manira Sandhir, Deputy Director for Planning with PBCE, and we'll be doing a presentation on this item. I'm joined by my esteemed colleagues, division manager Martina Davis and principal planner, Jarrod Ferguson, who will walk you through our citywide planning activities semi annual status report. With that, I'll turn it over to Jared.

Thanks, Vaneera. So first to get started, as we always do, just a quick overview of our citywide planning team. So the citywide planning team is our long range planning group within our planning division. Within citywide planning, we have five teams focused on specialized areas. So we have our general plan and data analytics team that focuses on regular updates to our general plan as well as processing privately initiated general plan amendments.

We have our housing policy and housing element team that focuses on housing policy and implementing our housing element. Our zoning ordinance team maintains our zoning code and also maintains our council policies. We have our urban village team that produces our urban village plans, and then our special projects team, which is currently focused on implementing our transit oriented communities or TOC policy compliance. So over the citywide planning team, we have a total of 19 positions with one current vacancy which we're looking to fill. We have three managers, five supervising planners, and then 10 planners below that.

So first to kind of go in a little bit to our team work plans and our team work plans, both what we've are currently completed since our last update, and then also the work in progress until for the next fiscal year and then upcoming work in the next fiscal year. So our general plan team completed our five year development forecast in February, and this is the key forecast which assists the budget office in estimating our construction related taxes for revenue purposes for the city's capital improvement program. Have several significant projects in progress. So of course our general plan for your review, which is a collaboration with our housing team, and I'll talk more about that in the next slide, currently planned for full completion in December 2027. We have a lot of work in the next fiscal year as well after the conclusion of the task force process.

The team has multiple privately initiated general plan amendments that generally take place in the fall, so it will be completed by December. Our general plan annual report for the twenty twenty five calendar year will be coming to you in June, and the team is also engaged in efforts to update our council policy five-one, which is our transportation policy. And then looking into the next fiscal year on work that the team will be starting, looking to start work on our tri element update. This is updating three other elements of our general plan, both updating the open space and safety element of our general plan, and then looking to complete for the first time our environmental justice element, which is a new required element per the state. Looking at adopting minimum densities, both downtown and then for our mixed use neighborhood designation, completing the next version of our five year forecast in the next calendar year and the next general plan annual update.

So to talk a little bit more about the general plan four year review, which has been consuming a lot of our team's work in the last fiscal year since our last update on the citywide activities. So obviously the focus of our four year review is really on housing, implementing key parts of our housing element, and also preparing ourselves for the next housing element. So we're looking at ways to increase residential capacity within the city, our work around missing middle housing, and then also looking at strategies to improve urban village implementation. We have three task force meetings remaining. We started in October, So we're coming into the home stretch for the task force process.

We'll have the vote of the Planning Commission at the June and then look to come to the full City Council in August with the framework of the general plan four year review update that is coming out of that. We've scheduled our four open houses. We've actually had two so far to date. We have another one coming up on Wednesday evening at the Bascom Community Center, and then one next Monday as well to to round out the four open houses. So going into the next fiscal year after that August, we would be looking to start the environmental review, and then also start to actually draft the general plan text amendments as well as draft any related ordinance changes and additional outreach as necessary.

But we do anticipate that work to take up or subsume a lot of the team's efforts as we look to implement what the framework agreed upon in that general plan process. So next getting into the housing team. So the work completed since our last update, we had a big body of work thrown at us with Senate Bill 79. So we did, you know, a pretty robust analysis of that and provided a report to the city council, collaborating with our ordinance team. In January, we completed a housing element item related to our zoning code around group homes in single family neighborhood single family zoning, I should say.

And then also completed our annual housing element annual report and update on our housing catalyst teamwork plan in March. Work underway, as I said, the housing team is collaborating with the general plan team on the general plan four year review. We'll be looking to restart work soon on our development fee framework, which is part of our housing element program. And then we have a zoning code update around reasonable accommodation. Other work in progress, we have our ongoing data tracking and also state law work, which is always something we could be doing more work around, but following closely each year the major body of changes around housing law.

We'll be looking to finish up the downtown ministerial approval ordinance definitely by December, if not sooner. So we're already undergoing that work right now. And then as we look into the next fiscal year of work, we'll be going back and updating our council outreach policy six-thirty. So this will be a pretty important one that we'll be working on in the next year. And then in the next calendar year, there's some housing element work to look at expanding, our density bonus ordinance and then our annual update on the housing element progress. And I'll pass it to Martina.

Thank you, Jared. Moving on to the ordinance, and policy update team. I won't read all of these in the interest of time, but I'll highlight a couple. So we did complete our S B 79 industrial hub exclusion in March. That was a very fast track. I think we're the first city to get one of those ordinances to HCD, housing and community development, for review. It is currently under review by the state, and we are waiting to hear back from them. In progress, we you will see in June updated standard permit conditions, excuse me, findings is really what it is. That was a housing element action item. We have to bring our findings into compliance with state law.

We have another package of other state law updates. We're kind of packaging those together, various minor changes. I'll note that last year when we were here, we had actually talked about workload, and we had left that as a placeholder because we kind of knew the state was going to do more changes on us. And sure enough, we did actually have to carve some time out this year for a state lot maintenance update. We are working with the Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs on the downtown digital wayfinding program and the ordinance changes needed for that.

We're working on some s B 79 walking path analysis, and then I'll highlight. It is not upcoming. We are now working on the vape shop zoning update. We're starting to do some of that policy work around that with hopes that to get that to you back in fall of this year. After fall of this year, the team's really gonna kind of shift to focus on ordinances that are being driven by the housing excuse me, the four year review.

That will drive a a number of pretty major changes to the zoning ordinance based on the changes we're proposing to the general plan. Alright. Urban villages. So we have three villages in progress, Alum Rock East, which we plan to get back to council in fall. We are gonna have one more round of outreach, and we are just out at Viva Cayet a couple weeks ago. It was very successful. Saw a lot of people we'd seen before, which was actually really nice. We are trying to work on finishing up that five rooms urban village plan, same schedule fall. We're working with VTA on that, particularly around the design standards right around the Five Wounds Church. In Saratoga Urban Village Plan, we are working on it.

It is on a slower time frame now due to it being tied to the four year review for reasons of CEQA. So that would not return to council until 2027. We are planning some community touch points this summer. And then my last team I'll speak to is transit oriented communities. We this team is really focused on compliance with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's transit oriented communities policy.

They are tying compliance with this to a lot of transportation and other kind of planning related funding moving forward. We have received some grant funding for this. We are trying to finalize our grant agreements. In the meantime, before that grant funding kicks in, the team is taking advantage of some of the overlap in that work and other policy work we have. So that team is working on the downtown minimum densities that we were directed to do as part of that SB79 direction we received in January. That overlaps with TOC because we actually do have to do minimum densities in kind of similar geographic area for that policy. And with that, I will turn it back over to Jared.

Thanks, Martina. So we talked a lot about our work in the next fiscal year, but I think the important thing to highlight on our citywide work plan is thinking long term about what are the big priorities as we look to the next five or seven years, and so not losing sight of those big things that we need to accomplish and make sure that we're on time with. We're And completing our general plan four year review work. We started in the spring, and we'll be looking to complete that by December 2027. And then we'll also be looking later this fall to start work on the tri element update.

All of those elements are required by state law. As we wrap up that general plan four year review process, that will really be the time when we'll need to actually start working on the next housing element. We anticipate it taking us at least kind of a three year window. So we would be complete by June 2030, which gives us a six month kind of buffer before the statutory deadline of January 2031. And then as we kind of complete our next housing element, sort of thinking through if there is a place for us to do a comprehensive update of our general plan, it would really be right after the housing element was done.

And so thinking that that's when we would want to that process. Again, are all very significant bodies of work that have very specific timelines. And so I think we just wanna keep these kind of milestones and big projects in mind as we continue to do planning work related to our work plan. And so getting into our next fiscal year, all those things that Martina and I talked about, our current work plan exceeds our current staffing capacity. So this next slide illustrates what our total workload is over the next fiscal year.

So all of the projects are categorized by size of hours. Everything in orange are those mandatory work items. So you'll see in there are the general plan for your review taking up a quite significant portion in the next fiscal year, looking at completing the neighborhood urban villages, which is again required as a part of our housing element as a part of our general plan work. The blue dotted line is our capacity in staffing hours for the entire fiscal year. So based upon our current projections for this project scope, we're looking at 126% of that capacity.

So this is all the work that we've committed to in the next year. So getting into each of those sections. So the mandatory portion of that work is about 90%. So again, these are items that are required either directly or indirectly by state law or the result of state law or things that we're required to do by law. So updating our housing element every year, providing that annual report is maybe a minor example of that.

And then all of the work strategies contained in our housing element as well. So that's 90%. And then looking at the city priority work. So this is other important policy work that either staff has recommended through these updates or has been most likely directed by council to complete. So and and these are important work.

So the no walking path for Senate Bill 79 is an example of that, updating our transportation policy five-one, which isn't required, but is sort of an indirect requirement of some of the changes around CEQA and state law. So it's a lot of important work. And what that will mean for us, I'll pass it to Martina to look over the out years. Okay.

So we showed you what this looks like in the next fiscal year, but this is what it looks like in the out fiscal years based on just what we know right now. What we know right now is a 126% committed this year, and we've already identified a 101%. So, basically, a 100% committed next year. Now what happens in reality? Right?

The projects, that 126% is means things get delayed into the next fiscal year. We also have new requests through the budget to add additional work. We know that the state will likely continue to give us new state mandates. We feel pretty confident that we're going to have to continue to address state mandates. And then there's always a body of of city initiated work that we want to do, and that tends to be stuff that helps businesses, kinda helps the smaller guys.

There's a never ending well of ideas there of our own policy work we could be doing. And this is all kind of underneath it, this major work items Jared's discussed that that are taking priority. So what might we do about it? We did receive direction in this budget to look at our citywide planning fee and evaluate other funding sources. I'll just speak very briefly on that fee.

So the team is funded about six about 60%, 70% by the the fee. The fee right now is not adequate to sustain current staffing. So we absolutely do need to look at increasing it simply to keep our current staffing levels on the team. So what we're gonna do is we are going to figure out what that number is and then also see if we were to raise it to accommodate the increased workload, what would that be? Something else that's important to note is based on the legal framework that created the fee, the types of work it pays for cannot be a 100% funded by the fee.

So any increase in that fee would likely need to come with an increased appropriation from the general fund or something else to match that legal framework of splitting the work between developers and the existing community. So we will get back to you with the budget on that, I think, light at the end of the tunnel. But given the state of the fee right now, we are very cautious around assuming that we would be able to reasonably propose an increase that would get us all the way up to the increased workload, but we're still evaluating that. So as I mentioned, the next steps is we are gonna do that deeper evaluation as part of the budget process and propose a fee update most likely. And that's, yeah, that's basically it.

There will have to be some trade offs if we wanna add the new work, or we'll need to just delay that into future fiscal years. And that concludes our presentation.

Thank you. That's that's a lot. You have a lot that you're working on. Do we have any members of the public who wish to speak?

Yes. We have one card for Lillian. Please make your way down to the podium. You will have two minutes to speak. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Lillian Koenig. I'm representing myself, but I do sit on the, senior commission as a district three representative. And I'm gonna comment a little bit on what was presented here today. You're you you spoke about annual housing element reports updates, citywide plans of action.

But really, I'm here to discuss seniors and the Envision San Jose talking about you spoke about data tracking. I wonder if you actually track seniors and how they live in middle housing, affordable housing, lists of housing that seniors live in, and how you quantify their income with their quality of life in housing. And when you talk about data tracking, I know you're overworked, but I wonder how much of the seniors is included in that. And then you mentioned your task force open house. I think you said this Wednesday on the twenty ninth that Bascom was was when you're having another one.

I wouldn't have even known because I'm supposed to chair and I am chairing the subcommittee for housing on the senior, committee. And I did not know about the other task force open houses, so I'd like to attend that one. I would have liked to have known where I could have found that because stakeholders in the community are seniors. We are very important in our community. We do a lot for the community. We are involved with our housing, and we'd like to be able to stay in San Jose and contribute to the community. So if you could just comment on that. Thank you.

Thank you. Back to the committee.

Thank you. Turning to, my colleagues, council member Mulcahy, you're up first.

Thank you, vice mayor. Thanks, for the briefing that we had on this item. And really where I've kind of been focused and my head has been at is around just the capacity issue that you're facing. And a week ago, we were in the study session and I asked the question about our sort of our everyday fee based program and how we're gonna deal with dealing with everything else that we get no funding for the unfunded mandates. So there'll be a theme to just a few questions here and open to anybody.

And I know, you know, we our IGR team, know, is tied to a number of things that that is in your world. But, I mean, we are definitely not alone as, you know, the San Jose department dealing with this issue of having to deal with our everyday permits that come through the door and how do we plan for and implement state mandates. So are we working across city partnerships, city to city, statewide with collective IGR teams on not just everything that's come to us now, but we just looked at a chart moving forward, you know, with a question mark, unfunded mandates question mark, and we all know there are gonna be more. So even if we don't get resources as part of this advocacy work, we have to be on record at how much trouble this is causing, not just San Jose, but every city in the state. Any comment on that, where we are with our own IGR team and what's happening statewide with advocacy around this, really to to sort of defend ourselves to, you know, lots of policies coming down the line?

Yes, definitely council member. It's something I think embedded in our current program is around local control is still a priority. And I'd have to look if we have specific language around recouping costs, but it's something we've been engaged on for a number of years, particularly through the League of California cities. I know it's something that they're very attuned to because all cities, not just San Jose, are experienced this like you're saying. I know it's something when we've had individual meetings with various legislators and their teams, we're talking about bills, it's just talking with them about the potential impact.

Even if we agree with the policy approach is that the timelines that they give us are not reasonable for when we can implement. You look at SB 79, it was something that we raised when we were advocating on that, is that six months isn't enough time. It takes effect January 1, and even if you give till July 1, cities can't work in that amount of time to accommodate it. So it's something that we've continued to engage on. I think there's probably ways we could think about how we perhaps collaborate even further with cities, maybe big cities in terms of how we could make our voice heard a little bit louder because I don't think it's something that has been well received in terms of that.

Not necessarily criticism, but sort of critique of some of these policy changes is that there's no resources associated with them.

Anybody else? I mean, I think we're beyond polite at this being needing to be polite. I mean, this is causing tremendous. I mean, we're at 130% rounding up of capacity. And how much of that percentage is coming from policies that we have no funding for. So I don't know Manira if you wanted to comment on it too.

Yes, absolutely. Council member, I think we are coordinating closely with IGR as well to identify opportunities where we can perhaps guide

this kind of legislation that comes forward. I know in the

past our approach is usually that we try to work with these legislators and shape the bill in a way that can have a positive influence on our policy work such as for SB79 preserving the industrial lands. I think that was something that we actively advocated for and were able to add to the bill. But I think it is also important to draw a line when something isn't appropriate and we oppose. So I think we'll continue working closely with IGR to identify those opportunities and perhaps shape this next version of bills coming through the state.

Just curious on that idea of consolidating some efforts right now. I mean, we just had a conversation about a general plan amendment that may be coming before us that it may be better and might help our own capacity by waiting for the general plan to be approved, you know, the four year plan to be approved. Are we sort of looking at that relative to our capacity to make that suggestion, hey, Mr. Developer, why don't you wait until the GP review and early consideration is not gonna catch you up on any timeframe that wouldn't otherwise be addressed by the four year review?

Yeah, absolutely. We're always looking at customer service and it's like what are the various pathways that you could take to get to what you want and sort of communicating what those pathways are, what those options are and what the timelines are and what the associated costs.

And we're doing that even if we're not, even if they're not asking the question?

Yes, absolutely. I think we're always thinking through, within what might be within our work plan, what policy changes might be coming that would enable a faster pathway for you, especially when we're talking about housing, what options are there? What state laws could you consider? I think those are all things that we're constantly evaluating in order to provide good customer service to people who are coming in to with interest in developing.

I think in the presentation it was just sort of pointed out that as part of the budget, you know, that, you know, this body would have to be sort of prioritizing moving forward. Have you considered suggestions of what to deprioritize as a as a PBCE organization and things to be specifically considering to get us within our capacity range. I mean, I I would always hope that we're always gonna be trying to achieve over a 100%, but a 130% is, you know, working against us, which, by the way, is also something that we should be talking to state legislators about and, you know, governor's office and everybody else about this fact that, you know, as these mandates come down, they're sort of counterintuitive because we're not even able to get to the real work that's our everyday work to get things built in San Jose. So are we gonna see a deprioritization list from from you? What we can't do?

We're certainly exploring trade offs at this point, council members. So through the budget process, we will be evaluating what are the items that perhaps can be pushed out to future fiscal years versus being done this year. But again, it is a tough conversation and I, between with the budget process being so extensive sometimes can get lost in the middle. Don't know if Director Burke

Chris has light went on.

I'll just jump in for a second. So as with last year's budget, there will be an MBA that comes out that talks about all the council referrals that we will typically and as with last year, we attached a separate document to that sort of listed out specifics that are in the citywide work plan because it does require a more direct approach to prioritization. So in that we'll have a recommendation. It requires counsel to agree with that. So it will be through that budget process.

And again, the budget document's a thousand pages. This stuff often tends to get lost if it's in an MBA, so we'll certainly make sure that we're making that aware through our one on ones with council members just to highlight kind of what's included in the list.

Thank you. Thank you, vice mayor.

Thank

you. Before I go on, I just wanted to ask the question that was asked of you, and that is when can you tell us when the next town hall meetings around the general plan with the task force are and where?

Yes. Absolutely. So the the next open house, will be at the Bascom, Community Center, this Wednesday starting at six p. M. And then we also have another open house Monday, May 4 at six p. M. At the Shirakawa Community Center. So those are the the remaining two open houses, and we also have an online engagement tool we've we've launched on our four year general plan four year review website that has some of the same content and ways to participate on them.

Wonderful. Thank you for for answering that question. I appreciate that, Jared. Council member Ortiz.

Thank you, vice mayor. I know I I said I didn't have any questions, but my apologies. Some things came up when you guys were, presenting. You know, I've gotten quite a bit of interviews I mean, emails from, you know, business leaders and community advocates who are, I guess, upset at our approach to the general plan, utilizing the project sorry, the Planning Commission as the de facto committee. Have you guys received similar critiques?

I think we've received mixed reviews. I mean, think there's also been folks who have viewed it positively as well. So I think it's something that we wanna take a look at and evaluate at the end. Yeah.

I I could see the positive fewer city staffs less work reaching out, appointing individuals. But when it comes to residents, I feel like we're not really getting a diverse set of input because, you know, for example, business leaders who are working every day, they don't have time to be on the planning commission for the for the most part, but could sign up to something a little bit more shorter or less demanding, I guess, time demanding, like the planning commission or the committee. And so I'm and then another thing is, you know, I was thinking like, okay, well, you can't go. Maybe I can invite you to an open house. But I only see there's four open houses, and I guess the one for East San Jose was already done during Viva Calle, which I think is very problematic because a lot of times, the people who come to Viva Calle aren't from my district.

They're residents from all over, the city. And then there's like, what about seniors who may not go to Viva Calle, because they can't ride a bike, you know, but they would go to an open house? So I just wanted to ask, what are the thought process behind choosing Viva Calle as the one open house for East San Jose?

So that was a thought process we went through with our engagement consultant, trying to think through ways in order to try to engage the community creatively. Sometimes the open houses, we actually I think got more people through Viva Calle than we got through

were they just five residents Or were they East San Jose residents? That's I

don't have the data, Exactly. You But you know, this was our outreach program, know, was something that we discussed with the City Council, you know, in August and it was sort of trying to balance between the timeline given to us and thinking through how we could complete it by June. And so that was what we could accommodate kind of with that timeline. So, but I mean engagement is very important and happy to kind of talk with you and your office if there are other ways that we could try to augment that work. Happy to think through that through.

And so are these the only four open houses that we're going to have?

They're yes. Four open houses. That was again kind of what our outreach and engagement plan was that was shared with the city council.

I just feel like a lot of these decisions were made from the perspective of making it easier for staff and staff capacity and not based on the needs of our constituents, which should always be our guiding star. I mean, we're a city that's who pays taxes. And, yes, I'm sure it was a lot easier to appoint the planning commission de facto in regard instead of appointing, for example, seniors or, you know, local youth advocates or or things like that. And so I just wanted to raise that. You know, obviously, we do this every, you know, every cycle.

And so for the next time around, we're obviously too far in this process, but hopefully, we're mindful of that moving moving forward. And okay, then I'm probably what I'm going to do is I'm going to send out an email and do some outreach for the May 4 meeting at the Vietnamese American Culture Center since that's somewhat near my my district. And so I'm gonna work with you guys to gather all those details so that I could include that in a in a, overall communication.

Again, just to reiterate to council member, we have been having meetings with some of the individual neighborhood or leadership groups in districts, and we've kind of been working closely with those council offices. So happy to work with you and attend other Great.

Community Have you met with anyone in District 5?

No. I mean, I'm saying we're happy to attend meetings that you So

if I do my own, you're saying or something like that?

If there are existing neighborhood meetings or if you plan something, yes.

Or like a neighborhood association.

Mhmm.

Okay. That's good. I I appreciate that. Thank you. That's all my questions.

Thank you. Council member Kamay.

Thank you so much for the report. And Thank you. I just wanna say that, that's one of the things that's been really good in terms of working with the staff and the office in terms of I'm gonna have a they're coming to the d one leadership group, which is a group of all the neighborhood association. So I'm sure that if you have different sort of entities that would like to know what's going on with the general plan, It's a good way of keeping them sort of up to date. And this will be the second time Jared comes, so, you know, he's taken all the hits and, you know, answering questions and, you know, just letting people know what it's about.

I think it's very helpful. You know, as I look at the slide on the 90% mandatory, 90% capacity for the for the mandatory work, over the years, I mean, if if you watch the trends, it's a little more, a little more, a little more. Now it's taking almost the entire pie. Right? And I don't see it getting less.

Right? So we are gonna come to a time and I don't know, like, how did it get so bad? Every city because I sit on the Santa Clara County Cities Association. Every city is feeling the squeeze. And I I I don't know exactly in terms of of how we're going to better address it, but as we start moving to using all of your capacity for this, other important work, community work does not get done.

And so I think that something's gotta give. And I, you know, like I I don't I don't want to say that, hey, all of this stuff is being done to us. But guess what? All of this stuff is being done to us. And, I'm not sure and I guess it's a conversation with IGR and and others, but but the cities are in fact feeling the whole weight of all of the, mandates unfunded mandates.

Right? Because you only had limited number of dollars. So I think that, you know, this is something that at some point we're gonna have to have a more a really serious conversation as to, you know, when you get to a 100%, what are you gonna do? Right? I mean, it's it it we're already at 90.

So I I I kind of am worried about how aggressively it has really sort of increased. And and as we continued on that trajectory, it's not gonna get better. So something to sort of think about and something for us to see what are the where are we gonna find relief because this is not sustainable. I guess I also want to mention, let's see here, there was one more thing. You know, of the leftover capacity, it's hard to choose amongst the city priority work that we already have.

So I don't know. I I think there may be I don't know if there's going to be a way to push some of the mandatory work and stretch that out. You know? And and it's not to say that we're not gonna do it, but, you know, there's only so much that you are able to do. Right? And and so I'm just sort of, like, wondering, as you're looking at this, is there any of those mandatory things that we can kinda, like, stretch out, ask for more time, or whatever? I don't know. I don't know. I think there needs to be some kind of way to find relief.

Yeah. I mean, think that's constantly part of our evaluation process as well. I mean, just as an example, not from this year, but I think, the work on the tri elements was something that we did kind of push out. Think this was communicated one of our past updates. But now we're sort of we are pushing against some of those statutory deadlines and so flexibility in the mandatory we do, but it it we usually have deadlines that we have to comply with that are challenging. And I I think we're you know contemplating some of those priorities, but like you said a lot of those there's very few that would be easy to sort of shift or move in terms of timeline.

Yeah. I'd like to add probably the largest single non mandatory, and I'll say non mandatory in quotes, project is transit oriented communities policy. That is one that it's not mandatory, but it is in the sense that MTC is still tying significant transportation funding to that policy. If that policy was not tied to significant transportation funding, it's not likely something the city would be engaging in. So that's an area we are exploring and maybe an area to kinda continue to press on that tie between that funding and that policy work.

Because that is a very, very large ask from MTC. It's significant, and although they are putting funding to it, if you notice, the funding is only covering looking at 26 of the 54 stations. And that's just one component of the policy. So I'll just mention that's an area that we're really exploring what maybe we could do to free up some capacity in that one, but it is challenging because of that funding tie.

Yeah. I guess what I was thinking of is is there a way to do some work ahead of when some of these mandates have the designated timelines so that we can work with whoever it is that we need to work with to push it out. Because I'm not worried about the stuff in the blue. I'm worried about the stuff in the orange. Right?

And if that's taking 90% of your capacity, then that means that, you know, it's pretty much all of the stuff that you're doing. Just about. Right? So so I'm I'm sort of thinking strategically thinking about how certain elements can be moved over a year or so. So instead of moving our stuff, we move their stuff. So anyway, something to think about and to strategize whether or not it's possible. Some people say, oh, it's impossible. You gotta do it. Well, yeah, you gotta do it, but, you know, I think you can work with them to see if they could squeeze it. We could squeeze them to push it out.

Council member, I just wanna add to that point, because I think the one thing that we don't talk about in this conversation is the implementation and enforcement by the state around many of these housing laws. So the interactions with HCD and other state agencies in part drives the way that we work on these things. So when you look at those out years, the fact that we're laying down a foundation for our next housing element now, which isn't due until January 2031, is all about that enforcement angle that comes on the back end. And that's true, not just for the housing element and builders remedy, but sort of everything else. So, you know, we're still under scrutiny for the actions we took related to SB 79, which is something that's, you know, core to our general plan is the preservation of employment lands.

And we think there's a reasonable case in the in the law, and yet we're back and forth with state agencies on their interpretation, which disagrees with ours. So, you you know, I do agree that there's always an opportunity to consider how we balance the work, but I think we're very mindful of those interactions as well.

Well, thank you for your work.

Of course, the housing element leads a lot of the discussion and takes a lot of time and you're trying to get a jump on it by doing by starting that work now, but that does have an impact. Council member Casey.

Thank you, vice mayor. There's some frustration in my district around the four year review process, but I did want to acknowledge that you guys have been available and we did try to set up meetings for you to individual calls and meetings with folks. So I do appreciate you guys extending graciously that offer. But there is also some frustration with, I guess, the actual format of the open houses. So if you could just kinda describe, is it just displays that are set up, or is there a staff presentation because then I'll tell you why.

There is a perception that although we are implementing state level laws that we may be going above and beyond what's required. And so a lot of folks, particularly in my district that although the cows out of the barn in terms of single family housing zoning still want to protect to the extent that they can the sanctity of that type of lifestyle. And the perception is that you guys may be going above and beyond the call of duty and acknowledging that there is a conflict of interest. You guys have to meet your arena numbers so if you're given an opportunity and not to say that this is actually what you guys are doing but the idea that maybe you guys are running with these state mandates to make your job easier potentially.

Yeah, thanks council member. So just the first on the format of the open houses, so they're displays, but each display has multiple planners at them and each station is meant to sort of encompass one aspect of the four year review. So we have one for example on the urban village process, and how we're looking at trying to strategize to improve the implementation of that. And so each individual or group of individuals when they stop by can have a conversation with the planner and they kind of describe, they can read the boards, they can have a conversation about, here's what we're proposing and they can have kind of a dialogue on what do you think, and there's usually opportunities on each board. You can share your feedback verbally with that planner.

You can put a comment on a board. There's usually questions posed poised on you know each board. So that's kind of the style and then there's also some general information ones as well like what is a general plan? You know, why do we have to have a general plan? And so it's really designed to be more interactive than just having like a single presentation.

And there's kind of multiple opportunities to provide input and have a direct dialogue. I think we really find that those conversations in kind of smaller groups, so one on one, is really more meaningful in terms of getting feedback. And so that's how we've chosen to do it this way. Mean, I think we're constantly adapting and sort of evolving in terms of how we solicit input, but we found that this format is pretty good. But like I said, open to feedback.

On the second question, so there's and this is you could spend a lot of time discussing this, so there's various state laws that have changed or modified single family zoning around what you can do on a single family property, whether or not that's duplexes or lot splits through SB nine or more recent laws where you can do potentially up to 10 units on single family lots. Those are those are kind of the baseline, but we also have a program in our general plan that says we're supposed to look at four to 10 units. And so that kind of was written before these state laws, but we still have an obligation to kind of consider how we would implement that strategy. And so where our recommendations are coming from is to try to fulfill what was promised in the housing element. And so, you know, there's not a hard line of like this is bare minimum versus exceeding it.

It's sort of, you know, it's an iterative process to sort of figure out what would fit within that program and this is, you know, our proposal to meet that. Now any of the units resulting, it isn't anything that we're officially counting towards our arena, but we have an obligation to at least propose to City Council that consideration of four to 10 units. Units. So hopefully that answers your question, but is you know, we have this sort of obligation built in to sort of look at how we would exceed it slightly from what the bare minimum is.

Yeah, no and even though I have a background in this, it's still not necessarily clear, and I don't think it's clear to the layman person or the average person. And I think figuring out a way to clear that up would be helpful, I think. There's still some frustration. And, again, the perception that you guys are going above and beyond what the state is mandating us to do.

Councilmember, I just wanna expand on what Jared had to say just a little bit because I think it goes beyond sort of an obligation to study this. I think we do see a myriad of state laws and the implementation has been sporadic and inconsistent throughout the city, and I think that will only increase as the state continues to pass additional housing laws that impact all of those zoning districts, not just single family, but particularly. And I think, you know, certainly the most recent round with SB 79 combined with some of these other things, we're gonna see significant impacts in our neighborhoods. Now, we're very much of the belief that planning is a local action. Right?

Is that our staff are on the ground, they understand the city, and that we have the opportunity to, know, work for the best outcomes for our community because we understand it. And we're not using that broad brush approach across the entire state. And so, know, in part what we're also trying to do is use this opportunity to create sort of boundaries within that as we have the opportunity to create a market outcome that the market might find more appealing that actually sits better with our neighborhoods than somebody coming through and trying to layer an SB nine project with additional ADUs and no parking is that when we keep the control local within our planning, we have the opportunity to get better outcomes for our community and for our residents. So, I think that's an important component as well.

It's important too to socialize that to the community. I don't think that messaging is getting through. I think it's important to actually encapsulate it that way. I think they'd be happy to hear that. Thank you.

Would you care to make a motion to accept the report, council member?

Motion to accept the report, vice mayor.

Second. Okay. Thank you for the presentation and obviously we we had a lot of questions. This is a a big report and and every time you come before us we hear about the capacity issue. And I think about that in relation to the fees study that and report that you're, were instructed to bring forward from in the March budget message. Will that be available to be included in the fees and charges of the budget this year? Is that the plan?

That is the plan. Yes.

Okay. I I think that's that's helpful. I I also will remind my colleagues that it's not just the state mandates whether they're funded or unfunded and the majority of them are unfunded, but there's a lot of council direction that planning is given on any given Tuesday. So when when we come with a council idea that is affecting land use or development or anything real estate related, we have to keep in mind that we too are adding to the workload and and staff. Your job is to tell us when you just can't do it or what will suffer, what can't be done if we're bringing something in that, and we bring something in that we think is important obviously, but we need you to say, well okay council member, you want that, that's great, and we're happy to do that for you.

You're always so very accommodating. But we also need to know that this isn't going to be done, such as, I'll give you an example, the sequence study at Coyote Valley. That was supposed to be done, but it's been pulled off and we're fine and we're moving forward, and I think we finally put that behind us. But that's just an example of work that you were that was instructed to do and but capacity resulted in taking it off the list of things to be done. So we just have to know what the trade offs are.

If we implement this thing and you say yes to it, what aren't you getting done like the vape shops or or whatever it is, just just to keep that in mind. Okay. That's the that's the end of that report. Let's vote. Thank you for that.

Next is item team San Jose semi annual status report. We have a whole big group coming forward. Let's see if they can stay in there ten minutes. Thank you. Who's kicking us off?

I will kick us off.

Welcome, John.

And company. Afternoon. And, thank you vice mayor and committee members for your time today. Very much appreciate it. I'm John LaFortune, CEO of Team San Jose. And today, the team and I are here to present our midyear 2526 results and some information pertaining some of our larger groups that we've already had in '26. Very interesting information. So let's kick it off with Ehab. He's our CFO, and he's gonna give our numbers.

Thank you, John. Good afternoon. We're going to go through mid year performance measures results for Team San Jose. We start to estimate it, direct visitors spending. We actually overachieved that goal by $5,000,000 The reason we have such significant variance, we had a group called OCP or Open Compute Project that basically increased the number of days in the program and also exceeded attendance significantly.

Future hotel room nights, we are up by 17,000 room nights as budget. Theater occupancy were up 5% against budgets as well. Gross operating revenues, 562,000 against budget. Gross operating results were up by $2,300,000 against budget. The reason for such significant variance for the gross operating results, we had a large technology group that canceled and about $2,000,000 of that gross operating results belongs to that cancellation fee. Customer satisfaction were up by 5% against budget. And I'll turn it to Ben.

Thank you, everybody. For the record, Ben Roshke, Vice President of Research and Strategic Development. This is our midyear report, but we did wanna, as John mentioned, share some of the initial results for the major 2026 events, that we saw from hotel performance. We'll start off with, Super Bowl sixty. As you can see, compared to Super Bowl fifty, considerable growth in terms of the hotel performance.

And when you have a large event like this, there's, sort of two major components that make up people that come to the events in the hotels. There's the contracted room blocks, which are we call the group rooms. And then there's the transient demand, which are the individual travelers that decide to come and, attend this event. If you look at what happened with Super Bowl, we had almost exactly to the number same number of contracted room blocks as we did in 2016. That 21% growth in occupancy was driven almost solely by transient demand, which really speaks to the importance of, the strategy that the city took in launching the major, events to the concerts, the fan zones to draw folks in, and then the marketing that was executed, to drive people to that.

If you look at sort of this report that was done by CoStar to look at the tracking of how 2026 compared to 2016, in terms of room flow. Just to orient everybody, they looked at San Francisco and then what they called the Levi's Stadium area, which was Santa Clara, the airport hotels in downtown of San Jose. You can see that there are distinct patterns for each of those, with San Francisco's peaking around Friday this year, whereas San Jose, you can see that growth there from the transient throughout. But once we hit Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the growth actually starts to enlarge down south. Again, speaking to the impact that the major, activations and marketing had as we were able to capture more and more share.

That culminated, on Sunday with an incredibly large capture down south, whereas, up north, it went backwards a little bit compared to 2016. In total, Super Bowl helped to propel February from a hotel revenue standpoint to be the best February that the city has ever had in a year. Moving into March, we NVIDIA's referred to their GTC conference as the Super Bowl for AI, and it certainly performs like it from a hotel perspective. We had incredibly strong occupancy, 90% over the course of the event with the peak nights of it, basically selling out the city in the upper nineties. And really strong revenue per available room, an incredibly strong week.

And then for our second major 2026 event, it flowed perfectly into March Madness, which typically the week after NVIDIA is a little bit of a downturn as everybody's recovering and moving moving on and moving out, but we flowed right into March Madness, had very strong results year over year. And these two weeks coupled with strong overall performance in March, means that we not only had the best March on record, we had our second best performing, month ever, in hotel revenue perspective for March. So very positive results, and we're looking forward to continuing into the rest of the big 2026 events. I'm gonna turn it over to Matthew to talk about sales.

Good afternoon. Always good to be with you. I'm Matthew Martinucci, vice president of sales and destination services. So at the midyear mark, we have some really positive numbers to show how we build our future with citywide business. And in our world, we define a citywide as 500 rooms or more on peak, a multi property lead, not as self contained.

So so far through the end through December, we have booked 12 of these events, which is an increase of a 140% over the same time last year, the same booking window. For the room nights associated with those groups, we're at 58,394, which is an increase of 99.9%. I wish we could've squeezed out that extra point one, but we'll keep working on that. But very good growth. The leads represented in this window are slightly down, and a lead is just an opportunity whether it's worth 1,000 or 5,000 room nights.

You can see we're down 1.2%, and the room nights associated are down 10% because the groups themselves are smaller. Now I am happy to report that in the three months that have ensued since December, we have caught up and we're slightly above in the number of leads and the number of room nights. So we've been working really hard to get out and find new opportunities. The the pie to the right just shows you the demographic of these groups. You know, high-tech and corporate, twenty one thousand six hundred and twenty nine, then associations, 9,100 room nights.

And then everything that is not corporate or association goes into SMRF, which are all sorts of these niche groups, cult you know, at sporting events, whether they're Super Bowl or CrossFit. Everything that is not corporate or association goes into SMURF. On the on the next slide here, I mentioned how we've been able to really increase the amount of leads, and we are doing more customer events, more travel, more engagement than we have ever done before. 67 different events in the course of the twelve month fiscal year. Is that for business trends, any business needs to if you're healthy, you need to keep good customers that are repeat and you need to go find new groups.

And so through through the halfway mark, of the 35 groups that we have booked into the convention center, 18 of those are first time customers for us. So a very, very high percentage. And in room nights, of the 70,000 room nights that those groups represent, 31,000 room nights are first time groups. So very, very healthy percentages. And then one other metric we look at are the show dates, which are not the move in and the move out dates for an event, but the dates where an event actually takes place.

And, you know, that has grown steadily. And particularly of note, when you look, we've gone from 74 show days in 2024. That jumped to 91 last year, and that would have been higher except for a couple of cancellations. We're at 93 right now for 2026. I'm really hoping we can get to a 100.

And then looking forward, when all the excitement of s j twenty six has passed us, looking forward into 2027, we have sixty one days confirmed right now. That compares to 28 a year ago for 2026. So very, very strong forward growth. We're all gonna be here after the sporting events have left. So and then the last thing, and I think there is a correlation, there is a connection here.

We are the first city in The United States to launch a citywide contract for hotel rooms. And so what that means is when a group needs five hotels to sign for us, they only they don't have to ask their legal department to sign five contracts. They don't have to negotiate five times. They have all of the verbiage is in one contract, and then all that's required is a two page addendum with the rates and the block for an for each participating hotel. So the what what this does also, it saves them a tremendous amount of time and headache.

It also gives the attendee brand preference because many people when they travel, they wanna stay at a Hilton or they wanna stay at a Marriott and get their points. Whereas, if you go to another city and you stay at a big Marriott, your Bonvoy members will be happy, but everybody else might not be. Here, you get to pick your brand, whether it's the Hyatt Place, the Signia, the Marriott, the Hilton, the Westin, the Holiday Inn, all of those people can pick their brand. So, no less than Merits and Cvent have said they have not seen a contract like this anywhere in The United States. So we're really very excited about it. Thank you.

Good afternoon. For the record, Laura Shimelusky, vice president of marketing and communication for team San Jose. This first slide you're looking at, it shows our advertising performance for the first half of the fiscal year. It's critically important that you remember that this advertising is focused on conversion. It's focused on driving revenue and not awareness.

We have removed any barriers so our local audiences in the outskirts of San Jose and in the Bay Area see it as well. We also pick production partners who can report production that is not a multiplier, but our actual dollars that are influenced by this campaign. So happy to report in the first six months, '22 almost 22,000,000 incremental dollars and over 33,000 hotel rooms. Next slide, please. Online for social media, you see our growth continues.

This is especially critically important going into all the festivities of 2026. You can see Instagram, especially in TikTok, are performing the best. This was year over year, but I wanna give you some numbers on what we saw the first week in February. From February 1 to February 8, we saw over 800,000 views. This is versus about a 100,000 we average monthly.

We had about a thousand new followers during that one week of Super Bowl, and we had 18,000 engagements, and we usually get about we usually get about a thousand of those a month. Next slide, please. PR for the first half of the fiscal year looked really good. We had almost 200,000,000 viewers for an ad value of $1,300,000. Next slide, please.

But really important was our positioning as San Jose is one of the best in the world destinations in national media. We never report on anything that we don't influence and that we don't pitch and that we don't have a relationship with the writer on. So we are proud to say in both readers' digest and veranda, we had company that included Mexico City, Milan, Boston, Chicago, Beijing, and Boston. The Vogue article, writer we've been working with for several years. We're, happy to note she got in the Children's Discovery Museum, Santana Row, the Winchester Mystery House, and Japantown among many others.

Next slide, please. I also wanted to report on the Fly, Stay, Play campaign. As you might remember, this was a partnership with the sports authority and with, the airport. Happy to report that the campaign itself drew over a 100,000 people into San Jose during the whole run, not just during Super Bowl, but also affected a 130 hotel room nights, 100 700 searches, and, 53 airline bookings. Next slide, please.

I'm honored next to my partner, Carrie, and we did an, co op partnership in an effort to, first, to show everybody visiting us for our sporting events that there is so much to see and do around and during the sporting events. You'll notice the shared visual branding. Through a generous donation for the office of cultural affairs, team San Jose's team developed the strategy. We identified media vendors. We brokered those purchases.

We developed creative and the copy with these great partners, monitored their performance, and generated performance reporting all in an effort to show them how digital media can help them grow important marketing channels that they may not have considered before. I'm happy to say it's a great hit. It's continuing. And, look forward to seeing many more of those signs on digital social media. Next slide, please. And I refer to John. Thank you.

Thank you, Laura. And just to wrap up our presentation, I just wanted to invite everybody to our next biannual summit of hospitality, a fondly recalled bash, and that's coming up on June 4. I'd love for you all to attend. Last last Bash, we had two twenty four attendees, all local businesses, hotels, business associations, and small restaurants and bars and so forth. So it grew forty seven percent one bash over the next. So very high profile, and thank you all. I'd love to see you there.

Wonderful. Thank you all for your presentation. It's exciting to see those numbers, and I look forward to seeing the final numbers of twenty twenty six after we go through the whole sports cycle and event cycle that we have this year. No members of the public. Don't see anyone up there. Then I'll turn to members of the council and council member Kameh.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the report. And I also wanna thank you for the briefings. They're always really, helpful. And, you know, one of the things I mentioned, in terms of as you're looking at the final report is I know you we always report on what has been booked.

It'd be interesting to see what are the actuals. And I know you probably won't have them right away, but as a comparison to see, you know, how things are trending and it's just good information to be able to take a look at if you're able to obtain that. The other thing I wanted to say is that the idea of having one contract and making it as easy as possible, I think it's a wonderful thing, as you go through any of your processes. If there are ways of making it, easy to, to do, I think that that's absolutely wonderful. It's just a great idea to be able to have one contract, the addendum, and and and make it simple.

So I wanna commend you for that because I think that those are the things that are gonna make a difference to the, the person who, has to, you know, do all that kind of work. So, I wanted to recognize that. And with that, I just wanna move acceptance of the semiannual, status report. Second.

Thank you. We have a motion and a second. Council member Mulcahy.

Thank you, vice mayor. Thanks for the report, gang. I just you know, congratulations on the citywide contract. I know that that has been something we've been working on for a very long time and just know that that's such a valuable tool for you as you're, you know, kind of working the system to bring those citywides, which are just so invaluable to us. I can't read my writing here.

Give me just a second. So talk about the the capture of the transient. I mean, do you especially with respect to the Super Bowl period of time. I know that's always been our hardest group, you know, set to get after. Is that in the spending, the specific spending, the partnership between all of the groups that were sort of focused on SJ twenty six. What's the secret recipe to that? And I think it's tied directly to that sort of uptick on the weekend, especially coming in and out of Super Bowl.

Yeah. I think I mean, I think there are a couple different things that we could probably directly attribute that growth to. One was if you comparing 2016 to 2026, we really didn't, as a city, invest in any kind of activations that we could then have Laura piggyback marketing off of to help steal the share as it came through. I think we're also seeing this is the second time this event's happened with this particular configuration with the stadium in Santa Clara, you know, still the vast majority of hotel rooms in San Francisco. I think there's some savviness from the repeat visitors perhaps around what the pattern is of the events somewhat that helped to bring naturally some things south as the game day got closer.

But I think directly related to us having these sort of you know, whether it was the massive concerts out in front of City Hall, the incredible activations over at San Pedro Square, all the different points of of activation that we had allowed us to go out and utilizing Laura's ad tech, go after those folks and steal that share into San Jose and South, around those events and giving people something else to do besides just the big game.

If I may add as well, when we first in 2016, we had just that week launched our first consumer brand, real consumer brand. We didn't have any money behind it. Now we've got ten years behind it. We've got hundreds of thousands of social media followers. We have a city that's committed to giving us money to invest in destination marketing.

We have all partners who decided to row in the same direction. We have a 74% repeat visitation rate for all of the people we've been inviting here for the past ten years. I think what you're seeing is the results of absolutely all the events that happened and that we celebrated, but the channels we had to get that to let people know about it, I think served us very, very well.

I mean, you know, some of us were around ten years ago for the last Super Bowl. And the reality is the thing that I see that is most valuable, not just more resources committed, but the fact that all of these organizations were actually working in lockstep, you know, starting with our own city hall all the way down through TSJ, Sports Authority, you know, you name it. Every organization, you know, was working in concert. I I'm wondering on the notion of the investment, the ROI, does and and maybe, Rosalyn, you may know this. Is there a plan, you know, sort of after s j twenty six, all of the events, maybe even through, I think the last major one is CrossFit.

You know, can we really sort of look directly at how much real dough we've put into these efforts and what that ROI is? And and do it in a way that, you know, we can actually break it down and understand it. So, you know, there's some sort of criticism on, you know, the the public spend, you know, how do we calculate that. But to really come back and understand so that the next time that we have to have a conversation about this, that we have real data that we can pull from because we know it works.

Thank you, council member Rosalyn Huey, deputy city manager. Yes. That is our plan. We are very fortunate that the sports authority has commissioned a comprehensive economic impact report for all of the major events this year. So we'll be using that data and working to calculate what really is the the actual return on investment from from the, Citi's dollars that has been going into 2026. And I'll just remind you, this is just the beginning. We're not stopping with 2026. We are building our muscle going into 2027 for those celebrations and beyond. So we'll be needing this data to inform our work in the months and years ahead.

Thanks. Thanks, Rosalyn. Appreciate that. Just to clarify for my colleague, council member Kamay, I think the question that she may have been asking is what's the yield on future bookings? And, you know, what do we you know, when we're you guys speak this language every day, you see a 160,000 or whatever the number is. What are we hoping we get from that? And what is our kind of goal around that yield to keep that business, you know, and convert it? I'm looking at you, Matthew.

I thought you were. We're despite any of the positive numbers we've shown, we still have room and considerable room to grow to the numbers that we want to get to. We do audits of the major events that we bring to the city. Like, right now, we're in the process of doing an audit on NVIDIA just to, you know, to make sure that the contracts in in some cases, we are understated and there are more rooms because with with some of these groups, there's a certain percent that's given to the group, and then the rest of the hotel sells out on what we would call maybe transient guests. And we know that the only reason that they happen to be in town on these dates is to attend that particular event.

So we have had some very productive meetings with the properties in the last four to six months to agree to do these audits to say, you know, OCP is another group that the the entire city is sold out while they're here, but the blocks wouldn't themselves sell the city out. So we're doing these audits now, to everyone's benefit, including the group, to put a true measurement on what they actually bring to the city. So most groups have what we would call an attrition clause, which is a minimum commitment of the block. In the cases like these major groups that we're talking about, they always exceed that number. Does that answer the question?

Does that help?

And then we true it up.

I mean, I think it would be helpful like in future reports, like if you're going to show us a, you know, future, you know, future bookings that we also have an opportunity to see, say, the same time last year, what we ultimately captured from that number. I just think, again, it's that notion that I always remind us, if we're speaking in, you know, convention center speak or what have you, sometimes it's hard to really understand the magnitude of what those numbers mean. So it'd be great to just to continue to refine that education for especially for this group and then as it goes to our council colleagues. Because ultimately we're the ones that are having to make a decision about whether or not we're going to put more resources into marketing the city or to boosting the visitors bureau budget. And if we can see ROI, we can see and know what those numbers are, I just wanted I can't overstate how important it is to continue to take every opportunity to educate this body as to the value of what these numbers mean.

If I can real quick, just to contextualize a little bit, I believe last calendar year we had in the neighborhood of 117,000 consumed rooms. Right? So to put Matthew's future sales in perspective, that's about 82,000 in six months for this year and future years compared to about 117,000 that occurred in the last calendar year, if that's helpful for scale.

We can figure a way. We keep many reports as you would imagine. One of them is just pace, and we do true it up. If a group cancels, we take the rooms off the books, for example. So, we can figure a way to incorporate what actualized looking backwards because that is, at the end of the day, the number we're growing off of not just what we contracted but what was actually consumed.

Okay, I'm running out of time. I just want to say it's super favorable what you've reported. I look forward to the next one and it wasn't a criticism as much as it is just that continued effort to try to make sure that we're all communicating and and understanding what the script says. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Seeing no further hands, I believe we have a motion and a second. Let's vote. Thank you all for the good numbers and the report. Appreciate it.

Moving on to 2026 major events status report, which should team San Jose's report will lead nicely into this one, I believe.

Hello, council members. Thanks for having us here.

Think we can switch slides.

Just as a refresher since it's been a since we were here, with s j twenty six, we focused on three major goals. One is economic benefits from these major sports events that are taking place in and around San Jose. The other one is build civic pride through having events in Downtown San Jose and throughout San Jose as well. And really set San Jose up for the next iterations of itself around the experience economy. So those have been our guiding principles.

In order to accomplish this, we've really focused around, like, what can we do to have big events in San Jose? And that's centered around having concerts in big fan fest in downtown San Jose. I'm happy to report Super Bowl was a very, very big success for us from a foot traffic perspective. We started out with the invisible skies project with Elizabeth Turk that took place right outside of City Hall. It was a great event. I was able to take part in it. I think we had over 2,000 people that attended the event. So it was a great way not only to start things out, but to also integrate with existing events that happen in San Jose that are beyond sports. We followed that up with opening night, media day at the Convention Center. Very, very successful event from an operational perspective.

It was great to have that event directly here in San Jose. SJ twenty six put on a drone show after that event in Discovery Meadow. The foot traffic data that we've seen, there were about 7,500 people that crossed through that area for the drone show. So very, very successful for us from a foot traffic perspective that was free to anyone who also wanted to attend that event. We had a series of events that took place throughout the Super Bowl week, including things at Creekside.

We had the Fitz and Wits podcast that took place there. So plenty of other events throughout the week in San Jose. We started out with our first big concert Friday right outside of City Hall here with Kehlani. We like to say global hero local superstar. She performed her first concert since winning two Grammys right here in San Jose. So I think that was a big feather in our cap to have. We had 12,000 people that attended the concert, and I think it did a great job of featuring San Jose. You could see City Hall. You could see everything that was great about San Jose. And I think it really helped to set the tone for what was gonna happen in San Jose during the Super Bowl.

We followed that up on Saturday with DJ Dom Dalla, an electronic digital musician. There were 15,000 tickets that were sold for that event. And I would say for both of those events, there are a couple of big things that we accomplished. One, we set aside tickets just for local residents to purchase, and we also tried to keep the ticket prices low for local residents to be able to purchase tickets. So if you look at things in San Francisco, Chris Stapleton, I think the cheapest ticket was $600, and we didn't wanna have that happen here in San Jose.

We wanted, again, to provide a great experience here for San Joseans. We also had our fan fest that took place inside of San Pedro Square. This turned out to be wildly successful. If you ask some of the merchants the days before the fan fest started, they were actually asking us if we were gonna compensate them from some of their staff because they didn't believe that we'd actually have enough people there in San Pedro Square to justify this. We wildly exceeded the numbers that we expected to have for our fan fest.

We had over 48,000 unique visitors throughout San Pedro Square over the three days of our fans fest. So it was great. It was free to the public. Tons of free family fun activities for people to experience here in San Jose. We also had another drone show Friday night of Super Bowl in Discovery Meadow, also very, very successful for us.

We have projection mapping also going on on the side of the Sobrado Building during two nights of the Super Bowl. So I think we really fulfilled upon the mission that we wanted to have, and we're seeing the numbers started to come in. Have some anecdotal data from some of the businesses in San Pedro Square experiencing record nights of revenue, dramatic increases in revenue. So the goal of increasing economic prosperity seems to have come to fruition from everything that we've done, and the foot traffic numbers seem exceedingly high for what our goals were. So it felt really great for us to set our strategy, execute on the strategy, and see some exciting results that have already come in from the data.

I'll turn the corner here in March Madness, and John Poach from the Sports Authority will give the overview on March Madness.

March Madness, as you know, was the NCAA men's regional basketball tournament. A very difficult bid to win. It's done in four year cycles, and we lost our last one due to the pandemic. So they don't give you a makeup. So we're thrilled to bring it back. It's the eighth time we've had the NCAA men's regional basketball tournament. If you remember, we also had the nineteen ninety nine women's final four. So we're we're thrilled to be able to host this. Following the Super Bowl, you know, we had to let our merchants and retailers in San Pedro Square know this would not be the scale of the Super Bowl. Right?

It's a regional basketball tournament. And the fact that we didn't know the participants until Sunday before Thursday. So we had three teams nowhere near the West in Purdue, Arkansas, and Texas, but we did have Arizona. Luckily, the experience of Super Bowl let our merchants and retailers know that this is for real and that our goal is simply to help promote your businesses. So we're thrilled that we sold. NCA issues zero comps. 46,500 tickets in attendance for all three games of the regionals. We did a free concert in San San Pedro Square. Our games were on Thursday, two semis, and a final on Saturday. So we wanted Friday to be the activation day.

And, we did a free featuring global basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal, DJ Diesel. And he couldn't have been more kind with our sponsors and fans, and the concert was free. When you say free, over 15,000 claim tickets, a little over 3,700 attended. Special thank you to captain Torres, sergeant Depp of helping us put together the security perimeter. That was quite expensive because we hired a private security firm as well.

But as I my staff told me, $30,000 equals zero incidents, because we had incidents in the Super Bowl. And so, we may have gone overboard on security, but for our San Pedro Square restaurants and merchants and then those in attendance, Everything went as smooth, and I have to thank captain Torres and PD. As far as, other creative, we partner with Office of Cultural Affairs. So, Carrie and her imagination created a special free throw, a digital display on the SAP Center during the games where fans can walk up and have themself in a digital image shot on the screens of the SAP Center as they did a free throw challenge. So it just showed the creativity that we have in San Jose.

And then we're more than a game. It's about the whole experience. So I'd like to thank the council members and our city leaders who took part in a mini press conference between the semifinals on Thursday. Overall, the hotel per occupancy was was very well. The transient pickup was better than I expected since three of the teams were were not local. And overall, I just thought it was a great activation, San Pedro Square. We went Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday initiating the City Of San Jose event zone ordinance, which much more participated this time than Super Bowl. And so, it was a great event, I thought, for us to activate the NCAA basketball at San Pedro Square in downtown.

Thanks, John. Just a brief recap here, high level of what worked well. Great activations in downtown San Jose. I think the other thing that was really interesting is as we sort of served as a catalyst, we started to see a lot of other events that were taking place throughout San Jose. So it was a great way for us to sort of set a template and let other places throughout San Jose see how they could replicate things.

So other watch parties, other types of Super Bowl parties, and things like that held at various hotels and parks throughout San Jose. A really great collaboration with the Office of Cultural Affairs. I feel like these art projects really sort of make things unique and really make it feel special to San Jose. And a big thank you to the Office of Cultural Affairs for everything that they did. If you've seen the Hometown Heroes exhibition that's right outside of here, I think it's absolutely fantastic. I thought it was going to be just some pictures and frames on the wall. I went down to see it, and I was absolutely blown away with what they had done. It looks absolutely fantastic. And then they continued that through the rest of the sporting events. So if you saw what they did on the site at SAP, it was a great collaboration with San Jose State University.

It was a great integration with digital technology as well. So I think these are the type of things that really make these events feel special other than just putting on a concert and having a sporting event here in San Jose. And it allows us to use these sporting events really as a way to drive traffic for people to experience more of San Jose and come back again and again and again.

We were able to activate, I think, the

first entertainment zones. Lots and lots of interest around doing that. We had entertainment zone both for Super Bowl as well as for March Madness and San Pedro Square. Great collaboration across the state, local, and federal, and private entities to make sure that these events are safe. I think in the emergency management center, I went in there on Sunday of Super Bowl. I think we had 72 different agencies that were in in there. So you can imagine the type of collaboration it makes it takes to make those events safe. And really great early data that we're seeing back. We'll have a full economic report later on in the year on these events. And I'll I'll just pause there.

Thank you for that tremendous report. It was such an exciting time, and and I know there's more excitement to come. Do we have any members of the public?

No public comment.

No members of the public. Kudos. We've been waiting for a report. I know we're gonna have to wait till the end of the year that, John, you've you're obtain getting a report from an expert on all of the events for this year. But, man was Super Bowl successful, all the activations downtown, the energy of people who live all over the city, who came downtown, who don't normally go to downtown, The reports from the restaurant tours downtown was just stupendous.

Truly an amazing achievement and I know it's always compared to what happened ten years earlier and I wasn't around in that capacity, this capacity ten years ago, but from all the numbers, everything was improved and and the just kudos to everyone, all the work that you've done and it it's just amazing what this city can do. It's not a sleepy little town, it's a sleepy little town who can really put on a good party for a lot of people and and make it safe. I've been to this report at VTA from a different standpoint. I've been to it through the interoperability committee where they they're the radio, connectors, and I've heard re updates from the EOC. So to hear it from sort of the top about all of the overarching numbers and excitement, it's really, I'm I'm just so proud to be a part of it, to be a part of San Jose, and thank you so much for all of your efforts.

With that, I have to run for another meeting, and I'm gonna turn everything over to council member Kameh. But thank you so much.

Thank

you so much. Let's see. As we do the switch here, if you give me just a moment. Okay. Well, I don't have any requests to speak hands up.

But, you know, now that you have raised the the bar, you know, it's, it it's wonderful what, you know, people are still talking about it. They really are. The the invisible skies was something that many people, you know, just came. They didn't know what it was, and they're still talking about it. So I and I I attended the Kalani concert and I haven't been to a concert in a long time and I thought, oh, what do I what what what is there to expect?

And it was wonderful. People enjoyed themselves. There were a lot of the smaller vendors and and just just the atmosphere was really a lot of fun. And so I know that we learned a lot from the Super Bowl to the March Madness and you know there were tweaks made. I'm sure you learned something from March Madness and you know one of the things that I was curious about and I know that you know, as we move forward towards what we've not done in the past which is FIFA, one of the things that council member Ortiz and I talked about back in November was to have this particular meeting of the community economic development committee to look at the to incorporate some of the outreach efforts because we know that the audience may be a broader audience.

And so I was a little bit disappointed that there wasn't that outreach information back to us as was asked for by counsel in our November memo. So I'm just wondering, know, ahead of FIFA, I understand from the administration that we are gonna get a supplemental memo. But I think it's important for us to look at outreach. Look at, you know, this is gonna be a very different demographic, more international in scope. Not that the other two were not, but you know it's at a level of six weeks.

I don't know. So I'm I'm just curious as to you know, what can we expect as we move forward?

Well, as team Jen Baker, director of the office of economic development and cultural affairs, One of the talking points that team San Jose had shared was a particularly exceptional bash event this year.

Yes.

And I think the opportunity to repeat that in June looking forward and look at some of the different ways that businesses will be impacted over a longer duration of six weeks of programming is really important. With the Super Bowl, Nvidia March Madness those were more finite duration. And so a company's working capital could be expended in bursts in different ways versus six weeks of burn time on one's capital. And so thinking about how we support the business community and that outreach moving forward is important.

Yeah. I am hoping that there's more targeted outreach. The thing is that we don't know what was done with Super Bowl and FIFA in terms of any particular targeted outreach. And so I'm kind of hoping that as we're looking at these six weeks that are coming up, you know, I mean, I would I would ask, you know, in terms of how are we going to sort of like push that information out so that, you know, whether it's residents, business owners, workers, visitors know what their rights are, what's available resources and partnership with even Santa Clara County because I know this was a huge effort with so many other partners all around. And you know, I just wanna give greater visibility to that that whatever can be done can be pushed out from our offices, know, our council offices as well so that the community knows, hey, you know, things are gonna be fine.

These are the things that are available and and and we could be helpful with that. We could be much more helpful with that.

And council member Bai could just add and thank you for that point. And, staff, we will be issuing a supplemental memo before we go to city council with this item on May 12. But I do want to share, what we have been doing in terms of partnering, with agencies including, the Immigrant Protection and Empowerment Network also known as IPEN. Mhmm. They're really our key partner, and that network is made up of a host of different, jurisdictions, and other organizations to help push that word out to our community to make sure that our residents and quite frankly visitors coming into our community know their rights and can feel safe.

And also we're of course working very closely with the rapid response network in the county as well. So we will detail the those outreach methods in the supplemental memo talking about what was what worked well for Super Bowl and March Madness and plans moving forward for FIFA.

Yeah. No. That's terrific because I think that this is gonna be huge. I mean, six weeks is a long time, and anything could happen. Right? So, you know, I think that it would be good for our community to also know that these resources are available should you need them or, you know, what is happening. I'm gonna turn now to council member Mulcahy.

Thank you, council member. I don't know if I misunderstood. Maybe a portion of what was missing from what you were saying was also how do you get, like, business associations and businesses involved and all of that. And I think, like, the tool kit is available. I think it'd be good to make sure that all the council offices are pushing that out.

I know, you know, we were doing it. We had the benefit of having a lot of events kind of in and around the our district. So we were pretty proactive doing that. But I think that and then also the app, the s j 26 app, I know has a lot of resources for the community on it so they can see schedules of what's happening. So maybe sort of pushing that out, you know, again, the the council offices as well would be helpful.

I just had my light on because I wanted to just recognize, you know, there's another example of the teamwork that we've seen, not just, you know, your organizations, but, you know, you too specifically, who both brought so much to bear. And it was a little bit of an experiment that just could not have been more impactful. So thanks to John and Tommy for stepping forward for San Jose.

Wonderful. And would you like to make a motion to accept and cross reference

it to San Jose City

Council? Council. Second. Second.

Very good. There's a motion and a second. Let's vote.

That motion passes with two absent.

Very good. Okay. And the last item that we have is item number four, economic strategy work plan annual report. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon council member Khamene and members of the committee. Jen Baker, director of the city manager's office of economic development and cultural affairs. And I'm here today to present the economic strategy work plan annual report and request your acceptance of the progress. This reflects the first technically nine months of implementation of the FY twenty twenty five-twenty twenty seven strategy. This work plan was approved as part of the FY twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six budget process and was designed to focus our efforts on five core areas: business attraction and retention, small business ecosystem support, downtown recovery, expansion of the experience economy, and connecting residents to economic opportunity.

In total, the plan includes five objectives and 22 goals with year one, now nearing completion with rounding the bend in quarter four. At a high level, eight of the goals are complete, 12 are on track, and two are, we're still working on leaning into. So over 90% of the work plan is progressing as intended. So happy to report that. This slide lays out the full scope of the work plan across all five objectives.

So what's important to note here is that many of these goals are two year targets and our year one benchmark is reaching 50% progress. Across the board, we're seeing strong movement in our job support and retention activity and revenue generation, the small business support systems, downtown activity, event activation, as we've just heard a lot about, and workforce placement. Where we're seeing some challenges and where we're staying focused is primarily around office recovery and daytime downtown activity, which continue to lag along with national trends. A few highlights that will illustrate where we have the strongest momentum across the work plan. We added or supported or retained 3,573 jobs.

This was up to December, so July through December, and sales tax revenue up $9,000,000 for the four months, to January to December of this past year. So strong sales tax revenue increase and we've supported key company investments across advanced manufacturing and clean tech. Some of these projects include have included rose batteries, net gear, lucid motors and EV charging infrastructure where we have supported on both planning and certificate of occupancy, ribbon cuttings to bring awareness to these milestones for companies. And then also starting this fiscal year or this calendar year rather, there have been a number of announcements that we'll look at reporting out at year end. So lots to look forward to.

This reflects a strong foundation of business retention paired with targeted growth in innovative sectors. In parallel, we're making strategic progress in large energy development which we know is one of our competitive advantages in the city. Two Equinix facilities are new and are now energized and you can see a number of team members at the ribbon cutting at Equinix. These are anticipated to generate 800,000 in near term utility tax revenue scaling to roughly 4,000,000 annually. And this is a key insight for us in that access to power is one of the most important site selection drivers across the country and we're well positioned to continue to compete in that space.

So that will be informing our focus areas moving forward. Pertaining to small business resiliency, we've received over 800 startup grant applications signaling strong entrepreneurial demand. We currently see more business openings than closures, which is a positive sign. And the business improvement districts, have been a capacity building exercise over the past two years, are advancing very positively. So in the start to this year, we've established or advanced five business improvement districts bringing over 760,000 annually to be reinvested in the communities that are committing that money.

These districts are critical. They create self sustaining economic infrastructure at the neighborhood level and really give community members the power of decision to create sustainable solutions for their neighborhood community and businesses. The work is about more than recovery, it's about building long term resilience and local wealth creation. And you can see listed the business corridors that have advanced bids and the East Village bid is still in progress. In downtown, positive resident sentiment is holding at 51%.

We saw a 4% increase in this past year, which is short of our 10% year on end goals. So that was one of the work plan areas, where you'll see a yellow across the work plan status charts. And that is based on the public polling for positive downtown sentiment. Daily foot traffic has increased 9.36.6% in the first two quarters. And major events, as we know, the Super Bowl activations and Nvidia GTC are helping drive activity.

We're seeing strong gains in activation and perception, particularly in evenings and event driven periods. But we know we need to make that activity sticky and work to achieve long term daytime activation and foot traffic that much more. We'll continue to focus on closing the gap on daytime and office utilization. In the experience economy, oops, got to talk and click at the same time. In the experience economy, we've facilitated five thirty five event days and that was at the December, exceeding our annual goal and that was only at the midyear point for implementation.

So you're going to see, a tremendous amount of activity that our existing staff and cultural affairs has, has really hustled to put together this year. I know we spoke and learned from the last panels presenting that ROI from a hotel room subscription standpoint and in a foot traffic standpoint have been strong. And a question about how we want to invest in the future to draw those types of events. And I would call attention to the existing staff and staff capacity that's been redirected to support these activations is really important also. So sustaining our ability to do what our team does is evidenced by this tremendous workload and all of the event days hosted.

So 100 or 100, 1,850,000 attendees, which is phenomenal, And the Super Bowl activations alone bringing in over 450,000 visitors downtown. So we know when we activate public space with compelling programming that people will show up and show up at scale. And so figuring out how to again, make this a sustainable recurrence and bring this quality of life and activation into our daytime more regularly is important to us looking forward. And that brings me to looking ahead. Oops, double click.

So there are three areas that I would like to highlight for us in repositioning for a long term competitiveness. And the areas are business attraction and retention, which we know is a cornerstone of business development, small business ecosystem and experience economy. So under business attraction and retention, we're committed to executing against the March budget messaging to build out a three to five year business development strategy. I'm particularly excited about that component because I know there are a lot of competitive advantages that we can showcase and really bring the brand and the talent and the amenities of San Jose to a broader audience. So we'll look at foreign direct investment, how we're telling the story of local talent and also developable land as part of that commitment to the business development strategy.

We'll continue to target industrial and R and D growth where we see the most considerable subscription of real estate. And so going with where the momentum is right now will be a good focus for us. Leaning into the target industries that will research that much more. Likewise, we know that supporting office recovery and business to business firm activity that aligns with that industry growth will be an important strategy to activate downtown. And then likewise aligning with state level efforts.

So GO Biz on the California level is also directing attentions to their business development outreach. We're seeing California on the international and national stage more than in the past at some of the industry outreach events that align with our competencies. So where possible, we want to also contribute to that inertia and put forth the San Jose brand. For the small business ecosystem, strengthening the full economic ecosystem is a priority for us. We want to expand and sustain the business improvement district capacity.

So it hasn't been enough just to stand up the bids. There are other communities that would like to also form a bid. And once they're activated, we want to make sure that their capacity to execute on their budget and deliver for community is sustained. So we're committed to to bid support and technical assistance capacity building. We definitely wanna encourage more local spending, so opportunities as we've seen through the SJ twenty six events where people are bringing their expendable income to our small businesses and neighborhoods.

And then likewise, advancing the, East Side revitalization framework that was also called out in the March budget message. And lastly, experience economy. We wanna build off of the s j twenty six momentum. There have been a lot of lessons learned and deliverables on the policy level, like for entertainment zones where we now have vehicles to be able to invite the community to activate. And we will continue to work on those types of interdepartmental policy tools that help help us us help the business community celebrate.

We wanna expand civic engagement and partnerships, support major upcoming milestones. We know we have the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the city and the seventieth anniversary of the sister city strategy that will be forthcoming in the next year. And we heard quite a bit about convention center activation. And so what are the ways that we can facilitate optimization of the facility and continue to partner with, team San Jose looking forward? Across all the strategies, we wanna become more proactive, data driven and partnership data informed and partnership driven.

And to close, after this first year of implementation, we're seeing strong execution across the priorities, measurable economic gains, and growing momentum in key sectors. So we look forward to putting more, into the activities that that we're invested in. With that, I'd like to, respectfully recommend acceptance of the report and invite any questions.

Thank you so much. Is there any public comment?

No public comment.

I'll turn it back to the committee. Comments or questions from the committee? Council member Mulcahy.

I have a question but I'll move to approve the report. Second. Hey Jen, one of the things that constantly comes up is this retention of our industrial base, We've got to keep it for jobs growth. And just I'm sure if the entire council was up here, everybody's got chunks of that in their district that you just rather see something get built there versus these blighted areas just sort of languish. I have three little chunky areas in my district that I think about Campbell Avenue, some pockets of Lincoln Avenue, Center Road in District 7, where you've got sort of unqualified property owners who can't afford to actually hold on to their properties.

And yet we're holding on to those properties for another use other than industrial. Has the department ever thought about how to help facilitate connecting investment to those kinds of areas specifically? Is that a fair question? You know what I'm asking?

I believe so. So one of the aspects of our focus areas looking forward would be identifying are there public private partnerships, CDFIs, alternative forms of capital that could be leveraged as tools to improve properties. In the past, there was the redevelopment authority, which doesn't exist anymore, that created some inroads and then also left some challenges to manage. But we are interested in looking at what sorts of tools could help jog loose some of the properties that are that seem to be stuck for any number of reasons.

I mean, just would say that having that inventory on a list somewhere for your team to know if there is an investor looking to do something. Again we have lots of people in this community that are owning properties that don't have the capacity to redevelop and they're sort of being held for a certain type of use type on those properties and we have a lot of blight as a result of it. So just be interesting I think to look at how we create an inventory list of those what I would call opportunities to connect developers to those sites. Thank you.

And council member if I may, this is a really interesting time to be having that conversation and that we're in the four year general plan cycle. And so evaluating, you know, where we are in terms of jobs creation capacity, how jobs are matching up with with housing and and residency and population, and and really how all of those things impact our structural deficit. So are there ways forward where land use zoning requirements can be either honored or altered in ways that have us pacing ideally population growth with b to b sales tax, property valuation on the business side that are helping us create a balanced budget. Great.

Well, thank you so much. I don't have any other hands so let's vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Thank you. And now we're on open forum. Is there anyone who'd like to speak on open forum?

We have no public comment.

Okay. Well, then we are adjourned at 03:28PM. Thank you so much.