Neighborhood Services and Education Committee (nse) - Regular Meeting

The committee members and members of the public to please follow our code of conduct at meetings. This includes only commenting on the specific agenda item and addressing the entire body. Public speakers will not engage in a conversation with the chair, council members, or staff. All members of the committee, staff, and the public are expected to refrain from abuse of language, failure to comply with the code of conduct which will disturb, disrupt, or impede the orderly conduct of this meeting, will result in the removal from the meeting. This meeting of the Neighborhood Services and Education Committee will now come to order. Can the clerk please call roll?

Campos?

Present.

Candelas?

Here.

Cohen? Absent. Vice chair, Duan absent. Chair, Ortiz?

Present.

You have a quorum.

Great. Thank you so much. And then looking at review work plan, doesn't seem we have anything to review. So we will go to the consent calendar. There's only one item, Library and Education Commission annual report and work plan. Do we have a motion?

So moved. Second.

Alright, we have a motion from Council Member Condellis and seconded from Council Member Campos. Let's vote. Oh, do we need public comment? Yeah.

No public comment.

Alright. Let's vote.

That passes unanimously.

Great. Thank you. Now we're going to item d, reports to committee. For the first item, it's Beautify SJ Neighborhood Blight Reduction Status Report with a presentation from Olympia Williams, Paul Perera, and Hilda Morales.

Good afternoon chair Ortiz and honorable council members. I am Olympia Williams, deputy director of the community services division. Joining me today are Paul Perera, interim division manager for Beautify SJ and Hilda Morales, program manager overseeing our neighborhood blight reduction programs. We're here to share the progress the Beautify SJ team has made this past year in reducing blight, engaging with neighborhoods, and enhancing the beauty and livability of our city. From removing graffiti and illegal dumping to partnering with residents and community groups, our work aims to create cleaner, safer, and more welcoming public spaces for all who live, work, and visit San Jose.

We are proud of what we've accomplished. We know there is more to do though. We continue to refine our service delivery model, strengthen partnerships, and seek innovative approaches to keep San Jose's public spaces vibrant and free of blight. With that, I turn the presentation over to Paul to walk you through this year's results and our vision for the future.

Thank you, Olympia. Good afternoon. Beautify San Jose uses a three e's model to address blight and illegal dumping. These three e's, education, eradication, and enforcement, serve as a holistic and effective way of addressing these complex issues. Some of our 24, 25 highlights are noted on the slide being presented.

After several years of focusing on eradication, we have shifted and placed a renewed emphasis on education and enforcement. Some highlights to the education component of our three e's approach include the launch of an environmental stewardship strategy. This program is at three schools in Council District 73, And 8. This program engaged over 970 youth at these three schools and provided more than eleven hundred hours of volunteer service by the youth and their families. This element of education proves to be a positive multiplier because we can educate our youth and then enroll them in volunteer service that almost always brings out an additional volunteer in the form of a parent, sibling, or caregiver.

Part of our education strategy also involves marketing and outreach. Beautify San Jose launched a multilingual ad campaign to raise awareness and promote community engagement in bus shelter and on bus ads for twelve weeks. A digital ad is currently running at Eastridge Mall that you see on the slide here. Hilda will now speak to the eradication component of our strategy.

Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'd like to share some highlights of the second e, which is our eradication efforts. On this slide, you'll see that the graffiti program removed just over 2,500,000 squared of graffiti which represents a 14.73% decrease from the previous fiscal year. It is important to note that that 29% of the reported graffiti was on private property, a significant increase from 6% last year.

To help address this, we have continued our strong collaboration with our partners as well as provided resources to small business owners. Of the £14,000,000 collected by the blight reduction programs, almost 10,500,000 pounds were collected by the removing and preventing illegal dumping team or the rapid team. This program addresses illegal dumping by responding to requests submitted by the public through the San Jose three 11 app. While the team's goal is to respond within five business days, the rapid team is currently responding in roughly three business days. Removing blight from our communities would not be possible with the support of our amazing partners and volunteers who generously contribute their time.

Over the past fiscal year, volunteers in the neighborhood litter program contributed over $714,000 worth of volunteer time. While the number of neighborhood volunteers remained similar to last year, challenges in obtaining MOUs with certain districts prevented us from entering some schools to conduct presentations. We understand that to reach parents, caregivers, and guardians, we often need to start by engaging youth. As a result, school presentations declined from 74 to 47 this past year. In the upcoming year, we plan to establish new MOUs to address this and reach out to other stakeholders and community groups who may be interested in volunteer work.

Lastly, I'd like to highlight the work of our neighborhood beautification team better known as a dumpster day program. This program is one of our most popular programs as it gives community ability to dispose of large bulky items in their neighborhood. Over the past year, this team collaborated with council offices, neighborhood associations, and community groups to host a 152 dumpster day events, collecting almost 3,000,000 pounds of waste. As a part of our blight reduction strategy, we plan to host dumpster days at fixed locations throughout the city moving forward. So I apologize. It was a 155 dumpster days. Thank you for your time, and I'll hand it back over to Paul.

Thank you, Hilda. I'll now highlight the enforcement part of our three e strategy. To better align blight related enforcement efforts, a blight enforcement working group was established last year. This working group includes key internal departments, including parks and recreation neighborhood services, code enforcement, the city attorney's office, and the San Jose police department. External partners include the district attorney's office and the California Highway Patrol.

The group is developing a recommendation to a key update of a municipal ordinance to allow for the impoundment of vehicles used in the commission of illegal dumping. Beautify San Jose also operates 12 surveillance cameras in high volume illegal dumping hotspots. This has both challenges and positive outcomes. Connectivity problems primarily due to weak Wi Fi, tree branches obstructing the camera's view, limited recording range, and vandalism have complicated maintenance. But despite these challenges, the program has yielded several positive results.

Illegal dumping has decreased by an average of 32% in areas where cameras are installed. The San Jose Police Department, also arrested three prolific taggers in the 2425 fiscal year. And in 2425, a new full time position was added to review camera footage and then refer track refer and track cases involving illegal dumping sent sent to code enforcement. Citations can be issued when video evidence captures both the act of dumping and a clearly identifiable violator such as a license plate. Warning notices are issued when evidence is less conclusive.

The city also continues to invest in physical deterrence through the gate clean gateways pilot. Landscaping improvements, including plants and boulders, have been installed at various entry points in downtown and areas east of downtown. Beautify San Jose has also installed fencing, signage, and boulders in areas with high rates of illegal dumping and graffiti. This is all part of a proactive and multilayered strategy to combat illegal dumping and promote cleaner, safer, and more engaged neighborhoods. And now I'll turn it back over to Olympia.

In closing, I want to extend my deepest thanks to our internal partner departments, our external interjurisdictional partners, and most importantly, our neighborhood associations. These dedicated community members not only give their time and energy to improving the quality of life in their neighborhoods, but they also inspire all of us with their daily commitment to making San Jose a cleaner, safer, and more beautiful city. Together through partnership, innovation, and community pride, we will continue to reduce blight, enhance our public spaces, and ensure San Jose remains a city we are all proud to call home. With that, I'd like to say thank you and we are available for questions.

Wonderful. Thank you so much to staff for their great presentation and also their very important work. I can say for sure that I'm emailing you guys a few times a week and I really appreciate your response and I love when I get a success story. So thank you so much for your work. Let's see who we got here to provide. Council Member Condellis.

Awesome. Thank you, Chair. First of all, thank you. Thank you for the report and the update. You know, this is one of those very visible city functions. And what I mean by very visible is residents often complain to us this is like one of the first things we hear not just when we're knocking on doors, but when we're out serving in office. And so I appreciate the work that you do not just with the dumpster days, the education campaign specifically at Catherine Smith. You know, I I had the opportunity to go and and see the the the the byproduct of that. You know, the the students are very, very proud to say, you know, I recycle or I go and pick up garbage or I pick up this or I pick up that. And so so that it's really, really helpful.

And and so that education component of our three years approach is is critical. And last year, I I don't remember us hitting that education piece as hard as we we did this year. And so I see I see the effect and it's and and and I think that's part of why we see the, you know, the the the the not so high of an increase from the previous years is our education. And obviously, it's gonna take time and it's not just one year, but I think that's the right approach. Coupled with the third E, which we, I don't think was very, very harped on last year, which was the enforcement.

And I guess my question for staff is, you know, considering we put funding in the budget this year in 2526 for one time support for those enhancements. What kind of enhancements can we see? Are we looking at fines, more cameras? You know, maybe I know the sensitivity of the locations of the cameras because we actually wanna catch people, especially the bad actors, but maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Definitely. Thank you for the question, council member. So we have an interdepartmental, committee that also includes some of our external partners. A couple of things that we are looking at is additional cameras so we could cover, and we have 12 cameras in a 181 square mile city because as you can imagine it's not enough. Partnering with SJPD to use their automatic license plate reader cameras to see if that can also kind of expand our network of cameras.

Looking at some fixed site locations for dumpster days. So you know we come into a neighborhood then tend to leave. If we could find some sites strategically throughout the city that says, hey, for the next six weeks, we're gonna be here every Saturday with 10 dumpsters to see if that can reduce not just reduce illegal dumping, but also allow us to educate folks on how to use the free junk pickup program so that maybe they're not as reliant on just waiting for those dumpster days which then leads to illegal dumping. Also working with code to see if there's an opportunity to bring back a part timer. Think about a retiree rehire that could just focus on illegal dumping and graffiti because those are the two areas that we have most, that we're being most impacted in.

So there's a variety of strategies that we're looking at how best to use that $250,000 in funding that we received this year.

Perfect. And then I guess with regards to the I think that's a great idea. I think there was a pilot last year for like doing it on a Friday or doing these dumpster days at certain locations every Friday. And I think I think that's you know, it takes time for the community to catch on. I mean, for example, I've been doing my music in the square at at the Village Square for the past three three summers every Friday, and people are like, this is my first time.

I didn't know about it no matter how much time and effort. So regardless, I think that's gonna be consistency and especially with the messaging is gonna be key. And and and I I would also I I I have a question with regards to the, you know, the work, especially with graffiti on how we're working with PBC on private property, and and the collaboration there and how we communicate, with partnering departments because to the community, it doesn't matter if it's public or private property, just see graffiti. And so I know that's been one of those troublesome areas but I'm curious from staff on how we intend to work on that and or address that.

Definitely. So as you've seen our graffiti declined on public property but it did not decline on private property. I think we've become so efficient at getting it down on public property that taggers now have shifted. So what we've done is we've worked specifically with our private property owners to say here are strategies you can use to reduce graffiti, good lighting, growing a bougainvillea alongside the building, etcetera, etcetera. But we also provide free paint and we do courtesy abatements.

If there's anything around hate speech or gang graffiti, we will remove it for those private property owners because we don't want that to stay up there a long time. But we also provide the paint that they need to remove it. We're also working with code to see how we can use our code enforcement officers who are out there on a regular basis to help us educate folks that are being impacted by graffiti, but also to educate those who aren't being impacted by graffiti and illegal dumping at this time so we can all work together. What typically happens is someone's business is tagged and then another person in the community reports it, then we go we go out to them, work with them on strategies to prevent it and address it, but we wanna turn that model around and see how we can get to people early to educate them so they know to either reach out to us if they need support or to implement strategies to just reduce it overall.

Thanks

for that Olympia and what I'd like to add is on a parallel track, you all know, we're also in the process of re engineering code enforcement.

Right.

And so as we're doing that work, what we're doing is we're also reevaluating and assessing are there, to Olympia's point, are there certain job scopes that we could kinda bleed into this work, so that way we tap into economies of scale, we're leveraging existing staffing, and we're connecting the dots more intently. I think more to come on that front.

Fantastic.

One thing I would like to do is, if you can go to slide six on the PowerPoint presentation, because I wanna make sure we don't gloss over this because I think this was a result of significant staff work, and for the first time since I can remember, we had a 14.73 decrease in graffiti. And we have the one hand stepped up our enforcement efforts in coordination with SJPD and the neighborhood blight enforcement team that meets regularly. We we set up these things, and we we are seeing kinda residual kinda impact from that work coupled with, to your point, council member, the additional educational work. Right? At least putting the word out around kinda community pride and and that kind of thing.

So staff has really honed in on that aspect of the work, and I just wanted to make sure we didn't gloss over it because this is a first. In in the last ten years, if you go back and look at the statistics, you will not see 14.73 decrease period. It's all been on the uptick.

That's fantastic. Excellent point, Andrew, and I think that's a testament to our staff's commitment to making sure that we're literally cleaning our community. And so that's fantastic. And I had a question, you know, I think it's also important, education, for the education campaign at Easter, for example, on the Beautify to try to educate, you know, I think there's, I look forward to hearing back from from that report because, you know, what I found is, for example, Eastridge Mall. We had, like, pervasive dumping right outside of twenty four Hour Fitness.

We kept hearing complaints and complaints. And and so the problem was the the operators of the mall weren't as responsive. And so I think, you know, it wasn't until a $500 fine was levied, that we got their attention. And now all of a sudden, they're actually cleaning. And and so I think that enforcement is key, especially when education and our staff's due diligence on making sure we're we're telling folks like, go out there and and we see it and reporting and the community's involved.

But now it's also, you know, we we can only do education to a point and then sometimes it does take that, you know, financial stick, if you will, to to get them to fall in line. So I I I appreciate that and and I hope that with the dumpster days, the targeted dumpster days, we don't see a drop in dumpster days for our offices. Just saying I, you know, love them. But, no, I I appreciate the work and that I'll I'll move approval of the staff recommendation for this item. Second.

Thank you, council member for your see here. Very important recommendation. Sorry. Trying to remember how to utilize this this screen here. Council member, vice chair Bien Duong.

Thank you, chair. First of I wanna say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The citizen in District 7 have expressed their gratitude.

They see the district is getting cleaner. And you know, My office use quite a bit of those dumpster days as well. And we would continue to do that in order to reduce that amount of garbage and blights. I do have multiple questions for you. One, how can we help you to communicate with either Eastside Union High School District or the school district in order to get you guys more presentation into the school Mhmm. To educate the young kids?

Thank you for that question council member. So if you have any direct connections that you can connect our team with at the school, we would be happy to take those because like I said, we used to be able to go onto the school campuses without those MOUs. But now we have to find the right person, discuss it with them to get an MOU established before we can start working with our youth.

I was just thinking, I could attend the school board trustees and ask, you know, for their collaboration. I can help with that. Second question is that even though it's not in my district, we're on like 101280 and the 680 on ramp from 101, a lot of times get quite a bit of graffiti up there and that filter down to the neighborhood as well. Do you do you work with Caltrans, including Pacific Union Railroad, especially right through Mulberry? It's just such an eyesore. I mean, they painted the whole thing, not just one little tiny section. They painted the whole thing and along the freeway as well.

Yeah. Thank you, vice chair. Yeah. I I understand the we we get a lot of calls and emails about the 101, and it's known as the Union Pacific Railroad Trestle. The freeway graffiti, we have a interjurisdictional partnership with Caltrans, and we have a once a month coordination call with them.

And outside of that, we have regular we have a team of folks that regularly work with them. The graffiti on the overpasses is a little tricky. And the railroad trestle is a perfect example. It requires closing down freeway lanes because as you paint it over, the overspray from the paint can get on passing vehicles. So we often have to do it at two or three in the morning and it requires a freeway closure.

Caltrans then has to put out a request for CHP involvement. So it's complicated and it's not something that we do that often just because of the impacts of closing down the freeway lanes. We are planning on doing something major with Caltrans in the early part of next year. But aside of that, some spots Caltrans is able to take on where there's some easier overpasses. The railroad bridge close to Mayberry Road is gonna be tackled next winter ahead

of

the Super Bowl partly because of the cost and the impacts of traffic.

Well, thank you. And you know what, we as 2026 come along, we're gonna have a lot of visitor and I wanna make sure that, you know, we we don't have all these graffiti that the first thing they enter is the San Jose and that's what they see, right? Well, thank you. Couple more question real quick. The grant based program, how's that helping out our community? Has it produced results that we want? Do you know, the grant base and the pilot program that we have? Yeah.

So in terms of our BSJ grants, they are an essential part of our blight reduction strategy. So we have found that they've been very successful in our neighborhood groups. First of all maintaining their neighborhood associations, having that community and neighborhood infrastructure is critical to how we get things done here in the city of San Jose. Also a lot of our neighborhood associations through their BSJ grants take on cleanup, take on projects to clean up the neighborhood, take on projects to paint out graffiti, etcetera. Last year we did 77 awards in fiscal year twenty four, twenty five.

This year we're able to do 88 but I would like to highlight that we are getting more applications from neighborhood associations and funding to be able to fund everyone. So that is a challenge that we'll be dealing with throughout the future and it's something that I know that I'm working closely with both Andrea and John and Angel to figure out how we could better fund all of those groups.

Thank you for that.

If I could add to that. Sure. Because I think there's a real opportunity here. You know, as Olympia was mentioning, you know, last year we gave out 321,000 in grants and we had more applicants than money. Right?

So I think it's a one, it's an awesome opportunity to to, you know, with a little bit of funding to engage a lot of neighborhood involvement. Right? The other thing that the team's been talking about is, in addition to the beautification efforts, is also adding an additional emphasis on having these same neighborhood associations get the word out on S J 311 and our free junk pickup. Because, again, in the spirit of education and educating the communities, the more we get that word out, then the more that gets used. And if that gets used, then that begins to decrease our ultimate illegal dumping. And so I think there may be an opportunity here for us to maybe take a look at opportunities to expand that pool of funds to engage more neighborhood associations.

Thank you for that info. I I know that I fought in District 7. We have two language barrier which is Hispanic and and Vietnamese. And a lot of the constituent don't understand that they can get that free junk pickup. Right? And so even on the dumpster day at seven three, which is, we should have one of those ongoing pilot program where we put those dumpster there. Because the day of the dumpster that my office put together, people said, I tell them you you can bring your stuff over. They went and go ahead and dumped it right out in the corner of Capital Expressway and. And seven three versus. Driving it over because there's no consequences.

And mind you, it was just not even less than a tenth of a mile they've got it. All said and done, I think the education come in that, hey, when you're moving out, you can just dial, I mean, do the 311 app and request for service. And also right on the corner of Loop Drive and Samuel, I see them dump every single week and and you guys doing a great job of cleaning it up. But every week they would somebody would just come and dump. There so I think if you can help by putting a sign there it was illegal dump, it cost $10,000.

I'll go buy a fake camera and stick on top of it. Then maybe that'll, you know, with a little blinking lights. It just, it's been ongoing, that same spot for years been ongoing. And if you can help me out with that I appreciate it. And again, God bless you. Thank you and thank you and thank you again for the incredible job. Everybody recognize that the city is looking cleaner, less graffiti, less garbage, but we still got a long way to go. Thank you.

Thank you, vice chair Dewan. Council member Campos.

Thank you, chair, and thank you staff for the report. It definitely demonstrates the work that's been done. And like my colleague said, we we really see it in the neighborhoods and in the community. I had a couple of questions that I wanted to better understand in working with the different jurisdictions. Is there an average time for each different partner? Like, does it vary from partner to partner? And what lessons have you learned in working with different jurisdictions, as well as pain points that we should be aware of to ensure a more expeditious process?

Thank you, Councilmember. Mentioned, we have interjurisdictional known as our interagency team that works with Caltrans, Valley Water, Union Pacific. We've learned, actually, during the pandemic that if we take care of things in San Jose, the pain point becomes people moving over into another jurisdiction. And then the common analogy that people use is then we're playing the game of whack a mole. The challenge that we have as you mentioned, as you highlighted is that the different jurisdictions do have different timelines for cleanup and a lot of it is guided around the outreach requirement.

In particular, Caltrans was sued for the level of outreach that provided and they provide a different outreach schedule that we follow, but because of that it's not the same that we follow. We follow what they do and we try to coordinate so that we are posting the same day that they are. We are having the same activity at the same time. So we're not then, as I said, playing whack a mole and moving the problem around as opposed to trying to take care of it and solve it together. Our interagency teams also, as I mentioned, include Valley Water and they have a different schedule as well.

But like I said, we have monthly coordination meetings and calls with each one of the different jurisdictions including Santa Clara County. We probably have the strongest partnership with Santa Clara County where the county has a fee for service program. We have a team that goes out to county jurisdiction areas that touch on San Jose. And we take care of a multitude of things, everything from graffiti to dumping to encampments on those for Santa Clara County, and we're able to build them back for that. And that's a model that we did during the pandemic and that we're still in place now.

Thank you for that. I am definitely interested in learning more about the best practices that you've picked up on from working with different agencies. You know, I heard from a D2 resident not too long ago who has been lives around Canoes Creek and has been working for the past two years on trying to get blight out of Canoes Creek and bouncing around from different agencies, VTA, Caltrans, the city, the Valley Water, and so I recognize that maybe as a city, as a government, we have ability to move things a little bit faster, but for a resident in their neighborhood who really wants help clean up an area, I'm I'm thinking about how to also streamline the process for them so that it's not so cumbersome and having to bounce around from different agencies. So thank you for for some more context there. And then thinking about illegal dumping, are you tracking and measuring what kinds of items are top contributors, or are you noticing that is it a lot of mattresses, appliances, furniture, like what are the trends showing?

Thank you for the question council member. Yes, all of the above. We collect about 8,000 mattresses a year, right. We're part of the California Mattress Recycling Council, so when we have those mattresses we are able to turn them in and basically get like a redemption fee for them. So that is one of our revenue streams for the program.

We also work with the Conservation Court and Goodwill as part of their job training program because they recycle those mattresses. We find a significant amount of household couches, water heaters, stoves, refrigerators, toilets, complete home remodels, small projects, fencing, wire, metal, kind of everything. What we like to tell people is that illegal dumping is really coming from our housed residents. It's someone buys something, they need to get rid of something and they have found that I just put it out on the street and eventually someone will pick it up. That's why we've been pushing really hard for the free junk pickup program which has high utilization rate but we know that we need to continue to work with folks to use that as their first option.

If that doesn't work then how do you get to a dumpster day? That doesn't work we want the illegal dumping program to kind of be the third thing that needs to come in because what we don't pick up will end up in a homeless encampment and it's times more work to get something out of a homeless encampment. So it's really educating our housed residents and businesses about how to appropriately dispose of unwanted things. Have you thought about donating it to goodwill if it's still usable? Have you thought about donating it to a church?

Have you got on Facebook and used your free community group where you can get rid of items? But using those things in the free junk pickup program prior to just sitting something out is our is what we've really been working with our neighborhood associations, our youth, and any other business group that we work with to say please utilize those options to get rid of unwanted bulky items.

Yeah, I really appreciate that note. Think realizing that it's housed residents who are contributing the most to this is significant and I think about the education and the kind of behavioral change that would be needed, but also the opportunity there to maybe think creatively and get people to find a solution that's more based in like the recycling economy. I think right now, especially the younger generations, thrifting is something that is very popular, but things like Facebook Marketplace. I have a younger sister who doesn't even have a Facebook account, so I think about like how to create environments or spaces so that everyone can benefit from the circular economy and especially right now when we know with inflation and folks having, you know, restrictions on their budget, the more that we can support this kind of opportunity and partnership for neighbors to come together. I recognize in Santee they have a monthly bazaar, and so neighbors can come out and have a flea market.

It's something that I'm interested in partnering with a school in District 2 on in partnership with our neighborhood association, but you know I think that there's a craving for this citywide. I just recently stumbled upon an Instagram page called San Jose Swap, and it's like a clothes swapping that happens the second Sunday of every month, and then the fourth Sunday of every month they do a clothing repair. So, you know, one of the items that we approved in the consent was the library work plan, and I know right now the library is thinking about those creative spaces, so I'm just, you know, advocating for thinking outside of the box and thinking about the different partnerships and community engagement strategies that could really help maybe bolster some of this work that's already being done by neighbors of their own volition and seeing how through grants, through partnerships, getting connected with their neighborhood association might be able to further drive the impact of these more grassroots community based recycling programs. And I guess just some food for thought about what the cost of a community ambassador like that could look like because it's a reoccurring theme in some of the meetings that we've started having and thinking about long term planning.

Just there's definitely a need for something like back in the day with redevelopment agency there was an ability for each district to have one or two city staff that were working on community projects and really tapped into what was happening in the neighborhoods. So I'm you know just curious about how we can think about that for budgets and future opportunities.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Council member, I I think those are great great ideas and and ones that we gotta really kinda lean in on and and perhaps we could mirror some of this or or or connect some of this work with our other neighborhood engagement efforts. You know, you just take a look at two kind of facts, the two things that kind of really jumped out at me in this report.

One, when you look at the baseline, when you look at the data from when we started collecting our baseline in 2122, this last year we collected 10,000,000 pounds more than we did during that baseline, which tells me two things. One, there's still a lot of illegal dumping and trash that we need to pick up, and two, that the team has really dialed in on our ability to collect that trash. Right? The second one is that when you look at mattress collections, when you look at that baseline, as Olympia mentioned, we picked up more than 8,000 this year. That's 3,000 more mattresses than the baseline in 2122.

So the data is definitely going in the wrong direction. The good news is that we've gotten better at picking it up, and it's kind of a blessing and a curse, right, because people say, oh well if I put it out here, the city will come get it. But we gotta really step up our education efforts and really lean into examples that such as the ones you just gave, like how do we start working with the community to start looking at other, you know, getting into the you mentioned did you say the thrift economy? You mentioned a certain term.

The recycling economy?

Recycling economy. Yeah recycling economy. I think that's something we ought to lean into if we're gonna really

Yeah practice I I that think it all comes down to communications, marketing, that community outreach. If the city of San Jose and our mattress program is the best place for folks to recycle their mattress, then I think everyone should know that. Right? Don't second guess how you're going get rid of your mattress. Call the city and we'll earn some revenue and we'll help you out there. So I think really connecting and engaging with the community to make it simple and make it easy to find these places so that they're not doing the alternative, which is dumping in their neighborhoods. Thank you.

Thank you Councilmember Campos for your comments. I got a few comments and then we'll go back to Vice Chair Dewan. But I just also want to thank staff for preparing this detailed report. I also want to thank Olympia for the great work she's done in our district and with our community. Because as you know, beautification and addressing blight is a big priority for our District Five office.

With that being said, I just do have a few questions in regards to how we can potentially strengthen our efforts. I wanna piggyback a little bit in regards to Vice Chair's comments on the Eastside Union High School District since I think that spans all four of our districts actually. So I know that we don't necessarily do partnerships with school districts that we don't have MOUs with. Is that really the barrier or are we lacking resources and funding to expand our capacity?

So I would say the first is barriers we have to be able to get on campus and then council member if you have like some extra dollars lying around that you wanna give to us we'd be happy to take them. And then we look at the resources. But I think for us, our first challenge is really getting back onto those school campuses because if we get youth engaged, we usually get their parents engaged, and we have a larger impact that's more sustainable.

Okay. And and I just don't understand how I guess how did we get removed? How did we not? Like, what did

that look like? Yeah. Guess. We had for years been able to go onto school campuses as city employees saying because we get background checked through the city, many of our school districts informed us that that was no longer gonna be okay, that we'd have to establish agreements with those school districts and schools. So we've been going through that process of establishing agreements and contracts. We need to have those executed before we're able to go onto a school campus and that's been, right. And it's not just the agreement, it's identifying the right person, having the school district agree to it, going through those meetings, and then starting to work on the agreement, and then keeping it on track. So any support we can get, we're always happy to have that because it'll help us fast track that.

Sure, I have some good, actually I'm gonna be meeting with Trustee Chavez fairly soon, so I'll be sure to elevate that in our conversation. And then I know that you guys also had like, I can't remember the exact name, I don't have the slide deck in front of me, there's like a youth ambassadors group at some of those schools. I think there was three schools that you had that in. And is that does that have the capacity to, you know, expand?

Yeah. Yes, council member. The that's the environmental stewardship program, I believe, that you're referencing. And we actually do we do want to expand it, and staff is is ready to. It's just the the challenge is getting into the schools.

Really? With that with that too as well. Okay. Well, it sounds like we need to get in there and get you guys some support.

So please Council member, what we'll also do is, you know, we we're we also have the Youth Empowerment Alliance. We have both superintendents. We have we have Glenn and Juan that sit on there. We'll use that forum as well. We also have a good number of superintendents that are part of our Children Youth Services Master Plan work. We'll talk internally and then we'll also be done the School City Collaborative agenda as well. So we'll dial this in because you know these are folks that we just gotta kinda reach out to Yep, ask

for help.

And then get ask for help, yeah.

Okay, great. Sounds good. Thank you for that. Yeah, because education is extremely important because I hear you know in other countries, those that have a lot less blight than ours, the education component is really embedded within their educational institutions. They're taught from a young age about the importance of not littering.

So I think if we begin to invest in that, it's easier to raise kids properly than to go to individuals who have already set in their ways and unfortunately are stuck in these negative practices. So next, in regards to the illegal dumping warning notices, and I've seen, had something like this similar happen to me during cleanups when I found trash and it has individuals home addresses on them. It's obvious people are either taking trash from their home and going to the neighborhood park and dumping or going to the neighborhood street corner and dumping it. I believe we send a warning notice to the homes when we do find this. Could you share, do we have on hand, if not that's fine, but could you share how many warning notices were sent since 2024?

I don't see anyone here from code but that's something that we can follow-up with you on, the number of warning notices sent.

Okay. For example, like our cases identified primarily through SJ three eleven reports, resident emails, or proactive field monitoring, it'd good to look at that data and see how we can aggregate it. And then if, for example, if we, like I said, I've seen this in the district, if we find somebody's address, you know, I think I was just emailing you, Olympia, about Mount Pleasant Park. And the person from PRNS said hey look this has this person's address on all the dumping and the garbages. If we find that, how can we make sure it gets reported properly?

So if you find the addresses for someone, you can definitely send that to code for those particular reports. If they find that it's stolen mail then code kinda is the bridge between the city and the United States Postal Service as well.

Yeah, I guess that's also a concern is if the mail was stolen or something like that. Okay and then third, this is on the Healthy Places Index resource prioritization. On pages four through five, you mentioned that Beautify SJ now uses the California Healthy Places Index to guide an annual data review process and prioritize resources in the high need communities. That's great, I'm really excited about that. But could you provide a concrete example of what prioritization would look like in practice? For instance, does it mean assigning more staff, increasing you know proactive enforcements or you know adding additional cleanups in those neighborhoods?

Councilmember, yes. I'll give you an example for District 5. One of the neighborhoods, there's certain neighborhoods along Story Road where it it does involve proactive pickups, but we're also working actively with the environmental services department to then work with their vendor to do certain neighborhoods along Story Road. There's three different neighborhoods along Story Road just in District 5 that we're looking at focusing more services, proactive services through environmental services for the pickup for For junk. Yeah. For junk pickup in in those neighborhoods.

Awesome. Okay. No. That that's good. That's good. Thank you. Thank you for that. And then I guess my final question is I know that, you know, we we talked about these camera the camera programs as a deterrent for for illegal dumping. And I know that we only have a few of them, how could we possibly get more? Can we do like a budget document? Say if I wanna, I got like 10 places in District 5 where I need cameras, can I do like a budget document through the next budget cycle to fund something like that?

Yes.

Okay. Alright. Alright. I guess I'll do a cost estimate on that next cycle. Finally, a lot of these illegal dumping sites are usually right next to apartment buildings. And people are leaving their apartments and I'm a renter but people are leaving their apartments and they're like, hey I'm a dump my couch here and then I'm a go somewhere. Can we start holding these property owners accountable? Because I've even heard people say, oh my property owner says I can dump right here as I leave and that the city will just clean it up.

Yeah that is something that we're working specifically with Code on. How do we get information out for those multi family units to make sure that the property owners are educated about the process and you can't just place things out on the sidewalk or street because you will receive a citation. Second, we're also working with our environmental services department so they can do an assessment because some of those property, those apartment complexes need larger dumpsters. If you live in a multi family unit you can actually put those large bulky items in the dumpster, but they need to either increase service or get a larger dumpster. So we're working with ESD on that.

Also in addition to what Paul said is how how do we go to these areas where we know we have these high rates of dumping usually closer to these multi family units and just proactively place dumpsters at sites so that people can you know get rid of those things appropriately. So we're looking at it on all fronts.

Okay. Good. Because I mean I support new apartments, we we need housing but for not being responsible partners we gotta we gotta do something about that. Okay. Thank you. Vice Chair Dewan.

Thank you. I I just got a about I think like three weeks ago with the last dumpster day at the Vietnamese Heritage Garden. There was a lot of refrigerator out there. And my concern is is for the city employee. The dump truck didn't have a lift gate.

He was by himself so I I I felt bad so. You know, I went out there and help him load up these refrigerator and then you gotta jump climb up literally like, you know, four and a half feet up and then jump back down, load up those things, sideway and then we lift them up, you know, eight refrigerator and then he had to come back another load. And I'm just thinking, this is a is a, he's a great employee. He's about maybe a minute or two from being hurt, right? And that would cost us a lot of money for disability or workman comps and stuff like that.

And I think to prevent that, a lift gate, a truck with a lift gate that would just help put the refrigerator on, we lift it up and we slide it in. It's a lot easier than just manhandle it and then jump up and shove it it up straight up, know. So I just wanna protect our employees. They're out there working hard, know, with with my staff and myself and and I I want I don't want them to be injured.

Neither do we. It is something that we are assessing. We have several of our vehicles in the shop getting new lift gates, and we have some rentals that we're getting lift gates on at this time. But definitely it's something that we're conscious of about worker safety.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you. Think do we have any do we have a motion? Alright. Let's go to vote.

Thank you so much. Alright, the ayes have it. That leaves us to open forum. Do we have any comments from the public?

No public comment.

Okay, we are adjourned.