Neighborhood Services and Education Committee (nse) - Regular Meeting

Hello everyone. I'm Councilmember Pete Ortiz. I'm Chair of the NSE committee. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Before we begin, I want to remind the committee members and members of the public to follow our code of conduct at meetings.

This includes only commenting on the specific agenda items before us and addressing the entire body, not us as individuals. Public speakers will not engage in conversations 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 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 the roll? Here.

Cohen? Vice chair Duan?

Here.

And chair Ortiz?

Here.

You have a quorum.

Great. Thank you so much. And then we are gonna go to item one from the consent calendar. And I'm actually going to request the pulling of item one, Senior Commission and Parks and Recreation Commission annual reports and work plans. Just for a quick question to staff, if I could get a second.

Second.

Awesome. Thank you so much. So if a staff member can please come down. Hello, Andrea.

Afternoon.

Awesome. Thank you so much for for being here, Andrea. Wanted to ask, and we we got some emails and some concerns in regards to the work plan, the PRNS work plan. Seems like a commissioner is concerned about it, and so wanted to see if you you had the opportunity to address some of those concerns.

Thank you for the question, chair, and to the NSE committee members. The Parks and Rec Commission follows the guidance from both council policy zero dash four as well as the use of the city clerk's template, which is used for the development, of all the boards and commissions' work plans. We go through a process where, in the past, and I have checked in with other, commission staff, usually it's, developed by staff, and then it's taken to commission, for final adoption, and it's usually discussed over one meeting. This last year, PRNS, decided to have, three different conversations, one to prepare, the commission for the items, to be disc that they would want to bring forward. We had that discussion on January 27, and then again on May 7, we had an input session where we wanted to hear from commissioners on what their priority items would be for the following year, as well as sharing with them what the committee's priority items were going to also be for the coming year.

Because as you know, most of our commission items, first, our work plan is developed with your priorities Mhmm. And so we layer that into our work plan, and then we see what space and capacity we have to bring further items. So we received the commission priorities in May, and then we brought back a staff recommended work plan on August 20, and that work plan was passed nine to one with one seat vacant. Vacant.

Okay. So that that's good for us to know. And I I mainly ask this just for the the record. And so there's it's mainly been one individual who's who's making these claims. It's not something that we're hearing from other individuals.

To my understanding, yes. That is the one person who voted against the work plan.

Okay. Alright. Well, thank you so much, Andre. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for and I don't know if any of my colleagues have any other questions. No? Great. I'll entertain a motion. Oh, do you have questions? Oh, okay.

I thought you moved it chair, but if not, I

don't mind moving approval of the consent calendar. Great.

Great. Second.

Alright. Thank you so much. If we could please call the vote.

I'll take a verbal vote. Campos?

Yes.

Candelas?

Yes.

Cohen? Duan? Yes. Ortiz? Yes. That motion passes unanimously.

Great. And my apologies. Do we have any public comment on that item?

No public comment.

Okay. Thank you so much. Now I'll pass it off to staff to introduce the next item. Thank you.

Council members. I'm Lee Wilcox, assistant city manager, and current executive sponsor for our council focus area reducing unsheltered homelessness. And joining me this afternoon is Eric Sullivan, our housing director, and John Ciccarelli, our director of parks, recreation, and neighborhood services. We are extremely excited and pleased to share our status report for this focus area with you today. I'm gonna provide a brief snapshot of where we are, more importantly what we're learning, and how we're building long term infrastructure to sustain the impact that we're making today.

This work reflects our city's commitment to both execution and adaptation, where we're balancing the urgency and immediate needs, but also our long term growth in the system level thinking. Here's a roadmap for today's discussion. We'll walk through our implementation process, share key insights from the last six months that we've learned as a team, and highlight where we're prepared to head through the 2627 budget cycle. And as you'll see, we're working to turn learning into into institutional capacity so that we can begin to scale the work that we've done and endure it in the long run. We're shifting from pilot thinking and pilot programs into larger portfolio management and thinking around these areas.

Council areas two point o is not just about projects and one off things to start and then begin. It's about organizational learning. We can take this model, and as you've heard in some of your other committees, this has been put into play around cleaning our neighborhoods, you'll hear next. It's also been put in place around increasing community safety and other needs. So the council ever deems to want to take a council focus area out and put something else in.

This infrastructure, this way of learning, and the training that we're doing as a team allows us to do that. It also allows us to clarify our strategy, link impact, and build shared infrastructure across departments, and sometimes more importantly with our partners. Execution as learning is the core philosophy here. We're not just measuring outputs, but we're asking key important questions as we begin this work. We're in the middle of this work, and sometimes at the end of it.

We're asking questions of what are we seeing? What's actually working here? More importantly, what isn't working and what needs to change? And we're doing this iteratively. Sometimes on a weekly, if not monthly basis, as opposed on an annual basis.

The iterative mindset echoes concepts for performance management and key critical adaptive leadership principles where public policy schools across The United States are shifting curriculum to address the very issues and how public employees learn and work together. Our use of logic model creates clear lines between our goals, strategies, and the assumptions that we make as staff, but also you as counsel. Each near term goal has a has a success measure that allows us to test what's effective and iterate accordingly. The structure is central to both accountability and agility and using this logic model not just as a plan, but to learn, course correct, and guide cross departmental coordination and measure accordingly. Since September 30, when council approved this, we've built the infrastructure and long term impact to report back to you.

We've completed retrospective trainings across the city, launched our first dashboards, and finalized logic models across all council focus area. This process has revealed where systems might possibly be misaligned, where data has been missing, and more importantly, where we need deeper partnerships, particularly with the county for essential or that are essential to our sustainability and work to problem solve these issues. Reducing unsheltered homelessness remains one of our most complex and urgent challenges across The United States. As approved and directed by the council, our long term goal is to move towards functional zero, which means actively managing an entire system from prevention to a permanent solution, not just responding to individual crises. To get there, we've identified four interlocking areas and a set of challenge initiatives that align our shelter capacity, our funding, compliance across the entire system, and data.

While this team can point to many hard fought wins in the last year, this is not about one time wins. It's about designing for throughput, coordination, and evidence based decision investments. And with that, to start us off, I'm going to hand it off to Eric Sullivan.

Thank you, Lee. Eric Sullivan, Director of Housing. And I will go through the first one and two of our assessments here. My good colleague John Ciccarelli will go through number three, then I'll come back and wrap up number four on data and forecasting. So first for number one, as we think through shelter capacity and shelter system operations, as we have mentioned before we have grown this system rather tremendously over the years.

Once our last construction site Ceyronie comes online early next year, we will be at just over 2,000 a 150 beds across 22 sites across the city. So we have built a significantly large system. And so now this creates significant opportunity to look for ways to optimize the management of the system and to find savings, standardization and processes across this entire site. So what this first set of shelter capacity and operations looks like is a challenge to look for ways to best get to cost reductions and standardization, find ways to improve our outreach and community engagement, to increase placements within shelter and that includes building in elasticity within the system that will allow us respond to events and needs such as our upcoming events in 2026, weather events that may occur, emergencies that may arise. The system is also has played a role in responding to emergency concerns such as apartment fires.

So we built the system with elasticity and flexibility. We now need to move towards optimization and cost effectiveness. And then number two is on sustainable funding. Sorry, and I'll flip to this. Cisco's to this. So I'm going to flip back. On sustainable funding, I'll give a quick overview here. The goal here is how do we establish funding sources beyond just Citi dollars? Where do we look at the inputs in our work around CalAIM and how do we create that as a stable funding source? And then three, as John will kind of get into later in this presentation around environmental compliance and our work around the return zones.

And then four, how are we best data forecasting existing demand based on the build out of all the shelter supply that we have brought forth and how do we ensure we're sizing the system correctly based on available funds and cost effectiveness. And so this slide now gives sort of where we're at in terms of status update. Number one, as we built out the majority of the seven zero five units that we brought online as stated in the memorandum, the last site is Ceronni, and we're working quickly with our partners in Public Works and Matt Lesh to complete this site and bring it online early next year. Number 1.2, we're looking at the standardized the shelter system operations as mentioned, identifying cost savings, where do we find efficiencies in execution in both property management, food, security, as well as case management services which has a strong interplay into the work that we do with the county in alignment around CaliM execution. 1.3 then gets into our work around placements and services.

Part of the work we're gonna be doing around creating more alignment between our engagement system and a system that can respond to emergencies, events, and issues that occur in daily life and throughout the community. The last set of items here, two point one and two point two, really speak to our work around sustainable funding, specifically our work around Calane. As we have made good progress in developing out the CalAIM system, including receiving a partial award for technical assistance from the state, this work will likely just take more time. And as we begin to implement the delivery of direct services to our sites in coordination with the county and then build that out to a full CalAmes system, we're going to look to probably take a little more time than we had originally anticipated, but are confident we can get this back on track in throughout 2026. And so I'll speak to then very quickly here Some of the areas where we have made capacity as I had mentioned really speaks to just the rapid expansion of the new sites as I mentioned.

The Columbus Park activation was very much synced to a lot of that work as Lee had mentioned. And then should managing that expansion with a lot of elasticity to it. Knowing that our motels as an example were brought online very quickly to provide a very temporary stay to then transition individuals into interim housing and then onto a PSH path. And that alignment of the system from motels, interim housing to permanent supportive housing is part of the alignment work we're doing with the county. As you see, one of the key insights out of this system speaks to how we have to continue to align that work in the operations and execution of it.

The two and just to dig into a little more details around sustainable funding. As I mentioned, part of it is really beginning to look at ways in which we can better build out our HMIS system management and connecting that work with the county systems. So that as we're looking for placements of individuals who are unsheltered throughout the city, that alignment of the system is gonna allow for that person to land in a county bed or a city bed and be a part of that integrated system that's delivering in towards more permanent housing. As part of the agreement recently struck with the county, we're gonna be looking to identify just about a 180 permanent supportive housing units on an annual basis that city individuals in the shelter system can transition to. And part of that transition will be supported by the work that we do around services in CalAIM.

So each of these problem areas are interconnected. So they have different end product deliverables. They are part of a global system as Lee had mentioned for delivery and service. So John?

Thanks Eric. So we've now established over 26 miles worth of no encampment zones. Sorry, no encampment zones. We do have more coming. Some of the lessons we learned in the beginning, Eric just talked about the housing production and how much has come online. But when we were first starting, particularly in the waterways, those motels weren't open, other EIHs weren't open. So all of that has since opened. But that also means that in the early days, those things weren't aligned, right, housing options and abatements. And so we saw a lot of movement, a lot of shifts of encampments as a result of that. We're definitely better aligned.

A great example of that is Columbus now, Columbus Park. The majority of people came inside from Columbus Park and that's the idea because the system was ready for it. We have a couple more EIHs coming online, so there'll be more capacity in the system coming up. But that migration to other parts of the city has been a challenge. People are showing up in places either they haven't been before or we've not seen them there in a long time, which is causing us to have to spread out and react to those issues.

A great example of this is north of the airport. We have a no encampment zone that runs all the way along the Guadalupe River along the airport. But after you get past 101, just north of the airport, there is no more no encampment zone, and that's where encampments are. So they're sitting just outside our zones in some cases, not in every case, but we are seeing that happen. Now with the police department and their neighborhood quality of life group and then Eric bring on an outreach team, there'll be better monitoring of this and enforcement of things like good neighbor policies, but also the no encampment zones to make sure people aren't, settling back down in them.

One of the things we learned was that in the first so the report here has our first three months of the fiscal year. During those three months, we had 125 re encampments into no encampment zones. But as we look deeper into the data, what we found is about two thirds of those re encampments happened in the first thirty days, and then it finally started to drop off. And that's because people are testing whether or not we really mean it's a no encampment zone and they need to be educated that you can't just simply can't be here. You can't re encamp, right?

For a long time in the city, we would clear encampments, walk away and people would just re encamp what we just cleared. So there's some getting used to that kind of a policy. That's way we're seeing more encampments in the early part and fewer encampments by the week by the time we get a little further along. So just be aware there's typically an adjustment period there when a no encampment zone first goes in. But we're aware of that and we focus on that. And then going forward, course, we're going be synchronized with housing. Another good example of that will be Coyote Meadows. So that's our last really big encampment that we know of in the city. That's a lot of people. But as these new EIHs are coming on, Cerrone and Cherry, that's going to move people from motels.

It creates space in motels. Then we'll be doing outreach into Cowdy Meadows to start moving people into motels so that we don't just show up on one day and 200 people all of a sudden have to move. So that's lining up. And so those it's starting the machine is starting to work the way it was designed. It just took some time to get there. So with that I'll hand it back.

Sure. And I'll wrap up the last section here on number four on data forecasting and modeling. Part of this work as we brought forth in the February study session, a review of all the different data sources and points of count that we have throughout across the departments, in department transportation and PRNS, in housing, in waterways, in HMIS, city county systems, the point in time survey. We're collecting a broader set of array including work, with the PD department as well to collect as much data as we can on the various different touch points that better understand and inform our creation of a demand side of the analysis. So we know how many people as most accurately as we possibly can are unsheltered so we can build out the shelter system appropriately that we can both afford, that we can maintain and continue to provide a decent safe landing place indoors.

And so we'll continue to do that analysis with updated numbers on both the demand side and the supply side of the equations to ensure we can provide all individuals who are unsheltered a landing spot as Lee mentioned in achieving functional zero. And so part of the key insight of this work is really identifying how best to forecast that knowing there are going to always be data gaps, but where do we look for best ways to mitigate those gaps in identifying the target number that we're solving for on a daily basis and bringing that model forward and publishing it on our website so everyone in the public can see the work and the progress that we have done across the various departments. So now I'll turn it

back over to Lee. Thank you Eric and thank you John. You know, I I did wanna say, the current community plan to end homelessness, which is which is ending right now, was actually adopted in March 2020 on the onset of us going into a global pandemic. And pillar three, which is really a bulk of the conversations that we've had with you over the last few months, you know, our our emergency shelter system, our emergency approach was brand new. And so we've talked about throughput today quite a bit.

We've talked to you about throughput in the entire system over the last few weeks. I didn't want to go have this be unsaid today. We can finally have that conversation because we finally have something in the middle after the prevention system fails where we can house people and move them along, know, the continuum to a throughput. We haven't had that as a city or a region forever. The man responsible for a majority of that is Matt Lesh, the public works team that have built more shelter capacity than any large city in The US in the last four years.

So I know Matt's in the audience, he's not part of this presentation, but that allows us now to do what Eric has wanted to do and look at the whole system from tip to tail and how are we most efficient. So while we've been very much focused on the expansion and get everything open by the end of the year, is what council directed, we now as a team have the opportunity to really look at the whole system and find what is most effective, what is most efficient. And again that is from tip to tail. One of the things we'll be doing as a team is what we talk to you guys about is retrospectives, retrospectives, where we get a lot of people that are involved in this work in a room. And we talk about frontline staff all the way up to the three of us in the box.

And we talk about the issues we're facing. So part of that is something that you are all struggling within your office with constituents as well, which is vehicle concerns. So as a group, we've finally now that we have things opening up, we as a team will have the ability to have our first retrospective next week and really focus on vehicle concerns. And how do we create a service delivery program and programs within the city to address those things that, you know, I know all of you get so many emails on that. So that's where we'll be headed in addition to some of the stuff that Eric and John have just touched upon.

So as we move forward, we will be in front of the full council again in the next few months. I did wanna go over that it's probably priority setting will probably either be at the very January or the February. That is where we will I I believe the mayor, he still needs to go to rules committee with his memo on what priority settings should be. I would assume that we'll be going over some of these details where we're headed with the team around the focus areas. It'll also be an opportunity for all of you to discuss directly with the mayor what your goals and priorities are gonna be.

I know we've sort of already kinda highlighted the budget situation this year will be challenging. So as a team, we will be focused on the efficiencies and effectiveness of this work, knowing that there's not a lot of new dollars to put into it. As we go through that process, the mayor's March budget message will come to you obviously in the month of March for you to vote on. And then as a team, through the normal budget process, we'll be putting together budgets by department, but also collectively rolling up across this work to make sure our systems, the data gaps, and the kind of the funding actually are aligned and make sense. As opposed to this was a very untraditional year as you approved a new approach that we could go forward, we were, you know, really adopting that in September.

This year, we'll be adopting that, you know, the the work in these work plans and the resources behind them as part of the June budget through an MBA or as part of the proposed budget so that we know as a team what our goals are and what you're directing us to do as we go into summer and start completing that or start that important work. And so with that, staff is available for any questions.

Thank you so much to staff for your presentation. Do we have any public comment?

No public comment.

Okay. Thank you so much, city clerk. I'd like to pass it over to council member Campos for public for council comments. Comments.

Thank you, chair. And of course, thank you to staff for the presentation and the work that our city departments are, engaged in to address the unsheltered homelessness in our city. What I'm learning to appreciate about the focus area two point o logic model is that we are encouraged to reflect upon, our programs and make progress. And with the adoption of the June budget, this council gave considerable direction to staff, and it's important that we're understanding in real time the obstacles that you're all facing to achieve program success. So I do have several questions.

One thing that this report revealed is that we are many beds short to ensure that we can provide shelter for all who accept it. And additionally, we are seeing federal funding leaving our community with fewer resources to prevent homelessness. So how are we preparing to protect families from a first time experience in homelessness?

Well I think thank you councilor for the question. I think a lot of the work and the investments that we continue to make around prevention as Lee had mentioned, captures a lot of how we invest in prevention in addition to the work that we provide through eviction diversion and assistance. Those are two programs that though eviction diversion is in a separate division within the housing department, it very much synchronizes with the work and the investments we do around prevention and investing in the county system.

I would just say too, I think that is where throughput is really important because the number of shelter beds and even the number of permanent supportive housing units, know, some ways that's never going to be enough. We could always build more. However, if we can make that system more effective and efficient, like to Eric's point, it does create space. So when the prevention system or those safety net systems don't kick in soon enough and someone does fall through the cracks, hopefully there is more capacity in the system so that we're not diverting that. So I do think there's a bunch of strategies that we need to pursue.

I do think the safety net and the prevention system, especially now that we've, you know, we we have spent a lot of leadership capacity in this city kinda opening up that shelter system and a lot of Eric's to figure out the operational models. It is an area where this team needs to spend more with the county and the nonprofit community to really figure out how we fine tune some of that. And I would imagine that's pretty central to the community plan and homelessness planning that'll start to take shape at the beginning of the year. Thank

you for that. In the budget message, we asked staff to find a way to reduce shelter costs and operations by 20%, and this staff memo states that we're not on track to meet this goal. So can you share what the next steps are to better coordinate with the community and county partners towards meeting this goal and tapping into Cal AIM dollars?

So we have made progress in achieving our goal of 20% reductions and I'll talk specifically about some of those areas. Number one was focusing on opportunities for reductions in staff and site security cost. Part of the challenge of a system of 22 sites throughout the city and numerous different providers is that there wasn't a standardized way for getting to scale on security cost operations as well as contracts. And so we've already completed an RFP process. We've identified $1,300,000 in cost savings through standardization of security operations.

The next item was food. The food RFP just closed. We are reviewing the bids at the moment. Projected savings are right around the same of about $1,000,000 We still have to complete the RFP and contracting process, but that is sort of a target savings, reducing existing expenditures for food of just about $5,400,000 a year across all sites, down hopefully about just about a million dollars there as well, looking at different ways in which we both improve overall quality of food delivery as well as understanding based on sort of the responses we've received back from residents and from our service providers of how do we best balance the amount of food that sort of gets tossed away, doesn't get uneaten with total food service delivery and quality of that food. So we're looking at that now as well.

Number three is then looking at property maintenance. Part of the work that I've done with our good partner Matt Lush in Public Works is identify what are those capital level improvements that public works would execute on and what are those daily maintenance work that we'll be executing. We'll be releasing that RFP in days as that has been finalized to receive a professional services for a single one or two contractors that are roll up through the inspections team within the division of homelessness response so we can standardize the delivery of maintenance services across the site as well as more effectively manage our capital improvement programs. One of the areas that Manlesh and I are now working on is as we have a system that has aged over the last four or five years, we're going to have likely some capital improvements we're going need to invest in. So where do we get more proactive on-site preventative maintenance to stave off some of those larger costs?

Another area that we have been focused on is looking at our loads of progress of And And a

in progress

progress for both the medical and behavioral health services that is going to be starting up here in the next couple of weeks as a direct service in the county to our sites. We're going to be looking at throttling down our total amount of case managers per site delivery since we'll have more direct on-site services. So the execution of each of those four key items as well as other cost saving measures that we're beginning to explore, I feel confident we'll be able to hit that 20% target.

Okay. If we were not able to meet the 20% reduction, what would it mean for our ongoing operations cost?

So some of that 20% will be baked into the base budget. So right now we're going through the base budget as well as forecasting. So that could affect forecasting numbers. However, we haven't actually counted on the full 20% moving forward.

Okay. And then in September 30 council meeting, council gave direction to track and integrate McKinney Vento data into understanding our family homelessness. What steps have been taken so far to implement that direction and when do we expect to begin seeing that information reflected in our reporting?

As mentioned during the September 30 amount, the McKinney Vento data collection has been a part of the global data collection we have already receiving. The additional points of collection are being inserted into site criteria contracts and are then being rolled up into the monthly reporting that we receive from site services. Once we're able to complete that initial clean set of data reporting as we're working with a couple of different contractors who are more struggling with some of this data collection. We're ensuring that data collection and integrity. We've set up a division led by Jerry Rudner to collect that data to verify its authenticity and accuracy.

And we will look to hopefully begin reporting out in Q3, end of Q3 of next year.

Okay. And I also noticed that some sites appear to perform better than others. What do we understand today about the reasons for those differences and how is that informing adjustments in operations or support?

Yes, so there are broad variations in site performance and that's part of the challenges that we have, as Cupid and I have been working on ways in which we can best standardize our operations including the institution of what's referred to as an admissions and continuing occupancy plan to look at ways to take and streamline all operations across different sites. Each site is a little differently composed, constructed and developed, but there are areas of standard operations that we need to install. That work is going to begin going forward in January as we're looking to implement both as we streamline data collection in tune with both the September memo regarding additional data collection and going back to the June 2024 memo on-site performance and management, that streamlining of data is going to coalesce around the execution of standard procedures across all different sites, given some of the variations of the utilization of the different sites from motels to interim housing to safe parking. So making some adjustments within that standardization. But generally, the standardizing operating model is also going to call for and sync with the request for data.

Two, as we look at that standardization of operations and synchronizing that to our cost saving measures, where do we ensure that as an example, the provision of site security and equalizing the provision of that site security at the sites, what are the impacts and adjustments around expectations of operational delivery that that is synchronized then as just one example. And then three, as we do that synchronization of data and operations for cost savings, the third is then how do we ensuring that as we're synchronizing with our other departments, PRNS, PD, DOT, around the work we have to do around outreach ensuring that that execution of the outreach results in as much as possible as Lee had mentioned a bed for someone to land in. As we look forward to the Coyote Metals cleaning in the spring, we want to make sure we have sufficient capacity to absorb additional individuals providing beds. So that's going to take the three areas of standardization of operational delivery I discussed. It will also inquire that that outreach execution is coordinated with the county and is coordinated with the work we do around the Department of Behavioral Health Services to ensure we have as much capacity as possible for delivery.

Where a site is not able to effectively perform, all of the contractors have been duly noticed based on the memorandum that council member Ortiz pushed forward a month ago of a lack of performance and where that deficiencies in performance will need to be directly addressed through the appropriate administrative actions.

Thank you. And I just have one question because I'd love to hear my colleagues weigh in as well. The report notes coordination challenges that slow placements. What specific improvements are being made to shorten the time it takes for residents to move from interim settings into long term housing?

So there are multiple areas of alignment that need to be improved that we have identified in our work with the county. Number one is as we transition and align our systems, the county shelter system, which is primarily congregate shelter versus the city shelter system, which is primarily non congregate shelter, we need to align those systems to ensure that the tools we have, the Here For You hotline, HMIS, SV tracking system can speak to both systems so we can better identify and more real time bed availability. Two, understanding sort of the bifurcation of our system, the county runs safe parking programs, the city runs safe parking programs, but we run them differently. Where is there opportunity for alignment between safe parking distribution that it goes into a shelter bed versus going into kind of permanent supportive housing, where do we figure out some of those areas of differential. And then three, as we look at our utilization of the motel system, part of the initial charge that we bought forth when we shifted to Motels away from some of the other strategies originally proposed is where do we look at acquisition and conversion opportunities.

So we're going through that assessment as we completed two RFP processes that allow us to hire the professional consultants we need to do assessments on the motels, realize whether or not they are good fits for acquisition and conversions into single room occupancy operations that provide more permanent supportive housing placements. So on the back end of this system for additional throughput on top of the 180 target of PSH units provided by the agreement with the county, we're able to find additional capacity at that end. And then that all speaks to again building out a system of sufficient elasticity to allow for growth and adjustments in various different areas within the system.

Okay. Thank you for answering all those questions.

Thank you so much Council Member Campos. Council Member Candelas.

Thank you, Chair. Yeah. No. Thank you to Lee, Eric and John for your your presentation. You know, I I think this is, optimistic about us leaning in as a city and shifting our approach especially with regards to continuous improvement and or our organizational learning.

Think it's, this is one of those areas that we hear a lot of from residents whether we have an expressway or a creek running through our district or not. And and so I I have a question. My first question is regards to the the sustainable the sustainability of of the program and and the the funding area. You know, Eric, I'm happy to hear about the cost reductions and and savings made to date. I mean what does that look like with regards to like percentage or dollar amounts to date on with the efficiency and restructuring of the contracts that you mentioned?

So to date, I can't speak to an exact number of cost savings because the last six months have very much been about build out, and that's what we've kind of really focused on. But we have put into place, as I mentioned, the administrative work, the RFPs, the identification of costs, the analysis, the data reviews. So once we get this last site, Sironi kind of open up and running early next year, we're going be in a position to start executing on those contract changes, those administrative and operational changes. With the totality, that 20%, I don't have a hard number on that yet. I can come back to at our next report out for NSC what that total number is as we're going through that analysis.

Right. And the reason I ask is, I mean, snapshot that was, you know, the 20% target is off track, right? But I mean, if we're on the way there, five, ten, twenty, fifty, I don't know, it's in the presentation. It would be helpful just as a barometer to see, hey, how much do we have to lean in on Can we start?

Yeah. Go go ahead. Well, you know, and I was gonna say, not surprised that some of this isn't on track. It's also a a point about needing to be able to sequence some of the work. July 1 of budget passes, it's not like 100% of that work plan goes into place. It is about kind of, okay, these things need to get done first. Let's get this started. With what Eric's been able to do, at least getting the RFPs advanced while we're still opening stuff allows us to kind of take that timeframe. But again until Cherry starts accepting people next week, Cerrone is going be by the end of the year, we'll have some idea through all the non profits and kind of that conformity and operational mix that needs to happen. We're trying to squeeze it in before budget process starts.

So we're doing less forecasting and trying to give the council actuals on what things will cost to run next year.

It. Yeah. No. And and that makes sense. And, you know, part of, you know, part of the lift is is, you know, things outside of our control with regards to, you know, partnering and or better integration or aligning with with our partners in the county.

But I I think that's also maybe an area of opportunity where we can lean in. And I mean, you mentioned, you know, the the collaboration a couple months back and and to see how we can sync these these systems for for not just better outcomes, but also efficiencies, dollar efficiencies. While residents may not care that I have no no say in the county budget, they look at it their at their tax bill in its entirety. And so this is something that I know I'm paying attention to and something that I hope we can narrow in on and see how we can better paint a picture especially with us back here. You all are the experts.

The second is, John, to something you talk about about those no encampment zones. And you mentioned something about expanding sites. And I'm just curious as as to obviously, you know, you you all are the boots on the ground. What kind of input we have given given, you know, the feedback that we hear from residents and the concerns we hear at the neighborhood associations and and and at the at the neighborhood level to be able to shape and or provide that input to staff.

Yeah. Thanks for the question. So the the way we work on the no encampment zones, most of them are along waterways. So that's generally where you're gonna see them and then around any of the housing that's being built or is already built. So Rufarare to Vidal Oro, Soroni, Cherry, all these things will have little zones around them to protect them. Those are primarily the areas you're gonna see it.

Right. And and makes sense. But you know, specifically, you know, on a point you made was, you know, we are seeing the ramifications of some of our engagement or encampment abatement efforts spread out to areas outside of those priorities if you will. And so, you know, I just wanna make sure that staff is conscious to to make sure that we're engaging, you know, for specifically my office to be able to provide some input like, hey, know, while we we we've been focusing and coordinating very, very well on a a downtown or a specific part of our city, it's having negative effects in, you know, the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. It's having negative effects in the the state's neighbor different neighborhoods in the and and throughout the city.

So, you know, we're areas, you know, at Thompson Creek runs right to the middle of my district where people are camp in camping and, you know, our our our our staff is going repeatedly to try to abate every pretty much on an every monthly basis. And so curious as to if it makes sense considering certain areas that are hot spots or troublesome as a as a as an effect of the work that we're doing in other parts of our city that aren't directly adjacent to the the priority areas?

Yes. We absolutely do. And we you know we do a lot of community meetings as all of you know, show up to some of yours as well. And we hear about these things and then we start looking into them to the degree they become a continuous problem. They may be advanced for an encampment zone. You mentioned the estates. The riparian corridor along that side will become a no encampment zone because we're just not able to stop people. So it now needs extra enforcement. There are a few other places like that where we start looking at them. I know you mentioned Thompson Creek, that's particularly weird one because of the jurisdictional issues. We understand that's a problem for sure. So yes, we do look at that. We do take that into account. We also have to take into account our capacity to patrol and enforce the

And enforce

the The more and more they are, the harder and harder it gets to kind of keep our arms around it.

Yeah. And I would just say in the spirit of like something that I think we thought we knew the answer to as a team, but I don't think we understood the scope or the gravity of it. This year especially with the waterways around you know encampment management with the state mandate. So much of our time was focused on waterways and you've seen those numbers. The other one was really around larger scale abatements and these encampments where they just grew so large.

And I think as a team we understood those are going to require additional resources. The time that it takes to do the outreach, you know, the number of staff would be involved. I think what we underestimated it though. It was quite a bit larger, you know, hence really trying to delay Columbus and align it with housing. It was also around just allowing our outreach workers to spend five times the amount of time out there.

So you know as we go through Coyote Meadows, that should be one of the last larger encampments that we'll be dealing with. And I would hope you know all things being equal, which won't be because of the budget situation, we'll have to kind of refine it and look at capacity. But that capacity around waterways and some of the larger encampments could you know help us kind of prioritize more of these community things. And honestly the those, I don't want say complaints, but you guys asking those questions. It also really helps you know PD on the NQOL side of where we distribute resources. So that's kind of missing data that's really helpful to get from you guys on on how we tackle those individual things. But I would think is you know, there should be additional capacity for some of those things, all things being equal.

No, awesome. No thank you thank you Lee. That and that's that's that's helpful. The last the last comment or question I I I want to talk about is you know, we've we've done probably the the most in the state, I would argue, with regards to scaling our our interim our interim housing units. And and so now I'd like to to to see and or I I'm curious what staff's take is on on addressing and or curbing the flow of folks actually on come becoming homeless and and the prevention piece, and yes, when it fails, and, you know, that's one something that we we you you all talked about today is when the prevention system fails, we, you know, we we we are there to react.

But curious is is, you know, is since we're in a in a in a new look of organizational learning and revamping and iterating, are we are we thinking about integrating a a a metric or a problem area directly tied to the prevention piece and or curbing the flow of folks entering homelessness? Is that something we're looking at?

So you know, I don't know if I could answer are we thinking of a metric or a measure because it is you know like a shared accountability framework and the county relies so much on it. So I'll let Eric jump into that because he's closer to it. I will say the know the safety net systems that the county has as well as the prevention system over all that we're a part of, it has the greatest potential to help the throughput model and to actually you know someone shouldn't be homeless for one hour let alone a few weeks. So it has the greatest potential. It also unfortunately is one of the greatest threats because a lack of healthcare and a lack of safety net systems which our county is facing because of, you know, federal cuts and quite frankly we are as well is significantly at risk.

So I would think this team as we come forward to you, especially through the budget processes, we say, hey, we need more leadership capacity and time on these problems. You will start seeing more of those kind of problem statements showing up, especially as we, you know, try and work on our own efficiency effectiveness. Just giving ourselves time and space with the county to kinda have those conversations is gonna be really important.

No. I I appreciate that. I expect you to give me a metric to how we're gonna solve the the the the rate of people entering homelessness and or and or the ratio that we always talk about. But but I guess it's it's the thought leadership and the thought partnership to be able to help us move the needle specifically with that one. Alright, that being said, I'll move acceptance of the staff report and appreciate staff's responses to my questions. Great,

thank you so much council member for your comments. Vice chair Dewan.

Thank you, chair. Well, thank you team for reducing the amount of unsheltered residents. I I think that from our resident here in the city of San Jose and our businesses see the changes. And not only that you you obey but you offer shelter. And I think that's important.

What concerned me is that the HMIS system or the data collecting is not coming together. If we don't have the data that we need, then how can we create a metric to solve it? And I know it's on page 10 on the presentation that particular data forecasting and infrastructure is at risk. Can you give me a timeline when we can at least fix that or collaborate with our county partnership?

Yes. Thank you, council member. So the reason why we've labeled this at risk is because of the high frequency of interaction and collaboration with the county. The county controls HMIS system. So as we're looking to make improvements to bring more modules within that system and source the data from HMIS into our other data sources that we're collecting so we can get to that leverage review as I had mentioned, you know the counts that we get from the various city departments.

The data we're sourcing from both the point in time survey from our depopulating duplicate records within HMIS and the other work that we do, all of that analysis is just gonna take just more collaboration, more time. So part of the work as Lee had mentioned that as we're talking through and working with the county on the various other aspects that engage in the prevention system, though not directly health security, food security, all the other work the county does, creating and identifying those different sources of data, bringing that into execution. I'm confident we can get through a lot of sort of the hard work that needs to get done within this space as well as agreements around data sharing and ensuring privacy with all the data that we're collecting as we're aligning our shelter system. I'm confident we can make significant progress with that towards the beginning of next calendar year. So that way we can be in the best position possible as we're beginning to stress test how our formula for best projecting out unsheltered homelessness is as accurate as possible.

So the at risk category is really just reflection and acknowledgement of just the challenges and the timing it takes to sync up two levels of government in order to best execute this work. So I'm confident we can get it back on track towards the beginning of next year.

Thank you. The second question I have for you is still on that slide on page 10, the unsustainable funding and talk about CalAmes billing and eligible services. Can you give me a little more detail of what does it take for you to get back on track? And what does it mean if we're not on track? And what is the, at least a quantifiable number, millions of dollars, whatever it is, if we're not on track?

So I'll say globally and I'll take your last question first and then go to your other two questions. First, the best projection of the revenue sourcing from a Cali reimbursement model is at best about 20% per head cost, assuming an average per head cost on an annual basis, a number we have yet to define because that's part of the work we're doing. In response to the other question around that HMIS sourcing, what are the acuity levels across all individuals, across all 22 sites and that acuity level correlation to the amount of case management services, the amount of service delivery needed for medical and behavioral health and quantifying that number. Right, so we were doing that calculation and analysis. Two, as we think through and have experienced the PATH TA assistance, is the state's technical execution program for building out a Calane reimbursable system, What we have found in doing this work is two challenges.

One is in building out our own sort of hub system within the city that also synchronizes, connects with, works with kind of the county hub, we have to make additional operational changes within our sites. That's part of the operational work that we're doing. I I referenced in response to council member Campos' question. And two, we have to identify what is gonna be the city's capacity within our current budget constraints as Lee had mentioned to bring on the appropriate staff that's needed to execute this. So there's sort of revenue generation and then according expense generation, and we need to make sure that net delta between the two is to a total benefit cost reduction within the shelter system.

So that is part of the just the lengthy work that is required to best understand how Calhoun builds out, how it's implemented, how it reshapes some of our delivery within the system, and then the bridges on many different fronts of coordination with the county. And so as we as Lee and I are on just monthly calls now with county leadership to frame up the various deliverables, check on progress, and work through some of those technical pieces that then become sort of executive level decisions we have to make around resource allocation and, you know, the political, the operational, the administrative kind of concerns of this execution. I'm confident that as we're working through each of these technical pieces, through our partnership with the county, through reconciliations within the system, and the opportunity we're gonna get next year in, you know, holding off any additional build outs and being able to optimize this system, that we're going to be in a better place to get this on track to look at and to be able to achieve kind of the beginnings parts of receiving those benefits. But the system is complex. We're stepping into the healthcare administration light effectively in order to capture that revenue stream.

And so there's a lot of other requirements that go into it in building out this system that are just going to take a little more much more time than we originally thought.

Thank you. As we build out the rest of the beds that or the shelter that we have at the end of this year, the estimation of our unsheltered residents is about 6,000 plus or minus. I don't know. I just know this. Would you agree that what we're doing now is unsustainable as a whole?

No. I think what the city has done is build a shelter system that is responsibly sized, and it is a system that can be sustained so long as we're able to effectively execute on the alternative revenue streams, on the stability of funding, on the cost reductions to get to system optimization and efficiency of delivery. And once we're able to achieve those goals, this is a system, at least in my view from the department view, I'll ask Lee to jump in here as well, that can be sustained and that can provide a sufficient additional safety net for those who are not captured by the prevention system, for those who are gonna be subject to extreme cost increases by the changes at the federal level and federal changes in policy that we have yet to see. And we can at the same time continue to build out more of those permanent solutions while we're providing an immediate safety net through this interim housing system.

As you stated very clearly that the revenue, we're an expenditure, we're not a revenue procuring because when you built these shelter with all their services as an expenditure. So I don't know where the revenue buildings come in. Secondly, we barely meet the demand of the unsheltered resin that we have. The number is way above what we can build or sustain. So I don't see how it can be sustainable as we continue to expenditure even though we've already in in a deficit last year, a large deficit and this year we're to be even more deficit including the county.

How can we say that we are going to be sustainable? And then please answer that and then my time is up. Thank you.

Yeah. I would just say, I mean I agree with Eric's answer. And I think looking this year refining operations allows us to take an additional look at the sustainability of funding. I would say, I think what we've done too is, you know, there are other cities that have built built just built more low barrier shelter. Often people get stuck in that system for a very long time and never are able to exit it because the services, the support, the links back to family aren't there.

So we do have a model where we, with the county and our partners, go heavy on the service, but that allows them to go through the system. So, you know, hopefully, we're never in a situation where if we have 6,000 people on the streets, we're building 6,000 tiny homes because there are other places that those people ultimately wanna get, that we wanna get those people to. So I do think it's about throughput. But also, I think that's why we're saying we also need, you know, to council member accomplishes point, we really need to double down after the expansion of the system with the county and partners on the prevention system. Because right now, you what what would be unsustainable is for us to add another 2,200 units of EIH capacity.

That would be unsustainable for our city. And quite frankly, it would make the system that Eric and team of development developed, you know, not as efficient as it should be. We should be focused more on the people that come into those emergency facilities, giving them the resources they need to move along that continuum, not stay in those places.

Thank you.

Thank you, vice chair. Appreciate everybody's comments. You know, I think about two years ago, I was kinda raising those points in regards to my concerns regard regarding the ongoing funding needed for these shelters and the sustainability. That was kind of my argument that I used for maintaining our funding for permanent supportive housing because once we build these shelters, it's going to require ongoing funding for maintenance and rehabilitation and then all the services and staffing. Since we've gone that way and that's where we're going, I think with your leadership, Eric.

But yeah, I share the concerns. I don't want to get to a place where we're having to close down, knock on wood, libraries or community centers in order to continue to fund these programs, as important as they are. Because they are important, but it kind of it almost pits like unhoused community against the working poor community who also need those services. So it's a tough conversation. But I just want to thank you staff for the depth of work that went into this update, as well as the learning mindset, your modeling through the Focus Area two point zero framework.

I just want to recognize all the teams across the housing spectrum, whether it's PRNS, City Manager's Office, and of course our county partners who are carrying out this incredibly difficult work every day, regardless of how hard it is. That said, I do just have some questions. My colleagues already answered a few, or asked a few of the questions that I had written down, but I have a few in regards to some specific items. I was definitely a critic of Responsibility to Shelter when it was proposed and when it came to council, but I also recognized the need of having tools that help us reach residents who genuinely need services but face barriers to saying yes or accepting those services. And for an example, in my district there's a gentleman on Alum Rock who I've tried to communicate with unfortunately, know, for I'm sure it's health related reasons, we're not able to communicate with him.

And I think we've tried to get him help several times and they just end up right back on a hall mark the next day. And so I'm just, you know, I'm trying to keep an open mind with this responsibility to shelter policy, even though I voted no, but how it may function in practice. With that in mind, is there any update on how this policy may have been used so far? Are we issuing warnings? Is there any notifications being provided to members of the unhoused community?

So as an update to the code of conduct for encampments, we have the NQOL team is a big part of that. So captain Donahue is here, chief the Paul Joseph and the NQOL team has been doing a lot of that work as that was quickly established. They will provide a critical support around the work we did around the Columbus Park clearing. On the housing department side, we have now just selected the team for the enhanced engagement part of that outreach. So they will be gearing up and starting that operation synchronized to John Ciccarelli's team on the abatement side of this so we can ensure we're having both that outreach and engagement piece as we they can foretell sort of the beds coming open, as I have discussed, and where those, experiences are, with individuals who may not be in a best position, from a health, standpoint to comply with our requirements around code of conduct for encampment, then John's team, the NQOL team will then play a role with the expectation here being we do a lot of that enhanced engagement first and then identify what are some potential solutions.

So NQOL is up and running. The housing department engagement team, that'll be up and running in January, and as we're continuing to operate institute.

Okay. That's so TBD essentially, but you provided the timeline. I I appreciate you giving us an idea, and I look forward to hearing it even though I'm critical and I don't know necessarily how it's going to function. But still interested in, you know, the outcomes in in regards in regards to this. Are we doing you know, and I know that a lot of these things, you know, come down to, like, judges and on on on in regards to the county side, especially members of the unhoused who may have been committing minor crimes.

You know, know we've talked, Eric, in in Alamok Village, we had somebody who assaulted an an individual and then was out on the street the next day. And then it took several several different crimes for this individual to commit in order to finally be in in jail. I recognize this represents a specific part of the unhoused. Not every unhoused individual is doing these type of crimes. Yet, unfortunately, those are the ones that give the community a bad a bad rap.

Are there other conversations we're having with the county on solutions for this? And because I just you know, right now, for example, I have, like, a city being built on the Capitol Expressway freeway entrance and exit, and there's like five different encampments right there. I know District 7 struggles with things like this as well, and the majority of those individuals are people who have refused housing. And so what can we do to start addressing this this specific population?

Sure. And I think the conversation is probably taking place in two areas with the county. So part of the increasing community safety, especially the work, you know, that Jennifer Schembry and Paul Joseph have been leading around kind of the repeat offenders. You know, that obviously shows up in this work as well, and trying to work with the DA's office, the county, and the judges on, quite frankly, getting judges more information before they make decisions. They actually don't see a full, you know, sheet of offenses at times.

So there is work happening there around actual offenses. And I would say, you know, especially the NQOL unit, when they are going out, if there's warrants out, they can have those conversations with the individuals. Say a lot of the conversations that we've had in this body of work with the county is more around, you know, it's around less about who is unwilling to accept the shelter because they don't want it. It's more around the individuals that are having a hard time making a decision because they just need additional help. And so what are those avenues with the county?

If it's not if they're unwilling to shut the shelter bed, is there another avenue at the county, or is there another program? And quite frankly, we've been kind of lobbying the county as well. They go through budget problems of of keeping some some of those avenues open, like Mission Street Recovery or something else so that we can help that individual obviously make the decision for themselves to accept shelter.

I I appreciate that. You know, these these things get difficult because as as was mentioned by my colleague, all these programs cost money. And I don't think there's ever gonna be a perfect program, you know, it's just it's just it's just very hard. And so the the the conversation's tough, and I I wanna be willing to adjust for every single individual, but I don't I don't think we're gonna be able to have boutique solutions for every member of the unhoused. I mean, in my district, we got families living three families to a home.

And that's not the ideal situation, but we understand, you know, that that's how specifically the Latino immigrant community has been able to survive in this area. And so it just gets frustrating for me. Thank you for that answer. I appreciate also the attention on the Columbus Park abatement and the lessons that we've learned from it, even though I have seen an influx in RVs in my district. But I I know many of the individuals were placed into temporary motel accommodations. But my understanding is that those placements may be ending very soon, at least my my understanding. Do we have a plan to make sure that these individuals who we've finally been able to help get some shelter don't end up back on the streets?

Yes. So the plan, you know, as I mentioned prior, was for the motels to be a very temporary landing space to get sorted and settled and to transition them into the interim housing that we have coming on open. And so all 100% of those individuals can be offered best to move into the interim housing system, which then syncs them up with our work with the county to put them on the permanent supportive housing path. And that's part of the that's part of the design of the system is that the motels are very flexible, temporary stay, transition into interim housing as we ensure that anyone coming into that motel system finds an exact kind of placement within the interim housing system.

Okay. Great. Thank you. Appreciate that. I'm glad that there's a plan. I just wanted to make sure I asked that on the record. Thank you for the thorough presentation. Clearly, you guys have been dedicating a lot of time, a lot of staff effort, a lot of funds to this issue. And so look forward to the ongoing discussion. Thank you. Let's call for the vote. Yep. That was a long item. Thank you.

That motion passes unanimously.

Thank you so much. Let's go to item two, city council focus area status report, cleaning up our neighborhoods.

Alright. I'll I'll go ahead and kick this one off as our team enters the box. Angel Rios, deputy city manager. And under this item, we'll be presenting to you today on the cleaning up our neighborhoods focus area. Joining us in the box today are PRNS director John Ciccarelli, code enforcement deputy director Rachel Roberts, environmental services division deputy director Valerie Osman, deputy chief Brandon Sanchez, and captain Steve Donahue, and assistant to the city manager, Peter Hamilton.

Our overall goal for this focus area is that San Jose residents can enjoy a city with clean public spaces and well maintained private property. We measure our progress towards this goal through our quarterly neighborhood survey of San Jose residents. We ask residents about their perceptions of the city as a whole, their neighborhood in downtown. The graph the graph on the bottom right shows the percent of residents who rate each of these categories as clean or very clean. We've seen notable progress over the past two years.

In 2324, 33% of residents rated their neighborhood as clean or very clean. While as of September, the same measure stands at 48%. Similarly, 67% rated the city as clean or very clean. In quarter one, twenty three, twenty four, while it stands at 73% today. So you can see some significant progress there.

And we believe this progress reflects some of the budget investments and focused efforts we've pursued over the past two years. The three problem areas and associated goals we'll see on the subsequent slides are intended to continue this progress. So we'll start with our first problem area first focus area. Our first problem area concern concerns blight on private property. In addressing this problem, code enforcement faces a number of challenges, including increasing case volumes, expanding scope, and static staffing for general funded positions.

The graph on the left shows the the increase in code enforcement cases, volume over time. We want to build on the operational assessment we completed last fiscal year to address these challenges. A number of our efforts focus on increasing the efficiency of code enforcement's operation so that we can move cases out of the pre investigation and investigation phases and into the enforcement phases more efficiently. The chart at right shows a number of cases at each stage of enforcement. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Rachel Roberts, to tell us more about court enforcement's goals. Rachel?

Thank you, Angel. So our first goal, 1.1, we have the chronic offender resolution and enforcement, otherwise known as CORE pilot program. This pilot program is intended to expedite enforcement against properties with a history of chronic or significant repeated violations so that we can bring them into compliance more quickly and sustain that compliance over time. Staff began work to implement this pilot in October, and we expect to be evaluating and addressing cases under this pilot framework beginning in January. Goal 1.2 is the implementation of escalating enforcement policy.

Staff revised this existing policy, and we provided training to staff on the revised policy in September. The updated policy standardizes compliance timelines and sets clear expectations for each enforcement step, including issuance of enforcement actions, responsible party compliance, and staff follow-up to ensure that greater consistency, efficiency, and timely case resolution. The next step is to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, and our early results so far show that cases are progressing more efficiently when we look at data today compared to Q1 of the previous year. Our third goal is implementing phase one of our new case management system codex. Due to the age of the current system, staff has encountered additional challenges that have affected the project timeline, including data issues requiring extensive cleanup and a more labor intensive requirement gathering process than originally anticipated.

To address these issues, we are working with the vendor to update the project scope and timeline. We have updated our project manager or, excuse me, added our project manager to the operational assessment scrum team to improve our focus and adherence and have created a RACI matrix to expedite decision making and streamline tasks. Staff will be providing a more comprehensive update on this implementation at our code annual report to NSC, in April.

Next slide. Thank you.

So our fourth goal is to complete the work already underway, related to fines Following the council direction and approval in August to raise the maximum administrative remedy fine to $20,000 per day with a $500,000 maximum, we are now focused on completing a fine study to evaluate our citation schedule of fines, which covers our transient type violations such as blight, solid waste, or illegal dumping or graffiti. We've contracted with Guidehouse and then we've kicked off the study just this last month. And due to the time required, however, to secure the funding for that contract and the additional staff work that will follow once we receive the consultant report, the timeline to return to counsel with recommend recommended amendments has shifted from February to May. Lastly, we continue our efforts downtown to bring chronically vacant and blighted properties into compliance. This fiscal year, we've continued the downtown enhanced vacant building and storefront working group using a coordinated multi department approach to address these properties more effectively.

We also began participating in the mayor's monthly downtown safety and security committee. And through these partnerships, the scope of the working group has expanded beyond just vacant buildings and storefronts to include late night activity, unlicensed smoke shops, and other emerging downtown issues. And these partnerships have enabled faster enforcement actions, stronger evidence gathering, quicker decision making, and timely litigation when necessary. And back to you, Angel.

Alright. Thank you, Rachel. And so our second problem area concerns graffiti. While we have an effective service for removing graffiti, the volume of graffiti we we remove is high. We'd like to prevent graffiti from happening in the first place so we don't have to remove it.

The graph on the left shows the volume of graffiti removed each year since twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. Notably, we saw a dip in twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five. As you can see in the graph on the left, q one twenty five, twenty six tracking slightly below the q one twenty four, twenty five. While this decline is encouraging, it's important to note that these statistics capture graffiti on public property, not private property. So we will need to continue to be vigilant on private property graffiti. I'll turn it over to deputy chief Sanchez to talk about our graffiti enforcement efforts.

Good afternoon, council members, members of the committee, staff, and the public. I'm deputy chief Brandon Sanchez, in charge of our Bureau of Field Operations. As you may know, we've assigned two officers to our gang investigations unit to investigate graffiti, over the last eight months. From February through July and then September through present, the total number of graffiti cases initiated by detectives have been 204. Toll total arrests authored by them, arrest warrants, social media warrants, presidential have been 249, with total arrests made 33.

We've assigned the two detectives to focus mainly on gang graffiti due to the potential for violent encounters to occur as a result of them. The intelligence gained from the from the gang motivated vandalism, specifically around net banging. Arrests have proven, very helpful in solving other gang investigation cases and have really, helped the detectives, solve a lot of these crimes. Most of the most of the suspects arrested for gang graffiti were also arrested for possession of firearms as well. Those are some of the highlights for gang graffiti.

Right. And I will note that, when you look at that dipping graffiti, that's the first dip we have seen since the inception of our graffiti removal program citywide. So I think we're starting to see some some results on both, you know, with increased enforcement efforts as well as additional education public education and community education efforts through neighborhood associations that the staff is doing. So we're starting to see some some shift in that area. Our final problem area is illegal dumping.

We collected over 5,000 tons of illegal dumping in last fiscal year, and the amount we've collected has increased steadily over the past four years. As you can see on the chart on the left, the chart on the right well, as you can see on the chart on the left, the chart on the right shows that illegal dumping collected in quarter one of this year is tracking at roughly the same rate as quarter one of last fiscal year. Removing this volume of waste from our streets is a real achievement and likely helped contribute to our improving cleanliness perceptions. But like graffiti, we would prefer to avoid the illegal dumping in the first place and see the amount of illegal dumping we collect decrease. So I'll turn it over to John Ciccarelli to talk more about how how we plan on achieving this goal.

Thanks, Angel. So this first goal, 3.1, is the is the coordinated strategy of enforcement. And so I'm pleased to let you know that we have a coordinated strategy now that is working. That is with our police department and our friends in code enforcement. We, ourselves, in PRNS have a staff member that monitors our cameras that we've put in our hotspots where we're looking for that illegal dumping.

When we view video where we think we might have a case, we refer that over. We've made 73 referrals over to code enforcement. Of those, 18 have resulted in warnings, 17 have resulted in citations. About a quarter really didn't have enough evidence to pursue, so we'll work through that. An example of that is, you know, we had an illegal dumper that on one of our our cameras couldn't quite figure out who it was, but they went in a direction. And we reached out to our friends in police department and said, hey. Your automatic license plate reader, could they catch this? Can they see anything? And sure enough, they were to pick them up on a few different cameras, and we were able to get that person too. So, you know, just using the rest of the system, not just our system to help us.

For example, another step that we're looking at is talking with our friends in DOT. They have a lot of cameras on the streets as well. Can those be helpful in any way, again, to coordinate enforcement around illegal and dumping? Next slide. It's got the okay. And then this one is about this next one, three point wait. We skipped one. Go back. There we go. Item 3.2.

So illegal dumping education strategies. So this one is also on track. We've doubled our number of presentations to neighbor associations and leadership groups and schools. We sir we educated about 2,800 more than 2,800 youth through that program so far. Looking ahead, one of the areas we really wanna target in the second half of this year is is neighborhoods where we have high levels of illegal dumping around the neighborhood or where we have sort of high move in, high move out places. Those spaces tend to create a lot of dumping. You know, Angel likes to bring up, like, the college. We know a certain time of the year, we're just gonna get a bunch of dumping around the college as kids are moving out. I should say young people. So that'll be a focus.

And then, of course, we've also got a marketing campaign coming up where we're gonna try to encourage people to use our free junk service more. We wanna make sure people are aware of it and are using it. Use your dumpster days more. You know, you can wait for those things, etcetera. So we're gonna try to encourage people to use the things that are there, more effectively rather than dumping things in in the neighborhood. And then I think, 3.3. Yep.

Good afternoon. Valerie Osman, environmental services, deputy director of integrated waste management. So related to what John just mentioned about our junk pickup program, we have great participation from our single family residents. But this this first part of this year, we have spent more time with our multifamily junk pickup hauler, Green Team. They're a great partner of ours and really delved into, doing some outreach with our multifamily property managers and tenants to make sure that they know that they also have access to this unlimited no cost program.

So we've seen some big successes in the first quarter of this fiscal year and seen an increase in participation and a significant increase in the tonnage, so about 26% increase in tons. So we're hoping to get more of that multifamily junk pickup material diverted and going in the right direction and not ending up as illegal dumping.

Back to me. So 3.4. This is about budget proposals, particularly related to trash disposals. We've talked to in the past. You know, we're picking up so much trash and debris that we're struggling sometimes to haul it. So we have done an assessment of this. I will remind you we're going you know, this is going to be a budget proposal. We're in we're at the beginning of the budget process right now. But as you all know, this is not going to be an easy budget year. But we have done an assessment.

We have looked at the hauling, and we've identified what we think are some potential efficiencies there around our corporation yards, including the utilization of in house staff versus contractors in some cases because in some cases, vendors, you know, they're paying a 115 to a $120 a ton. We can pay as low as $20 a ton because of our our agreements through ESD and our trash our actual trash haulers. We have a reduced rate. So once you add in labor, it starts to get to it may it may be less expensive for staff to do it. So we'll hear more about that as we get into the, proposals in March.

And as John mentioned, in addition to code enforcement providing support for issuing citations for illegal dumping as a result of the Beautify SJ referrals, we're also had efforts going forward related to our shopping cart or abandoned shopping carts in the city. So we completed a pilot program to proactively collect abandoned shopping carts. It ran from August 14 through November 14 of this year. We collected seven thirty four carts across the two pilot areas. This was really instrumental in allowing staff to test out a proactive model as well as identify challenges internally across departments and gather lessons learned to inform a potential permanent service model.

Staff will be presenting more detail on the pilot outcomes at City Council next week and hoping to share our next steps and continue the conversation.

Alright. And so in terms of what's next, you know, we'll be, you know, we'll we'll be moving forward through the fiscal year twenty six, twenty seven budget process. And as you saw during the last presentation, you know, we'll be following the timeline that was presented then, and it's on the screen here today. So with that, that concludes our presentation, and we're available for questions.

Thank you so much. We'd like to open up for public comment.

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

Name is Christian Greco. I'm with the Winchester Orchard Neighborhood Association, West of Santana Row. What you see there is a photograph that was taken in front of the Cypress Community Center. Is a perfect example of the type of illegal dumping that can happen at Cypress and does happen. What you're looking at is a small box lined with a thin plastic bag that somebody changed their oil into and then dumped in front of the Cypress Community Center.

I've got this kind of sign. I've got four of these from the Cal Recycle program that I'd like to get one of these placed. But one of the problems that we have in our neighborhood is illegal dumping. Primarily, our observation is that it would be coming from the high density housing that's immediately north of Cyprus. We've tried to, work with other through the city to get some of these things resolved, but I believe a a real partnership, a collaboration with the city is in order to help us.

The citizens are the backbone of the community. We're the ones we're the city's greatest asset. And if the city offices I'm kinda hoping that mister Rios can because this is right in the neighborhood cleanup wheelhouse, that he can at least talk with us. And there's ways of the city manager's office can collaborate with us to help solve some of these problems as a model in a neighborhood that can then be taken to other council districts. I'm hoping that the city policy zero dash four zero, the demonstration partnership policy, can apply here using innovative and creative methods, especially that we are in the dead center of the innovation zone that the city declared some five or six years ago and has brought absolutely no innovation.

Thank you. That's your time. Back to the committee.

Thank you so much to our, public speakers. Absolutely. I I experienced that same concern in my district. There's several apartments who I've had to work directly hands on with code enforcement and beautify SJ in order to contact property owners and make sure their their, tenants don't continue to dump. I will now go to count committee for comments, starting with council member Campos.

Thank you, chair, and thank you again to staff for this presentation. I was very pleased to read in the staff memo that we're making significant process year over year picking up junk at multifamily residences. Of course, there is room for improvement. And in District 2, we have several neighborhoods with illegal dumping issues near apartment complex is I want to thank staff for working with my team to get some of those cameras into the Roundtable neighborhood because it really makes a difference to ensure that all our community members have access to junk pickup services, mediation, and I believe that the junk pickup service is one of the city's best and highly rated services. So really, we're all here to make sure that every community member has access to those services.

I do have just a few questions that I wanted to better understand what issues we're facing. So can you share some of the challenges that haulers face when they're performing a junk pickup at a multifamily housing complex?

Thank you for your question, Councilmember Campos. They The haulers aren't necessarily chasing any challenges. We have one multifamily junk pickup hauler, and that's Green Team. And they they collect those, scheduled appointments with without any problem. What we had seen was just a lack of participation.

There just has not been any sort of increase in participation even when we made the program, free and unlimited about almost a decade ago. So we've been doing some increased engagement with them. The Green Team has been out meeting with property managers. We've been targeting some areas that Beautify San Jose has provided to us as being, sort of the priority areas where they've seen a lot more illegal dumping that is adjacent to multifamily dwellings, and we've increased that engagement there. So Green Team has done some more like clean out events that are a little bit larger than just kind of scheduled smaller items.

Some of the challenges that the properties face themselves is that they may have some lack of storage area or setup area and sometimes those individual piles of items just attract more and more items. So that can become its own sort of illegal dumping pile within their community. But those are those are some of the main concerns.

And you mentioned engagement can be a challenge. So what learnings have we identified that are going to help us adjust how we're engaging with neighbors?

With the multi families in particular?

With multi families, but just in general, if engagement is a general issue, what are we learning, what are we doing differently?

Sure. So we've sent out a residential garbage and recycling guide that was in August 2024 to all multifamily tenants and all single family residences. So that's helped. That provides overall program information, including free oil collection. But for the junk pickup in particular, there's a lot of postcards and a lot of different tactics that we do for junk pickup.

With multifamily, it seems to need that little bit of an extra property manager discussion to kind of plan out where to put things and figure out what the challenges are for each different type of multifamily complex since they're all so unique.

Councilmember, can I just add something Valerie kinda went over really quickly? But, you know, since the last council meeting, we got a lot of input from this council around really needing to step up our outreach to multifamily unit housing. And so that marketing has resulted in a 66% increase this year over last year. And I think that's real significant. So I don't think I don't think she's given herself enough credit there. So I just wanted to point that out because a 66% jump over last year is pretty significant. And it's attributed to the marketing and outreach that they were doing, which was different this time around.

That's amazing to hear. This might be difficult to answer, but I'm curious if you have any information about the neighbors who aren't leveraging this this service more often. Is accessibility an obstacle? Or what might we know if we know anything about the folks who aren't using the services?

Accessibility should not be a concern. Should all have access to that same service. I think it's just making it, making sure that they know it's available and that it is a benefit, to their tenants. Really, think it's a big, plus any tenants considering the level of move in and move out you see in multifamily.

Okay, thank you. And my last question, you know we are highly aware of the jurisdictional boundaries when it comes to these responsibilities. Sometimes our residents don't have the same maps in front of them and so how is the city collaborating with key partners such as Caltrans and Union Pacific around these issues?

So with respect to illegal dumping on their properties is what you mean?

Mhmm.

Yeah. So so we have an agreement with Caltrans where we can do things like abate and clean up abatements off their property. Dumping gets a little more tricky. That's part of is it part of the VTA agreement as well? Yes. So we do have some ability to get reimbursed for it. But these are great targets as you know. They're typically kind of vacant areas or a little off to the side, so they make pretty good targets. So we do coordinate. I don't know if there's more you want to add to that Olympia, in terms of their work with us. But it tends to be more around homeless issues than it is just specifically illegal dumping, but both of those things are happening in the same place.

And would graffiti also fall under that agreement?

Yes, to a lesser degree. Some of the harder parts are like bridges and things like that. But yes, could clean graffiti in those situations as well.

Okay.

Well, as you know, Monterey Corridor is one of the biggest intersections in my district. We have a lot of Union Pacific jurisdiction, and so these are some of the issues that come up frequently, and I'm grateful to staff's commitment to cleaning up our neighborhoods. You know, the fact that we are out in the community doing outreach, educating our neighbors about these important programs, and especially bringing our schools into work. I was really excited when I saw Steipe Elementary participating in Beautify SG's Environmental school stewardship program. I think it's really important that we continue to develop civic pride at an early age, educating our students on how they can help keep our streets clean and our waterways free of litter and debris.

I know it's it's really important that we have their buy in as well because sometimes our our youngest learners are educating their parents and their families about the resources available, And I think we can all agree that self agency, that pride of your neighborhood, of your community leads to far greater outcomes beyond just blight, less blight in the communities. So again, appreciate all the work you do, and those are all my comments. Thank you.

Thank you so much, council member. Going to council member Condellis.

Thank you, chair. I, appreciate staff's report, especially around the work, done. As Angel mentioned with regards to the multifamily, residents in in the in the illegal dumping under the junk junk pickup program there. So much appreciated. I guess my question that I have is is more geared towards, you know, for for a while we had the the three e approach, right, where we had, you know, the where we can all agree that our enforcement piece wasn't necessarily there.

We had the eradication piece, which clearly we're very good at. And not just because I I do the dumpster days every month, but but the data shows we're we're we're out there. And then the the third piece, I guess, specifically specifically is the education piece. And, you know, my I guess my my question goes to the point of how are we leaning in on the education piece? Yes, we're stepping up on the enforcement piece, but how are we also leaning in on the education piece so we're actually curbing the amount of people who are illegally dumping.

It's not the kids that are doing it that are going and dumping, but how are we educating, let's say, the contractors or let's say folks in our community that otherwise would not necessarily get that information if they have no kids in the community?

Well speaking for Beautify, our focus tends to be the neighborhood associations and their leadership groups and the schools. We don't have a specific program for people that do junk hauling and those kind of things thus far. I don't know Valerie if there's any work you guys are working on.

Thanks John. Not with the unauthorized nonexclusive haulers. So we do have nonexclusive authorized haulers that are bound by certain parameters and they're not supposed to be dumping illegally. They're supposed to be taking that material to an authorized facility and providing the city with information and data on what they're doing with that material that they're picking up. The challenge is definitely those ones that are not part of our non exclusive hauler franchise group. And those are those are I think more difficult to engage with. A lot of them are kind of flight by night.

Councilor Wyckard also chime in here. So there's two ordinances in the muni code that that really guide enforcement around illegal dumping. What we have found though is that although we have those two ordinances in the muni code, they're written in a way that really make it difficult to to enforce and implement. So one of the things that we're doing is we we've we have an interdepartment team that involve that also includes the city attorney's office, and we're looking at revising and modifying that current ordinance to, one, give us give us better teeth around enforcement, making it easier to administer fines. But we also know that we don't just wanna enforce our way out of this either.

Right? I mean, that definitely is gonna kinda move the needle to a certain point. To to your sec to to your preliminary to your initial point on education, we're we're really stepping up the educational piece. So for example, Olympia and her team have have developed, in coordination with the neighborhood associations, outreach to elementary and middle school and high schools around civic pride as council member Campos was mentioning and and really emphasizing that. The other thing that we've done is on the enforcement side, we've actually extended that e.

We used to call it, you know, just enforcement. Now we call it enforcement and diversion in education. And and and so the diversion is, for example, we've been pretty successful with with PD's lead in in in making quite a few arrest of graffiti taggers. What we've done is we've, in coordination with the courts, have worked around having them come out and do community education programs to younger folks around kinda what not to do. And they're able to kinda talk about, hey, look, you you have a talent, but, you know and so you'll see some of these folks at some of the local community events taking place.

So this is something that's evolving. We don't have it completely delved in yet, but we definitely are pivoting away from just eradication only and really, you know, we've leaned heavily into enforcement and now on the horizon here is really beefing up our education piece.

No. I love that. Thank you, Angel. That's that's that's great. Then that's, I guess, the point that I I wanted to to lean in with regards to, you know, making sure that we're also educating and doing doing what we can to stop the the the flow of whether it's graffiti or illegal dumping. And and then I guess my last question is just generally to to the 73 illegal dumping cases with sufficient evidence. What kind of characteristics and or variables did we see from these people? Were they the people that were illegally dumping, were they from San Jose? Were they out of the area? Were they contractors?

Were they unlicensed contractors? Do we have, generally speaking, what kind of information of the folks we actually caught doing this? Because we all wonder, who's doing the illegal dumping. It's not my neighbors I hope. But know does that make sense?

Yes. Thank you council member. So I don't have that information available right now. I do know however that part of why code enforcement's doing the enforcement is because you have to have very, well special clearance to actually run license plates and pull that information out of the DOJ database, and we can't really share that information. So to the extent I'd be able to tell you, I might be able to speak in generalities, but I don't actually have the data right now.

But if I mean if if you if once the know, if if it gets to a point where we we are bringing a case forward Mhmm. That information obviously becomes public, doesn't it?

Well if it went to court, but yeah I mean I could probably provide you kind of general information about if we're seeing a majority are from outside the city limits or you know we should get concentration in this part of the city, could probably provide that type of information.

Yeah. Mean because the ultimately the reason we'd wanna know is so we can help shape our education piece to see who we have who we have to educate. Right? And so so if we can extrapolate information, Angel, do you wanna speak to that point?

Well, you know, I I know Rachel's kinda trading a fine line because there's a lot of regulatory. I I I will say this because I I I I look at these reports. We're talking about contractors, subcontractors, and folks that advertise on Nextdoor and other places to say, hey. I'll I'll I'll dump all that for a $100. And we know that you can't even pay that that wouldn't even be a $100 that if you took it to a dump. So we're those things

Okay.

And those are some things that we're gonna be cracking down on. I I know Rachel's trying to find a line there because she's subject to some regulations. So I'll I'll just speak in generalities

Thank you.

Just based on the reports that I've seen.

Thank you. I appreciate that. That's helpful. And, you you know, this is yeah. This is something that that I you know, that as somebody who, you you know, forget the elected elected piece when I'm walking in my neighborhood or the trail and I see stuff that's illegally dumped, I get so angry. And and I and I know my neighbors feel the same way because they reach out to me putting my elected hat back on the they reach out to me as as as their representative. And and so this is good news on this on this report, and I appreciate the work staff's doing on on on on the front. Thank you.

Thank you. Council member Condellis, vice chair Dewan.

Thank you, chair. Thank you for keeping up with this keeping our neighborhood clean and but also I share the same sentiment with my colleagues is is that these illegal dumping is is getting out of continue to be out of hands. If you were to quantify the amount of money that we spend on picking up, the garbage from illegal dumping, meaning staff time, vehicle maintenance, the cost and so on, per year what would that number be?

Just on the legal dumping side alone, just that one line item, it's $5,000,000 on the on the Clean Our Neighborhood side of the house. It's an additional $5,000,000 when you look at it in terms of the creeks and waterways. But for that one line item, $5,000,000.

So it's cost us about $5,000,000 per year. I would imagine if we took some of that money and and we spent on on, you know, well back to code enforcement or convict some of these illegal dumpers, it probably save us quite a bit of money in the end because it's, I would imagine it's the same person. Most of the time they'll do the same thing. And the reason I'd say that is I, you know, around my neighborhood recently I've asked to, know, to install a couple of sign illegal dumping, how much it costs and so on. And and it it curbs some of it, but suddenly I see it picked up again and and I went out there and I put on a pair of gloves and some boots and I went through the garbage and and sure enough it's it's a house not even a block away.

And so I go, okay. Well, we'll we'll we'll see, you know, we'll wait a few weeks. And sure enough, the next week and the week after that, it's the same people. So I I finally went over that house and I said, hey. By the way, you know, I I we we have the neighbors, complaints about people dumping here.

And for the last few weeks, I I happen to be your council member and I picked out and licked in the garbage and it's actually have your address and your mailing and your boxes with your address on it. And so the person said, well, people probably stole my garbage and just took it out there. In the end, I I walked that the owner of that house over to the to the dump site and said, I just want you to clean this up and not do it again. And I took pictures and I kept it and just in case that you didn't clean up. And sure enough, since then that spot is clean.

And I know it's the same person, but I think it's come down to some type of visual affirmation saying that you're the one, we can attach a fine or not, but just to let him know, it's not okay. Because the neighbor that he dumped the garbage behind is so fed up that all the flies and the stinkiness of the garbage out there, they can't even go out to the backyard. And it's impede upon all of our lives. And I think that if we can just put some of that money into you know, either enforcement or eviction, I mean conviction of these illegal dumpers. Anyway, that's enough of my, I'll get off my soapbox, but I just wanna say, you know, we we all do the best that we can, but we can always have a lot of room for improvement.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair. Before we vote, just want to give some comments. I want to thank staff for their thoughtful update and for the work going into, this very, crucial, initiative. I'm excited. That's an understatement.

I am extremely excited, about the launch of the chronic offender resolution and enforcement pilot. For years, our residents in East San Jose have lived with the impacts from chronic blight caused by absentee property owners, the same ones we're talking about, who repeatedly ignore their responsibilities to keep their neighborhoods clean. I believe this pilot is the exact kind of escalated level of enforcement and accountability approach that our neighborhoods have been asking for. So really, really excited for that. Earlier this year, you know, I pushed for increased fines and stronger enforcement tools for repeat violators, and that work came directly from my experience speaking to residents who are near some of these derelict properties, whether it's illegal dumping hotspots or small businesses that refuse to maintain their sites.

And so seeing this pilot move forward where cases are identified early, escalated faster, and resolved more effectively gives me hope that we are on the right track. With that said, I do have a few questions. Can you walk us through the criteria staff is using to determine which chronic offenders are brought into the pilot, and whether those selections are being distributed evenly or or being distributed in areas that have the greatest need.

Thank you for the question. So we're planning to prioritize or target new incoming cases so that it can be anywhere in the city. When they come in they're going to be evaluated based on the criteria. So the criteria would be that they've had more than one case in the last three years for a certain set of violations that we're focusing on. It could also be a property owner that has had cases with violations on multiple properties that they own.

So our support staff that does the intake will review these cases for that criteria. It'll go to a supervisor who's gonna affirm their assessment. That way we're making sure we're catching the the cases we want to run through this program. And then they will they will be sent a letter right out of the gate letting them know that they're part of this program. They'll get thirty days.

We will go out and do the inspection. If they're in violation, they'll get thirty days to comply, flat thirty days. And if they're not in compliance, we move immediately to legal action or compliance order, whichever is appropriate. And they will also be notified that they will now be in the chronic offender resolution enforcement program for two years, and they would have to demonstrate compliance before they can come out of that that program for twelve months or more. So it's a much more a higher level or higher threshold that they're being held to compared to other cases and counterparts.

Great, thank you for answering that question. For these chronic offenders who've had multiple notices of violations, do we expect to see improvements in these type of cases based on the pilot? And how fast do we expect to see some of it?

Well, there will still be a process that will require steps and depending on the path it goes down and, you know, if it goes on a compliance order path, we'll still have to go to the board to assess fines and penalties. If it goes through the legal action path, we'll still need to go to court and do all those things. But we yes. We do expect I think two things are really critical is one, getting that compliance more quickly. I'm hoping that they're more motivated to bring it into compliance. And then once we get compliance, maintaining that over time is kind of the two main goals.

Great. Thank you. Then also, you know, this is a pilot, so it's not gonna be permanent. And so what are we hoping that this pilot proves? And how may this change the way we do business as usual? Whether that's code enforcement or or Beautify SJ? And what sort of resources may we need in order to actually scale this? Because I know thinking about, you know, these derelict property owners or individuals who are, you know, chronic offenders, we could fill this program in my district or in District 7 easily. So how do we really make it so that we can see widespread results?

Yeah. So I think it's gonna be really important that we're learning from the pilot and doing that analysis as we go. Think some of the things right now it's gonna be absorbed by the entire general code team. So we're trying we'll be looking at is this something that can be absorbed or do we actual and are we making the traction that we intended to or is this something that will have to be resourced separately because it does require that added level of time and attention. It will also impact the city attorney's office and because of the efforts that we've been really you know the goals we've been working towards and pushing towards over the past year, year and a half.

They are attorney that used to do transaction and litigation for us. They've now added a litigating attorney to support code and a backup transactional attorney to support code because we're pushing and moving so many things through our process and over to the attorney's office. So I do expect that to also impact them. Everybody sitting here with me today also helps code enforcement, so it could it could have some some impacts to other partners as well. But that's exactly what we're gonna be doing through the pilot is is trying to understand is it is it achieving the outcomes we're seeking? What is the impact to staff? And what are the resources will be needed to continue this workforce. And are there any changes we need to make to make sure we're meeting our goal?

Great. And sorry if you repeated this, but how long is the pilot and when may we like start learning about some of the results?

Yeah. So we think you know we need to run it at least six months to see some but real we are planning to provide a status report as part of our annual report to this committee in April, just so you kind of have a gauge of how we're tracking so far.

Wonderful. Council member, I also wanna remind us that we're also completing an operational assessment. Right? And so this pilot will also help inform that product. Right? Because we're looking at our entire service delivery model around code enforcement. So if we if we begin to you know, through this pilot, if we learn that there are certain patterns or certain profiles or certain that requires a certain level of maybe a strike team or or whatever it is, that will help inform our ultimate service delivery model for code enforcement, which is under review right now. So I just wanted to note that for the record.

Great. No. Appreciate that. Thank you, Angel. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you to our staff, everyone who has fingerprints on this very important pilot. You know, I think this is a great step in the right direction. You know, our residents are counting on us. So I look forward to seeing some early results from this pilot and next steps. Thank you so much. Let's do the vote.

Did we have a motion for the We

haven't had

a motion.

Move to accept the report.

Yep. Second.

Okay. Thank you. Alright.

That motion passes unanimously.

Awesome. Thank you so much. That brings us to item number three, Parks and Recreation's Master Plan and Community Impact Report.

Alright. Good afternoon. John Ciccarelli, director of Parks Recreation Neighborhood Services again. We have our report on our community impact report as well as our master plan report that we're combining together. We are aware, you know, we're going a little long in this meeting, so we'll try to get through the presentation quickly. With me is Amanda Rodriguez, our Public Information Manager. Amanda, want take it away?

Thank you, John. As John mentioned, in the interest of time I'm gonna focus the presentation on just a couple of slides today. But you have all of the information in your packet and if you have any questions we're happy to answer them. So today you're gonna receive three important updates from the department, an update on our work related to a potential 2026 ballot measure to fund park maintenance, an update on a new master plan to identify a more equitable way to spend park fees, And you have a copy of our 2025 community impact report which provides an overview of our department's impact and also satisfies council policy one dash 21 to report on the department's cost recovery. Sorry, while I skip forward a couple slides.

Okay, so parks are funded in several different ways including construction and conveyance taxes and development impact fees. Each of these support the development of new parks or major renovations in parks. While CNC can support a small amount of maintenance, development fees cannot be used for maintenance. The general fund supports park maintenance and operations and of course the department leverages grants, gifts and partnerships to supplement some of our costs. The department received council direction to explore new funding mechanisms for park maintenance because as you all know, the general fund is subject to economic fluctuations and once budget cuts are made, it's hard to recover and build back those resources.

In addition, if day to day park maintenance isn't met, it can lead to higher costs as deferred maintenance can get worse. At its peak in 2003, there were nearly 230 employees taking care of almost 1,500 acres of developed parkland. By 2025, there are about there are now about a 180 employees taking care of 1,800 acres of parkland. This represents a 19% reduction in staffing alongside a 22% increase in acreage. To help build this gap, the department has brought on contract resources to provide the equivalent of 12 FTEs in custodial services for restrooms and to maintain a 150 acres of pocket parks.

And while these contracts offer necessary support that the department needs to upkeep parks, they still represent a 14% reduction in staffing alongside a 12% increase in acreage over the last two years. In addition, contracts require adequate sustained funding to keep pace with park needs and the community's expectations for their parks. To further illustrate the challenge for park maintenance, here's a chart comparing San Jose's investments in park maintenance with those of the 15 most populous cities in California. On this list, San Jose ranks fifteenth at $37 per resident and these costs for each city are inclusive of contract resources to help meet the needs of communities. In September, we surveyed over a thousand voters in San Jose about park maintenance and funding.

In this survey, we learned that 75% of voters agree that there is a need for more funding for park maintenance and that 72% of voters support investments going to neighborhoods that need it most versus going to the park next to their house. When asked conceptually about a 2¢ per square foot parcel tax, so not specific ballot language but whether they support the concept of a parcel tax, that support drops down to 54%. A parcel tax needs 66.6% to pass on a ballot but what's most interesting about this survey is that 21% of voters who responded undecided on this question is is the fact that it was 21% of voters who responded undecided on this question. That number is usually closer to about 10 when you're polling on ballot measures, which means there could be an opportunity to engage the 21% of undecided voters on a parcel tax or another type of tax for park maintenance. So we've been exploring a parcel tax to fund park maintenance for several years now.

And, this year, we're looking into the potential of a sugar sweetened beverage tax to fund park maintenance and recreation scholarships. The potential of a sugar sweetened beverage tax or SSB for short is hopeful because anecdotally the community has been more receptive to this in our outreach over the last several months. Meaning that the 21% of undecided voters referenced on the previous slide could be more interested in supporting SSB especially because this type of tax provides more choice than something people feel is being forced on a property tax bill. In other words, people can choose whether or not they pay this tax by drinking or not drinking sugary beverages. The County of Santa Clara's public health department reached out to our department earlier this year with data that shows an SSB tax in San Jose could reduce childhood obesity and chronic diseases associated with sugary drinks.

In addition to the health care savings the county could see, the city Of San Jose could generate additional revenue to fund park maintenance and scholarships that support healthy communities. Passing an SSB tax in San Jose is not without its challenges. Just last fall voters in Santa Cruz voted to pass a SSB tax last fall but the city is being sued right now. So we're monitoring that lawsuit with our colleagues in the city attorney's office and their first court date is expected in March 2026. So a lot more to come on this.

Additional funding for park maintenance would increase the investment per resident, A $02 per ounce tax on a sugar sweetened beverage is estimated to generate approximately $27,000,000 per year in the city of San Jose or about $65 per so that would bring our total investment in park maintenance per resident up to $65 per resident. A $01 per square foot parcel tax would generate $37,000,000 per year bringing that investment up to $75 per resident. And a $02 per square foot parcel tax could generate $74,000,000 per year or bringing that total up to $113 per resident. Of course these are just estimates and a lot more to come on this. So we're engaging the community to one celebrate the pride that they have in their parks because people love their parks in San Jose, but also to educate neighborhoods about our resource challenges and how parks would improve with additional funding for maintenance.

This includes getting feedback on any potential spending plans for additional revenue that is brought in by a potential measure. The next neighborhood forum is happening Saturday, January 31 at the Southside Community Center from nine to 11AM. You are all invited to join the discussion where we'd be talking about potential spending plans and how we could improve parks together with our residents. And then additional polling is necessary and if any revenue option is viable, the administration will bring forward recommendations during the budget process. The next update is related to the creation of a new park master park and recreation master plan.

We received council direction to revise how park fees are distributed in San Jose. The current model is creating major inequities because areas with more residential development receive more fees leading to more funding to support new parks and update amenities. Over the past ten years, District 6 has generated over $53,000,000 in park fees, and District 3 has generated over $80,000,000 while all other districts have only generated 1,000,000 to $7,000,000 To address this and change policy, we will create a new master plan. The master plan will accomplish many things for the department, but most importantly, we'll be engaging the community on the most equitable way to distribute park fees in San Jose. This will be a two year process and we really look forward to working with your offices and residents in the community to advance this work.

And finally, we're excited to share the 2025 community impact report with you. I do have hard copies to hear today that I can pass out. In addition to just a collection of stories and photos from the past fiscal year that demonstrates our impact on the community, this report also satisfies the requirement to report on the department's cost recovery. It also provides an annual update on our Activate SJ strategic plan. With that, John and I can take any questions.

Great, thank you so much for your presentation. Wanted to open up for any public comment.

We have one speaker card for Chris Gian Greco. Please make your way down to the podium. You will have two minutes to speak. Thank you. I don't see anyone making their way down. Back to the committee.

Alright. Thank you so much. We'll start with council member Condellis.

Thank you for the for the report. And, know parks is something that you know obviously is something near and dear to my heart and something I always talk about in this committee. I did wanna, before I actually get into my points, wanted to actually uplift one of the items on the last slide that you glossed over, but I think is really important, is the volunteer hours. And and, you know, this past weekend, this Sunday, I did one of the VMU. I participated in a volunteer management unit activation cleanup at at at a park and, know, we all, like all of us, we participate every weekend.

But it's important for residents out there to to realize and know that the cumulative effort amounts to a 130 a 130,000 hours that volunteers have put in at a value of $5,200,000. And so, you know, that's the quantifiable data point that we can point to. And I'm not talking about, you know, what the the the unquantifiable of neighbors seeing, neighbors beautify their own park and and the community, pride that it builds. So, kudos to to the parks team and the and the park maintenance team for for for their work in this department. You know, I will say, John, every time we meet, I bring up parks maintenance and that's one of those reoccurring things that, you know, you and I both agree on and and the, you know, quite frankly, it's it's the the embarrassing fact that per capita we are spending, you know, an an embarrassing amount.

And so, you know, but glass half full by nature, that's who I am and that's what I do. One of my one of my residents recently told me, well Domingo, somebody has to be the most efficient. So I guess that's an opportunity for us given given the resource constraints that we have. But I wanna challenge staff to think creatively, especially as we are exploring potential funding revenues or funding mechanisms to see how we can not be embarrassing in the amount of money we're putting into our parts maintenance system. And curious as to why we aren't exploring or aren't seeing anything to like raising taxes on like corporations or like a big business tax.

Not small business, like the big business stuff. There was a recent PPIC poll that showed a 60% support amongst Californians that happened last month in support of this. And I'm sure if if the if the funding is dedicated and or, there is a direct nexus to it going to towards, improving the the the conditions of our parks and subsequently the livelihood of of folks who work at these companies that we wanna, you know, attract here. I'm sure I'm sure staff is is creative enough to to be able to, to to show the nexus there. But, I just you know, the the beverage, the sweetened beverage tax, great, that's an opportunity, but it's also regressive, especially amongst, you know, historically disadvantaged communities who largely, you know, have, you know, the Latino Health Assessment told us that we have worse health outcomes, especially with regards to diabetes and health issues, but it's because we are big consumers of, you know, the Pepsis and the Coca Colas with our Pandulce and so I'm optimistic to see how we can lower those health, those negative health outcomes or increase our health, our positive health outcomes.

But the sales taxes, I know folks are getting hammered with sales taxes right now and there's a lot of uneasiness around the regressive nature that is a sales tax. So throwing that out there for staffs, for staff to evaluate and to ponder. And then the last thing I'll talk about is I am really, really excited about this education campaign. Aside from going and doing like, you know, these these workshops and and the community engagement, I think we should also be very, very prescriptive into the key state stakeholder groups that we're engaging, the the chambers that we're engaging the the unions, so the workforce. We're engaging the environmental groups.

We're engaging all these different buckets of key stakeholder groups that all have buy in to the idea that we want better parks. And so in addition to a broader public campaign, I think we also have to have a concerted effort to identify these key stakeholder groups because ultimately whatever package we put together to be able to sell to residents, we're gonna need a robust coalition of people. A coalition of the willing, know, to use that phrase, of folks who would be supportive of this measure. So I appreciate the work and yeah. With that, I'll move acceptance of the staff report. Second.

Alright. Thank you, council member. Appreciate your comments. Vice Chair Dewan.

Thank you very much. I know it's a daunting task to take on over 200 parks, plus the regional and then 10 regional and then 65 miles of trails. How many parks do we have what you call public and private collaboration out of those numbers?

Thanks for the question councilmember. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but it's a small number. We call them a POPOS, right, or publicly operated and privately owned and publicly open. But the but it's it's usually in association with a development. So a development that has to pay park fees, but they want it to be part of their development, but they still have to have a public amenity. And so that's typically where we see those happen. So it's not very common. Most of the parks you're gonna see in the in the community are not that.

On Downtown Cesar Chavez Park, I believe J Paul is sponsoring beautifying that particular park. I would imagine there there's many other large company like J Paul or, Cisco would be more than happy to adopt a park. But I think we need to sell ourselves why we need this partnership. But I don't think we we we haven't really done a great job at at selling why they need to be part of the community. And I think if when we do, we'll find out there there's there's a lot of companies out there willing to to lend a hand and be our partner.

And I'm hoping that you will find some way to or someone within your department that is passionate about our parks and just make phone calls. I think that would pay us dividends. Secondly, I believe in this, the equity formulation. Look at District 6 is $55,000,000 and District 3 is at 88. I think it should go into a pot and because doesn't matter what park you go to, it's a pride of San Jose.

Right? It doesn't have to be just just downtown. There there's there for example, in District 7, there are about 4,000,000 visitor a year. And, you know, I and and a lot of people get a little disappointed because, some of these park but we're I know that we're working awfully hard to get the Japanese Friendship Garden back to what it is. It's an iconic spot, right here in the city of San Jose in District 7.

But we need to have that equity to make sure that we spread the wealth, Making sure that every single part because every single citizen out there paying the same tax. Right? We we should deserve to have the same clean, vibrant, safe park that that our, community deserve. And I know that I'm glad that you guys did the polling to see how the resident feel about that 2¢ or 1¢ partial. And I'm hoping that when the time come when we asked our homeowner to support us, we better give them the reason why.

We better give them the vision when we get that funding, how it's gonna look like. And I just wanna say thank you and I know it's extremely difficult with all the parks and the 65 miles of trail. But I know that you guys are doing a really good job. So thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair. Councilmember Cohen.

Thank you. I want to start by just thanking your team for the work that they do with limited staffing and limited resources. And I just received an email today from your deputy director with a list of specific responses to concerns I have in parks, you know, in my district. And I know that they're trying really hard to keep the parks maintained with with what with the resources that the limited resources that we give them to do so. So that's the the first thing I wanna call out.

And before council member Dewan comes for our developer tax money, I no. I'm just obviously obviously, there's probably a redistribution that that needs to happen. I will just, you know, I'm hopeful that obviously now the developments happened in history four that our number is gonna go up as well. There probably should be some sharing, but we also know that there's certain parcels around the city that as development happens need to be built into parks. The idea is with a lot of new development, there needs to be more open space.

And I'll always point out that with North San Jose, with the number of residents, the amount of parkland per number of residents is still pretty small. And we also have that 30 acres at Agnews that is kinda sitting and we're waiting to develop. So just, you know, wanted us to keep that in mind. I'm I as a glass half empty kind of person I mean, a glass half full kind of person today. At least today, I'll be a glass half full kind of person.

The the the looks like in your poll, it was about 25% disapproval on the idea of attacks. So while it says 54%, the fact that there's 21% under five sided means it's only 25% opposed. That's actually a fairly good starting point for a a parcel tax measure. But I just wanted to ask a question about the about how that was framed. I I think people are confused when they hear 1¢, 2¢ per square foot.

And so was the did the poll ask questions and explain exactly what that would mean to the average resident? A person with a 2,000 square foot home at 2¢ a square foot is is being asked for $40 a year in a parcel tax. So I mean it was were people asked the question about a $30.40 dollar a year level or was it did they have to do the math?

So they have to do the math in polling. But part of our education right now is breaking that down and helping people do that math.

Because the 1¢ is a $20 a year commitment from residents, from property owners. I mean, that's a for the average, you know, an average home size in the city or probably most many homes are smaller than 2,000 square feet. I just the idea that that 50% of the voters would say no to pay $20 a year to make to have improved parks in their community surprises me if they really knew that number.

Yeah. The calculation that we're working on with residents is it's not the square footage of your home but the square footage of your lot. And the average lot size in San Jose is about 6,000 square feet.

So $60 a year for

Exactly. One So $5 a month.

See so I couldn't even do bucks

math a month.

That 2¢.

Okay. But but still I think it's important the $60 a year you know versus some nebulous numbers is is a worth pulling on something more specific maybe at some point. But I am encouraged and even that the 1¢ number gives us a significant boost on our current funding levels and might be worth pursuing given that we had 25% opposition at a $02 level, zero one maybe something that's doable. And I find parcel taxes to be often a fairer and cost effective way to do things as opposed to going after sales taxes one thing one time after another. As pointed out, sales taxes are not the fairest approach in many cases.

So anyway, want to thank you for continuing to pursue it. I hope that we'll be able to get there on that approach in the near future.

Great. Thank you.

Chair, can I just make a quick comment? Yeah. Yeah. Just because it came up both from councilor Merdaughan and Cohen. In the polling, we also asked him this is to the redistribution model. We also asked them, do you do you have to have that investment only incur in your park, or are you okay if it went to the parks with the most need? And overwhelmingly, they said to the most need. Right? So that redistribution model showed up in the polling as we're okay with that. So just want to let

you know.

So but the question was parks with the most need, not necessarily communities with the most need. Right?

Yeah, yeah, we're talking about specific parks.

So a

park that has a major need Yeah, that's or something like

the way we would envision the master plan is it essentially is a rating system where you can prioritize, okay, this is the park that is in the worst condition, has the most problems, needs the most investment, you start there.

Okay. I mean, I would imagine that, of course, there's probably many people who think, yes, of course, because the one down the street for me is the one with the most need.

Well, asked them to compare theirs to it being distributed somewhere else. So we were asking

them that. Alright.

Thank you.

Alright. Thank you so much to my colleagues for their comments. I also want to thank staff for the thoughtful update and just your ongoing work on the master plan and the community impact report. I just want to begin by recognizing what our parks teams continue to do and accomplish under incredibly challenging conditions. Our staff are doing a lot with a very little.

And their commitment to keeping our parks functioning deserves real appreciation. I'm also glad to see us moving towards solutions that acknowledge the disparities in our park system and begin addressing them at a city level. One thing I especially value in this report is the explicit acknowledgment that our current structure in which park investments follow development has created deep inequities for parts of the city like East San Jose, where we have also a high usage of the parks. As the memo shows, neighborhoods with little new residential construction have received far fewer dollars, while high growth areas receive the overwhelming share of fees. And I want to be clear, absolutely want every district, including District 3 And 6, to have beautiful, high quality parks.

Every family deserves that. But the disparities laid out in this report are staggering. And when we look at how park fees have been collected and distributed over the past decade, the disparities are clear. Council District 5, East San Jose, has generated just $1,900,000 in park fees over the last ten year period. In contrast to other districts on the chart, it's not just a gap, it's canyon.

And that's why I'm encouraged to see the master plan moving forward. I know this stemmed from a memo that my colleagues, council member Candelas, former council member Jimenez, and I authored for the twenty twenty four Mayor's March budget message. And our goal was straightforward. To begin correcting long standing structural inequities and ensure that all neighborhoods, regardless of development patterns, receive the park investments that they deserve. And now with this master plan, we will finally have a legal foundation to update policy and redistribute park resources based on need, not just where development happens.

And looking ahead, I am especially excited to learn more about the potential park revenue measure, or a potential sugar sweetened beverage excise tax or a tax the corporation's tax. Don't tempt me with a good time. This is all something our our our city desperately needs. With staggering maintenance backlog and a system that has far outgrown its funding, dedicated revenue isn't just helpful, it's actually essential. And so a 2026 ballot measure could finally give us a long term stable funding required to to reverse decades of underinvestment and truly sustain our parks for the future.

And so I look forward to this conversation. I look definitely look forward to the the budget process. And I'm gonna be laser focused on this topic as this moves forward. Did we have a motion yet? We did? Okay. Let's move forward with the vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Awesome. Great. Two more very important items, everyone. That now leads us to item four, park impact ordinance and parkland dedication ordinance fees and capital improvement program annual report. Alright. Check this out.

So, we're gonna get started on this presentation. John just kind of needed a bio break. My name is Raymond Constantino, and I am the deputy director over the Capital Division. And I'm here joined by my teammates, Sarah Sellers, division manager, and Pam Velasco, our program manager over the capital budget. I have a condensed insurance presentation due to time constraints, so I'll be skipping a few slides in the presentation.

So today, I'll be providing a brief presentation on the annual report for the park impact fee ordinance and the park parkland dedication ordinance, also known as the PDO and PIO or the Park Trust Fund. For fiscal year 2026 through 2030, the annual report on the PDO PIO fee collections informs NSC and the community regarding developer related revenue fees and informs the committee and the community regarding developer related revenue fee collections. Excuse me. This is an abbreviated version of the report, so I'll be jumping over a few slides as I mentioned. And here's the next slide.

The the development oversees 400 the department, excuse me, oversees 423,000,000 and funded projects over the CIP's five year period from 2026 through 2030 to plan, design, rehabilitate, and construct new parks, trails, community centers, and other recreational facilities. This report provides an overview and update on the key capital improvement projects funded by these fees, were completed in fiscal year twenty four, twenty five, as well as those advancing forward into construction in fiscal year, 2526. This staff report on the CIP provides an overview and status of funding sources for capital projects including internal sources like the PDO PIO, construction and conveyance tax known as CNC and Measure P, as well as external sources including grants and local, state, federal level, and then FEMA as well as Cal OES reimbursements. In our current five year capital improvement program for fiscal year twenty six through thirty, we had approximately 180 active park projects that totaled 423,000,000 for, the five year period. This includes park trail, parks, trails, community center projects.

A snapshot of some of the last last year's projects includes includes five playground renovations, including one all inclusive playground, one new dog park, seven pickleball courts, approximately 12 new acres of newly developed parkland, 1.9 miles of paved trails. Also, community center. At community centers, this work includes three HVAC replacements, five restroom renovations, as well as the Camden Community Center installation of the emergency operations center and general enhancements at the Alma Community Center. In regards to the PDOPI revenue, which we are required to report annually based on state legislation called the Mitigation Fee Act, Last fiscal year, twenty four-twenty five, we collected $4,900,000 in PDO PIO fees plus an additional $4,900,000 in interest from the fund for a total of 9,800,000.0 This slide also shows what was collected in prior fiscal years. In fiscal year twenty three-twenty four, we collected 21,900,000.0, and in fiscal year twenty two-twenty three, we collected 15,400,000.0.

This drop in revenue is consistent with the downturn in the residential housing market that we have all witnessed, which is how the PDO PIO fees are generated. And then and another source another large source of funding for, Park Capital projects and maintenance is the construction and conveyance tax, which consists of two types of revenue generated by by the city. One is construction tax levied on most types of construction projects, and the second is a conveyance tax levied on real estate sales. Of the CNC tax, 64% is dedicated towards PRNS. In fiscal year twenty four-twenty five, we received $39,000,000 in actual revenue compared to the initial $43,000,000 that was adopted or rather projected earlier on.

In comparison to prior years, the actuals show a slight uptick. However, when comparing it with adopted projections, which shows staff's conservative approach to forecasting revenue due to fluctuating and unpredictable real estate sales and construction activity. If you take a wide lens view comparing to prior years, C and C revenues have dropped since 2021 when we collected the high of 64,500,000.0 in C and C revenues. So today's actuals of 39,000,000 are quite a drop in CNC revenues. As I mentioned, this is a brief presentation, and and these are the central points of the staff memo.

This concludes my presentation. If you have any specific questions on the memo, staff is here to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Shall we open up for a public comment?

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

I apologize for not making it down here at the last agenda item. I was up talking with the deputy chief of police on an important matter. But what you have here is a package that is the Winchester Orchard Neighborhood Association's formal request to the city that they do everything they can basically to correct the urban village boundary disparity that exists with the new Winchester Orchard Park.

Sir, I'm not is this related to the item we're discussing today?

From a park standpoint, I believe so.

Maybe we wait till open forum for for this comment.

You'd prefer that? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Because we can only take comments directly related to the item. But there's a open forum opportunity at the end of the meeting. There's a open forum opportunity at the end of the meeting. Thank you. And we'll make sure that we we hear your comments, sir. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. I wanted to open up to my colleagues if anybody has any questions.

I'll move, to accept the report.

Second. Great. Thank you so much. I do I just have a quick question. This is, you know, something I just thought about. I know that a lot of our conversations in regards to incentives for development has been focused on waiving or, you know, reducing park impact fees. Has the department looked at potentially deferring impact fees and how that may impact some of the projects you guys work on?

Sure. On a case by case basis, we do do that.

Oh, on a case by case basis?

Yeah. What if we It's often at the request of the developer. The quest the developer brings it up. We we and we see it as a hardship. We'll work with them to do that kind of

stuff. Okay.

What if what

if that was our approach to development? Would that cause a lot of hardship for the work that you guys do?

I've missed

What if that was, like, our standard approach to development to defer it?

I'm sorry. It wouldn't hurt from the standpoint of collecting revenue, although over time, obviously, money loses value. In addition, one of the things it can cause is if the development isn't also going to deliver a park with it, then we would have to wait until the development is finished and people are moving in and then build a park. And so it creates problems. In fact, your colleague sitting to your left, Councilmember Cohen, can tell you how this goes.

It does not go well sometimes where now a whole development's been built, everybody's moved in and everybody stares at a patch of dirt for two or three or four years saying, Why isn't my park being built? Why isn't my park being built? Because the development process, once we get the money, now we can start design, now we can start all these other things, which just takes a lot of time, as you know, capital projects do. So it has some of that risk in it. We try to mitigate for that risk, but but we do try to cooperate with them when we can to help them have it on the back end instead of earlier in the process.

Okay. Great. I'll I'll take that conversation offline. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll move for the vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Thank you so much. Now we're going to go to item number five, Animal Care and Services Annual Report. Thank you.

Good afternoon. We're happy to wrap up a very long meeting for you with some very, interesting information about animal care and services. I think this is an interesting juxtaposition and bookending the beginning of the meeting and the end of the meeting with our unhoused at the beginning and our animals that don't have homes right now and our work with them at the same time. So with me is, Monica Wiley, our new deputy director of animal care and services. Six weeks six weeks, mean, plus or minus six weeks. And then I have Kiska Eichardt and doctor Elizabeth Cather, both from the man from the shelter and the medical side of of the operation. So we'll walk through our slides and happy to take any of your questions.

Good after good afternoon. As we wanna start with our animals. And, here's just a snapshot of some of our animal success stories. A couple of them I'll point out is Mu Dang, and he was this very deformed, pit bull, Frenchie, who knows, that, somebody was filling up their truck at a service station and they came out and Mu Dang happened to be in the back of his truck. And he could not walk and, actually needed, this stroller to be able to to be carted around in.

And, he came to a lot of our off-site community, events and, actually ended up getting adopted by a family that had had wheelchair, dogs before. And, another, animal success story I'd like to point out is Lily, and she is that Great Dane puppy with the super long legs and, was placed into foster care with somebody that really did a lot of socialization, knowing that she was gonna grow to be over a 100 and, was adopted by her foster family. And, she has also obtained her canine good citizen certificate, and they hope to use her as a therapy dog, in the future. Here is a high level overview of our, shelter activities. And so, we've adopted out over 4,600 animals last fiscal year, adopt, fostered out nearly 3,000 animals as well as reunited 1,141 strays, pets with their families, and we're very proud that we have a 43% redemption rate for all of our dogs.

So out of all the dogs that come to us and brought into by Good Samaritans or found in the field, 43% of them will be re reunited with their owners. So that's a very significant metric. Unfortunately, for cats, it's a very low percentage, which is why we try to encourage people that find cats to look in their neighborhood because odds are the cats, are not too far away from home. I'll pass it on to doctor Kather.

These are just some of the highlights of surgeries that happen five days a week at the San Jose Animal Shelter. You can see in the top right, that's part of our Trap Neuter Release program, which we are operating two days a week. We book out 35 and because of the nature of TNR, we get sometimes 35, sometimes a bonus 38, sometimes 20, but they are all inhumane traps brought in in the morning, sterilized, ear tipped, vaccinated, microchipped, and picked up the next day for the person to recover and then released back to the colony the next day. That dog the X-ray on the bottom, believe it or not, that is actually a big stone in that dog's bladder. So the dog came in with bloody urine, took the X-ray, were shocked that the stone was almost the entire size of the bladder.

One of the part time vets hadn't done a cystotomy yet, so she was very excited about this teaching, learnable opportunity for surgery. The stone was successfully removed, the dog recovered, and eventually got adopted.

Yeah.

And this chart indicates our numbers of calls for services that our field unit, has experienced in the last fiscal year. And so we are seeing an increase after a two year drop in the number of calls for service of the community. And so we've received another about 2,000 additional calls this year versus fiscal 2324. And that is, even though that we had one less contract city, we did not have Los Gatos for this year. So but we're still seeing an increase in, people calling us and asking for help and assistance from our field services team.

One thing we're noting and tracking because of the amount of activity that was noted in the first presentation about the movement of homeless individuals in our community, where there's a hypothesis that a lot of these are result of the animals with homeless moving with them. And so we're tracking and we're we're seeing how many more interactions with police activity that we're having to support on police calls and so forth for these different things and tracking this into this year to see if we can find those metrics and see if we can address those things. And we're gonna have some things in the works right now to try to address some of those items.

So for last fiscal year, our animal intake decreased by approximately 8%, and that was a strategic shift for animal care and services to better operate within our capacity for care. In June on 06/27/2024, we had 822 animals in our residence. And last, this past 06/27/2025, we had 408. So that's half the number of animals in our shelter. And we did this through a lot of community engagement, and I'll talk a little bit about our kitten, decrease in the next, slide.

But I just wanted to assure everybody that the shelter is in a much better, state in terms of our capacity for care, more space for the animals, more, less stress for them. And, that is us working really hard at our intake unit and ensuring that the shelter is the right place for that animal. If they have another potential place that they can go to, we're giving resources and, really embracing this, current philosophy in animal welfare, which is right place, right time, and at right outcome, and making sure that the shelter is absolutely the right place for the animal at that given time. So now, this is the animal intake by by age. So in our overall intake, we had a 2% decrease for total cats, but actually that increase is all attributed to less kittens coming in our shelter.

There was actually a small, increase in adult cat intake. Our, total increasing decrease in kitten intake is about 6%. And last spring, we really launched a large scale community engagement campaign explaining that mom knows best if they're finding if community finds a little bottle little kittens that may have just been born, odds are mom's in the area and, that they can watch for mom and, attempt to reunite them because the kitten's best chance at survival is if they can be cared for by mom. And, also, the number of puppies that we have continues to, increase, and so we're close to a five year high on the number of puppies that are coming to us. So although, overall, the dog numbers have decreased, the numbers of puppies coming into us have increased, and we can surmise that that is attributed to a lack of affordable spay neuter services for, dogs in the community.

Excuse me. For our animal outcomes, we were have worked, like I said, very strategically over the last, year to try to ensure that animals had what they need. Our live live release rate for 2425 was 89% overall. We have a 95% live release rate for dogs, an 86% live release rate for cats, and a 94% live release rate for small animals. So we're really, we wanna continue to work to get that number as high as possible, but 89% live release rate, we're, pleased to see that that number is rising.

And this, shows the outcome by type, all the different pathways that animals make it out of the shelter. And, as you can see for adoptions, adoptions continue to be a very, robust, positive outcome for our animals, and that is wonderful because these animals are out in our community. They're spayed and neutered. They're wonderful ambassadors for all the different, types of animals and breeds that we get into the shelter, and we're really happy when an animal comes to us and, makes it back out into our community. And this is an example of of the variety of community support that we receive.

So up in the top left hand corner, you'll see a little, paper bag, and it says unweaned. So when we began our community engagement campaign with, attempting to reduce the number of kittens that without their mothers that were coming into the shelter. We also created some other ways that people could help in addition to fostering. And one of those was that may helping us to make some kitten care packages. So a girl scout troop made 50 of these bags and delivered them to us, and it had all of the supplies that were necessary to help somebody to care for kittens for about a week's period of time.

Over in the top right corner where it says student favorites, Los Altos High School, their, art teacher assisted, with a project. And these students, took some of our long term animals that we had promoted on the website and created these really beautiful, unique, pieces of art. And so if you come to the shelter, you can actually see those, displayed, proudly around the shelter. And then right below that, it's a you'll see a lot lot of food. We, collaborated with Chewy, the pet supply company, and they donated, I think it was 15 pallets of food and supplies to, San Jose Animal Care and Services.

And that, those supplies and food were restricted for community use, specifically. So we delivered some of the food to the EIHs. We worked with some of our, partner organizations to provide this food directly and supplies into the hands of the the community. So we were really happy to see that and to see the the community get a boost for their pets. These are some of the facilities improvements that we did over the past year.

And it's a little bit dark, but on the right where it says courtyard, individual heating and cooling units, we have these four cat rooms that sit, outdoors. And, they it's difficult for us to regulate the temperature as we do in the shelter. So we installed these, individual heating and cooling units. But there's a kitty perched on top there. So, she found that to be quite the space, for her, and it's wonderful that we can have consistency in air temperature when it's in the winter months and in the the summer months as well.

We also have a new electric electric vehicle and charging station as now part of our fleet as our crown Victoria is getting up there in age as much as I love her. Don't know how much more life that she has in her. As well as, installing energy efficient LED lights. It has made such a difference not only in how much energy we're consuming, but also just they're much brighter and, for our spaces. And, also, all of the kennels now have these covers on them.

And that was a big project because when you have, over a 170 kennels that have two sides to them, these were all constructed in house with our public work, facilities team. And this really is a big safety, issue to ensure that dogs are not hopping out. And it did happen where you would walk through the kennels and see a dog perched up on a kennel. So it's really happy that we were able to complete this project. Some of our other systems improvements is for our foster parents.

They now have the ability to schedule their own foster appointments for, spay neuter surgeries, for vaccines. And with over 3,000, animals in foster care on an annual basis, you can imagine how much, assistance this has been to launch this that they can, look at their own calendars and schedule the appointments, with what works for them. We've also begun, reporting our average length of stay for the, past year on the website so that people can have, more information about how long we can expect any, cat, dog, or small animal coming to us, but their, average time for them to be, at us with us at the shelter. And we also implemented these volunteer visual aids. So it's, I'll just go through them really quickly.

Dog walking, cat socializing, laundry, tasks, kitten nursery, and dish duty. And so these are some really, nice visual infographics that make it very, an easy how to and to follow for volunteers and all of the ways that they help the shelter and the animals that we have with us. And thank you to all of our volunteers. And just a sampling of some of our community engagement efforts. We had a Christmas tree at Christmas in the Park along with our pop up that we had last year on, San Carlos And 3rd Street.

And, we have also been invited and, taken animals out for bark in the ballpark with, Santa Clara University as well as the pucks and paws events with the San Jose Barracudas and also participating in our city's health and wellness fairs. And a couple of other, notable, community engagement is, working with the San Jose Barracudas. Last year, we were this we were actually featured as their calendar shelter, and our shelter pets were in their, calendar for this year. Jamajuice has been very kind to us, and, will bring over a box of smoothies for our staff and volunteers, which always gives us a nice boost. And, also a nice mention for Coffee Companions.

Kevin, Johnson, the founder of Coffee Companions, takes some of our long term dogs out for really long heights hikes, creates these wonderful videos, and he also comes and provides coffee for some of our events and really helping to, increase the visibility of some of our special needs, dogs.

Okay. So a lot of that is looking back at some of the last year's things. We have some things going on now that people have asked about. And so we're though it's not directly in the annual report, it's a part of that that we talked about as well. And so here we're talking about some of our TNR and owned animals.

So currently, of three weeks ago, we had to switch days around. So we are now providing TNR services on Mondays and on Thursdays. We just launched, about a month ago, low cost surgery for owned dogs. Our target, with the soft launch is 10. It's been going quite smoothly.

We're providing spay neuter microchip vaccines, getting them licensed if they're due for rabies with discharge instructions. And then just recently, two weeks ago, we were able to add on five owned cat appointments on our Thursday TNR days. So they're checked in in a similar way, signed the the waivers, so we've been securing those. And today was actually our second owned cat day, we got all five that showed up. They were big tom cats that I'm sure the owners are happy that are now neutered.

We have been trying to partner with the EIH when we started launching the owned dog days just to facilitate while they're in these interim housings to provide spay and neuter services. We put a pause on that just because there's more organization that has to happen, but it's been working well. So sort of December has been our pilot working out the kinks. And in January, we'll revisit not only the fee structure but targeted areas of of where we want to really reach out to provide the the owned dog spay and neuter services.

One of the focuses of the reason why the EHs are important is there are animals in our care of our housing department right now, and we have you see there's 700 beds that will be in that will be built this year. As of right now, there's about 300 to 350 animals in our EIH complexes right now. And so getting to those services and getting them is part of the key to getting them onto that continuum of care that Eric Sullivan needs to do. So we need to help them in that piece. And so that's one of the reasons why it's a real focus.

In 2026, my goal is to have all, animals altered that are in our EIHs by the end of the year, and so it's a it's a big lift. Okay. The eye chart that nobody can read and barely understand. The audit, which everyone is very anxious about and curious about our performance on it. You'll note in the bottom left, this is this is the status as of September 10.

And so I'll help translate a little bit in terms of what what the auditor views in terms of our performance, and I'll go through things in just a minute. Things are not implemented until the auditor accepts what we've submitted to them. So just because we submitted it to them doesn't mean it's implemented, and they do that twice a year. You've got the first one that happened in July, August time frame. You have another report coming out in March. And so we will not have any more, quote, unquote, move to implemented until the March report from the auditor. We don't deem them as implemented. The auditor does. We submit the things in, and they wait for their review, and then they report to you in March that they're implemented. And so they're adjudicating whether any of these things are done.

So you have all this I'm P and PI, so partially implemented, implemented, not implemented. So not implemented doesn't mean nothing's been done. It just means nothing's even been worked or shown to the auditors yet. And so they don't not even tracking that we've given them any work at the time of this report. Now in the FR, it means we've submitted it to them. They said we've given them what they want. But if you look at, like, 20, there's a b c and d. We've submitted three of them. They won't consider 20 implemented until all four are done. So don't so it's just a little bit little bit of an iterative to help explain.

So in March, three of the areas were due. All of them were submitted. All of them were implemented in March. In June, we had a bunch more that were due that were submitted. They were and then so you know, but not all implemented because the FRs mean the entire element we thought was a little bit longer. So if you look at, like, 36, a was submitted to them. They accepted that it was complete, but b was not submitted to them. So they but they've seen some work on it. So that 36 is not listed as implemented. So that's why you'll see what things are done and what things aren't done.

And so this is kinda how we're explaining it. So now what's due in December? A boatload of work. So we have about 21 of them that are already ready to go packaged, ready to be submitted, and four that we're working on final touches. That means by December 31, we will have submitted to the auditor everything on this list to review.

In January, there'll be back and forth and back and forth with them until it's all noodled, until it's exactly what they want. So once they accept the element that we have, both this will get updated and the website that we put up that has all of the things that the auditors have have accepted, those will be put on there after the auditor accepts them, not be because if we put them up there early, they might not like what we have there in terms of answering what they recommended, doesn't answer the question, is it exactly right, doesn't give enough detail. All of that will be implemented and shared with them and will put on our website once the auditor accepts them. We expect most of that to happen in time frame in terms of the update upload there, but the auditor will report to counsel in March. And then it's that time that they'll tell you that they've accepted our stuff and it's been moved to implement it.

I hope that makes sense. But, yeah, a boatload of work. We're really close. As of today, we have about 21 of the items packaged ready to go. We have about four more that we're noodling on that we're pushing through in terms of how we're wording it and what we're packaging with it that will all be submitted to the auditor by December 31. No one's done this before. Looking forward, one of the things I'm really glad about with Monica being here, she gets fresh eyes on how we're doing, what's going on. She looks at the audit, looks at our staff and so forth, and she gets this handed to her that this is your work plan and the audit and so forth. But then, again, she has her opinions about how things are going, and she'll have ways to set that forward. So, Monica, please take this away.

Thank you. And it's good to see such a passionate group of people here, so thank you. And we all love animals, and animal people are passionate people. So definitely recognize that. I do wanna say that my my I guess, yes, my first six weeks have been very busy.

I've been trying to meet with as many folks as possible as well as finish work on the audit and figure out the operational needs of the shelter as outlined and what I've observed. I will say this is a very, very dedicated team that we do have on staff as well as the volunteer side, and I am proud to be a part of it. And I am up to the challenge because I know there are a lot of the community of San Jose wants better, and and we want to be there and and provide the care for each other as well as for the animals and keeps San Jose a safe community and a a welcoming community for the pets and their people. That being said, some in addition to everything on the audit, which actually highlights most of these items, we're really looking at the community moving forward as part of part of the safety net because we already know that the shelter isn't an island, and we can't do it all by ourselves. So there are some systemic issues, I think, partially related to one that was addressed earlier with the housing issue.

And so let's just make keep in mind that we're looking at the big picture and to have the community involved as far as as to Kiska's point, there there's what's called the four r's, right place, right time, right care, which is definitely part of that capacity for care and the right outcome for the animals in our community. So it is definitely on the radar, and I'm aware of the best practices and all of that and how to get us there with our protocols. So on here, we see capacity management, which is capacity for care, c four c, or any of those acronyms that are thrown about. And we're definitely looking at that, and that is part of the audit. It's important to us too because, yes, we want the animals to have the best care that we can provide.

We want their needs to be met. And the shelter is, by design, a temporary safe place for pets in need. Shelters and and not our shelter for sure. If it's a shelter, again, is a safe place, temporary safe place. Two weeks is anything above two weeks or longer than two weeks is usually considered long long term.

And shelters aren't typically designed to keep animals that long because it's not necessarily what's best for the animal. So we are looking at that. We're doing our enrichment, and we we do want to get them placed safely in good in in good condition, healthy and in the community. And we also need support because the in inflow, the intake now to to look at that, last week, I think in two days, we had 42 dogs and puppies come through our doors. 42 in two days.

That's quadruple the amount we would get on a on a given regular day. And so what do we do? How do we balance that? Why are they coming into us? So we need to take a look at, you know, the whys. And quite often, I I mentioned it's a systemic issue. Is it because those breeds aren't allowed? I'm look I I'm new to the area, love the area, but when I was looking for my my rental location, I wanted to find one without breed restrictions. I looked at I didn't physically look at 400 plus properties, but those popped up for me, and I found three that might work. So I'm just throwing that out there, and I know I already spoke to council member Ortiz about that a little bit, that that's another thing.

Again, that's a community thing. What can we do? The kitten piece. Right? There's do we leave them? We don't know if the mom's coming back. We don't know yet, so we monitor. That's best practices. You know, check and see if the mom comes back or unless you actually saw I think the words they use are unless you saw the mom get killed, leave them and monitor for twenty four hours. They tend to have a better outcome when they can be with their mom.

So that is part of that campaign Kiska mentioned last year, and we'll be continuing that because that is the best place for them. Also, our training, that's part of our getting our SOPs the best practices. What does UC Davis say? I've worked with doctor Hurley, doctor Levy, doctor Delaney. I've worked with all of them before.

So I I feel comfortable that ASC ACS, excuse me, is on the right track, and it would be great to have the time to implement all these practices. Right? So I know we have the audit, and we're rewriting everything and redoing all these amazing things. The team's up to it. We just need a little moment to breathe so that we can do our trainings and move forward and elevate the care of the shelter animals and the engagement in the community.

So that's all I have to do. And, again, I'm up to the challenge. I have seen this before. I've done this before. And when I saw this opportunity, I I was thrilled to participate because I I know it can be done. And, again, with the passionate animal advocates we have, we can work together to make it happen and support each other and do what's best for San Jose, the people, and the pets in our community. So that is my piece. Thank you.

We'll stop with more animal pictures, all of our great social media work that's good listing all the people we put out about all the animals we have, and we're ready for your questions.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this presentation and the work that's been done by our ACS staff. Now I'd like to open it up for public comment. Due to the large amount of cards we've received, we will be limiting public comment to one minute. Thank you.

Yes. We have 17 speaker cards. Can the first group of speakers please line up on the steps in front of the podium? We have Mike Wagner, Fatima, Kathy, Rebecca, Alexandra, Anne, Anna Spear, and Anna with two n's. You will each have one minute to speak. The timer is gonna be projected above. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Mike Wagner. Last year at this time, the committee accepted an annual report that didn't even bother to include the average length of stay, one of the most important metrics for a high volume shelter. And staff omitted it. This year, we see a claim of a live release rate for cats of eighty six percent.

I've calculated that number. It's live outcomes divided by total outcomes. And it looks like staff has gone against the wishes of the auditor and the audit, Page 60, which says stop taking a shelter service called TNR and using it in your intake and outcomes. On Page four, they say they've aligned themselves with the audit, and they're no longer counting it as intake. But they're counting it in return to field, which is a live outcome.

How do we know that? Because Doctor. Kather sent a directive, an order to her staff on December 26 saying, outcome TNR, always RTF. That's how you inflate the live release rate. The real live release rate is 81%, give or take it.

Thank you. Next speaker?

Hello. My name is Fatima, long time foster service. For past year, you have received many photos and, firsthand reports demonstrating mismanagement of the shelter despite meeting after meeting. You see the same results. Over here, the current management team has failed us numerous times, and I wanna ask you guys to please listen to us, all of our fosters over here, and understand that we, as fosters, see firsthand what we do and what we see is different from what the reports are coming in.

It is not the same at all. The management has failed numerous times for past four years, and I personally have emailed you guys pictures, evidence, documentations, and, it's just it's just big failure that they sit here and say everything is good, and it is not. And I want you guys to please, please listen to us who take

Thank you. Next speaker.

I volunteered with dogs at both San Jose Animal Center as well as Humane Society in Milpitas. The difference is night and day. I urge you to visit the Humane Society yourself sometime to see the difference. I have two suggestions. Number one, soundproof the dog pens completely.

That's what they do at Humane. Due to the intense noise, the dogs are stressed, and potential adopters see agitated, barking dogs, which slows adoptions. Number two, allow volunteers easy access to enter and exit through the back of the dog rooms for dog walks and cleaning. It's not safe for visitors or the dogs to force them out into the public areas for walks. I've emailed I will be emailing you pictures and a little more explanation, and I will also send videos. And I've put something in the written record. Yes. This will cost money, but our area has some of the wealthiest and most innovative corporations here. There is no

Thank you. Next speaker.

My name is Andy Shane. I'm a resident of Willow Glen. I have been coming here for almost two years to try and get change at the San Jose Animal Care Center. I was hopeful that positive change is happening when I saw that two dogs that were on the euthanasia list had been reassessed and are now up for adoption. That is wonderful. But unfortunately, there's still other areas at the shelter

Please press the button again.

Okay. The mic's on. There are still people I'm still seeing people on Nextdoor stating that when they bring in stray dogs, they're told they cannot accept them. The public still does not have a way to find lost pets because the shelter is not taking lost dog reports. The medical care is still having issues. I want to talk about Betty, who was up on the picture. She was a Persian cat that was found by a man who took her to the shelter. She needed to be spayed and also have a mast cell tumor removed. During her spay surgery, she aspirated and had complications, which Persian cats are prone to have. Two days later, Betty was put under again to have the mast cell tumor removed, again aspirated, but this time she cannot be revived and died.

Why did she need the second surgery so close to the first? With over thirty years of nursing experience, I know she cannot have recovered

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

And committee members, good afternoon. I'm a San Jose resident here to speak for animals with no voice. It has been a year since the audit, and I am outraged. Despite an over $17,000,000 budget, our shelters still deals with terrible overcrowding and no proper vet care. New leaders and more money didn't fix the core problem.

The suffering has not stopped. We demand this committee commit to five actions now for accountability. One, open books, provide a full public audit of the entire 17,500,000.0 budget. Two, get real experts, Establish an independent oversight board with certified vets and proven rescue partners. Three, sign contracts. Create formal enforceable MOUs with rescue groups. No more handshakes. Four, stop the secrecy. Mandate monthly public reports on intakes, outcomes, and staffing. Five, fund the care, fully staffed, and fund the shelter for

Thank you. That's your time. Next group of speakers to make their way down. Alena Gaffney, Valentina, please wait. Lynn Ramirez, Dinah Hayes, and Courtney Farrell. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Rebecca Davis Matthews. I'm from Sustainer Shelters. Mister Lush Mister Lush previously committed to forming a community action committee made up of seven community members who would meet with him regularly. Much time has passed. The committee still does not exist. In a recent meeting I had with mister Lesch and miss Wiley, he stated the committee would not be happening. Instead, he has been meeting only with selected rescues and TNR volunteers, which is not what he committed to. I am asking this council committee to direct him to form the committee as promised, ensuring ensuring it includes a true cross section of the animal advocacy community. I also ask you to consider moving San Jose Animal Care and Services back to Parks Recreation and Neighborhood Services, where it was originally starting when the shelter opened in 2024 and where it logically belongs.

Finally, please request a financial audit of the Guardian Angel program and SJAX since nearly $700,000 in donations were collected during the previous fiscal year without detailed public expenditure records. Only a small fraction has been accounted for. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon. My name is Anna, and I am deeply concerned about animal services' lack of oversight and accountability. I've reported severe ethics violations to director Losch, deputy director Wiley, and animal control captain Jenkins. These violations include animal control officer Jack Hugh Fisher gifting stolen animals to shelter volunteer Leslie Romo, retaliation, a warrantless search and seizure outside of jurisdiction, and ethics violations to numerous enemy. I provided details detailed and verifiable evidence, and they have failed to take any disciplinary action and would no longer respond to me using an ongoing investigation as a shield to dodge accountability.

It doesn't matter what task the shelter employee or its associates are working on, they are responsible for their misconduct and must be held accountable for their transgressions. Animal services can't succeed while leadership enables and participates in corruption.

Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker.

Hi. Anna Spear. I'm looking forward to working with you, and you have a big job ahead of you. I am a neonate bottle feeder, have done it for years. Last year before kitten season, I've actually bottle fed over 500 kittens.

Last year before kitten season, I went in, offered to do the training as I had in past years. I was told thank you, but no thank you because I was not currently fostering for the shelter. I was not fostering for the shelter because there was a lot of things that were not going well. I'm not going to go into the specifics here, but there was a lot that needed to be done. Since then, a lot of kittens were not being cared for correctly because there was a one size fits all program that was implemented. You can't fit kittens into a one size fits all for little tiny babies. And fosters were not being given the cred

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon council members. My name is Courtney and I worked at SJACS until June. I witnessed many of the shelter's systemic failures firsthand. In May, I found a dog named Lola in the medical area only because an IV machine was beeping. Medical staff had gone home hours earlier leaving her unattended with a leash tightly wrapped around her neck and an IV line wrapped around her body.

I did everything I could to save her despite having no medical training as an ACA one and immediately contacted management. No one responded. The public statement released afterwards was misleading and resulted in members of the community blaming me, leading to online harassment and even literal death threats. But the larger issue is this, Lola's death was not a freak accident. It was the result of a shelter with no written procedure procedures, no real training beyond shadowing other untrained staff, and no accountability. Audit recommendation number 14 requests written protocols and proper training, yet seven months later, this still has not been implemented. These issues are structural and they will continue without meaningful leadership change. Please reject Matt Lash's memo, conduct a full financial audit and tran

Thank you. And the last group just wait one moment. The last group got to call down, Janine Sullivan. It looks like Christina Callahan, I believe. Laurie Landis.

Rosario, last name with a c.

Chris Gian Greco, and Christina Banajera. And that's all the cards I have. If you did not hear your name, please make your way down. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Linda. A few weeks ago, I found an injured dog in San Jose who had been hit by a car. I rushed him to MedVet in Campbell, and thanks to their care, he survived, but it was only because of the one time exception. Under the San Jose Animal Care Center recent policy change, Medva is no longer allowed to accept stray or found animals, for emergency care when the shelter is closed unless the finder pays out of pocket.

Instead, residents are told to call the non emergency police line or 911 911. That experience made something very clear. This policy has created a dangerous gap in care that and that dog was lucky. He was microchipped and reunited with his family, but many animals won't be so fortunate. Since October, if you find an injured, sick, or under or or underage animal after hours, your only option is to call the police and pay your bill yourself.

Thank you. You. Next speaker.

Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you all for your time and appreciate your support in listening to everybody here today. My name is Dinah. I'm a foster, an advocate, and on the front line of the animal overpopulation crisis here in the city of San Jose. I do trap, neuter, return across every district in the city. I help your constituents on a regular basis. San Jose cannot reduce animal homelessness without a prevention strategy. While the ACS annual report highlights adoptions and intake reductions, it leaves out the most essential context. How many healthy animals are turned away?

Why so many arrive sick or injured? How many requests for help go unanswered? And whether our resources are addressing root causes or simply reacting to emergencies. Prevention must be the priority. That includes reopening the TNR request list. Even with long wait times, tracking demand is essential. Without data, we cannot make strategic decisions. A closed list hides the need. A wait list

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

Good afternoon, chair and council members. I'm here today to beg you to help the animals at the San Jose Animal Shelter on Monterey Road. The shelter is overwhelmed. Dogs are being turned away because there is no space, and more animals are being euthanized simply because there is nowhere for them to go. It is heartbreaking and it is preventable.

When the city ended the low cost spay and neuter program about five years ago, the nonstop flow of dogs, cats, puppies and kittens became unmanageable. Staff and volunteers are doing everything they can, but they cannot keep up. Without affordable spay and neuter services, the overcrowding will never stop. I'm asking you to bring that program back. It's the only real way to reduce intake and give these animals a chance at life. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hello. My name

is Valentina Martynchik. I volunteered at the shelter for six years. I know that by speaking today, I'm likely losing any remaining chance of ever being allowed to volunteer again at the shelter because this shelter is managed through retaliation, bullying, and harassment. Today, I'm talking about volunteers, not animals. San Jose animal shelter shows very little respect for the volunteers who are essentially running their own program.

They're doing roughly 90% of work that should be handled by the volunteer coordinator, a position currently held by Align Rodriguez, which makes 85,000 a year. When volunteers pick up because they are frustrated and want things to improve, they are punished or pushed out without any explanation. There are many cases of bullying and intimidation, but people are afraid to speak up. In the twenty first century, in the country where free

That's your time. Thank you. Next speaker.

Hello. I'm Elena Gaffney. I'm from a local San Jose based rescue group. Mattelios told me about a year ago about multiple groups outreach, and he was frustrated. In response, I submitted a proposal for public commission. A year passed. No commission ever formed. Instead, we still see selective closed door conversations with small groups that we don't even know who they are. And San Jose Dugrescuos are excluded even from pilot's painter discussions. Meanwhile, critical questions are unanswered.

Why is animal services under public works, a building group? Where is the spinutor budget going? Why were offers of high volume spinutor providers rejected by the city. I believe it was the city's attorney's office. Why has intake and expenditure collapsed while being presented as progress? They skipped in their report data from 2008

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

Hi. I'm Christina. I'm a dog volunteer. And, I'm just here today because I feel like the city continues to fund the crisis instead of solutions that would actually fix it. We live in San Jose and according to the California legislation AB two forty analysis and San Francisco ASPCA you need about $2,000 per animal to you know spay and neuter them to house them feed them field services and currently I calculated we have over 18,000 entries for fiscal year 2024 to 2025, 2000 are repeat entries, but those are still entries into the shelter.

So I don't know where you got the 12,000 number from, love to talk about it. But that means we're only spending about $960 on each animal. So, I believe that, they're struggling and the shelter needs help, and I feel like, they're doing everything that they can. But at the end of the day, they need more resources from the city.

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

Hi. My name is Christina Banerjee, and I would like to volunteer with the approval and onboarding process for the volunteers.

Hello, my name is Janine Sullivan. I'm a Kitten Foster volunteer. Please don't stop asking for accountability and progress now that it's been over a year since the audit was completed. There continues to be poor communication and protocols, a lack of proactive outreach and relationship building to fosters, rescues and others. Currently, there are hundreds of voluntary applications that go unanswered. Many of the public have been trying to help and are not being addressed. Numerous cats in backrooms have been not actively promoted to rescue or foster. Things are slipping through the cracks and continue to happen. The current management team and shelter coordinators have been given recommendations from a number of stakeholders over the last year and beyond. This is well documented.

Earlier this year, after hearing no outreach from their division manager, volunteer coordinator and foster coordinator, fellow foster Fatima Lubinski and I called for a meeting to discuss concerns and demand a call for action. After repeated and documented attempts, the same management team has refused or obstructed many of the simplest of efforts to make improvements. We often have been Thank

you, Doctor. Klein. Next speaker.

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker.

My name is Rosario Concilio, mister chairman, esteemed council members. I'd like to put things in perspective here. Not that long ago, we were doing an intake of 17,000 animals per annum at the shelter. We had live release rates over 90%. TNR, we were doing a 160 felines a week. A week. Now what do we got? 12,000 animals per annum? No TNR? Live release rates.

We don't even make no kill status. Clearly, there has to be a change here. Alright? There needs to be some major surgery. I think the first step is to get a c s jacks the hell out of public works. Alright? I think I think they should be think there should be a direct report to the assistance to mister Rios, Angel Rios. I think that's the only way we're gonna get something done here. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next speaker.

I'm not very well versed in this issue. I've got plenty of other things that I deal with on behalf of my community. We have some seriously dedicated community members in our neighborhood that estimate that they've TNN'ed over 300 cats over the last five years, which is a big impact. They've told me about some of the problems that they've experienced with the shelter. One of them being, from what I understand, they have trouble scheduling TNRs because the place isn't properly staffed.

And my response is if if the place isn't properly staffed and those those those staffing levels are funded, why doesn't the city take that funding for those unemployed positions and contract with veterinary services to keep the TNRs flowing? I mean, that's just basic pretty basic solution. Thank you.

Thank you. That's your time. Next speaker. Back to count back to NSC.

Alright. Thank you so much. No worries at all. I wanna thank everyone for their comments. Really appreciate everybody's passion, as well as thank staff for their presentation. We can please start with, council member Campos.

Thank you, chair, and really appreciate everyone who came out to speak on this issue. I do have some questions prepared for staff that I wanna get to, but I know that this is an issue that my colleagues as well as I have continuously heard as a main concern from our community. And so, you know, we welcome you, Monica, to our city, and we look forward to your leadership, at our animal shelter. So my first couple of questions are for you, Monica. Can you share with us what is your first impression of the team at the animal shelter?

Thank you. From my six weeks here and actually from the first day and when I was doing my recon to visiting San Jose, I did see and I do see a very dedicated staff that works very hard and wants to do best by the animals in the community. So I know that with our new protocols and procedures and getting our training implemented and all these steps we're taking, I know that they want to make those moves, and I trust that they will, and I'm here to help them do that. And of course, we'll just need your support in allowing us to make these changes and make it happen. So a great dedicated team.

And there is a lot of compassion fatigue that goes on in this industry. There's a lot of emotional support that can be needed for the folks doing this work. And just I'm here to, again, support that and recognize that and help them have the tools to do their jobs. And we just wanna be able to do our work and make it better. So I'm very optimistic, and that's why I'm here.

Thank you. And you've been here six weeks. So what are the top priorities for you in your first one hundred days in the new role?

I have been meeting with groups and individuals as much as I can with the schedule and, again, allowing time to implement some changes and rewrite some protocols and do some training. So balancing that. So, again, I wanna meet with folks. I have meetings on Saturday this week as well as other days this week. So opening the door, hearing the concerns, helping find solutions.

I love that some solutions have been presented today as well because I love to hear those. And so in addition to that, getting the staff the support they need, like I mentioned, identifying what tools we may need to put in place, what's almost there, in addition to the audit, definitely the audit focus, which does check a lot of those boxes. So I think those for the first ninety days and obviously making sure we're elevating the care for the animals is the crux of everything.

Thank you. I'm glad to hear that you're already engaged in reaching out to the community, hearing their concerns, learning from them how how we can improve at the animal shelter. And clearly, have neighbors, community members, community leaders who care deeply about the health and safety of the animals at the animal shelter. So what is your plan for community engagement given what you've heard tonight?

So continued community engagement, of course, still doing more meetings, still listening, hearing more suggestions, getting to know everyone that's involved. And at the bottom line is we're all on the same team. We all want what's best for the animals and we want to provide that. So I definitely want to continue in that area. Once again, the shelter is designed to be a temporary safe haven.

So how can we mitigate any stress caused by the animals for being there? How can we keep them in their homes where they already have a home rather than trying to rehome them? And also in doing that, there are some other areas where we can collaborate more, not just with rescue groups but with other organizations. Because once again, the situation with the animals in our communities is just a symptom of some other things going on. So I think there's a lot more collaboration we can do for big picture outcomes and making San Jose an even better place to live.

Thank you for that. Matt, this question might be for you or whatever staff, can best field this, but with the $17,500,000 annual budget at the animal shelter, can you tell us where that funding is going?

Sure. So I appreciate this, and I appreciate the question. I appreciate everyone's interest in this. $17,000,000 is a lot of money that we're trusted with for this service. Public works has, as you know, a very large department, which our operating budget is, like, 230,000,000. This is about 17 and a half of it. Since we are a service industry in animal care and services, the the most of that goes to both the staff that does their work and our vendors that provide that service. So there since it's a service industry, it's all in the people that are providing the service. Now because they're animals, we have to have food and supplies and so forth. So that's a bigger portion of that than normal in just a service industry is in those kinds of supplies.

So for example, there's a lot of conversation about we went from like 15.9 or whatever it was to 17.5 this year. First of all, this is welcome. And if you look at it daily, it's a $48,000 run per day, about $2,000 an hour to run when we have about 500 to 600 animals in the building at any given time during the peak season and another 500 animals that we're responsible for in foster. And so it's a very large responsibility. And so look in terms of our burn rate.

That change, that increase, if you look at it, about 1,200,000.0 of the million of the 15,000,000 that increased was all in kind of truing up this ongoing cost. Half of a third of it was in COLAs and salaries and benefits of staff. Another third of it was attributed for the, animal health technicians that were added during annual report at a different time of season than it was normally. So attributing to that, the rest of that was in base things like increased cost inflation for food or services or other things we needed to purchase. That was $1,200,000 of the 1,600,000.0 that had increased.

So of the $17,000,000 about $14,000,000 is just in the staff. The other $3,000,000 is for nonpersonal services for like food and vendors and our contract support. So it's a service industry like all service industry, it's all in the people. This is a little different with animal care and services because we have food and certain things material that we need to provide to the animals or to care for the animals, leashes and things like that. And so it's it's pretty easy breakdown. It's all pretty transparent in terms of where the costs go, and, so I hope that helps.

Thank you, Matt. I appreciate that transparency, and I do appreciate staff's commitment to producing an info memo at the beginning of next year to report out the results of the audit implementation work through the end of this calendar year. Can, staff please remind the committee when the next audit report status update will be provided to NSE?

We weren't coming back to the NSE to talk about our audit. It's coming back to city council in March. And so I what I was gonna do so, originally, I was gonna come out with an info memo in December that we submitted everything, but that was when we were coming for our annual report in October. So I'm just telling you now that all of our stuff is gonna be submitted, and we'll be evaluating it with the auditor's office through the month of January. And when they complete the report, they will be reporting in front of you on this stuff plus every other audit in March.

Okay. And that'll be close to a hundred days for you, Monica. So I look forward to that report and hearing what my colleagues have to say on the issue as well.

Thank you, council member Campos, for your thoughtful questions. Council member Candelas.

Thank you. You know, I I just wanna begin by again thanking everybody who came out and to to advocate and and and uplift our our our our our animals and our our animal care shelter. I'm in awe of your passion and the work that you put in to make sure that, you know, our animals have a voice. And I also want to thank Matt and your team for your report. You know, I think this report was bittersweet in this in the sense that, you know, we're seeing progress and and we are making, in my opinion, positive progress.

But, know, the the I do wanna make sure that that for folks to understand that the reality is our animal care shelter is navigating through a national pet overpopulation crisis. You know, in doing research and my staff you know looked into the issue a little bit, it's not just San Jose. Fresno, Riverside, and even San Diego are all facing similar challenges with overpopulation of animals. And so, know, that just to put that into perspective. Director Losha, I had a question for you. Somebody mentioned a community action committee and lack thereof. Can can you speak to that?

Yeah. So like last time when I was in front of the committee, you have open mouth, put foot in conversation. So what what happened when I presented the audit? So the way the audit presentation happens, many of you know this, is when, the auditor's office finishes the report, we get a brief period of time after to write the stuff, the yellow pages that go at the end of saying, here's how we're going to implement this. We got a very brief time.

They get a they took about a year to produce the report. We took about a week or so to how are we going to implement this thing. And so I I put in there that I think some of these I'm gonna need some help to achieve these things. And I my idea was a community action committee to focus on the implementing the recommendations in the audit. And so as we started digging into the issues of the of the recommendations to implement, I realized they're very disparate in terms of their use.

And so this committee root pardon me. It would really end up being more focused groups of people on the actual issues. And so we've been bringing as the recommendations come in and as we needed to pull people in, it's not about pulling in friends to focus on. It's like these people are gonna be the result and using the thing that we implemented. The example, we've created a rescue portal. And so I don't need a committee to help me with a rescue portal. We we we were leveraging the software we had. We put together our best idea. We had a focus group of folks like, tell us what you like and don't like, what are the pluses and minuses of it so we could fix it, and off we go. We have another one that we're working on.

Again, it's part of a group of folks that are helping us implement an enhanced TNR program that we're working on. You see the the shift of days that was part that came out of that. We're talking to how we can add to own and own pets in that, so how we can keep expanding what things worked before, what things we needed to do and improve it. So is it part of a committee? It's more of focus groups in terms of solving a particular problem instead of forming it was the outcome the committee was focused on helping implement audit recommendations as the outcome, not anything else.

Now Monica and I have been talking, like, what are we doing for outreach going through 2026? Assuming we have victory in on the audit item, we and I have been talking about how do we frame what we want to do in terms of community outreach. That's still I I wondered, like, what's your work plan for '26? That's what she's working on now. There'll be more to come in terms of what we're doing for a group of people working for, to interact with us on a regular.

Great. Okay. That that's that's uplifting. So, Monica, add that to your to do. Kidding.

She's already aware.

And another question I had was regarding the TNR schedule. I think that was on slide. It was early on, one of the slides. So I I essentially, what what things are pending for five days of TNR, essentially, and and is this possible, and and should it be your target?

Yeah. So what so you can talk about it in just a minute. So we were directed to go see what we could do to get to five days and that what are we doing is five days the metric or is it the number of days? And so what are the things of so we have three days now, why three days, why not more? What are the things that are hinging us in terms of getting more days? If you could talk about what things are pending in terms of issues that are holding us back to adding more days, and is that the right metric. We had 606,990 surgeries last year, and that was up about ten percent to 12% from the year before. Right now, we're on target of the same thing, another 10 to 12% increase in terms of framing year to date roughly where we're projected to do the same. You know, what is it is that what is the goal? More isn't a goal.

It's an aspiration. So I've challenged the team. I want a number of what we're shooting for this year. And is it more days in terms of so I I challenge and they're still pondering it. What are the what are the hang ups for getting to five days? What are holding us up staffing wise to do that?

Definitely still staffing wise. We do not have the bandwidth with staff to operate two clinics five days a week because obviously we're operating our main shelter clinic five days a week to get pas adopt animals, kittens from fosters so that we can move them through the system. We don't want surgery to be the bottleneck where animals get stuck. We kind of revisited how we present our data. True TNR is not count towards population metrics with shelter.

So, TNR means an animal is trapped, it's brought in in the morning to a facility, it has surgery, ear tip, and it's picked up that day. It is not housed at the facility. So, TNR is not supposed to, per the national shelter metrics, count towards. So, we do true TNR two days a week. We, since I've started and historically, we have been doing and it's sort of shifting to now called a community cat program.

So, it's a combination of both TNR and what's called a return to field. So, RTF are cats that you do impound and you care for them and house them. Some of them have minor medical issues like a cold or a laceration excuse me, or an abscess. But we're providing care and housing them. But based on our intake questionnaire, we have a pathway planning that we can flag.

And yes, this is a cat that's part of an already established community. So its pathway is going to be returned to the field. We were never really tracking the RTFs. And so, worked with IT just this year to go back and flag the sort of areas in Chameleon where we could track how many community CAT surgeries that we've done. And we were shocked that it was well over 1,500.

And so, the years prior how the shelter operated with TNR is that they were all done in an RTF manner. So, these cats were trapped, brought into the shelter upwards as late as 09:00 and kenneled in a manner that now as we discussed last year is considered unacceptable housing. So, were kept in half kennels for three days and then they were transferred because at that time TNR was still a little bit controversial. So, lots of shelters would transfer the cats, but it was basically they're going back to their communities. So, that's why you'll see this inflated number of like live cat releases because they were done in an RTF manner during They were those turned to prior the So once we started capturing that data, we were shocked that how much community cat surgeries we've actually been performing this entire time because we're doing them every day.

Just plugging them in front shelter, back shelter.

Got it. Okay. All right.

So it sounds like we have a a multipronged strategy to how we actually do the TNR or the neutering program for kittens.

A community CAP program.

A community CAP program, yeah.

And when you look at other shelters, like comparable large government shelters, a lot of shelters are actually moving away from doing TNR at all. So Sacramento Front Street, which is similar in size, they take in 9,500 to 10,000 animals a year, they don't do TNR at all at their facility. So, they work with a nonprofit that fundraise, called Friends of Front Street, that sponsors 50 cats to be done at a nonprofit.

Oh, got it.

San Francisco Animal Control does not do any healthy TNR. They're all done by the San Francisco SPCA. So, I don't know that that's the direction that we because something's gotta give and we don't want it to be all the stray animals that still need our help. So we're doing it in a strategic way. We're doing more than all the shelters that I have compared us to.

We're doing more more than Stockton. We're doing more than San Francisco. We're doing more than Sacramento. So, we're doing more than other government shelters and I'm proud that we're able to, but we'll have to just keep revisiting. Do we even want to add more days or are we stretched thin enough that we really need to make sure that we're focusing on the animals that are already in our care.

Got it. And the staffing question is also something that we have to balance as council with regards to obviously the competing priorities we heard earlier today on the different needs and and and levers that the community is asking for us to

pull. Yeah. One last piece. This last year, were funded $200,000 for spay neuter services with outside vendors. We have those contracts. We're gonna be seeking more contracts in the New Year that we use those now. We have to use those for owned cats and, owned animals, I apologize, and, TNR cats and so animals. And so we're trying to figure out, how quickly we'll get those on. We have them now, but they soon expire, so we'll have to renew those soon enough. And so we do have those services and we do use those services.

Got it. No, great. And my light is blinking, but given I don't my light doesn't blink too often,

I'm going

to keep going. That's fine. A follow-up question. Michael Wagner actually sent a question about if the animal care center staff rely on the help of volunteer groups and when it comes to rescuing dogs placed on the euthanasia list, do does does the staff rely heavily on volunteers for this?

Our does staff rely on volunteer

On the help of volunteer groups when it comes to rescuing dogs. No. Please, let's I let's I I wanna hear I understand folks are very passionate, I wanna hear from staff. And I I have trouble walking and chewing gum sometimes, so I'd like to hear from staff.

So is your question how do animals get euthanized? How do decisions get made on them? Or how because your your question is how do we

Does the staff rely heavily on the help of volunteer groups when it comes to rescuing dogs placed on the euthanasia list?

So we rely on volunteers for tons of things. And so do volunteers seek rescue for for dogs that are on on youth on the final list? The answer is yes.

Okay.

Do we rely on them? The answer is do we rely on That is the outcome. When we put these animals on final, mostly dogs, it's because we don't believe what they think it is in their well-being to stay in our shelter. And the only outcome right now, because there is no other outcome, is to euthanize them. And we're happy to talk through what that decision set is and how that gets done. But the attention that gets to them and so yes, there are advocate groups and there are sort of rescues that focus on animals that are just on the final list and their chance to save their life. That is one of their missions.

Got it. And then the last question I'll ask is, do we have a low cost space slash neuter option for owned pets that is done by the shelter staff and not an outside organization?

Yes. That's what we listed on that chart with the TNR chart. On Mondays, we have straight TNR only. On Wednesday, we have owned dogs. On Thursday, we have TNR plus we have owned cats.

Got it.