Public Safety, Finance and Strategic Support Committee (psfss) - Regular Meeting

Okay. Well, before we begin, I want to remind the Public Safety finance and strategic support committee members and member of the public to follow our code of conduct at meetings. This including includes commenting on the specific agenda item only and addressing the full body. Public speakers will not engage in a conversation with the chair, council member or staff. All members of the public safety, finance and strategic support committee staff and public are expected to refrain from abusive language.

Repeated failure to comply with the code of conduct, which will disturb, disrupt or impede the orderly conduct of this meeting may result in removal from the meeting. This meeting of the public safety finance and strategic support committee will now come to order. Can the clerk, please call roll?

Tordillos? Here. Casey? Here. Mul cahy? Here. Vice chair Kameh absent. Chair Duan? Yep. You have a quorum.

Thank you. Meeting comes to order. Just to mention on the review of the work plan item number one has already been, updates and approved to, move to 12/04/2025. Item number two has already been dropped from, today. So there's nothing on consent. Do we have any public comments at this point?

No public comment.

Perfect. Item number one on the report to committee is retirement plan investment annual report. And I believe that it will be John Flynn, Director and Jay Kwon, the Senior Retirement Investment Officer.

Good afternoon, Chair, Council Members, John Flynn, Officer Retirement Services. Joining the box today and who will be presenting, our Senior Investment Officer, Jay Kwon.

Good afternoon council members. Jay Kwon, Office of Retirement Services.

Always

Davey. Davey technicality. Oh, there we go.

Apologies. Just for that we'll be super brief. Good afternoon council members, Jay Kwon, Office of Retirement Services. I'm here to present the report of annual investment returns for the Federated System and Police and Fire Department retirement plans. You may remember that the plans assume the investment portfolios earn a certain rate of return every year.

That's the discount rate. For both plans, the assumed rate is currently 6.8%. I'm happy to report that the plan returns for the prior fiscal year were 9.6% for Federated and 10% flat for Police and Fire. So to be explicit, the returns for both plans were in excess of their assumed rates. Additionally, both plans' performance continues to be above median in their peer universe of similarly sized public pension plans over longer time horizons.

Performance was largely driven by global stocks, which returned 15% about 15% over the fiscal year. Returns for other asset classes were more muted, but given approximately half of the assets of either plan are in stocks, this was a fairly good year. So to reiterate and conclude, returns were good in excess of the discount rate, in line with our policy benchmark and strong relative to peers. I I'm going to stop here for any questions, but let me just review the recommendation. It is to accept the annual pension and health care investment performance report for the Police and Fire Department retirement plan and Federated City Employees Retirement System for fiscal year twenty twenty four to 2025.

Well, thank you for the report. Do we have any public comments?

No public comment.

Motion to accept.

Second. Well, thank you. We got first and second. Let's vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Thank you. Thank you. Good job, thank you. On the second item on the report to committee is police department recruitment and hiring activity and Annual Report that will be presented by Lieutenant Viejo and Captain O'Neill.

Counsel, thank you very much for having you, having us today. My name is, captain Mike O'Neill. I'm currently assigned to the Bureau of Administration, which oversees our background recruiting, police academy, training, and field training office. Today we'll be discussing the annual report. It will be presented by my lieutenant who's Juan Vallejo, who is in charge of our background and recruiting units. And I'll I'll hand it off to Lieutenant Vallejo.

Good afternoon council person. My name is Juan Vallejo. I am the current lieutenant for the recruiting and background unit. I took over the position February from Lieutenant Mike Bowie who presented here last year. I'm here to present the recruitment and hiring activity report for fiscal year twenty four-twenty five.

And I'll start off by the sworn applications. We have a graph there listing the amount of applications that we have had for the last seven years. Fiscal year twenty four-twenty five, we had a drop off of applications from the previous year fiscal year twenty three and twenty four down to nineteen ninety eight applications. Understand that we do not close our hiring cycles. We have them continuously open throughout the entire year and we hold three academies per year, calendar year, starting in February, second one in June and the third one in October.

We currently just started our most recent academy a couple of days ago this week on the fourteenth, which is SJ54, and of course this will be for fiscal year twenty five-twenty six. On the graph below that, you will see the number of applications in relations to the amount hired and the percentage hired. You'll see a drop off in the number of applications as each academy class progresses up to SJ53 which started in June. We had a total of five eighty six applications for that academy which is just one off from SJ52. But the percentages of recruits that we hired increased by 7.1%.

So although the initial academies, SJ48, 49, and 50, which is last fiscal year, the percentages higher there are roughly 54%. We had a drop off in February Academy of fiscal year twenty 4.25% to 3.4%, but it's risen there to the last Academy. And in comparison to both fiscal years, we hired 102 police recruits in fiscal year twenty four-twenty five in comparison to 101 for fiscal year twenty three-twenty four. This is the target audiences that we are trying to recruit. In addition to this list, we have focused our recruitment efforts towards our local population in the city of San Jose and Greater Bay Area.

As you see, there is a variety of different avenues that we are using as tools to recruit from, but I will give you specifics to be able to make some sense of exactly what we are doing in regards to reaching out to our targeted audiences. Last year, Lieutenant Bui presented that he had lost, or our department had lost the ability to advertise via social media. And he went out and the department was able to hire Epic Productions, the advertisement company that we now have a five year contract with. They were in charge of creating media content, a new website that has been launched as of March. In regards to the content that they created, they created videos and photo content for advertisement on that is being used on all platforms, social media platforms, our new website, and also physical recruitment banners that have been placed at different locations throughout the city to include the San Jose Giants, which obviously they did very well this year winning the championship.

They've also outreached with a purpose and a plan using analytics. We've met with them monthly to make sure that our message is being disseminated in the fashion that we intended for it to be disseminated. And we started our analytics through all the social media platforms via Google, Meta, indeed.com, and a variety of others to really hone in on geotargeting and geofencing San Jose and the Greater Bay Area. We have met and we have now expanded out to the Sacramento Southern area to Monterey and out to the East in the Central Valley as a way to again focus our recruitment here locally, but not limit ourselves to just the Bay Area itself, but moving on to Sacramento and the Central Valley, and we'll continue to use these analytics to see what best is going to help us recruit the most qualified applicants into our department, and we will expand on those efforts as we continue getting information and reporting back from them. In addition to that, we believe mentorship is a very important part of the recruitment process.

What better way to get qualified applicants if they are mentored into what law enforcement career is? And in that sense we have expanded our cadet program. I believe that was something that was discussed last year in regards to the status of the cadet program. They are now under the recruitment chain of command, which is something that has occurred here in the last several months, which has really boosted the exposure and the assistance to our recruitment program to put law enforcement out in the local communities. We have approximately 50 Youth ages 14 through 22 which is what the program requires in regards to each.

Assist all aspects of our police department not just only recruiting, but Bureau of Field Operations. I'm sure you guys have seen them at different community events, at tabling, recruiting booths, and they are very visible in the sense of going out there and representing our police department in a professional way. And they're learning those tools in preparation for them themselves to seek a profession within the law enforcement community. We recently hired five of those cadets to part time positions, and that has taken fruition from a proposal that was submitted years ago by Deputy Chief Brian Spears. Those five cadets started their employment with the City of San Jose as of two days ago.

We're very excited for them. All five will have different assignments throughout the department to assist us in our recruitment efforts in the cadet program. And all five of them are also seeking a job in law enforcement which is a requirement for the cadet position, paid position. In addition to that, we have hired recently two cadets to the academy and there's two additional cadets that are in the process to be hired for the June academy. And we currently have over 20 past cadets within different assignments throughout the police department.

So we know it's a model that's very important to us, and we want to expand on that by the mentorship side of things. It's something that may not provide us numbers tomorrow, but it's investment in the future to make sure that we have a pipeline of qualified recruits coming into the police department knowing what they're getting themselves into and they're well prepared to be able to successfully complete the academy. In addition to that, we also partner with the 49ers Cal High program. It's a program long lasting, it's been around for over thirty years. We are releasing a set of three commercials highlighting current officers that played sports here locally and are now as officers in our police department.

And that's gonna be aired every Friday for the next forty two weeks throughout the high school year, televised broadcast on a weekly basis. So again, that goes out to the outreach for mentoring, reaching out to the youth in our community, as well as sports athletes that may be watching that are of age that are qualified to apply as a recruitment tool. We also have really dedicated ourselves to community based outreach in the sense that we're trying to leverage all aspects of our city to help us recruit. We know that city hall, we know that other entities, PR and S, we all help each other and try to make sure that if there's ever a need in hiring process that we utilize and we reach out to those entities to spread our message, whether it be through media outlets from each individual council member's office, we started that outreach, as well as the captains and BFO. They're the ones that deal with the four divisions and all the community groups throughout the city.

We've trained our community policing officers that bid different beats specifically for those reasons to train them to be satellite recruiters because they're the ones that are having the most interaction with our community and who best to recruit from our own to be able to explain what we do. So we've done that as well. And we're currently in the process of applying for the Department of Defense SkillBridge program. We have since halted going out to military bases because we have not been successful in applications. And part of the reason being is a lot of the potential applicants from these military bases ask if we offer the SkillBridge program.

And that's something that we don't. And the SkillBridge program, in a nutshell, it is a program which allows service members from all branches to seek prior to them coming back out to civilian life, and whoever, whatever company it is, it doesn't have to be law enforcement, it can be a tech company, it could be other forms of businesses that carry the SkillBridge program, the Department of Defense pays them for a period of four to six months with the goal of them being hired by that agency. And so we're currently in the process of applying with them. We're hopeful that we will bring SkillBridge to our police department, and therefore we will be back out at those military bases because we believe that's a missing link to us not being successful in recruitment of military personnel to our agency. In the college based recruitment, we know that, yes, we're doing a mentorship program that may take some years for fruition, but the college applicants are there in regards to age and requirements to become a police officer here in the city of San Jose.

So we build inroads and partnerships with the colleges in the Greater Bay Area, meeting with chiefs associations for the colleges and universities in the area to expand our outreach towards that demographic. So we're actively building those inroads to again really target this area not only through personal relationships but also through social media just explained through EPIC productions. This slide explaining the Academy reported ethnicities. Again, you know, laws here in the state of California require that you don't have to state what ethnicity you are, so you'll see a portion there that declined to state. But as of SGA fifty two, we've had a demographic of 9% Asian, 15% White, 41% decline to state, Hispanic and Latino 32%.

And in regards to the female recruits from SJ50 to 52, we've seen a decline, five in fifty, fifty one in four, fifty two in two. We do have Academy SJ53 who has we hired nine females, that's not listed up there, and SJ54 where we hired eight females. So for next year's report, you'll see the uptick in that number. And this is department overall. You know, February '1 at the request of this committee, it was requested that the department provide demographic information annually as part of the recruitment activity report.

So this is a fifth report where we contain this demographic information. In regards to comparison to the city, where we see kind of the big drop off and change is in Asian community. We're about 40% Asian, but we're still at the 15% number within our police department. And in regards to female representation, we're 13% female male 87%, which mirrors last year's report. I know that the 30 by 30 initiative that we are currently following, we're obviously well below that 30% female number.

And we are doing quite a few different things in regards to the recruitment of female candidates. We have an ongoing boot camp that we're currently in the process of organizing, a female boot camp. It's a multi week program to some sort of a mini academy, if you will, for them to be exposed and see the rigors and what police work is about. Aside from that, I think the mentorship part of things with the cadets has been huge. Out of the 50 cadets that we currently have, 27 are young females.

One of them is a cadet that got hired for this academy coming up. We too got hired for the part time job. And so we are really fostering and promoting that within our mentorship programs. I believe that is where I think we make the most impact for them to understand and realize what law enforcement and the benefits of that is. And so we are continuing to also help them help everyone out to include women with fitness, and being able to complete and be successful in the physical rigors of police work, and we host a Wednesday night fitness program every Wednesday, and it has been very successful when it comes to mentoring females in passing the physical agility test that is required by the state of California to be able to pass the academy.

If you're not able to pass that physically, you can't graduate the academy. So we are very involved in that mentorship portion of things to be able to have them be successful in passing not only the physical requirements of the job, but also helping everyone with the testing process and mentoring them with different things recruiting is doing right now in regards to assisting them with preparing for the hiring process in the academy. In regards to communications applications, last fiscal year or the year before 2022, 2023, the vacancy was about 22 vacancies for communications and dispatch. And last fiscal year, the vacancies have been reduced by half. And I'll be happy to say that by the end of this calendar year, we should have all positions for communications, dispatch, CSOs, also our records division completely filled.

So right now we are being very selective on who we're sending the backgrounds because we have the ability to do so. We have an enormous amount of applications that are coming in for a limited amount of open positions. And so right now we're currently backgrounding to completely fulfill all those non sworn communications and dispatch positions. And that's also something else that we highlight in the new website that we have, sjpdu.com, where we do highlight every position that we offer within the San Jose Police Department and not just sworn. There's a section there for CSOs, a section for dispatchers, public, the call takers, our PDS folks.

Our team that is in charge of this section has been doing a phenomenal job and I'll be happy to say by the end of this fiscal year there'll be no openings for any of those spots. I appreciate the time and we'll take any questions you may have at this point.

Well, thank you for the presentation. Do we have any public comments?

No public comment.

Fantastic. So, I'm gonna take my point of privilege. I'm gonna go ahead and ask ask a few questions before my colleagues. So, you read, you know, I've seen your recruitment presentation, you're reaching out to multiple entities including the San Jose giants and so on. Have you reached out to the shark, the barracuda, or even the earthquakes?

So, I know we've we have done some recruitment with the earthquakes. Part of our messaging is officer wellness and that's a big part of, I think, part of the recruitment process to attract folks to our department. So our San Jose Police men's soccer team that travels and competes in tournaments throughout the state, they've been very instrumental in the recruitment strategy and we've teamed up with the earthquakes to do the program Saturday Night Lights which has impacted several of the council districts in San Jose, and I know it's continuing to grow. So in that sense, we have. In regards to physically placing advertisement banners out there, it's just out of our price range.

It's just so expensive that we're not able to do it with our budget.

Okay. Well thank you for that. What are, I see that you're on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and and Hulu and so on. What about like advertisement on TikToks, YouTube, which is where the, you know, the younger generation really get on it. Just a little clips of what it is to become a police officer, what are the benefits, just like thirty second bleep, if you will. Have you guys thought of that?

Yes, I'm glad you asked that. I think we have been working on that since we got Epic. We don't have anybody assigned at our recruiting unit. We have two swarm full time recruiters to be able to do all of this, so we don't have an in house social media person to run all our handles. And so part of the two of the cadets that just got hired, that's gonna be their assignment, and they're being trained to be able to utilize equipment and also policies and communication to really ramp up our recruitment efforts on those platforms.

And exactly what you just mentioned, Councilmember Doan, is what we're working currently on putting out broadcasting, creating to for it to be attractive and attract applicants in the younger generation of folks that are looking at potentially being police officers here in San Jose. So we are currently working on that.

Well thank you. And what are the incentives for someone who want to become a police officer beside all the benefit? Is there a sign in, sign on bonus and any of that?

We currently don't offer any of that in San Jose other than for lateral applicants. Lateral applicants have a $20,000 sign on bonus. But if you're a police entry, you know, recruit, there is no incentives tied to their application or employment.

And then apart from Vault, what is not currently running or the partnership that could be further deepened to create a more consistent flow of qualified applicants?

So I think within the police department we don't have anything else that's dormant, if you will, right now, Volt, since the pandemic took a hit. And that is the other aspect of our efforts to try to revive that, especially the College Age Vault program where they could potentially get college credits in regards to their volunteer experience and time with the police department. And so I think that is something that we're going to be working on and part of it has been getting building those inroads with all the community colleges and universities in the area. So once we have that up and running again, we'll have a way to disseminate that information effectively.

Yeah, and I'm glad that your next recruitment class will hire on a few more female police officer and I would hope that someday we'll meet that 30% plan including also the Asian American, right, where the community continue to rise to above 40% and we're at I believe about 15% and we need to have a little more recruitment on that. But I see that the percentage is rising. The next class will be probably one of the larger class for many years. And thank you for your hard work. I'm there to support you and you know, anything we can do to to support you on on recruit and retention, please reach out to my office.

Thank you for everything you do. And now I'm gonna go to council member, council member Mulcahy.

Thank you. Thanks captain and lieutenant for the report today. Just a couple of questions on so when, you sort of have that chart with the total applicants, right? So a few years back we were in the 6,000 range, but now closer to the just above 2,000 range, but capture right, out of that you're up 7% in terms of applicants to graduates, right. So do you when you're looking at that chart yourself, new to the role in February, but when you're looking at that work, how do you sort of view that decline in applicants and I know we haven't changed our qualifications, we have such high standards in San Jose.

How do you sort of remedy that in your own mind like wow, we're down but we're capturing and graduating a higher number?

Part of that has to do with something that we implemented in 2020, kind of a pre screening tool which an interest card instead of an application. We get a lot of applicants prior to that that would apply without reading the qualifications, and that would count as an application, but they would be disqualified immediately because they didn't meet the educational requirement, or they were not of age, for another reason. So, when we go to events, we have potential applicants fill out an interest card, That's something that we start communicating with them in regards to the qualifications. And I think that is part of the reason for the drop off in applications, but better hiring percentages because we are now educating some of the potential applicants to the qualifications. Sometimes they just don't read them, read over them, or think that 30 units is enough, although it says 40, and they're working towards 40, and they apply only to get disqualified during that first initial process.

So I think that has a lot to do with the drop off in apps, and also our education and our efforts going out when we do go out and meet with the communities. This is exactly what you need to be able to apply. And what we see in a lot of the drop offs of applications is they fail during the first stage because they did not meet the qualifications. And sometimes it has to do with attention to detail and they're not paying attention to what it is that they need to do, they just apply. So I think that education and pre employment or pre application communication that we have with them has been a reason why.

We've also focused our efforts here in the area where we're not going throughout The United States to recruit. And so I think we are trying to do our best to build our department to represent the community that we serve and what better way than to start from within, and I think also that change has risen in the amount of hiring percentages because now we're retaining officers that are from the area and they're choosing to stay because they're rooted here. And so I think that those are part of the reasons why, and I think that is why we are very excited and invested in the mentorship portion of things. Although, again, that may not pay dividends tomorrow, it's going to pay dividends years from now, and we'll see the fruits of those labors down the road, and I think that's part of the reason we're getting more qualified folks that are joining our ranks.

I'm really glad I asked the question because I think if most people look at those numbers they think, oh my gosh, we're on a decline, but the reality is you've created a much more efficient process that actually speaks to the work you've done to refine kind of the intake, right? And the intentionality around how you're and who you're recruiting to, right? Organizations that might recruit across the country and then they see the sticker shock of Silicon Valley, right? So being and recruiting from the area is a super intentional and I appreciate the explanation. Maybe there's a way to qualify that slide for future that sort of speaks to the work you've done to make that a right sized number for the work that we're trying to do on the recruitment side.

And then do you know in the pool that you're recruiting against and this is kind of a naive question, are we compete like if somebody is in the applicant pool, do we know if they're applying to another public safety program similar to San Jose somewhere else?

We do find that information out once they get into the background stage of things because that's part of the information that they release to the backgrounder. But initially, it's not information that they disclose. We do get a lot of information just word-of-mouth when they come and participate in our Wednesday night fitness. That's where we learn from applicants that they're currently applying to other agencies. And I think the success and the interactions that we have at the recruiting unit with San Jose has helped us compete with other agencies that make potentially more money than us because a lot of it is figures with a lot of these applicants.

Where they see. The human interaction and that we have here at the police department in San Jose where they lack other places. Where there's no interaction there's no communication back and forth during the application process. Whereas here we're more open to the mentorship side of things. And so, we've had several applicants that have told us, you know, I'm hired in a different department, I could get hired there, I could make more, but I've chosen you guys for the professionalism and the contact that we have had in building that relationship through these different programs that we offer.

Just a couple of other minor things, but important to recognize that comms positions fill, that's fantastic news. And then on the cadets, I've seen many of the cadets out at different events and I noticed several young women in that program. So I think that speaks to the effort around 30% by 30. But the other thing I was at an event and there was an ROTC group from Del Mar High School. And they were so poised, they reminded me very much of our young cadets.

They were there for kind of being ambassadors of the event. And I asked them if they were aware of the cadet program and these two that I in particular that I spoke to were not. So that if you're not recruiting to some of the ROTC high school programs, that might be a good place to go for the cadet program.

And if I may, we are starting that outreach to it's just not mentorship within our cadets, it's to grow our cadet program by going out and soliciting recruitment from other groups such as those. We build relationships with SVCTE, which is similar to the RO ROTC program that you're talking about off of Hillsdale. We have a really good relationship with them. We're also mentoring them, although not all of them will become our cadets because they're in their own program. We've opened up our house and our home at the police department to treat them like our cadets and have them go through the experiences of our police department.

So, we have grown those relationships with other groups around San Jose and we'll continue to do so.

Thank you. And with that, I'll move to accept the report.

Second. Thank you. Just a couple more quick question. Have have your department look at marketing specialist outside of the department to help to really reach out to even more or a very specific group of people for that matter?

Currently, right now, as you know, Lieutenant Vallejo explained, we took over in February '25. And in doing so, we changed the structure entirely of the Bureau of Administration. Now from day one to year one through the field training program, we are going to be responsible for those applicants and try to get them through. We have been working with other marketing through Epic and through Cal High. However, working through the fiscal portion of that and getting those programs started, it just got kicked off like probably two weeks ago.

But moving forward, our plan is I mean the the commitment I'm giving the council as I did to chief Joseph is this is my last hurrah. My goal is to we have really good staff between myself, lieutenant Vallejo, lieutenant Nasser, who is in charge of the academy, and lieutenant Seymour, who's in charge of the field training office. Our goal and the only thing that we're trying to accomplish moving forward is to inspire and motivate, get some officers here to get this place staffed because I do remember being here when it was full staff. All the complaints we have of our line officers generally revolve around staffing. So our goal is to do what we can to get folks here that want this as their profession, not as a job.

Local community members, people that are pumped up to come to work and be enjoy police work. This is not a job that has to be a negative, and there's a lot of negative portions of this, job, but there's so many more amazing, you know, experiences you can have in this profession. And after twenty seven years, I still love this job. I've seen quite a few of the council at events. It's a great job.

We need to aspire and motivate these young guys and get them into this job for the right reasons. Not for a job, but as a profession. To be a master of your trade and serve the community, serve themselves, serve the council as best they can. All the things you brought up, the barracudas, the the sharks, are all within reach. I've let, lieutenant Vallejo, proverbially off the leash, to be as creative as he wants to be.

And our goal is before I retire, I want to get us as close to full staffing as possible while maintaining the standard that we expect. And I assure you that we've already are doing that now. We're seeing some dramatic changes in our police academy to hold them accountable. Our taxpayers money are paying them to go to the police academy. They shouldn't get bad grades.

This last academy by implementing a new seniority process, day one, they're fighting to be who's number one, and their seniority is now gonna be that. So if you're the best cop top cop, you're gonna be the lowest badge number or the the best seniority. We're now seeing our academics go up. We're seeing the female recruits coming in more prepared. So when they they have to go through the red man or the HELA event where they have to physically, take down a combative suspect, they're prepared. Not only they're prepared, they're excited about it. I was there today, saw two of our females, one of which is about five foot one. She let it rip. And I was pumped, she was pumped. It's great to see.

It's all about trying to get these folks excited about it and carry that on through a thirty year career, keep them healthy, keep them happy, and it can be done. And we're well on our way moving forward since February. We're we're hitting track.

Thank you. I I think I it's not only a career, a profession, but a way of life. And don't forget the 600 veterans over at San Jose State. That would be a great resource too as well.

And and that is a great point, Councilman Dawn. That is what the SkillBridge programs can give us. A lot of those military service member were slipping through and they have life experience, they have responsibility, they have all a lot of the things that you know the military provides them through their service. And with SkillBridge I think that we're gonna be able to breach that gap and bring in a lot more service members and you know give them a job and take them into another family after they've served our country, especially some of these folks that have been in, you know, war for so long.

Thank you. And keep up the good work. Unfortunately, my son won't be joining yet. He'll he'll join the fire department eventually. No other, comments or question. Let's go to vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Thank you. Number three, we have city generated tow services delivery model status report. That'll be come from captain Donahue.

Good afternoon, Chair and Council members. I'm Captain Steve Donnie of the San Jose Police Department. I oversee the support services division. Today, I'll be walking you through an update on our city generated tow services program, how it's working, what we're seeing that's going well, and what comes next. This program was designed to modernize how the city handles towing.

And when we say city generated tows, what we're talking about are tows requested by city departments, for example, the police department, Beautify San Jose through PRNS, or the Department of Transportation. Back in 2019, the city auditor's tow services report recommended moving contract oversight from code enforcement to the police department, and that transition is now complete. In August 2023, we brought on Autura as our tow administrator. And then in February 3, we launched Autura's ARIES system. This is a fully digital tow management software platform that covers dispatch, impound, billing, and reporting.

Officers can now request a tow from their patrol car through their computer aided dispatch system, they can fill out a tow slip from their mobile data terminals, and they can actually track tow trucks on their cell phones like Uber. It's pretty cool. When we first launched, the annual service cost was just under 5 and $70,000 paid annually. When we took it over, the first thing we did at the police department is we changed that to be billed quarterly so that we could deduct breaches when tows were refused by the tow companies. That amount, that $570,000, was meant to cover towing standards across the city.

However, as the program grew, that cost went up significantly for things like new efforts like the Olive program, the vehicle registration enforcement program, and large scale projects like Columbus Park. As you know, earlier this year the City Council approved an additional $200,000 to reimburse for some of the oversized lived in vehicle disposals when they're valued at $500 or less. Since the ARIES system went live, we've seen real progress. From June through August, we processed almost 3,900 tow requests. About 2,200 of those were returned to their owners and several 100 were disposed of.

The system has made our operations faster, more consistent, and easier to coordinate between departments including DOT and PRNS. One of the best examples of the new system was the towing and abatement at Columbus Park. Between August 18 and September 11, 121 vehicles were towed. 79 of those were RVs and 114 vehicles were disposed of. This was a major interdepartmental effort between housing, PR and S, the police department, and motor body tow.

There was exceptional communication and collaboration to make that cleanup happen. In addition, we've seen big improvements in billing with Ares software. We're now centralized and digital, which means we have cleaner data, faster reviews, and fewer duplicate charges. Of course there's still challenge areas. The biggest challenge we're having now is tow refusals.

Often these are because yards are full or specialized drivers are unavailable at the time. The second contract amendment with Atura that you, the council, approved on September 30 will raise the fine for refusals of an oversized vehicle from $500 to $2,500 Now we're seeing that the $500 fine was having no effect, so our expectation is this $2,500 fine will have an effect and will stop those refusals. Looking ahead, at the Police Department we expect to tow about 10 RVs per month for a total of about 100 the rest of this fiscal year, while PRNS is looking at about 50 and DOT is at about 35. We're continuing to work with Autura, the city attorney and the city manager's office to keep our contracts and funding aligned with what the real needs are in the field. The next step is rolling out the ARIES software department wide, and the updated duty manual sections should be published early to mid November.

Altura is finishing up its CJIS compliance, and we're building out a public web portal. Now this is going to allow the public to find their vehicle, pay their towing fees, communicate with the tow yards directly, and download their receipts. This is going to be more transparent and customer friendly. So in short, this new tow services model has modernized San Jose's towing, it's brought efficiency, accountability, and better customer service, and it's taken a paper heavy process and brought it into a new age. We're going to keep fine tuning the system, but ultimately we've seen great improvements over the last year. Thank you. I'm now here for your questions.

Thank you for the presentation. Do we have any public comments?

No public comment.

I'm going to go to council member Torillos.

Thank you for the detailed report. I think it's really great to see all of the operational improvements, the increases to efficiency here, and particularly excited to see that we're revisiting some of the fines for refusal of oversized vehicles. On my one on ones with Captain Myriad, this is something that has come up as just a challenge is when we see the operators refusing to take some of these larger vehicles posing a challenge to things like the olive program and some of our increased enforcement of expired registrations. So look forward to seeing a report in a future committee meeting in terms of if we're seeing that move the needle in terms of the number of these large vehicles that are being refused. So overall very happy with this report and I'd like to move acceptance of the report. Thank

you. I do have just one question. The memo included like $600,000 increase to the police department non personnel equipment budget. How confidence are we that these additional resources will cover all foreseeable surges? Just like the $252,000 from the Columbus Park. And what is the fiscal risk of actual cost exceed that estimate?

Thank you very much council member for your question. That's a difficult question to answer. To be totally honest with you, that is a projection for what we believe that we are going to have to pay for the rest of the year at the level we're at towing right now. If we have big projects come up like Columbus Park again, it's going to be more. Columbus Park was a quarter of $1,000,000 to be able to pay for that project just for the towing alone. So if something like that were to happen again, we're going to need more money to do it. But assuming that we stay at that 100 tows for the PD, 35 for DOT, and 50 for PRNS for the rest of the year. That additional money should cover it.

Well thank you. And I'm hoping that we continue with the program so that way we don't have these large encampment and then we have to put out this large amount of money in order to rectify the situation. With that, there's no other comments or question. Let's vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Okay. We go to item number four. City manager office, the emergency management work plan priority annual report that'll be presented by Ray Reardon and Alvin Galang.

Good afternoon, chair, committee members, staff members, members of the public. My name is Ray Reardon. I'm the director of the office of emergency management, city manager's office. And it's gonna be our opportunity today to present to you some information about how our work plan priorities are pulled together, and information about our annual report. I'm joined today by with Alvin Galang, an assistant to the city manager in our office.

Over the next few minutes, we'll cover the key results under each of the OEMs four program objectives, which are one, the city has a plan to tackle any emergency two, residents, businesses and employees are ready to take action and able to answer a call to action three, the public trusts the city to provide vital information at a critical time and four, responses optimized through technology.

Before

we continue, I'd like to remind all of you what OEM's mission and vision statements are. We envision a resilient city of San Jose. While we continue to do what we can to prevent and mitigate the effects and results of an emergency or disaster, we will do our best to ensure that the city of San Jose remains resilient. Our mission is to provide leadership to the City of San Jose's emergency management organization, planning and coordination of programs, functions and supporting activities to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies and disasters. At this time, I'll turn it over to Alvin to carry on the rest of the presentation.

Thank you, Ray. Good afternoon, committee members, committee chair, staff, members of the public. My name is Alvin Golang and I'm an assistant city manager in the city manager's office of emergency management. As mentioned, here are the four program objectives that guide the work of the office of emergency management beginning with the first. The city has a plan to tackle any emergency.

For fiscal year twenty twenty five-twenty six, the Office of Emergency Management will continue to develop an evacuation response plan to supplement the existing evacuation support annex. With an increased focus on the wildland urban interface, the plan would identify who implements the emergency and which software to use to identify areas of concern, establish clear roles and responsibilities during a potential evacuation, define procedures, determine who to issue how to issue alerts, and ensure compliance with regulatory and safety standards. To continue building emergency operations center position competency, we will advance our multi year training and exercise program which will help to ensure that our EOC staff are ready to tackle any emergency. Additionally, in 2026 we'll have the Super Bowl, NCAA men's basketball tournament and FIFA World Cup events here in the region. OEM will implement our trainings, activities and plans that we have created specifically for these events.

Residents, businesses and employees are ready to take action and able to answer a call to action. Over the last few years, OEM has been able to ensure a 90% completion rate of city staff that have completed disaster service worker training requirements and for fiscal year twenty five-twenty six we will continue to ensure that number remains constant improves. OEM will also continue to outreach with community partners including schools, faith based organizations and other community based organizations as we look to expand our community emergency response team or CERT trainings into more areas of the city. And specific to our CERT trainings, OEM will explore additional opportunities and methods on how to encourage more residents to utilize any of the three different formats of CERT training with the overarching goal of getting 10% of the city population trained in disaster preparedness. The public trusts the city to provide vital information.

The Office of Emergency Management provides personal emergency preparedness presentations also called PEPs to residents that are interested in a broader overview of disaster preparedness. OEM will explore partnership opportunities to build additional relationships within and among particularly underserved and marginalized neighborhoods and communities so that we can continue to reach over a thousand residents a year through PEPs and other outreach and education events. With eight activations of the city's emergency management organization, the public information team was hyper focused on access and functional needs. Communications will continue to deliver timely public information in multiple languages and through multiple channels including social media. And OEM will continue to work closely with our partners including the County, Valley Water and PG and E to coordinate information that should go out during any hazard, incident, or emergency.

And response is optimized through technology. As you may already know the city has a brand new state of the art emergency operation center and OEM will ensure that the EOC is ready for the sports and special events in 2026. Artificial intelligence has found its way into emergency management. With that OEM will explore how to best utilize and implement AI as well as other digital and online based platforms to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and efficacy of processes and procedures that prepare for respond to and recover from disasters and emergency. And finally, the emergency management accreditation program and the emergency management standard by EMAP are intended to promote consistent quality in emergency management programs, thus providing tangible benefits to the community and public infrastructure these programs serve.

OEM will examine and analyze the feasibility and suitability of applying for eMAP accreditation which would make the city of San Jose the first and only eMAP accredited city in the state of California. And that concludes our presentation. We welcome any comments or questions that the committee may have.

Thank you for your presentation. Do you have any public comments?

No public comment.

Anything comments or question from our colleagues? No. I do have one question. Is the EOC built to withstand an eight point zero earthquake?

It is built to the essential facility standards, so it should survive that. The structure and the piers that were placed beneath the EOC makes it very suitable for earthquake response.

Fantastic. I think we're gonna go to Council Member Mulcahy.

Thanks Ray, and just a quick question on CERT. Representing District six, we've got a pretty involved collection of folks that are involved with CERT and continue to be excited about it and want to create more opportunities. How are we, one of the things that I hear from them though is that sort of on a citywide basis, they don't sort of feel coordinated with other council districts and other CERT organizations throughout the city. Do we have any plans to sort of move that forward in a way that has a staff member that's sort of engaged in pulling all this and harnessing that energy?

I'll turn that over to Alvin. He oversees that program.

Thank you for that question. And so council member we have been working with a nonprofit, the San Jose neighborhood cert folks. And they have developed district leaders in every district. And so you know it's one thing for the city of San Jose to quote unquote control the cert program. It's another thing to empower those neighborhood leaders to really mobilize and really organize themselves. And so we are working closely with our nonprofit organization who again has established district leaders within every district to make sure that that communication in that organization happens.

And I can't remember what the number was, but I think a number exceeded 300 graduates out of the program.

This past fiscal year, yes.

And is that made possible because there's an online portion where it used to be all in person? I think when I was running for office, you should be certain and I couldn't do it because it takes so much time. But now I understand you can do it online. Has that made a big difference in that way?

That is correct. Because we have now three different formats of the training that has basically added more variety or more options for folks to and I get it, hours is a lot of time to dedicate and to invest. But because of those different formats, we have seen an increase in the number of cert graduates every year.

Great, thank you. And with that I'll move to accept the report.

Second. Let's vote.

That motion passes unanimously.

Okay. Open forum. Any public comments?

No public comment.

Well, meeting adjourned.