City Council - Regular Meeting

Recording in progress

Okay, so it is 7.06, 7.05, 7.06, and I'm calling the City of San Leandro City Council meeting to order. Today is Monday, July 13th. I will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Please stand if you're able to. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Madam Clerk, would you please take roll to establish quorum.

Council Member James Aguilar.

Present.

Council Member Victor Aguilar is absent. Council Member Bolt.

Present.

Council Member Bowen. Present. Council Member Simon is absent. Vice Mayor Rivero-Swelton. Present. Mayor Gonzalez.

Present. The City of San Leone conducts orderly meetings to fulfill its mandate. Indiscriminatory statements or conduct that would potentially violate the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and or the California Fair Employment and Housing Act California Penal Code sections 4, 3, or 415 are per se disruptive to a meeting and will not be tolerated. Please see the City Council Handbook and City Council Meeting Rules of Decorum for more information. Madam Clerk, your announcement, please.

If you would like to make a public comment during the meeting, you can do so in person or via Zoom. If you are present at the meeting, please complete a speaker card and submit it to the city clerk before the item is presented. If you wish to participate in public comment via Zoom, you can use the raise your hand tool when the item is called. During the public comment session, speakers will be invited to speak and will have a set time to share their comments. A countdown timer will appear for their convenience and when the time is up, the microphone will be muted. All raised hands outside of public comment will be lowered to avoid confusion. Once public comment is opened, hands may be raised to speak.

Okay, I consider City Manager Yoon, I think you've got an announcement for us.

Yes, thank you, Mayor, good evening. The fourth annual San Leandro Restaurant Week is next week from July 19th through the 26th. Join the fun by enjoying specials at your favorite restaurants and participate in San Leandro Restaurant Week Challenge for a chance to have your meals reimbursed. Over 20 restaurants are participating with multiple offering one time and three course meal specials. So learn more at sanleandro.org slash restaurant week.

And thank you. So even though it's not specifically a city sponsored event, we are supportive and collaborative with our Chamber of Commerce. It's important that we support our business community. So with that, I don't believe there's any reportable action on closed session, but I will just turn to my left and confirm. There we go, so that is correct. So let's move on to item number four, which is presentations. Tonight, during our work session, we've got a couple of presentations. The first one involves AC Transit budget and service updates, and we've got Diane Castleberry and Owen Christopherson here to present and share.

Good morning. So I'm Diana Castleberry. I'm an external affairs rep for AC Transit. It's my pleasure to be here today. I will talk about essential role of AC Transit plays in San Leandro and the East Bay alongside my AC Transit colleague, transportation planner Owen Christopherson. We'll also directly address our current budget challenges. AC Transit is a special district serving 13 cities and eight unincorporated communities across Alameda and Contra Costa counties. We carry more than 3 million riders each month and are governed by a publicly elected board of directors. Nearly two thirds of our riders are low income, making AC Transit an essential lifeline for all communities we serve. We're proud to have received the top honor as outstanding public transportation system in the United States in 2023. We provide 40 million rides every year, more than 140,000 riders aboard our buses on a typical weekday. And when school returns, at least 30,000 students will depend on us to get safely to and from class each day. In February, March and April, we delivered our first three straight months of year over year ridership growth since the pandemic. AC Transit supports more than 5,100 jobs across the East Bay. More than half of those jobs are created outside our agency. Together, they generate over $604 million in annual wages, and they inject nearly $1 billion into the East Bay economy every year. For over a quarter century, AC Transit has led the nation in zero-emission buses. Today, our fleet of 58 zero-emission buses, that's out of some 635 buses, are eliminating any tailpipe emissions from our streets. That leadership earned AC Transit a $40 million federal investment to launch the transit's industry-first zero-emission bus university, known as ZEBU. Alongside Chabot College and UnionATU Local 192, Zeb U will help our employees earn associate degrees while preparing the clean transit workforce of tomorrow. We're making transit more affordable, faster, and safer. On this slide, you'll see the E-ZPass program, which has unlimited rides at deep discounts at participating employers, colleges, and communities. Clipper Start gives income-eligible adults half off every ride. We redesigned 104 of our bus lines last summer under what is called the Realign Network. We have AI-powered cameras mounted inside buses to help keep bus lanes and bus stops clear, improving safety and reliability. AC Transit riders, as mentioned, nearly two-thirds are low-income, more than half earn less than $50,000 a year, below the federal poverty level in one of the nation's most expensive regions. 65% of our riders are transit-dependent. Service cuts would not be an inconvenience. They would upend the lives of those who rely most on AC Transit. You often hear the phrase, good stewards of public dollars. Simply put, it means making every taxpayer dollar count. This month, we launched the Multilingual Fair Required Fair Compliance Campaign. Also, a comprehensive California state auditor review found that AC Transit syncs service well with other East Bay bus agencies. I'm sorry, yes. And our collective real challenges are sustainable funding, not mismanagement. What's more, an independent review confirmed average annual savings of $33 million since 2020. This commitment to making every taxpayer dollar count is why we have a top tier AA plus credit rating. When the cost of running our bus network is rising faster than revenue supporting it, the result is a fiscal cliff. So what's behind this? Federal pandemic relief funding is gone, regional sales tax revenues have flattened, did it just, have flattened, and fare revenue growth has slowed. Fuel costs are up 28%, bus maintenance parts have increased 14%, and buying new buses have surged 35%. So you can see it's a bit lopsided, it's not sustainable. We've taken action, in the last fiscal year alone, we tightened our belt by $9 million. We've done this by hiring only four positions that directly support service. We scaled back temporary service staffing, saving roughly two million annually. We brought outside professional services in-house, and we're partnering with other agencies to purchase goods and services for less. We've even temporarily restructured payments to our pension plan to preserve cash, so we're making every taxpayer dollar count. AC Transit projects a $200 million deficit over the next four years that translates into a funding gap of at least 50 million annually beginning in 2027. Without long-term sustainable funding, service reductions of up to 16% become unavoidable. The human impact is that potential layoffs would be about 300 employees and this is our looming service workforce and community crisis. We've been thrown a lifeline, but it's not a permanent solution. It's a state bridge loan, and it's exactly that, a loan, not a bailout, and it must be repaid with interest. AC Transit's share is $55 million, enough to close this year's budget gap and avoid service cuts today. But next summer, the loan is gone, reserves are exhausted, and the funding challenges return. That's why hope now rests with the Connect Bay Area Act. This measure would ask voters in five Bay Area counties, including Alameda County, to approve a 14-year half-cent sales tax, and then one cent in San Francisco. If approved, it would generate an estimated $980 million annually for Bay Area buses, trains, and ferries. AC Transit would receive approximately $52 million each year, helping to protect existing bus service and prevent layoffs. Without long-term funding, our bus network remains at risk. I now invite my colleague Owen to provide an overview on our proposed contingency service plan.

Good evening, Council.

My name is Owen Christofferson, Transportation Planner with AC Transit.

So you've heard from Ms. Castleberry about the local and regional importance of AC Transit as an agency and the folks we serve, as well as the very serious financial challenges that we're facing. So, you know, our strategy and our goal going into this, you know, is plan for the worst and hope for the best, right? So the plan that I'm about to talk to you about, we hope we will never have to use it, but we do need to do that planning work anyway. The board of directors gave us some guiding principles, which included maintaining the realign network, which is a big network redesign recently completed, miminizing complete service eliminations, instead focusing on span and frequency reductions, restructuring our high cost services, and proportionally impacting service across our network. So AC Transit, we have something called our primary route network, and this is something that we really strove to protect. This includes the lines on your screen here, which are able to be preserved at 15 minutes or better on weekdays. Other lines, which include the 97, we are unfortunately having to make some cuts, but we are able to maintain at least every 30-minute service and service hours at least 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. And within this group of the backbone of the network, 93% of the lines remain unchanged. So for the city of San Leandro, as I said, we're gonna have to make some small cuts to the nine, which is going to result in some frequency reductions early in the morning and later in the evening. Line 97 is also unfortunately getting some more significant cuts from kind of 15 minute daily service, 20 minute evening to 30 minute all day. And then there are also some other both hourly frequency and hours of operation reductions that will happen on the other lines serving San Leandro, including the 28, 34, 35, 40, and 93. And if you have some questions about those specific lines, I can give you those details later. The Tempo or Bus Rapid Transit and our all-night service are not going to be affected. Just talk quickly about the road ahead, what this is gonna look like for the next year or so. On August 12th, 2026, the AC Transit Board of Directors is expected to set a public hearing, which would happen on October 14th. As you all know, the general election is November 3rd. If no new funding is secured, we would have a board meeting on November 8th. which would result in a kind of a plan approval on December 9th for service changes under this plan of June 13th, 2027. So that's when folks, if no new funding is secured, would see the specific changes. And that's it. I'm happy to talk more about the lines. And of course, we are very interested in hearing the community's feedback about this plan. You can scan the QR code on your screen to submit comments. you can email planning at actransit.org, and to learn more information about the plan, including these specific line-by-line recommendations, you can visit actransit.org slash contingency dash plan. Thank you very much.

And Ms. Castleberry, was that it? For both of you, perfect. So in the spirit of your last comment of hearing from the community, we'd like to just start with public comment on this item. We'll hear from the public and then we'll come back for clarifying questions and discussion. So Madam Clerk, how many cards do we have for public comment on this item?

Mayor, we have received two cards from the community, however, they're not for this item.

Okay, and do we have hands online?

Checking right now to see if we have any hands raised online. We have two hands raised online.

Okay, so we've open and closed public comment in person. We will open public comment online.

Thank you. Our first online speaker is Alvaro Ramos.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

All right. So I wanted to start off with a reminder that our current car dependent society is not sustainable and it's too expensive for cities to maintain and it contributes to increased municipal debt. which is why we need more public resources and we need to spend less on infrastructure. I mean, the United States has the most expensive transportation system in the world, but we have a situation of cars trapping people in traffic for hours, bus stops with no practical bus service, And when I talk about oil shock, it's not really about the gas prices, even though, yes, that is an issue, I acknowledge, especially for households. But it's about a fuel shortage, not having enough oil supply to properly fuel an oil-dependent society, And all the international countries are planning and rationing their fuel sources, but the United States thinks it's the exception to that, which makes us unprepared to face the real consequences. We should be shielding our residents from oil shock with public transportation. And I also have an issue with the creation of hostile public spaces that are unwelcoming and cruel to people. Specifically, you know, when I the at bus stops, you got bus benches that really should be replaced with more comfortable benches that don't slant at an angle because you don't want people sitting on them or don't have bars on them. And I also am concerned about AC transits use of AI because AI needs data centers which contributes to water pollution, air pollution and higher energy costs for households. I think where we really need bus lanes around here is going to be on East 14th and Mission Boulevard and Bancroft Avenue and Hesperian Boulevard. And we need to work on higher income riders riding public transit as well.

Thank you sir your time has elapsed. Our next online speaker is Douglas Spalding.

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I regret to say I'm coming to the presentation late, but I fully support everything that Alvaro just said. Thank you for your incisive analysis always. I agree with the need to extend the bus system. I would like to see For example, the rapid transit bus that was developed by my good friend, Kathleen O'Sullivan, extended from the San Leandro BART station to Bayfair and Hayward and like the whole corridor down East 14th and Mission Boulevard. So I fully support public transit, despite other disappointments and the development of my children, I am proud to say that they are Oakland school kids and they take the bus everywhere. And my daughter has ridden the infamous 57 bus every day. So I also, I'll be voting for the November ballot issue, but I'm just curious what you're basing your service cuts on, like the 97 bus, I know well, because that's a bus that my students in San Lorenzo use a lot. And the number nine bus, I think is used by working people out. I mean, you know, students and working people, who else is riding the bus except me when I, you know, my car breaks down. So I like to better understand that the rationale for those cuts, you know, it does make some sense earlier in the morning, later in the evening, not as many riders, but I hate to see the cuts. Thank you.

Thank you. Mayor, there are no more hands raised online.

So with that, we will close public comment. And I will afford our presenters the opportunity to speak should you wish to respond to either of the comments, either or both inclusively.

Yeah, I'll just, this is Owen Christopherson, transportation planner with AC Transit. I'll just respond to the comments about the 97 and kind of the methodology for how we developed these service cuts. As you can imagine, this was not an easy task, and this was not a task that myself or any planners look forward to or want to really complete. So we... The goal, as I said, was to maintain as much service as possible on that realign network, excuse me, on the primary route network, which is a combination of not only routes that are high productivity, high ridership, but also routes with steady ridership in equity priority communities and other communities. Every service hour that we cut on one bus, we cut that so that we could preserve service on another part of the system. And these, as I said, these were very challenging cuts. These were not cuts that we made wholesale, but we the you know the minimum service standards for uh the primary route network uh which is that that 97 uh line is included in that is uh 30 minutes um so we were you know as i said we were able to at least maintain that that 30-minute service uh all day um and um but yeah just know that every every decision that we made uh around uh hours was to you know really be able to allocate really even down to just the dozens or the tens of service hours to other parts of the network that needed it just as much as this area. I also just wanted to reemphasize again that this is not a plan that is set to go into effect. If new funding is secured this fall, the Board of Directors of AC Transit will not move forward with this plan.

Okay, thank you. At this point in time, we'll go to council members for their questions, comments, beginning with Council Member Bowen.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for the presentations. Can we go to the slide before, I think slide 12? Yeah, the one, maybe the one before this. It was, maybe the one before this. I don't know which slide it is, apparently. It's the one that had about the different lines and potential changes, the 90 minutes, this one.

Yeah, no, not this one.

This one, yes. I'm interested in line 40, the one that cuts down Bancroft. I sit on ACTC as Supervisor Tam's representative, and I also sit on the policy committee and focus a lot on the Safe Houses School and the student... transit pass my kids have now as middle schoolers got their clipper card so they're really excited to start to use it. I'm an incoming high schooler and so this idea is how do I get all of my kids to three different schools before school starts and the bus is how we're planning on doing that. And so two things, one, I'm looking at the route, the stop times for 40, and at one point, Bancroft Middle School, one of the big concerns at the bus stop was students getting out of school and a lot of kids running across the streets, jaywalking and just trying to figure out, not paying attention necessarily to red lights, and it was because they were trying to catch the 40 bus. And at one point, I believe AC Transit had adjusted the time to give the students a little bit more time. I just wanted to confirm if that's still the case, because I could be misunderstanding the bus schedule. I think there's a 3.02 and then a 3.22.

Yeah, so thank you very much for your comment, Councilmember. So the 40, yeah, so the 40 is currently runs kind of 10-minute frequencies during the day and 20-minute frequencies in the evening, kind of runs weekdays 6 a.m. to 12, all the way through to 12.30 a.m. midnight. For the portion of the 40 in between Eastmont Transit Center and Bayford BART, the service is going to be reduced to 24 minutes. That's going to be a 24-minute bus all day, and service is going to begin at 4 a.m. actually a little earlier and that's to offset due to this discontinuation of another OWL line. And what I'll say as well about this planning process is that at this point we haven't developed our exact schedule but we know how important those school routes are and I've noted your comment and I will absolutely pass that through to our scheduling department Obviously, we don't want to see this plan move forward, but in the case that that is the case, and we will work on that, yeah.

Excellent. On the schedule on ACTransit.org, it says it's effective August 10th, 2025. So I just want to make sure if we can get some feedback on that, because it's a 20-minute interval. But if there's any opportunity for that bus to be just a few minutes later, it will significantly increase safety at the middle school and also at the high school because kids are desperate to catch the bus before, would not wait another 20 minutes.

Absolutely, and Council Member, just so that I understand, are you referring to the current schedule right now where there's an existing problem or was this something that was already tweaked?

do you remember it was already tweaked but i'm looking at the schedule now that says effective august 10 2025 and i just want to make sure that when we're talking about any proposed changes that that doesn't get lost again absolutely um that that's a significant barrier for the students and obviously just again to reiterate that that line is so important for all of our students in the community

absolutely thank you and yeah we will absolutely be looking at that you know if if we do have to move forward with this plan there's going to be a lot of work around scheduling and coordination as you can imagine because not just our services will be affected but bart's as well and so we're really going to be looking at like every time point throughout the day thank you

I would just add one thing is with the scheduling coordination with the schools. We reach out to the schools every year. It's really important that if they make changes to their bell times because that triggers some of this kind of adjustment. We need to know as soon as possible in the for that upcoming year, because basically by February, no later than maybe like the first week of March before the next school year is when we need to have that information so we can kind of time it with the rest of the overall schedule. And that's where probably sometimes we have a little bit of an issue if we don't get that information from the schools or they decide to change it after we've already made the schedule.

We had spoken with AC Transit board and then AC Transit leadership and staff as well and the engineers that actually come out to the middle school. I just wanna make sure as we're starting to reschedule that it doesn't get lost in that so I just, and I'm happy to follow up with anybody that I need to. Just wanna uplift that, thank you.

Council Member James Aguilar. whoops, if you can jump in, please.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you so much for the presentation. I am kind of a self-appointed transit nerd. I love transportation. I mean, specifically AC transit, it gets people where they need to be, school, They need to go to work. And I'm a product of line 57 in Oakland, line 34. And I think Council Member Bowen brought up a great point with line 9. From my experience, taking 34 to San Lorenzo High School and landing at San Lorenzo High School is something that I definitely don't want impacted. But, of course, like you said, that's the worst-case scenario. And I kind of just wanted to uplift and appreciate the motto, plan for the worst, hope for the best. And no, I fully understand that, you know, that is the worst-case scenario. But, yeah, impact to Line 34 would be an impact to so many kids. And same for 35. I mean, that's an artery up his sparian, right? But, nevertheless... Just appreciation, I love what you guys do, and I appreciate your approach to fiscal stewardship, and that you know what you're doing. Yeah, but I would say, because Council Member Bowen really brought up all of the points that I think I had, yes, let's focus on not getting here, and if we do get here, I'm 34. Let's advocate for keeping that as is, but of course, thank you very much, appreciate your presentation.

Vice Mayor, please.

Thank you for the presentation and for the service that you provide to the public in terms of public transit. I had a couple of questions in terms of I'm looking at slide six. in the launch of having folks use exclusively Clipper cards and versus there were some equity issues in terms of cash paying riders versus non-cash paying riders, whereas cash paying riders were effectively paying more for transit service. Can you expand? Has there been any changes to that, any improvements?

The improvements are happening, but they're very slow. Clipper is a third-party vendor that is providing the ClipperCard kind of payment service for all of transit in the Bay Area. And so, unfortunately, that was a piece that, that they're still working on. They've made a lot of progress, but they're still not quite there, if I may. And so we have a team of folks who are meeting with CLPR and other Bay Area transit agencies pretty much on a weekly basis to kind of be checking in on this and helping to kind of address the issue. Also on our service, giving some, leeway to people who are riding the bus where they're being affected by for instance if they're a senior youth who normally gets 50% off on their card and then with this transition over there is not showing up working through our customer service office trying to get that resolved and so it is an unfortunate side effect of the transition into this new generation of Clipper that we as the transit agency don't have a lot of control over other than just kind of staying on top of Clipper and then also trying to work with our customers to help them through this process.

So effectively cash riders are still paying more than non-cash riders?

I don't know the numbers on that, but there probably are some cases where that's happening. But they're getting resolved, so they're correcting them. So a customer will say, hey, I got charged a full price versus half price, so then they're going in, they're working with Clipper and getting an address so that then they get refunded that amount.

Thank you for that, but I'm talking about customers that don't have a Clipper card that are cash riders. They're effectively paying more for service. And I'm asking about whether how that, is there a timeline for resolution? The reason that I'm asking is I'm concerned that people who are underbanked or people who don't have access to banking that are effectively paying more for public transit. And I'm just asking, are there any plans or you can get back to me? This has been reported widely, so that's why I'm asking. I'm just really concerned about those folks who are under-researched, under-banked, or not even using, not able to use banks and effectively paying more for a service that is intended to be used for the public in general.

Yeah, I don't have the specifics on the response to your question. I do know that it's definitely on the radar, and we are following up on that, and so we can get back to you with those specifics, but I know that there's been a lot of effort to work with those cash paying members, and in some cases, even at the fare box, there's some, they're working with, they're not like turning away riders just because they can't, because they're being charged a full amount. So we are working on that. I'll have to get back to you with details. I don't wanna give you misinformation.

I appreciate that. My other question, and I'm gonna go a little over time is, so this is in relation to the updated Title VI regulation that just came out of the US Department of Transportation. And I'm thinking about, and that's just, again, making the implicit explicit. It essentially relieves transit agencies and effectively a lot of other government agencies of doing equity analysis. And I'm wondering what is AC Transit's approach to this new... I'm just wondering what is AC Transit's approach in terms of, in making these recommended changes, I'm thinking about the intersection of impact on low-income communities and disparate impact, essentially, and I'm just wondering how is that being factored in?

Yeah, thank you, Vice Mayor. That's a very good question because you're absolutely right that the federal guidelines have changed in this area. So for this plan, AC Transit is, you know, is We're running the same types of disparate impact analyses, Title VI analyses, as we would have had the federal guidance not changed. So we are, when the plan will be presented at the board, it will have a Title VI analysis, it'll have a disparate impact analysis attached to it.

Thank you, I really appreciate AC Transit's commitment to continuing this type of analysis to ensure that low-income and under-resourced communities continue to have access to public transit. Thank you so much, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that and appreciate your time, thank you.

Council Member Bolt, please.

Yes, thank you for the presentation. Thank you to my colleagues, because most of my questions were asked. I will say that I am also interested in that, where somebody who gets a clipper card gets some type of discount, but then someone paying cash doesn't. And I understand the idea is to go cashless, if you will. But I don't want to see anybody that doesn't have the means be... overtaxed, because most likely, not taxed, that's the wrong word, but essentially it is because they don't have the means to get there. So when you find that out, maybe to all of us, because that is important, I think, to all of us, I will put in a selfish plug for line 35, which goes through my district. The last thing was, I don't see it and I could have missed it, probably did. Students used to receive a discount. They used to get cards from the local schools, things like that. Is that still available through the programs?

Yeah, so there are two programs for students or youth. So one is a student transit pass program that the Alameda CTC provides and there's two types of student transit pass programs. So one is an income-based discount which gives them basically about a 50% off their fare. The other one is a universal discount and the universal discount is for that school district all the students get to ride basically for free. And I'm sorry, let me go back to the income base, it's also free, I'm sorry, that correction. On the Youth Transit Clipper Card, it's a 50% discount and they just need to apply and just demonstrate that they are between the ages of five and 18 and a student.

Where do they, can they still apply at their school?

Yes, so for the student transit pass program, their school office, there's usually someone designated who takes care of that and then they work with Alameda CTC and then also there's someone in our customer service that coordinates with the other two entities so we can get them their student transit pass. For the youth Clipper card, they can go to clippercard.com and go to the youth discount program, and they can fill the application online. They can also pick one up at our customer service, or they can reach our customer service and ask them to send them the link or send them the information so they can get that. And we're also out in the community where we provide the brochures with that information as well.

Great. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Council Member Bowen, please.

Yeah, thank you Council Member Bolt for uplifting that again. Because I literally just went through this process and because I sit on ACTC. You can go to the AlamedaCTC.org and all students sixth grade to 12th grade can get the student pass and it is free for AC Transit buses. It's 50% for BART. And so any student from sixth grade to 12th grade in San Leandro and they just have to apply and put in their number, their student ID number and then they'll get it.

Okay, so for me a couple of questions. The largest cost component in your budget, what's the largest cost component?

It's the labor and fringe benefits combined.

One of the things that I think I heard you say is that you're essentially deferring a payment or some level of payment for your pensions. Did I hear that correctly?

Yes.

Okay, can you elaborate on that please?

I can't elaborate fully because that one surprised me a bit but they're deferring but it's gonna be paid back so basically with the loan that we're getting from the state of California is deferred for now and then they're going to pay that back and it was negotiated and passed through our board.

So my primary comment on that is there's significant risk associated with pensions, deferral of pension payments, loans to make pension payments. A number of transit systems over the years have gotten in trouble with respect to pensions and pension payments and the like. So I think a little bit greater transparency about something that could be a big risk would be useful. And to understand that if the measure what does that imply about that piece in particular? It was unclear whether the commitment was that basically all service remains as is, Maybe I should ask that as a question. Suppose that the measure passes in November. Is there a commitment for the next, let's say, three years in the forecasting to maintain the service as is or is there still anticipated to be service decreases?

There will not be anticipated to be any service decreases, any service cuts if the funding is secured in November. And so the current levels of service and of course potentially more service or all of our potential future plans, those will still be able to move forward as is if that funding is secured in November.

So I do want to dig into that one a little bit because we just went through a process of realign which resulted in service cuts to a number of neighborhoods and riders for purposes of delivering better service in the higher use lines. I use the term trunk, I forget your term. Priority network or what's the correct term?

Primary route network.

Primary network. So in that realigned process, there were already adjustments. But what I think I hear you saying is there would be no further decreases. and then you kind of tossed in as a little bit of a teaser and there might be some increases. Is that like a wish or is that modeled out?

That's a wish, yeah. There's no commitments to service increases but, you know, and this was why we worked so hard to try to not, because, you know, an alternative would have been to do another, you know, realign or redesign or something like that as part of this contingency plan since that, as I'm sure you know, multi-year process was recently completed. We were really trying to hang on to those recently redesigned routes and lines as much as we could and just make these little adjustments in terms of frequency and hours of operation.

Thank you for that and thank you for the presentation as a whole. I think that there have been several asks from the council. If you can, when you circulate the answers, just hit the full council. My ask that I will add is clarity around the magnitude of this pension payment deferral. and kind of a little bit about the math of that, because my recollection is that it's a relatively large number. And so if we can just kind of get some clarity, transparency, for lack of a better word. Okay, so thank you for coming and joining us today, and we will move on to our next agenda item.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Have a good day. Okay, so at this point in time, we will move to item 4B.

And we have got

Acting City Manager Yoon here to introduce this item.

Okay, thank you, Mayor and Council. Tonight, staff will be presenting updates on our five priority work plans, quality of life, economic development, public safety, infrastructure, and housing and homelessness. To give you some context on the history of these plans, the quality of life and economic development work plans span fiscal year 2025 through fiscal year 27. And staff first presented these work plans to you in the fall of 2024. The public safety, infrastructure, and housing and homelessness work plans span fiscal year 26 through fiscal year 28. And staff presented updated work plans to you in July of 2025. You last received updates on all of the work plans at your council annual planning session that was held in March of this year. So we will have various staff present updates to their work plans this evening. We will discuss next steps at the end of the presentation, but as further context, this is an update only presentation. No edits are being made and no items are being added to the work plans tonight. We will bring forward new work plans for fiscal years 28 and 29. as part of your biennial budget process, which will include your annual planning session next year. So we will first start off with the quality of life and economic development work plans, which will cover work conducted across fiscal years 25, 26, and 27. And I will hand it over to Library Director Brian Simons to kick off quality of life.

And before you kick off, we've had some discussions internally about how to prepare your questions, your thoughts, et cetera. At the end of each council priority, we'll come to you for your reactions, any questions, clarifications, or commentary that you may have. Okay, so we'll go. So just be mindful that that may stretch out our presentation, but it will let you be timely to what you are hearing. Please proceed.

And just to be clear, after each priority or after each priority section?

So after quality of life. Okay.

Perfect. Then quality of life questions. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that clarification. Well, good evening. As stated, Library Director Brian Simons, and I'll be here... this evening to present a portion of the quality of life presentation. I'll be handing that off later to our rec and parks director to continue with the second section. Many of the quality of life priorities that are listed here today are either completed ahead of schedule or they are on track to be completed on time. In part, that's been made possible because the priorities have been aligned with our city's strategic planning documents, so we've been able to really keep on track that way. That said, many of these quality of life priorities are ongoing efforts, so there's still plenty of work to do. And we're going to continue to do that to continue offering these services. Our first priority is developing and implementing an arts grants program. This was achieved with each objective completed on time or ahead of schedule. Since city council has generously funded $30,000 for the arts grants program in fiscal year 27, this will again continue to be one of our focuses even though we've effectively achieved it, again, it's ongoing. We have to keep up with this. What we've been able to do is establish a proven recurring process annually. We create a detailed budget with the Arts, Culture, and Library Commission. We review and update the arts grants application and process. We hold at least one kickoff reception to promote the grants and also provide opportunity for prospective grantees to get acquainted with the process and ask questions. And the library then, library staff then manages the application process and submissions, which depending on the year can range from, we've had as low as 10 and as high as about 60. The ACLC, the Arts Culture Library Commission Grant Selection Committee then chooses the grantees and from there the library staff then manage payments to the grantees and the grantees reporting when the project is done. So while this is fairly time intensive, it really does bring some value to our community. We've also identified businesses and sponsors as possible supporters. Library staff and the ACLC, with ACLC support, will explore monetary and in-kind donation requests and grant opportunities going forward. Our next priority is expanding utilization of art gallery spaces in city facilities and establishing partnerships for installations. The first two objectives were recently completed in June of 26 with the third currently on track for completion December of 26. a catalog of possible city-owned spaces as gallery spaces was created. It really aligns into two really distinct and separate types. We've got indoor spaces, which are really good for short-term, possibly long-term exhibits, and are really more focused around your wall hangings, and then our outdoor parks and facility ground spaces, which would yield themselves to more long-term or permanent exhibits, really yield themselves well to large outdoor 3D sculptures and possibly murals. What you're seeing in the images below there, obviously the examples with art hanging are just examples, but also are of spaces that would be of value. But the spaces with no art, so for instance the middle one there with the fenced in wood chips, that's in Root Park and there's I believe three of those little box spaces. and that's where the Dahlia garden beds used to be years and years ago before it got too shaded. So that's kind of ready-made to have a sculpture within a little fenced-in area. Another example is the city facility building at Halcyon Park, which is the one on the far right as you look at it, that perhaps city structures like this could house a mural. So our biggest opportunity in this regard from what we've been looking at looks to be that large outdoor opportunity. So where am I here? Artists and agencies have been identified and contacted to gauge interest in exhibiting. There still needs to be some ongoing work we have to do. So this is the objective we haven't yet finished. So some ongoing efforts remain to connect artists and agencies to commit to exhibiting. we still need to build an understanding of the exhibit spaces and locations so some site visits have to happen with artists we need to detail the arts value and insurance requirements if they're going to exhibit with us and we need to acquire the aclc's recommendations of course The area with the, as I mentioned on the last slide, the largest opportunities for those outdoor works, but a gap exists with the artists available and the funding available for those large pieces. The priority to develop programs celebrating community and diverse cultures in San Leandro has been achieved, but it too is an ongoing effort. We've created an annual calendar for cultural and special events so the public can more easily find these events on the city's website. Also, the library, Rec and Parks, SLIA, and other agencies meet quarterly to plan for best outcomes. One of the things that we really focus on when we meet like this is we really are now looking at trying to do a unified city response. And we try to amplify each other's efforts, whoever is taking the lead, as opposed to duplicating efforts. That wasn't always the case until we really focused in on this priority. Now we're really working more as a team. And we also collaborate to avoid automatic repeats. So we really take a look at what's working, what's not. There's no automatics anymore. We kind of evaluate and see where we're at, and if it's worth repeating, then we'll do so. If it's not, then we try to look at something else. The library alone has held 945 events for the fiscal year at the time of creating this presentation in May. I just looked today and early data from the fiscal year shows about 1,100. Examples include Lunar New Year, the Lucha Libre Hispanic Heritage event, the Black Choir event for Black History Month, Fred Korematsu exhibit with Karen Korematsu as keynote speaker, Cinco de Mayo, the MLK Oratory event, and those are just to name a few of many, many, many I could go on for probably a half hour just listing events. We have also expanded utilization of early childhood education programming. And now as we have done that, we also have to sustain that effort. This focus began December of 24 and was completed in December of 25. Through outreach, using in-person bilingual verbal communication, and conducting better planning for regular communications, we've improved communication with the target audience of bilingual early childhood programs. So what I mean by that is more people who natively speak that language are coming to those programs as opposed to people who are coming there to try to expose their kids to that language. And it's shown, attendance has grown. We've also expanded participation in the Thousand Books for Kindergarten program. And this focus on this program sparked a redesign and a greater emphasis on carrying out this ongoing effort for our community. Programs like Stay and Play and Lego Robotics, we connected with in-home day cares as well as a lot of other library partner agencies. And then expanding technology-based adult education priority was completed in December of 25. However, especially in this current AI environment, it's gonna take a lot more continued vigilance on our part to really continue to work with our community to make sure our community is prepared and resilient. And the way we do this is we teach adult literacy in multiple ways. The library and senior center staff lead classes. We have paid presenters. The library also offers tech tutors, which is a volunteer and a patron that we match together. And we also provide online self-paced offerings with LinkedIn Learning and now Fiero Code. So this completes my portion of the Quality of Life presentation, and I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Rec and Park Director Vicente Zuniga, to continue this presentation.

Good evening, Council. Vicente Zuniga, Recreation and Parks Director. So the first one I'm gonna speak on is expanding volunteer opportunities for cleaning streets and public spaces citywide. So staff was able to grow Beautify San Leangelo into a high-impact program, funding 13 community-led projects and building a network of 600-plus volunteers, while also launching the Trash Free Initiative. Local businesses like Ghirardelli have supported our efforts through Employee Volunteer Days. Couple pictures of coastal cleanup as well as Giverdale's Gives Day where we had over 200 volunteers participating in cleanups. The next one I have is design and implement a planning initiative to introduce native and drought-tolerant plants across city parks, medians, and public spaces. So staff was able to launch a citywide planning initiative, introducing native and drought-tolerant landscapes, establishing long-term turf reduction strategies, and create a public-facing plant palette webpage as a resource for the community. Couple pictures of one of the projects, turf reduction, as well as our city website that has native plants and resources for the community. The next one is expand citywide tree canopy coverage. So urban forestry efforts are underway. Staff was also able to secure a 244,000 state grant, launch a tree sponsorship program, and increasing community education through workshops and partnerships. a couple pictures, Arbor Day, as well as partnering up with the Extreme Heat Planning Grant with San Leandro 2050. The next one is strategic placement of litter receptacles to maximize usage and enhance cleanliness. So staff's negotiating for some additional big belly containers beyond those that were included in the original contract. So on top of the 20 that were downtown, staff's currently negotiating to up that number. The older plastic litter cans did not perform well in San Leandro, so we're hoping the new containers will improve durability, capacity, as well as cleanliness. develop recreation programs for inclusivity and diverse age groups. So staff have been able to expand programming, nearly tripling all age offerings, increase bilingual classes, and advance adaptive recreation partnerships. partnerships with local organizations to create accessible and affordable healthy eating options, really focusing on low-income families. So the city was able to invest more than $180,000 in 11 community organizations to strengthen food access and food security throughout San Leandro. These partnerships have helped provide food assistance to approximately 23,000 residents through pantries, meal delivery, grocery distribution, and daily youth nutrition programs, including the Boys and Girls Club Meal and Edible Garden Initiative. host health and active living events. So city staff was able to expand community wellness opportunities by offering free fitness programs, outdoor exercise classes, and family-friendly active recreation events in partnership with local organizations, strengthening community partnerships to promote healthy lifestyles through wellness initiatives, fitness challenges, and signature events such as some of the five and 10Ks we're having at the Marina Park. picture of girls on the run as well as free yoga in the park sessions that we had throughout the city partner with local organizations for expanded senior services so staff was able to expand senior senior education and wellness by partnering with TechExchange to provide multilingual digital literacy classes serving roughly about 97 seniors. Staff was also able to offer specialized caregiver training for Alzheimer's as well as dementia support services to estimated 28 participants and provide valuable education and resources. So the last deliverable that we have on the quality of life work plan is to collaborate with schools for public use of recreation facilities. So staffs continue to advance negotiations with San Leandro Unified School District to update the master joint use agreement to expand community access to shared facilities. Staff has also been working and implementing a new field allocation policy to improve scheduling and maximize field utilization. We've also expanded partnerships with schools, nonprofit organizations to increase community programming, outreach, and participation through community events. And here's a couple pictures of some of the joint use sites that we have. We have a Junior Warriors program. It's robust and really popular, and that's one of our joint use sites. Gymnasiums with San Leandro Unified School District. So we have leads in different services and activities in some of the joint use fields we have. It's a picture of one of our partners we have with the Girls Softball League. With that, I'm open for questions.

Thank you for the presentation on this council priority. We will begin with Council Member Bowen.

Thank you, Mayor. I love all of the priorities in all of the departments, but I will say really love these too. So I'm gonna share a few things. I wanted to give one piece of feedback and ask that's gonna apply to the entire presentation as it relates to all of the departments. I know we've talked a lot about trying to present the work plans and have them scaffold up to the strategic plans and the goals that we have. And if we could go back to any number, any one of the slides, for example, like part, yeah, Collaborative Schools for Holistic and Recreational Facilities. To me, that's like, it's a fantastic thing that we are doing, and it is because it is tied to something that is in our strategic plan. I think it would be really helpful to just have a little, section that says what it ties up to or what plan we have so that it's really clear to anybody that looks at the work plan and it's really clear how this is building towards a goal we have. And I think that in the library presentation, for example, if I look at the strategic plan you have for the library, It says our strategic priorities and four key opportunity areas, communication services, facilities, people. That would be really great to have up there because that's exactly why we're doing this. Why should we collaborate with schools? It's a great thing to do, but how does it tie to something that we have said we wanted or that is going to immeasurably improve quality of life? We know it to be true. but it's helpful to see that so that we can justify funding for it and say this is exactly how that's happening. And I really do appreciate that there are so many things here that I know is direct feedback from the council or you've heard us have conversations about. I know that there are things that I have said that I see up there right now and I'm like, yay, it happened, right? So super appreciative of staff. So one of the things I also wanted to mention, love the library programming so much, really love that we have early childhood education, that we're really focusing on uplifting and improving capacity for the childcare staff even to come in and doing it in bilingual ways and in culturally appropriate ways, inclusive ways, so important. On Wednesdays, it is really beautiful to see the number of folks that are there and parents, caregivers, grandparents that are there. So it really is a critical community space. So shout out to library services for that. It's like the number one thing I hear about from everybody. I was at the Karen Karamatsu event and I will say that I was really moved by one, how much it is tied to San Leandro and that also, made me think about the art walk that we have, which is phenomenal. At one point, I had given some feedback around including a history walk as part of that. So for example, we can very much tie in Fred T. Kirimatsu into the history of San Leandro. And it's just a simple addition, so something to just think about. Really also appreciate the work around beautification and volunteerism. We've talked a lot about that. And senior services, I know we have the Senior Friendly Plan, I forget the next exact name of it, that we work through, but I to highlight how those things are absolutely doing that right now, because we want to give you that recognition. And then also really appreciate the effort by the city to do what we can in our limited scope around food access and food scarcity and the partnership with San Leandro Unified School District for REC programming, because that is a huge ask the community is coming to with spaces to be able to, participate in recreation, especially now that we have this phenomenal gym at the high school, but if we don't build up opportunities for kids to learn how to play those sports, they won't really be able to utilize that. So just really wanted to uplift all of that for you all.

yeah Thank you and yeah you're correct I think there's a lot of alignment with a lot of our strategic plans age-friendly action plan library strategic plan recreation parks master plan tree master plan and a lot of those plans had robust community engagement and so you're seeing the connectivity and the synergy between council, the community, and what the programs that they want and initiatives they want. And this is a great reflection of this plan that takes all those plans together with these deliverables. So thank you for highlighting that.

At this point, we go to Council Member Bolt.

Thank you both for the presentation. I'm going to start with one that I know of Councilmember Simon was here. He'd comment on and that's the expanding citywide tree canopy coverage. It's important to him. I think we all believe in that, but I know he would have said something, so I'm taking the chance to say it for him. Additionally, the planting of the initiative for native plants, I seen it in some of the local parks. I love it, it's a great idea. It actually feels cleaner and tighter, and I know it's better on our resources. volunteer opportunities I've been out to a couple of those we're doing the cleanups or planting trees those are great our community comes out they feel invested in it I've heard multiple people after the fact hey look at our tree it's doing good you know like it's our tree you know it is One thing that I really love the idea of the art gallery spaces in the city facilities. That's awesome. I can't say enough about it. I will... Take one second to say this, because my wife beats me up over it all the time. She won an art contest at San Andres City High when she was 95 or 94. And it was placed down here at City Hall. And so I hear about it all the time from her, so I'm saying it now. I think those type of efforts that we can connect with our local school districts and do those things, it brings them in and they feel ownership of it. So if we can somehow collaborate with that in the gallery spaces, that would be so neat. Lastly, I'll end with this. The city facility murals, awesome. when you go to different places and you see a new mural up and they look fabulous. I did want to ask, because I feel like there was some prices kind of thrown around last time, somewhere around the two grand mark for the trash enclosure in the downtown area. Can somebody say if I'm way off or I'm close? I see some looks right now like, oh, let me back it up a little bit.

I'm not sure if that is the accurate number or not. If it's a part of the arts grants, I could check into that to see what the total amount was. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it's the one Slea applied for and got into?

I think so, yeah, and it was around the trash enclosure.

I think my guess, if I had to guess, again, I don't have data in front of me, but my guess if it was 2000, it was probably 2000 that the arts grant applied to and then there were other funds that they applied in addition to that 2000.

I think it would be neat for us to, maybe like a challenge even to a council member in their district hey you want to mural up at the marina park around the facility let's get some people from the community to come out see what kind of money we could raise what kind of time we could spend cleaning up and helping reduce the cost but i would love to see more of those murals especially around the facilities like you mentioned for the one at toyon park or not no it's not toyon 143rd right but at the marina we have a few of those facilities with big walls it would be so neat to just see a nice big mural out there butterflies whatever we can think of so thank you for all the work that you guys are doing it makes it a cleaner nicer place to be and I know we all appreciate your work on this thank you

Okay, so I will follow up on murals. Do we have budgets set aside for maintenance of murals?

From the arts grants perspective, we do not have budgets set up for maintenance. The maintenance generally, the way we've talked about it with the grantees, has been since we're just funding it and they've secured the space and the rest of the funding for it, the maintenance of it is up to either the, however they structure it, the applying agency, the artist, the owner of the building, but the city doesn't have that responsibility as of right now.

Yeah. It's something that I think that we should be thinking about, particularly for the ones that we view as more permanent structures and budgeting for it explicitly. Every 10 years, we need to refresh the colors on the mural or whatever the case may be, particularly if it's on a city building. So that's the first thought on murals. When you talked about the arts grants program, A lot of energy went into setting up the infrastructure, the process, the controls, whatever the case may be. Now that it's established, setting aside the funding cost for the actual distributions, the grants, What does it cost to run that program?

Thank you, that's a good question. Our secretary, who is the assistant library director, spends probably nine months out of the year working, I would say, a good 10 hours to 20 hours a month on that program. It's more extensive than you'd think because of all of the intake of the grants and then organizing it in a way that the commission can work with and then also we're the staff level that communicates back to those who get grants and those who don't get grants, and then the management of the funds going out to the grantees, and then we're the ones that follow up to make sure it got done, that the art actually got done, so we don't have to ask for our funds back and then if it does get done then we're the ones that also get the reporting and we communicate and there's a lot of, since a lot of these folks applying haven't ever done anything like this before, it's a new process for them too and we really have to kind of coach them through sometimes even the application process. So it's a lot more work than it would seem on the surface. So let's revisit that offline because I've got some ideas.

Sure. so we have providers that come in. Do we have some sort of standard fee schedule for what we pay the puppet person or the musician that comes to the library?

We do, it's based on.

I'm not asking you to disclose it even, but just we do. We do, yes. That's really all that I want to know. For the bilingual events, you had something on page three. I didn't really understand the comment. It was something like people are coming to receive training in the native language?

Yes, so this is our bilingual story times. So the In the past, we've seen more people who it is not their native language coming to expose their children to this as opposed to really the target audience is if you speak Chinese or Mandarin and we're doing Mandarin story time, we would love if Mandarin speakers came as children and families as opposed to people who want to expose their kids to it. And we've kind of started to turn the corner there and get that traction with those families.

For the 1,000 books, I think we initiated that this fiscal year, is that right? Or was that two years? The 1,000 books before Kinder. Was that this year that we initiated that?

We've been doing it, but at a very almost, very, very passive way. This last year, we started featuring it, and the feature has really helped accelerate, and just, it's really been the helping our staff communicate, and it's, that, seeing the community latch onto it a little more also inspired the library staff to say, you know, the images are kind of stale, let's re-up that. The program is stale, let's re-up that. Approximately how many participants? It's hard to, I don't mean to evade your question, but it's a running program that you can start at birth and you end whenever you're done with 1,000. So probably on an annual basis, probably about 1,000 folks at a time are doing it.

Okay, thank you. And then just two more, one more question. Expansion of senior services. Can you put some quantum on that? Have we doubled, tripled? Do we increase by two programs? Help me understand what that means. Expansion of senior, of services for seniors.

We've, I think we have a 15% increase in services for seniors. We're also currently exploring senior services has transitioned and is part of now the recreation parks department. So we have a lot of data and community feedback on additional expansion of senior services. So we're taking a lot of recommendations from the age friendly action plan. For any more specifics, I can pass it on to former human services director as well too if needed.

Fine, so then I'll end with a comment, and that's just gratitude for all the work that you guys are doing. I think that in terms of quality of life, there's a lot of metrics that point to the significant increase in service levels. And just repeatedly, I talk to residents who say, thank you for the library, thank you for the parks, thank you for the programming, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. There's a lot of gratitude for the work that you're doing. And I'll close with this. I had an email that I got today specifically about the Washington Manor Pickleball Courts. Saying that it's on that list of the top five pickleball courts in the Bay Area. So, you know, we gotta brag when we're there. Anyway, so thank you for what you are doing. At this point in time, we will move on to our next council priority, which is economic development.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm here to introduce our Economic Development Manager, Katie Bowman. Katie and her team have been the primary leads, and to Councilmember Bowman's point, the basis for this Economic Development Private Work Plan is the Economic Development Strategy from 2024.

That's right, and I took a moment to look up, right, what are our goals for that strategy? So to grow the local economy, expand the image and identity of San Leandro, spur new investment in high-quality jobs, and improve the quality of life for residents. And as we've talked about in economic development overall, goals are to support businesses and the local economy in order to create revenue for city services and programs. And so here in our work plan, we have six areas of focus. The first that we've talked about with you before to support growth of businesses and target industries where through our strategy we found that we have a competitive advantage and they have a lot of potential for growth including what we would call clean tech. We have a number of battery companies, food technology, advanced manufacturing and what I'm hearing from the businesses they now call hard tech. and biomedical and more specifically medical device manufacturing. And so in that area we presented to you a deeper dive in this area on the innovation action plan back in March and also to begin implementing it as well as our retail attraction plan. We've made a number of updates to the city website as well as attractive and really usable flyers that you see here. and under the Retail Action Plan put retail listings available and you can see more at sanleandro.org backslash retail. And most recently work that we have come to you to talk about is the City Brand Assessment. and really doing a city place branding project, as you know, and looking at how not just the imagery, but the messaging behind it. And we've been hearing really great things from the community, and we'll be moving from the input phase to initial ideation phase to put together, bring that into concepts, which we will later present to you all in the fall. And then in the long term, the goal of that is to use that in city programming and messaging as well as in attraction efforts and even for the community to identify with. Our next area is to support development and update our zoning and we have worked on this in three kind of key areas to engage the development community to hear about their needs and also to attract development, to work in a number of ways improving our process as well as to work on updating our regulations and most specifically our zoning code which as you know oversees development standards. On the outreach side, we held our annual, what we call a broker breakfast or a development breakfast. There's a picture of that there, and it gets a number of attendees, recurring attendees, to come and learn about opportunities in San Leandro. And also really the core of the work in this area has been done by members of our planning team, our building team, the public works engineering team. And so you'll see in the housing presentation, Wayland Lee, our planning manager, will share some other things as well in this area. And I highlight that because not only does it help commercial development, it helps housing development. And so with a goal to help make development efficient and straightforward. And so several concrete things have been set up in that regard, what we call a customer experience survey, where people can provide feedback on service at the permit center, as well as a interdepartmental development review committee, a more formal process to review applications internally, as well as an Acela power users group, which that is our permitting software, And with regards to non-residential zoning, our planning team has been working for the past year with a consultant in this area and that zoning really we're working off of a structure that was set up in the 80s. And so initially they've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work related to updating the structure, incorporating amendments that have been made over the years for consistency, usability, And next, moving into outreach and engagement to try to make sure that it's understandable, includes current uses, is modern, also reflects what the community and council want, and then also reflects some regional activities going on. And so you will see on this one, it does show a delay of that project. And I just wanted to note that. The proposal is for it to come to completion by the third quarter of 27. And if you have any more questions, we can talk more about that in a bit. The third area is in supporting industrial districts and addressing infrastructure needs. And here we've worked on two projects to look at, as I mentioned, finding funds for city services. And so we have done some evaluation projects to look at opportunities across departments and across city facilities for ways to improve efficiency, to generate revenue, reduce risks. And so starting, we just completed working with a consultant on a city real estate assessment and really gathering all of the real estate that's managed by multiple departments. The city, not only do we have civic facilities like City Hall, here we lease properties and of course have other community centers. and looking at best practices and ways to do best property management. The consultant had shared, we actually have relatively large real estate portfolio for the size of city that we are. And we are also now working with the parks, excuse me, with recreation, with library, with public works to gather the thoughts across departments and gather information on what are we doing right now with regards to what we call private partnerships. So that could range anywhere from sponsorships all the way to development agreements and partnering on developments. And so what are we doing right now? What might we consider doing? And then if that's something that we recommend, we would bring that forward for the council to discuss. Fourth area, working on supporting exciting retail as well as placemaking. And in that area, we completed last year the Retail Action Plan, and then this year, updating commercial incentive programs as well as placemaking. And so one item that we did on the commercial incentive program is we made a $5,000 really streamlined grant process that we developed during COVID. And it has been really popular and really useful. and so we work to make a permanent process for that and make it more user friendly. Also going on in downtown throughout the past couple of years is that we've been implementing some of the remaining ARPA recovery funds. We're at the very end of that and so from those funds we have seen different things like outdoor tables downtown, those blue and yellow tables, some permanent tables as well as that downtown art walk that you mentioned and also quarterly power washing which happens behind the scenes. Fifth area is to support residents with workforce training and education. In that area, we developed a workforce partnership strategy and outreach plan. And a couple things that I wanted to highlight here is we have been working to support an effort called the San Leandro First Jobs Program. It's really excited. Tarani has spearheaded it, and it's a manufacturing-focused internship program. And they and another business are working interns through the program this summer. and hope to build more employers for the next year. And also we do, as Brian Simons mentioned, we work with the chamber on a number of programs that we support through our annual contract. One of them is the chamber job fair and we work to amplify their work. And also that this year there were new headshots and all sorts of exciting things. And finally, working to support small businesses and entrepreneurs. And in that area, we have completed a resource outreach plan, as well as updating materials to help make our process more understandable to different types of people and businesses. One key way that we've worked in that area is through continuing monthly free small business advising, which is held at the chamber and is provided by the East Bay Small Business Development Center, and continuing to work to do outreach to businesses about that, as well as continuing our regular business outreach visits. And our development team, building, planning, engineering, have continued to update flyers and materials, update our Acela system. And also one final thing that's not on here that was mentioned at the beginning of the meeting is the restaurant week, which is also a program that we amplify through the contract with the chamber to support small businesses and restaurants.

And you are complete. Yes. Your timing is literally perfect. Very impressive. With that being said, we will come to council members for questions, reactions, comments, and the like.

I know, sorry, there's not a ending slide, but yes. I just had to take a breath.

So beginning with Vice Mayor, please.

Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Tom, for your work and your team's work. I just have a couple of questions. I wanted to go to slide 39. And I'm just wondering who the customer is that is being referred to? Develop formal process for customer interactions and feedback. Who's the customer here? Is it people applying for permits? Yep.

Oh, OK.

Yeah, and then it's on the email signature block for everyone in community development. So theoretically anyone that I work with or any of us I work with could provide feedback.

Gotcha. Thank you for that clarification. I also wanted to go to the workforce development slide. Let me go to, so it is goal five, slide 45. And then on the subsequent slide, on 46, it talks about, there's three bullets. There's the San Leandro First Jobs Program, but that, who is the host of the San Leandro First Jobs Program?

Yeah, that is a private initiative. Tarani, it is multiple parties, though. Tarani is playing a role. The Chamber is supporting the school district, Workforce Development Board, the city. Really, it's a multidisciplinary, but the the organizations putting funding in for the internships are the businesses.

Gotcha. Thank you. Just something that I've been reflecting on and thinking about is I would consider myself a higher education expert. That's what I do for my day job, as well as kind of connecting workforce development with higher education. Not higher education with a capital H, but post-secondary education that includes certifications, training certificates, apprenticeships, that whole kind of ecosystem. And one thing that I walk away with that I don't know are if we look at industry in San Leandro and looking at the job needs of who we have right now so that we're able to upskill and actually either support, coordinate, partner with our local community college district and with the kind of various institutions that provide that kind of post-secondary education and training. I'm just thinking about what is it that I don't know and what I don't know is what are the types of certificates and education that the current post-secondary education salient or job market is asking for so that we're actually able to build programs to expand access to jobs for people that wouldn't normally have access to those jobs and So there's a lot of kind of already ongoing work through some of the regional partnerships on kind of mapping out what are the industry needs. But as we talk to businesses, especially some of our larger employers, We know that there is a shortage of healthcare technical workers, and so are we able to partner with our local community college district to provide those certificated people to be able to be placed locally in San Leandro? there's HR professionals. So I'm just wondering like if we look at the industry in San Leandro and we kind of have a kind of like a heat map of we have a shortage of finance managers that don't necessarily need to have a college degree but do need to have some sort of certificated training or HR professionals or some sort of like manufacturing technical skills where you have to be, you have to have a certificated training. Anyway, So what I'm trying to get at is to really understand what is the gap in certifications, education, ongoing adult education to actually meet the needs of local salient industry and regional. So that's just something that Kind of comes up for me. I really, I have a lot more comments and questions, but we have, we're halfway through our slide deck and there's a lot of staff waiting to talk to us. So I'll leave that at that. Appreciate your time and your investment and to the rest of the team. Thank you.

So I do want to be clear about our use of time. because we talked about it as a team and we recognize that we may not be able to finish today. It was a conscious decision made by certain people to let's just plow through with everything. But I am very clear about this. These are the five council priorities. we will spend as much time as we want to on each of the priorities. That was very clear coming into this meeting. So I don't want any council member to feel like they cannot ask because you have to protect other staff members. Everyone is aware of the challenge that we face and as we look through our time, if we honestly don't feel like we're gonna get to the last two, that's fine. and we'll continue at our next working session to work through them. So please do not hesitate to ask your questions. That being said, the one thing that I did want to offer Ms. Bowman, if you wanted to, discuss a little bit some of the connections perhaps with the battery manufacturers. and some of the guidance and connection that has been provided to them and or talk about Carrington College or other opportunities that you are already aware of.

Thank you. Yes, you had asked what are we hearing from businesses as to needs. You know, an ongoing thing, you know, for all the time I've been here is the aging out of of people in the trades and other people at our businesses. And that has been ongoing and there's still more work to be done there. We do talk about that with the community colleges and the Carrington College expansion is one example. where they have added electrical training there. Another thing that we have heard is the need for battery technicians, and with several of our battery companies that are looking to move to small stage pilot production, and they kind of do multi-year planning, so we don't see it yet, but they're planning for it in one. As the mayor had mentioned, there have been some discussions and concepts related to more targeted internship programs or programs with the community colleges and in the high school and things like that. In all of these areas, this first phase over the past year has really been building those relationships and strengthening those relationships with the providers and there's still a lot of work to be done. So certainly I hear what you shared.

Okay, so we will go to council member, Council Member Bowen.

It's me again. I'm on. I'm here. And I decided to let Council Member, Vice Mayor go first because I'm like trying to queue in for everything. I love economic development and I love this department. A few things, I had the opportunity to visit Oklahoma City earlier this year and really focus on how they've been able to build up because of public private partnerships. So I'm really excited that we're really focusing on that as well. I think that the more that we can get stakeholders involved in shared goals, the more people will obviously then be committed to help the community thrive. I also cannot talk about economic development without talking about childcare. And so I really appreciate childcare as a economic development strategy and making sure that when we have businesses here, especially large businesses, that there's also an understanding that if there is no childcare, employees, especially women will choose to work somewhere else, because they will not have a place for their children. So really want to uplift that. And I know that that is part of our plan, but that that's constantly being part of the calculus, and we're thinking about how to build things out. In terms of workforce development, and I actually think about it, along with small business entrepreneurship, I really love our focus on that. Because one of the things that makes San Leandro so special is because it feels really accessible and small town and vibrant and I think that that's because we have so many small businesses that we're really trying to support our local economy and so I know we didn't talk about it in this one and we've talked about it in the past but in terms of that support we have for small businesses and workforce development are we focusing on populations that are less represented so businesses owned by people of color or women? Also, do we provide that support through the association that we work with, to provide support in different languages as well?

Yeah, one example that the SBDC advising at the Chamber, their advisors have changed a little bit, but at different times we're really working to advocate to have a Spanish-speaking and either a Mandarin or Cantonese-speaking advisor there. So we currently do not have the Spanish-speaking directly there, but they can definitely through the big network have access to that. And as always, there's continued work and outreach to these communities and to reaching businesses in general in the ever-changing communications and media landscape.

yeah and i and you know the chamber does fantastic work but i know that there is also just a capacity strain and constraint and so if we can help support the chamber in helping them reach out to new businesses especially ones that um are chinese speaking or spanish speaking because that is just i think i've heard for the chamber as well that they do have difficulty with translations and whatnot and i love all the new businesses that are coming in um i had one i have to do a plug for for district five but the corner of dutton and bancroft is a really exciting opportunity i know we have levanta was there and i know that the the chef was in here today because he's he would like to, we'll have outdoor tables, right, and that whole area that there's, Chef Chen has left, and then we have the uniform store across the way, but I love that we're thinking about how do we build out these spaces, not just for one business, but for the entire community, and like, what would this look like, and to think through, like, what kind of business should come in here, and how can I, as a council member, or the community support that, because we want it to be a thriving, you know, commercial district and it would be really great if it was filled with lots of great businesses like a wine bar and a floral shop combined together is what I would love to have come and I've shared that with Katie in the past, but you know, anything. And then the last thing I have a question on, if we go to slide 41, Yes, I had a question around evaluate potential for industrial area specific plan to streamline environmental review and utility infrastructure upgrades, and that's upcoming. Can you share what that means?

Yes, so the scope at this point, and it'll be finalized, but looking at, we currently have some evaluation going on with the larger community development team at whether and how there may be potential for financing districts in San Leandro, whether it's in TOD areas like Bayfair or downtown or the industrial area. And they have identified that there is some potential where that would pencil. And those are actually a different way for public private partnerships in which additional ways to generate revenues for infrastructure. And so it would be taking those evaluations to the next step.

Would that consider something like how we have the downtown benefit district, but to have a benefit district further north, like along this corridor, 14th Street?

That study doesn't specifically look at that. And yeah, I think, as you know, those districts need a certain size to be viable. And there had been some discussion in the past as to whether the current district could get larger, which that might come back up as that looks towards renewal.

Seeing no other hands raised, I'll ask a couple of questions myself. We talked a little bit about the permit center and some of the troubleshooting teams, et cetera, that have been established. Have we developed some metrics to assess Are we getting better? What does better mean? Is that distinguished between small businesses that are getting permits and large businesses? Help me understand a little bit when we talk about that, what that could look like or does look like.

Yeah, and I may look to our planning manager, Wayland Lee. I think we're very early in those processes, but we do have overall performance metrics for the department for those teams. And I'm not able to quote them exactly right now, but we could pull those for you. So I believe looking at how many rounds of review the planning applications make, and they have a goal of a percentage to... increase the amount that have the lesser amount. And then on the building review too, they're looking at how many projects have reduced rounds of review.

But Avalon can. Katie summarized it well. And so we're working on both the overall process because our building team, they are the conveners of many other technical experts. And so we want the overall time to be reduced, not just one group's time to be reduced because it doesn't make a big difference if other teams are taking a lot longer. So this is a holistic effort between all of the development services teams within the city and our external partners.

What about, I'll call it concurrency of effort, concurrency of review. I think one of the questions or comments that typically come to me and presumably to other council members is this idea of like, well, I wish that you had told me that before because I could have fixed two things at once or three things at once. Is that in the multiplicity of turns where you're trying to address that? And if you can elaborate a little.

Yeah, so we had an external group come in who works in cities across the country and help us do an audit of our development services and identify our priorities. And so we're working through that work plan and how we communicate with customers and how we provide information in a very timely manner so people can Take action even if it's involving an outside agency, which is often the cause of delays and development That is a hundred percent aligned with what we're working through in our implementation plan Absolutely as well as communication expectations timeliness response times all of those factors I think one thing that would be certainly useful for me and maybe for the whole council would be to lay out

kind of the current state, the outcome of the audit, and then some targets. We're trying to reduce this 50%, whatever the this is, because then that lets us to go and speak to the business community like we do have standards, we do have a process, we do have expectations that we are driving towards. So thank you about that. There was a description, I think we're looking to make our spaces more inviting. And so part of that I heard like tucked in very quickly, quarterly power washing downtown. Recently, I got some not just a challenging email on the topic. And so I think the question is, whose responsibility is it to maintain a shopping center cleanliness? And then are there objective standards that we can enforce to encourage that to actually occur?

In thinking about in private shopping centers?

Well, that's the thing. Because I think there is oftentimes a combination of the two, public spaces and private spaces. Private spaces that look and feel like they're public spaces, but they're actually private. And so if you can talk through that just a little bit, because I think oftentimes in the public's mind, they are intertwined and intermingled.

Yeah, and that specific quarterly power washing is at this point somewhat of a limited duration with some of the recovery funds doing some supplemental power washing on top of power washing that occurs with the downtown district. And that would be, as you mentioned, just in public spaces. So some of the outlaws of, say, Washington Plaza, the front is public. but whereas the main building is private and so it depends on the space, the responsibility as you, the pavement, if it's on private property is the responsibility of the shopping center and that power washing is not occurring there by either, that one time or the district. And there are standards, commercial property maintenance standards, and some of my colleagues could get into that in more detail.

I do think that that's one of the biggest complaints that I receive about private spaces, particularly spaces that are not occupied, is the accumulated trash, the graffiti, the dirty windows and the like. And so helping the public understand through probably website communication or other means Maybe we do some online postings. What is within the purview of the city through code enforcement, et cetera, to make sure that all the eyes that we have out there, the 89, what is it, 89.5, 89.9, 89.7, whatever people used to say, all those pairs of eyes that we have out there, that they're not creating... well-intentioned but misdirected work because we're not clear on what we can act upon. And so I think that can really, if we can empower the people to help us drive a cleaner, more attractive community for investment, Because that's ultimately what we're trying to do is attract businesses. And then the last question that I'll ask has to do with the tracking of businesses that are open. And I don't know if we have some sort of data set or we have a consultant that helps us understand, for instance, Over the last four years, we now have more child care facilities or less child care facilities. We have more restaurants. We have fewer restaurants. We have more battery businesses, less battery businesses. Something that lets us take what we're looking to do and measure, and I realize that from year to year you're going to get variation, but presumably over a five-year period, if we are in fact achieving our goal, it's not for the purpose of saying we completed a work plan, but it's really to get the outcome that we have more of a certain type of business or that we have more people coming to do coming to our restaurants, whatever the case may be. So just food for thought around how we may be able to measure outcomes and not process would be useful. So thank you very much for the presentation and for your willingness to take our input. At this point in time, we will go to, is it PD? Public safety. all right good evening council members so before you get started i think a good question has been asked uh do we want to take looking down council roll do you want to take our break now or after well that's a there's in theory three more what do you think take our break now Now we typically take a break at nine o'clock, right? In fairness to you, right? I think two hours is a good running time. We've been running for about an hour 50. So I wanna take a quick break, seven minutes. So the time is 8.54. Let's come back at whatever time that is. Let's come back in seven minutes. So we stay in a recess.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, we are back in session. The time is 9.02. Please proceed.

All right. Good evening, city leaders and members of the community. Captain Abe Tang with your police department, here to discuss the public safety portion of the council work plan. All right, starting with section one. This is our staffing plan. As you can see, we're currently on track to meet our two incremental staffing milestones, 78% of authorized strength by the end of this fiscal year and 82% by the end of the next fiscal year. You'll note that our objective to fill two vacant traffic officer positions unfortunately will be at risk or delayed indefinitely, and I'll discuss more of that on the next slide. No problem. All right, as mentioned before, our current sworn staffing level is at 76% and we are on track to meet the 78% goal due by the end of this year. Our successful hiring efforts have been offset by some recent spate of retirements and separations. And going back to the goal of filling our two vacant positions in traffic, that's going to be delayed indefinitely, unfortunately. We are given priority to fill our critical vacancies have resulted in a couple of recent retirements from our Criminal Investigations Divisions. So, unfortunately, the traffic unit replacements will have to be on hold until we can fill those positions. Section 2 will discuss recruitment. And as you can see that we have four objectives under this recruitment priority, and these are recurring goals that will continue through fiscal year 27 and 28. Our social media team continues to be active on our platforms with a consistent volume of posts and engagement. In addition to showcasing a variety of work done by different divisions within the department, we also provide a balance of recruitment, celebratory, educational, and on occasion, whimsical posts to give the community a more holistic view of the police department. We aim to visit one academy a quarter and we have been averaging eight recruitment events per quarter. That exceeds our target goal of six per quarter. Our recruitment teams found that the greatest amount of success occur during in-person recruitment at the written and physical agility tests for police recruits. And we've also placed an emphasis on consistent follow-ups with applicants to guide them through the process. We found this personal contact has been the difference between some of our candidates coming to our department versus going to another. In the next four sections, I'll be going over the work plan priority that's broadly aimed at reducing animal control costs overall. Section three, reducing number of strays taken to the shelters, pretty straightforward. We want to reduce the number of strays that are taken to the shelter either by our staff or by members of the community. So the total number of animals taken to the shelter from January to May of last year, 173. For the same time period of this year, that number currently stands at 151, which is a 13% reduction. And in the next section, I'll go over how we've accomplished this reduction. So shelter diversion strategy. So we're progressing in each of our strategic milestones under shelter diversion. We have increased the time that strays are kept at our temporary shelter at the Corp Yard for up to 24 hours, thereby increasing the opportunity for reunification with owners. We've increased our social media messaging to the community to direct strays to the police department instead of taking them directly to the shelter. We've also hosted our Pawchella pet microchipping event. Now, while this recurring goal is still progressing, we've reduced it from being an annual event to every other year. Our next section discusses filling the vacant animal control officer position. So as you can see, we've completed two of our goals in this section, but one goal is very jarring in red, and that we are recommending to discontinue, and that being the internal selection of an animal control officer. And I will discuss this more in the next slide. So we've transitioned away from having just a single dedicated animal control officer to ensure broader coverage and increase enforcement of animal control issues throughout the whole work week. All of our police service technicians are now trained in animal control laws and related municipal codes. And this starts during the field training period for any new hires. And all police service technicians and the police service technician supervisors are sent to a 40 hour animal control training course. And to show how this change has worked out, I'll move on to the next section, which is increased enforcement of loose dog violations. The numbers I'm gonna cover here are actually gonna be all animal control related numbers, not just loose dog violations. So we've already completed a review of animal related municipal codes and also trained all of our police service technicians on them and incorporated this into our training program, as I previously mentioned. As you can see, our educational enforcement goals are both progressing and on track. So we've taken a two-pronged approach towards increasing enforcement, the first being educating our community. We've done this via recurring social media messaging, and we've also done it via in-person warnings that we've issued. At the same time, we've also increased the emphasis for staff to enforce violations. So the enforcement numbers from January through May of this year currently are 70 citations and 133 warnings issued. And this is compared to 38 sites and 80 warnings issued for all of 2025. Section seven. Ensuring strong community engagement. Here we have a list of community events for both the police department and the fire department. And this of course is not an exhaustive list of all of the events that both departments participate in. These are just the ones that have been prioritized in the work plan. And I think I can safely speak for both Chief Krines and Chief Bowie that both departments firmly believe that building and maintaining a strong relationship with our community is foundational to any success that we can claim. And these pictures are just a small sample of the various events that we have. We see National Night Out, we have Santa at the Firehouse, and a food and toy drive by the Fire Department. Section 8, I'll go over encampment removal. As you can see, we are progressing well in all of our goals here, and we are, in fact, exceeding some of the set expectations that I'll go over in the next slide. So... We've established recurring biweekly meetings with Human Services and Public Works to continue our collaborative efforts on encampment removals. Currently, we are averaging between one cleanup per week to one every other week, so far exceeding our target goal of three cleanups per quarter. Also, instead of our stated goal of monthly meetings with the Union Pacific Railroad Police, we are now conducting them on a biweekly basis. And for the final Public Safety Section, Emergency Management, I'd like to bring up Emergency Services Specialist Libby Bessman.

Thank you, Captain. Good evening, Council. I'm Elizabeth Bessman, emergency services specialist. Emergency management has four projects. Annually host a wildfire preparedness and defensible space workshop, host an annual community emergency response team, CERT, update the local hazard mitigation plan, and update our emergency operations plan. I'm excited to share our local hazard mitigation plan is out for public comment and closes July 24th. After it closes, we'll make the appropriate updates to our draft, send the draft to Cal OES and FEMA. Once the plan is approved, we'll be able to update our emergency operations plan. Because of the Alameda County Fire Department, in March, we were able to complete our yearly wildfire preparedness and defensible space workshop. And just last month, we were able to complete our yearly CERT training. A big thank you to our partners at the Alameda County Fire Department. This concludes the public safety portion.

So thank you for your presentation. We'll come to council members for questions slash discussion, beginning with Council Member Bolt.

Thank you for the presentation. Let me go through my notes real quick. On slide 60 with the animal control, where it says, looks like we may go in a different direction. ease my fears that, please, that these type of calls are gonna go unserviced. If they get in a queue with all the other calls, that, in my opinion, I don't know, you can correct me, but that would be like a low priority. So when we had the animal control unit personnel, that's what they dealt with. But in this case, it sounds like that won't be the case, it'll be in a queue. Is that true or false? That's just what I feel.

So it is true that the call will go into a queue based on priority, but I can say that I don't have the metrics for it, but I can tell you that Previously when we had a dedicated animal control position, they were working, I believe it was a 410 shift, so they were only available four days out of the week and obviously 10 hours a day, whereas with transitioning to having all of our police service technicians being trained in animal control, now it's 24 hours a day, it's seven days a week that we are able to now, granted, they do have other responsibilities so sometimes the animal control we'll call them maybe the lower priority ones will wait but we found that ensuring a broader coverage throughout the work week is able to allow us better services and actually it provides a lot of the employees with better confidence to be able to deal with these issues because they've all been trained since the inception of their their employment all the way through attending a 40-hour course so they're all equipped and ready to deal with these issues regardless of the time of day or the day of the week so it becomes a trade-off of hopefully more service what would we do if somebody called when the animal control unit was not on duty would that then fall to the officers on duty Yes, and it would largely depend on the acuteness of the call. If it's something that requires, let's say it's a vicious animal in the process of attacking someone, officers will respond. Actually, that would still be the case currently. But if it was something that... If we didn't have a PST on, excuse me, police service technician on duty, that would fall to an officer and that queue would be even longer than it is currently with the animal control responsibilities falling to the PST position.

okay so hopefully we're open to trying this out see how it goes and then maybe pivot but maybe it's a good thing maybe having all of them available like you said couldn't elevate the service well and to to kind of augment the police service technicians in terms of their duties with animal control one of our supervisors one out of two of the psc supervisors

actually was our former animal control PST. So he's also taken on the position of conducting follow-ups when there's more in-depth investigations that have to be conducted. So in terms of that, there's not much of a drop-off. We still have, and he works a 410, so we still have that expert, so to speak, that is available during those hours, but now we just elevated everybody else's competency and confidence in dealing with animal control issues.

Okay, thank you. The next thing I have is the, we've already established the biweekly coordinated meetings with the Union Pacific. I think it was slide 67. I like this idea, but who's in those meetings? Who's a part of that meeting?

Currently it is spearheaded by our, we call it the homeless czar, it's not an actual position, that's just a title we give them for Lieutenant Robertson and he meets with his counterpart from the Union Pacific Railroad Police.

So the idea is to get help and not just clean and move.

Well, as you can see in some of these slides or on the bottom slide, a lot of our encampments happen to be on Union Pacific Railroad property. So it's more of a coordination and collaborating with them while it is their jurisdiction, but we also know that they're their staff is not readily available to conduct these cleanups as ours are. So instead of having our community wait an exorbitant amount of time saying, hey, that's just UPR's jurisdiction, this kind of helps us coordinate that, hey, we know that this is there. I know you guys can't. Can you guys get to it? You can't? Are you okay if we take lead on this? So it's more of a just communicating, collaborating.

And then we follow up with, hopefully, the human services department, and we try and get as much help out to them as possible.

Yeah, so these responses are all coordinated. So we also have biweekly meetings with human services as well as public works. So it's a multifaceted approach. We're not just... spearheading it just with the police department. We want to offer services whenever possible, whenever appropriate as a first resort to help people at least maybe find temporary shelter versus just posting the 72-hour notice and saying, you know, we've tried everything, but now this is turning into a public hazard.

Thank you. Thank you for all the work you're doing. I know it's not easy.

Thank you. Council Member James Aguilar, please.

All right, yes, thank you very much, I appreciate. I appreciate first the answer to Council Member Bolt's question on the animal control officer. I was gonna ask kind of similar lines, and so I thank you for the clarity on that. My question is mostly around community engagement and outreach, but first to comment on that. I definitely have seen in the last couple of years a big push on social media, and i really appreciated what feels like a more human approach right and making pd just just I think you said it earlier, kind of changing how we see PD, the image of PD, and I think that that's working really well on social media. And that goes with recruitment too, making San Leandro Police Department look like the place that we need to be, that you should come to, right? And so I want to appreciate that. My question is about the one thing that I see missing here, and that's outreach and engagement with public schools. And so can you talk a little bit about what PD has done to reach out to schools and engage with schools in our community.

Yeah, so there was definitely a, obviously a large drop off when the school resource officer program was canceled, so that really limited the amount of direct interaction that we have. I know that our recruiting sergeant, actually Sergeant Watson, has still gone onto school campuses after notifying them and trying to participate in certain speaking engagements so that we still have contact with the schools, but we don't, And we also do some of our recruiting at local colleges as well, as we know that obviously people getting ready to enter the job market is probably a good source of potential applicants. So those are definitely activities that we still engage in in terms of engaging with our schools.

Totally, thank you. Yeah, I would love to see us push in a little bit deeper. High school is a great pathway, too. I mean, I went to San Lorenzo High School where we had the Sheriff Explorer program, and San Leandro High had something similar. I'd love to bring some of that back. But I think that that's my only question, because that's something that's really important to me, and also appreciation for the work that you do. It is not easy, and so thank you very much. Thank you.

Vice Mayor, please.

Thank you for the time and attention and putting together such a thorough presentation. Thank you. I have two main questions. Second one is on emergency management, so just on deck for that. I wanted to... One priority that had been elevated several years ago was around the hiring of a data and crime analyst. And I'm just wondering where that is. I think tracking our data, but also sharing it and just, is it fully staffed? Is it staffed at the position that it was budgeted for? I believe it was two FTEs, or is it one? Can you clarify?

So we, I believe we are authorized for one crime analyst and one management analyst.

Okay.

And currently we have the crime analyst position staffed. We did, not too long ago, we had the management analyst position understaffed with a second crime analyst. Unfortunately, that second crime analyst was released from employment. So that current position is vacant right now. The crime analyst or the management? The management analyst that was being understaffed by a crime analyst. Gotcha. Under filled I should say.

Okay. I know that that is something that continues to be elevated just in terms of tracking and benchmarking our numbers across the community just in terms of our public safety numbers. I'll transition over to emergency management. What is an emergency operations plan?

So when something significant happens, big earthquake, large fire, COVID, all significant, slow moving, fast moving, this is how we're going to operate as a city. It's not specific to the Emergency Operations Center. It's not specific to an incident. This is going to be guiding our city. Okay.

Thank you for that. I didn't. Anyway, thank you. My next question is around the hazard mitigation plan. So the current comment period is currently open. When did it start? July 14th. Today's the 13th, so probably Monday, whatever Monday was. This Monday? Yes. Okay. So it just started? Yes. And it ends?

The 24th. Oh, it's only a 10, like a... Then the start date's wrong.

Okay.

We closed the 24th, so it has to be the 10th, two weeks. It's only a two-week comment period? It's only a two-week comment period.

Okay, and then once the comment period closes, you briefly spoke a little bit about that process, but once we have our comment period, how does community input actually influence the local hazard mitigation plan?

Great question. So I got feedback from our consultant and I believe feedback came through other avenues, where looking not just at wildfires, but how are we moving people? How are we being mindful? So we will take all the feedback. As appropriate, we will make changes to the draft plan. Evacuation is not a part of the hazard mitigation plan. It's the hazards that we look at and how do we mitigate them, hence local hazard mitigation plan. But we will take feedback and address the concerns. Mindfully, obviously.

So then once the comment period closes, you collect all of the input from the public, and then we have a consultant that is kind of helping us, and then what is the timeframe from, the closing of the common period to, and actually before I jump into that question, does it get approved by any entity?

So before it goes to Cal OES and FEMA, we will do the review. Depending on what the comments are and the suggestions, I may ask for some help from our partner agencies, my partners within the city as well. It will then, it doesn't go to approval there. What happens is it goes to Cal OES. In FEMA there's a 45 day review period. It comes back to us and then it comes here for approval. we will be sending the draft to other agencies. So Water District, City of Hayward, a long list of our partners that will look at it. So we're collaborating and making sure that everything makes sense and others have time to review.

And so from coordination and communication with other partner, with other partners, what is the timeline to actually have updated local hazard mitigation plan?

So the review period closes the 24th. Depending on the comments, that will take some time if it's pretty quick. My hope is that we can do a quick turnaround. It may not involve a lot of feedback. I mean I hate to give you like the I don't know exactly timeframe. There's no hard and fast deadline to this. The big push is as things change, FEMA requirements change in the local hazard mitigation plan, they're not the same as five years ago. We have different leadership. So my hope is that we move this through the process correctly but being mindful that things can change quickly.

So is it like a six-month process, a year process?

We should be done well before August of 2027. So we should be done in less than, I would say, three months. We should be pretty close to being finished, assuming no big problems.

It's tight. Yeah, it looks, it feels very tight, especially with it going to Cal OES and then coming back to us for approval. But okay, thank you.

Just to clarify, did you say that council approves it?

Yes, it has to come here for approval.

So we pass a resolution saying we agree. Thank you. Council Member Bowen, please.

Thank you, Mayor. I love this plant, no. Really appreciate the work. I mean, shout out to you, including many slides with cute animals and children. I understand what you're trying to do. So a few questions, comments. If we can go to slide 66. Yes, so encampment removals. I have a few questions around that, and then I think on the next slide it talks about the establishment of the biweekly meetings. Really appreciate, and we've talked about this before, but interdepartmental approach. I get pretty regular emails from community members, and what I really appreciate is being able to reach out to the city manager and staff, and I include, I think, everybody that attends these meetings, or every department that attends these meetings, because there's a little piece of that that everybody kind of owns, and I'm wondering if in these meetings, obviously you know the locations of it, but is it possible for there to be some easier, more, Efficient way for the council members to be able to work with the team on what's going on in particular like hot spots Just because there's a lot of back and forth with trying to answer questions from constituents I know that you are doing work and certainly if I an area or an issue arises that you're not aware of, then you become aware of it and then you do something. But it's really important for me to be able to share with the community members what is happening and what's being worked on. Oftentimes the immediate solution isn't going to be necessarily possible, but it's clearly something that, you know, that staff is aware of and that we're trying to be really holistic with our approach of yes, let's clear encampments, but let's make sure that there's somewhere for them to go or let's make sure services are provided. And so is there, I don't know if there's anything anybody can add to that in terms of what's the process when you all get together and work on an encampment cleanup or an issue area arises?

So not personally being have having been in any of these meetings I can't speak to the actual process, I just know that. Something that you already touched upon and that also spoke to is that you know we do try to make this a holistic approach sounds like the Council members wanting are you asking for a. almost like a report back, a brief back on certain problem spots that you've already communicated, but you haven't heard back, is that what I'm getting at?

Yes, but not necessarily to ask for you to do more work, because you're already talking, I mean, when you're meeting, you're obviously already talking about things, but is there, maybe that's the ask, is there an easier way for me to be able to communicate with you so that I can communicate Communicate with the residents that these things are happening and that we're working towards solutions.

We've got a team standing behind you Good evening, I'll add one piece which is that staff do develop a monthly calendar of encampment cleanup That doesn't preclude new sites from being added throughout the month however, if that's helpful information we could share that as well. And then I know Chief Bowie wanted to add some additional information about services offered.

I'll just add, I know Captain Ting isn't in these meetings, but the ARU is also getting that calendar and they often coordinate with PD, with Union Pacific. They know all the players involved as well and they'll go through ahead of time before a sweep comes to offer services. So that is happening on a regular basis.

So it sounds like I need to CC you in my email.

You do.

Okay, we'll do, we'll do. I really, but yeah, I mean, I obviously just really want to shout out for the work that you all do. I mean, it is, the question that I have too, and I think any of you could answer it, is obviously we've been talking about budget and budget constraints, and I'm wondering if, if there is going to be an impact on this particular service with the cabinet removals or just mental health services or just the ARU, what are some things we're thinking about in this next year as we're continuing this work?

Specifically, you were talking about budget impacts or cuts? Yeah. I don't foresee any changes to the way we're operating right now. It's part of the ARU's normal operations. It's been built into it at this point.

Great. Also, I don't foresee any budget changes having an impact on the amount of encampment cleanups that we're able to conduct.

Great, and then, you know, Council Member Aguilar mentioned earlier about schools, and I did wanna mention that I really appreciate that, especially at the beginning of the school year, and it's gonna be next month. Again, I think, what, like the second week of August? I know that PD does a really great job of trying to do outreach and education to the parents. because traffic will become an issue. We will all converge on the schools, and people will still need to try to get to work, and kids will still be walking to school, so just really appreciate the additional effort you all put in at the beginning of the school year, even if that means some parents get tickets for double parking or sitting in drop off zones, but I think it's a really important thing for us to be able to do in partnership with the school district to ensure that kids can get to school safely. And then the last thing that I will say is for the police department and all of the departments that work on encampment removal across the departments, I really, really appreciate the responsiveness that you all have had to my emails and the community members because they're just desperate to be able to figure out how to help their neighbors and how to ensure that, especially when it comes to public safety, that we're addressing those needs. So thank you so much for that.

So a few thoughts from me. I think it's important that PD be tightly connected with providers such as Building Futures. And so when we think about the operation of the navigation center, making sure that you guys are just attached at the hip. You mentioned PSTs being cross-trained. Obviously we believe that cross-training, or at least I believe that cross-training is extremely important. It creates diverse job possibilities and makes work a little bit more interesting. That being said, I'm a little bit unclear on what is currently on the PST's plate. So, can you elaborate?

Yes. I think the best way to describe a PST position is it's kind of like a Swiss Army knife. They engage in a whole lot of different responsibilities. So one of their primary duties is to operate our temporary holding facility. So they act as prisoner transports. They'll do our booking processes, fingerprinting, photographing. They'll also supplement our patrol operations by taking some of our cold reports that are lower priority maybe things that don't have suspect information or don't require extensive follow-up that we will send our police service technicians out to certain types of reports. They'll also do things... Some of their responsibilities also include issuing parking citations, abandoned vehicle abatement, some... I think some derelict properties as well, they will write up violations on, they'll tow vehicles. So a lot of supplementary duties that they can, any way they can take these things that don't require a police officer to respond to.

So thank you for that. PD profile or PD promotion, you guys have been very good at social media engagement and I think you have a very powerful following, significant engagement. One of the questions or I guess maybe comments, requests of you is when it comes to things like schools, Really doing a little bit more. You did one video last year at the beginning of the school year, so that was an awesome video. But what about more, specifically with respect to our schools? So that's just something for you to think about. When it comes to walking, one of the main challenges that we have around our school sites is too many vehicles. The number of vehicles creates traffic risk, particularly risk to young children. So what can we do to help promote walking to school? What can PD do to make it cool to walk to school as opposed to being driven by parents? And I think that part of that's creating that safe environment perception and what can we be doing to help bring comfort to parents. Are we spending time with parents at school sites, PTAs and the like to let them know that it really is safe to let your child walk to school just based objectively on information that you have. So finding ways to do that encouragement, you can be a piece of that equation. With respect to the hazard, so moving on to hazard, and then I'm gonna come back to fire in just a second. It's such a basic question, but what you said, evacuation is not hazard mitigation, so maybe you can tell me, what is hazard mitigation? Help me define the parameters.

So it's looking at our infrastructure, right? There's a dam. If the dam breaks, how do we mitigate? What are our options? We are looking at our seniors. How do we address those with access and functional needs? While they are not a hazard, we still need to be mindful of our community. It gets larger. What if there's an airplane on their way to Oakland? Doesn't make it to Oakland, it makes it to us instead. Trains that come through heat, cold, rain. So as we look at how our weather is changing, how do we mitigate some of these hazards? I hope that answers your question.

I'm just gonna try to take them in pieces. So suppose that the dam breaks. Okay, so water's coming down, you know, Estadio or whatever, wherever the water flows according to your maps. When you think of hazard mitigation in that scenario, what sorts of things are we considering?

So we're looking at the dam, how well is it built? How are we getting water out? Who's gonna be impacted? What are city services that will also be impacted? Are we in the flood as the water pours out? There's a bit more when it comes to flooding. Sorry, we're beeping. Okay, sorry. So it's going to be what can we do to strengthen, to mitigate some of these problems? I'm not an engineer. I can't really give you a really great answer on that, and I apologize. The smart people take care of that response. I just need to make sure that we're looking at it. How do we mitigate it? What are we going to do?

Okay, so my ask would be to try to provide us before the plan comes that we need to vote on to provide us a little bit more information, maybe a draft of the plan, something so that we can start really socializing and understanding because when I think of hazard mitigation, and I'm not an expert in this, but my first reaction was like, how can evacuation not be part of hazard mitigation because when When there's a fire or when the dam breaks, what does the school, what do the school children need to do a mile away? Do they need shelter in place? Do they need to go to the second floor? It's like movement of people in response would be a mitigation to the risk that's presented. We might be using different terminology. Please, if you can help us work through that. For the fire team, Chief, please. What I think I heard you say is that ARU not only responds to let's say a 911 call saying that we have someone who is mentally, appears to be mentally ill at least, but also is being used to respond to encampment sites where there may be mentally ill or substance abuse disorder, individual suffering from those conditions, is that correct?

That's correct. Okay.

And if you were to break down what I call the emergency response versus the day-to-day, we need to go and visit encampments or work with Building Futures perhaps at the Navigation Center or some other thing that's not a 911 call, can you just roughly break that? Is that 60-40, 30-70?

I would have to check. It's more, I would say, 80-20, 911, maybe 70, 30.

If you could just come back with that. It's not critical, but I just want to make sure that we're framing the type of work that's being done. Sure. In the goals up there, it didn't really see fire. and this is not about creating work plans, but I do think that are you tucked into something like recruiting or other goals up there where it wasn't as explicit?

We are. The public engagement was the one that's most front-facing, but yes, we have similar recruitment goals as well, and we can work to show those also, if that would be helpful.

I think it'd be just to elevate the things that fire is doing, because obviously we're aware of the firehouse events and the like, but finding other ways in which you are specifically addressing recruiting challenges and diversity of recruiting, all that kind of stuff. Coming back to police to wrap up, on police recruiting, one of the concerns that I have had all along is that using corporate terminology that these goals are sandbagged. It's not that hard in the grand scheme of things. It shouldn't be that hard to hire two or hire four. But I thought that we'd blow these goals away. But we're just kind of meeting the goals. Talk to us a little bit about that.

And so, as I mentioned, we've had successful hiring efforts, but they've been offset, but we've had a recent spate of retirements and separations. Now, while we can somewhat project upcoming retirements with a fair amount of accuracy, we've had several unanticipated separations that we obviously had no ability to foresee, so that has really kind of set us back, whereas we would have made a lot more progress than we currently are.

So if someone wants to join the force, someone comes to me tomorrow and says I want to join, what is that process, what should I do with that information?

So you forward it to any one of us at the police department, we will forward it to our professional standards unit and specifically our recruiting and hiring sergeant, Sergeant Watson. He takes the reins in terms of kind of walking people through the process, but we also have a recruitment team that we've established in the recent couple of years to try to augment his work. Again, talking about reaching out to applicants, following up on an individual and personal basis, and those have yielded a lot more successes. You funnel someone to Sergeant Watson, he'll guide you through the website that you have to fill out the application for police officers specifically. There is the Pellet B exam, the WSTB, and obviously once they pass that, there's an oral panel that they are invited to if they do pass those standards once the oral interview is done, then we may or may not send them through a background process. That includes polygraph, medical, psych, eval, and then once that is done, excuse me, before we send them the backgrounds, they will go through a command interview as a second level of interviews before we decide if we're going to send them through a background process. But once that process is done through the backgrounds and they're actually hired on, then we're talking about a brand new recruit they're going to have to send, go through a six-month academy, field training, et cetera.

I think my interest is primarily when someone comes to me. Because I have made a referral, and I'm going to make another referral. But it's like, what should they expect? So if someone could follow up with me, just so that I can make sure that the expectation is what's actually happening. And if it's not, then we can close that feedback loop. So with that being said, I think we are done with this presentation. Thank you very much for all three of you for stepping forward. At this point in time, we are going to next to our list. I think is Infrastructure, capital I, Infrastructure, here we go. Mr. Tom, welcome.

The highlight of the evening, I'm sure. Good evening, Mayor, good evening, Council. I'm Nick Tom, Assistant Public Works Director, here to present on Infrastructure. A revenue measure was discussed by the city council at the July 6th council meeting, and at that time staff was directed to defer this item. We will revise this schedule to show a ballot measure in November of 2028. Before I knew you were going to revise the schedule, we had this slide of a summary of our outreach efforts for the current year. We will revisit this again in about a year. We are moving forward with an update to our stormwater fee. We will start this effort this month and we'll complete this on time. For background, this fee was established in 1993 and has been constant since that time. We did an effort in 2024 to have the fee updated and the measure was defeated by mail-in ballots. Success this next time around is going to hinge upon two things, clear messaging and public appetite for the fee. The economic conditions are not great for a lot of the community. We will make a recommendation as to whether we should proceed with this fee at this time when we get closer to that. As part of our transition to an electric vehicle fleet, we were tasked with applying for a PG&E program that covers the cost to bring upgraded electrical service to our site. When we submitted our application, we learned that the program is fully committed and that no funds are available for additional sites. We recommend continuing with the transition to an electric vehicle fleet, but dropping this item. We are currently working with a consultant hired by the MTC to prepare schematic plans and a budget for our electric vehicle charging system build out. We're also purchasing electric vehicles. However, it has proven difficult to get them delivered. Of the eight that we have ordered, only three have been delivered. Ford canceled our pickup order twice, and we now have ordered them through Chevy. These tasks to support our environmental goals have been initiated on schedule and are still underway. I have details. Specifically, the trash-free San Leandro initiative has been launched and used for several internal events. Our first external user will be the vendors at the farmer's market starting this month and then continuing onward. The environmental purchasing policy has been adopted and guidelines are being developed. It will be implemented this summer. Two of our facilities, the Public Works Environmental Services Office and Manor Library are now green business certified and we will continue to look to expand that to other city buildings. We have made project on our major CIP projects. Memorial Park, Stephen Taylor Sanctity of Life Pavilion, and our fuel tank projects are complete. Cary Haas Bridge is in progress and is anticipated to finish slightly ahead of the deadline shown here. Our new branch library project is on schedule. Lake Chabot Road has been delayed a quarter due to difficulty in obtaining NEPA environmental clearance for the work near the creek. So we're showing a one quarter extension. The MacArthur Superior Roundabout is on schedule. I have some pictures of projects. We have the dedication for Stephen Taylor Sanctity of Life Pavilion, some of our first users from Memorial Park, photos of the fuel tank project before, during, and after. We have a photo of the Cary Haas Pedestrian Bridge project. This is after the damaged bridge was removed. Obviously we haven't started construction on the new bridge yet. And on the right we have construction ongoing for the Mulford Marina Branch Library. I'd be happy to take any questions.

So thank you for your presentation. There you go, Council Member Bolton. Yes.

Slide 73, design, construction, execution, and PG&E rebates. It says we're going to recommend discontinuing, but then you said we're going to stay with the cementity. Can you just explain that a little more for me? I'm losing it here.

Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. This goal was very narrow. It was to apply for a specific program. The goal supports converting to an electric vehicle fleet. We still propose to convert to an electric vehicle fleet, but this program is just not available to us.

Funds, or what do you mean, it's not available, time, or what happened?

PG&E had a certain budget for assisting applicants with this work, and they received enough applications to expend their budget before we got our application in.

Okay, but we're still on track to go to an EV fleet?

We are still moving toward an EV fleet. We don't have a deadline to convert all of our vehicles or replace all of our vehicles with EVs, so I can't really say that we're on track, but we are still moving in that direction.

Okay, thank you. Councillor Bowen, please.

Thank you, Mayor. Yay, infrastructure. I didn't realize how much I would talk about or think about infrastructure until I became a city council member, but now I really appreciate it, so thank you so much to the Public Works staff and everybody for working on this. I wanted to ask about the MacArthur Roundabout on slide 77 for the major construction and project delivery. Is that... saying that October to December of 2027, we will have a finished MacArthur roundabout?

Yes, that is the schedule.

Okay, Jason's ready to explain how that's gonna happen.

Hi, good evening, City Engineer Jason Imai. I think the latest, we just provided an update to Facilities and Transportation Committee and I do have to apologize. The date now is January 2028, so one month off from that little quarter. I know. But we are diligently working past the last few obstacles or issues, outstanding issues, I should say. Let's not call them obstacles. to get this out to bid and then to construction.

Okay and I know that the residents along that corridor have been really engaged in this and continue to be really engaged in it. Once we do actually start the project, is there going to be an effort towards just outreach and just letting the community know what's happening?

Yes, the construction of a roundabout, as you can imagine, is gonna be very, very impactful to traffic around the area. The plans do include a very complex staging, multi-staged, various traffic lanes shifts, detours and all that such. This has been thought out prior. So there is gonna be an intense outreach to the community to advise them of upcoming traffic shifts and so on and so forth.

And what about engagement so people know how to use a roundabout?

That is a good suggestion. Roundabouts have been used in Northern California for several years now, and you see more and more of them popping up, but still people get a little confused when they drive them, so it has been discussed that we would partner with our comms team, communications team, to maybe do like an outreach on how the proper way, you know, the rules of the road, so to speak, literally, how to use a roundabout, so that's a good suggestion as well.

Thank you. And then I just also wanted to give a quick shout out for slide 75 and 76 around the implementation of environmental programs. I also sit on the stop waste, and we talk a lot about different, I know that they work with cities and have meetings with the city manager and staff often about things that are coming out of the state and how we can be better, more sustainable and to be able to implement these environmental programs. So really appreciate all the work that you all are doing towards that. And I know that, again, it's like just a mindset shift, and also to make it easy for us to be able to do these things. So I really appreciate the effort that you all are putting in.

Okay, so a couple of questions. So we'll go to Vice Mayor.

Sorry, I neglected to punch myself in on the queue. I would be remiss if I did not ask some questions about Lake Chabot Road. So just to be clear, on slide 77, that's only on phase one.

Slide 78 is our schedule. I'm sorry, 77. 77. Ours is different. Oh, I'm sorry.

I've been quoting the wrong numbers, the wrong page numbers. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Okay, I was like, somehow y'all managed to follow along, even though I've been saying no.

So... This is the phase one repair of the two slides that occurred after the winter storm of 23. Mm-hmm.

And is this updated... Is this timeline matches up to the project page or does the project page need to be updated with this timeline? There was an update I think in June 26.

I'm just wondering when. I believe they're coordinated but I will double check and update the project page if necessary. Okay.

So we're looking at this Q1. When I see Q1, I think January through March, but this is fiscal year, so July and September. Okay. All right, I have to, that's my only question for now. Really excited about Mulford. Anyway, thank you for your work. It's getting late and I will leave it at that. I cede my time back to the chair.

Okay, here we go. Seeing no other questions, I'll ask a few myself. 1383, how are we doing? Are we ahead of schedule, behind schedule? Are we super excited? Talk to me about 1383.

I think I might need to phone a friend.

You can phone a friend. Where's your friend? It got too late for a friend. Okay, we'll come back to that another time. NEPA, Lake Chabot Road. It strikes me that whatever animals happen to be there, toads, salamanders, fish, fruit flies, whatever it is has to be protected. That's gonna be true regardless of whether we're working on slide one, slide two, slide three, slide four. Is that a fair assumption?

Yes.

Okay. Right now, the upslope slide, I think that's four? Yes.

Number four, but included in phase one.

That's fine. Is that work complete?

No. That work has not gone out to bid.

to the work that we have there with the rip rap that we've put in, et cetera, that's not the final outcome.

No, that was an interim measure to stabilize the slope. The design for the full mitigation for that and rebuild of that slope is complete. It's gonna be packaged with the repair work at slide one. So slide one and slide four are gonna be packaged together and put out to bid.

Okay, I need a motion to extend. Council Member Bowen.

Me again? Yes, I will make the motion.

Do I have a second?

Vice Mayor. I'll second.

30 minutes. You can do it, Council Member Balz.

So I have a motion for 30-minute extension from Councilmember Bowen with a second from our Vice Mayor who's nodding yes to that specificity. Please vote.

All votes are in and the motion carries with four yes votes and one no vote.

Let us proceed. So continue with the questions. How long, so to speak, is a NEPA valid?

Oh, that's a good question. I think once it's certified, it is good. But it's only for the areas that were studied. So specifically for slides one and four, the NEPA applies to those two slides.

Okay, so if I just say, hey, I wanna do it for slides two and three as well, just loop it right in since we're apparently delayed already by our NEPA, and it's the same creek. So talk to me a little bit about that.

you would still have to do NEPA again. Now, they could build off the old NEPA survey, and NEPA will only be required, again, if there's federal funding involved. If there's no federal funding, then we would result to CEQA. But you could build off the study that was done before, but still, the biologists and everyone has to go out to that specific site to see if there's any environmental concerns. Now, they should be similar, you're correct. They should be similar, but you never know, they could find something else.

My point is, the biologists can be out there once and look at both sites, no?

They could, but the work that was done was, again, specific for one and four, because that was what the funding was for.

Okay.

We'll revisit this later.

When we extend deadlines, so this is back to Mr. Tom. When we extend deadlines, so from MacArthur Roundabout, that deadline has extended through time. How do we capture that in the reporting that we do? Because I'll give you the context because when Council Member Bowen and I met with the residents in 2023, we told them in no uncertain terms that the MacArthur roundabout would be done in 2025. And so when I come here and see green, and it's gonna be done in fiscal year 28, it makes it difficult for us. And so it doesn't seem like it's green relative to what we communicated publicly at one point in time. So it's really more of a process question. I'm less fixated about this. I'm more fixated about the color and how we communicate with the public when deadlines change.

And I will apologize for the misrepresentation of the color. We are updating the public on the schedule. So the schedule on the project website is accurate. So whenever there is a delay, and then there are examples of it on on MacArthur Roundabout and Lake Chabot Road. When we say, hey, we promised this by, we said the NEPA was gonna be done by, I think it was a certain date. We said there's a delay, now the due date is this. And we publicly disclosed that on the website, on the Project Updates website. So our primary method of communication to the public is that website. and we try to keep it up today as much as possible and whenever there is a delay we'll state the reason for that delay.

Because I think ultimately what I care about and I've heard from a number of council members but I'll let them speak for themselves. What I've heard is that we want projects on time, on budget and sometimes we're delivering things ahead of budget and that's awesome and we need to celebrate that. I think I've heard some really good news recently that wasn't highlighted here.

No, and I'm glad you brought that up. I'll share that with you. So there have been a couple of projects recently that have been delivered on ahead of schedule and under budget. In comparison, those projects are completely within the control of the City of San Leandro. They do not have any outside agencies. They do not have any regulatory Those two projects specifically were a curb ramp project where we replaced over 100 curb ramps ahead of schedule and under budget. The second one was our sanitary sewer point repair project. That one's coming in ahead of schedule. Those two projects were completely under the control of City of San Leandro. When we start to involve other regulatory agencies like FEMA, like the Water Board, Caltrans, all these other agencies that have approval authority, that's what puts them on these major construction project deliveries and that's what makes them major because they're so complicated. So that one, some things are out of our control and we try to react as appropriately as possible. it's difficult, but when we are able to control a project fully, I think we've proven that recently that we can come in on schedule or even ahead of schedule sometimes.

So we're gonna find reasons to celebrate that, trust me. But when we are behind, we need to be very transparent that we are behind. And the other comment on that is that on these bigger multi-jurisdictional projects, use your electeds to put extra pressure to make things happen. Delays are natural, but when projects are delayed several years, that's not good, and that's where we need to, because that's literally costing the city millions of dollars, so that's really important. For the electric vehicle fleet, I know you were talking about a PG&E program in particular. There are other programs that have been funded out there. AVA Community Energy was looking for opportunities to build chargers in different cities because I'm assuming that's charging programs or is that for paying for the vehicles themselves?

The program I'm familiar with through AVA was a... initiative where they wanted to lease public parking spaces and put in charging infrastructure that would be open to the public

Because I know that the Air District and AVA in different ways have been focused a lot on supporting electrical vehicle infrastructure in particular. So let's just make sure that to the extent that we can tap into either of those or monies that ACTC is working to allocate, there seems to continue to be this set aside of money for charging infrastructure. And if it's only for public, then we can confirm that. But for example, there's been a lot of electrification of school buses, and that's clearly not public infrastructure. So it's the money that's going to electrify the charging stations on school grounds for school buses. So I'm just looking for ways in which we can find that type of money for this type of purpose that might be outside of PG&E. And then the last one, that I was very interested in as a stormwater fee update. Because obviously, we cannot run a city on revenue that's 35 years old. Costs have increased, full stop. So my real question here is that it doesn't have to be addressed today, but I very much want to understand how we will approach this differently from last time. That's really important to me. Last time we did not have images of trash capture devices. We did not have images of breaking down pipes that were cracking or whatever that needed to be fixed. so one recommendation that i have is that we'd be very much focused on actual images videos things that people can say oh wow i didn't realize it was that bad because i think the opportunity is there residents have told us that they are willing to pay for infrastructure in particular This would be a fee that's specific and it's associated with a specific purpose. I think we can, with that focus, help our residents see how instead of using the general fund to subsidize,

Good evening, Council. Jessica Lobron, Deputy City Manager. Thank you all for your patience as we wrap up our final priority work plan. I'll kick off this evening with an update on our Homelessness Prevention Rental Assistance Program. As a reminder, this is a limited subsidy for extremely low-income households that are at risk of homelessness. We're excited to share that we, oh. Sorry, I don't have pictures for this line. We launched this program in April of 2026 Graham. As a reminder, this is a limited subsidy for extremely low income households that are at risk of homelessness. We're excited to share that we. Sorry, I don't have pictures for this slide. We launched this program in April of 2026. Based on our first quarterly report, we have so far served eight households, of which seven are households with minor children. We did a lot of work coordinating with the school district to make referrals for this program. We're excited, one of the upcoming programs Tasks from our partner agency is to prepare a dashboard so we'll have more live time data on how many households are being served. I'll now hand it over to our housing manager, Carrie Huesler, for the next projects.

Thank you, Jessica. I'm here with the next three work plan items. And first I will go into information on rent program implementation. I'm pleased to share that this work program item represents the successful integration of two previous council priorities. This is the merger of the adoption of the rent stabilization ordinance and the rent registry implementation. So we're now rebranding as rent program implementation for the purpose of the work plan. So over the past three years, we've been building the city's new rent program division from the ground up. That work began with an extensive community outreach effort and has progressed through ordinance adoption, staffing, software development, and implementation planning. And as you can see here, we've completed many of the major milestones to date. This next slide highlights the key activities currently underway as we prepare to launch the rent program this coming January. Our efforts are currently focused on two major implementation activities. First, developing the initial community outreach and engagement plan, and then second, completing the public-facing rent registry software portal. In summary, we've successfully completed several key milestones including adoption of the rent stabilization and rent registry ordinances, completion of phase one of the rent registry software, hiring of three new staff members, and then I'm also pleased to share that we are in the process of hiring a permanent rent program manager who will lead the city's rent program as we transition from implementation to full program operations this January. Next, we are here with the mobile home space rent stabilization amendment. Council approved a one-year extension of this work plan item through June, 2028 to allow sufficient time to prepare the first draft ordinance. Following the rent program launched this January, we will begin a phased community outreach and engagement process. Feedback gathered during that process will help inform development of the first draft ordinance. As shown on this timeline, the remaining implementation activities extend through 2028 and are contingent upon the identification of funding. This phased approach provides time to evaluate the ordinance, engage the community, and develop a thoughtful first draft. This timeline highlights the major milestones over the next two years. Following the rent program launch in January, we will begin evaluating the ordinance. Community outreach will begin in March 2027, and the feedback received will help shape the first draft ordinance. Subject to available funding, we anticipate bringing that draft forward in 2028. And now I will bring forward the local preference disparate impact study item. So to date, staff has completed the initial phase of this effort, including background research, data collection, and analysis. Based on our evaluation, staff recommends discontinuing implementation of the local preference disparate impact study. Here's some key takeaways. Moving forward will require additional consultant costs. There is no state or federal mandate requiring adoption. Discontinuing this effort would not affect the city's inclusionary housing ordinance, and there are currently no available, excuse me, and there are no current affordable housing projects that would be impacted by this recommendation. And I will hand it off to Jessica Lobedon, our deputy city manager.

Thank you, and to present an update on the Llewellyn interim housing and drop-in center. We will be coming to council in the fall with a more robust update on the first year of operations, but just some of the key highlights from the first year. In total, 618 persons, individual persons, have accessed the drop-in center. 36 persons have moved from shelter into permanent housing. These are all photos of former Llewellyn interim housing residents with keys to their new homes. So we're very excited about the preliminary successes of this program and look forward to giving further updates in the future. I'll now hand it over to Planning Manager Waylandee.

Good evening council members. The purpose of this work plan item is to remove the barriers and the constraints to the development of new housing in the city. And over the past year, we've made progress on multiple fronts, including the following. First, with regards to development impact fees, we completed a major update to our impact fee structure in the past year, which reduced and, in some cases, eliminated park and traffic impact fees for two key housing types, ADUs and deed-restricted affordable housing. Also, as part of this effort, we right-sized park impact fees across the board to ensure that they aren't serving as a barrier to market-rate housing production, which is also a critical need for the city. With regard to market feasibility, we contracted with an economics consultant to analyze the market feasibility of major entitled housing projects in San Leandro. And those findings were presented to the council earlier this year in February. And as a result, the council now has this information as a basis to make informed housing related decisions that are based and grounded in real market conditions. With regards to parking and TDM, our housing element identified minimum parking requirements as a constraint to housing production. And in response to this constraint, staff worked with a transportation consultant to amend our minimum off-street parking requirements for the purpose of reducing unnecessary costs on housing developments and providing developers with a greater deal of certainty when evaluating whether to move forward the project in the city. This slide highlights some work that's currently in progress. Regarding Bayfair, staff is continuing to work hard to advance a development plan for the Bayfair TOD area, and that's funded by a $1.8 million MTC grant, and this effort is to turn decades of planning into implementation by providing a framework for transforming underutilized land into development-ready sites. With regards to project tracking, as we mentioned briefly in the economic development item, we created an Accela Power Users Group, which is a multi-disciplinary team, which is working on a coordinated recommendations to improve the development project tracking system for the city. and the goal of this effort is to reduce approval times to cut related staff costs and to make the permitting process work better for everyone involved and together these efforts are building condition that will make housing more uh more viable and achievable in san leandro and with that i'll turn turn it back over to jessica lobodon to finish the presentation

Thank you again for everyone's patience this evening and I understand we're moving directly to public comment now.

Very quickly, we will take the council questions. Going to council member or vice mayor Viva Suelten, please.

Thank you. I wanted to go back to... Hold on, I have too many tabs open because I've been opening up the project pages for various things. I wanted to go back to the rent program. And... Wanted to ask on the expanded renter protections that included Just Cause, some of the other, there was a kind of a legislative package, so to speak, that included Rent Civilization, Just Cause, and other expanded renter protections. It is my recollection that the council proposed elevated rent stabilization based on staff capacity and I'm just wondering where the other expanded renter protections, where are they in the work plan or are they not included in future work in like fiscal 27, 28?

You mean something like Just Cause or something? Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be something that we'd have to bring up at a future planning session. It's really not on the radar right now, so to speak. I think we were, like you said, prioritizing the last couple years between the rent registry and then rent stabilization more recently. So that would be something for council to certainly discuss and bring up in future priority planning sessions.

Okay, I was under the impression, I'd have to look back, because I was under the impression that it had been pushed, but that's fine.

And mobile home would be also, it is delayed, as we had mentioned, at the March session, but that was actually next in the queue, too. Okay.

My other question was regarding, we have different slide numbers. I'm looking at number four, local preference, disparate impact study. Is that a housing disparate impact study? I'm not clear on what part is being delayed.

Sure. Director Tom, did you want to answer that? Okay.

initiate so this is a study that is related to cities it has to do with fair housing also cities who wish to implement a local preference policy when their projects are federally and state and or state funded About 10, 12 years ago, the federal government did actually pass under HUD fair housing that if you want to keep with federal subsidy a local preference policy, you'd have to go through certain sort of hoops, so to speak. The state followed suit, I believe, a few years after that. So it's been in place over a decade plus. So this was an attempt to initiate that process. What we would say here is that we have a local inclusionary zoning ordinance that's been in effect since 2004. That is not impacted because if that's to say Central Cal has no federal state money, the city can't continue to have a local preference or have a developer implement that for us. So that gives you some context about what this is. This is a selection process for tenants.

So, I guess this is more of a comment, so I'll save that to ensure we have time for public comment. I just, I'm still unclear. I would have to look that up, but I just, my brain and heart really goes against, if a disparate impact study, which is intended to protect and to ensure that low income and low income communities are able to not have disparate impact on policies, right, this is the intent, is to prevent disparate impact. This kind of, I'm trying to kind of align it, But anyway, so I'll just leave that there, and if there's time for comments, I'll add that.

Council Member Bowen, please.

I just want to express my enthusiasm for housing and homelessness, just as I have all of the other priorities, but seriously, awesome. I wanted to ask about double home space, rent stabilization amendment, the timeline. So the... public review period, community stakeholder meetings, due date February 2028, and then the next date is a city council work session in March 2028. Maybe I was getting my, I was trying to, I'm trying to figure out sort of like what's gonna happen from, I don't know, the sort of like beginning of it to the end, because it seems like a pretty long timeframe from when we're like doing the work to the final second reading and it passes. Why is it such a long period?

Sure. I can add that we are gonna start the public outreach campaign and the stakeholder meetings in a similar fashion as the rent program work that we did a few years ago to get to this stage. We're going to start that alongside the council hearings and inform and have a lot of feedback. and so once we come to the program evaluation in september we'll have more of an idea of where the ordinance is heading and what program costs and staffing and budget and then moving into more of your questions then we will bring forward the reality of a program towards the end of 2027 and start bringing the actual ordinances through public hearing that helps so a lot of the time will just be to to outreach and listen to the community

Okay, thank you so much. And then I really appreciate that we are really focused on getting people housed, and obviously the picture of people getting keys, that's so wonderful, but also that we're talking about supporting housing production, because it's very much part of the same goal, and I really appreciate the work that we're putting in, I say we, you all are putting in, to making this happen. And then the other thing that I wanna say so that Council Member Bolt can get out here by 10.30 is for support of housing production. I love what could happen at Bay Fair and for us to be able to have more housing and more folks moving in and more families. I just have to always plug in making sure that we're providing resources and services to families and children as we're thinking about getting more housing in as well, thank you.

At this point in time, we're gonna take public comment on this item.

Mayor, we have received two comment cards and there are two hands raised on line.

Please proceed in person.

Our in-person speakers are Jenny Madsen followed by Mike Katz-Lacabe.

And if we, before we can have our first speaker, if we can get a time extension for 15 minutes, please. Can I get a motion? Council Member Bowen?

So moved.

Can I have a second? Yeah, Vice Mayor. Second. And so by 15 minutes, that amount to 10.45. Please vote.

All votes are in, and the motion carries unanimously. Five yes votes. Two council members being absent.

Thank you.

Thank you. At this point in time, can we proceed?

I was gonna yield my time so you could all go home on time, but you voted, so. Just Cause is still part of the deal. And I know it's not on the schedule, but we're not going to forget. The rent registry, I think, puts us in a better position to have some sort of enforcement of rules that have been ignored far too long by the landlords. because that's all I'm gonna say about that. I work on the state and local county level about mobile homes. I haven't forgotten about that. It's a promise y'all made, maybe not these particular individuals, but the council has made it over and over and over again. You got nine parks. It is not gonna take three months to do outreach. It's different than the tenant outreach, which was a whole city full of buildings and renters. This is nine parks in San Leandro. It's a targeted area. And when it comes to local preference, the funding has always determined who gets into the subsidized housing. And it's rarely been any money from San Leandro. So San Leandro residents are usually kind of down. They don't get high priority for housing, subsidized housing. I can be done now. I want you all to go home.

Thank you. The next speaker is Mike Katz-Lacabe.

Good evening. In reference to a previous part of the presentation, I must say that the use of the term hard tech makes me think that someone has been reading an energy recovery press release. But I digress. So speaking of public safety, it has now been more than 65 days since San Leandro police shot and killed a person at the San Leandro Marina on May 7th, 2026, for whom police were conducting a welfare check. AB 748 has been the law for more than seven years now, and that law requires the recordings of critical incidents involving use of force by law enforcement resulting in death or great bodily injury must be made publicly available within 45 days of the incident, with limited exceptions. According to the department's own policy, 805.11.1, disclosure may exceed 45 days if the department demonstrates that disclosure would substantially interfere with the investigation. Just to be sure I didn't miss anything, I checked the police department's critical incidents page today and the unanswered response to my public records request. As with previous times in which the San Diego Police Department has been in violation of California state law or its own policies, I expect no accountability for this violation. Accountability appears to be reserved for black police chiefs. I look forward to the prompt release of the critical incident video and the report detailing this violation of law and how it occurred. Thank you very much.

Thank you. There are no more comment cards from here in the room.

So we'll close public comment in person and open public comment online.

Our first online speaker is Douglas Spaulding.

Thank you very much. Here are Jenny and Mike. I first want to share, I've been having a little debate on some social media, Facebook page, someone who commented on the city doesn't do anything. And having sat through this entire presentation, there's an astonishing, amazing amount of work going on. And I think everyone for their parts in that. The thing I think is missing here is a discussion of data centers. And I'm mindful that Councilwoman Bowen raised it as an issue. I don't think we can afford to wait for the next priority setting meeting in March of 2027. It's an issue that touches on many of the priorities here, including economic development. Are we updating zoning guidelines? so that we can put in data centers as office buildings, quality of life, public safety, the whole nine yards. And the way that these data center developers are moving quickly And furtively, secretly, you know, the wool might be over ours by next March. So I urge you to reconsider that as an urgent matter for your discussion. And I believe the best course forward is to declare a moratorium until we know a lot more. And, Mayor, I did go and I spent a lot of the last week looking at Santa Clara and I The information is not great. I want to quickly move to the housing and homeless issue. I just find this astonishing that it's going to take so long. The mobile home rent stabilization ordinance has been promised for a very long time. It's not rocket science. We know what the elements are. Same with Just Cause. That's supposed to come after March of 2028. Come on. It appears like there's some quid pro quo going on where, well, you got your rent register, you got your RSO, so we're gonna slow the brakes on these other things. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Alvaro Ramos.

Okay, so I wanted to talk about how finance is a more significant issue, and it's not just about addressing the city's fiscal deficit. I want to pull finance out of the shadows and put it into the spotlight. we need to prioritize financial assistance. And I saw it appear under small business and entrepreneurship, but it's too limited and it should be expanded significantly. I'm going to give you some examples because it's not just about money. We need a careful study of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act that passed the United States Congress. The president vetoed it, I think because Congress didn't want to pass voter suppression. Anyways, it includes flexibility for community banks to loan money for building housing, which I found interesting. And furthermore, I'm glad also I heard earlier tonight about unbanked and underbanked populations of people. How much medical debt do people have? How much student debt do people have? How much credit card debt do people have, especially as a result of cuts from the federal government to food and healthcare? Maybe this is a place where credit unions could help. I'm open to ideas. Let's talk about workforce issues. So I'll argue that work access worked in the 1990s and stopped working in the 2000s. And it's dependent on a model of economic growth and rising productivity for there to be work to be done. So if you have economic stagnation and no significant productivity increases, there's not going to be any work. When the Great Recession happened in 2008, work requirements got in the way of people getting access to welfare. Work requirements have made a comeback. in eligibility for Medicaid. And frankly, people will die from getting kicked off of Medicaid. That's going to be another government statistic. There's too much exclusion for workers in the economy.

Thank you, sir. Your time has elapsed. Our next speaker is San Leandro Chamber of Commerce.

Hello, everybody. This is Emily Grego with the San Leandro Chamber of Commerce. I don't have any actual prepared remarks for tonight, but I was listening to the entire presentation and realized that the business community touches on every single department that was reported on tonight. Our businesses or the organization itself touches on all of them. And I just want to give a shout out to those that we work with at the city There are times when we're pushing for something and asking questions, but we are always really happy. I don't wanna use the word happy, but we're always wanna work with the city staff so that we can get things accomplished for our businesses. I wanna give a big shout out to the mural that is for the trash enclosure in the middle of downtown. That looks beautiful. We worked with the library on some workforce development initiatives. There's a lovely young lady there by the name of Sarah that we've been working with and we are gonna do more. We are gonna do a workforce development workshop around the trade certificate programs. I just realized we should probably invite fire and PD. We are in the midst of a first jobs program that is going on successfully. Restaurant week is working out really well. There is difficulty with translation with some of our Asian owned restaurants and others. So we could use some help and some collaboration there in some way or another. and public safety. We're happy to hear that encampment removal is still on track, but we're still worried about the third party contract that is no longer gonna be in place. That's really important to keeping our community safe, but all in all, thank you all for the work. Thank you for the collaboration and happy to answer any further questions on how we collaborate after this meeting to any of the city council members, thank you.

Thank you. Mayor, there are no more hands raised online.

Okay, so we'll close public comment online and come back to council members for final thoughts. Having given the opportunity and seeing no further thoughts, what I'd like to do is adjourn our meeting today in the memory of Supervisor Scott Haggerty. He played an instrumental role in a variety of things, a variety of commitments. One of his legacies was helping to organize and implement the The structure that we today know as Ava Community Energy, the Joint Powers Authority, and the wind farm bears his name, primarily as a sign of respect for his commitment, but he played a role in many different areas. It's a remembrance of his efforts as a public servant for many years, and with sympathy to his family, who is feeling the loss probably closer than anyone else. We pause for a moment to reflect. In memory of Supervisor Hagerty, we are adjourned.