City Council - Special Meeting

But the ethics of having them race while it's over 100? That seems not right. I don't know why they're not doing 6 a.m. starts.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right. Well, welcome to our brown bag lunch. Sorry, our brown bag meeting on Monday, July 13th. Today, our meeting topic is... Meeting management. So do we want to do we need to do the Pledge of Allegiance?

I don't have it on here.

I don't think so with workshops. So I wasn't sure. But OK, so there's been a lot of conversations about how we could maybe run the meeting a little smoother, a little more efficient and hopefully a little shorter per meeting because, you know, we're meeting about five hours later. on average, not including closed session. So I don't know, Teresa or Whitney, if you'd like to start. So I'd love to hear some of the ideas and the best practices you've seen from other cities before we got into each of us.

Maybe I'll just kind of kick things off. And I know Teresa's looked at a few different options as well. But yeah, we really, we kind of one of the Frameworks for this type of meeting, just provide context as we don't prepare a staff report. It's much more informal. So we can have a conversation about topics that just lend themselves to more of a free flowing conversation. And this there's lots of different ways for cities to. set up their agendas to run their meetings. There's obviously basics that are required under the Brown Act, but aside from that and parliamentary rules, we're here to really figure out how as staff can we help support you all and then to the extent you want to have conversations amongst yourselves about how you want to see our meetings run. We had looked at and talked about options including Some jurisdictions where council questions and deliberations are done at the same time so that staff presentation is made, the public is provided an opportunity to provide comment, and then council questions and deliberations happen in one go. um and that is i believe done from more of an efficiency standpoint um so that's one idea an option we've kind of looked at and known is done in other jurisdictions um but the way that really Things are largely open to your discretion. If we want to move things around, we would need to or put other restrictions on the way our agendas are formatted and put together. We would need to look at making amendments to our policies and procedures.

We would do that before we actually change anything in the meetings themselves, right? Right.

So those are some of the conversations that we've at least had internally, of course. And from a timing standpoint, we always... We've been trying to, from the staff side, do what we can to streamline our presentations and are happy to talk through any suggestions you have about that, as well as our staff reports and just the information that we put in a staff report versus what we put in a presentation versus what we end up putting into agenda correspondence. We've been trying to adjust based on what we think will be most effective for you all in terms of the level of detail we put in our staff reports. We're not sure that we're quite hitting the mark because it seems a lot of the times when we make our staff reports really detailed and have, let's say they're 30 pages long, we still get a dozen to 20 questions with an agenda correspondence that is almost as long. And so are we at a point where you would hope to have our staff reports shift in terms of the amount of detail that's in there?

Those are all things that are open to conversation.

So I know Teresa's looked at also how we've tended to have spent our time during a meeting, like what's the breakdown of time between staff presentations, public comment, questions, deliberation. So if that's something you're curious about, we have a lot, not every meeting or anything, but we kind of looked at it a little bit. And then finally, of course, the city manager report component, I'm happy to make those as big or small as we want. I do, I'll just let you know, I do hear from folks that they appreciate hearing things in there. So I think that's important. Yeah. So that's. just kind of going through what's in our meetings and what's on the agenda. Those are the main components. So we're happy to help support the conversation. We'll take direction and so forth. Awesome. Thank you.

Mayor, I know these are more free flooring. We do have one person joining virtually and that we did have public comment at the beginning. I don't know if you want to go ahead and see if that's for public comment and then we can get that out of the way or you want to keep going and see if this person wants to talk later but we are only taking public comment on this topic which is not of course meeting it's not a free flow um uh about talking about anything so

And yeah, let's go ahead and have them call for public comment as well. If you would like to do public comment. It's only regarding the meeting management topic. And so if you want to let them in, I'll let them know that as well.

They can hear us.

I will take the in person first, but I want to let them know that we're only taking public comment. Okay, cool.

All right. Sean, you I've unmuted you.

Can you hear us, Sean?

Yes, I can hear you can hear me.

Yes. Okay. So what we're doing, Sean, is this is a meeting only workshop meeting only about meeting management. So if you have a public comment about meeting management, we'll definitely take that. We have one person in the chambers right now. So I'll have them speak and then I'll have you speak. Sure. Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right. Come on up soon. Do you have a three minute time? Sure, let me come around and face you. Oh, thank you.

There's all of us turning around. Everybody's back. Since there's no report on the spacing, we've been on a Harvard commission where we went to midnight every meeting. I do understand. But democracy is a messy business. It is not efficient. And so when you're thinking about public meetings, just aiming for efficiency in shortness of meetings is, in my view, a mistake. If you need more time to listen to the public or to receive more information from the public, you might consider meeting more frequently instead of just twice a month. The other thing is that the detailed reports do generate more information for the public, which is why you get more public comments in the way of or respondents or more folks showing up to give you their viewpoints on what's going right in a neighborhood or what about a policy might actually be self-destructive to the operation of the city. So I would encourage you to have the discussion based on those kinds of aspects so that you can have the most information possible from your constituents And those are the folks you're here to serve. You're not here to serve the very fine public staff you have. You're here to make sure the city runs well for citizens. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, Sean Harris, we're ready for you.

Okay, I'll start my three minutes. I'll make it quick. That's a great topic. Sounds like you're going to kind of discuss how the meetings are going to work. I really enjoy going to the meetings. I just thought it might be considering some of the legal imbroglias that are happening right now with the mayor and city manager and the fact that they were recused themselves on the last city council meeting. I thought maybe it might be worth discussing censorship because if it continues to go downhill with the legal stuff going on, the city council might want to actually consider censoring a couple members. And I don't think we've talked about that topic and how to approach that because that may be coming down the road if the city loses those members. lawsuits and uh uh you know uh this taxpayers were forced to pay out some sort of settlement um i thought it might be a good idea to talk about uh how you're gonna approach censoring members of the city council and supporting staff i saw on the city manager's bio city website that she was uh unanimously nominated by the uh city council so i kind of think that might be a reflection of their decision making and judgment ability to judgment, because right now, if I understand correctly, the city manager is involved in a whistleblower lawsuit. So I just think censorship might be a good topic to bring into your discussion today. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. So getting back to meeting management, I thought 1st, if each member of the council would like to share how they would like to see things a little bit more efficiently for the conversation for today. And then we could also talk about, like, kind of starting from the top to the end as far as, like, each section of. The agenda and. Do we wanna keep it the way that it is? And then lastly, talk about staff reports and staff reports slash presentations. Does that sound like an okay way to break this up to have the conversation?

Mayor, if it's okay, I'm actually really curious in the data that Teresa collected on how we're currently spending time. Do you mind if we start with that?

That's great. Yeah, absolutely.

So what started this, me looking at the different cities, was trying to figure out how other cities were that didn't go dark after the Zoom bombing, because there were many cities that continued to do teleconferencing. So just in preparation for the 21st, I went through and I was watched other meetings to see how they handled public comment on during those meetings and also how their agendas and things were set up, which I am going to be making changes to our cover page of our agenda. But. Quite a few city and knowing how the last I would say. three months of meetings, especially when we have larger items, whether we've had public and we're having council questions and then we go on break and then having public comment, how we happen to lose a lot of people at that point in time. Now that may change somewhat with having hybrid, the ability to do hybrid meetings now, but several cities had done staff report public comment and then as Whitney described, having their questions and their deliberations together because it gave the, what it appeared to me is it gave the council an opportunity to ask more pointed questions with regard to what some, maybe some of the public had. And I thought maybe we wouldn't lose as many members of the public during that break, recess time, or them that have to go home and, you know, different things. The big one you all probably noticed was that last meeting with, oh, King, South and King, how there were all those people with their children in the audience. And then we had to take a break because we'd been there for two or three hours, it felt like. And then they were all gone and they couldn't provide their public comment. Again, I think that happened like when we did the code enforcement one too. Understanding how much this council values and wants public comment and people to, you know, participate. I just thought, now that was an interesting thing that I thought we should bring up in this meeting. And so I did, as I do the, so what happens is I do it sometimes during the meeting, but also when I go back the next day and I'm redoing my minutes or finalizing my minutes. I write down how long staff presentation was, and then how long consent took if something got pulled. And then I kind of go council questions, public comment, and then deliberations. And I'm sure it's really no big surprise that the bulk of the meeting are council questions and the deliberation. And, you know, depending on the number of people we have, public comment is right there in the middle. Sometimes if it's a bigger item, of course, there's more. But a lot of times it's us talking to ourselves because there's no public there, either because it's something that they don't, know about or you know they're not caring as care about as much as when it's right in front of their house like south and king and all of that um so that's one of the biggest things i did see and i really think potentially moving public comment to right after quite um staff presentations would be you know even if we just do it as a pilot for three months and see how that works and see if that changes plus that'll give us a lot um amount of time to see how hybrid meetings ends up happening That's the biggest thing that I did see when I do that. I have numbers tracked. If you ever go into the forecast on on SharePoint. If you go to the Archives Council meetings, you'll see numbers on that very last column. That's my times of how long things take.

Interesting.

So I try to do it almost every meeting, but some meetings when I'm, depends on the next meeting, how busy I am. But all that information is right there. Awesome. And it also lists how many items we have. It's kind of interesting to see how that all plays out. Wait, where do you put that? So if you go into the file, the agenda forecast file in SharePoint, so there's the first workbook in that file is the current agenda forecast. And then there are two additional tabs that show all of 26. And then the next tab over is 25 back to 26. I want to say 22. I didn't start doing the tabulations then. I only started doing the tabulations this last year. But we used to just delete the old list of what was on each agenda. And then I thought, wait, I can search this and be able to find when the last time I saw something, we did something was. So now I cut it and put it into this other side, the archive spreadsheet. So then someone asked me, when did we talk about North Dror Greenway. I can just type North Dror Greenway in and it'll show me every single time that word came up on an agenda title.

Whether it was consent or whether it was public hearing.

Yeah, and how many times and different things like that. Like when we did PG&E, the Bill 66 thing, I was trying to figure out when we took it the last time and no one could remember the exact date, so I just searched my file. You're a great choice.

I know, right? I've never tried to do that, so I need you to show me. I'll show you.

I was curious about what the philosophical or sort of practical reasons were that they were split. Was that just sort of a holdover from...

It's the way it was done with... Well, it's always been done that way for 10 years that I've been here. And that's just the way... policies and procedures is laid out. So that's how we've done it.

Yeah. In my head, it makes a lot of sense to do them together, but I'm wondering if I'm, you know, what are some of the advantages of separating them that some of you might be thinking about?

Well, sometimes the clarification of what the staff member just said is helpful, but a lot of the questions seem to be in addition to, so they're more of your own personal interest, my own personal interest in the topic, then clarification of the presentation. And I think clarification questions, I wish there was a way we could celebrate that or separate that clarification questions and then public comments. We'd have the majority of the public comment that we can hear before we start any sort of additional personal thought or community thought that we had gotten from the email. and then having additional questions, which kind of turns into a deliberation very quickly after. So, because some of our questions are questions to talk about a deliberation point, and some of our questions are really a question to the staff member around the actual topic. Wait, help me understand how that policy works again, because that doesn't make sense. Or help me understand, is it going to be 30 seconds before that beacon starts? You know, whatever it is. So I think that's part of that. Go ahead.

Yeah, and I just want to say I really appreciate the effort of staff to streamline the staff reports, and I can tell when they're, yes, it's got so much to say, and they've been making sure that, you know, I really want to say, though, when we, when council starts asking questions. then people who have so much to say can just start elaborating in response to the question. And that often becomes very lengthy, and there's no way to... That I've been outside of being rude and just saying, you please short, be succinct, please, you know, whatever. Then, you know, so that's another time that it's well spent. I mean, we need to have that information. But I think that that's another aspect.

That's true. Yeah.

And just one other thing I wanted to let you know. So there's always been concern that the public doesn't know about staff communication or council communication staff. So like I said, I've made changes to the cover of the agenda. So now above, right below where it says we're now going to hybrid meetings, it says staff reports are available seven days prior to the meeting, but I also put staff agenda questions. So council questions, and staff's response will be published by one o'clock the day of the meeting on the agenda. So kind of giving the public more of awareness that if they're really interested and there's new information to check. Before we'd never done that and we do post it with the staff report, but I don't know that a lot of people know to go or knew to go back And maybe if there was more information, or maybe they had a question. And as I noticed, a lot of you go, and we've asked this before, and staff answered it, but I want to make sure the public hears about it. I think that doing that change will also allow you not to have to do that. So that we're telling the public exactly when staff agenda correspondence or additional questions after the report comes out are being answered.

That's a great idea, Dawn. And I'm not sure that that will necessarily make people, even just announcing it on the agenda, that there is a gender correspondence, it won't necessarily make it so the public goes there and looks at it. It might still need that question answered verbally.

Yeah, to some degree. But I think it'll at least have an awareness for those that actually do, because now... Those that are wanting to attend virtually, they have to go back to that cover, which is right above where the address and everything is. So I tried to make it as obvious as possible on there. So hopefully we will catch some. I mean, I know we won't catch them all, but at least a few.

To the point or the idea of moving council questions like after public, so presentation, public comment, questions and deliberation, would questions and deliberation be like one section or would we all do our questions first and then have deliberation? Would it be intentionally separated like that or would it be kind of mixed up?

That isn't completely up to the council. I've seen it done both ways. I've seen some cities actually limit the amount of time each council member has to speak. And I know at one point in Ventura they did that because we had a few council members who liked to filibuster. So they were kind of along the same lines of public is three minutes. I think at that time they gave each council member five minutes to ask their questions and do their deliberation. because we had a few at that time that would talk for 10 to 15 to 20 minutes. And so when you have seven council members, you can imagine how long that has to.

That's when you worked for the city of Ventura. Okay. Yeah.

Mike, any initial thoughts?

I suspect to some extent that asking the council asking questions was partly also for council to be able to ask probably some fairly obvious questions perhaps that might help the public better form their comments. I don't think time-wise it'll probably make much of a difference of how we do it. I mean, we have our questions and then we'll have our deliberations. So if we split those or do it at once, but I have been thinking a lot about how we can get things, public hearing items earlier so the public can comment on them earlier. So I think that's probably the big value is that we could just simply get to public comment quicker. As opposed to actually shortening the agenda item, which I doubt it would do.

I did see another thing that I thought was interesting. I did talk to Whitney a little bit and it will be a little bit more difficult for staff, but of course we're staff and we'll work around it. A couple of cities actually put consent at the end of the meeting. So you get your business items and your public hearing items done first. which I thought in some ways was a little bit better because you're all fresher. We haven't gone through everything else to get to there and you're more tired. And if you rush through consent, it's not quite usually as big of a deal. But what I think would be required of that is you would have to look at consent and maybe let the mayor know in the beginning, if there were any of those consent items that we were going to be pulling off of consent and adding them to the business item section in the beginning. But that is something that would get you to those other business and public hearing items, the media items on the agenda quicker.

I think we'd still have to say, call for anything you'd like to pull from the consent item after public comment. And that way the community would know we're pulling those two items up and then everything else will be at the end. Because I know they are for non-controversial, but... It also would allow us to recuse things that we need to recuse from if we live to near a project or something like that, people would hear that early on versus they might not hear that later. If they didn't. Wait for the whole hearing or the whole business, having that known in advance.

You'll see a bunch of staff in the room, beginning of the meeting for consent. So we put it to the end. It would be good to know who needs to stick around.

Right?

Exactly.

Same pulling of the items at the end of business. Right, but we would say at the beginning, like after the city manager's report, is there any items that need to be pulled from the consent agenda? And then if they are, then those would be heard after the hearing items.

Yeah, we do have to public comment, but yeah.

Yeah. After...

Public comment, or after the hearing in business, a general public comment, and then I would call for anything items that need to be pulled from from consent and do business and public hearing. Then do the rest of those. Hold consent items and then do consent. but I'd call for it in the beginning so that way the whole public would know what we're calling and moving around. Because people do, even with kids, you might be like, okay, that's supposed to go on around seven. I'm going to feed the kids and then you got them. I'm going to go, you know, or, and I think, I think we have to, and we'll see, because obviously we have Zoom now as an option, but people did kind of make plans around the timing that things were going to be on our, on our agenda. And so it's, If they don't know that certain things are getting pulled, I'd want them to know right away from the beginning or pretty early on in the beginning.

You could just do consent when we normally do a pulled item. Just go to the end of it.

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

Don't talk about the pull. Whenever it's pulled, great, we'll add that after the business. But think about this. If something we are not talking about yet is the 11 p.m., if we end up getting too long and then we never get to those consent items, sometimes those are things that have to be done based on schedules and that kind of thing, grants or whatever we're turning in or payments. If we end up getting close to 11, we're like, well, we're not going to get to those consent items that we had to pull because we had a question, that could be a challenge. Yeah.

I like the idea of doing that the way that you outlined it. But I also want to just say that I think splitting up our questions and deliberations, it could be in the same section of the meeting. But I learn a lot from... the questions that my colleagues ask and staff answers. So sometimes I'll have all these questions, and I really don't understand something. And then somebody else will ask a question, and I get an explanation. I say, oh, great. Don't have to ask that. It helps me shorten and make my presentation more succinct because the scope has been covered. And then because if we had to make deliberations before hearing everybody's questions, I think that the liberations might go on for a long time. It's like, oh, I said that, but now I think that's all that.

Because after like five of us, whoever kind of goes first ends up kind of needing to come back and it's like a white elephant game, you know. like give away my prize. And now I'm like, Oh wait, I have a question. So I think there's, if we went to everyone just questioned deliberation all at the same time, I think we'd all actually end up talking more because, Oh, I actually had, well, I didn't mean like that. Well, hold on. I'm doing like that. Let me come back to this now that I know that. So that concerns me a little bit about just kind of questioning deliberation all at the same time. I like the idea of public comment and, before we go into our questions and deliberations, and I would say questions and deliberation sections, similar to what we have with just scooting it over. Because I think of the public comment, similar to like the emails we get or our grocery store stops, which is it's before the meeting. So in a sense, like that public comment is the input before we get into those questions and deliberations, because that might be, kind of almost answering some of the things we didn't have that we learned from each other or learning from the public.

It makes sense to me to do presentation, public comment, questions. I think this is what you're saying. Sort of have the questions and deliberation a little bit separated because it seems like it could get almost confusing. Like what's the, like, is that what you think? Or was that just a question? Like, I think there's value in the deliberation being a discussion amongst us. It's kind of, you know, rather than us just saying what we think and proselytizing what we think. Yeah. how we're gonna vote. Sometimes it's nice to be able to like, well, what did you think about that? And I'm curious what you guys think about this or that and have it be more of a discussion after the questions, at least as many of the questions as we can have gotten out there. In regards to the, length of the presentations versus the length of the staff report. I'm okay, actually, with the staff reports being really thorough. I think it helps answer a lot of the questions in advance, but I don't think the staff reports need to cover everything. I mean, the presentation needs to cover everything that's in the staff report. I think the presentations can be more succinct if there's lots of information in the staff report. Yeah. And having links in the staff report, like if you want to go research this a little bit, you can go read the whole, you know, history of this.

That's just what I was going to say, like, you know, hot links throughout the staff report. Yeah. If we're reading it online, then, you know, for those that are budget walks, it's like, oh, yeah, I got to dive in that. But those of us who say, oh, it's probably okay. Well, you know, anyway. It matches the number we wanted. Okay. Yeah. We just want the bottom lines. Yeah.

Yeah, I think the hot links are really helpful. I mean, I feel like we've been doing that for a while now, and that's been really nice. While I feel like the packet has grown, I do feel like we're able to go dig into other things more if we want to. And some of the topics we have, the packets just have to be big. I mean, transportation, budget.

I thought the packets had gotten smaller because we don't do as many attachments. We do the links instead. We're not 1,000 page anymore. You're right. You're right.

There was a minute where they... We've gotten closer and closer to that 400 to 500, though.

We got back down to 275. That was nice. The 500 in one week is a lot.

Well, a lot of that's because of the number of items.

I know. I know. We just have.

I'll tell you just from my own proclivity is to be more detailed. And so I'm definitely inclined to ask staff to make sure that our staff reports are exhaustive, almost exhausting. I mean, there's a line, right? You don't want to lose people by doing too much. So because my... sentiment and kind of, I guess, value is this is our work product that we are providing to the public to show what we have done to evaluate, research, and support the decision that you all are being asked to make. So I would, you know, definitely my natural inclination is to be much more detailed because it is the record that Pretty much. This is the record. So when we go back to when was the last time that we looked at this, we would pull the staff report. We would first start with an ordinance resolution and then kind of go back to the staff report. But I think the challenge we have with the presentations is that we... So if you look at this sequence of events, staff reports that are very detailed... often agenda correspondence that is also very detailed, sometimes on par with the staff report itself, then the presentation, which if we are in a position of getting a lot of questions that may be similar to or equally detailed as what we already put in the record, how do we prepare a presentation? Because we don't know what might come up and we have been signed to shorten the presentations, knowing all the things that are in the record. But if we also believe that we're going to be there answering questions for an hour or an hour and a half, how do we make sure that we have the information available to us and to the public? So sometimes we have probably PowerPoints with 10 slides and 30 backup slides, which is okay. But we've done a lot of work to prepare all of that information so that we are available to answer the questions. And then we end up with a six, seven-hour-long meeting, and we're there until past 11 o'clock, and then we've lost the public along the way because they're not able to hang in there past the questioning. So there's a balance in there, as Teresa mentioned. We don't want to lose people, and also we want to provide the information that is necessary for the decision.

Just a follow-up question on that. If you do a really detailed staff report and then you get – a lot of questions that you've answered in agenda correspondence. Isn't that a situation where you could do a shorter presentation? We try. We try. Yeah. And then we still... Because you've already provided the detailed staff report and the detailed answers to questions. And so it's like that.

You've already done the work.

But you had to show that publicly. It's still pouring into a PowerPoint now.

Then you all still ask the questions.

Again.

Again, verbally. So we don't quite know. At the end of the day... All we're doing is a lot more... Well, it's not all we're doing. The work is showing everybody, but we're just doing more work. Yeah, you're doing three times the amount of work. And the results is the same in terms of the decisions, usually. So, curious.

We all get you... You have questions, and there's a agenda correspondence. I'm wondering if maybe... it doesn't all get published ahead of time. Maybe it is, great, we've got all your questions and we'll answer those in the meeting. It doesn't make the meeting any shorter, but it sounds like it's not making the meeting any shorter anyway. So at least work like physical work product, you're not, staff doesn't have to write a very intense report, agenda report, and now a PowerPoint to explain the agenda correspondence. Instead, they're getting ready the PowerPoint that explains agenda correspondence, and then we'll answer that in the meeting, whether it's through part of expanding part of their presentation that All of us pretty much asked the same question. That one thing wasn't clear or just ready to answer it because we're going to ask it anyway, because if we have a need to ask things in public so that people hear the things that we got the answers for, which I've done that before as well, very many times, because once I get the answer, it's usually a good answer. It's usually helpful for the public to hear. So then maybe maybe that could at least. not make staff triplicate the amount of work. It will not make the meeting shorter, but it'll get the information out to the public, which is our goal. And yet maybe eliminate a little bit of the work that staff is doing. I don't know, trying to find a compromise.

Actually, I think that's a good idea because we spend a lot of frantic time Monday, Tuesday, especially me running around yelling at everybody to read the gender correspondence and write them. Review them. Yeah, to get them out by one understanding that it's important because you guys need time to actually read right so that if we knew you the questions that came in on Monday morning, just were like incorporated to the last.

Hopefully, 5 or 6 slides of the presentation, and we're not having to write all the get those out and then do the PowerPoint to include them in there.

I think that might help streamline at least that.

That process of council questions, and I also want to say, as I'm now in teaching, I get to have more flexible schedule, which has been why I went to teaching, but as a staff person. I don't care if you gave it to me at noon or 1, I don't have time to read it. I'm doing my other full time job. And so I think that's the thing that is frustrating because then between 5 and 530, trying to get through the agenda correspondence is wild. So as we talk about this role. being for people who are full-time workers and doing this as a part-time job, that's also kind of not a great expectation for someone who's doing a full-time job to know like, hey, by the way, you're pretty much going to need to take Tuesday off. And I mean, it could be how we kind of say that but then we should let our potential candidates in the future know pretty much noon on you're gonna have to leave your job so you know if you if you can and so i think that's something that we have to take into account not just for this meeting management but for the whole long term is this is a part-time role for people who work full-time and that's not necessarily even one o'clock or noon they can try to scramble on their lunch but it's it's hard

I agree. I think, you know, having done that for many years, running my own law practice and being on city council, when I got elected mayor, I wound down my law practice. Well, it just happened. It was good for me to do what was going on. I was able to retire. You know, but I do want to say that step, you know city council members are people who are working people, and so we have working conditions to yeah and we're all especially this Council, I think, very conscientious and so we're going to try to absorb that information. As soon as possible.

Yeah.

And I don't want to change the flow too much, but just also we have moved agenda review to Monday. Is that like a final decision or is that something? I think we've been piloting this for what, three months?

Yeah, it still is. Yeah, it's been three. Okay. And it was just to see if it didn't help one, me and us not go crazy trying to get staff agenda going. Because before when it was Tuesday, you know, we had Monday, but sometimes questions didn't come in and then there's questions at agenda review. So we're sitting in two hours of meetings at on Tuesday from 930. 10 to 11, 30, 12. And we've got to get them out by one. And so that's why during that meeting, sometimes Whitney or Greg or Scott or that or Christine are having to read during agenda review. So they couldn't focus on what was actually going on in agenda review because they needed to get those are my reviewers before I send something out. to you guys in the public. And so we tried moving it to see if we get the questions early. So that would allow staff time on Monday night, Monday, so that by Monday night, they had it in there and they had hours to review. But Whitney, Christina and I still have mayor's agenda review Tuesday morning that we're trying, because we've swapped them because we used to have mayor's agenda review on Monday and your agenda review on Tuesday. Okay. So trying to streamline our process to be able to get all of you in the public by one o'clock, any of those questions. So, yeah, it was just something we were trying. We haven't, well, we kind of landed with, we weren't sure how you guys felt about it. That's why we have only done it once.

It has been so, I like it on Monday. Just gives me a minute to actually absorb like the process of, Versus Tuesday is the day to talk through stuff with people. Yeah. And so like having to do it the day of and like, oh, OK, like that totally changes how I'm feeling.

So having it on Tuesday morning, too, was another one of those things that took me away from my Tuesday. Yeah. Yeah. Like I just really couldn't very much. Yeah.

Yeah. So I have what I have done, though, because we were on break is I have extended it out for the next week. I mean, for the rest of this year. I'm sorry. It's very easy to flip-flop if you guys want to, if it works better for you. But I think it really all depends on what we're doing with staff agenda correspondence. Because I know for us, it has helped us. I'm not quite as frantic on a Tuesday as I used to be because trying to get... agenda review, staff correspondence out. Then, of course, God help us if we have a closed session and I have to figure out dinner and then have a meeting because I start at 7, so that means I go till whenever we end on Tuesday. But I will say Alejandra is just amazing and I think we work away.

So is there sort of Consensus that we want to stay with the gender review on Mondays for microchips.

He says Tuesday on this thing. We just got.

Well, did I put it on Tuesday? Yeah, that's it. But it's actually on Monday on the calendar dates.

No, but the heading says regular council meetings.

Yeah, I forgot to change the heading, but the dates are actually the Mondays. Oh, okay. That's actually Monday.

Oh, I see. The dates are Monday. There's that heading. Okay.

I was so focused on the dates. No, thank you. No, I just trying to, you know, what the heck is going on. So it's my big question. Yeah.

How has Monday worked for you?

I don't care.

Okay.

Just making sure. I have a very flexible schedule. So Tuesday mornings, I mean, I tend to prepare on Sunday afternoon. And so I'm just about as ready on Monday. But I do want to speak about the meetings going on so long. Like Teresa said, Well, you probably have to leave home at like 6.30 or 6, something like that. Something like that, something. And, you know, for me, and I think also my observation for the quality of deliberation of the whole council, after about 10 o'clock, what happens is we were very tired. Maybe if we had a closed session at 4.30, some of us didn't get dinner. Yeah. And what happens is that our natural self-discipline makes us express ourselves succinctly disappears. We talk more and more and more. And so we start free associating more and more and more and more. That's partly why it continues so long because we're like, we're really tired, all of us. So I would like to see if we could move closer to stopping at 10 myself. I think if we start at 530, we should be able to do that. That's just a thought. But then some of us have nine o'clock meetings the next morning.

Or eight. Or eight. Before we go there, I just want to see if my agenda review will work for you on Monday better. Way better. Okay, cool. Just wanted to kind of wrap that part up. Sorry.

No, no, you're okay. Trying to get like a gestalt view on is how do people feel about before we moved on to a different topic? Because I want to talk about the topic you just brought up. But how do we all feel about the changing of sort of the order of presentation, public comment, questions, deliberation versus having the questions before public comment. Is there a...

I think we ought to try it. I think it's worth it. A gut feeling is I actually think it might help with a little bit of redundancy. I know there's a feeling that it might not shorten things, but I like getting everything out there and then talking through it and then deliberating on it.

And I like hearing from the public first. I feel like that is the important part. So they will have heard the presentation too if they're here or online. And so hearing from them first I think is really more important than our 20 questions. Or 200 or 10, but I think that. Game for that, I think I know we have to talk about changing council procedures for which we have for a pilot, not for this part of it, because there's no nothing in the policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures that says you must do. Public comment and all that so. We can start doing that just automatically.

Okay, good.

August 4th, because we have new business items or public hearing items on the 21st. Right.

So that would be weird. I know it is weird.

But you're talking about like a public comment for things that are not on the agenda. That's first. That's still first. At each item, just to make sure I understand. So at each item, what we're saying is that staff report, and then we hear from the public about that item. And then we ask our questions. And then we do deliver questions. And then we do hear what everybody's questions are. And then we do deliver questions.

I generally don't think that people change their public comment based on the questions we've already asked. Very rarely.

Very rarely.

And so we might as well get everything out there first so we can process it all at once. Yeah.

Sometimes we ask more questions after public comment because we've heard something that they brought up that we want to then ask about.

Yeah, I think this order makes a lot more sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I agree with Emily.

I like it. I think we should definitely try that starting August 4th. You're absolutely right. Also, just to give us a space, even if we were about to have an agenda get presented tomorrow or posted tomorrow with a public hearing item, it would still be like a last minute change that I don't want to create last minute change right after our break. So I think that's important.

What about the whole breaking up the consent and putting any pulled items at the end? I didn't hear. I heard that idea come up, but I don't know that it will change the length of things, but it would move the hearing items perhaps above a consent item that got pulled.

How often do we pull stuff and how long does consent usually last? It's rare that it...

When there's nothing pulled, consent is usually five, ten minutes. When something is pulled, it could be anywhere from a half an hour to... I think there was a couple recently that were over an hour or more.

How frequently are we pulling things in consent? On average, every other team.

I would say about every other meeting, there's at least one.

Is your gut feeling that this would create some efficiencies or efficiency?

I see is. We wouldn't have that mad dash on business and items at the very end because you're getting close to being hitting 11 o'clock because in theory, Consent is a mad dash to get through a lot of things that have to have a discussion. Don't have to have a discussion, but have to have a vote from the council done at one time. That's the whole intent of consent. They're usually non-controversial. Most of the time we think they are, and they are. Occasionally it's just a higher... Usually it's around... salaries and different things like that or bigger public works projects. But, you know, that's why I let, I allow there to be, or I try to, like 13 consent items because they're all just advertising for a construction project or something like that. The only thing that might be on there that you often want to talk about or call out at least is the appointments to your advisory bodies. But there again... Those are hit or miss.

Same with grants.

Yeah. So that was the only reason why I thought maybe that could be something because if we had to rush through those, it's not as big a deal as having to rush through a bigger business item or consent item. And I'm not saying this because usually it's my item that you rush through because you all know how much I love to do presentations. I love. but it's it's some of the other ones that we've had to do um like dei the dei strategic plan was one that got pushed really yeah and we rushed through it but i think you all wanted to talk a little bit more but it was after 10 yeah and it was harder um you can still rush through my stuff i'm okay i'm not gonna hurt my feelings but then again i only have three or four things so um Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's that, so I think it could have some merit, but I don't really know if it's going to be a lot of time. I just know that I've heard it very often that we get to these really important things and you guys are tired and it's, you know, and it's a lot to absorb. And this may, my only thought was this may help that. So I think that,

one, I would like to see if we are all open to it, that public hearing business item moved up. Because I do think the meaty part of the, and it could be tofu, the meaty part of the, we keep saying meaty, and I'm like, sorry, Mike. The juicy part, I don't know. The important part, the part that people are coming to the meeting for from the community is usually a public hearing item or a business item. So I think if we could move those up, if we're talking about trying to get more public input, that makes the most sense. The thing is about the consent and polling is I think this is where this goes into a we have to make a council procedures item on the agenda in the near future, sorry, I just want to make sure I get this all through my head out, is I think there's an aspect of, I don't know the exact amount of hours we have. I always forget if it's 24, 48, 72 of absolutely must if we're going to change the agenda. But if we're going to pull something, if we could know that ahead of time, then it's we could make that post to the public and say, these items are coming up to business or coming up to, it's a consent item, but it's being pulled. There's something in that realm that I don't feel great yet about us moving the consent item down. So that's just...

You're saying the implication is that we would have to let them know in advance.

That's my own.

But I don't know that we would have to.

We don't normally because it's just I'm pulling it right now, right here in front of you. But if we're pulling it ahead of time, do we have to? Because if you could let us know Monday when you're in your agenda review or you've sent in your comments and questions, we would know that we had to change the because that changes our script. That changes how we're going to put a break in. That changes all of that, too.

See, the question of something being non-controversial or not is a judgment call. It's a deliberative judgment call. And obviously, if we're pulling an item, it's controversial, at least as far as council members know. concerned yeah so are you saying it would need to be pulled in advance and basically moved from consent to a public hearing item and that's why you think more i'm curious i don't understand let me uh let me back up a little bit i think it would be helpful to have some kind of definition of what of what goes into consent and what and what is considered a business item and like we have that in the council procedures we can just but that's controversial it's like You know, everything that's pulled is, I'm thinking of Michelle with your something about the transportation about the ATP and I can't remember all the details but you know that where there's a lot of public comment and a lot of concern about something, about an item, it then becomes, to some extent, controversial. Like the or something. So I mean, to me, we have statutory obligations. That's got to go on consent. We really don't have discretion over that. We have to do it. There's all that. That's really slam dunk. But then when it gets into the area of policy decisions, You know, then, you know, that to me brings up the question, why did staff think this was non-controversial? We have a room full of people that want to talk about it. We're getting all these emails. So I'm just throwing out that as a question. I'm not as a criticism of staff, but it's, you know... I think I think it's if we leave things just the way that they are right now, that's fine, too. But I think we need to anticipate that they're going to be kind of hot items that the public is really concerned about that we might think or staff might think that's not controversial, but it is to the public. And so it needs to be pulled and needs to be given a full fair hearing.

Well, there is a prerogative of the, just generally of the mayor, to reorder the agenda. Right. If it, we'll find something. And we've done that. We did that recently.

It was like a family, like a more family thing that was.

We did with the South and King.

Yeah, South and King. Oh, yeah. There was a lot of people there.

There was a lot of families too.

That above the other one. And I've seen on a lot of, because I look at a lot of videos. I mean, actually even 3CE, I think, has it on theirs at the very beginning where the mayor can ask, are there any items you'd like to be moved around or if we leave the agenda as is? I can pull up some examples of that and we can look at them at a later date. I can't do it right now, but at a later date to kind of give you that idea if that would maybe help you know, understand what we would pull up or potentially not pull up. But at any point in a meeting, the mayor does have the prerogative to ask the council or a council member ask the mayor to reorder the agenda based on the amount of, could be the amount of public comment we've gotten ahead of time. It could be the number of people in the chambers we're in using overflow, you know, just to, kind of streamline and help the meeting run better and have the people who want to speak be able to be there when that item is called instead of having to wait through you know a big long budget item or something else and then afterward um so i don't necessarily think we have to do all of this all right away but you know baby step through different options to see what works better for us as a whole kind of like doing a pilot and then come back and codify it into your policies and procedures as we're trying it out just to make sure that it makes sense. Maybe it doesn't work and we don't want to make the change permanently in policies and procedures. Mm-hmm.

Um, so something, something else we could do too is, um, well, there's, there's two parts that keep going. My brain is we get the forecast the day after or two with the minutes. So if you see something on the forecast beyond even just the upcoming meeting, you might see something in the next two meetings or three meetings. You're like, why is that on consent? Totally feel free to Send me, Teresa and Whitney, an email. I mean, I know you've done that before. Like, what's that? What's that? Why? And I think that would be one thing that you may know that something should not really be on consent because it's controversial more than I know or more than Whitney or Teresa know because it's in your specific constituency that is really upset about something or really interested in something. I think that's one of the things is that we... I'd say that Jan is probably the only one who really communicates with me about agenda. So if there's things that you see on the agenda you want to see moved around or changed, you know, you have the ability to send that to me and Teresa and Whitney pretty ASAP.

I'm just going to blow up your email now.

Perfect. Just keep it going. That's fine.

You know, the people with children, that's obvious, but also sometimes with the senior citizens, like I'm thinking... the whole two mesh mobile home park you know those poor people we were doing it toward the end of the meeting and they started falling asleep and they started like i have to leave you know going out with their canes and their walkers and i feel terrible you know keeping them up so late you know

So if it's not violating our policies and procedures, which it doesn't sound like it is, I'm open to trying to have old consent items heard after the hearing items. If we want to try that as a pilot. So say that.

The last provision in the section about consent says pulled items shall be heard at the close of the consent agenda, unless the majority of the council chooses another time. So that's what we're doing right now.

Yeah, I was just thinking if it can sense at the end of the meeting. Where does the public comment come to advise counsel be like this item be pulled? Could they just use the general public comment section to say, hey, I'd like. And I can't stay the whole meeting. Oh, the community member wants to. Yeah, the community member wants to say, hey, you should really look at this item to suggest polling it. You could use the general public comment as a venue to do that. Yeah, you could. We did that in Morro Bay. Yeah, I wouldn't say their whole spiel about the consent item. Or they could. I mean, because I can't stick around. I mean, that's just something.

If it's something that's later on the agenda, we say, well, when your agenda item comes up, we'll bring you up. But in that case, they could say, well, I think you should consider pulling this because of X, Y, Z. And at that point, we can decide if we wanted to pull it or not based on what the community is asking. So that's a good point. Yeah, that could make it work or not work.

I think, so the section starts with the consent agendas generally first on the council agenda and is provided to expedite the meeting. And then it explains what types of items are considered consent. So there's some wiggle room in the language, but I do think if we're talking about moving the whole thing, then I would... I don't know. My own thought is it would be good to make that change known. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

We'd have to put it as an item on the agenda for the future council meeting for it to be a public conversation.

We could pull one item and move that today without changing the...

Right, for sure. Similar to as we go into the public meetings on recording, not recording, sorry, on Zoom Live, we could end up having a need to have a break and move public comment. So all of these things, remember that back to your comment earlier of being able to move things around, we do sometimes move things around. We've had a couple that we had to put a break on, take a pause, move public comment to end. It's only been two since I've been mayor, but it does happen. So I think that Part of this pilot is to see how these things work and how they don't and go from there. And then if we say, hey, we really want to try that consent thing and change the whole thing, then we need to have this on the agenda and have a conversation about it in public. I mean, we're public, but, you know, but this not being the conversation they knew about.

So do we want to try a pilot of having poll consent items done at the end?

Well, we'd have to vote each time right now based on our procedures, which is fine. Yeah.

Well, could we put that on the agenda or on the mayor's script to say, you know, to make that decision?

Yeah, we can put that on the script easy. Because I'll forget.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, you know.

Yeah, we can put that on the script easy to have, like, and if anything's pulled, we will need to vote on it as to where we want to put it. Yeah, great.

Yeah. That would be very helpful. Because sometimes we pull items because somebody wants to ask one question.

I know.

And we sit through the item anyways. And then other times we pull it and we talk about it for 45 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

So having a little bit of flexibility where you as the mayor can exercise a little discretion and direct us a little bit. Yeah. Say, hey.

It's more than one question conversation. You can kind of check in with everybody.

You'll maybe have a sense if there's 20 members of the public that want to speak on it. In which case, you know, if it's going to be quick or if there's a lot of public there, you may want to go ahead and address it. Yeah. And otherwise, we may just want to question it. Yeah, so there's a lot of public that would just need to answer that. My concern, or, you know, well, I mean, part of this is just looking through those first five things that we do and figuring out, can we shorten any of them so we can get to the public hearings quicker?

Mm-hmm.

So this is obviously a potential bigger area. We had, I think in the last year, we had two times where we had long discussion of pool consent items that were, that then pushed back public hearing items where we had public.

Yeah, not able to get in. Yeah, waiting for those items.

Yeah. And so I think, you know, it doesn't happen that often, but it happens occasionally and being Being flexible enough in those moments to try to manage that. Yeah, I think I could definitely do that. That would be helpful. I think the one other thing to keep in mind is, again, depending on how long or short that pulled item might be, is how many staff are in the room to support that. Right. And do they have to be there anyways, or are they just here to sit through that? Or variables.

And if you've already had a brownout conversation before, with another buddy that is not me. And other than saying, I need to pull this item and you don't want to say anything else, you could always talk to Whitney and Teresa and say, here's the reasons I want to pull it. And so it's going to take an hour to talk about it. So, you know, I want to talk to these people and let's make sure these three staff people are there. You know, there may be a few times that happens, but not often.

I will say, I don't know. if I've ever gotten that level of heads up. So it would be great if people knew they were gonna pull something to just, I mean, sometimes it'll be like, oh yeah, I'm gonna wanna pull that. And maybe it's like, yeah, I get it. I've heard from a handful of other people already. Any amount of we're going to need to have a longer conversation about this would be really helpful for not just me, but then making sure that I have the right people ready to go with the right information.

Yeah, it's a visit slow Cal hearing. So Madeline goes home and it turns out we pulled something on public works, you know, during the consent item. So she's now having to wait and didn't know she would have to wait. So just... I'm just making up an example.

And I definitely would recommend that if you look at how it is that consent items ahead of time, you know, there's like an indication we're going to pull it and maybe move it. You want to give your... you all need the flexibility to pull something in that moment, right? To be able to have the conversation because something has come up. Because sometimes things come up the very day or the hour before, or you do have people in the public who maybe haven't talked to anybody at any point in time, but showed up at the meeting and... And we've done that. You've seen occasionally, I'm thinking of some, like a map that was on consent. Oh, yeah. We actually, we had members of the public show up with questions and staff said, we actually think we should pull this off of the agenda. Yeah, let's bring it back. Because we need to go back and address what we are hearing right now because there are some questions that we need to answer. So that flexibility is super important. That's important. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So I think as we as we there's always going to just be some flexibility as a whole. And we can't necessarily solve it all ahead of time.

It's alive.

Yeah. Yes, it is. Commenters point that democracy is not as efficient.

Yeah, that's OK. OK, so what I heard at this point is we are. starting the fourth we will continue to do the flag first of course proclamation and presentations city manager report general public comment we're going to leave consent but find out if anything needs to be bold as we normally do from that polling we'll determine at that point if we should all vote about putting it after the business and public hearings items or if we can have a real quick conversation and keep on going after after we do the general consent Then we'll do the public hearing and business items. We'll do a staff report and general public comment on that item. Then we'll do council questions, then council deliberation. Is that everyone on the same page?

Yeah. Thank you. That sounds pretty good.

Yes. Two more thoughts on items, on those early items on our agenda. On nights where we have a packed agenda with public hearing items, and especially if we know there is going to be public who wants to speak on those items, I think we should either consider not having a city manager report or restricting it to five minutes, eight minutes, 10 minutes. The other thing I think we should consider, it's usually not that big a deal because you usually don't get a lot of open public comment, would be to shorten open public comment. And I know that gives people less opportunity to speak, but in my mind, you're trading that for people who showed up to speak on a particular issue being pushed later and possibly having to go home and not being able to speak on the agenda. So... I don't think we'd ever have to do it very often because we don't ever have really that much open public comment. But if it coincides where we have a meeting where we know we're going to have public hearing items potentially starting at 10 o'clock at night, which we don't want to do, and there's public there to speak on those, then I just want to get to them as quick as possible.

Yeah, some thoughts on that. I have some thoughts on that too. And I also just want to mention that speaking of other jobs and having to be other places, I need to probably leave the room in about 12 minutes to go in another room and get on a Zoom call. But I also really want to talk about the end, how we end the meetings and whether or not we try to structure how we end the meetings. My interest is, I think, just slightly different than Council Member Marks, but I do hear her concern about us getting tired and making less sense and making less competent, thoughtful comments and decisions after, I don't know, pick your time, 1030, and being forced, feeling forced I want to just own that I feel very forced as it comes close to 11 o'clock to make either a rash quick decision or make a motion that nobody wants us to make. And I'm super uncomfortable about that. I'll just voice that personally. So I would love us to figure out a way of... I don't even know what it is. foreseeing that we shouldn't start any new items. That's the way I've been thinking about it, that we shouldn't start any new items after a certain time and we shouldn't decide when our special meeting is going to be to finish that item or that we're going to move it to the next meeting if that's possible, depending on the timeliness of it. But getting close to that 11 o'clock hour and having to have somebody make either a quick decision that isn't well thought out or a motion is...

super not great. So maybe we can have a check-in at 10.30. I mean, I start looking at the clock when it's about quarter to 11, and I think, am I going to make it to 11? Can I drive home afterwards? Because I'm really tired. But maybe if we had a check-in like at 10.30, and at that time ask, does anybody want to make a motion to extend beyond 11? And we've got two more items to do. What should we do? What do you think about that?

Sometimes it's like the we have to do the video thing. So it's 707. You got two minutes. Let's go. We have to officially vote it in. It's almost a consent, but we can't make it a consent. So, you know, there's sometimes we have topics like that. There's other topics that are very robust that we're like we need to. have a special meeting or see if we can push it off. And I think if we can ask that question a little earlier, I'm happy to do that. We can add it to my script.

Oh, yeah, but I had a thought. Okay. Because I'm with Council Member Marks. Get tired.

You got to drive to AG.

I know. What if... usually if we're going to, if we're going long and it's, we're at a second break, what if right when we come back from the second break, we know how much we have left. We make that decision, which is usually around nine, nine 30 ish. We make it at that point to see whether we, you all have the stamina because we'll all be here no matter what, because you're all here. Um, to go through and knowing how many items we have. And, you know, I really, really try to limit the public hearing business items to two, three, if Whitney makes me. Because I really try to keep us at 15 items. That's when I look at the forecast. That's when I start saying, okay, we really have to think about, can we do this? And then there's my interpretation of how long an item will be. And then there's Steph's interpretation of what the item will be. Who's usually close with Steph. How much?

Yeah, 100%. We always take a bet. She knows this too well.

No, I just know public and the whole thing. So I was thinking that might be a really good time. It's a lot earlier than when you're... You hit 10 o'clock. We're all getting a little bit punchy. And I'm fighting to stay awake. And the public's They've lost interest by that time. They're done. Yes. They have lives. You guys do what you need to do. I trust you. Not really. That's fine. Right. So I'm thinking that maybe the 9, 9.30 time is a better time to make that decision for you all, for us, for the public, for everybody. And then we can also think clearer as to when we can reschedule this to, where we're going to go with it.

Yeah, 10.45, we're like trying to make a panic last minute decision.

Yeah, so that's just my thought based on, you know, sitting there and understanding all of you and 33 years of this.

What would that look like? Would that look like us coming back from the break and having a discussion about whether or not we're going to continue?

Yeah, I would put out the question and you guys could say like, oh, we got this.

These are quick. Just to take stock at that point, I think. I have things to say.

Yes. Actually, I prepared my report.

I just think, you know, it might, that's just a little bit earlier and it kind of can set you up for that next, okay, I need to go through, have this, it gives you a kind of sense of where you're going in your meeting and how long, and again, it'll allow the public to have that same information. They need to go put the child to bed. They can feel safe, you know, going to do that, feel free to do that or whatever. Just a thought I had.

The other thought I have as well that I think can reduce things a bit is the proclamations It feels bad putting a buzzer on a nonprofit or whoever, but sometimes they speak for like ever. I don't know how many minutes, but ever something to spend, you know, the minute or two. So I think I hate to do it, but we probably need to put the public comment timer on them and say, you're really going to have three minutes. The buzzer is going to go off. So I suggest you plan like two and a half minutes.

There are a few times when we've had three of them. You've done a first and last paragraph. Yeah. I actually kind of, you know, the whereases sometimes...

All right. Extensive.

Yeah. So what if we kind of focus on doing a couple of like high level where ads is and then I'm all for that. And then the handshakes and the pictures and where I hate.

Yeah. I feel like everyone just staring at me as I read you this long, long, long, long, long thing is there for the screen experience.

They have it. They have it. If they're watching on YouTube, they have it, you know, you can read it.

And so I would encourage, and maybe Teresa for the future is. Have them tell them that I'm going to read the first and the last. And if they have another one in the middle that like me to highlight as in the whereas is because one of them is real important fact data or real important, heartwarming, fuzzy, whatever it is. Then so I'm kind of reading three. That's it. But yet the whole thing is always available on our screen, on our laser fish. And then they can also they have their two minutes to say a few more words about it.

And if it gets presented at whatever event they're having, if it's Juneteenth, then you can read the whole thing. Yeah, exactly.

And that could, I think, too, decrease things just a little bit. I think when we have presentations, though, we have presentations. And there's a reason we're having them. I mean, we have the voting coming up. We've had the homeless point in time. We've had Cal Poly. Perfect.

Perfect.

Yeah, we've had something else that was super important. Oh, like the update on the SLOMA construction.

Yeah.

I mean, so these are things when we have presentations, they're usually going to be longer and they usually have questions. So I just want to make sure that we take that stock. And I know you have in this last agenda is 30 minutes. Thank you. Because 10 minutes is a joke for a presentation because we're going to have questions. So I just want to make sure that we really plan that in for the agenda going forward. Yeah.

I think where we will likely end up is that, I mean, fully the desire and need to end earlier. We're all, everyone's super exhausted. I mean, our options then are to, one thing we could consider doing at some point and would be a change is starting our meetings earlier. But that has all kinds of other ripple effects.

People wouldn't be able to come as early, which therefore we're trying to move public comment up to make sure people can comment. But they're still at work.

So there's trade-offs all around. I got on council. They used to start at 6. We moved it up to 5.30. But we kept it after 5 because of that work.

yeah uh and then we end up just needing to add more meetings because we have business we need to take care of yeah i mean especially as we talk through consent items that need end up needing to get polled it's always a balance of we need to get our work done um and then also how else do we do this if it's Otherwise, the thing that would be appropriate for the consent agenda that always goes into the consideration. And so if we're trying to squeeze time, but also do the same amount of work. Yeah, no, it doesn't. We're going to need to we're going to need to add meetings. Yeah.

And I think, too, like we've done that. We had we had that with the code enforcement. We did that with parking. We've done that with parking. I mean, there's we do this, we do add meetings when it's necessary and it's usually like an extra topic. We feel like we can't fit in the normal agenda, but maybe the normal agenda ends up having to be added to and that's okay.

Just so, you know, the 1 thing I did do, because we. And I did this without asking anybody, but myself, and I thought it was a great idea. It's all good. It now has a box that says one minute, two minute, and three minute. Every speaker card, no more having to pull out colors. There's a checkbox on there because based on the last few times when we've done the bigger, have more people in that, there's those people who like being first and want to just say a few words and then they're gone and they're done. Yeah. So people will have the option on every item to speak for one minute, two minute or three minutes.

Just trying to first then two minutes.

Yeah, that's good. See, I told you, I thought it was a great idea. So I told myself he did that.

I mean, making sure they have the right color. I was always nervous about that. And then they put on the wrong color. We're not going to tell them they're in trouble.

But, you know, I'm trying to help people who want to speak but don't want to speak for a very long time to be able to have their piece and say, you know, say what they want to say to counsel. So when I had the girls update the... New speaker cards. There's a box on there for everybody now. The online ones will also have that same thing where you can check which ones you want. I'm not 100% sure the people attending virtually will do that. So we are still going to do the raised hand thing.

um but i did make that change on the speaker card do you have the ability to do the correspondence with them because i know that we don't open up obviously commenting um but can you do it as a host or panelist saying that you know we do the one two three minutes so people can know that online too because we kind of repeat that i kind of repeat that different times because people come in and i see that all of a sudden kind of had a little swell so same thing a little swell for them that know like

Yes, so along with everything else, the other things I'm changing is the opening presentation. Well, you all never get to see that because you're always in closed session or something. So in the beginning of the meeting, the video that goes out on YouTube and Instagram, social media, all the platforms of the council preview, It plays in the chambers before the meeting, before you all come in. The end of that is going to have a whole section of it now on virtual comment and the one, two, threes and raising your hand and how to do that. When we go to recess on top of the recess slide, they'll have a rotating slide that talks about how public comment will be handled, how people virtually will be doing it and everything. So that'll be going through the whole process.

When people come in later, just like they do in real life online, I want to be able to have that because they don't get to see the previous chat. It's not available.

No, but when we go on recess, if we go on recess, they join for later in the meeting. It'll be scrolling through, running through with the recess slide. So trying to get as much words there as possible. The agenda, of course, links to a whole other page that talks all about online participation and how that is handled.

The only other thing that we did not get to yet, but you all just add and then you guys can keep going. But I got on the topic that you brought up council member Boswell about public comment at the beginning of the agenda. I think this is where you were going that We have never, even though it says on our agenda that we will keep public comment to 15 minutes. It used to say. Oh, it doesn't say anymore.

No, Christine had me pull that off. Okay, good. Something else.

Yeah, perfect. And we never adhered to it. Okay, yeah, because one thing, and I agree with you, it doesn't feel great to cut off public comment at a certain time period, and that's probably why we never have. Although I did wonder if it would be okay for us to, one idea I had was to, To not necessarily cut off public comment for items, not on the agenda, but after a certain amount of time, maybe move the rest of public comment for items, not on the agenda to the end of the meeting so that we could get to the hearing items to reduce their time.

Well, 3 minutes.

Luckily, we only maybe had 8. at the most recently on that. But definitely at any time, the mayor, again, asking the rest of the council to go ahead and reduce times. She can do that at any time when we have a lot. And that's, her and I are a lot of times texting that information back and forth to each other. She'll ask me how many speaker cards we have on a certain subject in that to see whether or not we have to Reduce times and everything, or you guys are doing closed session. I'm out there counting, so I can give her account of how many public speakers we have to see if we need to reduce it. That's usually when we do reduce those times. But I know that our city attorney is much more comfortable with us doing it that way, as opposed to saying we're only going to take 30 minutes of. Public comment on that. That's why we removed it because we never.

Yeah, no. Is there any way we can do a little stand in the back of our little like. You know, outbox kind of thing of the slips because 1 thing I noticed is that. If if the if the front clerk, where am I? Clerk has now left that little stand because it's done now and people have come in, slipped in. They're like, oh, it's already started. And they don't know. Then they have to walk all the way around to you and Greg and try to get a slip. It's awkward. So I'm just wondering, because like when I think about going into the board of supervisors, there's some in the back and there's some towards the front where the last seat is. So that way you can just, okay, going up and going into the back middle, wouldn't it be that awkward? So I'm just trying to figure out how to get them that slip because what I see happening too is people didn't know how to get up and get the slip. And then it's like, oh, I need to talk though. And they're like trying to climb over people and it's weird. And so that way, like when I, cause I do repeat over and over again, hey, this is the time, get the slip. Greg waves at you, wave it. But then like they're still in that front,

Middle over here, they do not want to, like, climb over people and get to you and say that there's because we leave them out front still or or we can put them closer to leave the meeting.

Yeah. Over here.

If we build it. Yeah, just about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Put it right. Yeah. Like the oranges sometimes. Yeah.

So police officer in the corner to do it for your friendly police.

In the back of the room, because where there's only three feet. So I can't put it back there. But we could move the table right here in front of the door.

Once they're done, it goes right there.

Or at least a small stack. Because Sarah's here until 530, sometimes 545. Before she leaves, I can just have her move the table or the cards to this other table. So it's a little bit closer and we can say right outside the door or on this side. Okay.

I would feel better with that just because it's like the quick access, it creates this weird thing and I see it in people's faces and they're like, I can't. And they really want to. And then it's like, this is my last chance. I got to climb over people. And it's.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, good idea. When we get a chance, I have another kind of turn in the conversation.

Yeah, it's 1.30, so I think we can keep going as long as you guys are good with going.

Well, this is a short thing. So I have noticed that there have been meetings where, because we're starting at 4.30, that there hasn't been any food for council. And people coming straight from work are not eating anything except, you know, maybe gumdrops or peanut butter things in the middle of the meeting. And I do think it affects the level of deliberation if people haven't eaten dinner. So, you know, again, my schedule is more, you know, is more flexible. I can always do that. Or sometimes Michael will bring a to-go luncheon or something so that he's got his food. But I don't know. So the present cutoff is 4 o'clock, right? For what? 4.30. 4.30.

It's an hour before.

It's 4.30? Oh, okay. Well, then I'm wrong. It's 4.30. So if we start at 5, I guess for the working people, is it possible to get a meal between 5 and 5.30? Yeah.

I mean, most of the time I bring one, but I can swing down to Woodstock's Pizza, grab a slice, and come back. And we have a half hour. Okay. That's what I usually do.

So that's my problem.

Okay.

Well, and also... That's what you do.

Yeah. Yeah. Give a half hour.

I was going to say, also, I've been... And with the new budget for the advisory bodies, there's going to be, you know, those cheese and crackers or yogurt. I always make sure that there's protein bars. Okay. And then, of course, our normal snacks. So because we're going to start doing it for advisory buys, it's all going to be done through my office. So we'll have that separate here. So there'll be a little more substance that it's not all sugar. Not all sugar. No, but definitely. There's usually there's not today, but there's usually cheese in the fridge. And we've appreciated that.

It's been a nice change. And there's usually tangerines or something.

Yeah, and I've always loved the nuts.

I feel like it's useful.

Yes. Did we get direction on agenda correspondence? I know there was a conversation, we had a conversation about it, but Is there something different that we should do with it? It felt like there was directions to not do any more agenda correspondence. That's the direction people were going, but they didn't say, I want to make sure that we not do agenda correspondence.

We need the agenda correspondence. It just answers to council questions.

Right, staff agenda correspondence to council. That it would come out at the meeting rather than sent out. Quite a change.

So what's the cutoff for council to ask questions? What's the deadline for that?

Eight o'clock in the morning on Monday, supposed to be what we all agreed on. As we said, we'd get them all on Sunday. So when they walk into the room, they would have them at eight o'clock in the morning on Monday.

Just really ruin their Sunday nights.

They don't have to check in Sunday night. That's how I said they prefer that.

But you know, that's true.

You can, you can delay send it. Although that is on eight o'clock. That's the problem. Sometimes that part doesn't work or all of a sudden staff gets 200 emails because we delayed send them. That was awkward.

Because I know, I mean, I have heard that it's helpful that you all have, from time to time, said, I appreciated seeing what somebody else asked and answered. And then we were making sure we got it out early enough so you could read it.

I'm not sure that I want that change yet.

Okay. I think we're ready for it.

It's an interesting idea to chew on, but I... I appreciate and enjoy reading them the day before.

How about, can I offer a suggestion maybe? We don't get to read them. That's the whole thing. Not everyone's not reading them or has the ability to read them. We modify them and we will try our best to get them out by one. But anything that we don't get, we get after nine o'clock on Monday. You're not going to get in writing. That's fair. It's going to be part of the presentation. But if you get it to us before Monday at 9, we will get it out as a staff agenda correspondence. And then anything after that, we stick in the last meeting. So have you no laterally made that decision on occasion when things have come in later? I just tell staff, no, I'm not holding up this agenda correspondence. Put it in your presentation because they come in on Tuesday. Right.

That's what I'm saying. I think, I think when those come in, they still are going to come into you because there are still questions in our mind that we got from someone. We're going to still give it to you. So you have it to answer, whether it's during the meeting or in another future time, or that you know, we're going to ask it. But we agreed last time, if we don't get it to you on Monday morning, that's our bad. And so you can hold us to that. And I think that's totally fine. It may make us sad and we may pout about it, but you can remind us that we said today and last time that, This is the time period we have to get it to you.

And so I think that's a good idea.

Yeah. And just remind us of that. I mean, are you all okay with that? Yeah. I think that's our bad at times that we can get busy and we don't get it. That's our bad. And we can ask her question here.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that'll help staff not have to, I mean, running two agenda correspondence. Because there's been times when we've had the complete agenda correspondence done and more questions have come in.

And they may choose to have the answers ready on Tuesday at the meeting because they know what's going to be asked. Probably makes sense, but that's up to you. And often it's when I see the additional questions come in, and it's a 23 page agenda correspondence, I would have rather had those 21 pages at noon or one, then see all that come in at three and i'm like yeah i can't read that right the three o'clock is impossible yeah so one question that came in at four that you want to feel like you want to respond on cool but 21 people's yeah like that one time i like i can't uh here's a question going back to the zoom thing are the civility i like the mayor's um uh script here public comment disruption

Is there any way this could be posted on the Zoom so that people know it?

Yes, it will be. So this is what's going to be laminated mostly for the mayor for if something happens. And the thing that this includes is when we did the public hearing for the mayor, changes to SB 707, the disruption policy, that we went into detail of what, I'm sorry, service, internet service disruption. And that is in the code that says we can't talk about that unless it's in a notice, public hearing or change. But what we didn't talk about was people disruption and how we were gonna handle Zoom bombers or people who disrupt our meeting. So basically this is the clerk's office first go of, Two chances, the third one, the clerk, the mayor will ask that I remove them from the Zoom room. Now, what that doesn't do is permanently remove them because they can call in again under a different name, which I cannot stop them from doing, and they can come back in. But at least in the moment, we can get rid of this person in, you know, temporarily, maybe.

We can put them in the room. We don't have to hang up on them. We just put them in the room.

No, we actually just take them out of the room.

Well, the waiting room, I'm saying, versus in here.

Yeah, they will not be online.

That's what I'm saying.

They'll be offline. But then they can, like I said, change their name and log in as a new person. And I cannot tell if they do that because I don't have that ability to see that. are we required to give them two chances no no so the clerk this is very generous um the attorney's office is going to be looking at this also this was just our first blush the clerk's office first blush of what um other cities have done um and just to give us a standard at this point in time um so that they have more time to get a more depth thing that Marquis, I think, said that they will probably send out to council separately. The disruption, service disruption policy, hard and fast. We have to stop the meeting for an hour, try and get the service back up, and then make that decision. All of that, which we agreed to when we adopted the rules for 707. Those are hard and fast, and that's all here in case that happens. It's just the people part of it that we didn't have to deal with. I will say, but from what I understand from talking to other clerks in the state, it has not been as big of an issue as it did coming out of COVID and everybody... Having Zoom bombers, it's much, much fewer and far between. But now that the world knows that all of us have to go back to this, we'll see what happens. Luckily, we'll have other people have three weeks to figure it out before we actually have to. By notice of how we did this time. So, you know, keeping our fingers crossed. Yeah. that people are busier.

So when they call in, their cameras are off, right?

Correct. We will not have their camera on at all. You will not be able to see them. The chambers has been modified the timer. So you'll see now a shadow of a timer behind our timer. That's the public side, the Zoom side timer that you're seeing. Right. But they'll see the same thing. They run the same time simultaneously.

And so we can't hold up hate messages.

I want to talk about parking. Not at all. You will see a name. No. Nothing else. Yes.

So we're only unmuting them or muting and unmuting them.

We're not, yeah, we're not going to ask them to unmute because it takes them 12 times to figure it out. Remember from COVID.

And then the conversation is all about where is that button?

Yeah, so we're just, we're just, Teresa's just going to unmute it for them. You got three minutes, do your thing, two minutes.

Just like you saw here, he had to unmute. We are going to do that conversation. Well, they have to. There's no other way to do it. Again, directions are going out all over the place, hopefully.

So some conversations will still be up.

But the bigger problem I had before is we, council wanted to be able to see them. So I actually had to move them over to panelists and then move them back over. None of that has to happen this time. It's just an unmute. I tell them you're now unmuted. They unmute themselves and talk. There's no moving back and forth.

So let me ask one other question that I forgot to ask you before. Right now, I'm on Zoom. It says, OK, Stuart, sometimes you see my profile, sometimes you don't. If they chose to say N-word, hateful, F-word, et cetera, as their name. How do we deal with that?

I can change it. I can make it be a number. Okay. And then I will tell them that, you know, you are now this number is what I would do. Just to make sure, because I don't need that sitting up there for three minutes. And then once I change them, they cannot change it back.

Okay. So yeah, right.

It turns in the back their profile settings just just on for what we see on the screen or anyone else sees on the screen will just be a number.

So this zoom will be for general public comment and then for comment on the business items and every item consent and then and then possibly consent toward the end. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's it. Boy, you've got a big job.

Yeah, so I think of it going back to COVID times when we were all on Zoom and everybody was hiding that way. And I will tell you, there are people that have been asking me about the advisory bodies, and I strictly said no.

Good. It's too hard. Yeah.

It's too much for staff. Yeah.

Okay. And then I think we have to wait until a future date to talk about liaisons and committee reports until Michelle's back. I just don't think we should have that conversation without Michelle. But we probably do need to talk about that. But I think also depending on the 9.30, 10.30 time that we figure out, are we ending the meeting before? Are we moving the topic back? Because what we keep doing now is, Is community committee reports and liaison reports are pretty much we'll talk about it later. Sorry. Then all that work that people are doing all these different committees is getting is not getting back out to the public. So, I think that in some way, not that they're dying to listen to that probably, but a few that are, you know, I want them to be able to have that information.

One thing that I have seen. I think this council used to do it also is the council used to submit those in writing and they became a part of the packet packet. Yeah. So you didn't have to go through them and all of that. Yeah, so that's an option for those.

If all of us went to the same ribbon cutting, it's just in all of our reports versus me too, me too, me too, me too.

That'd be nice. So just something to think about when we bring that up.

And that would then have to be everything up through like the... Two weeks before. So it would always be a couple weeks behind.

So maybe that could be agenda correspondence from council. Maybe we could just post it. We would call it council correspondence and then committee and liaison reports.

Potentially. Potentially.

Would we be agreeing to not then include it in the council hearing, or would it be in addition to what we were doing in the council hearing?

What do you mean hearing?

In the meeting. Oh. I mean, I think...

I'd pick your top three to highlight kind of like our, whereas proclamation situations or something you were like, Oh my gosh, this was amazing. But also if there's a conference that was paid for, we have to report those out no matter what. So there are some things that would still come into that session. You know, you went to civic well, I went to the tribal stewardship convening, et cetera, et cetera. So those will still be things that we stay and say in that time.

Yeah. But just the, all of the other liaison reports, as far as, you know, Still called.

Yeah.

RTA work on rack. You could do through.

I mean, we could do it just based on like, if we're done at 8. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Give you a report. Yeah. And if it's 11.

Yeah. It's 1045.

Yeah. Or. I mean, if we've got a little bit of time, maybe you're just reporting on things that we kind of have to report on or things where. Not just every liaison activity, but ones where you're like a voting member of a board. Right. You have a formal responsibility to represent the city. Those might be important to report out.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's something we kind of let you know. We just committees we sit on and observe. Like, yeah, we're not on the committee. We don't vote. they're it's truly a liaison other things we're a voting member yeah and when you go to lafco you know it's usually ish yeah there yeah or unlike slowcock right we're voting you know so yeah all right well something use your use your your own judgment

Sometimes we make announcements, you know, this is coming up and like that. But, you know, we can do that. We can make those announcements other ways. We can also just email, you know, sheep shearing shindigs coming up next week, you guys. We want to go. That can go on. that email. Absolutely. Okay. All right.

This has been good. Thank you. This has been really helpful. Scott, some script changes, got some actual agenda changes after August 4. And we'll try it out and see how it goes. And if we need to adjust.

And just to circle back on your question about warnings, we are only required to give one unless it's like a true use of force or true threat of force. um so no two is generous and as Teresa mentioned our office bandwidth allowing is going to be putting together some sort of brief confidential memorandum that sort of better outlines how we're balancing the first and first amendment rights versus some of the things that we've seen and how we can manage those in accordance with the Brown Act and yeah when we can't work yeah

Well, appreciate it. All right.

Thank you all so much.

Teresa, do you still have time for me?

Are we adjourned? We are adjourned. Sorry, the end.

Okay.