City Council - Regular Meeting

Well, good evening, everyone. Thank you for your patience. We had a little bit longer of a closed session today. I am Mayor Erica A. Stewart, here for our regular City Council meeting and stating that all members are present. Council Member Marks, will you lead the Pledge of Allegiance? City Manager and Assistant City Attorney Marky Kirsten, can we have a closed session report?

Thank you. Yes, I'll start us out. The Council did meet in closed session to discuss the items listed in the agenda, starting with a conference with legal counsel regarding anticipated litigation. A number of potential cases were won. There was no reportable action taken during that item.

Thank you, and yes, the Council met in closed session on two other matters of real property negotiations for the properties identified on the closed session agenda in which the Council provided direction on price in terms of payment, and there's no further reportable action.

Thank you. And with that, we'll move forward to the fun part of the day. Today we have three proclamations. We have the Hunger Action Month Proclamation, then we'll do the 30th anniversary of the San Luis Obispo Greenbelt, and lastly, the 30th anniversary of the Performing Arts Center. So I will kick it off with the Hunger Action Month, and then Andrea, I'll meet you up front for your three-minute Share out. So whereas with each September, the nationwide Hunger Action Month campaign, sorry, Hunger Action Month campaign unites millions of people across the country to raise awareness and provide nutritious food to neighbors facing hunger. The region's high cost of living frequently forces many of our neighbors in SLO County to make impossible choices between paying for essential needs such as rent and buying groceries. The Slow Food Bank provides food to 50,000 neighbors every month, a 58% increase in individuals served over the past five years. The Slow Food Bank's hunger relief network reaches more than one in six county residents, including over 10,000 neighbors each month in San Luis Obispo. This work is made possible by a collaborative network of 70 non-profits, that's 7-0, non-profit partners who distribute food directly within their own neighborhoods, including Cal Poly, Cuesta College, Access Support Network, CapSlow, 40 Prado, Goodwill, Haslow, 860, Salvation Army, and more in San Luis Obispo. The Slow Food Bank's mission is made possible by the profound generosity of our community, with more than 70% of the organization's funding coming directly from local individuals, businesses, and nonprofits. The expansive reach and daily operations of the Slow Food Bank are sustained by the dedication of over 1,300 active volunteers who generously give their time to nourish this community. Hunger Action Month serves as a county-wide call to action, inviting all of the community to learn, raise awareness, and contribute their time and resources to help feed San Luis Obispo County together. Now, therefore, I, Erica A. Stewart, Mayor for the City of San Luis Obispo, on behalf of the entire City Council, do hereby proclaim September 2026 as Hunger Action Month in San Luis Obispo.

Let's see here.

Mayor Stewart and council members, thank you for shining a light on this vital issue. Food insecurity is something that happens behind closed doors. There's no way to know if your colleague, your child's friend, or even the person bagging your own groceries is struggling to access nutritious food. During Hunger Action Month, we open those doors to make sure that thousands of our neighbors in need know that they are not alone and that the entire county is working to alleviate hunger and build a healthier community. As you shared in the proclamation, our community is experiencing food insecurity at a level we've not seen in our 36-year history. For some context, prior to this year, the most people we had ever served in a single month was 47,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are now regularly serving over 50,000 individuals each month. We're honored to provide compassionate, nutritious hunger relief to the tens of thousands of SLO County residents through our direct hunger relief efforts and the network of more than 70 independent nonprofits whose kitchens and pantries we stock. While hunger is a challenge that is very much a part of our local community, impacting every one of our neighborhoods, our schools, our workforce, and our seniors, in San Luis Obispo and across SLO County, the solution is also local. In the compassionate hearts of these agency partners, the hard work of hundreds of volunteers, and the support of thousands of donors, large and small. We're so grateful to be this community's food bank. Thank you again for your kindness, for helping share our story, and for supporting our mission on Hunger Action Month and throughout the year. If you're ever interested in learning more, I invite you and anyone in the community to come by for a tour of our warehouse or to volunteer at a distribution to see firsthand the difference a nutritious meal can make. Thank you so much.

Thank you, and I definitely encourage that tour. It was amazing, and to see the amount of food that goes through, but also in the organized fashion, it was awesome, and I believe Council Member Shoresman and I were there the, what was it, relay? Yeah, the relay, what's the official name? Yeah, I think it was Hunger Awareness Day, and watching everyone racing, trying to fill those bags as quickly as possible. It was a very fun competition for a good cause, but thank you. Next, as you can see from Council Member Mark's handkerchief, it is the 30th anniversary of the Green Belt, and she is styling today as we talk about all the different parts of our Green Belt. With that, I will kick us off. In 1996, following years of planning and engagement, The city of San Luis Obispo kicked off implementation of its signature Greenbelt protection program. On the 30th anniversary of the San Luis Obispo Greenbelt, we have protected over 4,000 acres of open space lands that we own as a community, another 4,000 acres of farms and ranches and scenic hillsides in permanent conservation status. and we've built over 65 miles of trails. 30 years ago, community leaders and residents had the foresight to say, these open space lands are special places that matter. They're worth protecting for future generations. Open space contributes to our environment, let me just say that again, contributes to our environment, economy, public health, and quality of life. Our community has made intentional choices to protect the natural landscapes that surround us. These open spaces shape our sense of place. They provide habitat for wildlife, trails, and connection to nature that many communities have lost. Implementing the Green Belt didn't happen at once, but instead through sustained commitment over time, planning by the Environmental Quality Task Force and the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County showed the way. leading to early conservation wins by Dr. Neil Havlick, blossoming partnerships, and the Greenbelt we know and love today. We've spent the summer of 2026 cherishing open space through a series of special events while also being reminded that land stewardship is never finished. Protecting open space isn't a one-time accomplishment. It's an ongoing commitment. It's a forever promise. So now, therefore, I, Erica A. Stewart, Mayor of the City of San Luis Obispo, On behalf of the entire City Council, do hereby honor and celebrate the 30th anniversary of the San Luis Obispo Greenbelt and extend our sincere thanks and appreciation for all those that have contributed to creating a land conservation legacy of San Luis Obispo. Mr. Hill, are you picking up? Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Stewart and Council. I'm Bob Hill, and on behalf of our Office of Sustainability and Natural Resources, just really want to thank all of you for your ongoing dedicated support to open space and to the San Luis Obispo Greenbelt. What's really special to me about the Greenbelt, this is land that belongs to all of us, for land that has been historically important land that is important to us now for habitat protection and wildlife, for natural resources protection, for outdoor recreation, for that enhanced quality of life, of mental and physical fitness. And it's there, of course, for the future, right, for future generations. That's fundamental to why we do land conservation and we do it in a permanent way. It's really just a deep honor for me to be here and receiving this proclamation, but really, there's so many people that have been involved, people over the years, people that were mentors to me, like Neil Havlick and Ray Belknap and others, and all the, All the city councils, I remember being in front of this council as a graduate student presenting about the Green Belt and Ken Schwartz and Dave Romero were there and Christine Mulholland and John Ewan. There were others that definitely led the way and it's really an honor to be able to carry forward that tradition and that important promise and also to be planning for the future. Right now, we're talking a lot about El Nino. You can go outside and you can smell the wildfire smoke and so we have a lot of responsibility to care for and steward these lands, to think about a climate change future and what that means for our natural lands and our open space. But overall, it's about people, it's about land that belongs to all of us, but it's also about wildlife, and it's just really remarkable when I think about Hundreds of species of birds exist in the San Luis Obispo Greenbelt, dozens and dozens of special status rare plants. We have steelhead trout, we have mountain lions, you may have read in the Tribune, we have bears just this past weekend. A couple of species that have come back from the brink of extinction, bald eagles and pelicans are now present in San Luis Obispo in our Greenbelt and we're part of that recovery, we're part of that conservation. I want to thank the City Council for the proclamation. I want to thank our community who's been always strong supporters of our open space. And there are so many people who care deeply and tell me over and over again, this is the reason why I want to live in San Luis Obispo, because we have this amazing thing. part of what makes San Luis Obispo special and mostly my colleagues you know it's a really fun to work with the Rangers and go out there and learn how they do things and how they build trails it's fun to work with our city biologist and learn something new every single time you go outside and have great colleagues in Lucia and Chris and I wanted to point out in particular that Lucia is here and she has a 30th anniversary complimentary bandanas that she designed. They're available tonight because this is the culminating event of a summer of cherishing open space. We had a lot of fun learning about trails with Ranger Neils Grether. We had a Terrace Hill community picnic and had the most amazing sunset that evening. A really nice docent led hike that Ranger Doug and I were able to do in Irish Hills just a few weeks ago and now this proclamation. So the bandanas are available and thank you.

Thank you so much. And last but not least, we have Mr. Ryan Grass is here to collect the Performing Arts Center Proclamation. And I will say that we had quite a nice celebration on Saturday, sorry, I was like Sunday, Saturday, Sunday, Saturday, on Saturday, and got to see a lot of people that were in the slideshows of 30 years ago, 40 years ago, when this was first being discussed, and it's really fun to see what some of these visions are that we have 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and where they are today. So last proclamation, I promise for the day. Whereas on September 27th, 1996, the Performing Arts Center of San Luis Obispo opened the Christopher Cohan Center, establishing a premier performing arts venue in the heart of San Luis Obispo and launching a grand opening festival that ushered in a new era of arts and culture for the community. In 2026, we celebrate the We celebrate the Center's 30th anniversary and recognize its lasting impact in inspiring audiences and enriching the cultural life of our region. In 1886, community leaders recognized the importance of philanthropic support for the success and sustainability of a performing arts center and began the work that ultimately formed the foundation for the Performing Arts Center. In 2026, we celebrate the foundation's 40th anniversary and honor four decades of dedication to raising private support, fostering community engagement, and ensuring the arts remain accessible to all. In 1986, a visionary partnership was created among Cal Poly and the city and the foundation for the Performing Arts Center to build and sustain a world-class performing arts center. In 2026, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of this partnership and commend its enduring collaboration and shared commitment, which have made the Christopher Cohan Center a cultural cornerstone and a source of community pride. The arts have the power to educate, unite, and transform, and the Christopher Cohan Center, the Foundation for the Performing Arts Center, and the PACT Partnership exemplify the strength of vision, generosity, and cooperation in building a legacy that will continue to inspire future generations. Now, therefore, I, Erica A. Stewart, Mayor of the City of San Luis Obispo, on behalf of the entire City Council, do hereby honor and celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Performing Arts Center San Luis Obispo, the 40th anniversary of the Foundation for the Performing Arts Center, and the 40th anniversary of the PACT Partnership, and extend our deepest gratitude to all who have contributed to the remarkable legacy of arts, education, and community.

All right, thank you to the San Luis Obispo City Council and the City of San Luis Obispo for this meaningful proclamation recognizing the Performing Arts Center's 30th anniversary. For three decades, the city's partnership, consistency, and belief in the importance of the arts have been critical to the PAC's success. Your support has helped create a place where countless children and citizens have experienced the inspiration, connection, and joy that the performing arts bring to our community. On average, we welcome over 10,000 school children from our local area and over 100,000 other people through our doors each year. We're deeply grateful for your ongoing commitment to the Performing Arts Center and the arts in our city, and thank you for helping San Luis Obispo be a place where the arts can thrive. I encourage everyone to join us on September 26th for the PAC 30th anniversary celebration, and surely for the thousands of people watching online at the moment. We're looking forward to having you all. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Ryan. So next we have our city manager report. One of the things we love to do is get to learn a little bit about what's happening in and around the city.

Thank you very much happy to be here this evening, we have a few things to update people on. we'll start with something that was mentioned by Bob hill just a couple minutes ago, which is our upcoming El Nino season, so we are expecting and and. and El Nino this year, which is based on unusually warm Pacific Ocean waters. And hopefully, folks, if you're not sure what El Nino is and what it means, there's a lot of really great information available online, articles in the press about what it means, what it looks like. And what we believe that will mean for us here is a rather wet winter. And so as a result, we are well underway in preparing for what we believe will be a very uh busy winter season and so in preparation the city has established an el nino working group and this is made up of staff from departments across the city because you could imagine an incredibly busy wet winter involves a lot of different parts of our city and infrastructure This group is led by our emergency manager, Joe Little. Our working group is reviewing our previous storm seasons, and I feel like I am still remembering very vividly the very, very busy season in 2023, assessing our stormwater infrastructure, identifying neighborhoods that have been historically impacted and evaluating our response procedures to help ensure the city is prepared and even though the notes don't say it here i would i would like to to let everybody know we are very grateful to assembly member addis for helping the city obtain what we believe is in the state's budget at about 1.3 million dollars to the city to help us with our storm preparation infrastructure projects. So we were able to let Assemblymember Addis know what some of our needs would be. And so the state has actually, it looks like, going to be providing funding to the city to help us complete some of these projects we were able to identify. So that's just a little piece of what we've been doing, which is making sure that we are quickly addressing what we know may be issues in areas of, you know, hot spots and concerns throughout our city. And we also want to start having these conversations, we'll be talking about it more and more as the year progresses, because it's really important for the community to be aware to take steps to make sure you know what your own homes or your businesses might need in the event of a lot of rain, and potentially wind and other types of things coming your way. So we want to start talking about this. Again, we'll be continuing to monitor the conditions closely and provide updates and information as soon as they become available. For more information or preparedness tips, you can go to slowcity.org slash prepare or contact our emergency manager Joe Little and he'll be happy to help provide additional information there. So again, you'll be seeing more of these slides as the fall and winter come up. Next up, we wanna make sure everybody's aware, we will be celebrating or commemorating 9-11. Everyone is invited to our yearly 9-11 Memorial Ceremony at Fire Station One. This year marks the 25th anniversary, and so the ceremony will begin at 830 AM with a CHP flyover, followed by a presentation of colors and invocation and speeches by a number of our dignitaries and our fire chief Harris mayor Stewart and police chief Scott, this will the ceremony will end with a slow high school Chamber singers. ensemble and a placement of roses, there will be 403 white roses laid out all day to honor the courage and sacrifice of. The emergency responders who lost their lives on that day back 25 years ago, so want to make sure everybody is aware, we will be commemorating again at 830 am on 911 at station one. On a different note, this one more exciting, I think we have a list of new businesses, we know. there's a lot of vibrancy and some turnover and businesses throughout our Community we want to just make sure to highlight some of that on about a quarterly basis so we're here. To share this exciting lineup of new businesses that have opened in San Luis obispo over the past quarter. What stands out to us is how many of our small businesses are now opening second and third locations within our city, which is incredibly exciting and just really a great indicator of the ability of folks to start and grow businesses here in San Luis Obispo. On the food and beverage side, there are eight new spots opened across three distinct parts of our town. Downtown welcomed Uma's at Broad and Higuera. which serves Central Asian and Eastern European cuisine. We'd like to highlight this is the family's first West Coast location, so we're really excited that they chose San Luis Obispo to be their West Coast home. Just around the corner, Frankie's opened on Garden Street. which is the second concept from the owners of la la conda which is just two doors down idola wine company opened a natural wine tasting room at the creamery a slow cider company opened a creekside tap room across from mission plaza you can see the photo of their building i'm sure folks been have been in the mission. You've probably seen that wonderful mural on the side of the building. And Park 1039 has reopened on Toro as a family-owned wine bar. At the Slow Public Market, Goshi opened its second Slow location, and Little Spoon Creamery is scooping up on South Higuera. Out on Rebecca Rebecca court high street deli opened its headquarters and its third location in our county. New retail includes goryana the lukena beach jewelry brand which chose downtown for its first San Luis obispo county store. And basset salon solutions is a family owned distributor serving salon professionals on the services side body rock Pilates Pilates studio opened on in the foothill neighborhood so a salon studios opened at the marigold shopping Center and kovacs. Coastal Optometry took over a practice that has served this community for more than 20 years. It's just really encouraging. We want to highlight these new businesses as we see more entrepreneurs investing in San Luis Obispo. We have more businesses in the pipeline to share with you all at a future meeting, so we'll keep you updated. Next up, we are having our ninth annual and 2026 state award winning September September scramble, which is our family obstacle event. You can register your kids or the entire family and experience over 26 different obstacle adventures along nearly one mile course. That navigates throughout our laguna lake golf course this event is held on Saturday September 26 between 10am and 2pm. And it's a drop-in start, so feel free to come anytime between those hours. If you come early and complete the course multiple times, you can also enjoy food, booths, and vendors. Definitely, we've had people go through there, I don't know, a dozen times, something like that. It's always great to see them. Registration is now open and is $15 per child, which includes an event t-shirt or $40 for the whole family. And for more information, you can go to slowparksandrec.org. Next up, we're wanting to provide a little bit of an update on where we're at with our 2026 paving and mobility improvements project. So people have probably seen us out and about in some state of construction related to this paving project over the last few weeks. A lot of that work has been sealing pavement cracks. And so this week, we expect that pavement crack sealing to be completed and slurry sealing of streets to begin. within the French Park and Islay Park neighbourhoods. Community members can expect to receive prior notification via door hanger or flyer at least 72 hours beforehand if your street will be impacted. This will also include a street map and dates expected for work on each street. Working hours are Monday through Friday between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. and during slurry sealing, which is different from the crack sealing, that's when we come in and essentially put a layer down over across the entire street. Community members can expect no parking signage, temporary road closures with detours and intermittent flagging. City staff are working with the contractor to open roadways as quickly as possible after slurry sealing so that people can re-access their homes. and we expect slurry sealing operations to continue through September as our contractor works from the south end of town northward toward neighborhoods off Johnson and Meadow Park. We're really thankful to residents and businesses and anybody along these areas that we are touching and impacting for your patients as the project progresses. We know there's a lot going on out there because we do have a lot of streets underway. We know it's impactful, but it's going to be beautiful when it's done. And so if you have any questions, please email us at slowinmotion at slowcity.org, or you can call us at 783-7887. And then finally, just highlighting our items on our next agenda, which will be the City Council meeting on September 15th. We do have a couple of Mills Act contracts. Wanted to highlight that we are also bringing forward a proposed resolution to support an Emergency Medical Services Alliance resolution, a Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act hearing, as well as the item which we added following our last council meeting to discuss amendments to council policies and procedures, specifically chapters five and seven. So with that, that's the end of my report this evening.

Thank you it's so great to see all of the new businesses and, like you said, additional businesses of the current businesses. And so many of them are small local businesses, which is really neat to see. I do want to say that I a big thank you to some assembly Member addresses office regarding the budget, one of the things that her office shared with me was that because we had shovel ready projects. they were also really easy to squeeze in right at the end when they said there's really no time and no money we don't have it and then all of a sudden they learned they had a teeny bit left all right yours is ready so that's why we work so hard on the shovel ready projects and so just big thank you to all the staff who continue to help us make that possible to be able to receive so thank you any questions for city manager council member shoresman

Thank you. Yeah, I don't know if there's anybody that can talk about this here tonight, but I did receive some comments from some community members about the paving and wondering, especially around the high school, they've, as part of the paving project and probably some of the slurry sealing, all of the lines and street markings kind of on San Luis Drive leading up to and around the high school have been all shaved down. And so the concern that I heard was, we've got a lot of new drivers and a lot of chaos around the high school at the beginning and end of the school day and a bunch of new drivers in the beginning of the school year, so wondering what the timeline would be for having the work done there around the high school.

We'll see if our team is able to nail that down right now, I'm not sure.

All right. Madeline Consenta, Assistant Director of Public Works. Madam Mayor, members of Council. I don't know the exact timeline for that street. I can get back to you on that. But I do know usually they'll come in, they'll do the whole story seal, which is basically, yeah, they put a very fine layer on top of the street, and then they'll come back and they'll do a temporary marking on it until they can come back and do the actual striping on the project. So that should at least give some guidelines for those new drivers, but I can get exact timing for you guys and send it out.

And that would be helpful. Thank you.

You're welcome.

And then my other question was about with the storm preparations. I don't know if this will be you or not, but I know one of the things in the past that we've talked to downtown business owners about getting out their floodgates and making sure they know how to use them. And are we doing that kind of education with folks as well?

I do know that preparation has come up at meetings that we have on a regular basis with Downtown SLO, and we do have protocols in place for reminding folks about their storm gates and what to do there, or flood gates. I think the first step is for everybody to determine whether they have a floodgate and then educate themselves on how to go about installing it and when, but we can, I know that that's a topic that we roll out pretty much every winter, I think, when we think there could be a big rain event, but certainly let our public works and utilities director clarify.

Thank you, City Manager. And good evening, Council. That was a great answer, City Manager. Yes, this is one of the parts of the larger El Nino response that we are working on. So in addition to our internal operations, which really expands across almost all of our departments at this point, we are also working on a lot of outreach because we recognize that a lot of community members, both private residents as well as business owners, need to have awareness on what to do. this so this is definitely one of the upcoming processes that we are getting ready to work towards is working with the folks in the downtown areas or any of those flood prone areas as far as the private residents will continue to provide additional information as we had spoken to on the slide a little bit right there but we will be talking about locations for sandbags ready slow making sure folks are already in their personal residence as well so a lot more to come on that but yeah that is definitely a part of it so great question

Can I tag onto that? Of course. Thank you. With the sandbags, people have already started asking me can they come and fill their sandbags now or is it too soon?

I would think it's a little bit too soon. We need to actually establish those sandbag locations, fill those up right there, provide folks with the opportunity to have the bags and everything ready right there. But we will make sure that we are well in advance of that time. But it is good feedback for us to hear also that folks are, two part, being ready for that, and they're also ready for us then to start rolling that out so we can expedite that process a bit too. So that's something I can talk to our emergency manager, Joe Little, on and relay that. So thank you, Mayor.

Great. Thank you so much. That's all my questions.

Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. Well, we'll move forward to public comment. I just want to encourage if anyone in the room has a public comment, this is the time to head over to the city assistant city manager and grab one of those yellow slips or go outside and grab one. If you are online on Zoom. please raise your hand so we know that you have a public comment item or comment. These are for anything not on the agenda, so if it's on the consent agenda or on the public hearings and business items, we'll talk about those a little bit later. So for that, city clerk, will you call the public comment?

Okay, we have two people in the room. So Garrett Philbin and then Thomas Burt.

All right. Good evening, Mayor Stewart and Council. My name is Garrett Philbin, and I'm here with the Slow Tenants Union. I first want to start by thanking you, because four out of the five of you said that San Luis Obispo should have a mandatory rental registry and directed staff to make that part of the 2027 financial plan and work program. That took clarity and courage, and we really appreciate it. So tonight, I want to talk about what it can look like once the registry is implemented. So let's imagine it's two years from now. Staff opens a map and sees nearly every rental unit in the city, where they are, how many bedrooms, how many folks are living in those bedrooms, what they rent for, which ones sit empty. Right now, the city can only see about 2,600 properties with active business licenses out of an estimated 14,870 units. In a few years, suddenly the housing element isn't guesswork. You know which neighborhoods are actually short on family sized units, where infrastructure can carry more density, and where you're quietly losing long term homes to short term rentals. You approve the right projects in the right places with confidence. and picture a landlord who genuinely didn't know that the state cap on rent increases 5% plus inflation up to 10%. Instead of a tenant discovering it too late and there being a dispute that nobody wanted, the city flags it early and sends a friendly notice to them both. Most landlords do want to follow the law and a registry can help them do it. And then there's a city's own balance sheet. Currently, there are about 2,600 business licenses for the estimated 14,870 units. That's about one license for every six units, and city staff has admitted that's low. So even if we go on the conservative end, because we know that you can have multiple units per business license, so we say that there's one business license for every three units, the city would be collecting an additional $196,000 every year. Not just one year, but every year, which would help pay for the initial investment in the program, at least in the first couple of years. So let's make it happen. We're asking you to fund the program in full in the 2027 to 2029 fiscal cycle and place it in the staff work program in the first quarter so that we can get started gathering this information and you can start using it sooner rather than later. Thank you, we're excited to build this with you. And lastly, I live on Johnson, so for y'all, the slurry right in front of the high school is happening September 2nd through September 4th from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. after high school starts and before it ends. You can quote me on that, at least that's what's on the signs. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Thomas Burt, and I'm here with the Sloan Tenant Union. I wanted to share a story that I've had from the past two weeks. I had a friend text me and say that they were having a dispute with their landlord as they were moving out regarding the security deposit. And they asked me what advice I had for them and any resources available. And I had to say there's not really too much to do that I could help with them or point them towards, specifically since the mediation service that was supposed to be available in September is not available yet. That is, this is just one example of one renter in the city that could have been helped by this program and given how many renters are coming back to the city with Cal Poly back in session, I know that there are many more possible. We wanted to say thank you for the questions the answer to the questions from the August 16th council meeting and provided by deputy city manager but we still have a few more. We want to know when this when this service will be fully implemented for the public and when is the target date for the city issuing the RFP. We think that this program could help a lot of renters and overall be very beneficial for the community, not just the one friend that I anecdotally know. And along with what Garrett said, I also would heavily encourage a rental registry being pursued as early as possible in the first quarter of the next fiscal year. Thank you.

Thank you. And there's at least one person I see online.

Yeah. John Q, you can unmute yourself.

Hello.

Hello.

Hi. Thank you. Sean Harris here. As a middle-aged, lifelong Californian who's lived all over the state and country, I've seen its demography change, as has its economy, from Ronald Reagan gassing hippies in People's Park in Berkeley to its treatment of Native Americans to its environmental pollution to its export of good jobs facilitated by Democrat Bill Clinton signing NAFTA into law and the replacement by low-skill, low-wage jobs to its strangulation of Central Valley farmers by environmental regulations, from its public universities being practically free, providing marketable graduates, to now being overwhelmed by administrative bloat, expensive tuition, and graduating students with obscure and unmarketable degrees, to what in my mind is even more concerning, the increased role of the Catholic Church in state politics. At present, there is a 600-strong person caravan of foreigners, predominantly members of this religion, marching to our southern border from Mexico. intent on storming our border, joining their illegal comrades here, and ultimately spreading their religion. As a secular American, I find this appalling. Our country was established by Protestants, and with this came a certain perspective, namely that one's salvation isn't contingent on religious rituals. Many Americans believe material success gained through hard work may, and I repeat may, show God's favor, not a blessing from a priest. This makes divining our souls' destination through frugality and hard work possible, as opposed to engaging in sanctified sedition, as so many of Rome's believers knowingly do. From spitting on and burning the American flag, as we saw in L.A. last summer, by members of this same Roman faith as those marching to our southern border from Mexico, to engaging in human trafficking, extortion, and organized crime, again, as many of this religion's adherents do, why follow temporal rules at all? For members of this religion, they see the rest of us as either atheists, apostates, or heretics, and already went to war with us in the European wars of religion. By overwhelming our society through mass illegal immigration of their believers, the Vatican is again at war with us. They already comprise a majority on the Supreme Court, as is the Vice President, the Pope is American, and there is no incentive for the adherents to assimilate, other than milk the state for what they can, burn our flag while doing so, and encouraged by bleeding-heart liberals and celibate priests, Propagate their religion through large families they can barely pay for. For liberal apologists, take heed. This religion is monolithic and deeply conservative. It opposes everything you stand for. It opposes reproductive rights. It opposes marriage equality. It opposes divorce. And at one point, even opposed heliocentricity. Within the Protestant faith are hundreds of denominations, some liberal, some conservative. Just ask yourself when the last time you saw a Catholic church with a rainbow banner. Answer, never. Within this town, there are numerous denominations and non-denominational Protestant churches that do have the rainbow flag. So stop encouraging illegal immigration. You do so at your own peril. This is a foreign religion at odds with our Constitution and Bill of Rights. This is the very religion that prohibited the importation of Bibles written in anything other than Latin. And I'll stop there. Thank you.

Okay, thank you, anyone else on Zoom? Or online, I should say? No, I'm not seeing anyone. Okay, me either, wanted to make sure. All right, thank you. City Manager, did you have anything you wanted to update from any of the public comment?

Thank you just just a couple clarifications on the mediation program we we are continuing to work on the rfp which we are doing in conjunction with cal poly. it's a little bit as mentioned at our last meeting a little complicated when you have. A city and state agency trying to work together on on a matter like this, but we do know we we are continuing to progress on the rfp preparation which we do need to issue and then go through the process of allowing somebody. To submit a proposal back so that will take some time I don't have a specific date at this point, but I would like to mention that. We did get authorization at least through conversations during the budget process to have some funding available if there is an immediate need for mediation. The city has the ability to support that through a direct one on one mediator contract, essentially. So if if there are people who are out there who need mediation services today, we do have the ability to support that through an individual agreement with a mediator. So please reach out to us and we will help facilitate that while we're in this period before the RFP is completed. So just wanted to provide that clarification.

And where can they reach out to get that help?

I realized that as I was saying it out loud.

I think Council Member Shoresman has that answer.

In an email that Deputy City Manager Greg Herman sent earlier, I don't know what day this was, on Wednesday, he said to contact Christine Wallace and gave her email address and her phone number at 781-7186.

Thank you. That was really important to make sure that that information was out there because I know that I've shared that with people before since we're in this funky space since the last couple weeks. So thank you very much, Deputy City Manager. I just want to say people's first names. So trying to be formal and official when I'm up here. Thank you. Any other questions, comments? All right, moving forward to consent agenda. I will just say to the public and people online, if you have any public comment on the consent agenda, now is that time to either raise your hand or grab one of those slips of paper for your public comment. At this time, is there anything that my colleagues, you would like to pull from the consent agenda? Seeing none, we'll move forward. Do you have anyone online, city clerk, that has a public comment?

No, we do not.

All right. And I do not see anyone in person either. So moving forward, Vice Mayor.

I would like to move approval of the consent agenda.

I'd like to second it.

Thank you, Council Member Marks.

Vice Mayor Francis? Yes. Council Member Marks? Yes. Council Member Boswell?

Yes.

Council Member Shoresman? Yes. Mayor Stewart?

Yes, and the motion passed 5-0. Thank you very much, and I want to say a big thank you for the Slow Transit 2026 Transit Asset Management Plan and Contingency Fleet Plan. I know that's a mouthful for me to say, but the work on our public transit is a great deal, and I'm so thankful to be able to read through all the work that we're doing and what we can tell the federal government we're doing, and hopefully if funding comes in the future, that can help us expand getting more people on public transit. So thank you. Well, that will move forward to the business item today, and we only have one, so I'll ask our presenters to come on forward. We have our Police Department 2025 Annual Report. With that, we'll have Chief Police Chief Rick Scott and Deputy Police Chief Aaron Schaffer to present the report.

Well, good evening, Madam Mayor and members of council. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be with you tonight to present our 2025 annual police report. Tonight, myself and Deputy Chief Schaffer will give a high level overview of the department's annual report. And we're pleased to share some important outcomes and achievements from this past year. I'd like to start off by reviewing the department's vision and purpose. These are still fairly new to the department since they were adopted as part of our five-year strategic plan. With both our vision and our purpose being our North Star, we feel it's important to ensure that our activities are delivering unparalleled service to our community in line with the broader organizational goals and that of our department. Our purpose is to safeguard our community from harm by reducing crime, ensuring dignity, equity and justice for all. Our vision is a community partnership built on trust, focused on safety and shared values to ensure the slow quality of life. As we've navigated public policy changes and challenges both locally, regionally, and of course nationally, we feel it's critically important to remain true to our values, ensuring that whether you work or live or visit here in SLO, that it provides an exceptional experience, a quality of belonging that you just can't get anywhere else. For tonight's presentation, we're going to have a look at our updated organizational structure. efforts in community engagement, and a few new innovative programs focused on moving our collective sustainability efforts forward and into the future. One of the items I'm sure you're very interested to hear about is how we did in our crime reduction effort this past year, and I'll jump ahead and say we did good, very good, so we're looking forward to providing that data to you here very shortly. We'll also talk briefly on some unique first-of-a-kind employee wellness approaches that we're implementing here in SLO in our police department. We're going to talk a little bit about recruitment and retention, some challenges we're having on that front. And then we're going to wrap up with a status check-in on our strategic plan, our five-year plan, as you're all aware, just to give you an update where we're currently tracking and headed in that process. In reviewing our organizational structure and budget, there's just a few changes I wanna make mention from 2025. Up first, I'm happy to tell you that we promoted Deputy Chief Aaron Schaffer here with us when Fred Michael retired back in 25. Aaron Schaffer's doing a great job, so I'm happy to report that to you. Told him there was no pressure tonight, but there's always pressure tonight, so. We'll see. We also added two police officers under our federal COPS grant, and we have those officers hired now. And that brings our total staffing up to 97 full-time employees with 63 sworn officers specifically. We've been able to restore some staffing in our traffic safety team, which is our motor unit, so we're very, very happy to get that unit back near where it should be. Unfortunately, we did lose our vacant crime analyst position that was removed during last year's budget reduction exercise. We also completed a pilot study where we embedded a community service officer, a CSO, into our CAT team. This has really already given some pretty incredible results. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in the presentation, but I just wanted to give you a preview of how we're moving some of our staff to meet the needs of our community. And looking at our budget, even though the department did make some reductions this past year, staffing costs did continue to increase to the tune of about $2 million over last year. 93% of that is funding our ongoing personnel costs. About 7% or 1.8 million supports the rest of the operation. That's our contracts, our non-staffing equipment and programmatic needs for the department. 2025 was another great year for community engagement. Both the police roundtable and our public advisory committee, our PAC group, as you know it, consistently met throughout the year. We were able to grow both of these groups respectively, adding members from both our downtown business core and our Islamic faith-based communities specifically. We tackled tough topics throughout the year, including immigration enforcement, hate crime reporting, automated license plate readers, and anti-Semitism. These partnerships that we've developed and continue to grow continue to provide critical insight into our policies and our practices and strengthens trust between our community and your police department. In addition, we continue to prioritize community connection as we attended or hosted over 30 separate or unique events throughout our community, many of which you were there. We saw each other throughout the year. National Night Out, Pride in the Plaza, Grizzly Career Fair for our folks at the Grizzly Academy up the street. Juneteenth, our Jewish Heritage Day celebration, just to name a few. And these events, more and more like them, create excellent opportunities to grow and strengthen our connection and promote our overall sense of community here in SLO. As we have a look at our specialized teams, both our CAT team and our CSO officers, they had a very active year in 2025. As both of these teams are getting up to full strength, we're able to move some of the personnel in and out to best meet the needs of our community. Our CAT team is now operating with a, as I mentioned, a community service officer and a licensed site tech provided by the county. They made 157 different referrals to services, including eight family reunifications and 85 housing or shelter referrals. The addition of the LPT and the CSO officer both complement our multidisciplinary team approach and thus increase our chance for success in treatment of folks needing help out on the street. As we've talked many times before, it takes several contacts to build trust with our community members, especially experiencing homelessness. And to have our team out there working on these topics or these challenging situations every day, they are building trust and increasing our success at getting people who've historically been reluctant to these type of services. And looking at our CSO team specifically, they were very busy, 444 citations, 189 arrests. and their efforts continue to be focused on our downtown core to improve visibility and security, but most importantly, increase the feeling of safety and security. We can talk about it, our data's gonna show we have a safe city, but when you see these folks downtown, it does increase the feeling of safety and security, especially where people come and visit and shop and also live downtown. Aside from these proactive enforcement statistics, our CSOs provide a friendly and familiar face to our community. Part of their responsibility, aside from walking beats downtown and walking districts, they do interact with all of our business owners to provide a direct contact and somebody they can reach out to if they need help or have questions. This is a new slide. I don't think we've presented this before. Some of this is pretty cutting edge, I think. As I wrap up my portion of the presentation, I want to talk a little bit about sustainability and our efforts in leading and helping our community achieve carbon neutrality. The department is continuing to work in exploring and growing an all-electric police fleet. And I don't know many agencies that have done this or have it reverted back, but we're moving slowly, but we're moving in that direction. So I'm very excited to tell you some of the accomplishments in this area. As you see on your slide in front of you, we've purchased an all-electric police admin vehicle, also two electric patrol cars. One is already out on the street answering calls. The other one will be behind it here in a couple of months. All-electric fleet of e-bikes and a light duty police motorcycle. And so we've mixed up the different pieces of equipment to test them all, see what's kind of the best out there, and that helps guide our purchases into the future as we seek these common goals. Our focus is to, of course, improve efficiency, but also not sacrificing equipment capability, especially with the type of work that they do. It really has to be tough, very durable type equipment that can get us where we need to go safely. As we move this concept forward, we're currently designing a supercharging infrastructure to support further electrification of our fleet all across the department. We're excited to see that the advancements in policing technology that are bringing this equipment available, making it available to us is also supporting major city goals for cleaner fuels and improved equipment infrastructure. So now I will pass to Deputy Chief Schaffer. He's gonna go into the remainder of the annual report.

Thank you, Chief. Madam Mayor, Council, I lost my voice today. I think I'm coming down with a little bit of a cold earlier today. You might want to stay away. I'm not sure. I just got back from a trip. So probably sitting on an airplane is probably why that happened. So I'm just here to talk about some exciting news for 2025. And despite staffing, the increases that the chief described, we've actually been working below staffing most of the year of 2025 just due to vacancies and transitions, promotions, and then backfilling those promotions to higher officers. Nevertheless, the department achieved measurable outcomes across crime reduction. We increased community outreach and operational efficiency to ensure the best service to our community. As you can see from this graph, our calls for service in 2025 have continued to decline since 2021. From 2024 to 2025 it has gone down essentially 1% based on the current data coin in 2026 we're projected to be 7% above where we were in 2025 so just to give you some perspective that we are heading upward as of this year. Over the first, over five years, part one crime has actually decreased over the last five years by 12% on average. Traffic collisions, however, have increased by 8%. This relates to the population growth, increased housing, increased student enrollment at Cal Poly that are present in our community, and new drivers to our area. or new to San Luis and one-way streets. Also, with more people on the road, the likelihood of traffic collisions increases. We understand these patterns, and as Chief mentioned, in 2026, we've actually increased our traffic unit from two to three, and so we should see that impact this year, and we continue educational campaigns and working with public works and engineering concerns throughout the city. So the good news, the great news is that Part 1 has declined substantially since 2021 to 2025. Overall, it dropped 42% during that timeframe. Specifically, cases decreased in 2021 from 2,063 to 1,210 Part 1 crimes in 2025. This reflects both effective deployment strategies and more presence of officers, and you'll talk about this in a little bit, but the utilization of CSOs has freed up officers' time to be more available and do proactive work, and I think by doing that has reduced crime in our city. So just to take a deeper look into the part one crimes comparing 2025 to 2024, In 2025, violent crime declined by 16%, while property crime declined by 24%. This created an overall decrease of 23% in part one crime. A major component of this drop is general theft, and those are crimes of opportunity, bike theft, just petty theft, those types of calls, and then also theft from vehicles. Those reductions have played a big part of that reduction. The department has seen success through community outreach via our social media. We recently hit 22,000 followers. We've probably added 12,000 followers in the last few years. I give a shout out to Christine Wallace, who runs those campaigns and has done a great job, and we expect now to continue. It's been a great tool for us to inform the public. We use strategic resource deployment in our higher crime areas with the assistance of data-driven policing, i.e. a resource router, which is a software that we have that allows us to do that quickly. Expanded proactive enforcement and leveraging the CSOs to allow those officers to do that proactive enforcement. And we know addressing those types of issues, whether it's proactive in our parks and holding people accountable for maybe drug-related crimes that's typically our demographic who is committing those crimes. And actually with the increase of Prop 36, we're starting to see the effects of that and that's the Homeless Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act that passed in 2024. So 2025 was essentially the first year that that proposition was in full effect and I think we're seeing that and these numbers support that as well. I'd also like to give some credit to our detective bureau. We know that people come to our city from out of the area and commit crimes, and obviously patrol officers aren't leaving the city to go investigate that, but they do their part in that investigation, and then we collaborate with our investigative bureau, and we've made several arrests and served several search warrants outside of our area in order to address these chronic offenders, if you will, Oops, I think I actually went too far. There we go. Traffic safety, right? So obviously this is an important topic for us. It's an important topic for our community. And our total traffic collisions declined by 7% from 24 to 25. That's about 38 collisions. Although we did see, if you look at this table, you see a slight increase in ped-bike collisions. The good thing about this is we've seen a decrease in the fatalities of those collisions. And I think, you know, essentially a balanced approach of both education, as you can see, our citations went up 10% and our warnings went down, so they're kind of almost a little bit of a wash. But as you can see, that number totally has gone up, and that way we're educating. And we know by doing enforcement, it changes behaviors for, you know, it's not rocket science, not super, you know, Articles about it, but at the same time, like it's been known that changes behavior for about six months, where a warning is like six weeks, for example. In 2026 like a chief said we were able to increase our so this year we anticipate hopefully this impact we see in 2026 with the increase of our traffic unit and I want to give a big shout out to our public works partners obviously. Luke and his team have done a great job as far as engineering some of our roads and making and road diet. We work with them very closely, and we target enforcement based on the data that we've given through the High Injury Collision Network, and that work has been huge in order to implement and make an impact on the city's Vision Zero action plan. Neighborhood quality of life. Unfortunately, our noise did increase in 2025, comparing it to 2024, by 6%. But one of the biggest things I want to make, to let Council and you guys know, is that our enforcement effort has been stronger than ever. And I think that's a huge attribute to You know, just setting expectations of if there is noise and it's causing problems and we're getting second responses that we're actually addressing these and writing citations and then documenting those appropriately as well in order for those to be held up with a hearing officer. And so we actually increased 44% this year. So we wrote 260 citations in 2025. The previous year we wrote 180 citations. And that's been, again, we keep on harping on the CSO program. I personally believe in it. I think it needs to be bigger than it already is. And we've used them on big weekends, like start of school, Halloween, St. Pat's, graduation, or specific weekends, we know something may happen. And having them out there addressing these issues noisy complaints or noisy parties, it allows the officers to be out there doing other proactive work. And they're not just dealing with noise, they're also dealing with other neighborhood livability issues while they're out there. Just for perspective, in 2024, 12% of the noisy parties calls we went to received citations and almost 20%, 17% in 2025 received citations. So we got, that's a pretty good number. It kind of goes along with the increase in citations that we've issued over the last year. So neighborhood noise and campus living. The department remains committed to its partnership with Cal Poly to support on-campus living initiatives that help reduce noise and improve neighborhood livability in our city. Since Cal Poly built Poly Canyon Village in 28 slash 29, we have seen the number of noise complaints drop over those years. Even though, like I just said, we saw a slight increase this year. As you can see from this graph, it's pretty telling. The more on-campus housing, more students on campus, noise continues to go down. The line, just for perspective, the line is the students living on campus and the bar graph is our noise complaints over the last 20 years. So the city continues to use Versaterm. You might have known it as Spider from previous investigations. Provides timely feedback daily for myself and our management teams of how we're doing with the community. And the community remains very satisfied with the interactions with our department, as you can see. I mean, these are almost A plus. Scores, almost. I was a teacher, but I don't think they're A pluses, but it's close. So Chief said it was, so I had to go with it. So 93% satisfaction rate with their interaction with the officers, 92% overall satisfaction with the department, and 89% with our dispatch center. These matrix demonstrate strong community confidence in your police department. My favorite slide is taking care of our people and making sure that people enjoy working here because we know that studies show that if people enjoy coming to work, they're typically better employees. And the department continues to prioritize employee wellness with our longstanding peer support team, which did increase its members this year. We added two new people in 2025. And then also our partnership and the city's commitment with the Counseling Team International and our contract with CJPIA. In 2025, we implemented mandatory wellness checks. And at September of this year, actually today, it's finally been one year since the program was implemented. And so as of today, essentially everybody has had a wellness check with a culturally competent therapist. And what that means is somebody who has either a spouse or family member or parents or somebody that they understand what law enforcement or public safety and first responders deal with and know how to basically connect with those people. And we're one of probably five agencies in the state that have this program. And what that means is all employees. Some agencies just do it for their sworn officers. When Chief and I sat down and kind of created this program, we wanted to include everybody, so it's every employee. All 97 of them have to go through this appointment. And this just goes back to our investment in people's resiliency, professionalism, and long-term organizational health for our department. So recruitment and retention has been a constant ongoing problem for law enforcement across the country. And luckily, we are very blessed that people have bigger issues than we do, to be quite honest with you. And we celebrated a lot of awesome things this year. In 2025, we promoted four members into new leadership roles. We promoted three officers to sergeant and one sergeant to lieutenant, and then some lieutenant got deputy chief in 2026, I think. We've also hired several new cadets, as you can see in this photo, and several officers in 2025. And something that's come up recently, and you guys are aware of it, the school resource officer position has been cut, or was potentially being cut. Chief and I have had many conversations with the superintendent and assistant superintendent regarding The importance of that position, me having worked that position for four years, I know how vital it is for us to have somebody to work with our youth. And so the district has provided some numbers to us in order to make this program happen. And we recently applied for a grant that we're still waiting on. We should hear about October 1st. We have since then filled the position with some salary savings in order to maintain that relationship. And then we'll have to make a decision here in the next couple of months. But it was I think I'm very optimistic and I know the chief is and the community should be that that program is vital and we're going to do whatever we can to make that programs stay alive. Additionally, we created one of the biggest things we always found when people look for a job in San Luis Obispo is what does slow look like? What do I get paid? And we used to have to guide them to several websites throughout the city. It's still the city's page, but there's different landing spots for each of them. And so we created a joinslowpd.org, and that page creates somewhere where they can see what the slow life looks like, and they can see compensation, contact information for people. in order to get more information and also links to the HR's job openings. And so people have a one-stop shop essentially to learn about the department on one page. And that's been super helpful for us to guide people to. And they're on the back of all of our police cars as well. So if you, you know, people listening tonight, we are hiring. And so seek opportunities to come serve your community with us. So the following chart we presented to you after we completed our staffing study. And in January of 2024, we approached council and we got authorization to hire the two additional sworn positions partially funded by our COPS hiring grant, which further supports the staffing strategy in order to increase our staffing, which Based on this chart, as you can see, we're headed in a good direction. But in 2026, based on the staffing study, we're still short a second dispatcher and a sergeant. Additionally, in 2026, we would need to move forward with, I'm sorry, in 2026, we since now, because of that 12th dispatcher, we've lost a few, and we've had to fill those positions and vacancies, because we're pretty short staffed in dispatch. We've actually had to move our CSOs, again, you CSOs, in order to fill those vacancies, and they're being trained right now in order to fill in when we don't have dispatchers that actually can take 911 calls and work the police radio. So ideally, we do need the 12th spot in dispatch for overstaffing to cover shortages for unforeseen circumstances. So I believe this chart here is important for us to just continue to remember where we need to be and what the staffing study provided us about a year and a half ago, two years ago. As you guys know, two and a half years ago we we started on this journey and a five year strategic plan we are officially as of a month ago we're halfway done. And, as we conclude this first half of this five year plan the department and we have completed 76% of the plan already well above the halfway mark, as you can see from this chart. Key accomplishments key accomplishments include 1106 walnut building expansion facility upgrades to our. 1042 Walnut Building, completion of the staffing study, ongoing recruitment improvements, as I just talked about, and then further development of employee wellness, including our annual wellness checks. These achievements reflect steady progress towards the long-term needs identified by council and the community. I officially lost my voice, I think, so I'm gonna turn it back over to Chief so he can save me.

well thank you very much deputy chief schaefer on an excellent presentation i'd say that was an a-plus honestly so 89 89 he's on a curve you know what can i say um we'd again like to thank council and our community for your continued support thank you for listening to our presentation tonight And then we'd also like to thank all of our dedicated staff in the police department. Tonight we presented a lot of programs, facts, figures for you all, but really behind the scenes that make this come to life is our amazing staff. And you have a wonderful team of women and men in the department that put themselves in harm's way to ensure that our community is safe each and every day. And so our sincerest appreciation to our entire team that is really behind this report. And so thank you. We look forward to discussing how we can best advance safety in our community and what these approaches will look like as our future continues to develop. At this time, I'd like to open the presentation up for discussion, after which we'll ask that council receive and file our 2025 annual police report. Thank you.

Thank you so much. What a great report in person and also within our packet. It just, it's constantly amazing to me when I look at all of the work that's being done. We've been talking a lot about strategic plans, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, in a couple of months, but seeing that you are so far along in the strategic plan has gotta be a pretty great feeling, and also shows how much work that you are also doing, so thank you for that. And where that may be a curve, I'm not sure about the A-plus equation, but it's for sure A-plus work, so thank you for that. Any questions from my colleagues? Vice Mayor, oh sorry, Council Member Marks.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm really happy to hear about the work of the police roundtable. and the Police Advisory Committee, the PAC, not the PAC that celebrated 30 years, the other PAC. But I'm curious if someone wanted to join one of those groups, what's the process? So we have a pretty elaborate process to join an advisory body in terms of the city in general, but what is your process and how would someone, who was really interested in joining one of them, how would they go about doing that? Who did they talk to? What's the first step?

Absolutely, that's a great question. And really kind of some of the differences between the two groups. We have the police roundtable. Predominantly that's going to be our business representatives all across the city. We have some school board members on there, things like that. And then you transition to PAC, which is mostly marginalized representation of our community. And so what I ask to join on our PAC group is that you represent a group, something. you know so if you if you're part of let's say gala or any other community out there they'll typically assign a member to be a liaison with our pack group however it is open to it to anybody and so i would strongly encourage people to reach out directly to the department Our generic email is up on our website, so you can reach out directly there, or you can call us, or you can email me. We can have coffee, however they'd like to meet. But I'm interested in talking to anybody out there that has an interest in being a part of one of those two groups, for sure.

So you would want people to reach out to you personally?

Absolutely. If they just use our email on the website, it'll route through my staff, and then we'll make contact with them.

I'm just curious if the Downtown Association also participates in the police roundtable.

They do, yes. So Downtown SLO as well as several individual business owners, and then we've often had chamber representatives on there, and then I think the president of Downtown SLO is currently a member of our roundtable.

And then I was concerned about seeing that rape was up 7% this year. And I wondered if you had any kind of insight into why that might be happening.

I'll ask Aaron to weigh in on that. I will say I think aggregate it was It was two incidents. You know, it's a very low percentage. And so typically when we have, not that, you know, any one case is acceptable, but any time we have one, two, or three, it does swing the percentage fairly dramatically. And so if Aaron has any insight on that, I'll let him answer that question. But none that comes to mind for me specifically.

Yeah, I think Chief answered that perfectly. When you're working with small numbers, the percentage looks higher than it really is. So I don't have any, there's not any, there wasn't any string of cases. They're all independent of each other. Okay, thank you. That's all I have.

Thank you very much. Council Member Boswell.

Yeah, thank you. Just a couple of questions. I do need to go back and read the PDE staffing study. You mentioned a couple of times about the impact of the CSOs. Are CSOs accounted for in the staffing study in terms of having like a target number? And then the other question is, I mean, it's really interesting to hear that the CSOs at times can pick up things that allows our patrol officers to remain on patrol and answering higher priority calls. That capacity that they create is, do we sort of understand, you know, what that is if you hire one more CSO? Is it a direct, it frees up one officer or, you know, I'm trying to understand a little bit of the possible impact of expanding a CSO program.

Sure, this was a pretty detailed conversation we had with our consultants and the end of that conversation was you're good, is what they told us. And I think what they meant by that as we talked deeper was for a city of our size and the size of our program that we were, equally if not overrepresented in our non-sworn support, which is great, because I think we should be pushing that boundary to have more of these resources out there. The issue we see when we look at calls for service, especially priority one calls that CSOs can't go to, We're holding calls typically because we don't have sworn staff to go answer those. So even if you had more CSOs, it wouldn't necessarily make that call an officer available to go handle that call. Because right now, if they're on a paper call, let's say, and a priority one comes out, the officer will clear and go take that priority one call. So the issue we're having is kind of a combination of more calls coming in, more serious in nature where CSOs are not going to be able to go handle those specifically. However, they do take a lot of pressure off the system because especially with the proactive work that they're doing downtown and actually throughout the city, they do rotate around the city. They're able to handle some of the calls that it would take an officer maybe 45 minutes to get to. They go immediately. Plus the proactive work, they're handling a lot of stuff before it gets called into the police department. So we would like to evaluate what additional CSOs could look like, especially more dispersed across the city, because we do focus in the core downtown most of the time. But right now, we do know that we have some critical, some more needs for traditional police officers.

Great, thanks. And then just one more question. I mean, it was really interesting to hear, you know, whenever you see the crime statistics going in the right direction, you're always like, what's driving that, and can we do more of that? And I know it's always, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty there, and I know you can compare to state and national data and things like that. You had mentioned Prop 36, for example, is probably I don't know if it's currently having an effect or you're anticipating it having an effect, but are there any other insights as to why numbers are going in the right direction? I mean, I know we're implementing our plan, we're doing the things we wanna do, we've staffed up a little bit, but do we have any other sense of what might be happening in the community that might be changing our crime statistics?

For sure. One of the things we looked at pretty closely is how is everyone else experiencing crime? Is this an anomaly? Is this slow? Or is this regionally or beyond? And what we found is it's beyond. And the whole state is down. It's been down consistently the past couple of years. And we're also seeing national trends related to violent crime. reaching almost historic lows and so we're glad to say that crime is is down in our state and it's down everywhere which is good but i do think as deputy chief shaffer mentioned there are things we're doing specifically to tackle issues that we've seen been consistent issues for us even when crime was down in previous years we were getting a lot of theft calls. We were seeing high volumes of retail theft, organized retail theft activities. And I think since the passage of Prop thirty six, those have dropped significantly. And so while we do see them from time to time, not near at the level where we were. And so I think that's really twofold. One, we've had some helpful and friendly legislation. I think that's reinstituted some of the responsibility for committing those types of crimes. And the other thing is we're heavily invested in data-driven policing. And so we're trying to put officers in the right part of our community proactively to keep visibility out there and hopefully thwart off any would-be activity before it started. But I'm just, in all transparency, everyone is down, so that's good. But we'll do our best to keep that trend going in the right direction. Great, thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Shoresman.

Thank you, Council Member Boswell. That was one of my questions too about, so we're doing great, which is wonderful, and I'm sure it has some to do at least with the great work that you all are doing, but is this like a trend that we're seeing elsewhere? So I appreciate that. Sounds like it's probably a little bit of both.

I think so. And we've talked a lot about CSOs and probably will. That program has been just remarkable for us. Before we called it CSOs, we had a group of two people that were helping out patrol and doing very beneficial work that they were doing. But once we staffed up to six, and we may even go to a seventh on a contract position, It's been incredible. Everything that they touch just improves. When we put a CSO downtown, we see instant results and data coming back as less incidents happening downtown. We put a CSO in parking, we're seeing more enforcement. We put a CSO in our CAT team, And we're seeing more improvement there. And now dispatch. And so I think when we talk about what Deputy Chief Schaefer was saying about staffing, the last place we want our CSOs is sitting in dispatch. We have great dispatchers. They should be dispatching. But right now, it's just the crisis that we're in. And so we're eagerly wanting to get them back out on the street. But I think just having that presence and preventing what we see a lot as crimes of opportunity, and that's really where I think they pay off the most.

Great, okay, so I think I wanna just clarify that I heard you correctly when you, I think you said that calls for service have been down generally, but down 1%, but they're so far heading up this year. Did I understand that correctly? Do you have any like context or understanding of what may be causing a slight, what seems to be an uptick so far this year?

Yeah, I think part of that is, well, one, our students are back. We just looked at the calls for last week, and we're up 150 calls compared to where we were the week before they were here, which is actually that number actually caught me off guard. It was a little higher. It was almost 900 calls in a week, which is I've never seen 900 before, and we were at like 85 or something like that. So I think we're going to start seeing that with the school schedule changing. The next year is going to be kind of interesting because everything started a month earlier. And so we're going to see our calls go up next year by 7%, as I said earlier. And I think at this rate, we already are there. And now we have the students for another month early. then it'll take a year cycle. Our 2026 report will be a little interesting, to say the least, as far as what that looks like.

I'll also just add in on that. When we see our inputs going up as far as more rooftops, more multifamily housing, more sheltering opportunities, when businesses are doing good and people are coming downtown, when Cal Poly is increasing their numbers, all those are inputs into our system. The more people, you're going to have more calls for service, and we expect that to continue to rise.

uh this is kind of piggybacking off of that and and and you probably don't have the data at your fingertips um because uh we're in a new school year as you were saying but i'm curious if you have any and this isn't we're in a different year than what this report is covering but i'm so i'm not like i said i won't be surprised if you don't have the information available but i'm curious about this past safety enhancement zone and If not tonight, if we could maybe get a memo of what the safety enhancement zone results looked like from this past beginning of the school year period. And if you have any off-the-cuff comment right now that you want to share, that would be interesting, I'm sure.

I was looking at Deputy Chief He didn't bring it up, so we're down to an A. I don't have that data for you tonight. I will say this past year is going to be very interesting because a lot of our traditional metrics are going to be thrown out the window with going to the semester system. And so we know the timing of the students coming back and the types of activities, especially when we look at spring break, things like that are going to be off. But certainly, I think from a reference point, we'd love to provide that data to you just to see that we have been busy.

Yeah, thank you. I would love to see that. And then you don't have your slides up anymore, but I wanted to ask just a little bit about the noisy party calls and citations issued and the DACs. And maybe you could just, yeah, if you can find the slide, that would be great. But I know we get a lot of calls, as you do, about noise and parties and what our processes are for dealing with those and questions about the party registration system. And so some might look at, and I appreciate all the context you gave in the several slides, but some might look at this chart and think, well, 1500 calls and only 260 citations. and 328 DACs for those who don't know what a DAC is. Maybe you could just give a little quick definition, but also just basically some could say that that doesn't seem like you're doing very much if you get 1500 calls and 260 citations are answered. So maybe you could give just a little bit more clarifying context around this.

Yeah, and I think you know that that was five years, but we purposely threw in this slide just so you could see where we were 20 years ago. Yeah, and obviously we kind of hit on those high points on that particular slide. And so if if somebody calls in a noise complaint and in our cat system, our dispatches, if there's a known address, sometimes it's not known, sometimes it's Grant and Slack, and we go and look for noise. If we find it, great. If we don't find it, our officers or our SNAP would initially go first, which is our Student Neighborhood Assistance Program. They would go first. If they can't find the violation, they would just clear it as a UTL. They're unable to locate the source. And in hopes that if the person does, if the noise continues, reporting party calls back and reports the actual address so we can find it. Obviously, we have some dense neighborhoods up there, so sometimes it's hard to find that source of where that noise is coming from. And if our student neighborhood assistance program officers get there, they would write, if there is a violation, they would write a DAC, which is a disturbance advisement card. It puts that location on a list for nine months, and every time we get another noise complaint from that residence, an officer will go out and write a citation. if there's a violation. And so at that point it takes our SNAP team out of that equation and then it turns into an officer calls. When we have CSOs working on these busy weekends, we don't send an officer, we send the CSO because they are allowed to enforce our municipal codes. And so that's been super effective. Just to give you some perspective, you threw a lot of questions in that. Sorry, yeah, yeah, you brought up obviously our party registration I do have some of those stats as far as you know what that looks has looked like over the last since it started in 2017 In 2025 We had 400 or 453 requests for a party registration. 353 were approved, which means 100 were denied for various reasons. Could be that it was It didn't meet the criteria that is set in our municipal code actually i'm sorry it's not a municipal code it's a policy it's not a it's not a municipal code I must spoke there, and then, if they don't meet the criteria I usually get asked is this you know we're going to deny this i'm usually in part of that decision making. Making sure we're following our our rules and of those calls and this last year 50. We got 50 complaints on those 353 parties, and what that means is they got a phone call from our dispatcher, whoever was registered for the party, and that person gets a phone call saying, hey, we got a noise complaint, you have 20 minutes, you need to shut it off. And of those 50, 44% were successful in stopping the nuisance of that party. And only six actually were in violation and the reporting party called back and we sent officers and they were issued a citation at that point. So it's pretty good, it's like an almost 90% as far as success rate of the program and it's working. And if you look back at the last three years, it's been fairly consistent with those numbers. about 88 to 90% success rate as far as them stopping the noise after, without having to send anybody out there. So we're not sending it to SNAP, we're not sending it to CSO. So that's 300 parties that happened that followed the party registration and didn't cause a noise disturbance in their neighborhood.

So I think what I was getting at, and I apologize for my all-over-the-place questions, because that's kind of how the emails come in, quite honestly, is the emails, most of the time, they have all sorts of issues all sort of wrapped up in together with each other, and so it's sometimes hard to pull each individual question or issue out. But I guess the the question the real thing that i'm trying to get at is just because you register a party doesn't mean that you now have permission to make a lot of noise right like that's that's not the that's not the point of the registration system. I think we've gotten some emails that have implied that maybe that's that's approving the party or making it seem like the party is okay. But what it really does is it gives you another tool for reaching out to that entity that has registered the party and saying, hey, cut it out. We got a complaint.

Am I you were 100% accurate because that's what the neighbor right? If you if I if I was disturbed by the noise back in when I was a kid, don't you gonna knock on the door and tell them to quiet down right? We're essentially doing that as the police department. We're giving we're that voice of saying, hey, your noise is too loud. And we usually tell the reporting party that it's the registered party, and we have a process in place. And that place is to then be their advocate, essentially, the complaining party, and go stop the noise. It just allows us another tool, and it's been successful. And I think some of the inquiries you're talking about is, why aren't those 50 calls counting towards our noise complaint? yeah that's been another question, so why isn't that, and so we are assisting we build those calls as citizens assist because we're not sending anybody to those calls. And so that's why they're categorized different and we're assisting the citizen i'm making that notification to that party host that they are in violation of the noise ordinance and they stop their party. it continues over 20 minutes they don't shut it down they can't clear out their party and the noise is still there they're encouraged to call back in that time frame and so essentially they would call back in their 20 minute time frame if we don't hear back from them we assume that the party was by the party host was shut down or the noise was turned off or what they made the adjustments in order to not be a disturbance anymore

So if you're calling in and the noise isn't going away and you've waited 20 minutes or half an hour or longer and it's still loud, call back again is what I'm hearing.

So that's where that 50, those 50 have turned in from citizen assist to actually, our circumstance code changes to categorize it as a noisy party.

Okay, and then last, and then I'll stop bugging you on the topic. The back to the 1500 this slide before this one where you said that in 2025 we have 1500 calls for service about noise and 260 citations issued 328 decks that doesn't necessarily mean. that because you've had 1,500 calls and only 260 citations that the other, what would that be, 1,300-ish calls were not responded to, correct? What does that mean?

We responded to those, but the officers have different clearances based on when we get there, the noise is gone. One, the reporting party doesn't give us an address, so we're going out and looking at, and there's, People walking in the neighborhood like was that the noise so it's hard to determine if there's actually. A residence that can be can attribute the noise soon if that's if that's not the case, then we have to clear it negative violation or we're unable to locate that particular party. So those are two typical clearance codes that the officers use either negative violation or they're unable to locate the party based on the description provided by the reporting party okay.

Thank you so much. Sorry to dig into these questions. I know you talk about them a lot. So thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate my colleagues asking so many great questions. I think you got all of mine except for I'd love to hear an update. Thank you for the tour of the walnut facility. It's beautiful. I'd love to hear an update about how that's going. I know there's some challenges associated with that. And just love to hear from you all about your impressions that you've settled in a little bit.

No, thank you, Vice Mayor, and it's a great opportunity for us to express our gratitude to the council for the funding to develop that project. Some challenges, obviously, we're in two different locations, and that's always going to be a challenge, not being connected to the entire department. But from a facility standpoint, the building is great. It's clean, it's bright, and it's offering a really safe and healthy workspace for the staff that are fortunate to be in that building. We also have a project to do some very important work at the old building, 1042. And so that's going to be, it's programmed in our CIP in the next 18 months-ish. We're going to start seeing some of that work come to fruition as well. I'll call it new walnut or 1106 some of the challenges over there it's at the end of the day it's a it's not an essential services building and so there are certain things that the building is going to have and not have for example we don't have emergency power which is pretty important for some of the work that's taking place over there and the other piece is if it's not rated for you know certain size seismic events being a non-essential so non-essential services building there we go and so obviously if we have some catastrophic catastrophic events uh we do have some concern with the the rating of that structure um but aside from that um we the project has gone very well we're in the final in uh tail end of getting it wrapped up We've got our, you know, part of our meeting rooms over there are available to all of our city staff that can come over. Some departments have had their meetings over there, which is great. And we have secure parking. We've been able to secure that lot effectively for all of our employees. At 1042, we had staff parking out on the street and in the neighborhoods, probably not making them very happy. So now we're able to park everybody on site in a secure location, which is good. But no, as far as the building itself, the last piece is the IT project, which that equipment's coming in and being installed as we speak. And it's coming together very, very well. And so thank you all for each of you that have come over and had a tour. And we're very grateful just to have the opportunity to work out of there.

Thank you for the facilities update. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you, and yes, thank you to my colleagues. Great questions, some of them I had, which is wonderful. Two, only last two questions. LPT funding, so kind of along the same lines of the CSO conversation. I get a lot of... voicemails, emails concerned around homelessness, and I know we've received the point in time count that says there's a decrease, but yet there seems to be bursts of locations within our city that things have increased. I know just going to the recent recognition event of employees, we got to see a great CAT team member being recognized, and at the same time I'm wondering should there be more as far as the CAT team? Should there be more licensed psych tech as we think about this funding over the next couple of years that we start to plan for? What does that look like to you and the team?

When we talk about our unhoused community and what we face here, and so it's very cyclical and transitory, even among our transitory population, because being on the Central Coast between essentially LA and San Francisco, we get a lot of people that migrate to and from, and I would argue some that aren't captured obviously in the point in time count. I get a lot of questions. Some months are better than others. We have more challenges in certain months, for whatever reason that may be, and then other months it seems to relax. I think with our specialty teams, CAT in particular, continuing to grow and diversify the team I think is key. We weren't the first to do a multidisciplinary team. That's been done other parts in the country. But I think for us, continuing to expand the disciplines that are part of that team and being flexible, Three years ago, we would have never thought about an LPT. And then now we're setting the standard for what these teams should look like in police departments, I feel. And so whether it's another LPT or whatever's next, we'd love to welcome that. And I think increasing the staffing, what we're now being able to do is divide these groups up into sub teams. Before it was just the CAT team and you may see an officer with a resource coordinator or a social worker and that was good and it was good. But now we're able to diversify these teams and take an LPT, put them with a CSO and no cop and put them on certain cases to see how effective they are. And we're seeing really, like I said, impactful results by splitting up the team, mixing and matching for the cases that they're working on in particular, or having them out there in two separate teams doing work collectively. And so I think it's going to be very important. Again, I would say the numbers are, they are technically dropping, but they're pretty close to being flat, you know, as far as statistics go. But, you know, I think part of that is getting, there's no shortage of people coming through into our community. And so I think where we're seeing those results is directing people into services. It's the family reunifications. It's the change in life structure as far as addiction and things like that where I think we're starting to see those positive results. As far as future funding, That's gonna be, right now it's the opioid settlement money that will go away at some point. So we should be planning for the rainy day. Right now the county is augmenting our cost based on a previous agreement we had with their splitting 50-50 with our LPT. That will probably go away at some point. And then just for anybody watching at home, we have a licensed site tech that's part of our CAT team and then one that's also part of our MCU mobile crisis team for the fire department. I think there's some synergy there where these teams can also mix and match. They do on occasion. But I think building up both of these teams as we look for future funding and opportunities and even grants, I think will continue to show really positive results on the streets.

Thank you. I think that compassion and order conversation that we continue to have is how do we help someone who is unhoused and get them to the services that they need and to be able to thrive, but also to not do things that are not appropriate, finding that other discipline if necessary, so finding that balance. So thank you. Also lastly, it seems as though in the emails we've received and in some of the comments I receive, I hear more about live bands. So I'm wondering if there are more live bands that you're noticing in the responses when people call you, versus in the last year or two years, and I don't know within those noise party calls how many of those equal live bands, but just kind of curious, do we have a newer problem to solve or is this really the same problem that we've been working on all along?

I'll make a statement and then I'll pass over to Deputy Chief Schaefer. You can prove me wrong, but I think we are seeing an increase, honestly. And I have social media. I see the same advertisements you do. I don't think that's necessarily reflective on what we're seeing weekend to weekend, although there are occasions where we're seeing that. We're also seeing other venues in town hosting live music, which is probably not a bad thing as well. And so just when we talk about noise complaints and kind of referring to Councilmember Schor's main question, Not all noise complaints are the same, and a lot of these complaints are a couple people talking loud on their back patio. Some are really blowout parties. It's only one stat, either way you look at it. But it definitely changes how we approach and resolve these complaints. And so when we talk about live bands in particular, that's a citation. And it's a very hefty citation because it's an unruly gathering. So it's not the fact that you had a party. It's not the fact that you disturbed your neighbors. It's the fact that you hosted live music, sometimes charging a cover charge for people to come see it, which is totally inappropriate for any neighborhood. And so that elevates it to an unruly gathering, which bears significant consequences if they do that. I'll ask Aaron to provide any stats off the top of his head that he may know about. But I will say just based on what we're seeing, I do think there is an uptick in these activities happening. And our staff's direction is clear that if you go out to a call like this, it is not a warning. You should know not to have a live band in a neighborhood.

council member shorts when you requested all those stats i don't have them all off top my head but i know we issued in the last two weeks for unruly gatherings for live bands and neighborhoods which is prince why you got probably some correspondence regarding that those all got citations and it's been my direction at least down to the officers that are responding they know that It's a citation, because we all know that amplified music can be heard for several blocks away. So it's depending on where they have the party, it could be heard from pretty far. And so we are encouraging. We are seeing a lot of stuff at under 18 plus events. Milestone hosted one. Some of our businesses downtown have hosted these live, which is where we want them to be. We want them to be somewhere where they're not going to be disturbing the residents in the neighborhoods. And so the encouragement to the community is go rent space and have your live band perform or multiple bands perform in a place where you're not going to receive an OAS complaint and it's permitted to do so. And so we've actually been working with, had conversations with code enforcement, making sure some of these businesses have the right use permit in order to operate at certain hours. And so those conversations have been happening over the last two weeks as we've seen this kind of influx with the students coming back. We're trying to figure out and navigate them to the appropriate place.

Thank you. City Manager, did you want to add to that?

Thank you, and hopefully I won't step on Chief Scott's toes. There's an additional piece that we are recognizing and are going to be ramping up as well and response to what we're seeing, which is not only are these. parties with live music very disturbing to the neighborhood they're also very risky and can often be creating quite an unsafe environment for the people who are in there, as well as neighbors so. I think folks should not be surprised to not only have a visit from our police officers with their citation book, but also potentially from our fire marshal. Because again there's a huge there's a there's this very significant safety concern for egress in the event of something happening structural stability, so you may be seeing other folks from our building division out there, and I think for property owners who are. Who own properties where these things are happening there's a risk to the damage to their property, but also again to the physical safety of the people there so. We we are aware and we're also coordinating efforts and again people should be expecting to see quite a team of city responses as necessary to make sure that people get a control over what's happening, but also are more safe. I just wanted to make that note.

Thank you. Chief? I'll just add on that. Thank you, City Manager. We like live music. It's vibrant. It brings excitement to our community. And there's a right way to do it. There's a wrong way to do it. As I was preparing for our presentation tonight, I went back and just looked over the history of our Unreally gathering and really the issues around this very topic. And we have a very dark history. kind of dangerous history when we look back about why we needed some of these ordinances and a lot of cities don't have necessarily an unruly gathering spelled out because they haven't had to but here in this community this is something that has happened every couple of decades where we've had to respond with police resources and council action to curb some very serious behavior that's put people in the hospital and created very serious injuries

Thank you, I appreciate that. It seemed as though there was quite an uptick and I wanted to make sure that we could hear what was the plans and what you were experiencing from police as well as from our community development and fire. And I will also say that I really hope as Cal Poly continues to grow that they start to have some venues that maybe aren't as expensive. So I can imagine that it's hard when, You know, the students are not making as much money, and they're trying to figure out where do they rent. So I hope that Cal Poly and Cuesta have venues they can use and that, yes, come into the community. We have places that you can permit. And with that, I don't know if there is a list of where people can use live bands, but I'm wondering if maybe there's a place where City and Cal Poly and Cuesta can come together on that conversation. So maybe that's something for a future SCLC meeting, but probably not this upcoming one in two weeks. So thank you so much. Well, it sounds like there's no other questions. With that, I will thank you, and we will receive and file. No motion required. Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, public comment. So sorry about that. Do you have any public comment? No? How about online?

Okay.

All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for reminding me about that. I appreciate it. And with that, we'll move on to liaison reports and communications. Thank you so much. Thank you. This has been a busy couple of weeks. It's always amazing to me that the beginning of the school year, I feel like people kind of go on their breaks for summer and all of a sudden everything is crammed in going forward. So I'll just kick it off. I have quite a bit and I apologize. So we just got done, we had our student community liaison committee meeting the SCLC and there's three main things I wanted to focus on. One, we have a new community member. I just want to say a very big thank you to Jeffrey Land. He is joining our team on the committee. And we also have two at-large positions available from any neighborhoods in the community that are non-students. So I hope that if you know of someone who is interested in applying and being part of these student and community conversations, please apply at the SCLC. We do have the welcome to the neighborhood, trying to meet your neighbors. So please encourage people to apply to that meet your neighbors. There's actually $1,000 of prizes that Cuesta Cal Poly students, we want you to meet your neighbors. We want you to get to know each other. And that is for students and non-students both to apply for those prizes. The last thing about this, we have changed our meeting dates. They will now be the second Thursday, which used to be the third Thursday. So that changed things up a little bit. Make sure you see that there are new invites on your calendars. Also, during my California Men's Colony Advisory Committee, we did have a meeting, and we welcomed Clint Weirich and Dr. Steve Hansen. They joined us, and we also agreed to have two more non-profit positions available. So if you know a non-profit that seems logical to connect with the prison, or yes, the men's colony, please let us know, and we will have them apply for that position. So that could be kind of fun. Tomorrow is the RTA meeting, so we'll be talking about buses, buses and more. And then just wanted to say a big thank you to every single employee here through the City of San Luis Obispo. It was wonderful to be able to attend the employee recognition event and see so many employees recognized. I'm sure you'll see their pictures in City Hall. in the next couple of weeks or next couple of months. And then we had the National Latina Day on the 20th and there was a mixer that happened at Ola Slow. It was right in the middle of Farmer's Market and Congressman Carbajal was visiting Farmer's Market and got to pop in and it was such a fun thing for the awardees to receive their pictures with the Congressman. So thank you so much for that. also on the 21st we had the mayor's meeting in grover beach i just wanted to say thank you to mayor cassidy she held a great meeting uh we had um the homelessness uh pit count that we had here presented at the mayor's meeting and then an update from the county And of course, we had Good Morning Slow just last Thursday. Lots of always fun things. And you know what's going on in our businesses, our nonprofits. That's awesome. And then we had the Belonging Project, Your City, Your Voice. A big thank you for all of the people employees and community members who came out to that we had a great Q&A session and Some really fun public comments and I say that with quotes because that was a whole exercise similar to some of us who've done leadership slow Experiencing what it's like to give public comment at the city and with that I'll pass it on to council member marks Thank you

Yeah, I wanted to say that I really appreciate the city's effort in celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Greenbelt. And I realized that a number of people who were very instrumental in kickstarting the whole thing 30 years ago were not able to join some of these events. So staff very generously gave me about 15 extra bandanas. And I have been visiting these people individually and presenting them with bandanas and thanking them for what they did 30 years ago. And I just want to say that I was probably the age of some of my colleagues here on the City Council in 1996, 30 years ago. And I hope that you all keep advocating for open space for the next 30 years. I'm not going to be around for those whole 30 years. But it's, as Bob Hill said, it's an ongoing project. So I just want to name some of these people. Terry Donovan, Dick Crescia, Neil Havlick, Carla Saunders, Gary Felsman, Alan Settle, John Ashbaugh, Christine Mulholland, Dave Chipping, Eric Greening, Ray Belknap, Amy Shore, Pat Visart, Ken Haggard, Phil Ashley, and Richard Schmidt. And I'm still contacting some of them. There are probably more people out there. But I do think it's really important to recognize and respect people who have contributed to get the whole thing going in the first place. So I wanted to say that. And of course, the bandanas, as the mayor said, a fashion statement for sure. Speaking of 30 years, there was also the August 29th luncheon. And some people were recognized for having advocated for the formation of the PAC 30 years ago. And I was one of them. I'm wearing my pin. I got a special pin. So I was surprised about that. But it's nice to be recognized. In terms of other activities on the 25th, I did a tour of the um still university atsu that is setting up a medical educational facility in the old mind body campus with council member francis it was a great tour and that institution is going to be actually bringing in students quite soon they're aiming for the end of this month. I don't know, there was still a lot of work to be done on the facility. But at any rate, their goal is to graduate at least 40 of physicians assistants twice a year, so that'd be like 80 per year. The first year they're doing basically what they call didactic work, which is just study, intellectual. The second year they're actually out in the community. So there are a lot of other programs that are just, it's got, I'm so happy that they're here. Okay, and the Air Pollution Control District meeting, is going to be happening next month. And as is the RAC, the County Water Resources Advisory Committee, they canceled their September meeting. So I'm off the hook for tomorrow. At any rate, that's all I have right now. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Boswell.

Yeah, thank you. Let's see, 820 meeting of LAFCO was canceled. On 820, I... Also, I attended the Student Community Liaison Committee. Also had a CAPSLO board meeting, the August board meeting. Let's see, what else? Attended the Cal Poly CIE ribbon cutting. It was great, great to see the, I'd seen the facility when it was half built, so it was really nice to be in there and see the final construction look. And it's very cool because they can roll the doors up inside and really open the building open. So very exciting. Cal Poly's consolidated in that one space and reactivating that corner in our town, which had long been a vacant retail space, so. I also attended the ATSU tour with Council Member Shoresman on 8-27. Just amazing what they've done inside that building in a relatively short amount of time. So looking forward to welcoming them to start operations and, yeah, a bunch of new students in our community, especially in a sector where we desperately need more professionals. While we're welcoming students, welcome back to Cal Poly and Cuesta students who returned last week to start classes. And then my final thing is I attended the City Employee Summer Picnic and congratulations to all the award winners. Well deserved.

Thank you. Council Member Shoresman.

Thank you. Well, I can say ditto to a lot of the things that you all have already mentioned. The National Latina Day Mixer was great to get together with all of those women and Carvajal and Congressman Carvajal to celebrate Latina women's and their contributions to our community, as well as the summer celebration with the staff. Always fun to see who gets the gold hard hat and gloves. um statue um where where it'll be displayed for the next year and good morning slow always informative um i guess to different things that uh that i did over the last couple weeks were that i attended the center for innovation and entrepreneurship demo day presentation where they had seven pitches from seven different businesses over at the rock and there are some there are some businesses that are already like in the there's there's one business that has sells these little cheesecake bites. Um, that are supposedly healthy because they're made with Greek yogurt. Um, but they're going to be, um, they're going to be putting their product in the slow food co-op. So that's cool. So go and check those out there. Um, as well as six other businesses. Business startups also had our HSOC executive committee meeting on the 19th, which was the same day that I moved my son into Lassen Hall at Cal Poly, so I am now an empty nester officially, but he still comes over and cleans out my refrigerator on a regular basis, and will be coming over for dinner tomorrow night, so it's nice to have him not far away. And then also had a really... and always love to meet with students. And Ryan James from the school district had a student project where they had students pick a public policy issue and write up a summary of their issue and an argument. And the culminating part of the project was to meet with an elected official and basically pitch your project to an elected official. So I met with a young man who was very, very determined to encourage cities and other jurisdictions to ban plastic water bottles, the sale of plastic water bottles. So I appreciated the, I still have the flyer of information that he brought me and I keep meaning to bring it in to the city manager to show it to you. But it was really always great to see that our young people are gonna, they're gonna be ready, so.

That's awesome, thank you. Vice Mayor Francis.

Thank you, Mayor. On the 20th, I had the Investment Oversight Committee meeting where we got an update on our cash and investment positions. And things are shockingly continuing to do well. And so that's always good news. In our upcoming November meeting, we're going to be talking about our ESG strategy and investment strategy more broadly. So if you're interested in that, you can always These are public meetings and make comment and help give us direction on any changes you'd like to see. Also joined my colleagues here at the National Latina Day downtown hosted by Mujeres de Accion, and that was a fabulous celebration. And as Councilmember Marks mentioned, we toured the A.T. Stills University together. On the 26th, I attended the annual grand jury mayor city manager meeting to welcome the newly seated grand jury and answer their questions. And it was a really awesome group from all over the county. They had fabulous questions and looking forward to seeing what they decide to look into. And we also celebrated the legacy luncheon at the pack together. And that was the last event for me.

Thank you so much. So much good stuff all the time. We will be back here next week on the 15th. Same time, same place. And have a wonderful evening.