City Council - Regular Meeting

you Thank you. Thank you.

You're ready to go, Mayor. Please start the meeting, Madam Clerk. I hereby call the Santa Ana City Council meeting to order. The meeting is taking place in person attendance and by teleconference via Zoom. The public may access the meeting via the Santa Ana YouTube channel or the city's website. Please bear with us. As the technology may disrupt the flow of the meeting, Madam Clerk, please conduct the roll call.

Council Member Becerra. Council Member Hernandez. Council Member Lopez. Council Member Pham. Here. Council Member Vasquez. Here. Mayor Pro Tempagnolosa.

Present.

Mayor Meskwa. Present. Four members present, that is a quorum.

Madam Clerk, are there any additions or deletions to the closed session agenda? There are none. Do any Council Members need to announce abstentions on closed session items? Hearing none, do we have any speakers for closed session?

Mayor and City Council, we do not have any speakers in person or on Zoom related to closed session, nor did we receive any e-comments related to the closed session agenda items.

Thank you. We'll recess to closed session. Thank you.

do do you you you Thank you for watching. you Thank you. you Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.

Mayor, you can go ahead. Thank you very much, Madam Clerk. Please start the meeting.

Yes.

Meeting is ready. I hereby reconvene the Santa Ana City Council meeting to order. Madam Clerk, please conduct the roll call.

This meeting is taking place with in-person attendance and by teleconference via Zoom. The public may access the meeting via the Santa Ana YouTube channel or the city's website. Please bear with us as the technology may disrupt the flow of the meeting. This is a meeting to conduct the business of the city. There's an opportunity to call for a recess or break or even to clear the meeting room if a meeting becomes too disruptive to properly conduct business. Warnings will be provided prior to any action being taken and we appreciate your cooperation For everyone's safety per the fire marshal Please do not stand or place objects in the aisles in front of the dais Along the back wall of the council chamber or in front of entrances and exits during City Council presentations and oaths of office Guests of individuals being recognized are welcome to come to the front to take photos for roll call Council Member Becerra?

Here.

Council Member Hernandez?

Present.

Council Member Lopez? Here. Council Member Phan? Here. Council Member Vasquez?

Present.

Mayor Pro Tempano-Eliza?

Present.

Mayor Mezcua? Present. All seven members present.

Madam Clerk, before you proceed to the Pledge of Allegiance, please make an announcement.

For members of the public on Zoom or teleconference to request to speak during public comments on agenda or non-agenda items within the city's jurisdiction, you must dial star nine from your phone or click the button labeled raise hand from Zoom now in order to be in the speaker queue once public comments commence. This does not apply to public hearing number 21 or the housing authority agenda for which comments will be heard separately. Please hold your comments on those items until specifically called upon. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. At this time, the first item on the agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance. Mayor Pro Tem, can you lead us in the pledge, please?

Of course, Mayor. I'd be honored to. If you could all please join me in rising, facing our flag, putting your right hand over your heart, and follow along. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, Mayor Partem. At this time, the words of inspiration will be provided by Iman Hamza Abdallah. Please come to the podium, sir. Thank you.

أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين You alone do we worship and You alone do we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those on whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who are angry or of those who are astray.

In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful. This opening chapter of the Quran is a prayer recited by Muslims around the world daily, seeking God's mercy and guidance to the straight path. Honorable Mayor, members of the city council, city staff, and residents of Santa Ana, thank you for the opportunity to share a few words this evening, and thank you for the service you provide to our city and our people. As an imam serving here in Santa Ana, I'm constantly reminded that our city's strength comes from something deeper than buildings or policies. It comes from people, from neighbors who look out for one another, families who sacrifice for one another, and communities that continue showing up even in difficult times. Many of us have also been saddened by recent violence that occurred in Southern California yesterday. Moments like these remind us that hatred can spread quickly, but so can compassion, courage, and solidarity. Our traditions teach us that the best among us are the people who benefit others. So my hope tonight is simple, that Santa Ana continues to be a city where differences are respected, service is valued, and every resident feels a sense of dignity, safety, and belonging. May God bless the city, guide its leaders, and bring peace to our communities. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Madam Clerk, are there any additions or deletions to the City Council agenda?

Yes, Mayor and City Council, there are two. Items number six and eight, appointments to certain boards and commissions, are being postponed at this time. Thank you.

Thank you. The first presentation will be by Mayor Pro Tem David Penalosa, honoring and recognizing Sara Rita Ramos on her 100th birthday. Yes. Happy birthday.

Well, wait, not yet.

All right.

Come on up, family. Come on up.

Family, please.

Come on up, everybody. We'll get pictures and send them to you. Come on up. Okay.

So... Good evening. Today, we are honored to recognize and celebrate Ms. Sara Rita Ramos on the remarkable occasion of her 100th birthday. Estamos bien feliz y orgullosos de estar aquí reconociendo y celebrando a la señorita Sara Rita Ramos en la ocasión de sus 100 años. Born on May 1st, 1926, in Arandas, Jalisco, Mexico, Let's go. Mrs. Ramos' life is a remarkable story of resilience, sacrifice, and dedication to family. As a proud mother of six children, grandmother to 16 grandchildren, great-grandmother to 24 great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandmother to one, her legacy continues through generations of family members whose lives she has helped shape with love and strength. Seis hijos, ¿verdad? Dieciséis nietos, veinticuatro bisnietos, I was like, I don't want to say that wrong. In 1970, she immigrated to the United States in pursuit of greater opportunities for her family. Through hard work and determination, she achieved the dream of homeownership and has proudly called Santa Ana home for nearly 60 years. Affectionately known as a true luchona, Mrs. Ramos represents perseverance, unconditional love, and the enduring spirit of our community. Her life story is an inspiration to all of us. On behalf of the mayor and the city council, we extend our heartfelt congratulations and wish Mrs. Sara Rita Ramos salud, felicidad, y muchos, muchos más bellos momentos rodeada de su familia en sus 100 años. Feliz cumpleaños, señorita Ramos. Un aplauso, por favor. Okay, now, like any birthday, tenemos que cantarle y comer pastel. All right? So, ¿quieren las mañanitas or happy birthday? All right, happy birthday. One, two, three.

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday, dear Sara. Happy birthday to you. Hercules, Hercules. Okay, que le muerda. Que le muera. No, no, no, no, no. Si usted quiere. Muchas gracias de parte de la ciudad de Santana, la alcaldesa y el concilio municipal y las hermosas ciudades de Santana que está aquí presente. Queríamos presentarle esas flores en su cumpleaños. Y ahora, no sé si usted quiera decir unas palabras. Comparte con nosotros, la comunidad de Santana, su secreto para vivir tantos años y verse de cuarenta.

So, she said, essentially, that her secret to a long, healthy life

is to not look for problems, not to have problems with anyone, and not to do what you want, but what you're able to, right? See, okay, Latine. Okay. Thank you so much for having us. All right, so now if my colleagues want to join me down here, Mayor, to take a group picture,

Go back, go back. Ready? One, two, three.

Wow, we're going to start council meetings like this every meeting. This is the best way to start. Yes. It's a beautiful, yeah. All right, we're going to go to Councilman Becerra now. Declaring May 2026 as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Come on up.

Thank you, Mayor. If I could have Suzanne Choi and the ABAOC come on up. Come on up. Now I notice that Mayor Pro Tempaloza had the cake with the candles when Chief Henry wasn't here. Come on up here to the front, please.

Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much.

Good evening, everybody. So tonight, we proudly recognize May 2026 as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month here in the city of Santa Ana. And as part of this celebration, we're honored to highlight the Asian Business Association of Orange County for its outstanding leadership, advocacy, and lasting contributions. to the economic vitality and multicultural fabric of Orange County's AAPI community. The Asian Business Association of Orange County, or the ABAOC, was founded in 1992. So for over 30 years, the ABAOC has served as a leading voice for Asian American businesses and multicultural businesses. helping entrepreneurs and small businesses alike grow, connect, and succeed throughout Orange County and throughout Southern California. Through strong partnerships with corporations, public agencies, healthcare organizations, and community leaders, ABAOC has created valuable opportunities for diverse business, businesses, excuse me, to access procurement, contracting, and economic development resources. ABAOC has consistently championed supplier diversity and inclusive economic growth ensuring that small and multicultural businesses have a seat at the table and the tools that they need to thrive. Their impactful business conferences, workshops, networking events, and leadership programs have strengthened the local business community and fostered collaboration across industries and cultures. ABAOC has also played an important role in mentoring and supporting the next generation of businesses and civic leaders, helping inspire future entrepreneurs and community advocates. So during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we celebrate the incredible innovation, leadership, culture, and economic contributions of the AAPI community, which continue to shape and strengthen Orange County. This recognition reflects ABAOC's enduring mission to uplift businesses, empower communities, and build bridges through leadership, opportunities, and service. Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month reminds us not only to celebrate culture and achievement, but also to continue to strive towards inclusion, equity, and opportunity for all. We encourage all residents to take part in the educational and cultural events happening throughout the month and to learn more about the lasting impact and the legacy of AAPI communities. So as the first ever Filipino American and the second ever Asian American elected to the Santa Ana City Council, it is my honor to proclaim May 2026 as AAPI Heritage Month and to honor ABAOC's many contributions to the AAPI community here in Santa Ana and beyond. Susanna, can I have you come on up?

Thank you. Wow, what a tremendous honor. We are so grateful. Thank you so much. What an honor. Thank you. Thank you from all of our hearts. Asian Business Association tries to help everyone achieve the American dream by helping people start and grow their businesses. So if you would like to do that, contact us at abaoc.org. I'm so honored to be here with our treasurer. Secretary Alex Kim, Joy Liu Kim, and Jennifer Wang, who is the Executive Director of the Asian American Senior Citizen Service Center. And they are all such wonderful leaders. And you know, everyone has a story. And the Asian American story is one of sacrifice and hard work and resilience. And we are just so honored for you to talk about and recognize our stories.

because hopefully it inspires others and all of us, because times are hard right now, and we all need some inspiration.

So we just want to thank you again so much. What a tremendous honor.

Okay, next up is Councilmember Lopez, please, recognizing the voice of Refugees OC for their outstanding support in helping refugee families stabilize, integrate, and thrive. Please come on up.

Okay, good evening. I'm Councilwoman Lopez, and today I'm really excited to be recognizing the meaningful work of Voice of Refugees, a grassroots nonprofit organization serving refugee and immigrant families throughout all of Orange County. Their organization was founded in 2010. 2009 by three former refugees and immigrants. Voice of Refugees began with something very simple but powerful, helping families that are coming to this country by helping them have furniture in their new homes. And so what started something as small, but a really strong act of compassion has grown into a trusted community organization helping families stabilize, integrate, thrive, and ultimately find community. Voice of Refugee provides holistic support for refugee and immigrant families through food assistance, mentorship, transportation, support, ESL connection services, youth empowerment programs, and community integration efforts. And that's really important because when you look at the data of who is successful long term in the United States, those that are able to have a strong community around them tend to do the best in terms of work placement, education, economic opportunity, and also giving back. Their work addresses both immediate needs and long-term opportunities for success. Through partnerships with houses of worship, volunteers, and community organizations, Voice of Refugees walks alongside families, not just during their first week in the United States, but throughout their journey towards stability and belonging, which again, is really, really critical for long-term success of refugee and immigrant families. The organization has also created spaces that celebrate dignity, culture, and connection through multicultural events, women's gatherings, and seasonal community programs that help families feel welcome and supported. In addition, Voice of Refugees continues to expand partnerships with local businesses in Orange County, some located here in the city of Santa Ana. AAA is one of them, different organizations Chains is another, and Invesco to provide career coaching and mentorship and practical support that help families build sustainable futures. Most importantly, Voice of Refugees is helping create pathways for refugees and immigrants to become community leaders, engage in their communities, contributors, and active participants within within their communities. Their work reflects the very best of Orange County spirit, which is compassion, service, and opportunity. And on behalf of my office and the city of Santa Ana, I extend our deepest gratitude to Voice of Refugees for their extraordinary dedication, compassion, and service. to families that are looking for a new future. Their work goes far beyond basic assistance. Again, they help restore dignity, they create belonging, and offer hope to families rebuilding their lives after unimaginable hardship and displacement. Through countless hours of volunteer service, meaningful partnerships, and unwavering commitment, Voice of Refugees has become a powerful example of what community care in a human-centered approach can truly look like. We deeply admire the way that this organization not only meets immediate needs but also empowers individuals and families to thrive, to lead, and to contribute back to the communities that they now call home. The city of Santa Ana is proud to recognize and celebrate Voice of Refugees for embodying the values of service, inclusion, resilience, and humanity that strengthen and uplift our entire region. Thank you so much. And now I would love to hand over the mic to all three of you, actually.

We are a community that opens our doors to our global neighbors so that they can thrive here. And our duty is not to be just good neighbors, but to empower people who are displaced because of war and violence into a place where they feel welcome, but also where they can be part of this community as members that can be effective and efficient in this community. I'm so thankful for your honor, Mayor, and all the council members, especially for Council Member Jesse. I am so glad that we get to be honored because we're a privately funded organization. We have been serving grassroots nonstop holistically with whatever any displaced family needs. So if you ever know of anybody is in need, don't leave without giving a resource. We partner with a lot of churches, with a lot of uh people from different organizations and companies like chick-fil-a or triple a that helps us pack food and make sure that every family is fed everybody has furniture has a mattress to sleep on but also everybody has a job and can create a livelihood for their family even though their country is at war or they experienced violence in their country and they are displaced Thank you for being a city of welcome, and thank you for this honorary notion.

Thank you, next up is Councilmember Phan, recognizing Los Amigos High School students for outstanding academic achievements. Come on up. Los Amigos, come on up.

Oh my God, look at all these Lobos. Come on up. That's right, Garden Grove Unified School District representin'.

As we wait for all of them, oh, there's so many of you.

I know there are more. Come on up, squeeze on in, pretend you like each other. If you're short and you know who you are, you should stand in the front. I am not making eye contact with you, but you know. Okay, hi everyone. I'm so excited to have the young people this time because usually mine is so sad and I have to go after the kiddos. But good evening. Tonight I am so, so proud, so excited of Los Amigos and the Lobos who go to school there. I'm excited to recognize these students from Los Amigos High School's Civic Action Club and Latinos Unidos for their hard work in attaining the California State Seal of Civic Engagement. Let's give them a round of applause. This distinction is awarded to high school students who demonstrate excellence in civics education and participation, along with an understanding of the United States Constitution, some adults don't understand that, the California Constitution, and democracy as a system of government. I'm so glad these young people are getting involved in government and in civic action. I didn't know what a city council was until I think grad school, so the fact that you're here is just incredible. I did ask, some of them are 18 and in fact can replace me, so please apply. The group we are honoring tonight is a portion of the 233 total Los Amigos students who earned the Civic Seal this year, including over 60% of the senior class. The Los Amigos cohort had a smaller senior class by about 150 students as compared to the next closest school in the district. But Los Amigos had a higher percentage of students earn the seal with a smaller pool. Even more impressive is that Los Amigos High School's median percentile rank for achievement of the state seal is 61%. This means that students across socioeconomic backgrounds and GPAs are achieving the seal, not just those from traditionally high-achieving backgrounds. Some of these students also include special education students who earned the seal, demonstrating that everyone and anyone can participate in civic action. Of course, student success relies so much on amazing advisors like our ward one resident who's not here tonight because she is present for her daughter, English teacher Adriana Alba, history and social science teacher Rebecca Martinez, and civics and ethnic studies teacher Mike Solis, who is here. These dedicated teachers all collaborated to provide students with opportunities to earn points for their civic seal. Please join me in congratulating these hardworking students, their teachers, and advisors on their amazing achievement of the California State Seal of Civic Engagement. And now for the part that you guys are actually interested in. We now invite Civic Action Club presidents Lily Alarcon and Anjin Nguyen to say a few words, followed by Latinos Unidos Club president Ana Hernandez, Gardner Group Unified School District Board President Bob Harden, and the teachers and administrators who might like to make any remarks. Welcome. Thank you. We'll all get one.

Hello, my name is Lily Alarcon. And I'm Angelina Nguyen. And we are the co-presidents for the Los Amigos High School Civic Action Club. We want to thank the City of Santa Ana for this generous recognition of our joint efforts to promote civic engagement within our community. We could not have done it without the support of our wonderful advisors, Mr. Solis and Mr. Nguyen, who guided us throughout our quest to foster enthusiasm for civic involvement amongst our peers. We would also like to thank our school, staff, admin, and the Garden Grove Unified School District for creating amazing opportunities for this, like this, for students.

Through the Civic Action Club, our club leadership worked tirelessly to encourage political engagement, promote democracy, address injustice, and help provide opportunities to keep our school issues... Sorry. Our... are our school politically informed our club hosted information sessions all school year addressing important social and political topics such as know your rights and how to navigate cuts to snap benefits and of course encouraging our young globals to get pre-registered to vote even teaching them about the first-hand voting process by holding mock election

We also helped gather valuable resources for those affected throughout the cut on SNAP benefits in the late November, and we took lead on our school-wide fundraising initiative for local food banks, including a donation drive in response to LA wildfires and later a food drive for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County. We worked with our sister club, Latinos and Eagles, very closely through many of these activities so that, and so we would also like to give a special shout out to that club. Annually, we also host a youth forum led by our very own Ward One Councilmember Tyvia Phan to help pinpoint concerns about our city and alleviate community issues by giving students a platform to share their experiences and perspectives.

Through this, we are not only showing students how the city of Santa Ana works for its community, but also teaching students to advocate for themselves and participate in their communities and government. With all this, we are so proud to say that we pushed over 233 Lobos to earn their California Civic Seal of Engagement, breaking both our school and school district's record. Through these accomplishments with the Civic Action Club, we can safely say that Los Amigos is a democratic school. Thank you once again. We are beyond grateful for this honor and will continue to strengthen our community and work with the city of Santa Ana to make our beautiful community even better. Thank you.

Mr. Solis, President Hardin. I also want to say in the youth forum, they ask harder questions than the political debates. I just want to say that.

Good evening, Mayor Emeskwa, council members, students. members of the community. I'm Bob Harden, president of the Garden Grove Unified School District Board of Education. On behalf of the board, it is my honor to congratulate Los Amigos High School on this remarkable achievement and to thank the city of Santa Ana for recognizing these outstanding students tonight. The California State Seal of Civic Engagement honors young people who demonstrate a deep understanding of democracy, civic responsibility, and the power of community involvement. When more than 60% of a graduating class earns this honor, it says something powerful about the culture of a school. Los Amigos High School has created an environment where every student is encouraged to participate, contribute, and lead. To the students being recognized tonight, thank you for reminding us of what active citizenship looks like. Your leadership, compassion, and commitment to your community give us tremendous hope for the future. Congratulations again to the incredible Lobos of Los Amigos High School. We're proud of you.

All right, let's take a picture. And before I forget, I'd also like to mention board member Lan Quan Nguyen is here. Thank you. Oh yeah, Latinos Unidos, is there a representative from LU? Yes, okay, come on out.

Good evening, Santa Ana City Council. My name is Darla Godinez.

And I'm Ana Hernandez.

We are both seniors from Los Amigos High School representing Latinos Unidos as club presidents. We would like to start by thanking Santa Ana for recognizing our efforts in making our community a safe and welcoming place. This student activism could not have been accomplished without the hard work of our advisors, Ms. Alba, Mr. Solis, Ms. Camero, Ms. Bermudez, our GGUSD staff, and administrators.

Latinos Unidos is one of the biggest clubs on our campus. Our main goal is to give back to our community by spreading awareness and pride for Latino culture and helping our members be civic leaders. We participate in many community events throughout the year, including some elementary school events and some events in downtown Santa Ana, like Fiestas Patrias and the Dia de los Muertos celebrations. But most importantly this year, we directly helped hundreds of families in our community who were negatively impacted by President Trump's ICE raids.

At the beginning of January, ICE raids had emerged in our community. At the Año Latinos Unidos Conference, Piers and Dr. Moffey showed their concern for families. With this information, we began to give out our Know Your Rights cards, but we knew that wasn't enough, to support the GGUSD families. Luckily, Ms. Chase, Los Amigos Community Schools' coordinator, shared her ideas on starting a resource fair where we invited over 500 district families to this event. In this event, food trucks offered a free hot meal, free dispensary items like clothes, diapers, baby necessities, fresh produce, and individual healthcare booths that help these families in times of need.

Just this school year alone, we helped hundreds of families in a time when they were afraid to leave their homes because of the political climate. We were a sigh of relief and a judgment-free help for so many families like my own. We took part in helping Dr. Moffey's initiative to rename Rosita Elementary to Palomino Elementary. We are in full support of this project, which will give much-needed credit to the et al. in the Mendez et al. v. Westminster case. The Palomino family's efforts, along with other families in this case, are the reason most of us in this room are as successful as we are today and have the opportunities many children before us may not have had. We owe everything to these families who allow us to love education and to one day have a career and give back to this community.

Thank you so much Santa Ana City Council for recognizing our efforts and we will continue to grow as a club and a community to take initiative in major events to improve our community.

All right, great job. Congratulations, everybody. All right, we're moving on now.

Madam City Attorney, do you have anything to report out of closed session? Mayor, council members, members of the public, we had two closed session discussions this evening. We do have reportable action on one item, the second item with respect to potential initiation of litigation and review anticipated litigation, the city council by unanimous vote directed us to pursue a formal complaint against Southern California Edison for all of the many delays and costs that has caused the city to incur due to its lack of action.

Thank you, Madam City Attorney. I appreciate it. Before we start public comments, the city attorney has given me something to read. I'd like to read this publicly before we start. At the last several council meetings, we asked our city attorney for a full report on the Colch Royal situation and the status of the city petitions. We have received a comprehensive memorandum on the facts, the prior lawsuits, the evictions, and the status of the petitions. The information shared with us included the fact that the parties, Kingsley and the tenants, agree to keep many of their stipulations and evictions confidential. Kingsley and the tenants are subject to the state mobile home residency law. It is a state law and the city is preempted by this law, meaning that the law is controlling and the city cannot interfere. The city's role... The city's, you have to be respectful while we're speaking, please. Thank you. Well then, I'll stop the council meeting. Thank you. The city's role in this situation is based on the voter-approved ordinance, which is summarized in two parts. First, there is rent stabilization, and second, there is just cause. The coach royal tenants are not alleging any violation of the rent stabilization part of the ordinance. They are alleging harassment and retaliation. The ordinance that was approved at one time by the city council and subsequently by the city's voters states that retaliatory eviction protections can only be alleged in a court of law. The city cannot take action in relation to these type of complaints. The anti-harassment complaints are the ones that the city has jurisdiction over, and these are being handled through the petition process involving an independent administrative hearing officer. Again, this is being done in accordance with an ordinance adopted by the voters of Santa Ana. The city is aware that there was a confidential settlement agreement between Kingsley and the tenants. We believe that settlement to be in the millions of dollars based on what some advocates have said, but we cannot verify this because it was the subject of a confidential agreement. The city is doing all that it can legally do under its ordinance. In addition, the city has provided emergency rental assistance and assistance through several of its programs, providing thousands of dollars to tenants. For example, the Baragon family collectively has received over $149,000 in city funds from several programs. We are sympathetic to the tenants and have been responsive. Coming to the city council and saying that the city is doing nothing is just not true. The city is enforcing the law It can enforce and it has provided nearly $200,000 in funding to the impacted tenants. It was recently reported that the tenants have turned to making threats and acting physically aggressive acting physically aggressive with our city staff. That behavior will not be tolerated by the city. If the tenants choose to continue to work with the city, the city will work with the tenants and be supportive. However, if the tenants continue to make threats, we will pursue all legal remedies to protect our staff and officials. Thank you, Madam City Attorney, for this report.

At this time... Madam Clerk?

We're gonna try to get through public comments. There are people all throughout this whole council meeting who'd like to speak, so we will try to get through this. If we cannot, then we'll take a break and we'll leave the room and then we'll see how things work out. But I'm hoping that we have enough respect for each other that we can let everyone speak. It's about respecting each other in this room. So this is the time of the meeting for the City Council to receive comments from the public on agenda and non-agenda items. Madam City Clerk, please explain the public comment procedures, the time, and the first speakers. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. Pursuant to resolution number 2025-004, speakers are requested to address the City Council directly and to refrain from profane language, racial epitaphs, and libelous or slanderous statements that disturb the decorum of the meeting. Pursuant to the Brown Act, the City Council may not enter into discussion at this time. Speakers will have one minute for their comments. Before calling speakers, I will... Before calling speakers, I will report the summary of emails provided as of today. We received a total of 49 e-comments by 3 p.m. Those were 12 on non-agenda topics, one on item number 19, seven on item number 20, one on item number 22, and 28 on item number 24. Those were distributed to the City Council and posted online for public review.

Mayor, point of order. Did we make, why is it a minute?

Excuse me?

Why is public speaking a minute?

Because there's so many public speakers, and so we made a motion for a minute, and there's support from four council members plus. We'll be here for a very long time, and we need to get through the budget.

Guys, please.

If you would stop, we can talk.

Please be respectful.

I would rather hope that we just give everybody the three minutes that we usually do.

Sorry. Thank you, Mayor Proctor. I'll make a motion for one minute. Is there a second? Yeah, I'll second the one minute. Thank you. All those in favor of one minute? All those opposed to one? Madam Clerk, can you take a roll for those supporting the one minute, please?

Yes, thank you. This is a motion by Mayor Mesquite, seconded by Councilmember Lopez to limit public speaking time to one minute. Councilmember Becerra? Yes. Councilmember Hernandez?

No.

Councilmember Lopez? Yes.

Yes.

Council Member Phan? Yes. Council Member Vazquez?

No.

Mayor Pro Tempignolosa?

No.

Mayor Mezcua? Yes. Vote is four ayes, three nays. Nays by Mayor Pro Tempignolosa and Council Members Lopez and Vazquez. Motion carries. Speaking time will be one minute.

Thank you very much. Let's proceed.

We will now hear from members of the public that are physically present in the council chamber, followed by those on the conference call or Zoom to provide their comments on agenda or non-agenda items. Please state your name and the ward or neighborhood that you reside in for the record. I'll call three speakers at a time. If you could please line up in the center aisle when you hear your name and then approach the podium. First three speakers, Pat Lenahan, Patricia Mendoza, and Jesus Gomez.

You can come on up, please. Thank you.

Let's come forward. Thank you.

Go ahead and begin.

I guess I'm going to have to speak Philadelphia past.

My name is Pat Linehan.

Oh, is that better? My name is Pat Linehan. I'm Ward 5, Vice President of the Washington Square Neighborhood Association, member of the Comlink Board, formerly on the Santa Ana Library Commission and member of the Santa Ana Police Department's Family Violence Emergency Response Team. I'm here to talk about the park, Washington Square Park, a walkable park. One of the things we have, I've had a neighbor who had a serious fall because of the, an older neighbor, because of the impediments and the walkways. We have a lot of people of all ages who could benefit from this. We refer to Freeman Street as the Freeman Freeway. I've been actually passed on it. People drive too fast, we have problems, and it's not a safe thing. To have a park would give the community a great sense of space. It would allow people for greater mental health, physical health. Pat, your time is up.

Thank you very much, your time is up, thank you.

Next speaker. Patricia Mendoza. Patricia Mendoza, followed by Jesus Gomez and David Pulido.

I'm overwhelmed, but I'll make this quick. My name is Patricia, last name is Mendoza. I'm from downtown LA, born and raised there. I'm an activist, worked in the law office for 30 years. Today I'm with a friend that I met two months ago in Norwalk County, and she bought a property and she lost it two years ago. But the reason I'm here is because we need the support of her city council, Mr. Hernandez. This building is right here in the corner. And they never did the bankruptcy for Ms. Gomez. And she's paid these people like $56,000. And it took me two months to... to put everything together and I feel like Eli must. The more I dig, the more I dig. There's a lot, there's a lot of people involved. But my plans are that I'm gonna send this problem to the district attorney in downtown. So nice to meet all of you guys. Thank you for your patience and the public and maybe I can help these people in the back. I've been doing slumlord buildings and lawsuits and thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

We actually have a translator and only one person can speak them.

She was called. Jesus Gomez is the next speaker.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you.

We have a translator. She can speak in Spanish. Thank you.

Go ahead, please. Go ahead, please. En nombre de todos los que tenemos esa situación de las casas, nos pongan atención porque hacen y deshacen lo que quieran y nadie les dice nada, nadie les hace nada, nadie les pone caso. Vamos a hacer quejas a la policía, por favor. Pongan más atención. No, aquí yo no vine a regañar ni vine nada, pero que nos pongan atención porque es algo horrible andar cinco minutos en cada casa de cada hijo cuando uno trabajó honradamente 40 años para tener su propio...

Secret afternoon. My name is Jesus and I am not here. I'm here because I've paid some services for some individuals and I paid a long time ago, but even though I paid, I still lost my property. We are talking about $400,000 plus that I lost that I had based on that and I am I am here to please, please tell you to pay attention because these people do things and undo things and nobody's really paying attention. I'm asking you to please, please pay attention. I am not here to scold anybody. I'm here to humbly request that, you know, it's very difficult for me to be five minutes with one family member and five minutes with another family member, one kid and another. It's very difficult for me to do being that I've worked for over 40 years for this.

Next three speakers are David Pulido, Sue Palak, and Tomas Castro.

My name is David Pulido. I'm a member of community service organization Orange County. We're here today to present the early results of our petition for justice for Noe Rodriguez. It's been over a year since Santa Ana police officers Luis Casillas and Isaac Ibarra executed Noe in front of Casalina Furniture, shooting almost 30 bullets at an unarmed man having a mental health crisis. Today would have been his birthday and you robbed that time from him. You robbed that time from him when you took away that time. We're working class residents. This is our time that you're not respecting. You talk about residents, we are your residents. Shame. Last week, the petition stood at 611 signatures from across the country. 94 signatures came from every ward in this city. They represent wards where we did our outreach, 10 separate outreach events. And while the residents, those of us who signed that petition, over 228 signatures, those are people who live or work in our city, and they deserve a say on this. If this mayor can receive thousands of dollars from the police union of Garden Grove and Anaheim, then we have a right to demand police accountability, to demand that these David, your time is up. David, your time is up. Your time is up, sir. Your time is up. Your time is up. Thank you, sir. Your time is up, sir. Your time is up.

Isaac Ibarra!

Luis Garcia! Isaac Ibarra! Justice for Noel Rodriguez! Shameful, shameful. No, yeah, fuck you.

Next three speakers. Sue Palak, Tomas Castro, Giovanni Chavez. Sue Palak.

Tomas Castro. I'm sorry, Madam Clerk, can you say the names again because of the noise, please?

Yes. Sue Palak. Sue Palak, please. Tomas Castro from Climate Action Campaign, followed by Giovanni Chavez and Ana Cruz.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Evening, Council Members. My name is Tomas Castro.

Can you speak into the mic, please? I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Good evening, Council Members. My name is Tomas Castro. I'm an organizer with Climate Action Campaign. I'm here to encourage the Council to support several key pieces of legislation currently making its way through the state legislature, all of which deal with the mounting crisis of energy affordability in our state. It's no secret that our utility bills are rising, and the key driver of the cost of living crisis is the unmitigated greed of investor-owned utilities. In Southern California alone, over 800,000 people are behind on their bills by an average of $600 to SoCal Edison. This number will continue to rise as the utilities raise rates and lobby lawmakers to continue milking working families. However, by supporting legislation such as SB 886, SB 1159, AB 2463, SB 913, SB 905, and AB 2338, to name a few, the Council can stand with working families in Santa Ana who want leadership on affordability. Thank you.

Giovanni Chavez, Ana Cruz, and Joey Figueroa.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. I'm Giovanni Chavez, Santa Ana resident in French Park. And first of all, I wanted to thank the City Council for approving the staff and operational requirements for self-checkout. And I urge you to, again, approve item 20. I also wanted to stand with the children that are against the cuts to our PAL program. That is a program that helps a lot of our kids here, helps them grow up to be the incredible residents that they are. And I wanted to speak in favor of item 22. Thank you, Mayor Emescuwa and Council Member Becerra for introducing this item. This is very important considering the current climate. ICE is attacking and raiding our communities. They are arresting citizens and non-citizens alike. They are the reason why a lot of our small businesses are struggling. We need to take a strong stance against ICE. And you've all already been taking an incredible stance. We're a sanctuary city. The police department's had a long-time policy of not sharing information with ICE, and this goes a step further in making sure we codify that. Please approve item 22. Thank you.

Ana Cruz followed by Joey Figueroa and Lilia Fuentes.

Buenas tardes, mi nombre es Ana Cruz y vengo a decirles que si pueden considerar encerrar los programas. Es un lugar donde están nuestros hijos después de escuela. Nosotros no nos preocupamos porque sabemos que tienen un lugar seguro ahí. They know that as Hispanics we work, sometimes we don't have enough money to have them, and we don't know the language or we can't help them. And that's a program where they can do their job and they can have many things that we can't give them. So we would like them to consider it and they could have the children there. It's a safe place and they're out of things they shouldn't have. Thank you.

Good evening, my name is Ana Cruz and I'm here to request that you please don't close the different school programs because it's a place where my children can be, they can be safe. A lot of us as parents, we just don't have the money We just don't have the money to take them to other places because we work. And they are offering them to do things like homework and other things that would be great for them. And since we don't know the language and we don't have the money, this is great for them. It also helps them to build a lot of memories. It's like a second home for them. My children have been going there for a long time, and they also help them to find jobs. This is a place where they can go and have events. They do things during the summer. And please do not close these services for the children.

Joey Figueroa, Lilia Fuentes, Janelle Hardy.

Good afternoon, my name is Joey Figueroa. I'm here to talk about PAL and how it benefits the community. I started working with PAL this year, and I started by teaching kids how to play baseball and athletics. We primarily focus on teaching kids how to focus on education, fitness, and enrichment. I know people who go to PAL, and honestly, It has a positive impact on kids, and I feel like if you guys get rid of this program, it's just gonna ruin the community more. It's gonna help kids drift away from education and start affecting our future more than it already has. As a student, I plan on attending a four-year university, and PAL encourages students to attend four-year universities as well. I think you guys shouldn't do budget cuts, and you guys should actually start promoting those organizations as well. Thank you.

Next three speakers, Lilia Fuentes, Janelle Hardy, and David Jurek.

Hello, mayor and city council members. My name is Lilia, and I'm currently a student at California State University, Long Beach, where I am starting my sophomore year this fall. I understand the city's difficult budget decisions to make, but I hope Powell continues to be seen as an investment in young people and in communities. I've been part of PAL program since the third grade, so PAL has been in my life for many years. During elementary and middle school, it's like a second home to me. It's always a place where I feel safe, supported, and encouraged to grow. One of the biggest parts of PAL for me was the run team led by Officer Kearney. Even though I joked I hated running, it taught me discipline and importance of supporting the people around you. One of the things Officer Kearney would tell us was that finish together, and that's the lesson that... stayed with me forever. As I go older, I want to keep giving back to the same program that helped me grow up, so I volunteered during high school later as the opportunity to work through the same program. The experience taught me this responsibility, leadership, and the importance of helping the community. Thank you.

Janelle Hardy, David Jurek, Jair L.

Hi, good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, Council Members. My name's Janelle Hardy, I'm in Ward 2, and I'm currently serving as an HRC Commissioner. Tonight, I want to bring you information about the state and city program, the Mills Act Agreement. I'm here to tell you that Mills Act property owners do receive property tax bills. Mills Act property owners do pay property taxes. Mills Act property owners do pay for parks, roads, pavement, and street sweeping, and every other item that all property owners contribute to. And property owners do receive, Mills Act property owners do receive a property tax increase every year, like most property taxpayers. So I hope this information was helpful. Thank you for your time.

GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. GOOD EVENING. And we presented our case many times to the council and the city staff about the vacant land in Washington Square. And this is our last chance to get a park in Washington Square. And we're very pleased that the council chose to move it forward into the budget. And we just ask that it remains in the budget when you vote on it in four weeks. And the... Residents of Washington Square are counting on you all to make our dream of a walkable park in Washington Square staying. I'm sorry. We really want the walkable park to stay in the budget and keep our dream of a walkable park alive.

David, your time is up.

Thank you very much, and it's a must-have.

Next three speakers, Jair, Jorge Rodriguez, and Victor Romero.

April 29th, 2026, petitioners of the Coach Royal Mobile Home Park met with Kingsley Management Corporation, represented by Bedell Law, a hearing under the RSO. During the meeting, the city of Santana did not provide any interpretation or offer any interpretation services initially. Petitioners had to advocate for themselves for this. And this is required under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and under state law like the Dimley-Alatorre Bilingual Service Act. And during this time, Kingsley's lawyer also confidently said, we are not required under law to provide interpretation services, which raises alarm and suspicion as to whether they use the same tactics when negotiating settlements with tenants. And also, Salo Mesquita and Maricela, under the offices, I think the social services offices, attempted to kick out witnesses of the Coach Royal residents. They didn't let them, and that was a direct violation of the policies and procedures of the RSO. So please look into that, all right? Because that was illegal. They tried to kick us out. That's not right. There's more I have to say, but I only got a minute.

Your time is up.

Basically, the city of Santa Ana, let Kingsley steamroll the residents of Santa Ana.

Take note of that. It's starting to make sense why you guys won't speak up.

Because the city didn't let them. In a small room. So take that what you will. Don't let the city of Santa Ana residents be steamed.

The next three speakers.

Jorge Rodriguez, Victor Romero, Abraham Q.

Hello, Mayor and City Council. My name is Jorge Rodriguez. I'm a bakery manager at Albertsons 598 here in Santa Ana. Two weeks ago, the Santa Ana City Council advanced this measure on item 22. Thank you to all the workers in Santa Ana and California, because I know this ordinance will go beyond our city's borders. Self-checkout causes so many problems. It's only run by one person, and currently they're unlocking liquor, getting baby formula, or just attending other matters. This creates an unsafe environment. I don't know if you've ever visited the store, But we're working with backed-up drains, fire exits that are blocked and neglected mold growth. We're chronically understaffed at the store, and customers often have to leave self-checkout to find help at other departments. So it's not working out. Management says nothing can be done, but there is. I don't know about you, but I'm... There's countless hours that I'm cake decorating and baking, and for it to just be gone in a blink of an eye through self-checkout, it's not fair. Thank you so much for supporting this ordinance. It will do so much to protect us in the stores.

Thank you. Next three speakers are Victor Romero, Abraham Que, Socorro Vargas.

Good afternoon, City Council people. My name is Victor Romero. I am a meat cutter with Stater Brothers 29 in Santa Ana. I've been working for Stater Brothers for 29 years and I'm a proud union member. And compared to when I started, I can see that the company is cutting back on labour costs. Our stores are already at bare minimum staffing amounts and they are continuously asking us to do more with less people. Less workers means more stress for both workers and consumers. If Stater Brothers utilized self-checkout, I would bet that we'd have even less staffing. In my hand, I have petitions of people that have support the Safe Stores Act. This is why I'm here. I'm here to stand with my union brothers and members to ensure that the customers have a good shopping experience and that the workers have safe working conditions. The way to do that is via more staffing, not technology. That is designed to replace us. Regulating self-checkout does not stop companies from utilizing the technology. It just simply requires the companies to use it responsibly. I've seen how it works in Long Beach. I've seen how it works in... Thank you very much.

Buenas tardes, miembros del Consejo y empleados de la ciudad y a mis vecinos en Santa Ana. Mi nombre es Abraham. Soy miembro de la Organización de Servicio Comunitario en el Comité de Responsabilidad Policial. Esta noche estamos entregando una petición de nuestra campaña Justicia para Noel Rodríguez. Hemos recogido más de 600 firmas demandando que los policías asesinos Luis Casillas y Isaac Ibarra sean despedidos del Departamento Policial ahora. Desde que mataron a Noé, estos oficiales han estado bajo investigación del Departamento de Justicia de California por matar a un hombre desarmado. Pena. Los dos han sido involucrados en otros instantes de mala conducta y también en otras muertes en la ciudad. Cuando los concejales no critican y no castigan, y hasta a veces defienden la mala conducta policial, así como David Peñalosa, como Phil Becerra y Valerie Mezcua, nuestras comunidades van a seguir sufriendo la brutalidad policial. Dicen que no quieren enfrentar un pleito de la asociación policial, pero la realidad es que las asociaciones policiales en muchas ciudades le están pagando sus carreras políticas y sus campañas. Despidan a los oficiales Luis Casillas y Isaac Ibarra.

Justicia para Noel Rodríguez.

Good afternoon, city council members, the city employees, and my neighbors around Santa Ana. My name is Abraham. I am a member of the Community Service Organization and Police Accountability Committee. Tonight, we are submitting a petition from our campaign for justice for Noe Rodriguez. We have collected over 600 signatures demanding that killer cops Luis Castilla and Isaac Ibarra be fired from the Santa Ana PD. Noe was a resident of Santa Ana. He had two young daughters. My apologies. Since both officers have been under investigation by the California Department of Justice for killing an unarmed man, both have also been involved in other incidents of misconduct and even death. Like Isaac Ibarra took part of the arrest, Freddie Washington. When the city council members do not criticize or punish, sometimes they even defend the police misconduct as David Penalosa, Phil Barrera, and Valerie Amezcua. Do our communities will continue to suffer police brutality?

Next three speakers, Socorro Vargas, Diana Vargas Juarez, and Autumn Overton.

Hello, good evening. My name is Socorro Vargas, and I'm here to encourage the PAL program. It has really helped me and the community in so many ways. It has helped me build my confidence, join extracurriculums, and just be out and about. They have currently hosted a baseball and softball camp, which I'm very interested in. And it has helped me just make new friends and help others while teaching them how to play the game. I just think it's a very good program overall, and I think it will help benefit the community and students that join it in so many good ways, teaching them life skills, teaching them how to have fun, and just life management skills in general. I encourage you to look into the budget and just fund the PAL program. Thank you, have a good day.

Next three speakers, Diana Vargas-Juarez, Autumn Overton, and Jesse Rodriguez.

Hi, my name is Diana Vargas, and I am a former student of the after-school program PAL. I am here today to talk about the program PAL. The PAL program has a bunch of different things to offer for the students to attend or for anyone in general to attend, even if they are not part of the program. For example, they have a softball and baseball camp for kids that like those sports while also having soccer too. If you are in the program, they give enough time to do your homework while also giving time for the students to eat and play games. The program makes the students do exercises and activities that are actually fun and helpful to staying fit and healthy for these kids. These are some of the reasons why I believe the PAL program should continue to get supported and grow bigger for other people to join in and have fun like me and my sister did. Thank you for your time.

Autumn, Jesse, and then Santiago Orozco.

All right, good evening council, my name's Autumn. I live in downtown Santana and I'm deeply disappointed in the city's leadership for your warm embrace of flock cameras. Santaneros have never wanted this technology in our communities and we demand that the city council end the flock contract. These systems create a culture of mass surveillance while providing little evidence of meaningful public safety. You have a responsibility to protect our privacy, civil rights, and safety, and you must dismantle these technologies that are used to target our communities. We know that ICE will use these cameras and the data. We know that Trump will use these cameras and this data. Fox cameras do not prevent crime. Please stop surveilling us. End the contract. Number two, we ask the Council to please pass agenda items 22 and 23, the No Side Jobs for ICE Act. We want ICE out of Santa Ana and the police out of ICE. And we support our incredible UFCW workers. Thank you for fighting for that self-checkout policy.

Autumn, your time is up. Jesse, followed by Santiago, and then Miguel Martinez.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Jesse Rodriguez and I am the Vice Chair of the Youth Commission. I urge you not to cut the Youth Commission or PAL. The savings are small, but the impact on Santa Ana's youth would be huge. The Youth Commission gives young people a voice in local government and PAL provides mentorship, after school programs, and safe opportunities for kids. I first hand... have participated in POW and it's always been a great experience and we're disappointed in having it cut. These programs would keep youth engaged, supported, and connected to their community. They also create positive spaces for leadership, growth, and trust between young people and the city. Investing in youth now builds a stronger and safer Santa Ana in the future. Please continue investing in the young people of Santa Ana. Thank you.

Santiago Orozco, Miguel Martinez, Bumaro Vicente.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Santiago Orozco, and I urge you not to eliminate the Youth Commission or cut support for PAL. The money being saved is small, but the impact of Santa Ana would be long-lasting. The Youth Commission gives young people a voice in local government and the chance to be involved in decisions that affect our future. Eliminating the Commission would show that the city is not truly prioritizing its youth, PAL provides mentorship, sports, after school programs, and a safe space for kids. These programs are investments in our community and help young people supported and engaged. Please stand with Santa Ana youth and protect these programs, thank you.

Next three speakers, Miguel Martinez, Omar Vicente, and Tanya Navarro. Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Hi, my name is Miguel Martinez, a produce manager at Albertsons here in Santa Ana. Speaking on item 20, I want to thank the City of Santa Ana City Council for advancing these measures two weeks ago and for hearing it again today. I've worked for Albertsons 37 years. Throughout my years at the store, I've seen the problems the self-checkout causes. Lines are long. Customers come through with overloaded carts. They have trouble with codes and more. and this gets them upset. They go off on the one person that is watching over self-checkout. This isn't safe for the going charge. Our managers are usually far away and unable to come and help up in time. This ordinance will help make it easier for grocery workers. Customers will be able to go out faster and they'll be happier. Our store will be safer, not so aggravating for the customers. Supporting our ordinance will ensure our stores are safe and a good place for workers and customers. Thank you.

Next three speakers. Bulmaro Vicente, Tanya Navarro, and Johanna P.

Hello, Mayor and Council. I'm here to speak on a few items. First, we support item 20, the second reading of the ordinance establishing staffing and operational standards for self-serve checkouts. I want to thank the Council for moving this forward and also the leadership at UFCW for their advocacy on this issue. We also support item 22, and we strongly encourage that any ordinance prohibiting immigration related secondary employment apply to all city personnel and contractors, not solely the police department. Immigration related employment can involve a wide range of roles across city departments and agencies. ADDITIONALLY, WE SUPPORT ITEM 23. THIS IS ONE OF CHIEF SPAW'S PRIORITY BILLS AND WE WANT TO THANK THE COUNCIL FOR MOVING THIS FORWARD AS WELL. WE'RE ALSO HERE TONIGHT TO SUPPORT THE FAMILY OF NORA RODRIGUEZ AS THEY CONTINUE SEEKING JUSTICE AND ACCOUNTABILITY. AND THEN LASTLY, REGARDING ITEM 24, WE WANT TO EMPHASIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF INVESTING ADDITIONAL FUNDING FOR POLICE OVERSIGHT. THE COMMISSION IS ALREADY DOING IMPORTANT WORK, BUT ADDING AT LEAST ONE ADDITIONAL INVESTIGATOR WOULD INCLUDE, WOULD SPEND ITS ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE CITY.

THANK YOU. Tanya Navarro, Joanna P., Carla Alvarado.

Hello, Council. Tanya Navarro with Chispa. I'm speaking in support of item 20, 22, and 23. For 22, Chispa demands that the ordinance also prohibit ICE-related secondary employment for city personnel and contractors. I'd also like to uplift the demands from Norio Rodriguez's family, for his family has not received justice for over a year. On May 6th, this council passed the flock contract. Tai Fan moved to approve the contract with an asset there would be a public report back within one year showing updates on installment process, criminal statistics and more. As of May 19th, 2026 today, that has not happened. Santaneros never wanted this technology in our communities and we demand that the city council end their flock contract immediately. This follows a pattern across the country where oversight and guardrails are promised, but are either not put into place or fail to address the concerns raised. This is because the problems with this type of surveillance cannot be remedied by oversight. And Valerie Emesco, there's a long list of different abuses. So different abuses in different states. Kansas, Milwaukee, police officers have searched their exes. Wrongful arrests.

Your time is up, ma'am.

Your time is up. Thank you, your time is up. Thank you. Thank you, your time is up. Next three speakers.

Joanna, followed by Carla Alvarado and Celica Diaz.

Good evening. I'm here in support of item 20, 22, and 23, but want to make sure item 22 applies to all city employees and contractors to not be able to work with ICE. I'm also here to voice concern over the fall contract some council members voted in favor of. Council FAM moved to approve the contract with an ask that there would be a report back within a year. It's been a year now and we have no report and it doesn't seem like it's been acknowledged since then. This is technology we don't want and we demand that we end the contract. At a time when AI tech and surveillance tools are rapidly expanding, especially alongside increased immigration enforcement, our city must be proactive in defending communities from harmful surveillance and data sharing practices. Local government have a responsibility to protect residents' privacy and civil rights, safety for profit of technologies that are used to target our communities, and justice for Noah Rodriguez. Thank you.

Next three speakers, Carla Alvarado, followed by Celica Diaz and Maria Enriquez.

First of all, I want to let everybody know that Santa Ana is a charter city. And you need to stop lying to the constituents, telling them that there's nothing that you could do. Your city has authority. Our city has authority and flexibility to respond to local housing crisis, public safety concerns, tenant protections, and community harm when residents are being affected on a systemic level. If some of my residents are not here, it's because they're scared. Because look at what happened when we're vocal. And you mentioned my family. We have three houses there, two that were stolen. You think we're going to freaking let them go for $140,000? That's disrespectful. Our houses were worth over $250,000. Okay? That averages out to $40,000 per home. Okay? I have the money. Let's give them back to them. That's disrespectful. Talk about my family. Okay. A settlement that I told you guys was done under duress, where we were only given a line. Carla, your time is up. Your time is up, ma'am. If I didn't sign the document, I would end up homeless with my five children. Ma'am, your time is up. If I didn't sign that, I would still not be able to save anything, okay? That was with my children.

Your time is up, ma'am.

We are not sellouts. We'll give them back the money.

Thank you, ma'am. Your time is up.

You guys can't waive our future rights. You guys know this. And we're not talking about a failure to maintain law. Ma'am, your time is up.

Your time is up, ma'am.

Your time is up, ma'am. Ma'am, your time is up. Thank you, thank you, your time is up. Thank you.

Thank you, your time is up.

Thank you. The next three speakers, Celica Diaz, Maria Enriquez, and Sofia Gallegos.

Good evening. My name is Celica Diaz. I live in Pacific Park neighborhood, Ward 2. And I am here because I care deeply about the future of our youth and our community. I am urging you to protect and allocate funding for the PAL program. The PAL program has proven to work. The program is a safe space for children. They provide support, activities, and encouragement. At a time when Santa Ana residents identified youth services as one of the top three priorities for our city, it is concerning to see programs that directly serve our children are facing major cuts, especially talking to Ty, Hernandez, and Van Vasquez. You guys talked about wanting to get rid of the PAL program at the last meeting. Investing in youth programs is investing in public safety, mental health, education, and future of Santa Ana. Instead of discussing and eliminating these programs, the conversation should be about expanding them. We should be recommending that programs like PAL be extended to serve junior high and high school students as well. Parents are here to speak about it, so please listen to the residents. Salica, your time is up.

Maria Enriquez, followed by Sofia Gallegos and Rosie Arzola.

Hello, my name is Maria Enriquez. I'm here to support PAL. PAL should be continuing because it's a great program that motivates young people in positive ways. In my case, it has helped my boys in positive motivation with their education and physical activities. The program has teach them how to properly use machines and encourage them to stay positive and healthy. Also, Pell has teacher responsibilities, organization, and how to use their time wisely and productively. Coming from a neighborhood where it's gang related, this program has helped my kids in many ways and stay away from the streets and help them with their future and their goals. Most important, Pell motivates them to go to school, stay positive, and believe in themselves. This program is really helpful for our young adults And we need their support so they can continue to help our kids. Thank you.

Sofia Gallegos, Rosie Arzola, Erica Armenta.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sophia Gallegos. PAL has been a huge part of my life. It has helped me become a better person, improve in school, and discover my love for softball. This program gives kids a safe place to go to after school where we can get homework help, stay active, and be surrounded by positive people who truly care about us. PAL also helps parents by giving them a peace of mind knowing their kids are safe, supported, and staying out of trouble. Closing this program would hurt many families, take away opportunities from kids like me. Every day, PAL was something I looked forward to because of how fun, welcoming, and supportive it was. The staff and coaches always encouraged us to do our best, both in school and life. They taught us important lessons about teamwork, responsibility, and confidence that will carry with us forever. Without PAL, many kids would lose a safe environment where they can learn, grow, and build friendships. Programs like this give students opportunities to stay active, try new things, and believe in themselves. My experience with PAL has been nothing but positive, supportive, and unforgettable, and I know many other kids feel the same. I truly hope this program can continue helping students and families for many years to come. Thank you.

Rosie Arzola, followed by Erica Armentha and Sandra Deanda.

I'm here to speak on behalf of Noel Rodriguez. Shame on Santa Ana Police Department for executing and shooting him 30 rounds while having a mental breakdown. We are asking for justice, transparency, and accountability. Luis Casillas Isaac Ibarra be fired and removed from the police department. Shame on them for executing Noel Rodriguez on a mental crisis that he needed help not to be executed. Justice for Noel Rodriguez and for my son Alberto Arzola. Emanolo Gonzalez, Brandon Lopez, Joel Ceredo, and the rest of the fallen constituents from the police department. Brutality, prayers for the Examen community in San Diego and everywhere. Thank you.

Erica Armenta, Sandra Deanda, Jose Perez.

My name is Erika Armenta, and I'm a relative of a loved one whose life was taken care of by the police in a truly tragic and painful way. It's been 504 days since December 1, 2024, since the murderers Casillas and Barra killed my daughters' father, Noe Rodriguez, in a rain of bullets. However, you haven't done anything. The mayor in particular is in charge de protegerlos, ofreciendo públicamente su apoyo a estos supuestos agentes de paz sin consideración alguna por el dolor que nos causa a nosotras.

Les quiero decir estas palabras que mis hijas... Es el cumpleaños de mi papi, ya no lo puedo abrazar y me siento frustrada porque le arrebataron la vida y los que hicieron eso todavía siguen libres.

My name is Erica, and I am here to talk about the loss of Noel when he was killed in 2024 under a rain of shotguns. And the mayor has done nothing about it. They have done nothing to do this. And let me play a little something for my daughters. And it was a little play, a little recording of a child saying happy birthday daddy my daddy I will never be able to spend any time with my daddy as my daddy is dead and the people that killed them continue to walk free please do not continue to come to make comments about our pain do not make comments about our pain next three speakers Sandra de Anda Jose Perez grace or Zola

Good evening, mayor and council members. My name is Sandra, and I am a Ward 4 resident. I'm here today in support of items 20, 22, and 23, and I see that today we have . I'm also an immigrant rights advocate, immigration policy maker, and ICE watcher. An ICE watcher is a civilian observer who monitors, documents, and reports ICE activity to the community. I engage in this work because for close to a decade, I have stood alongside families whose rights have been violated by ICE and who have been deeply dehumanized by our immigration system. Since its inception, ICE has operated with a troubling lack of transparency and accountability. So I am supporting item 22, but like my colleague Bumaro shared, would like for it to extend to personnel of the city, all personnel of the city. Thank you.

Sandra, your time is up. Jose Perez, followed by Grace Arzola and Matthew Compton.

Good evening, Mayor, council members. My name is Jose Perez. I am the president of UFCW Local 324. We represent 21,000 members in Orange and Los Angeles counties, 16,000 of them in the grocery, drug retail, and pharmacy industries. Your support for the self-checkout ordinance at the last hearing showed a true understanding of the critical need to protect local workers. Passing this ordinance tonight comes down to four critical goals. Protecting good local jobs, improving safety for both workers and customers, reducing retail theft and store disruptions, and ensuring seniors, families, and all shoppers always have access to staff checked out services. On behalf of all UFCW members and working families in Santa Ana, respectfully urge you to vote yes tonight to support this ordinance. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Next three speakers, Grace Arzola, followed by Matthew Compton and Rain Mendoza.

Good afternoon, I'm actually here because of Noel Rodriguez. It is May mental health awareness. I'm sure you guys are all familiar with it. What makes me sad is that there was a resident from Santa Ana who was experiencing a mental health condition and instead of you guys getting him the mental health he needed, you guys decided it would be good to shoot him up with 30 rounds. Another thing is that maybe you guys would have extra funding if you guys didn't pay the lawsuits for all the excessive force to fund the after school program. And you guys talk about etiquette, Mayor Mesquite, you chew gum while people are here talking. And you have a telltale when you don't like what people are saying, you do this and you do this and you shake your head. Body language is still body language. That's another thing. And for the record, we don't need you to put your Chicano fists up because we know how to do that. And change comes from the community, not from the people that are supposed to serve. And if you guys are too busy to give us a three minutes, don't hold a public office because you guys don't have time. So well.

Thank you. And if we accept this program, the team will change to gang members.

Next three speakers. Matthew Compton, Rain Mendoza, Miran Tomajan.

Right, I'm not even gonna bother to introduce myself. Y'all know who I am at this point. I just wanna say that you guys are really fucking scared of the Coach Royale people and it's fucking shameful that you guys decided to cut it to one minute. Including you, Jesse. The Azoles are sitting right there and they saw your bullshit. They canvassed for you and they supported you and you spent time with them and they just saw your bullshit. You decided to call us sellouts or paid actors, as you said, on January 26th. Well, I have you fucking know that none of us in CSO are paid to do this. We do this for free. We're here because it's right and just to hold killer cops accountable. That's a basic fucking thing, dude. I work at an Amazon warehouse, 9 p.m. to 5.30 a.m., busting my fucking ass, and you sit up here in your fancy-ass fucking suit and decide to call us sellouts. Well, fuck you, dude. You're a fucking piece of shit, and you're a fucking ass.

Next three speakers, Rain Mendoza, followed by Mehran Tomajan and Joey L.,

Es una desgracia lo que ustedes están haciendo. No voy a dejar que ustedes defamen a los residentes de Coattrail. Es una mentira que ellos están amenazando a city staff or personnel. Los únicos crímenes que están aquí son los de Kingsley Corporation. ¿Qué no entienden de eso? Una vez más señalaré a los casos en que ustedes, el Consejo, se tomó medidas contra la propiedad privada. El Consejo Municipal presionó, multó y demandó el centro en el 2021 debido a un encampamento de personas sin hogar que se había instalado en su propiedad privada. Ustedes obtenieron una orden y sacaron a la gente sin hogar así de rápido. Your time is up, ma'am. Your time is up, ma'am.

Ma'am, thank you, your time is up.

Ma'am, your time is up. Your time is up, ma'am. Thank you very much.

Your time is up, thank you.

It's a disgrace that you guys are talking against the people that were living there when in reality the only people that are corrupt and that are doing all the damages is Kinsley. Once again, I would like to remind you about the cases that you have supported here. from back in 2021 when there was an encampment you right away in the because it was an encampment on private property right away those people were kicked out immediately it was unjustified and now the only person that is doing wrong here the only thieves are kingsley and as you can see right now i'm trying to see and help people next three speakers miran tamajan joey l and connie major

Good evening, honorable mayor and council members. I'm here on to imagine government affairs liaison of the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce here testifying in strong opposition to agenda item 20 is representative of Santa Ana's business communities. Santa Ana Chamber is deeply concerned about the impact this proposed ordinance will have on local small businesses, working families and the overall economic health of our city. 95% of companies in Santa Ana are small and mid-sized. Many of our Chamber members are family-owned businesses working for the overall health of our local economy. We cannot afford policies that exacerbate operational costs in an already difficult economic climate. Small businesses are more than storefronts. They are employers, community partners, and neighborhood anchors. Increased operational costs will threaten the ability of businesses to continue making those important community contributions. For these reasons, I respectfully oppose Agenda Item 20. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Next three speakers, Joey L., Connie Major, and Irma Dregui, sorry.

Hello, I am here standing in front of you, a part of the CSO Immigration Committee to amplify the voices of the members of the city facing threats to their safety and facing verbal harassment from Kingsley Management, as you heard from the families directly. The gluttonous are here. Let me just actually seek from the heart. It's actually crazy, because we come to you to look for answers, and I think the disbelief of that nothing can get done is actually gonna fuel this movement a little bit more, because the people deserve to live in their homes. We talk about displacement, we talk about homelessness issues here in Santa Ana, and we're coming to you before the issue even arises, so please let these residents Or listen to the residents to at least problem solve a solution. Don't tell us that you won't do anything. At least try to do something. These people have worked hard to live in their homes and they should stay living in their homes. Thank you.

Next three speakers. Connie, followed by Irma and Dale Helvig.

Good evening, Council. Connie Major. wishing it was noon and I was sitting in a park. I'm here about item 24, park land available in Washington Square. The city is so park poor, that this is an opportunity not to pass up. Please keep the money for the park in the budget when you're looking at 24 tonight. Secondly, new topic, the train station in Santa Ana. I frequently take the train from San Diego back home here, and at the train station now, the lighting on the elevators do not work. You do not know if the elevator is going to work or not. You're standing there pushing the button over and over. There's no lights on the button. There's no lights on the triangle. There's no lights. There is lights for safety. But is the machine working? You can't tell. So I just want to put that in to somebody down there in maintenance. Get on the elevators. Thank you.

Good evening, Council. I'm Irma Haraghi. I think everybody knows me and I know everybody. I hope you're having a great evening. I am here to support the PAL program. Everybody has talked about it, so I'm not going to repeat that. What I'm going to be focusing in on is the efficiency and the use of the dollar for the program, because that one dollar that you're spending on the PAL program, it has a multiplier effect between the the authorities and the coaches and the children and the community. When you have a positive community and you heard nothing but fabulous things, you have a society and children that grow in a positive atmosphere, supported, surrounded, protected, encouraged for a better future, a better tomorrow. Those are our future citizens. So when you have a program that's so successful, cutting that off, is cutting yourself at the throat because you're now allowing other forces that are negative or possibly negative because some children are in bad neighborhoods and the parents here have a lot of peace of mind. So I strongly encourage you. Thank you. Irma, your time is up.

Next three speakers, Dale Helvig, Mai Do, and Carl Benninger.

GOOD EVENING, MAYOR, CITY COUNCIL, CITY STAFF. SUPPORT THE FUTURE, SUPPORT POWELL. INVEST IN THE FUTURE, SUPPORT THE WORK THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE TO GET WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK PUT IN. A proposal that I've heard about putting vending carts in the parks for sailing products. I think the park should remain open space for parks. I appreciate item 19 coming forward to you tonight. I hope you approve it for the grant money to improve Park Santiago. I'M ALSO OPPOSED TO ITEM 20. I THINK THE CITY SHOULD NOT BE IN THE BUSINESS OF DICTATING WHAT PRIVATE COMPANIES SHOULD BE DOING. I THINK THAT'S THEIR JOB FOR THE COMPANIES TO DECIDE. THAT'S BETWEEN THE UNION AND THE COMPANY. IT SHOULDN'T BE THE CITY'S JOB TO DECIDE WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. THANK YOU.

Good evening, my name is Mai Nguyen Do. I'm the Research and Policy Manager at the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice. Incidentally, I'm also Council Member Becerra's constituent. The Harbor Institute is a proud co-sponsor of AB 1537, which is why we're also supporting agenda item number 23 and urge you to move forward with it. We know that ICE is really desperate to recruit more deportation agents, and it's spending millions of dollars across California markets. And as agenda items 22 and 23 suggest, there currently is a loophole in state law that enables local law enforcement to take side jobs with ICE. There's something preventing that. Now, agenda items 22 and 23 kind of beg the question of the scope of the issue, right? And AB 1537 would provide us the ability to gain transparency to be able to answer that question. So really, AB 1537 is about transparency, it's about accountability, and we hope you move forward with agenda item number 23, also to strengthen the work you're trying to do through agenda item number 22. Thank you.

Carl Benninger, Kathy Akonlis, Diana T.

Good evening, Council. I'm wearing my, it's not burnt orange, but Orange County soccer is coming this Saturday to Eddie Westfield. What a great thing for Santa Ana. Please come out and enjoy, and yours truly will bring the scoreboard and time clock there on it. Also, Comlink, June 25th, we're recognizing neighborhood heroes and most beautiful yards, and the yards are beautiful. I've seen them myself. Number three, vote no on issue 20. Well intended, however, these always tend to backfire on wage increases and what have you, have always resulted in less people being employed, not more. And let local businesses run their businesses on it. On budget, please do not cut PAL. I think it's very valuable for what it does for the city. Also, we need cameras along the bike trail in Alton, help improve the safety. Look at how much money we're spending on different celebrations as is there. And in closing, we need to work on- Carl, your time is up. Thank you.

Kathy Akonlis, followed by Diana T and Vern Nelson.

good evening my name is katya canlas organizing director for the orange county labor federation we represent 97 unions and 270 000 union members in orange county i urge the council to support staffing requirements at self-checkout lanes grocery corporations continue to prioritizing profits and cutting labor costs by replacing good jobs with self-checkout systems while workers are left overstretched and customers are left without help they need Workers should not be expected to monitor multiple lanes at once while dealing with safety concerns for selected customers and increased stress on the job. At the same time, older adults, people with disabilities, and many community members are being forced to navigate systems that are not accessible or user-friendly. It should support people, not replace them.

Diana T followed by Vern Nelson and Michael Burren.

Hi, I'm here with the CSOC Immigration Committee. I think it's a shame that you guys are trying to slander the Coach Royal residents and saying that they're threatening city staff. We have a video that shows that during their hearing, city staff was trying to put hands on them and trying to push out their supporters, which is their right based on the RSO. So it's your city staff who's putting hands on them first and trying to push people out of their hearing, which is their right. Secondly, this is a sanctuary city and during that hearing a DHS vehicle showed up outside of the building and that's a shame that these residents have to feel that fear while trying to fight for their rights. You guys keep telling them to sue Kingsley to submit their petitions and do this and that on an individual basis. What we're asking is for this to be treated as the systemic issue that it is. Everywhere that Kingsley is across the country, these issues are happening. It will not be solved by an individual lawsuit. So shame on you guys for doing absolutely nothing. Please stand with the presidents of... Diana, your time is up. Fuera Kingsley! Fuera Kingsley!

Next three speakers. Vern Nelson, Michael Burren, Guadalupe Baragon.

I'm Vern from Tenants United Anaheim. We really like what you have here with your rent control ordinance and we're collecting signatures ourselves to have something like that for ourselves. But when we heard what's been happening in Coach Royal, we thought, how can this be possible in Santa Ana? Doesn't the RSO protect these people at all? We're talking about dozens of families evicted by Kingsley on flimsy pretexts, many of them made homeless. We're talking about illegal $700 space rent hikes that families can't keep up with and which should fall under the RSO's purview. We're talking about Kingsley not allowing evicted residents to sell their own homes. And we're talking about home theft on an industrial scale. Dozens of mobile homes, each representing the life savings of a family, seized unjustly by Kingsley property that hadn't spent a penny for it. Home theft is Kingsley's business plan. I want to thank the members who tried to give us three minutes and were disappointed in the ones that gave us only one. Justice Bernoulli.

Vern, your time is up. The next three speakers, Michael Burin, Guadalupe Barragan, Sylvia Ayala. Michael. Guadalupe Barragan, Sylvia Ayala, and Julie Herrick.

Again, we see each other's faces. How sad to present ourselves like this again. What you just said, Valeria, that we harass the park, we are the ones who have been exploited. I hope you have proof of everything you just said right now, accusing my family. You know me and we are working people. Yes, we are angry because they are stealing the houses. Ellos son los que nos toman fotos. Mira, todos los días están tomándonos fotos, explotándonos. Ellos son los que nos acosan a nosotros. A esta señorita, la supuesta abogada de aquí de la ciudad, dice que nosotros dimos nuestros derechos. Su tiempo ha terminado. Your time is up, ma'am. Señora, your time is up. Your time is... Sí, Valeria Mezcua, estoy hablando contigo. Tú, si tienes que...

Valeria, I'm telling you, if you're supposed to be saying all these things, do you have proof for all of that? We never gave up our rights. We never gave up our rights. These are the people that are stealing. They are stealing our homes. We never gave up any of our rights. And the attorney, the supposedly city attorney that we have right here, she's saying that we gave up our rights. We didn't. What happened was that there was no maintenance in the park. And this is not what's happening, and it's them. It's them that are taking pictures of us. We're not taking pictures of them. And I would like to have a meeting with you so that you can sustain all of the things that you are saying to us, that you are telling us that they took our homes, not us.

Sylvia Ayala, followed by Julie Herrick.

It's all of them. I don't have a reason to accuse anyone of being in the unit. The only person I can accuse is the manager. I don't know. Su tiempo ha terminado.

I guess my name is Melissa. Today I am here to tell you about the people that I'm being accused. I'm being accused that I'm going to sue people. I'm not going to sue anybody. I have nobody to accuse. People are accusing me. They're accusing me of leaving the unit. I'm not accusing anybody in any unit. The only person that I can complain about is the manager and the attorney. The attorney, of course, yes, the attorney, because... LACK OF RESPECT. I DON'T HAVE ANY LACK OF RESPECT TO PEOPLE YOU KNOW US. WE'RE NOT THOSE KIND OF PEOPLE. WE DO NOT DISRESPECT PEOPLE BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, THE STAFF, THEY ACTUALLY HAVE STOLEN OUR HOMES AND AT THIS TIME THEY ARE COMPLETING. BUT IF YOU KNOW WHAT, WE'VE COMPLAINED SO MANY TIMES AND NOTHING IS BEING DONE. IF YOU CANNOT TAKE THE PACKAGE, IF YOU CANNOT TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY, THEN LEAVE THOSE SEATS.

Hi, my name is Julie Herrick and I live in Ward 3 and I'm here today to stand in solidarity with the residents of Cote Royale and to demand that the city treat this as the systemic problem that it is and to stand with Santa Ana residents who've had their homes stolen by Kingsley. And while I'm here, I'd also like to ask you to expand the no side jobs for ICE to include city employees and contractors, thank you.

Mayor and City Council, that concludes the public speakers that are present. We'll now begin with the Zoom speakers. Speakers on Zoom, when unmuted, please announce your name and the ward or neighborhood that you reside in within the City of Santa Ana for the record. Pocha Pena, please unmute and make your comments.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Well, greetings to the City Council and staff. I'm Sandra Pocha Peña Sarmiento, the former neighborhood leader for Pacific Park Eastside, also the lead artist on the Panache History Walk on the Pacific Park Trail. We have an opportunity today to reaffine funds, Justin, for POW over to Parks and Rec to make use for community services. senior center, teen youth center, which we don't have. And dollar for dollar, if you compare, Funds and Prestige, Parks and Rec, serve over four times the amount of youth and seniors. Remember, you can only sign up for PALS if you're under 18 years old. If you have a problem with your youth and they're 10, they're 15, you can't get into PALS. So we really need Parks and Rec and our resources to go and be used by all of our residents. seniors, all of our youth, and our parents. Not just limited to a small tiny group that is fostered and promoted by the FDA.

Pocha, your time is up. Next speaker on Zoom, Victor Payan. Please unmute and make your comments.

as a pacific park resident who worked with community leaders to save the cypress street fire station from being sold to a private developer in 2022 i am writing strongly to say that no funds be allocated for the buildings used to pal as this was not the use that was requested by the community and none of the uses for the building that the community did identify in 2022 and which we did present to the city were considered when the city voted these uses were identified as a digital library a community technology center educational programs for youth and adults. None of these were considered by the staff or the city. It's a shame to see the Santa Ana Police Department use their resources and deep pockets to crush community efforts. They already have a facility in Public Park in the Roosevelt Walker Community Center. It's horribly underutilized. It's empty. And I was told by staff that a computer center was displaced so they can go in there. And last time I looked in their space, it was empty and all they had was WITH CONSTRUCTION PAPER AND CRAYONS. WE DON'T NEED THAT. WE NEED COMPUTERS, INTERNET, AND RESOURCES FOR ALL AGES. SO I'M INCLUDING MY COMMENT THAT I SENT AN E-MAIL, MY AUGUST 1622 COMMENTS TO SHOW WHAT WE SAID.

TIM JAMES, PLEASE UNMUTE AND MAKE YOUR COMMENT.

Tim James, California Grocers Association. On behalf of Santa Ana Grocers, we are extremely disappointed that you've ignored and failed to recognize Santa Ana Grocers in your consideration of the self checkout regulation. The fact there has been a complete lack of communication with grocers leading up to the initial hearing and going into tonight is inexcusable. There is no conceivable way you can make a fair and informed decision tonight. You have intentionally and actively chosen to only hear one half of the issue. It has been proven with data that in Long Beach and Costa Mesa, this ordinance does not deliver on any of its promised results and has many negatives. especially the four claims that UFCW made this evening, they are simply not true. Ignoring grocery while regulating them is shameful. It has shown us again that reasonable policy discourse is not an option here. Our ask is for you to not move forward with the second reading. Tim, your time is up.

Mayor and City Council, that concludes the public speakers that were in the queue when we began.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, I appreciate that. We're gonna go through the consent calendar items, and then we're gonna take a five-minute break so council can take care of some personal bathroom. And then at this time, Madam City Attorney, would you like to make a comment, ma'am? Mayor, if I may, just quickly, I know we have a lot of- Can you speak loudly into your mic, please?

Yeah, I'm so sorry. If I may, to the Mayor, Council, and members of the public, I know we had very passionate comments tonight on several issues, but I just wanna address the issue with the Coach Royale situation. because it is just not true that the city isn't doing anything. I think whenever we speak in absolutes, it leads to distrust and it leads to inaccuracies. So the city is currently working under its ordinance, adopted by the voters, to do what we can under the ordinance. That's one piece of the puzzle. The second... The second, and this is exactly what I'm trying to tell you. I've offered to meet with some of the residents. Mr. Morales in particular did reach out to me and I sent him a condolences email. I offered to meet him at any place he wanted to meet to discuss the issues because I do so respectfully. I would like to thank several of the speakers tonight who came forward and really heartfelt shared their concerns with us. We are concerned. For anyone to believe that the city would not do what we can possibly do just doesn't understand how we function. To have someone come forward, again, my case in point, I could take this video and everyone would understand. My case in point is that we understand the law, we are the ones that understand how to enforce the ordinance. I have personally reached out to attorneys, because I know a lot of them in Orange County, and I have explained to them the situation in hopes that we would find a civil attorney who might bring a class action lawsuit against Kingsley. So I just tell you, we are doing what we can do, but the city cannot bring a civil action to tell Kingsley to stop. That is not within our jurisdiction or purview. Yes, we're a charter city, but anyone who understands municipal law would understand that the California Constitution gives us power to regulate in the area of police power. It doesn't give us an absolute hammer to go after a private entity in these situations. If we had that authority, I want the council to know, if we had that authority, I would be giving you the options for what we could do civilly. I would do that. I will do everything in my personal power to continue to reach out to private civil attorneys to see if they might take these cases for them. I've been doing that. I've made an offer to meet with these folks personally. And to date, no one has contacted me to say, I'd like to sit down with you respectfully and show you documents and go over these things. But what we have done is we followed our ordinance Everyone who's filed a petition, they are entitled to a hearing and those things are being processed. So again, I just wanna leave the community to know if members of this mobile home park, whether they're former or current, want to sit down and have a conversation, respectfully, I will make myself available.

Thank you, Madam City Attorney. At this time, we're going to go to the consent calendar items 5 through 20 are before us. Council Members, please announce any items that you'll be abstaining from due to conflict. If there are any requests to pull an item from the consent calendar for further discussion, please state that.

Mayor, I'll make a motion to approve the consent calendar. Second.

Thank you. Are there any items that any Council Member, please raise your mic if you'd like to pull an item. Yes. Council Member Phan. Yes.

I'd just like to recuse myself from item number 17 as All-American Asphalt is a client of my employer, Rattan and Tucker. Thank you.

Thank you.

Madam Mayor?

Yeah, hold on. I'm coming over there again. Anything on this side? No? Okay, perfect. Councilman Hernandez?

I just have a brief comment for item 17.

Then you're pulling item 17?

Yes.

Thank you. There's a motion to approve the items. There's a second. Let's prepare to vote, please.

Motion by Mayor Pro Tem Peñalosa, seconded by Council Member Becerra, to approve consent calendar items number 5 through 20, with the exception of item 17, pulled for separate discussion and consideration, and items 6 and 8 that were postponed. Thank you. All the items passed include the item 20, correct? So this would be for items five through 20 with the exceptions of items six and eight, which were postponed and item number 17, which is pulled for separate consideration and discussion. And the vote is seven ayes, no nays with a reported recusal. that will be taken care of and the item is pulled. Great, thank you. Thank you.

At this time, we're gonna go to item 17. Actually, Mayor, we do have the one oath of office. Oh, I apologize. Let's do this first and then we'll do the oath of office, okay? So we'll take care of it really quick.

Okay.

Yeah, we'll take it. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Go ahead.

Thank you. I just want to thank members of the community who came out to today's council meeting. I pulled this item just because I wanted to thank the city manager's office and our public works department as well. This is a remaining stretch of rate that has not had completed construction. Since we saw the streetcar come to Artesia Pilar, we saw many of our streets renovated.

Now. Can you speak louder so we can all hear you please?

Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor. I was just thanking our City Manager's Office and Public Works because this contract before us will complete Raitt Street from Washington. And Mr. City Manager, could you tell us what the end of the construction path will look like? It'll begin from Washington and I believe it'll go down to McFadden, is that correct? St. Gertrude. St. Gertrude, so even further. I'm very supportive of this item and I'll put a motion on the floor to move this item.

I'll second. Let's prepare to vote, please.

Motion by Councilmember Hernandez, seconded by Mayor Emescua, to approve the recommended actions for item number 17, inclusive of a construction contract to All-American Asphalt, project cost analysis, amendment to the CIP program, appropriation adjustment, and CEQA determination. Councilmember Hernandez?

Yes.

Vote is six ayes, no nays with a recorded recusal by Council Member Fan, motion carries.

Thank you, that's the end of the consent calendar. We're gonna take exactly a five minute break because we have a lot to get through today. Could you do the oath of office before that? I apologize. Go ahead, Madam City Clerk, I'm sorry.

Is Ben Salazar here? Okay, if you could please come forward for your oath of office.

I, Ben Salazar, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I'm about to enter. Thank you very much.

So item six was pulled, Madam City Clerk. I just want to be clear. Item six was pulled and item eight. The only one that we're moving forward on is item seven. Is that correct? That is correct.

Item six and item eight were postponed to a later date.

Perfect. Thank you very much. At this time, I'm going to take a five-minute break.

Bye. Thank you. you Thank you.

Mayor, you're ready if you would like to reconvene.

Thank you so much, Madam Clerk. We're gonna go into the public hearing at this time. Before the public hearing, do we have a quorum? Yes, we do. Before the public hearing, item number 21, Madam Clerk, please provide instructions to the public who would like to make a comment on this public hearing item only, please.

Yes, members of the public joining us by way of Zoom or conference call who would like to make a comment for public hearing item number 21 only, which is the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan and the 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan, please dial star 9 from your phone or select raise hand from Zoom now. Speakers will be called once the public hearing is opened. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Item number 21 is a public hearing relating to the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan, the 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan. I don't believe we have a, we need a presentation. The City Council, you're good? Is there a motion?

I'll make a motion to move the item.

I'll second.

Mayor, if you will please, you do have to open the public hearing first. Oh, I'm so sorry. I apologize.

Before the motion. I'm so excited to get to the budget.

I apologize.

I know.

But we want to make sure we do this procedurally correctly.

Okay, are there any questions by the council presentation? Hearing none. No. I now open the public hearing for members of the public that would like to provide their comments in person and virtually. Madam City Clerk, do we have any speakers?

Mayor and City Council, we did not receive any e-comments related to public hearing number item 21, nor are there any in-person or Zoom speakers to speak on behalf of this public hearing.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. With no further comments, I hereby close the public hearing. Do any council members have additional comments or questions? Seeing and hearing none, is there a motion and a second?

I'll make a motion to move the item. Second.

There's a motion and a second. Let's prepare to vote, please.

Motion by Councilmember Hernandez, seconded by Councilmember Vazquez to adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Santa Ana adopting the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan for the City of Santa Ana and adopt a resolution of the City Council of the City of Santa Ana adopting the 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan for the City of Santa Ana. Councilmember Vazquez. Vote is six ayes, no nays with the absence by Mayor Pro Tem Penalosa. Motion carries.

Thank you, at this time we're going to end the public hearing. And we're gonna go to council member requested items. Is that correct, Madam Clerk? Item number two is requested by myself, the mayor, and Councilmember Becerra. And let me just cover a little bit of it, and I'll turn it over to Councilmember Becerra as well. So just to be really brief, or just, I mean, we'll go into detail, I'm sure, if we need to. To discuss and consider directing the city manager and the city attorney to reaffirm Santa Ana Police Department policy, and I will say reaffirm Santa Ana Department policy, to prepare an ordinance to codify the prohibition of immigration-related secondary employment. As the state of California considers numerous bills to regulate secondary employment of law enforcement officers as it relates to immigration enforcement, we believe it is imperative to act and we cannot wait for the state. Various Assembly and Senate bills seek to disqualify a person from being a peace officer based on employment and immigration enforcement. As a charter city, we want to exercise the maximum ability that a charter city allows and codify language in the Santa Ana Municipal Code that protects residents and ensures that police officers are not employed in immigration enforcement. Santa Ana Police Policy 1021 requires written approval from the chief of police and human resources for outside employment. The requested legislative action will establish language within the Santa Ana Municipal Code prohibiting secondary employment of Santa Ana police officers related to immigration enforcement. This action and future approval by the city council reaffirms the city's commitment to public safety and our community's public trust. As you can see for the council that's up here, the local law enforcement standards The City of Santa Ana maintains rigorous hiring and training standards for its police officers consistent with and often exceeding those established by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. These standards include comprehensive background investigations, psychological and medical evaluations, strict disqualifying criteria under California Government Code 1029 and 1031, and additional local requirements including enhanced screening and qualifications. That's what makes Santa Ana PD so unique and one of the best departments in the country is that because we go above and beyond when we are hiring people to work as officers in our city. Secondary employment and policy alignment, the proposed legislative action will codify that the Santa Ana Police Department does not permit secondary employment arrangements that conflict with city policy or undermine community trust. This includes employment with federal immigration enforcement agencies such as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This position is consistent with the city's longstanding commitment to community-oriented policing and compliance with state laws governing the separation of local and federal immigration enforcement functions. Santa Ana is a diverse, densely populated urban community with a significant immigrant population. Maintaining clear boundaries between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement is critical to ensuring that all residents feel safe reporting crimes, accessing services, and engaging with public safety personnel. The ordinance will reinforce the city's commitment to public safety through trust-based policing, transparency in law enforcement practices, and alignment with state legislative efforts to clarify permissible conduct for a peace officer. Recent Santa Ana Police Department sworn hiring data reinforces the importance of maintaining clear, locally controlled hiring and outside employment standards. From 2023 through 2025, Santa Ana PD hired 86 sworn personnel, 47 officers from the academy, 12 ladder officers from other law enforcement agencies that were not ICE agencies or any agencies of that nature, and 27 military veterans. Reflecting the recruitment process that draws from trained public safety and service backgrounds while still requiring local review, approval, and compliance with city standards. Importantly, Santa Ana reported zero, let me say that again, zero sworn hires from the Department of Homeland Security during that time period, codifying a prohibition on immigration-related secondary employment would therefore align the Santa Ana Municipal Code with existing local practice, strengthen public confidence in Santa Ana PD's community policing mission, and provide clear direction that city police officers may not accept outside employment that conflicts with Santa Ana's public safety values or community trust. Councilman Becerra.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. So this item came from a conversation the mayor and I were having about how ridiculously ill-trained ICE had become since cuts were made to their training at the beginning of 2025. The cuts eliminated more than 100 hours dedicated to hands-on instruction and practice scenarios, including half the hours once spent on firearms training. Fitness training was almost entirely cut, as some of the videos online show. Numerous hours of classroom learning were eliminated on such topics as case processing, ICE officers' legal authority. Our police officers here in Santa Ana are some of the highest trained law enforcement officers. We do not need ill-trained individuals thinking that the Santa Ana Police Department is even a remote option. But what we also don't want, and through this item we want to make very clear, is that we also do not want our officers to have any secondary employment with any immigration-related enforcement. There is PD policy in place. that requires written approval from the Chief of Police and Human Resources for any outside employment. This item, though, would strengthen that policy by also placing that policy within the Santa Ana Municipal Code with the added prohibition, though, on immigration-related enforcement. We believe it is imperative to act now to maintain and enhance our community's trust in our police officers. We cannot wait for the state, and this item shows that as a charter city, we don't have to. So I want to thank Mayor Mezcua for her work on this item because her many years of experience in law enforcement were very helpful as we were deliberating, trying to make sure that what we brought forward was relevant and implementable. So thank you for that, Mayor, and I hope my colleagues will be in support of this so that we can get to work, get this ordinance drafted, and get this codified as soon as possible. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Before I open it for any comments from the council, Chief, can you just cover very briefly, our officers go through the Orange County Sheriff's Regional Training Academy, and there's a total of post hours are 568 hours, sir. We give them an additional 336 hours of training. Can you cover that just briefly, please?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. So our officers attend the Orange County Sheriff's Academy, and POST has a minimum requirement of what requires a peace officer, and it's in that range of 568 hours. Not only do at the Sheriff's Academy they get an additional 320 hours, but with all the testing and review and scenario-based training, which is critical to learning, they get approximately 1,000 hours of training during the police academy, which far exceeds a minimum from POST.

Thank you, and Chief, also to have outside employment, there's multiple layers that they must go through, is that correct?

That is correct, they gotta go through multiple layers of approval, all the way up the chain of command, all the way through me, through the city manager, and that's for any employment that may conflict or compromise the city or the trust of our community.

And my final question is that federal ICE agents are not POST certified, is that correct?

That is correct, they're not governed by California POST.

Therefore, we would not hire them, and we would not allow our officers to go work for them as well.

Not as a secondary employment, no.

Thank you very much. Are there any questions or comments by the Council? If not, Mr. City Manager, there was a request by the community about other departments. If you could come back with that, that may be an issue that you need to discuss with the unions, with SEIU, because I don't want to bring that on if there's an issue that we need to meet with our unions prior to. But because the Santa Ana Police Department, there is a policy already in place, we're codifying this now at this time.

The city hall has a typical policy. Any outside employment has to be approved by HCC directors, HR, and the city manager's office. So we can look to expand and include in this codification all city employees.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Council Member Vasquez.

Thank you, Mayor Mescoff, for bringing this forward. I'm going to support this item, and I also would like to include, as the mayor just mentioned, any city employee as well to add to make sure that the trust of the public is within the whole city. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Lopez? Yes, thank you. I'm happy to support this. I mean, my office supported about two months ago, 1537, when it was introduced. And so, again, I think this is going to be important, but codifying it to me does not necessarily do... You know, we can pass a lot of laws, but if we don't have teeth in our laws, they are not as impactful. And so I would like for the mayor to consider when this comes back, or supporting the request now, that when an ordinance does come back, that it also has language covering the coverage of not just direct employees with ICE and CBP, but also private contracts. and subcontractors engaged in immigration enforcement, coverage of volunteer and reserve arrangements, not just paid secondary employment, a clear enforcement mechanism, discipline, termination, and civil penalty where appropriate, application to all sworn personnel, including command staff and reserves, and to non-sworn SAPD employees with access to sensitive data, also application beyond the police department. I think it's important that this is applicable to all city employees and to entities that engage in services with the city, you know, that have contracts with the city. I think that that would be important in order for this to actually be able to protect and close this loophole that we're talking about here today. Thank you.

So thank you, did you have something, I just have a question. Council Member Lopez, when you talk about the loophole, so if you look at policy 1021 from Santa Ana Police Department, it's very clear about outside employment, and that's why I was asking city manager to bring back the information from the other unions in our city, right, so, but what loophole, and I was gonna ask that question with Council Member Vasquez's item, exactly what loophole, if you can be clear on that, please.

Yeah, we're talking about this because other state law does not necessarily say that current public employees cannot necessarily go out and be contracted, which is why it was introduced at the state level. And so I heard you clearly, I saw it in the staff report, that personnel here have to essentially come to you and say, hey, I'm looking for extra job for whatever reasons. And so this language that I'm asking to be introduced into the ordinance is so that it is not just for SAPD. I think it's fair to implemented citywide and also that it impacts the people that we do business with because I don't think that we want to sit here and say, hey, we want to protect our communities, but then engaged in contracts using their public dollars that ultimately turn around and support the abuses that we're seeing in our public streets.

Thank you for explaining that. So I just want to share, Mr. City Manager and Chief, the request to engage, actually Chief, request to engage in outside employment form per City of Santa Ana Municipal Code Section 916. So there's an employee information and then requesting permission to engage in outside employment with the following entities. So they must identify who they want to work for, whether it's a contractor, security, or ICE, for example. Is that correct, Chief?

That is correct.

And then I see here that it says request approval or request denied, request approved or request denied. And the first stop is where, sir? The sergeant or where is the first stop, sir?

It's usually at the command staff level. So it has the bureau chief approves or does not approve. And then it comes to me and then to the city manager.

So what Councilmember Lopez is requesting, it's already in place pretty much. I mean, if they come to you and say, we're going to contract, we're going to work for a contractor who's working for ICE on the side, the answer would be, sir?

Definitely no.

Okay, thank you, I just wanna make sure. Because it's here in the Santa Ana Police Department Addendum to Outside Employment Requests. It says that, I agree that I shall not become involved in any investigation of the City of Santa Ana, nor will I undertake representation of a party to any civil or criminal matters involved in the City of Santa Ana, or that are in conflict with the interest of the city of Santa or its police department. So for me, kind of broad, it's always a gray area. I read it and I say, okay, it's a conflict if they go work for ICE at any way, shape, or form, contract or outside entity. Is that correct?

That is correct.

Okay. So, yeah, I'm good with that. Are there any other comments? Councilman Hernandez.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'm fully supportive of the item. Mr. City Manager, thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Becerra. Thank you, Madam Mayor, and thank you, everybody, for your comments. My ask of the city manager would be just whatever comes back simple is better, and I appreciate Councilmember Lopez's comments of trying to make sure that we capture everything, but I think in saying immigration enforcement related, I mean, I don't think that we're saying only ICE. We're not saying only one. You know, we're not trying to create a narrow lane here. I think, if anything, the intent of this is to cast the net far and wide as far as anything related to immigration enforcement. Because, as I said earlier, the idea is to make sure that whether it is our PD or city staff, that the community has trust in them, that they aren't working against them.

Thank you, Council Member Fann.

I support whatever broadest ordinance you can bring back and look forward to making a decision on it. Thank you. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you, Mayor. I also just want to thank you both for bringing this item forward for the conversation. I'm overall supportive of this. I don't think anyone up here supports our, anyone in our city of Santa Ana, under our city of Santa Ana umbrella, whether it's PD or any other department, working in any way, shape, or form with immigration enforcement. I just, when this comes back to us, I'd like clarity on making sure that this is just not an overreaching, I would say, ban on anyone in our city. Is it... I guess the definitions of Department of Homeland Security versus Immigration and Customs Enforcement, just because I know that in the staff report that was submitted, under the statistical, I know up above it says Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but in the statistical hiring data and local control, it says... Santa Ana Police Department's sworn hiring data reinforces the importance of maintaining clear, locally controlled hiring. And then underneath it says, importantly, SAPD reported zero sworn hires from the Department of Homeland Security. I just want to make sure that under the Department of Homeland Security, we have the United States Secret Service, we have TSA, we have the U.S. Coast Guard, multiple different agencies that if... one of our officers or city employees wanted to get a second job working with TSA or the Coast Guard, to me, I wouldn't have an issue with that. It's the immigration enforcement that I would have an issue with. So making sure that there's clear definitions of what agency our employees can and cannot participate in or have a secondary employment. Because I know that there's Senate police officers that sometimes work together with the FBI for various reasons or whatnot. And I know that's not under the Department of Homeland Security, but... I know that there's just numerous different agencies that that could apply to. So making sure that when this does come back, it specifies, no, we don't want our employees working with immigration enforcement. So that would be the only comments that I would make.

Thank you, Mayor Procham. Thank you. Thank you. So Chief, just to clarify, when Mayor Procham states that Santa Police Department works with FBI, I believe those are on certain cases, task force, narcotics, home trafficking.

Yes, Mayor. That includes our task forces when we do join task forces to address certain crimes.

And ICE is not there, sir. Is that correct?

And ICE is not part of it or anything regarding immigration enforcement.

Right. And so the reason that the Coast Guard wasn't put in here, any military, because we do as an agency hire military veterans. Is that correct?

We do hire, but we also have when it comes to... peace officers and professional staff for that matter, that serve as a reservist in various military branches to include the Coast Guard.

That's correct, and so, but they still go through the post, California post training, is that correct?

Yes, and any peace officer in the state of California has to go to California post. Even if we hired a peace officer, let's say from Arizona, but they weren't HSI, but they were a peace officer, they would still go through our California post academy.

Yes, thank you, I proudly have a post number. I keep it framed in my house. So with that, I just really want to thank the Council up here for the support. And Council Member Becerra, thank you for joining me on this. And I want to leave you all with this. In 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement significantly reduced its training to new officers to accelerate hiring, cutting the program from 72 days to 42 days. So basically, that's all the training they were getting, which is not acceptable. The shortened curriculum reduced focus on the legal limits of force, firearms training, and constitutional law. And I would like to emphasize again, Chief, that we give over 1,000 hours of training. Is that correct, sir?

That is correct.

And if you look at the sessions within the training, you have weapons, active shooter, emergency management, officer safety, policing in the community, things of that nature. Is that correct?

That is correct.

And once again, I'll say that's why we are one of the best departments in the entire country. I'm biased.

Yes.

And with that, Chief, thank you so much for going to D.C. and speaking on behalf of Santa Ana, the city of Santa Ana, and representing as well and sharing with them how I think your quote was picking up the pieces after immigration or after ICE leaves our city. So with that, thank you. And I believe, Mr. City Manager, you have the support that we need. I want to thank the Council, Mr. Becerra. Councilman Becerra, anything? Thank you all very much. Let's move on to the next item. The next item is Councilmember Vazquez and Hernandez, item number 23. Councilmember Vazquez, go ahead.

Thank you, thank you Mayor for that last item. I wanted to propose that the city support AB 1537 by Assemblymember Brian, because public agencies should not serve as a pipeline to a career and family separation. We know ICE is desperate to recruit more deportation agents. It's even launched ads trying to recruit local and state law enforcement officers to join its ranks. And it's clear that we have a pretty troubling loophole in state law. Nothing prevents local law enforcement from taking a side job with ICE, and we don't have any state laws to help bring transparency to those who might be doing so. So AB 1537, we'll close the loophole. It's important that we advocate for statewide bill because we should do what we can regarding SAPD, but SAPD is not always the only law enforcement agency within our city boundaries. We should support AB 1537 to make sure that it's not just SAPD, but that anyone who's state or local law enforcement working in our city isn't using their free time to work as deportation agents. AB 1537 is about transparency, accountability, and fairness. I hope my council colleagues will join with me to move forward with the resolution supporting this important state bill. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Vestas, thank you so much, Council Member Hernandez. I do have a question. In here it states, when residents cannot distinguish between local police acting in their official capacity and those same officers working for ICE on the side, community trust is shattered, victims of crime become reluctant to report incidents, witnesses refuse to cooperate with investigations, and residents avoid seeking the public services they need. This creates a less safe community for everyone. So I just wanted to let you know that... In Santa Ana PD, even SWAT has changed their uniforms from all green. And Chief, can you cover that please, sir?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. So several years ago, we used to have black uniforms, and at some point they went to green, and then we switched back to blue to make us look a little bit more like our police department and not be confused with any other police department or to look that we were part of a county agency.

Basically, so you don't look like ICE, sir. I can say that up here.

Yes.

Or Border Patrol. Yes. So I just wanted to let you know, Councilman Vasquez, so yeah, it's important that, I don't know if you spoke to the chief or the police department, but I was very happy to see that our SWAT did change their uniform color so that they're not mistaken for ICE officers.

And that's awesome, and what this was alluding to was the same face, the same person.

Correct. No, no, I just want to be clear, because when we talk about the community, I don't want them to confuse Santa and PD with ICE officers.

And thank you, Chief, thank you for clearing that up, Mayor, and thank you, Chief, for doing that work.

Any other comments? I'm sorry, make them tie-dye? Mayor Pro Tem would like your uniforms tie-dye, sir.

I'll second that.

It's okay. We already have the autism patch, which I really love, so thank you very much. Councilman Becerra.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. And I just want to say I support the premise of the bill, but I would ask that we support it, but be contingent upon amendments made to the bill that don't limit officers from serving in our military reserves, because it sounds like it captures all of that. I don't, like with the last item, I don't want to have anybody working with immigration-related efforts, but working with the Marine Corps Reserves, the Air Force Reserve, or the National Guard, I'm not aware that that would involve immigration enforcement, but I think the way that the bill's written, it may encapsulate them as well. So one thing that we've done on this dais, because I think we're a little more sophisticated, we could support a bill, but again, upon some sort of amendments being made. And thankfully, Council Member Vasquez, by bringing this forward to us as early as you have, it gives some time because as it works through Sacramento, and it takes a lot longer to work through Sacramento than here, hopefully some of these amendments can be made.

Thank you for that, and I concur that we should not have allowed military to be taken off the list, so I appreciate your comments on that, and we should be hiring our military personnel into our police department.

Yes, they're well trained.

So my ask would be that we support this, but just contingent upon those amendments being made as it works its way through the process up in SAC.

Are you good with that? Perfect, all right, Councilman Hernandez?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I want to thank Council Member Ben Vasquez for his proactive leadership in making sure that this is an item that we addressed. I'm supportive of the item as it stands. I do also echo the sentiments of the community in that I would like to see this extend to all of our employees. I don't think that, I think there would be a dichotomy for people to work in Santa Ana, but also have the desire to work for ICE at the same time. I just don't think that that is something that, I think that that would be a contradiction to our very community. So I am thankful for Assemblymember Isaac Bryan for his due diligence with Assembly Bill 1537, and that'll conclude my comments, Madam Mayor, thank you.

Thank you. Mr. City Manager, I'm sure you're going to be watching the bill. I believe it's in suspense, or did it move already?

Suspense.

It's in suspense at this point.

We'll still prepare the resolution.

Correct.

So that it's there beforehand.

Great. And again, we will include our military. So I believe that was okay with Council Member Vasquez as we move forward. The entire council, we do not want to exclude our military at this point. So thank you. Mayor Patem?

Yeah, I just wanted to, for the record, voice my support of having this come back with Council Member Becerra's comments. taking into consideration and seeing, imagine this will come back at the next meeting or are we, no, just watching the bill, right?

We're looking 90 days because of the budget.

Yes, folks, it's the budget.

Both of these items will come back in 90 days. Wonderful. Because we need to get through the budget. That's what we're going to do a little bit tonight. Council Member Pham did look at me and say she supported it. Yes. All right. Council Member Lopez?

Yeah, this is what we just discussed seconds ago, just like a different level of government, right? And again, 1537, my office supported it back in March. I think it's a piece of legislation that has... real teeth. You're talking about disclosure requirements, post-de-certification as a penalty, and for public records access to secondary employment records. So that's something that I'm happy to hear our council supporting.

Great, thank you, Mr. City Manager, I think you're clear. Okay, we're good, let's move on now. All right, we're gonna get to the fun part now. Item number 24 is the City Council work study session regarding the fiscal year 26-27 budget. I believe all the council members, I hope, met with the city manager and staff and asked any questions so that we can... Actually, you know what, if you guys don't mind, can we do the special housing? So then we'll do the budget last. So we are recessing the City Council meeting and convening to the Housing Authority meeting. I hereby call the Housing Authority special meeting to order. Madam Secretary, please conduct the roll call. Authority Member Becerra?

Here.

Authority Member Hernandez?

Present.

Authority Member Lopez? Here. Authority Member Phan? Here. Authority Member Vasquez?

Here.

Vice Chair Penalosa?

Here.

Chair Meskwa? Present.

All seven members present. Thank you. Madam Secretary, do we have any speakers for items within the Housing Authority agenda?

We have no e-comments. We have no in-person speakers. Is there anyone on Zoom who wishes to address the Housing Authority agenda? Seeing none.

Does any authority member wish to make a motion?

I'll make a motion, Madam Mayor, to move the items.

I'll second. Authority members, cast your vote. And the city clerk will announce to display the roll call, please.

Motion by Authority Member Hernandez, seconded by Chair Emeswa to approve consent calendar items one through three of the Housing Authority. Authority Member Becerra? Yes. Authority Member Hernandez? Yes. Authority Member Lopez? Yes. Authority Member Phan? Yes. Authority Member Vasquez?

Yes.

Vice Chair Penalosa?

Yes.

Chair Emeswa? Yes. Vote is seven ayes, no nays. Motion carries on those three items.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. We're going to end this. and the Special Housing Authority and go back, it's adjourned, and reconvene to the work study session at this time. Mr. City Manager, the floor is yours.

Finance Director Alex Trinidad will consider, introduce our second study session and updating where we're at at this point.

GOOD EVENING, MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS. TONIGHT'S PRESENTATION IS A FOLLOW-UP FROM THE MAY 5TH BUDGET WORKSHOP. IT INCLUDES STAFF PROPOSED BALANCING MEASURES FOR FISCAL YEAR 26-27 BUDGET. THE DETAILED DRAFT BUDGET WAS POSTED ON THE CITY'S WEBSITE ON TUESDAY, MAY 12. TONIGHT IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU TO PROVIDE

Madam Clerk, can we get them to fix that, please?

Yes, we're calling up to the booth. You should be good to go, Director.

Tonight, it's an opportunity for you to provide additional input before the scheduled public hearing on June 2nd. So we'll begin with an overview of updates since May 5th discussion, followed up by an updated general fund summary and additional balancing measures incorporated into the draft 26-27 budget. We will also review proposed workforce changes, one-time spending recommendations, and a capital improvement program overview. And lastly, we will cover other miscellaneous budget related items and conclude with next steps in the budget process. So staff will now highlight the key changes made since May 5th budget workshop, including updates based on city council feedback and revised budget information. So the draft general fund budget is balanced. with recurring spending supported by recurring revenue. The draft budget avoids employee furloughs and full-time employee layoffs while continuing core city services and minimizing impacts to residents and employees. All other funds are also balanced within available resources. So this slide summarizes the draft fiscal year 26-27 general fund budget, including recurring and one-time resources. So the draft budget includes a combination of revenue adjustments, expenditure reductions, workforce changes, and other balancing measures that close the estimated budget deficit and balance the budget. The draft budget also maintains the city's required 18% general fund reserve After accounting for the proposed one-time spending and the contribution to the pension stabilization account, approximately $3 million in one-time resources remains available for City Council priorities as part of this budget discussion. As noted in the staff report, any revisions to the draft budget, including removing proposed balancing measures or adding new expenditures would require corresponding reductions or adjustments in other areas to maintain the balanced budget. So we'll review the major balancing measures and related budget adjustments in the following slides. So the draft general fund budget includes a combination of operational changes, fee adjustments, and cost recovery measures to help balance the budget. So the proposed changes include modifications to boards and commissions, elimination of certain fee subsidies, updates to stadium user fees, and the ambulance rate alignment with OSIMS rates. The budget also includes a proposed technology fee to support ongoing system costs, operational adjustments to contracted security services at City Hall, and elimination of Quartura printing costs as part of the broader expenditure reduction efforts. So the draft general fund budget includes approximately $13 million in balancing measures. As discussed during the May 5th budget workshop, staff initially identified approximately 8.4 million in balancing measures. Additional measures reflected in exhibit two increased the total identified amount by approximately 4.6 million. So a handout has also been provided summarizing the balancing measures discussed at the May 5th budget workshop and additional measures reflected in tonight's draft budget. So the balancing measures include departmental expenditure reductions, revenue and fee adjustments, workforce changes, and other citywide operational adjustments. As shown on the slide, after the police department, which operates on a 24-hour basis, public works and parks and recreation represent the second and third largest operating departments and therefore reflect larger balancing measures impacts. The draft general fund budget also includes supplemental budget requests that increase expenditures by approximately $610,000. But together, these adjustments allow staff to present a balanced draft general fund budget tonight while continuing to maintain the city's 18% reserve. The draft general fund budget includes the elimination of 20 vacant full-time positions across multiple departments, resulting in approximately 2.3 million in ongoing savings. The proposed reduction is primarily focused on vacant positions identified during the budget development process. So as noted in the footnote, staff expects to update the final budget to maintain funding for one of the police department positions and offset that change through additional part-time reductions. The draft general fund budget includes approximately $2.6 million in reductions to part-time funding across multiple departments. The estimated number of impacted part-time positions is shown on the table. The proposed approach is to first eliminate existing vacant part-time positions, then reduce additional positions as vacancies occur during fiscal year 26-27. As noted in the slide, the draft budget includes additional library and police reductions to maintain selected positions. The draft general fund budget includes the proposed dissolution of five non-mandated commissions as part of the city's balancing measures. So the proposal includes dissolving the historic resource commission, arts and culture, parks and recreation, Youth Commission, and the Environmental and Transportation Advisory Commission. Some responsibilities would transition to existing commissions or staff. A portion of the reported costs reflects staff time that will be redirected to other operational priorities and projects. While the prior slide outlined the proposed dissolution of select non-mandated commissions, so this slide highlights the boards and commissions that will continue to operate. So the proposed PAL program recommendation would shift resources away from the current after school and summer camp model and focus on services on programs that reach a larger number of children. So under the proposal, the after-school program and summer camp serving 87 children will be discontinued while athletic teams, mentoring, and coaching programs will continue. The proposal would also reinstate the lunchtime fitness program at four elementary schools serving approximately 2,200 children. The recommendation is estimated to reduce program costs by approximately $472,000. The Santa Anita and Sarpis facilities will continue to support community programming in partnership with Parks and Recreation, library services, and the police officer mentoring activities. So this slide provides examples of estimated per participant or per user cost for select city programs and services. The examples include the PAL cost savings per participant, historic registered subsidy costs per applicant, cultural printing costs per issue, employee appreciation lunch costs, excursion programs, and parking recreation programs. So these examples are intended to provide additional information as staff evaluates operational and funding adjustments and put it in the draft budget. So the following sections highlights one-time projects and funding options identified for City Council consideration as part of the 26-27 budget discussion. So as discussed during the May 5th budget workshop, staff identified several unfunded one-time needs for City Council consideration as part of the 26-27 budget process. So option one includes a proposed Washington Square Park land purchase totaling $4 million using a combination of general fund balance, A&D funds, and cannabis public benefit funds. If selected, staff would also evaluate a potential affordable housing opportunity at this site. Option two includes approximately $3 million in one-time investments across several projects, including improvements at Gabriel Park, additional lighting and cameras along the Alton bike trail, sidewalk maintenance, street lighting improvements, park improvements, and an additional pension trust contribution. The draft budget already includes $1.5 million in pension trust contribution. Option two would increase that to $2 million for fiscal year 26-27. So next, we'll provide a high-level overview of capital improvement programs, followed by a status update on active projects. So the draft fiscal year 26-27 capital improvement program currently includes approximately $25.3 million in proposed project funding across several categories. The largest category is street-related projects at approximately $21.1 million. followed by traffic improvements and city park facility projects. The capital improvement program includes a variety of street and sidewalk repair projects that are currently under construction or proposed as part of the draft fiscal year 26-27 CIP budget. So including improvements along the Warner Avenue within MacArthur Place business area. CURRENT ACTIVE PROJECTS TOTALING APPROXIMATELY $64 MILLION WHILE THE DRAFT 2627 CIP BUDGET INCLUDES AN ADDITIONAL $18.7 MILLION IN PROPOSED STREET AND SIDEWALK REPAIR PROJECTS. THESE PROJECTS ARE FUNDED THROUGH A COMBINATION OF GENERAL FUND AND NON-GENERAL FUND RESOURCES. IN ADDITION, THE ONE TIME SPENDING OPTION TWO INCLUDES ADDITIONAL $450,000 FOR SIDEWALK IMPROVEMENTS. THE CAP ROOM PROGRAM ALSO INCLUDES TRAFFIC, CALMING, PEDESTRIAN AND BICYCLE SAFETY IMPROVEMENTS THROUGHOUT THE CITY, INCLUDING PROJECTS ALL ON STANDARD AVENUE, MCFADDEN AVENUE AND SURE SHROOM AVENUE. THESE PROJECTS REPRESENT MORE THAN 10 MILLION IN ACTIVE AND PROPOSED IMPROVEMENTS AND ARE FUNDED THROUGH A COMBINATION OF GENERAL FUND AND NON-GENERAL FUND RESOURCES. IN ADDITION, ONE-TIME SPENDING OPTION TWO INCLUDES AN ADDITIONAL $600,000 FOR THE ALTON BIKE TRAIL PROJECT. Next, staff will highlight several additional budget-related items, outstanding items, and just next steps. Several additional budget-related items are also moving forward as part of the 26-27 budget process, including the quality of life custody vehicle with the existing funding, OC Pride funding, arts trust seed funding within the arts and culture budget, and funding included for negotiated increases for the part-time non-civil service compensation. The draft budget also includes funding for a proposed 12-hour ambulance unit following completion of the coverage study. Outstanding items include a proposed partnership with Santa Ana USD School Foundation for a book vending machine at a cost not to exceed $10,000, as well as a long-term planning related to the animal shelter cost. The next steps in the budget process include public hearing on June 2nd, and then June 16th would be the adoption meeting. Additional budget-related documents and updated materials would be presented as part of the June 2nd meeting, including the proposed ordinance related to commissions, the 10-year outlook, local sales tax spending plan, proposed CAPRA improvement program document, the proposed class and comp plan, Uniform Schedule of Miscellaneous Fees, AB2561, the Vacancy Reporting Requirements. The June 16 meeting is scheduled for final adoption and related approvals. So that concludes my presentation. The staff is ready for additional direction or questions Council may have.

Thank you so much, we really appreciate it. So Council, if you'd like to speak or ask any questions, please raise your mic so I can call on you. Yeah, Council Member Becerra.

Thank you, Mayor. I don't know who should answer this question, but regarding the Washington Square Park, so where are we at? So regardless of the budget, where are we at today? Let's just say we've already got the money in hand, we're ready to do something from the budgetary standpoint. Where are we with the purchase? negotiate with the property owner? Have we made an offer? Have we poked holes in the ground? Do we know if there's like a big toxic plume under there? Have we done any of the due diligence yet?

So other than two weeks ago when the city council as a majority provided direction to go look and to try to purchase the park, we have reached out. We have reached out to the property owners of the different parcels and have done the assessment of what the cost would be. Obviously, two weeks is not enough you know, dig, look for contamination, or any of that resources. But we have looked as far as, you know, assessing the value of the property, right? Obviously, we know the zoning of the property. And then the city, as far as our team is working on, will be the best option to try to allow for some level of investment to purchase the property, guarantee that the pricing at the level it is now, try to do a park, but also understanding that there's other priorities throughout the city. That's where we're at.

Thank you for that, Alvaro. I appreciate that. You know, I absolutely appreciate the advocacy that's been coming from Washington Square, whether it's in person or in our inboxes. I absolutely support a park in Washington Square. I would absolutely want to see one there. I'm just not comfortable with the path that we're on. And I say that because you're asking us to commit $4 million to a property owner. I don't know that we even want to purchase all the land. It's a very irregular shaped site. I think from a septic standpoint, I don't want us to have a park that kind of goes into these little corners. I would think we'd want something a little more conventional and rectangular. I have concerns with the appraisal. I have concerns with the fact that we're talking about buying land that has been appraised at the potential for residential development, knowing that we're not going to develop for residential, or at least the predominant majority of the site. So why would we pay that? Also, the last time I spoke directly with residents in Washington Square, Again, this is a little bit ago, a couple weeks back. They had told me that Director Garcia, they felt, or at least they understood that Director Garcia wasn't given the green light to even negotiate with the property owners. So I guess my concern is here we are talking about $4 million. We're already showing our cards. We're saying, hey, property owner, we're willing to possibly pay $4 million. To me, that's just a ridiculous way of trying to negotiate with somebody. And also, too, to Director Garcia's credit, when we were talking about the park at 10th and Flower, one of the things that helped us get a full park site that we are now creating the park on was that he was able to engage in land swap. He was able to use existing property that the city owned to be able to do such a swap. So that is something that I feel like should be flushed out before we start talking about whether we commit $4 million Again, I want the park to happen. If you come to us and you say, hey, we've got something where this could work, I'm for it. But to just blindly commit to it right now as is, as far as the way we're trying to fund it at this moment, I can't say that I'm supportive of it. Option two, as far as for the unfunded needs, unfunded one-time needs for consideration, we have items in here that benefit the entire city. We're behind in making Santa Ana a destination for tourists to stay and also leave their TOT behind in our coffers. We need to get serious about attracting hotels so that our residents who work in hotels don't have to travel to other cities for work, and we need to make it more attractive for tourists to stay here at our existing hotels. I don't have the answers to how we're going to do that, but I would sure love to get the experts on board who can do that. So that would be part of option two. We all talk about sidewalk maintenance. Well, here's our chance to show how serious we are. Here's where we can literally put our money where our mouth is. I'm very frustrated, though, with the way that the park is being presented to us. Again, there's a lot of unanswered questions, and I think that's just because there's a lot of eagerness. So I'm not mad. I'm just more, it's like, hey, we've got to temper ourselves. Let's do it the right way. Let's not run into the room and say we're ready to give you $4 million when we're We may not have to. There may be another way, and God forbid, we can negotiate a much smaller price. Option two has items that I think are spread throughout the city that are things that we need today. One thing I would like to amend, though, with option two, would be so I have a concern as far as when we were talking about with the police budget removing parking control officers and I understand that those are two positions that for a long time have not been filled and I respect that but so the police can't fill a position and now the community suffers that I'm not tracking that logic so if the police can't hire the parking control officers yet we have a contract for parking control then maybe we should augment the contract because I don't know about my colleagues, but I get a lot of calls because folks go through a lot of pain to get parking permit districts implemented. And then they say, well, you know what? What the heck did I do? Why did I even bother? Because nobody's coming to enforce the permits that they sought out. So I would like to propose as a possibility taking option two, and since you already say here that the draft budget includes a 1.5 million contribution to the pension trust, which I thank you for doing that, that's a very responsible thing to do, but maybe we take this additional 500,000, and two things I'd like to throw out there would be number one, somehow, someway augmenting the contract with parking controls so we can if we can't get the bodies on staff then let's at least go with the company that's already doing it that we've already retained and then taking also a portion of that 500,000 I know because parks are very important and I know council member Vasquez you had talked about Bristol and I believe it was Bristol and Wilshire was it correct? Bristol and Wilshire.

But he said he's going to support the part of Wilshire. Oh, I understand. I understand.

Well, I want to be clear on that. I understand. But what I'd like to propose.

So your time is almost up.

So I'll come back to you if you want to finish. Oh, no, no. I'm almost done. So maybe possibly we'll put Bristol and Wilshire. Maybe we can do like the initial, because looking at the site, it's dirt. So maybe we can put up some fencing, at least some landscaping as part of this $500,000.

It's already there. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Councilman Vasquez. Thank you. Let me come back to you. Councilman Vasquez, go ahead.

Council Member Becerra, let me go through this budget page by page so we're good. I'm good with the items that we're gonna dissolve a few commissions here. eliminate the historical register fee subsidies, increase stadium use fees, increase ambulance fees, technology fees, contract security reductions to be applied for by City Hall, eliminate cultura printing, I'm good with all the balancing measures that we have here across all the various departments. Thank you to all the departments for working with that. Eliminate vacant full-time positions. But I'm gonna, I'm just gonna push back a little bit and agree with the parking control officer, because in downtown Santa Ana, we could have one there. It'd probably pay for itself. I'm saying, it might pay for itself. Reduce part-time funding. Dissolve non-minded commission, something good with that. And I'm coming to the PAL program. And I'm okay to reduce the PAL program because the proposal says Santa Anita and Cypress facilities to be used in partnership between parks and rec and library with police officers mentoring. No kids are being thrown back to the street. We might even be able to get more kids in off the street because of the efficiency of the parks and rec and library, of the lower cost that we have in those departments. We pay our officers good, we pay them great, but we pay them an exorbitant amount. As you can see, it's 5,000 per child. If you turn the page, 5,000 per child per year. and cost savings that we're gonna get for each one of them, and that's a lot less. Parks and Rec child programs are 103 per child, right? The library's probably the same, close to 103, while the PAL program's 5,000 per child. As far as items, the one time for consideration, I want a park, I'm like Council Member Reseta, we need a park. We have to make sure, have a real solid plan to be able to put this together and have a plan. So I'm looking forward to being creative in how we come to get the park. Everything on option two looks great. And thank you for making sure that we're still taking care of our streets, traffic, city, and parking facilities. I would like to see some more stuff on drainage. I'm not sure every neighborhood has great drainage. We have the floodings, but can we look at going back to this and looking at drainage and some lighting in some neighborhoods that we can have walk-arounds? Because I still think that's necessary in unsafe places. And that's all I have for now.

Thank you very much. Council Member Lopez, did you have something? Mayor Protab.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, city staff, for working really hard to get this to us and trying to do the best that you can. With the unfunded one-time needs for consideration, the hotel feasibility study that I submitted would be inclined to support because, like Council Member Becerra mentioned, it's just our constant need to try to attract tourism and generate revenue for this city to continue to pay the bills and keep the lights on. Do the city staff have a general idea of where in the city? Is this a specific location that you have that you have in your mind for a hotel feasibility study? Is a hotel feasibility study just a generic, let's see where in the city this would work?

Yeah. For us, it's literally contracting with the most capable consultant that would give us that. We already know what we have on Grand. And we know what we have on MacArthur and Main. So for us, it's literally looking throughout the city, what is the best course for us? I know we have also some on Harvard Street. So the idea for that is, you know, how do we do a best assessment on where would be something that would be more successful? You know, what do we do as far as new hotels as a possibility? And what we have was an assessment of what we have and what we can do better. So that's what it will be. It will be a very comprehensive detail. At least that's what we're thinking.

Okay. Thank you for that. And the reason I ask that is because I know that over the last decade, this city has contemplated and gone into serious conversations with having a hotel on Main and the 5 Freeway. fell and disappeared into the abyss. Third and Broadway, that has now potentially disappeared into the abyss as well as the YMCA. And every time that we've moved down this path to bring a hotel and build it in the city, I just don't see any real effort to aggressively move in this direction. So I would hate to now Invest another $100,000 in a feasibility study for a hotel that, like we've seen over the last decade with every hotel that we try to move down the path, it just falls through the cracks and we never see anything built. Go ahead.

Council Member, you're not wrong, right? We make the same type of frustration in that capacity. So we can only point out to at least to our last years of administration, right? Some of the focal points that you're seeing and we're exercising and we keep saying it, right? When you have Cypress allocated for funds, we're going to finish it this year. When you have lights in San Antonio for 20, some 30 years, we're going to have lights at the end of this year. Memorial Park, lack of completion. The dog park. Our first splash pad in Portola. We share that frustration. So I don't want to sound defensive, and I'm not trying to say that we're different in overall comprehensive capacity. But even at 3rd and Broadway, right, we brought the first update in closed session to literally discuss what can be done to expand that. So when, I'm proud to say that we've garnered a team in the city manager's office with Kat Downs, you know, from finance going to the city, assistant city manager to the eighth floor, with Mentai from development, you know, Celia, obviously, we didn't gather yes people, right? And so I think you're seeing that fruition as far as the projects we're completing. The Chinatown effort just this weekend, that was out three years ago. So I think we're moving in many directions. And so this is for us. We want to make sure that those 100,000 is feasible because we do agree with your point. We capture the same frustration. We don't want to make the same mistakes.

Thank you for that, City Manager. But I guess what I'm saying is instead of investing $100,000 in a feasibility study, would it not make more sense to just go to the triangle location on Main Street and the 5 Freeway and... Do we still own that property, or is it owned by, we don't, right? No, we do not. Okay, so.

For $2.5 million.

So because that work's been done, wouldn't it make more sense to, I mean, hammer down the property owner and be like, what is, because that lot's been now fenced up again for many years, so I guess, I mean, go ahead.

So that's not an idea that hasn't been vetted. So we are still trying to encourage the developer who had indicated the willingness to build. So the door has not completely closed. Okay. I can say that.

Good. Awesome. Thank you. With the option two that... For the number of listings for option two that we considered, the Cabrillo Park Restrooms and General Style Improvements, that's Ward 3. 18th and Jefferson Street, Ward 3. Aetna Park State Structures, Ward 3. Two streetlights at Harvey and the Carroll Cul-de-Sacs, that's Ward 4. Alton Bike Trail, that's Ward 4. So I feel like, again, we're also... ignoring huge swaths of the city that historically have been ignored, which is Ward 1, Council Member Phan's district. She often says it, for years it was considered the forgotten part of Santa Ana that nobody invested in. which we're improving that now. But again, residents in central Santa Ana, in western Santa Ana, oftentimes see these investments, these continued investments, even with deficits. Oh, north of 17th. Oh, south of Warner. I mean, they're the only areas of the city that seem to see these investments. While I love, would love to move forward with all of these, I see that they're... or centralized in one specific area. With the Washington Square Park, which is something that I'm super supportive of and I would want us to focus on entirely if we can, you mentioned multiple property owners. Is there more than one owner for this land?

I believe there's three.

There's three owners, okay. have we started any, and I know Council Member Becerra asked this, has this started any, have we started any conversations with any of them? Yes. Okay, because I know that this conversation for this park didn't start two weeks ago, again, but I know that the current administration has been moving forward with a lot of various different projects, but I would hope that we, so I have, And I've talked to you about this last week at our briefing. Potentially, if these parcels of land weren't available for a park, looking at the piece of land on Bristol Street north of the In-N-Out, I know that there's... And these are, again, I'm going through lists of one through five in priorities. One being preferred, which would be THESE PARCELS THAT ARE AVAILABLE NOW WITHIN THE WASHINGTON SQUARE NEIGHBORHOOD FOR A PARK. BUT NUMBER TWO WOULD BE OKAY LET'S LOOK AT CITY OWNED PROPERTY ON BRISTOL STREET. I KNOW THAT THERE'S SOME M2 FUND RESTRICTIONS TIED TO THOSE PARCELS BUT I FEEL LIKE WE WOULD HAVE MORE FLEXIBILITY IN BEING ABLE TO USE THAT LAND FOR A PARK FOR WASHINGTON SQUARE. And three and four, the less ideal for me is reaching out in good faith to our superintendent at the school district and seeing what kind of joint use agreement we could come up with either Wilson Elementary or Heroes Elementary because both of them have their open space available or backing up against the neighborhood where it would offer for easy access to residents during off hours. I know there's security concerns, but we could have legit conversations with them and say, hey, let us use this for the neighborhood after hours, before 10 p.m., we'll take care of all maintenance through, you know, half the maintenance. Have those conversations been had with the school district at all, Mr. City Manager?

Those conversations were had with the previous superintendent. We haven't engaged in new conversations with the current superintendent. So we can do that.

And I'm listing all of these in level of desire for me. Again, one would be to acquire that land for $4 million and move forward with a park. Two would be shifting over to Bristol. And third and fourth would be reaching out to the school district about potentially having a legit joint use agreement within the neighborhood for a park usage to increase that open space. And obviously the land swap, I brought it up two weeks ago. I would hope that we really, really consider that. I know that, again, a lot of the land that the city owns is also tied to M2 funding and we have restrictions on that. But I think there's some flexibility there that we could and just be creative about and, and come up with the cell phone tower antennas that are throughout our parks. What, how does that funding look like right now? I mean, what, what does that account look like? Is that money still, I know a couple of years ago we used, we collected the funds from the dozens or so and antennas and used for a purpose to I know that the intent originally was for that money to stay within the park. What does that look like, finance director?

Yeah, your comment about the funding that the cell tower generates stays at the park, that is correct. But I don't have the exact numbers how that's performing, but we usually have an agreement. It's an annual agreement, right? Yeah. We can find out for that for you.

Okay, because I know in the past, about five or four years ago, there was another question about being able to finance something, and I don't remember off the top of my head what that was. But working with the city manager and the city attorney, I remember they were like, well, we could just use the cell phone tower funding. And it was collected amongst 10 different sources. And that came up with like close to a million dollars in resources available for, and I'm just, again, trying to come up with the funding. I know funding's tight. But if we could just look at all these options that we could potentially use to acquire part of this land, if all those parcels are $4 million together, then if we pick up one, it might be less. Those would be the comments that I have as far to that. But definitely, if I had to pick one of these, it would be option one, the park site at Washington Square. I think that should take priority because, again, streetlights, we could add those next year or the following year. But this land, once it's gone and built, it's gone forever. And I think that's the key here is that missed, that would become a missed opportunity if we let that slip or if we don't try to at least acquire part of that I'll stop for now, but I am supportive of all the other ones. Getting rid of the commissions, I think that would be great. I mean, not great, but when we got a tie-in, that's...

Let me come back to you, Councilman. Sure. If I can, please. Okay, because we have other council members. I'm going to speak really quick. First of all, Mr. City Manager, to you and your staff, I want to thank you, all of you, for putting this together. And I know when I met with you, it was great detail and lots of information. And... I see all the staffing reductions that Council Member Lopez asked for a very thorough report came out. You cut in the city manager's office, finance, the PRCSA, PBA, PD, PW, you've cut everywhere, sworn, non-sworn, and so across the board, and I really appreciate it because you took the time to look everywhere. And so that took time, a lot of work from all of you, and all the departments that stepped up. So thank you all very, very much. And it's painful, right? The budget's always painful, every year that we do this. So let me go to, I'm with the Mayor Pro Tem. Option one, I'm supportive of. Option two, we can come back to another year. But I do support the land swap looking into that. And I'm just dropping four million. And I don't think the whole four million was just the park. So I see in here, I didn't see this little asterisk until afterwards when we met that affordable housing, half for affordable housing, half for the park. So we can talk about that at another time, but I do have some questions about that. I'm very supportive of housing, that's not the issue, but in Santa Ana, we have met and exceeded affordable housing by leaps and bounds. And yes, housing's very important and we wanna provide it, but that four million, if that's what we end up, let's say the owner says, okay, three million, or you get them down to two million, and we do a land swap, then... that other couple million could be used for something else, youth programs, whatever it may be, right? So I'd like more information on the affordable housing piece and then hopefully you've had conversations with the community because I think that would be something they'd wanna talk about is what are you looking at to bring in, what affordable housing are you gonna put there if we're able to purchase that land? So the question I have is with PAL. I understand, you know, moving to your proposal, we'd be able to serve 2,200 children and a budget savings of $471,000 and change. So here, per capita cost of various programs, you know me with the seniors, only $65 per senior excursion. Come on, but whatever, okay. I'll leave that one alone. We'll talk about it at a later time. I don't wanna cut parking validation for city council meetings. That's definitely not something that we're gonna cut, right? Okay, good, I wanna make sure we're not doing that. So the PAL program, you said $5,421 PAL cost per participant. can you tell me how you got that cost and break that down and that's one question i apologize that i didn't ask for when we met but i would like the breakdown because chief correct me if i'm wrong there's one sworn one officer in in powell is that correct sir yes mayor that's correct one officer and then the other are non-sworn that's correct they're uh

Two full-time non-sworn.

And then when they have activities, some of those officers are there on a volunteer basis, is that correct?

Yes, when they do some of the coaching for the softball team they had.

I saw the ladybugs here earlier, yes.

Those were volunteers.

Okay, so can you tell me what is the breakdown for the $5,421 per child, per participant? Somebody break that down for me, please.

Sure. That's actually your savings per child for the two programs that total 87 children. So that would be the children that are served by the after school program at two locations and the children that are served by the summer camp. That's a total of 87 children. So if we downsize the budget by $471,000, what you've actually got there is a savings of $5,400 per child. So what is the cost per child to participate in PAL? Well, it... is it stands currently because they suspended the program where they were providing the athletics instruction at the elementary schools. So right now, they're only serving 87 kids for the after school and the summer camp, and then they're serving 200 and some with the sports teams. But the sports teams is, even though it's a larger number of children, it's a much smaller portion of that 870 some thousand budget. So the lion's share of that budget is going to support the 87 children that are currently served.

And I heard that, I know when we met, we talked about that as well, but what are we using that money for?

It's the one sworn that is a site director, the two assistant site directors. That's three full-time positions. The two assistants are non-sworn, correct? That's correct. And I believe that there's eight to ten part-time positions. And that is for tutoring? Yes.

Which we can eliminate and use the library for.

Yeah, yeah. And there's a whole series of supplies. There's a little bit of contract money. So it's just, it's an expensive program, quite honestly. Well, but they've been a wonderful program.

And I want to serve more children. So if you can break it down for me and send it, I don't know if the rest of the council wants it, but I want it. So when you talk about supplies, what type of supplies, contracts, And I want all that information sent to me because I just don't want to lose programs for our children. And you know, I sit up here all the time and I say that. That's one of the things. So I'd like to make sure that we don't lose our programs for our children. And I know the school district has their 360 after school program. And Mayor Pro Tem talked about working with the school district. I used to sit on the joint council meeting that we had, three school board members and three city council members, and we tried the joint use, and that didn't go anywhere, then nobody wanted to budge, the school district wanted us to pay for everything, because again, we're Mikey, we pay for everything. So hopefully with the new superintendent and different school board members, we'll be able to come to an agreement, because the school district is down, I believe, to almost 25, high 25,000 students, they're not at 30,000, so therefore they're losing ADA money every single day. They have the ability to close a couple schools, which they're not doing for a lot of different reasons. Maybe they don't want the charters to grab them, but there's things that they can do to work with us to give us property there at the school site so that we can run a great program for our youth, especially like in Central Santa Ana, that would be great. I think Lowell and Pio Pico are running at 200 on a good day, 180 students. and correct me if I'm wrong, give me the numbers, I can look them up, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be having a conversation with Dr. Perez about using those school sites. They can merge those two schools, whatever they decide to do as a board, but there's a lot that can be done working with the school district if they're willing to work with us. And I would think this council, I believe, would be supportive of that. But I am supportive of option one, the Washington Square Park. The only thing I do want information on is affordable housing, the affordable housing piece, and I would ask that you meet with the community about that, share with them what the plan is. We have two more meetings to go through before this budget is approved, but I just want to say thank you very much for everything that you guys have done and the time that you have taken, and I've looked at the proposed cuts that you provided all of us, and there's a lot of cuts in here. You know, whether it's public works, parks and rec, planning and building, HR. I mean, if you go through all of your lists, thank you, Mr. City Manager, because you did go to every department. Police department, you touched everything. So I really appreciate that. That's all I have at this time. Council Member Phan? Go ahead, Council Member Fenn.

I've been waiting, Madam Mayor, with all due respect.

Yeah, I was going down the list, so she's, go ahead, Council Member Fenn.

I have selected, I'm the only one that's requested to speak.

No, no, she's actually, she requested.

All good, all good.

Thank you. Go ahead, Councilman Hernandez. Thank you, Madam Mayor. She's going to give you her time.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. City Manager. Thank you, city staff, for working on a balanced budget. I want to echo my sentiments that I'm very happy to see the way that the city manager's office ensured that there was no employee furloughs, no full-time employee layoffs. I know that was a priority, was to protect our employees. I am supportive of increasing the stadium use fees by 14%. I think it's important that we generate as much revenue as we can from the amenities that we own. I am extremely supportive of the non-mandated commissions being dissolved. Mr. City Manager, just a clarifying question for the Arts and Culture Commission, that would be connected to the Community Development Commission. Would the commissioners stay as is, or would there be additional commissioners added to that?

Well, the idea is to only have the community development commissioners review the arts and culture issues. So when we're saying we're disbanding or eliminating the arts and culture, it would be getting rid of the commissioners. And that includes the historical ETAG youth commission. It's just removing that staffing.

Thank you for the clarifying question. And then just a further question related to that. So would the community development commission make decisions related to community development grants and arts and culture? Yes. Thank you, sir. And I am also supportive of us increasing youth services by having a budget savings of $471,650 with respects to the PAL program, which currently mentors and coaches 228 children through athletics, 32 children through summer camp. We, through this new proposed recommendation, will reinstate exercise instruction at four different elementary schools, and we will increase the services from 228 children to 2,200 children. over a 100% increase in services. We are not cutting youth services, we're actually adding youth services while saving money for our city. And so that speaks volumes to the experts that are on your team in the city manager's office. I want to thank them. I am supportive of the option one, Washington Square Parkland. Part of why that is so important, Mr. City Manager, and I just want to share, The Washington Square Park is a historic neighborhood, and this opportunity that we have is aligning with the park's master plan. When I was elected to the city council, we did not have a park on Raitt and Myrtle at Carruthers Park. We did not have a park established at Willard, 10th and Flower. Friendship Park was very dilapidated, and Articia Pilar did not have La Artista Park. The parks that existed before were Elridge Park at the outskirts of the city Morrison Park, Fisher Park, Santiago Park, French Park in the French Park neighborhood, Chepas Park in Logan, Garfield Park in Lacey, and Angels Park in Flower in the Flower Park neighborhood. That leaves miles of neighborhoods that are park poor without access to park space. Willard will have a park on 10th and Flower, but it is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in all of the city. The center of the city has lacked significant investment, and that is why this park space is so important. So I just want to thank my colleagues who echoed their sentiments there, and I particularly want to thank Mayor Pro Tem Penalosa, because you're absolutely right, Mayor Pro Tem, when you mentioned option two and you highlighted ward one and ward five, being parts of the city that have historically been neglected. I want to tell you as your colleague thank you because it is refreshing hearing my colleagues on this council consider historically neglected neighborhoods like Washington Square. So I want to tell you thank you as a fellow elected for looking out for the center of the city It means a lot because that Washington Square neighborhood is one of the only neighborhoods in the city where you have two different elementary schools in the same neighborhood. You have Wilson Elementary, which has existed nearly 100 years, and you have Heroes Elementary. You have Willard Intermediate, and you have Mendez Intermediate, and you also have Santa Ana College. You have six educational institutions where you have students of all ages walking across Washington. I also want to mention my support, Mr. City Manager, for the sidewalk repairs from Shelton to Flower Street between Civic Center. I see that you funded that. It's included in the budget. I want to highlight the importance of that. I also mentioned the importance of us having a crosswalk at Figueroa in the Santa Anita neighborhood on Figueroa and First. That's a $26 million investment to add a renovated park there. Residents who live on the Fifth Street side of Santa Anita will use that park and that means they will more than likely cross the street. Residents don't typically walk to Harbor, they cross at Figueroa. So I wanted to highlight that given that First Street is a corridor where we've had a number of pedestrian accidents. And then lastly, in closing, I just wanted to highlight my support with the Fairview Street rehabilitation from the Southern City Lits to Alton Avenue. I'm very happy to see that. Fairview's an important corridor. I am also supportive of the POP Co-Book Kiosk, given that Ward 2 and Ward 5 are neighboring districts. This is an at-risk neighborhood, and if we can add amenities that will increase children's access to literature, and education, I think that'll make the neighborhood safer. And lastly, speed humps for the Washington Square neighborhood. I want to highlight areas of importance between Washington from Bristol to Flower, Freeman from 17th to Civic, and Louise from Washington to Civic Center. um and then lastly mr city manager we recently renovated civic center there was bollards located on louise and civic center they have been there for many decades during the construction they were removed to make room for the construction they have not since been replaced if we can please add those bollards to civic center and louise i don't think that needs to be included in the budget since they were already there before thank you mr city manager and thank you madam mayor that concludes my comments thank you councilmember fenn

Thank you, Mayor. PAL, there's a lot of people who talked about PAL today. And for those of you who don't know, when I was first elected and during the first budget cycle, I remember talking to then City Manager Ridge, what is PAL? Are we paying for police officer gym memberships? And when I discovered what it was, I really spoke, I supported it. I supported Santa Anita. I supported Cypress Fire Station. I supported it. At Roosevelt, I supported it in every which way I could, but this budget requires us to make difficult decisions, and that includes cutting things that we like, we love, we want, and making tough choices. And one of those difficult choices is looking at bang for our buck. What, you know, can we invest in that gives us the highest return possible? And in this case, well, I would love to be able to fund PAL for the 87 students who get, you know, the most out of the program. It's just very, very expensive. And an almost $500,000 cost savings by, by not cutting PAL, but really still finding a way to have some of the program, I think is where we kind of try to meet in the middle. And so I would love to bring it back one day, whether we can get other grants or other type of funding to continue to expand it. But at this time, I think it's necessary to make those changes to PAL. And I really appreciate staff trying to find a way so that we can preserve some part of it while also creating these cost savings. So thank you so much for that. Regarding the park, I am not in support of option one. While I am very supportive of parks in general, I just don't see how this works at this time. I do understand in meeting with staff You have tried to look for creative ways to make it affordable or make it feasible for us. But the $4 million is actually a million dollars above and beyond what we have in one time spending. So we're looking for an extra million dollars. So I want to know what the $800,000 in A&D funds are and the $200,000 in cannabis fund. What are we cutting it from? What other programs?

Thank you for that question. So A&D funds, these are fees that are charged to new residential developments. And we have four districts. And so typically it takes time to accumulate these funds. So I forget which district, but this district is close. It's an eligible use of funds. For example, we're using some of that funding for the stadium. And then for use for Washington, you know, The fund has enough funds to be able to pay for that. So that's where the $800,000.

Sorry, will you clarify that? You said so you're taking that $800,000 from money that would have been invested in the stadium for this park?

No, it has enough for the stadium and for this $800,000 for the Washington Square.

So why is that $800,000 not in option two?

The $800,000 is restricted money for park projects. Okay. And so that money just simply has accumulated and has not yet been appropriated. So it is available for appropriation. So the city council could also direct us to use that $800,000 of accumulated money for a different park project in that district.

Oh, and it has to be in that district. Okay, good. That's helpful to clarify. And then the $200,000 in cannabis funding?

We sharpened the pencil and found that our cannabis fund has $200,000 available for this. You could use the $200,000 for any other program or capital project that would serve the city. because the cannabis fund is for youth and enforcement. And so I think that if you were to, if the city council were to direct us to do this park purchase, I think we could justify the $200,000 in that sum total as serving the city's youth.

Got it. Okay, so that's really helpful because that $200,000 could also have gone to the Edna Park shade structure, Cabrillo Park restrooms, and things like that. And I really appreciate us being able to figure out where we can get the funding for just the purchase. I'm worried about, and I think I mentioned this last time, that we buy land and it stays vacant. Because right now we have no money to seat the park, we have no money to staff the park, we have no money to make any improvements, we have no money to put in any type of shade structure, seating area, bathrooms, anything like that, right?

We've received this council direction over a very short period of time and quite frankly, the city council could direct us tonight to just put an allocation in the budget and then come back to the council with some creative ideas so it doesn't preclude you from adopting your budget You would just adopt a budget with this, I'll call it a set aside for this project and maybe we find some creative ways not to use that entire set aside or maybe we bring back some proposals for the council at a different time. You could use it for this or this or this is how you would pay for it or whatnot. Maybe it ends up being a passive park without much in the way of improvements on it. Don't know, but I think that we've got a lot of homework to do to offer a range of options to the city council. But at this time, we're trying to get the budget balance, or budget adopted, balanced and adopted. And so if the city council wants to just direct us to set aside that money and come back with options, we can certainly do that.

Thank you, so for example, if we wanted to cut the almost $900,000 in arts and grant funding in order to improve Washington Square Park, we can do that. Okay.

Absolutely.

Or cut the other $500,000 from PAL and use that for this park.

Yes. Absolutely. The only thing that I would be careful with is using any one-time money for recurring projects. So I heard from the dais this evening the concept of potentially using some of that one-time money. Let's see. That was to... Oh, I think that was to reinstate. Oh, I know what it was. It was for the parking enforcement. Parking enforcement is a recurring cost. And so the idea of using one-time money to cover a recurring cost, I wouldn't advise against that. Of course, it's the city council's purview to direct us how they will. But as one of your advisors, I would not advise that.

Thank you, because, well, the arts and grants funding and the PAL funding, that's a recurring cost. That's not under one time. So we could reallocate those dollars, so that would be $1.4 million almost, for purposes of park improvements, correct?

That's absolutely correct.

Okay. I mean, that's really helpful for me to understand because we're looking at big numbers. We're not looking at $20,000, $30,000, right? Changing the commissions, I think, saves us $60,000 or, you know, it's not a huge amount. So we have to look at six figures or more. And so that's helpful. I guess I wanted to go through that process to figure out what we can do and what kind of decisions we have to make because so far, I've only heard what we want and not what we need to cut. In this case, I support option two because number one, it gives us a wide variety of improvements that are necessary specific to public safety in the case of cameras, lights on trails, restrooms, sidewalk maintenance, which we talked about being a huge part of our torts claims, street lights, shade structures, especially for the summer with a lot of kids not being able to use the playgrounds that we currently have, investing in the things that we currently have. So that's what I would like to see. If my colleagues would like to direct something different regarding option one, I would love to see it, but I'd like to hear folks make recommendations on what they would like to cut in order to receive what it is they want with Washington Square.

Thank you. So Kat, can you go back to set aside funds? we can just direct you tonight to put the funds aside. That doesn't mean we're gonna eliminate the park, it just means, because you're right, it came up right when we were working on the budget, and so it was like hurry, hurry, hurry, rush, rush, rush, and I know that they've been, the community's been coming for quite some time, so I have lots of, emails from them that stated, you know, we've been trying to meet with a certain, we've been trying to meet, we've been trying to meet with a certain person, it's not happening, it's not happening, and then I would refer the city manager to look at it, and then that's pretty much when it started coming up, so.

And in fact, the city council could, you know, okay, so we put together, we cobbled together money that could be $4 million, but that's $3 million from the general fund. The city council could direct us to set aside oh, 2.5 million for the Washington Square project, if you will, whatever format that might take, and use 500,000 for something else. Maybe the city council decides that the hotel consultant rises to that level. So think of it as that kind of, you can direct us however you wish on this one-time money.

Okay, thank you. And thank you for bringing that up. So the only thing I would say is that, you know, and I'll stop beating this one up, is that, as you know, I'm a huge supporter of the PAL program, not because it's police. And I know some people are like, oh, we're cutting the police out, we're cutting the police out. No, we're not cutting the police out. That's not what this is about. The community trusts... is built in that PAL program. They look at the officers, they go there and they have relationships with the officers. I know our parks and recs can do the same, but not the way that PAL does it. Our libraries can do the same, not the way that PAL does it. So if we're gonna cut it, Mr. City Manager, then I wanna make sure that Yes, it's gonna go to the library or Parks and Rec, but also that our police department is involved because kids see police officers. When I went to closing ceremonies last Friday, I'll give you an example, for Pony Baseball, Santa and PD was there and the kids didn't wanna talk to me, they wanted to talk to him. They wanted stickers. They got in his car. They were excited. They have that relationship with the officers. Whenever we have events, they go and talk to the officers. They got on the motorcycle. We had the resource fair. You go to the booth where our officers were with the bike and the car and the dogs, that's where all the kids were. That to me is very important because we all talk about up here about building community relationships and having a positive relationships with whether it's fire, police, parks, public works, whatever it is, we need to continue that. So I just want to make sure whatever cuts we're making that we continue to include our police department even if it's non-sworn which is not costing us as much money. To me that's very important for public trust.

So two things, and I don't want to get lost with what Kat says, is that in the end, we have a very finite budget, right? I think we presented a balanced budget for your consideration, and obviously we're sticking your direction. Yes, in many ways, the idea of the park in Washington Square has been around for a long time. But not until two weeks did the city council as a majority provide a direction for us to look. So for us, it's one of those cash 22s when administration and policymakers have this discussion. If we move too soon without majority direction, we preempted it. Why are we moving? Why are we having discussions? Who approved this? Only one person liked it, two council members. So we're very cautious about what that means. So when we have deliberations in public, right, then we get, okay, now we count majority of the city council, let's go look at it. So that puts us where we are today. When we talk about using, as you see the fine note about some general fund, some restricted funding, even the funding that Council Member Phan mentioned, we're looking at ways of how do we make it a successful aspect to, okay, let me see. We were able to get a majority of the consensus, more or less, that they went apart. But at the very same time, we have very limited funding. And so Council Member Phan made a very poignant observation. Even if we buy it, we still can't develop it. Right. And so we got to look for a way. And so that's what we're doing. We mentioned the land swapping right when we bought those properties on First Street. un-Bristol, un-Warner, we look very specific funding. Those restrictive fundings have parameters that doesn't allow us to just do us up with any other property, right? So when CAT says you can align and direct us to look for ways, that's what we're doing even as we speak. Do we use water funds? Do we use housing funds, inclusionary funds, A&D funds, general fund? That is what we're working to do. But at the end, we have to have a balanced budget for you, the first meeting in June, so hopefully approve the second, so we have an effective balanced budget of July. That's the objective. Nobody wants to cut any programs. Nobody wants to lay off anybody. So we knew, and we said it in the closed meetings, I'll say it out loud, we knew that at a certain moment we would have to wear the dark hat. We would have to make those costs. If you notice the cuts that we made, we made almost proportional costs for full-time and part-time at exactly the same amount, $2.7 million. It's not at the single department that wasn't touched. We talked about PALS. If you look at what we're proposing in the staff report, we're injecting PALS with library, with proxy recreation as a team effort. How do we maximize the funding we have to ensure we expand and maximize outreach to the most youth that we can? There's no way we're not beating our heads trying to be a balanced budget and make sure that nobody gets harmed. They continue with the services. That's what you notice in our meetings and our one-on-ones. I never said cut services. because we don't want to cut services, but we might have to limit the frequency, right? And so that's the objective that we're looking to approach.

And I thank you for that explanation. This is not the first budget that we have done. I've been sitting here and I've sat on the school board with over a billion dollar budget. I understand about cutting. My point, and I always want to stress it because everybody else is, see, everybody has a ward up here. I have citywide. So I hear from every area. I don't just hear from, whatever area, I hear from every area. So my emails are probably a lot different than other people because I hear from ward three, ward four, ward one, ward five, I hear from every. So I did get a lot of emails about PAL and I was trying to explain how this is gonna happen. I know we're not cutting per se the entire program, we're gonna be able to serve other, you know, more children, the quality is what concerns me. And I understand the majority up here, I understand the politics very clearly, the majority. But again, when I sit up here as the mayor and I hear, well, I want this for my ward, I want that for my ward, and Councilman, Mayor Pro Tem Penalosa said it very clearly tonight, if you look at option two, it was ward one, ward three, ward five, ward whatever. This is, the whole city needs services. And you have a big job in front of you and you have seven of us to sit up here and six of them want it for their ward. And I'm the only one who sits there like, hi, I'd like it citywide, right? And so I just want to be clear my position on this. I don't like cutting programs for the youth at all. And I'm not gonna throw out like, oh, it leads to gangbite. No, I'm just gonna say I don't like cutting programs for the youth. I would love to have a better relationship with the school district so we could partner with them. But we're not bringing all the carne asada, they can bring half of it. And I don't like that word partnership. It should be half and half, right? So you guys have done a remarkable job on all of the cuts. We do have to cut. But I just want to be very clear, my position, there are certain things that I don't want to, I don't give up on. And the park and Washington Square, they have been asking that for years. And we are park poor in our city. But people want their trees cut. People want their sidewalks fixed. People want the potholes. We want the construction done. We want street lights. We want more police officers. We want more fire. We want 24-hour ambulance care. I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on. You can't have all that because our budget's this little, this big, and everybody's asking for this much. So at some point, hopefully, when we do pass the budget, the second meeting in June, or the next meeting, you could say, you know, I gotta give credit where credit's due. The previous city manager, she basically said, there's no more money. She said it just like that, there's no more money. I understand that language very clearly. I truly do. So no, there's no more money. Because you can't appease us all up here. You're not going to please everybody up here. So I thank you for this. I think you guys have done a phenomenal job. And if there's no more comments, okay, two more. Oh, you do, okay. So let's get through this and then, because we don't want to be here and we want to close out with Council Member comments. Council Member Vasquez.

Thank you. Thank you for all that information that we've been getting. And just to make sure that when we talked about a reduction of PAL, there's going to be continued police mentorship. And I've always said we should have a police team in our little leagues. We should have police team in our soccer leagues. to have them all wear blue. It'd be beautiful to have them out there and have them coaching our teams and be within the community with our parents that are volunteering. That'd be great, I'd love it to be part of that. For the Washington Square Park, you came up with some solutions. Councilmember Penalosa came up with some solutions. And then Councilmember Tai said we could do set asides. affordable housing and land swap. Can you come back and start a project with all three that we can figure out something now? Like, hey, we set aside some money. We're going to do a little land swap over here and some affordable housing. Like, be creative with it and bring us... I don't want this to die is what I don't want to happen. I don't want to say we're going to pick option two and there's no park. That's not what should happen. It's like... we're letting you know we need this park and we're going to think about it later next budget meeting and then oh it's too late again that's exactly we want low down payment money start looking whether we could do land swap and bring in affordable housing project uh to make it feasible for us to be able to pay for it and get things done there so i want some action going on on this park and making sure uh we get it right and uh for the Pico Lowell neighborhood for a book kiosk would be great if I could get some support on that. That'd be awesome, thank you.

It's his ward. Council Member Lopez.

Yes, thank you. Well, I wanted to start by thanking city staff. You kind of mentioned this earlier, city manager. We're closing a $13 million structural deficit without full-time layoffs, without furloughs, or eliminating core city services. I do think that that is a meaningful achievement, and that is something that I want to acknowledge. And I think even the last year budget, I said publicly, you and your team presented a balanced budget. And this is only gonna get harder as we continue to lose revenue and our cost of services, of cost of labor, our employment costs. everything continues to go up and that is the big issue that we have. We have severely fallen behind because of political inaction for many, many years now. There's just no other way to say it now. And so I wanted to ask about some of the, I wanted to provide a clarification and I think that it's always good to provide a clarification for the public. because I got a question about some of the full-time positions, and when we met, you clearly stated that those positions are not filled. So it is not people losing their jobs, they're vacant positions. Can you confirm this? That is correct. Thank you. And so that is, your recommendation is consistent with what this council gave to you the last time that we met, which is why you have brought these recommendations forward. And so where the cuts are happening, and the public can clearly see this, you know, various departments, police is absorbing some of the cuts, but they're all in clerical, like, administrative roles. Planning is absorbing some, and the other are spread across some of the departments, and my question is really about the part-time positions, because they're I mean, you understand, right? That's the heaviest hit right here. And so about 70 or more part-time positions are gonna be impacted citywide with the heaviest in the library and in parks and rec. And so I would love to learn more about those specific cuts to those specific departments.

Thank you for that question so every department because like you said this was a difficult process right but it was really We did it in a certain way to minimize the impact to the community so for example the library You know they're losing potentially 16 part-time positions But what that means is maybe the plan is to adjust to hours before they I don't know the exact hours for the library, but, you know, they open from, for example, from 9 to 9, right? But the plan is to adjust those hours to minimize, to still provide a quality service with the staff that they have.

So, Councilwoman, you asked about the more detail on the impacted positions. Well, as we've stated, our plan is to first eliminate part-time positions that are already vacant. And then two would be to eliminate those that become vacant in the near future. We have situations where kids go back to school and so it's okay to eliminate their position after they leave the city, say in September. So that would be our second tranche of positions. So the idea is to get it down to a minimal amount of positions that we would have to impact. We did pull together a list of the titles of the positions that we would be looking at, and we can certainly provide that to the city council. But we have no desire to, as staff, as management, to just take an ax to our part-time staff. That's not what we want to do. But we are trying to balance the budget. And so that's why we're trying to come up with this very measured, humane plan to eliminate the vacancies first, then go after those that will become vacant in the near future, and then look to see what we have left over. In some cases, maybe some hours will be reduced across more positions to save a couple of people. We just don't know. So the first step was to get the city council's direction on this. Like, is this something that we can adopt a budget with? And then we can work through the details of how that is humanely done with the least amount of impact as possible.

Thank you. I would love that information. I was actually going to ask how many are currently vacant versus filled. And also, I think when you send that information to the council, I mean, I know this is moving very, very fast, but please tell us, what is it that we should expect in terms of hours reduction? Is that going to be a reduction of our libraries that are open on the weekends, Fridays? What is that plan going to look like? What are the specific services in library and parks that... we should be prepared to tell our constituents these things will no longer exist. I think that's incredibly important. And I think that that's also going to help inform when we have a much more serious conversation about the budget and we have to make final decisions, but I do think that your recommendation in terms of the full-time vacant positions is obviously something that is a good one because they're vacant and for a lot of these departments, they have been vacant for months. Some have been vacant for a really long time. They haven't been filled and so maybe there isn't a need for us to fill those positions. So I do think that that was a good approach that I support. Of course, I would love to see more detailed information. Moving on to the commissions, I really encourage all the current commissioners and members of the public to see exhibit three because it really does tell a story. Many of the meetings that have been canceled have been canceled because of lack of quorum. that means that people that have been appointed to the commissions are not showing up. And so work has not been able to really, I think, move with the original intent, perhaps, of the commissions. Most agenda items are informational, receive in file, substantive business items, the moments where a commission is actually shaping a decision are not the exception. Actually, they are the exception, not the rule. And so that really, I think, has informed why the council feels as though when we're thinking about not impacting some of these really big, important services that the city is providing, this is low-hanging fruit because Well, one, many of them are not even meeting. We're not receiving recommendations. And I also think it's fair to acknowledge that we are in a different era of civic engagement. And so people will engage with us directly. People will engage with you directly, city manager, at community events, social media. And so I would love to see some flexibility with arts and culture. I just want to reiterate that I don't want to see you know, a hammer, right, or a machete being, going in their direction. I think we've done a lot of great progress in not just uplifting the importance of arts and how much it supports our local economy, our residents here, tourism, and so as much as flexibility that we can have in that area, I would really appreciate that. And so I also wanted to ask for the functions that need to continue for park naming, mural, and public art review, can you just share with the public what that process will look like? Like, if the council's accepting the recommendation to remove parks and rec, how now will we treat park naming, which... the council has always kind of done its own thing.

Right. Well, it can go through the planning commission. In essence, the municipal actually requires that the proper hearing is the planning commission and not parts of recreation.

Oh, got it.

Right. And if you notice, the naming of the streets, same thing, before we got here, we weren't following the municipal code. And that's why we're very careful as far as noting, especially the presentation, mandated versus non-mandated, because I think part of the difficulty, at least from staff's perspective, and I think the city council can appreciate, is that here we are in an age of more civic involvement, and we throw the word transparency out, and yet people weren't going to the meetings. And if you look at the... that exhibit, and I'm gonna thank publicly the clerk of the council who helped us gather that information, is that you see the level of work that was being done. And so it's not so much just communicating with the folks, it's also staff time, right? Somebody programming, setting up, showing up, and making sure that there's some issues being addressed. So for us on the arts and culture is we're looking to integrate, not cut the level of work, just to ensure that the community development commissioners address that. So I'll be very frank, I was hesitant to add arts and culture elimination because we just approved the policy two weeks ago, right? And so thinking out loud, how does it look? We just approved a policy that was historic in moving, and yet two weeks later, I'm in a city council study session saying we need to cut the commission, right? So the best idea for us in that capacity is if we think arts and culture, and people say it in the crowd, and people say when they can make the presentation that it's an economic development issue, okay, let's put it with community development. And so we don't limit the amount of work, we just assign that work to the commissioners that we appoint. So it's a more balanced aspect in that capacity.

Thank you, City Manager. I want to thank staff, again, for putting the draft budget together. I want to thank the community for coming out and being engaged, vocalizing their wants. And I look forward to staff's recommendation in June. I encourage the public to stay engaged. encourage the public to continue to advocate for the things that they care about. And I will also encourage you, city manager, and your team to exercise the fiscal responsibility that you have and that you owe to every member of this community. And it's not gonna be easy, and it's not gonna be easy up here, but we all have to be clear about what our role requires us to do in very difficult moments. And so, you know, I, again, for me, I think it's really important that we save through efficiencies and that we seek ways to increase revenue. And I do want to thank City Team for their recommendations, right? This is not the first time that we discussed the recommendations that are moving along through the process. And I also wanna thank you for understanding the recommendations in option two that address multiple residents facing safety and infrastructure needs across the city. It is not just happening in one part of the city. And that's really important because I don't just, I don't just stay in one part of the city. I drive throughout the entire city. My constituents in Ward 3 drive through the entire city. They support businesses in different parts of the city. I want to thank you all for also recognizing the importance of making recommendations that are actually fixing infrastructure projects. I don't know when's the last time any member of the council has driven over the Flower Street Bridge, right? But it feels like you're off-roading when you're on that bridge. And this is the multiple, multiple complaints that my constituents have highlighted to you. And I want to thank my colleagues for their support. And I am also very proud of the years of investment and infrastructure dollars that I have supported in various parts of the city. It has always been about taking a measured approach here. And Ward 3 is no different than any other ward. We need the infrastructure just like everybody else. And again, I want to thank city staff for their recommendations. And I look forward to seeing what we're going to get, including the CIP budget that we are not seeing today. So thank you.

All right, you got it, right, Mr. City Manager? Cat, you got it? All right, let's move on. Okay, Mr. City Manager, we're gonna come back to you for your comments. At this time, I'm gonna go to council member comments. And thank you for everything, all the staff. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, you gotta go to the bathroom as we start to do council member comments. Should we wait for you then? All right, Mayor Pro Tem, you're up. Council member comments.

Wait, I'm confused. We're done with the...

Yes, yes, we're done.

Okay.

Council member comments. You're up, Mayor Pro Tem.

Oh, shoot. Okay, well, yeah, I guess I'll... I'll, as part of my council member comments, I will just want to add, as we continue having these.

These are his council member comments in closing, Cat, so.

As we continue having these budget conversations over the next couple of weeks, I do wanna just reiterate to my colleagues and city staff that as we look at the different balancing measures for our budget, I wanna thank every department that looked closely into your budgets and made these hard cuts. City Manager's Office, Human Resources, City Clerk's Office, Finance, Public Works, Planning and Building, Parks and Rec, Community Development, Library, Police, and Fire. I will say that one of the few departments that is missing from there is the city council. And I hope that we could also look at our city council budget, that when I first started here, it was only about 400 grand, and now it's $1.2 million a year. So I would hope that we take a close look, and whether that's cutting in half, that's something that I'd be willing to do to fund PAL. I just wanted to also reiterate for the record that I am very supportive of continuing to fund our PAL program and not seeing cuts there.

Those are your closing comments.

Sorry?

Are those your closing comments? We're done, right?

I'm not done yet. Oh, okay. But just wanted to make sure that we take a good look at... our budget as well as the city council because the buck stops with us at the end of the day. It shouldn't just fall on city staff. We also gotta tighten up our belts. So with that, I do wanna thank city staff for your hard work in this. It's gonna get worse and worse, so I hope that we really just, I hope that our staff at ICC is communicating and having conversations about Willowick and developing Willoway Golf Course and seeing the potential there. But that is it, Mayor. I do want to ask that we close tonight's meeting in memory of Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awar, and Mansur Kasiha, who were the three victims and heroic victims from yesterday's awful shooting in San Diego. They gave their lives to save those children and are true heroes, and I hope that we could close tonight's meeting in honor of them and their memory. And that is it, Mayor. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. We've definitely closed in their honor. Thank you so very much. Council Member Vasquez, please.

Thank you, Mayor Meskwa. I appreciate it. I want to start off by I want to congratulate the zoo and Parks and Rec for a beautiful event at the Santa Ana Zoo. It was great, I loved it. Bruet Zoo again, 800 people showed up. and I just had a good time, it was a great feeling. 900 attendees, 25 vendors, great company, and I ran into Ethan Fisher, our zoo director, he's been out, but he was looking good and it was nice to see him up and about talking to people and just joking about where he's at right now, but hopefully he makes a strong recovery and he's back with us soon, I loved it. You know, Councilmember Penalosa just mentioned our staff, our council staff, and I just appreciate mine so much, besides staffing, taking pictures, and putting social media stuff. She does a lot of research. She goes into research about chickens and how many chickens we can have and keeping chickens healthy in Santa Ana.

He did not talk about counseling. I'm talking about counseling.

Because, you know, if you're going to have a big staff soon, figure out something for them to do. So we figured out all kinds of stuff. We come up with a crazy amount of work. And maybe you want to work with Karina and help out some research. We worked out researching on houselessness and how can we support our commercial properties with houselessness. She did the research. She was like, I need this. She goes to neighborhood association meetings and they ask about murals on the side of a market. I'm like, go figure it out. Call the city staff and call the private and research that because they want a mural. Or they want an event at a church and a lot. I'm like, call the church and then call the department. Let me know what we can do. I go to every neighborhood association meeting and they have questions. And I look to Karina and I'm like, Karina, can you do the research? Of course. I'm like, this is your, she belongs to us. She's doing the work for all my neighborhood associations. If they need something, she gets it done. Karina's amazing. Thank you, Karina. I love you for doing the great work. for our neighborhood is we got trash bins going. We didn't have trash bins when I came in. The big trash bins that you get, she figured it out. And now we're all getting trash bins across ward two.

She should run for council.

It's amazing, they tell you. She's got a great leader.

Does she live in ward one?

I'm kidding, finish. So she's doing amazing work, and I really appreciate the work she's doing, working closely with our elementary schools to get the word out and other things. I'm looking forward to this Saturday. We have the OC Soccer Association coming to our field here and having a great game. Is there going to be another... Another Brewfest? Bring to our pay.

We're doing closing comments, not questions. Come on.

It's great. Okay. I will have a workshop for neighborhood associations on how to apply for the Culture and Art Program to bring some more festivals, street festivals to our cities. I'll be at the Senior Center next Thursday at 6 p.m. I want to congratulate all the new graduates from Santa Ana, Garden Grove, wherever other school district we have, that we have all the graduates who are graduating. But I want to give a special shout out to my nephew, Noah Ramirez, who's 22 and now has his master's from Cal State Fullerton. He graduated with an AA degree. at the age of 18, his bachelor's by 20, and now he's got a master's, little strong kid. Carolina Molina, unaccompanied at 10th grade, in my classroom, she found a job. She found a place to live and she got a room. And she got a car by the time she was a senior. She went to Sac and graduated, went to Cal State Fullerton and graduated. Somehow in there she got her papers as well and then brought her family over. This girl got a full ride to Indiana University, and she got her master's degree. Congratulations to Carolina Molina, one of my heroes in life. She's all, thank you, Mr. Vasquez. It's all because of you, Amal. No, it's not, Missy. Otherwise, I'd have thousands of children coming out, you know, getting their master's from Indiana U. And as always, justice for Noel Rodriguez. Thank you.

Council Member Lopez, please. Yes, thank you. Well, first, I was really thrilled to be with some of our planning staff this past week with the Kennedy Commission representing the city of Santa Ana that received an award for the affordable housing. project, FX housing project. And again, I just really want to thank our city staff for their work. And I'm really proud of the work that the Orange County Housing Finance Trust is also doing. We just celebrated an affordable complex for seniors in the city of Orange and so this is part of the work of the housing trust to help build housing not just in the central core of Orange County but throughout all areas of Orange County because it is so desperately needed for people. I also want to recognize that we're going to be honoring Memorial Day this coming Monday, and I want to remember and thank not just people that have served our country, but the families of people that have said goodbye and never got a chance to hug their loved ones again, for families that have to deal with people that come back with PTSD. For all the mothers that had to say goodbye to their kids once they were 18, I still remember my family's experience and so I just want to thank everybody and I want to wish everyone a safe and reflective holiday weekend. I also want to thank the amazing class of 2026. So many of our students are heading to college. community colleges, universities across the nation, and we're really proud of all of our students. They're going to, I'm sure, represent our city incredibly well, and I hope that you always remember Santa Ana and come back to give back to the community that helped shape you and I also want to say that my heart is with our Muslim community because of the horrific event that happened yesterday. It wasn't just a house of worship, it was an elementary school and to see the images, the videos of kids having to be escorted out is so deeply painful and once again a reminder that there's so much more work to be done at all levels of government to truly provide safety for all members of our community and chief, I just wanna thank you. I know we've been in contact since Monday and you too, city manager. What is our plan? Our families, our residents in my district are getting ready to celebrate Eid and Friday prayer and I wanna thank you both for being responsive and for committing to supporting our mosque and for having some presence there so that they feel a sense of safety, which is really important to them and to me. And I also want to invite the public to attend our LGBTQ flag raising ceremony that is happening this Friday. This is an event that really my office was proud to help cement. I know not everybody agrees on this dais and off this dais, but it is so incredibly important to me to be able to Yes.

I think we're all just looking because we don't know who disagrees with LGBTQ.