City Council and Authorities Concurrent - meeting_joint

Staff mic one.

Staff mic one. This is Jovan's mic. We're testing Jovan's mic. Glenn's mic next door. Staff mic two. Staff mic two. Up on the dais, number, position number seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Next door, one, two, check one, two, going down the dais. Working my way down towards the other end of the dais, checking the microphones. Hello, hey, this is the mayor's mic, one, two, one, two. Hey, hey, one, two, one, two, check one, two. Check one, one, two, this is position two. Check mic one, check mic one on the dais. There we go. Yeah.

Ready? Just I don't have a gavel here, but welcome everyone to this joint meeting agenda of the Santa Clara City Council and Stadium Authority Concurrent Board. I'd like to call this meeting to order. Confirmation of a quorum. Assistant City Clerk.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yes, confirming quorum.

Thank you. We have four items in closed session. City Attorney.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yes, full slate this evening. Item 1A is Conference with Labor Negotiators. The city representatives as listed. The employee organization under discussion is Unclassified Fire Management Employees, Unit 9B. Item 1B is comfort with legal counsel regarding anticipated litigation, potential exposure to litigation. One case, facts and circumstances as listed on the agenda relate to a builder's remedy dispute for a development project at 422. Zero Network Circle. Items 1C and 1D are related cases of existing litigation. City of Fresno and others, including the City of Santa Clara versus Turner et al. in the United States District Court and 1D. City of Fresno et al. versus Nome et al. in the United District Court, Northern District of California, and we will be meeting in Sparacino Conference Room tonight.

Thank you. Do we have any members of the public that would like to speak on these closed session items? I see no one in the chambers. Is there anyone online? All right, we're adjourning.

Madam Mayor.

Oh, I'm so sorry, City Manager. You did tell me.

Just a quick announcement. We appear to have a localized Comcast outage that is not specific to us, and so staff is contacting Comcast and working to resolve that. Members can access the meeting via a number of other vehicles that we have, including Zoom, web streaming, and YouTube.

Thank you, and we'll report on that at 7 o'clock as well if it hasn't been fixed. Correct. Okay. Thank you. We're going to adjourn to closed session. We'll be back at 7 PM. Thank you. So we don't have to say anything, okay. Okay. I'm waiting for the city manager. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Santa Clara City Council Stadium Authority concurrent meeting. I'd like to call this meeting to order. Could you please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and remain standing for our statement of values? 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.

As we gather, we humbly seek blessings upon this meeting. May we act with strength, courage, and will to perform our obligations and duties to our people with justice to all. Let us seek wisdom so that we may act in the best interest of our people, our neighbors, and our country. All this we ask so we may serve our community with fairness and respect, putting their needs before all.

Thank you, please be seated. A roll call, assistant city clerk.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Council Member, Board Member Chahal is absent this evening. Council Member, Board Member Hardy. Present. Council Member, Board Member Park. Here. Council Member, Board Member Jane. Here. Council Member, Board Member Cox. Here. Vice Mayor, Vice Chair Gonzalez. Here. Mayor and Chair Gilmore.

Here.

Thank you.

Is there a motion to excuse Council Member Chahal?

So moved.

Second. Motion by Vice Mayor Gonzalez, second by Council Member Hardy. to excuse Council Member Chahal. Do we have roll call votes all night tonight, or we're okay? Okay, good. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Council Member Clark, you have your light on?

Yeah, I had my light on to make the motion, as is the process, but we did not do that.

Somebody jumped the gun, so you were correct. All right, next we have City Clerk, yes.

The AB 23 announcement. Members of the Santa Clara Stadium Authority, Sports and Open Space Authority, and Housing Authority are entitled to receive $30 for each attended meeting. Statement of behavioral standards. The City of Santa Clara has adopted a code of ethics and values and behavioral standards for public meetings. to promote and maintain the highest levels of conduct. This includes mutual respect, robust discussion, and allowing city business to be done in an efficient and consistent manner. Please note that as the presiding officer, the mayor's and chair's direction in matters of process and decorum should be followed and that use of the gavel indicates all conversations must conclude and everyone in attendance should come to order and attention. Welcome and thank you for your participation. For those attending this evening in the capacity as a registered lobbyist, we ask you to please identify yourself as such and disclose the clients and organizations that you represent. This is pursuant to City Code Section 2.155.110. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. For today's meeting, the Council's back in person and is conducting its meeting in a hybrid manner. The public is welcome to attend in person. and the city continues to use a Zoom feature to allow participation from your home or office. Members of the public can still join via the link and or call into the, sorry, let me see. I should have this memorized by now. Members of the public can still join via the link or call into the Zoom meeting phone number shown on the screen now. If you would like to speak on an agenda item or during public presentations, please raise your hand on the Zoom application or press star nine on your phone. Please only raise your hand while the item you're seeking to speak on is presented. Staff will enter your name or the last four digits of your phone number and I will call on you to speak. As a friendly reminder, members of the public have two minutes to speak on an agenda item and three minutes on public presentations, and those are reserved for topics that are not on the agenda. Prior to each agenda item, staff will lower your hand to ensure that members of the public are seeking to speak on the appropriate agenda item. So we will move forward with our agenda now. Reports of action taken in closed session, City Attorney?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. City Council did meet in closed session on all items listed on the closed session agenda, 1A, B, C, and D. 1A was conference with labor negotiators for the employee organization unclassified fire management employees, Unit 9B. Item 1B was conference with legal counsel regarding exposure to litigation, one potential case, builder's remedy, potential dispute regarding property at 4220 Network Circle. Items 1C and 1D were related cases of existing litigation, City of Fresno et al., including the City of Santa Clara versus Turner. and City of Fresno at all, including the City of Santa Clara versus Nome. Council met on all these items, however, there's no reportable action. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Thank you, City Attorney. Continuances, exceptions, reconsiderations, do we have any on the Council? Do we have any from staff or the public?

City Manager, no?

All right, we're moving along. We're gonna move on to our consent calendar. All items are approved with one motion, unless an item's pulled for discussion. Do we have any consent items pulled for discussion from the council? Council Member Jane.

Yes, I would like to pull item 2H. That's a salary plan for mayor, city council, and clerk.

All right, anybody else have an item to pull, discuss? All right, seeing none, Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Make a motion for the rest of the consent calendar.

Second. All right, we have a motion by Vice Mayor Gonzales to approve the balance of the consent calendar and a second by Council Member Hardy. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. We're moving so fast, I can't keep up here. Okay. All right, next we have, and that included the stadium authority board consent calendar, public presentations. I think we have quite a few. All right. First we have Jay. Is Jay here? Please come forward, Jay. Welcome. Can you speak in the, let's turn on the microphone. Hold on, we're gonna turn that on. There you go.

How about now? All right. Okay, so I have a few people on Zoom who are gonna be ceding their time to me. It's Tim M., Linda, Kara, Dr. Aggie or Dr. Aguilar, Austin, and that should be it.

Yes, I do see those there. So you would have 12 minutes. 12? Isn't that 15? Just five people? It's three minutes each, and you're allowed up to 12 minutes.

Only up to 12? Oh, okay.

Only 12, that's pretty good.

Well, I mean, I've seen other people get 15 before, like the former member who comes here.

I don't recall anybody getting 15.

Absolutely they did, but that's fine. All right. Okay, so I just want to take a moment, good evening everyone, and recognize the nice people of Santa Clara who came to my aid when I fell really hard on my bicycle, maybe about 30 minutes. So that was really nice of them to come over and help me out. But I'm here to speak about something else. I'm here to speak about Our data sharing problems here in Santa Clara and ALPR cameras. I'm here because this technology creates a permanent searchable record of every driver in this city's movements. And SCPD's own conduct over the past several months give me no confidence that record is under this city's control. On March 24th, Chief Morgan and NICRC Executive Director Mike Sena stood at this podium right here and told you all, this council, on record. One, no federal lookup access. Two, no out-of-state sharing. And three, strict prohibitions on data leaving California. And Director Sena said, and I quote, we have strict prohibitions to share outside of California. In the very same breath, He just said, quote, there are other things that the state allows us to share and they will be able to be shared with federal agencies. Now this is not some technical detail, but rather a contradiction live in front of this own body. I want to address something specific from that meeting. Chief Morgan told this council that a community member, me, At a prior meeting, had said that, quote, Nick Rick accessed our system between February 1st and February 19th at 18 searches per hour, or every hour. And these accesses violate state law and carry statutory fine of $2,500 each, totaling $20 million. Now, Chief Morgan's response was direct. That is to put simply, as a quote, a false statement. I'd like to ask this council to notice what was actually disputed in that exchange. What Chief Morgan called false was the characterization that a search count automatically equals a legal violation and the total that I gave up. He did not dispute that Nick Rick access the system at that volume. The dispute was over legal interpretation, not over the underlying fact of access. that distinction matters because it means even the department's own rebuttal implicitly confirms the access occurred and the disagreement only is only over what it means in that same presentation they also told us that the internal audits found 114 497 searches conducted by six non-california agencies against this network between 2024 and 25. and that of those only two were directed specifically at santa clara's own network I want to be precise about what that framing does and doesn't establish. It narrows the question of whether an outside agency logged directly into our cameras. It does not answer whether Santa Clara's data was swept into a broader multi-network query run by an unauthorized intermediary on someone else's behalf. and the department's own logs by its own admission cannot answer that question either. And quote, search event data does not equal data access or sharing, and the logs do not indicate data export or download. Sergeant Williams told this council that a search entry does not indicate results returned or that data was obtained, and that inclusion of multiple networks in a search does not mean Santa Clara data was accessed or returned. Now listen to that carefully. The city's own oversight mechanism cannot tell us whether that data was actually taken. We are being asked to trust a system that by design cannot confirm or deny the very thing residents are worried about. I want to flag one more thing from that presentation because it's a rhetorical move worth naming. a significant part of the march 24th slides was devoted to comparing alpr to parking enforcement systems toll systems and private parking garages arguing that those systems actually collect more personal information than alpr does since they leak plates to names addresses and payments account payment accounts that may well be true but it is not responsive to the actual concern nobody raised this issue because they're worried about santa clara's alpr system knows your home address The concern is what happens to a comparatively narrow data set once it leaves the city and enters the regional information sharing architecture that by its own government documents, which I sent you, authorizes onward distribution without our approval. Comparing the depth of the data collected here says nothing about the breadth of where it travels once it's out of our hands. So I decided to check what actually governs this myself. And on June 23rd and June 24th, I filed Public Records Act requests with the city clerk and SCPD records asking for the MOU, the current MOU or current data sharing agreement between SCPD and NITRC. You should all have them in front of you. I printed them out and brought them. We do, we have them. Thank you. The exact document Chief Morgan and Director Sena had just spent 20 minutes discussing in this room. Now both offices gave me the identical answer. No responsive records exist. As of today, I formally challenged that denial in writing, citing the city's duty to assist under government code section 7922.535 and 7922.600. In arguing constructive custody, the SCPD cannot function as a participant member of the Bay Area Flock Network, sending officers, receiving alerts, submitting hot list entries, while claiming no document defines or governs that membership. I also cited section 722.5. 722.525, which requires the city to segregate and release non-exempt portions of a record rather than issue a blanket denial. And section 7922.530, which gives the city 10 calendar days to determine disclosability, not business days, which is what I'm always quoted in next request portals. And this is a deadline that has already passed once on this request. Whether the city reopens these requests and produces what state law requires remains outstanding as of tonight. Here's what matters regardless of how that challenge resolves. I obtained independently the actual NICRC, the actual agreements NICRC operates under a standard NICRC data sharing MOU in two county of Santa Clara staffing contracts. with this county of san mateo one from 2014 this is the foundational document that established the data sharing agreements between the county of santa clara county and san mateo knickrick And one from 2022. In these funds, a Santa Clara deputy assigned to NICRC. These are documents the city itself claims do not exist. The MOU states that once data reaches NICRC, the member agency, quote, grants authority to NICRC to further share the information with other public safety entities and that new sharing connections will not require further review by approval by member agency, meaning Santa Clara. Okay. Not our approval, not our knowledge, until we go looking for it ourselves. That is the plain language governing every camera this city has put on a pole. Oh yeah, sorry. And I'd note that Director Sen himself described the underlying architecture the same way. In his own words, he told this council that the strength of this system is, quote, having the connectivity of multiple agencies through what he called a single sign-on tool. A single sign-on to used by local and state agencies in the state of California. A single sign-on architecture by definition means one authenticated account. NCRIX can reach across any member agency's data at once. That is not a rebuttal to the proxy sharing concern. That is a description of the exact mechanism that makes proxy sharing possible. Both staffing contracts 2014 and 2022, nearly a decade apart, list nearly identical duties for the Santa Clara HELPS funds. Both versions require, quote, disseminating information to the appropriate liaison officer, investigative task force, and or information sharing agency task force after approval from NICRC management, the storage agency, and the supervisor of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, CT1, when appropriate. The 2022 version adds, quote, direct interface for information sharing with the United States Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the DEA, United States Attorney's Office, and the United States Coast Guard, and promoting the use of Western Information Network, WISN. I raised issues about WISN and NICRC many times before. This is a one-time oversight in a single contract. It is a structural recurring feature of how Santa Clara has funded its participation in this network for over 10 years. WISN, the same WISN that San Francisco's own police department identified just weeks ago as having improperly queried their flock camera network through NICRC, a federally funded intelligence network accessing local ALPR data through the same authorized user pathway that Santa Clara plugs into every day. According to that reporting, SFPD disabled NICRC's access after the audit confirmed the systems were, quote, improperly queried on behalf of out-of-state and federal agencies. San Francisco cut off both NICRC and WISN entirely. This isn't speculation about what could happen. It already happened. One county over, through the identical architecture this city relies on, funds and just spent 20 minutes reassuring this county about it. California Civil Code Section 178.90.5, or SB 34, restricts ALPR data with agencies outside California absent specific statutory authorization. Government Code Section 728, or SB 54, the California Values Act, restricts using that data for immigration enforcement. The Director of the Senate himself told this council that the Attorney General's office has already sued at least one California agency for this very kind of unauthorized sharing, litigation that remains ongoing. And yet, NICRC's own governing MOU contains no equivalent contractual prohibition of its own. It authorizes onward sharing and expressly waives our right to approve it in advance. This restriction that exists comes from the state statute and from vendor-side platform settings, flock adjusted in 2025. It does not come from the agreement that actually defines what NICRC is authorized to do with our data. So when Chief Morgan effectively tells us that the department has no control over what NICRC does with our data once it leaves this building, the documents back them up. And when the city simultaneously tells a record requester that no such governing agreements exist while the department cites the same regional framework by name in detail in a public meeting, that is not oversight. That is legal gamemanship and is exactly backwards. The city should be able to produce on demand the document governing where our residents' movements end up. I have two requests tonight. And I'd like to address them tonight and not at some future meeting. First, I'd like you to direct staff to suspend all data sharing between SCPD and NICRC effective immediately until this council has the actual governing statement in hand and can certify with certainty and not platitudes and insurances that no Santa Clara data is reaching any out of state or federal agency. Second, bring Chief Morgan back to this die and tonight or at the next meeting to answer directly under public questioning why his department told a records investor that no data sharing agreement exists when California law required SCPD to maintain and disclose exactly that document and when the chief himself discussed that framework at length from his podium in March. We don't get to have it both ways, an agreement detailed enough to pressure this council but nonexistent enough to withhold from the public. Pick one story and be prepared to answer for it. Thank you.

Thank you, Jay. I know we cannot take action on your request, but we've heard it and we also have your information. Thank you so much. All right, next we have Brian. Please come forward. Welcome.

Thank you, Madam Mayor and Council. 250 years. Doesn't that amaze you? Our species has arguably been around for 200,000 years. Our planet has been around for 4.54 billion years, and our universe, as far as we can tell, has been around for about 13.8 billion years. That's a long time. It's even older than I am. That's supposed to be a joke, sorry.

You don't look that old. Sorry.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, right there. When this document was written, it wasn't everybody in this country. Half the population was written out of the document just by using the word men. I'm not faulting it, time is what it is. But one thing that our country has is that it's constantly pushing forward to that utopia that it probably will never reach. That's probably one of its biggest strengths. That comes by trusting the people next to you. Doesn't mean you don't believe everything they say. I mean, it doesn't mean that you don't hold them accountable. It means that you trust them. If one person nominates somebody to be on a board, you allow that person to go forward unless you have real concerns about them not being able to do it. And I read both sides and I thought, that's something interesting. And that's not a fault on anybody. Every July 4th, I take the chance to reread Medal of Honor recipients. I don't know how they did it, but I think one thing that's easily said, and I'm just, from what I've read and what I've seen in personal testimonies, is it wasn't grandeur words, it was the person next to them, why they ran up on the beach, why they held a tank gun like Audie Murphy did. It's, people are drawn to great sacrifice for the people that are next to them. That gentleman that just spoke talks about something I admire him for being able to do all that research, and he is correct. Our species has not evolved quickly enough yet to be able to ascertain all this stuff that's coming through us. One thing we are, though, capable of is that person that is next to you. That's a start, that's common ground. Maybe this council could learn from that. I know I have, thank you.

Thank you, Brian. Next we have Howard. Please come forward. Welcome, Howard.

Hello, thank you for having me tonight. We'll start out with, yes, I'm still angry about FIFA being cut out for 21 days of earning money. really sucks and i thought about it i just got a challenge for anybody and everybody who was involved all in that gathering and deciding who's going to do what i challenge each and every one of you to give up twenty one days of your pay step up and do it now you won't do it let the hot dog vendor take the fall because we don't give a crap about him except when I do the events. Luckily, Parks and Rec put on a really good show over there at the college. It was really fun. We were very, very busy, got to see most of you, got to serve Suds, believe it or not, got to even serve the city manager. It was all fun. My family came out and served people up in Santa Clara and I hope we did a good job and we moved our line as fast as we could. But anyway, outside of that, I just wanna thank everybody for putting on such a great show. There was a lot of people out there working really hard to make that happen. I always get there early. So I see a lot of stuff behind the scenes So it's kind of like a lot of stuff go on a lot of guys working late at night To tear that down for the people to have a good time Outside of that It was a great show, like I say. Santa Clara had hot dogs this year. Last two years, you guys put it on, you didn't have hot dogs. This year, Santa Clara had hot dogs. Guess what? Morgan Hill did not have one single hot dog served at their Fourth of July show. Oh well, that's what happens when a hot dog dude don't do you no more. But outside that, we got Cinema in the Park coming up. I'll be there. The popcorn's gonna be flowing. I'm sure y'all heard about the popcorn. That line was bigger than my, my popcorn line's bigger than my line for the event we just did. It's fun though. Got concerts in the park. Sadly say I'm not doing concerts in the park this year. I'm only gonna do the north and the street dance. Can't pass street dance up or the mayor could throw me in jail or something or have a camera follow me. Anyway, thank you.

Thank you, Howard. Thank you for participating. Your line was very long at 4th of July. Very long. It moved. Thank you. Next we have Kerr. Please come forward. Welcome.

Good evening. Thank you, Mayor and Council. First, congratulations on six successful games at Levi's Stadium, or I'm sorry, just the stadium, whatever it was. Levi's Stadium. So I have a couple slides here just to kind of recap things you've already seen. These are just... higher density projects, I hate to call them high density projects because they're not really high density, but they're higher than normal, mid to high density. Those are, I've showed before, this kind of summarized the last presentation I did, just to kind of summarize them on one slide, just to show them all in one place. Since that time, it's been about a month, these other projects have been announced. So Google is converting one of their properties into an apartment complex. You have two apartments. Dare I say Summerhill is proposing a 600 unit, two buildings, eight stories each, or I'm sorry, six and an eight story building. And then this one I think touches pretty close to home. This is the Prune Ridge Golf Course, I think everybody knows about. It's a 316 unit, five story, wrap around a corner structure. So the common thread here is apartments that are more than town homes. That's the common thread, the takeaway. This little stat came out a couple weeks ago that basically said the last couple years there haven't been anybody building apartment buildings, which is why rents are going up six to seven percent. That's what we can expect from the lack of high density or moderate density housing. And so my request, it's a very simple request. I'm getting tired of showing you. I'm sure you're getting tired of seeing these presentations. I appreciate that. I want to be sensitive to that. Last year, the mayor and council, I believe, asked the city manager to create a staff report on the AgriHood, just kind of what happened. I don't remember seeing that. I spoke with the city manager now, and I guess it went to you directly. I didn't realize that, so please, if that happened. I didn't know about it. I'd like to see that if it did happen. But if it didn't happen, my ask is that we do kind of a status on where we are with the agri-hood. What was promised? What was really like concrete in the development agreement? What was done and what was not done and has the work has yet to be done? And so if we could do that, that would be awesome. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Kurt. Next we have Edward. Go ahead, Edward. You're online.

Yeah, I just wanted to say that I saw the crowds for San Pedro Square, San Jose during the FIFA games, and it just really irritated me, thinking that we could have had that related project completed for retail, restaurant, hotel. That phase could have been completed to where it would have brought a lot of money to the city of Santa Clara. I know you guys have been having problems you know, getting funding. And you've recently had the city manager and the attorney get that pay raise. But there's no performance review. Yeah, it's just crazy what's going on right now. But I just also wanted to say that there's other things going on, like the Supreme Court decision where You can no longer sue Monsanto if you get cancer from the chemicals. That's another crazy thing that's going on along with just recently I saw posted that somebody in Texas was complaining about poor water quality on Facebook and they were arrested and I guess being prosecuted for a felony sentence. It's just crazy. It's like we no longer live in the United States of America. We just celebrated 250 years, and it's like our freedoms are being taken away from us. It's just ridiculous what's going on today. All right, thank you for your time. Thank you for allowing me to speak.

Thank you, Edward. Do we have anybody else that would like to speak? Okay, seeing none, we're gonna move on to consent items pulled for discussion. Oh, I'm sorry, do we have somebody else? There was a hand that just went up. Oh, Anthony is not here, he's online. All right, Anthony, go ahead, please.

Yes, good evening. I should be there, but I'm unwell this evening. Anthony Becker here, former council member. Before anyone, I basically just want to get to what I was here for. Most of you here for the night know why I'm here. It's the 12th time I'm asking about this item, which is putting on the agenda a discussion regarding the May 7th disclosure of the FIFA information. As I said, this is the 12th time. My first request was on February 10th, and we are now months later, and there has been no action by the council nor the city manager. From the beginning, I have repeatedly requested a truly independent investigation into the FIFA disclosure that appeared in the Chronicle, and the city has avoided investigating the entire city council. And I know there's some comments made from before, which I don't agree with because I was never investigated. And my understanding is that conversations at the time essentially were just the concerns that individuals are not going to tell the truth. But I'm not surprised by the Council avoiding this discussion publicly, and I'm going to shift to something else, which is the second item I had last time, which is about agendizing an item that is to have a ethics consultant during our 2026 election cycle. The last time we had was in 2016, a full decade ago. Since then, our candidates have been held accountable for misleading the public. The last time we had one, Council Member Watanabe had been held accountable for lying about me and other candidates like Sus Jane by taking money from certain lawyers. Since then, and now I know why, there have been no accountability forums, and since every candidate has been endorsed by the mayor, has not been held accountable for their misleading information. So I asked the City Council to do this and put this on the agenda. And why? Because the period of the election nomination cycle begins next week. Council should do this quickly. In 2016, there were 11 complaints filed and since then, nothing's ever been done. So what are we going to do? What kind of framework are we going to put together? So both of my requests should not be controversial. Again, the second one shouldn't be controversial. It should be pretty straightforward for the next meeting. And I'll get into some other stuff next meeting, but I will stop off on the performance review situation in the last meeting. And I want to support Suds Jane on this, which is, you know, there's many times the mayor and others were never available to meet for these performance reviews. And to me, that seemed very purposeful. And I have some more information to provide everybody on that when we go to the next meeting, because I'm going to run out of time. And I just think it's just unfair that the mayor says these things. And I think Council Member Jane was right. So again, those are my two items that I hope that the City Council can look into. I mean, the second one I think is the most important currently, because we are currently entering an election cycle. And again, are we going to hold candidates accountable for what they say, or are we going to continue to do what we did the last 10 years? So thank you again, and I'll see you guys the next time.

Thank you very much. We have a Siprakash. I probably said that wrong. Please come forward, and then we can get to you after that. Welcome.

Good evening, honorable mayor, members of the council, and officials, and the audience. I am a senior citizen, and I live on 2231 Caldwell Mundo since last three years. Our apartments don't give us parking, and parking is a big issue in our area. I have been given citations. My cars have been towed. I have already paid $2,000 by way of citations and towing. I would highly recommend The Mayor, could you please see into this? I'm living an affordable living. I can't go on paying citations like this because just I'm leaving the apartment. Don't give us proper parking. Where am I supposed to park my cars in case of events? I have to park my car 20 minutes away. I have to walk all the way down. And this is my concern and hope you can give a thought on this, please. Thank you.

Thank you for bringing that forward again. Thank you. If anyone would like to speak, please come forward.

Welcome. Hi, thank you. My name's Kathleen Fareed, and actually I'm part of AgriHood. I live there, as well as these lovely ladies. I've never done this before, so. Oh, you're okay. What I wanted to actually report is something around our safety. Again, on Friday, there was a woman who was stuck in the elevator for four hours, and that's not okay. And they finally, you know, the fire department and Otis came out, and the elevator's still not working. So... That's just a major part of safety that we've been addressing. And what I'd really love to see is because John Stewart is doing an abysmal job managing that. And now the landscape is starting to die because they're not watering it. It's just on and on and on. And I could go on for hours. But I would like to also have the council have a review of what CORE has promised for AgriHood because they're not fulfilling their promises. It's really, really frustrating being a resident there and having these things that take place and see. That's it.

Thank you, and thank you for bringing that forward. I think the city managers heard the comments, and we'll look into that. Thank you. Is there anyone else that would like to speak? Please come forward.

Welcome. Welcome. My name is Jamila Wright and I believe me and him live in the same complex, so I'm here also about the parking situation. We have whole bunch, I live on Cala del Mundo, so it's kind of like, it goes around in a C. If there are complex, there's only, there's They don't have enough parking in our units. So there's actually a waiting list to actually get in there. Technically, all of it says no parking. But I mean, they do let us park, but sometimes there are tickets. There's not enough parking spots, so people park in the red. And then there's an empty slot that has, I guess they're going to build something else there, but it's an empty parking lot, so people park there. But if you park there, every once in a while you do get towed. Just like him, I got towed, and I even have my phone number on it so someone could call me if I need to move. So it We just need some kind of fixture to the parking situation because the ones that are there, they're all red. And it's not even just like a little bit red, it's more than the casual red. And they took the side, one of the sides, and they made it just a bike lane. So technically people are parking there, and I done seen a rows of tickets on that side. I live paycheck to paycheck. And it's like a race to get home to find parking. And then you have the construction workers. They have a side open for them to park. But if they can, they park closer, which means it takes from us who needs a parking spot. So I don't know exactly how this could be faced or what could be done, but it'd be greatly appreciated. I done got about three tickets myself and towed. It's a hassle, it's inconvenient, and it's expensive. So thank you.

Thank you for letting us know, you and others. Thank you. Anyone else like to speak? Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. 0183. 0183? There you go.

Good evening. My name is James Rowland, and I would like to I wish you all a happy summer. God love you, Madam Mayor and the City Council, and God love the City of Santa Clara and the City staff. You had a speaker previous, Mr. Becker. I would like to remind people for the record that Mr. Becker was convicted of perjury. Perjury, according to Robert Ingersoll, is the most cowardly of crimes. It is a crime of moral turpitude. So I will leave you with this. A man convicted of a crime of moral turpitude who has been convicted of the most cowardly of crimes is giving us ethics advice. Thank you. God love you all.

Thank you. Is there anyone else that would like to speak? City Clerk, do you see anybody else? Okay, Council Member Park, you have your hand up.

Yeah, I know that the city managers heard this, but I went to a AgriHood meeting where we were told that there was alarms going off all night and nobody had addressed them. And when the firefighters came, there were no hookups for the alarm. And now I'm hearing that we've got people stuck in an elevator for more than a single minute. And I'm very concerned. I think that Mr. Vartan has correctly identified that we did request a report and there is maybe a report that was given. I can tell you a little bit about that. But I feel at this point, I really want to push that referral because there are a lot of things that have happened since the last issues that have made this come before council and I'm really concerned about what's going on there.

So city manager has heard that from the public. Okay. I know there's no discussion. I just wanted to underline that point. Underlined. Thank you. With an exclamation mark. Okay. Next, we have consent items pulled for discussion. Item 2H, action to adopt a resolution approving and adopting the updated unclassified salary plan for various positions, including the updated salaries of the mayor and council members and the city clerk. Council Member Jane, you pulled that.

Yeah, I pulled this. This is related to a discussion we had about the raises for the city manager and the city attorney, but I'm gonna read from the resolution that was passed in March 2025 by the Salary Setting Commission. It says, pursuant to the city charter, the Salary Setting Commission is charged with establishing the compensation for the positions of mayor and council member for the period commencing July 1st, 2025 and ending on June 30th, 2027. They met on four occasions. It says the mayor and council members are not regular employees of the city, subject to internal performance review. Rather, the mayor and council members are elected by the voters of the city of Santa Clara and is therefore solely within the purview of the voters to determine the quality of the performance. There is no formal requirement for the number of hours worked in city service per week. the Commission recognized that the work of Mayor and Council does require significant dedication of time and effort. The Measure O Charter Commission noted time commitment of approximately 30 hours per week in 2016, and this Commission has no basis for believing that figure to be reduced in 2025. They compared the salaries of five comparator agencies. and what they found was that the city was at the median. Two comparator agencies which reviewed salaries fell below those of the City of Santa Clara, but they mitigated the effects of the lower salary figures by providing medical benefits, which taken together with salary brought the total compensation for the position of council member to a level greater than the total compensation provided for the position in Santa Clara. The Commission noted that the City of Santa Clara was the only city amongst the comparator agencies reviewed that did not provide medical benefits for the positions of Mayor and Councilmember. It was noted further that the provision of these benefits essentially doubled the cost of the position. Due to ongoing budget deficits, the Commission's desire to provide maximum salary increases allowed by the Charter Section 2702, medical benefits were not included in total compensation for the 25-27 period. The Commission is hopeful that in the next salary setting cycle, 2027, the issue of medical benefits will be reviewed anew by the Commission. while the agenda item didn't list the salary increases, the mayor's salary went up from this year, and this is what we're approving, went up from 2,625 per month to 2,750 per month. That works out to an increase of 4.76% without a performance review versus the 2% that was disputed at the last meeting and fought for and was awarded to the city manager and the city attorney. The council members' salary went up from $2,100 per month to $2,200 per month for 30 hours a week work, and that was also 4.76%. So I would like to make a motion that we adopt the resolution, but we limit our salaries to 2%, like the city matter and city attorney, since we didn't receive a performance review and neither did they.

That is a ridiculous comparison. I just, I don't even understand that. And we have a salary setting commission that made a recommendation or a finding. City attorney, do we have to? except they're finding, I can't remember what the charter says.

Yes, Madam Mayor, the salary setting commission sets your salaries. I don't think the council can act collectively in any way to modify that based on the charter language. Each of you can do individual things if you choose to with your salaries, but I don't think there's a collective action that can be taken that would be inconsistent with my understanding of the charter language.

i thought so um yes did you want to say something uh yeah just uh uh marco mercado acting director of hr just to clarify this is uh the item before you is an administ administrative action to have the pay plans um be publicly posted as accurate uh as the city attorney indicated the salary setting commission set the salaries and this is just to update the pay plans to reflect their decision right i the whole thing is ridiculous um it was there a motion to

Okay, Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Make a motion to approve the recommendation for 2H. Is there a second?

Second. All right, we have a motion and a second for the recommendation on record. Council Member Park.

Yeah, I mean, I understand why people think this is a ridiculous comparison, but I also understand why Councilmember Jain is bringing this up. I think that when we look at compensation, 2% is not really that much. And when we look at the compensations across the board for staff, you will see that is among the lowest. I don't know that unless we count the groups, the units that thank you very much for your service took zeros during COVID because that's what we needed. I don't know that I've seen any percentages, yearly percentages in the 2% range ever. At the same time, I would like to address the council salaries, which is the council salaries, I mean, it's 30 hours, and I would say in some cases it takes more, and these aren't just, well, do it on your own leisure, because I know a lot of council members don't put in 30 hours. I think that when we look at the number of people that come to events, that respond to emails, that do the work of talking to the people, that varies depending on the individual. But I do know that there are lots of roles that we take that we are required to be there. I mean, we can be sued. I mean, the reason that we're part of some of these committees and some of these commissions is because of a measure that was passed and we are required to have a meeting. There are lots of issues where if we are not part, if we do not participate, then we lose voice as the City of Santa Clara. And because a lot of the agencies that we work with are... city or county agencies and regional agencies, those meetings don't occur after hours, they occur in the middle of the day. I have had a lot of meetings that occur, whether they're update meetings, whether they're VTA meetings, whether they're other meetings, they occur at one o'clock in the afternoon, at three o'clock in the afternoon. This is very difficult for people who have a job. I know that I've complained about this quite a bit, but we start a lot of our closed sessions at 5 o'clock, and even when I was working, I was working in Fremont, and I got out at 5, and it took me not even 30 minutes to get down here. It took me sometimes 40, 45 minutes to get down here. Unfortunately, the way that this council works is it works on majority. So if one person or two people or a minority of people are put out because they're the only ones that are working class, then it turns out that we'll have the meetings at 5 o'clock or whenever we deem that the meetings are necessary. And if those meetings don't require the full time, well, that's just too bad. the majority of council has spoken. I think that at some point, the salary setting committee and the commission or whatever it is, they need to have a better understanding of what this job entails. They need to have a better understanding of what it means for people in the working class to not be able to run for council because of the pay and because of the time it takes. At some point, we are getting an aristocracy of council members who are retired or independently wealthy or have jobs which are you know that are somewhat compatible and it's funny because i know that in other cities we have people that work for housing agencies and and they think well that's a good thing because their job is related to their office in the short answer is no that's a terrible thing that means that a lot of cases you get people that you know what they're going to vote for because of the work that they're doing and nobody calls that as a conflict of interest but it absolutely is at some point i feel that the only people that should be on council are not people that have real estate interest uh... people that are you know, working for state agencies or working for other council members or other politicians, I think that they need to be independent. And at some point, I think that the only thing that gives us independence is a salary that allows people to be on council, focus on council without having to do other work. People always say, well, what should we do? I don't want to be in this for the money. A lot of people say, well, we shouldn't be in this for the money. We should be doing this for the love of the city of Santa Clara. And the short answer is, in this economy, People need to be able to afford to do the work. There is no one in the working class. There is no one that's working two jobs. There are very few single parents. There are very few people that can afford to even run. They won't even think about it. And as a result, the people who need the representation most, the single parents, the people who are having multiple jobs, the people who are not financially, you know, or stable in housing, they get the least representation because there is no one here on council that looks like them or works like them. I mean, we saw this with the last council where there was only one person here that was a renter. And I know that Aisha Wahab, she says it quite loudly. She is one senator out of 40.

you know representing forty million people in the state of california the only person that runs think we need to stay on task please for understood not saying you're venturing up when i think when we talk about some of our policy says we have to stick to the item and you're going in a different direction

Understood item on the agenda there is a lot to discuss here and at some point having the salary setting As it is not being able to talk about it not being able to do these other things I think that's a big problem, but I agree with Councilmember Jane, but unfortunately, that's not what we can do as a motion. Thank you.

Thank you councilmember Jane Yeah, I'm gonna read from this The current salary levels, without taking into consideration the value of additional benefits provided for the positions of mayor, 2,500 per month, and Councilmember 2000, were found to fall approximately the median level of the five comparators. But later it says that if you include medical benefits, all our comparators would have been double what their salaries are. It said that if we provided medical benefits, it would be about double what the salaries are. So it doesn't actually seem like we were, the salary setting commission was given apples to apples comparators for, should have been total compensation when they were comparing. And I was pleased to see that the Salary Submission recognized that in the next cycle they may consider medical benefits. But again, to Anthony Becker's point, this council has not done formal performance reviews in four years. for the city manager and the city attorney. We have not completed formal performance reviews. We have failed in our job to do that. And so if we have failed in that job, then I don't see, and I've said this before, why the city manager and the city attorney should be given zero salary increases

Again, we're talking about this item, please. And there's a motion and second on the floor.

I'm talking about why I think it should be 2% or lower. You're repeating yourself. Well, I can repeat myself if I want. So my point is that first, I agree with Council Member Park. The salaries for the city council are too low. The charter says that they can only be increased 10% per year. So I'm not sure how we're gonna resolve that without having to go to a ballot measure. But I just think that,

our salaries are more than double if it's 4.76 percent more than double what we gave to the city manager and the city attorney thank you again i'm just going to repeat that has nothing to do with the city council and mayor salaries and i'm really happy we have an independent salary setting commission because it's not supposed to be political and get political like all of this up here so we have a motion and a second i'm calling for the question city clerk Please register your vote. And that passes four to one, thank you. Next we have the item, let's see, it's our first business item, I believe. Yes, item number four, adoption of a resolution approving the execution, delivery, and performance of revolving credit agreement with TD Public Finance LLC for capital costs for the electric system in the amount not to exceed $350 million. and authorizing the execution, delivery and performance of related documents and certain other actions in connection with this financing. Did I read that right? 350 million. Why didn't we take this first? I guess it's early enough. City Manager.

Thank you, Mayor. As you said, this is Capital Project Financing to support our electric utility, Silicon Valley Power. You may recall in October of 2024, you approved the first tranche of capital financing totaling $130 million. However, as you know, the department is currently in the midst of $480 million worth of projects. Significant equipment purchases have already been made, and as you also know, construction is underway. As the projects proceed, it is now time for additional debt financing. Tonight's item... recommends that you authorize a revolving credit agreement for $350 million as an interim financing mechanism to continue with the capital projects. This interim financing provides flexibility and cost savings for the utility until a second tranche is approved. The presentation will be provided by Acting Assistant City Manager and Chief Financial Officer Ken Lee, supported by Nico Prokos. Thank you.

Thank you. Welcome, Ken.

Thank you, City Manager. Good evening, Honorable Mayor, City Council, Ken Lee, Acting Assistant City Manager, Chief Financial Officer. As the City Manager mentioned, I was before you about a year and a half ago with the first tranche of bond financing. This is the next step in the continuation of many large capital improvement projects and the necessary funding for those projects. And so both Director Prokos and I will tag team this presentation. We'll talk about background and status of some of those projects, including projected delivery and completion. I do have a couple of slides on financing plan and why You might be asking why a revolving letter of credit? We've looked at some of the numbers. We have a team of consultants here just to find the most flexible and cost-effective means of financing those projects, and then we'll talk about the recommendation. This first slide, just by way of background, the financing team includes staff from finance, our treasury team, as well as our SVP business services finance division, In addition to that, we have bond counsel, a municipal advisor, the lender after completing procurements of sorts to solicit potential submittals from different lenders, select a TD public finance, and then bond counsel for the lender. And so with that, I'll just start it off by kicking it over to Director Prokos to talk about where our projects are at.

Thank you. Hello, Director.

All right, thank you, Ken. Good evening, honorable mayor, council members, Niko Prokos, SVP director. So I'm going to show a chart here that I think you've seen several times in the past, just to give a little bit of background. This gives a sense of the growth that we've been experiencing as a utility starting in January 2000 and all the way to the right there to January 2025. Really what I want to draw your attention to is starting around January 2021, 2022, we start to see a significant increase in energy consumption from our utility. And this is something that is quite striking and different from what a lot of other utilities are experiencing, but it's something that we expect to continue for the very near future and beyond. Our current peak is about 780 megawatts. We are building the system to be able to accommodate 1300 megawatts and actually more than that as well. So in terms of load growth, we have a multi-phased approach to this. One is what I consider external, and the other one is internal to our system. We work very closely with the California Independent System Operator. We analyze new loads for upcoming projects, and we also look at the load ramp. So what are they planning on doing over a four- or five-year time period? We work with the ISO to plan for additional power and transmission capacity. And the ISO then moves forward to develop and construct transmission projects. And again, this is outside of our service territory. And I have a slide here in a moment to talk a little bit about some of the transmission that we're seeing. In terms of in-city projects, we are rebuilding our receiving stations. We have new transmission. That's that 115 KV line that was approved a while back. We're upgrading existing transmission, and then we have a battery storage project, which is on track to be completed by August or September. In terms of powering the South Bay, and these are the external projects, several of you are familiar with these projects. We were just at a groundbreaking recently, and I think the mayor gave some comments for that. We have three projects that are in play right now in various stages. The first one is the Newark to NRS line. That's more advanced. They just did that groundbreaking, as I mentioned. The second one is the Metcalf to San Jose Bee project. And then finally, we have the newest project, which is San Jose Bee to NRS. All of these projects are being constructed by LS Power, and it just so happens we have... I was going to say, there they are. They're here for this item and also the item right afterwards as well with the franchise agreement. We're also, as I mentioned, building that 115 KB line. And then you can see that battery there denotes the battery project. So really there's a lot happening to both within our system and then external to our system to accommodate the growth. And this is something that we've been planning for for many years, five to 10 years. Our receiving station projects are moving along on schedule. NRS, the cost for this project is approximately $158 million. The contract was awarded to Henkels and McCoy. If you drive by, you can see them out there. The notice to proceed was issued in July 2025. Construction underway. And there's been some significant milestones of late. Again, that project is on schedule. And estimated completion date is June 2028. KRS and SRS, again, lots of work happening there. That cost is $221 million. That contract was awarded to DMZ Builders. The schedule, we issued that notice to proceed shortly after the NRS project. Construction's going well, and the completion date is on target for the 2029 timeframe. Finally, this is related to that newest project, and I think there was a question about this regarding who pays for this project. The 230 KV line is a transmission project external to our system, so it goes through the ISO process, so we don't pay directly for that. We pay through transmission access charges. However, When these lines are proposed, we do an analysis of potential impacts to our system. And based on that analysis, we have to do new projects. And that's where that 109.3 million comes up. There's a variety of projects that have to happen at our receiving stations and some other things related to that as well. And this has all been incorporated into the budget that has been approved. The schedule of procurement contracts planned for mid-2027, estimated start date 2027, and we're aiming for a 2031 completion date. And with that, I will turn it back over to Ken to cover some of the financials.

Thank you, Nico.

Thank you, Nico. So appreciate just the update on those projects. As previously mentioned, we funded a good portion of the equipment purchases and the start of construction through a first tranche of debt issuance. That was $130 million for capital projects. Currently proceeds remaining roughly about half of that, and we have some large delivery of transformers expected later this year. calendar year, and so the full tranche one is expected closer toward the end of this calendar year. This original tranche one was issued with the anticipation that a second issuance, a tranche two, would be issued to fund the remaining costs of both the three projects, SRS, KRS, and NRS. With that second tranche, approximately $250 million was expected in late 2025. We have not issued that second tranche. We took a look at the timing of the cash spend of those projects. And you may recall from prior bond conversations, there are requirements in terms of when those funds could be spent, when they're issued, 18 months before, 36 months after. And so with the team of professional debt financing staff, we also looked at the additional needs, the need for the equipment related to that 230 KV line, approximately $109 million. That brings the total kind of outstanding need to that $350 million. And so when we're looking at the financing plan and we're looking at the four projects that are being funded here, in total 480 million or so, we funded $130 million through that first tranche. Some other funding sources, low development fee to the extent that specific large customers contributed for some of the expansion portions of these projects, $31 million. Some of the rate funding through fund balance customer service charges, $12 million. So in total, what's been funded, $173 million, with about $305 million outstanding dollars to be funded. So sometimes we're asked, you know, why are we debt financing? Why can't we use cash reserves? And so just wanted to provide some elements, some of the pros to why we're debt financing. And so when we are looking at debt financing, we have rating agencies that look at our bonds, they look at our cash reserves, and In fact, very recently, S&P and Fitch reiterated a double A minus rating based on our healthy almost 500 days of cash on hand. And so they do look at that on a go-forward basis, on an annual basis, and so to the extent we do tap into those reserves, that would impact our bond ratings and then subsequently as we borrow the cost of borrowing. Secondly, because these are large projects, $480 million or so, we want to smooth the impact to our rate payers, to our Santa Clara both residents and industrial and commercial customers, and so we want to spread that out over time. And then the third item here, because of a lot of the equipment being purchased, installed, have a lifespan of let's say 20 years or so, there's an intent and purpose here to debt finance in order to spread kind of that share of those costs over the time frame for the equipment and those that would be benefiting from those improvements. And so there's an equity portion of why we debt finance. To support that debt financing, just a slide here to show the revenues. Significantly, 93%, 95% are from our industrial and commercial users, so they are footing the bill for the debt as we issue bonds, as we look ahead in terms of who would pay for that financing. And then the question of why a revolving credit facility or a line of credit, I mentioned earlier, allows flexibility to the extent we are unsure of the exact timing of the cash spend. It preserves both interest savings in terms of dollars that we would save by having a line of credit and really only drawing when we need the cash. It would preserve existing cash and fund balances to support credit ratings. I talked about kind of that large cash outlay, avoiding that and spreading that over multiple generations. And then with our consultant team, we did an analysis. If we were to issue that second tranche, today or as expected, versus having a revolving credit facility and issuing those bonds at either a later date of January, I think the 28th, or even further out, July of 28th. Some cost savings, net present value savings up to $11.5 million by having a revolving credit facility, interim financing available to the extent we need it, and then once we know that that cash spend is occurring, fixing that out, refinancing it, and issuing long-term debt. So the plan itself, not to exceed $350 million, that does provide a little bit of a cushion to the extent that as those projects continue and there's a need for change orders or additional financing, $350 million, that line of credit is a five-year term, would expire June 2031. based on the timeline of the projects to date that felt five years was sufficient. There is a cost to that, a 20 basis point cost. It is based on what's a secured overnight financing rate, so that's a variable rate to the extent that that market or that rate changes over time, currently about 3.8% over the last year. And this revolving credit facility also assumes a credit rating of A plus or above. Currently we're at double A minus, which is above that rating. And then just the cost, $150,000 for this financing plan with a scheduled close date of in about a week. This slide just wanted to show a lot of different things to manage and maneuver here. The timeline since 2021, the initial planning for those very three large projects, design and construction. As you can see there, October of 24, that issuance of that first tranche. And then the credit agreement in between tranche one and tranche two here, really a cost effective, flexible way to allow these projects to continue and then go out to issue long term bonds once we know more in terms of the actual dollars and spend on those remaining projects. And so just in terms of fiscal plan, I talked about the analysis that staff and our consultant team performed comparing that initial plan to issue a second tranche. versus a short-term credit financing that is presented before you, and then issuing both long-term bonds, either at a January or July 2028 rate. And really, I know a lot of numbers on this slide, the point here in the box and in the red, depending on scenario one or two, which this financing facility does give us that flexibility, anywhere from two to eleven and a half million dollars in savings versus issuing long-term bonds today um and so really looking at the cost to be the most effective and then when you look at the bond debt service costs over time the cost avoidance uh 15 to 25 million and that's over time so that net present value is a little bit less so there is a financial advantage to having this credit facility it does give us flexibility when it comes to spending the dollars and saves dollars for our rate payers. And so with that, our recommendation is that the council would by resolution authorize the execution of the revolving credit agreement to TD Public Finance amount not to exceed $350 million for capital costs in the electric utility and approve the execution of all the financing documents. There's a handful of attachments in your packet, and then authority to the city manager, director of finance, director of SVP, attorney's office, and clerk to execute all those agreements. There's, I think, some signing dates for that execution if the council approves this tonight. And so that is staff's recommendation, and we're here for any questions you may have.

Thank you for that. I'm gonna ask the city Attorney this isn't it doesn't have to be a special public hearing or Does this I didn't see it on the agenda, but I'm just double-checking No madam mayor this regular That's right.

It can be adopted in regular order.

Okay. Thank you so much. All right questions only councilmember Jane Um, yeah

You know, we're taking on $350 million worth of debt, and the total cost of the project is $480 million. If you go to slide 14, you see the residential component of that is 5.8%. 5.8% times $480 million is 27.84 million, and so that's gonna be a cost to the residents of Santa Clara. And so I'd kind of like to know how that's paid for. Presumably there'll be rate increases. But to offset that, I wanna recognize that we have a 5% utility tax, and if we have $700 million worth of electricity sales, we're making $35 million a year just on the utility tax, which is more than the 27, and that goes directly to the general fund. So that's more than the $27 million utility tax. impact to residents. So, and when we build NRS, KRS, and the T-Line, we're gonna be able to expand our electricity sales. I think it's gonna go from 750 megawatts to 1300 megawatts. So, what do we expect the utility response to be? tax revenue from the 1300 megawatts of sales to produce for residents to offset the general fund. And the reason why I'm saying this is because I've heard that this debt is going to increase utility rates 2.5% to our residents. But I want to understand how they're gonna benefit from the electricity sales and the utility tax. So can you sort of explain how the residents will be offset by contributions to the general fund? Does that make sense? Okay, thank you.

Council Member Cox. Thank you, Director Lee. So just a few questions. I see that in order to secure the loan we have to maintain, and again this is a little bit about the rates for residents, an adjusted net revenue of 100 times or 1.0 of the debt service. So I want to know in a worst case scenario if that was to change, when does it begin to impact resident rates? uh the agreement also talks about in the fees and unutilized fee that is essentially a charge if we don't use the full um 350 million so i'd like to understand if we know what the full cost is if we don't fully expend that amount this was a request for proposals it didn't say in here how many proposals we got and why we particularly selected this uh banking institution so i'd like information on that And then one thing that's confusing me is I see here that we anticipate the scheduled closing date of July 15th, but there's a part in the documents that says this is described as excluded principal payments, which leads me to believe that we intend to pay back at least a partial amount of this with future debt again. And I may be misunderstanding that, but I want to understand the long-term plan to permanently retire the full $350 million.

Any other questions on council? Council Member Hardy.

So if I understand this correctly, what you're asking for is a lot more flexibility so that we can jump into the market in the right time and limit our costs with still providing the services we need to and building into our system the growth that's needed, if I understand that correctly. Thank you.

Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just wanted to mention, it's a question as far as, because if we keep our rating at that certain level, I believe that gives us the best opportunity to save, basically, as far as the basis points that are being charged to us. How do you see us making sure that we keep that AA minus rating?

Thank you. Council Member Park?

Yeah, so I understand this need for increased infrastructure and increased power, but my question is what do we have currently? What power do we have currently in this city? What percentage of that is residential? What amount of the power? in, I guess, megawatts is going to be used by the residents, all the residents. How much power does a single mid-sized data center use? Yeah, and that's it.

That's it, Ken, for the questions.

All right, I will start, and then if Director Prokos wants to add anything, or the team online, our financial consultants, especially under, I think, some of the fees and worst case scenarios, I'll turn to them. So Council Member Jane talked about several different kind of rates. I think slide 14, which I'll go back to, which does show that about 95% when you look at commercial industrial, 93.8 it looks like, are funded through commercial and industrial. You're right, we do have a 5% utility tax that goes to the general fund that's roughly, let's just say $30 million to the extent that Let's just say 5% for ease of math. 5% are from residents. That $30 million, 5% of that is $1.5 million that goes to the general fund. So the 5% that our residents pay support the general fund services, our police, fire, parks, libraries, to the extent that this The utility continues to grow, double in size. If that 5% is consistent in terms of a ratio for residents, an additional 1.5 million or so in utility tax fees. That will continue to help support the city. As you know, those utility taxes flow into our general fund. A lot of critical city services are funded through that, including public safety. The expansion, so to speak, over time of SVP and including the sales, the residents and our businesses would benefit from the utility taxes generated from that expansion. Council Member Cox, a couple different questions that I'll take and then possibly our financial advisor online on the worst case scenario question. There is a cost to having this revolving line of credit, 20 basis points on $350 million or so, roughly $600,000, $700,000 or so in an undrawn fee. It is a different fee if we do draw against that. so that, you know, those fees would change. And then there's closing costs of about $150,000 So there is a cost to carry this line of credit, and what we did is we compared that to if we were to issue bonds today or at some time in the near future, there's a significantly larger interest payment that we would be undertaking as a utility. And so what we did is we looked at the timing of the cash spend, working with both our engineering consultants and our engineers, project managers at SVP. What is our cash requirement? We've entered into contracts with regards to construction and equipment. And then over that time, what is the most flexible financing mechanism, the cheapest alternative to issuing bonds? And we know that for tax exempt bonds, there are requirements that when you issue bonds, you can only reimburse within a certain period, and so with these projects spanning multiple years, close to 2031, we felt that this line of credit gives us the best option in terms of identifying certainty in terms of when our cash spend will be, preserves interest costs against bonding much sooner, and then it does have a carrying cost, but at a much lower rate than if we were to issue bonds and pay tens of millions of dollars in interest. So this was both a financial and a flexible from a project management and expenditure management standpoint. We did work with our financial advisor. I know there were at least six or seven and maybe they could give the exact number of solicitations that we did receive from many of our major banks and in the industry we looked at their proposal in terms of dollar amounts, undrawn fees, and drawn fees, and so there was a comparison of cost as one component. There was a comparison of duration. Some banks didn't offer a five-year term, or they wanted a shorter term, and so we had to think about how certain we were with regards to our cash spend and our projects and what duration would give us the best flexibility. And there were other requirements in there in terms of beyond the fees that we weighed against. So we looked at all the aspects and parameters of different proposals. And again, we did receive proposals from many of the major banks in the field and felt TD was both cost effective, provided the best uh duration and flexibility um uh out of the proposals um and correct in in the loan documents uh you you mentioned the future date you know we have a closing of july 15th that's the access that we would have to at least that line of credit and this is short-term credits this is at most would mature in five years and so within that five-year period i will be back before the council with a recommendation either for long-term bonds once we know that we've spent the dollars and we're ready to refinance it, or if there are delays in projects, we may be before you with an extension to a line of credit. So we'll look at all options at that time, but this is a short-term financing, interim financing credit facility. It is common for municipal utilities, especially with large expenditures over time, to have short-term financing mechanisms to provide that flexibility and save on interest costs. Council Member Hardy, correct. This gives us, I talked about interest savings in terms of versus compared to long-term bonds. It also gives us flexibility in terms of when we're gonna spend the dollars, allows us to have access, but also to jump in and refinance when we're ready at the time. Council Member Gonzales asked a great question. How do we keep our AA minus rating and or improve on it, which is always the goal? And it's, you know, for different rating agencies, it's a long list of different criterias. I can say that some of the key factors are cash on hand, how much of a reserve we have. our revenue kind of growth or what's our business forecast when it comes to the outlook, the revenues that would support a debt issuance. What is the consistency for our governing body to kind of keep up with costs? And so rating agencies like to see kind of a history of modest rate increases. And then they look at the management team. Who's managing these dollars both from a utility standpoint, from a finance, from a city governance standpoint. So they look at many different factors. It goes into a complex model that they use to come up with kind of their ratings. And I will give an opening to our financial advisor if they want to elaborate on that at the end. I'm happy to have them do that. And then Council Member Park, I think the question around residential megawatts and a typical mid-sized data set, I don't know if, Nico, you have that. And then after Nico responds, I'll give an opening to PFM, our financial advisor, if they're available to add any color to those questions and answers.

Thank you.

So before I go to Council Member Park, I want to go back quickly to Council Member Jane. A couple of points, I think Ken covered everything really well. What we're undertaking here is an expansion of our system, that's the big driver here. But we're also replacing aging infrastructure. And from that sense, that perspective, all customers do benefit from that. We have facilities that are 40, 50 years old. And now, five years from now, they're going to be brand new. And that's going to put us, from a reliability perspective, And then also, pointing to the slide right here, the residential number, as we grow to 1,300 megawatts, and that is largely driven by our large customers, the percentage of our revenue that's going to come from our residential customers is going to drop. and potentially dramatically. So those large customers are going to continue to pay for the bulk of these financing costs and so on. And then with that, I'll go down to Council Member Park. I think you asked how much power we currently have in the city. We have a peak. Actually, we just set a new peak a few weeks ago of 780 megawatts. And we are, as I mentioned earlier, we are building out the system to go to 1,300 megawatts and actually beyond that as well. So we've got a lot of interest from our data centers and from other companies, from the Intels and the NVIDIAs of the world. for more energy and we're doing what we can to be able to continue to build out the system to be able to accommodate that need. And you asked about how much power does a mid-sized data center use and unfortunately I don't have a very good answer to that because it can vary quite a bit. And we do have, there's certain sensitivities in terms of sharing specific customers and the data regarding those. But I will say that the data centers, the mature ones that we have in our service territory, do use a significant portion of their, I guess what we would call their nameplate. So if it's 50 megawatts, they might be 30, 35 megawatts, or 40 megawatts. So they're fairly predictable from from that perspective. I don't know if that answers your question about the data centers.

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at data that says that midsize data center, and there's some definitions for midsize, take between 15 and 20 megawatts, so that's within the numbers. You're a little bit higher, but again, you know better than I do.

We have data centers that are smaller that size. We also have some up to 99 megawatts as well.

Yes, and they have different ratings, meaning that if you look at a large data center, they often talk about 100 megawatts and above, right? And then there's the larger data centers, which start at a certain number, and that number is not an incremental number. It's an order of magnitude larger than the large data centers. For example, it's a range.

And we don't have the data centers that you hear about in the news. In Virginia, the 500 megawatts or larger ones like that, ours tend to be maximum 100 megawatts.

Thank you. Ken, did you want someone online to?

Yeah, I know that we have a PFM, Michael or Louise online potentially to add any color. We have both of them.

It sounds like Mike has unmuted himself. Mike? Yep.

Yeah, good evening. Thank you. Hopefully, I'm coming through okay?

Yes, you are. Just fine.

Pleasure. So, Ken, I'm happy to address a couple different things. I think one question that I had written down was, you know, we did receive, just confirming, we received five responses to the RFP that we sent out. It was sent out to a host of financial institutions that commonly participate in I would say five responses for a request of this size is a good response. We were very pleased with that number of responses. You know, smaller banks can't do the size that we were asking for. Across the responses, we were very pleased with the aggressiveness of the offers and the willingness of the banks to sort of, you know, provide pretty favorable all-around terms and conditions. Again, one of the other questions that I recall was, you know, there's a question around, you know, kind of worst case scenario. And I think you actually teed this up really well, which, you know, in my mind, the worst case for... the utility would be to over borrow all $350 million upfront for projects that could potentially, you know, have delays or cost overruns or, you know, not be needed in the future. You know, the facility itself addresses sort of what I would characterize for a program this size is sort of the worst case, which is that over borrowing situation. The facility is there to just be drawn as needed, and you only pay interest on the amounts that you draw, so very similar to a credit card. I think, Ken, you also addressed there is a charge to have it in place. It's only 20 basis points. It's quite modest. And then when you do draw it down, you do pay an interest rate on that, which is also pretty cost competitive compared to what you could borrow at today. But you're only using it as needed. So you really are mitigating some of the overcommitment issues that we would be most concerned about. Ken, I'm happy to address any other questions that I may have missed or that you were hoping that I could elaborate on.

I think that was it. But, Counsel, if we missed any, happy to...

Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mike, about that. And thank you, Ken. I'm actually going to go to the public now. Is there any public members that want to speak? And I have Brian. Please come forward.

When I first read that on the agenda, I was shocked. Sorry. Thank you for explaining that. I had a lot of questions. I don't have them anymore. Is there a way to summarize this? Because when we look at this, some of us aren't really good at this kind of stuff. When we look at this as a public, it's like, wow, $350 million. That's like... I finally figured out what a trench was, never heard of that before. So if there's a way to summarize that with the fine explanation that we're given to us, that might educate some of us, because sometimes this is quite overwhelming, but I think it sounds like they have it under control, so I hope you vote for it, thank you.

Thank you, do we have any other members of the public? We have someone online. Edward, go ahead, Edward.

Yeah, I was just wondering about the Silicon Valley Power. I'm hearing that It's not enough power to get that related project going. It's going to take two or three years before maybe that can be resolved as far as maybe getting related to start on their construction phase. I know they want to start with manufacturing first before the retail, hotel, restaurant phase of it. Again, I'm just wondering if that is one of the reasons why they haven't done the groundbreaking and if it will maybe take two or three years before we actually get something going with that project. Thank you, bye.

Thank you. Is there anyone else that wants to speak? I'd like to know that answer as well, so. Thank you, Nico.

certainly so i'll kick this off and then excuse me maybe i'll turn to chris carwick as well for some additional details i will share that we have been meeting regularly with uh... related and uh... we had a discussion this morning we are in the process of finalizing what we call their system impact study for their first phase of their project. And I can't really go into a lot of details about that right now, but I will say that things are progressing and we are working very hard to be able to provide the power that they need for that first phase and work with them through the system impact study as well.

Thank you. Thank you for that, appreciate that. I didn't see any other comments, so city manager, did you wanna say anything on this before I ask the council for a motion?

No, nothing more. I think we've addressed all the questions.

Thank you. Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. Could we put up the recommendation up on the slide so our,

Makes it easier.

Public can understand, yes. And it's the resolution for this revolving credit and authorize the staff to do what they need to. So I'll make a motion for staff recommendation.

Second. So we have a motion for staff recommendation by Councilmember Hardy, second by Vice Mayor Gonzales. Councilmember Park.

Yeah, I just want to put a lot of this stuff into context, which is I had written down that we had about 750 megawatts. uh... for the city i mean we you told us that we had seven hundred eighty it's a new new peak for us couple weeks ago that's that's really good and residential is about six percent of that load so i put down about forty megawatts and when we look at the amount of of power that uh... data center takes a single data center takes as much energy as the entire residential base of the city like i want to put this in perspective i want everyone to hear this which is if we close down one or two of our 60 or so data centers we could actually double the residential power for you know we could double the number the population of the city without having to do a single thing without having to generate any additional power I want to say that if we reduced our data center power by 3% we could increase our residential by 100% we could double our population And I know where we're doing this, which is money, and we talk about money going to our general fund, and I think that this is a good thing, but I want to put that in perspective, too, which is our general fund, for people who don't know, I mean, that's what we use for things that aren't earmarked for things. That's where our salaries and pensions come from. In fact, the reason that we say salaries and pensions, because 70% of our salaries and pensions, 70% of the general fund is used for salaries and pensions. and 50% of the general fund is used for public safety. And that's twice as large, just the amount of money in our general fund that we spend on public safety is twice as large as the entire general fund for the City of Cupertino. It is as large as the general fund for the City of Sunnyvale, and you should look it up, because I've certainly done it. And again, I think that the CEO of SVP said it, which is if we double the power our city uses, the amount residents use would largely stay the same, reducing that percentage from about 6%, 5.8% down to 3%, which should mean that the rates would go down because our our percentage of the power should go down. But why aren't the rates going down with this math? And the short answer is because we are paying for the infrastructure, and we get benefits from that. I mean, you said it out loud, which is we're not just bringing in new infrastructure for the sake of bringing in more power. We're also replacing a lot of old infrastructure. But again, I want every single person to know that if we removed a single mid-sized data center from this city, we could double the population of this city without requiring a single megawatt of additional power. Like I want people to keep that number in mind. This is a big thing. And the fact that we keep increasing our rates while we are making more and more money on SVP, that's simply to put things in the general fund. And right now, this is problematic because all of our money We've got a $1.7 billion city. We take out SVP, and we'll give them a lion's portion of the budget. That's still a $1 billion budget, which is multiple times that of neighboring cities, multiple times that of neighboring cities that are larger than the city of Santa Clara. And while they're putting in place new city halls and new civic centers and putting in place downtowns, and main streets and revitalizing the retail areas that we have. We are losing infrastructure in this city. We've lost the International Swim Center. We've lost Great America. We are in the process of losing Great America and there's no way to get something like that back. We've got a convention center that needs lots of work because of neglect in the last 40 years. Same thing with the Triton Museum. At some point, when I look at the streets, I can tell you when I cross over into Sunnyvale or I cross over even into San Jose because the road becomes smoother.

Please focus on the issue at hand, which is the electric utility, not the roads in Sunnyvale.

At some point, we need to look at why we are expanding the electric utility and charging the residents more for services that the residents don't actually need. And we're doing this for money. And at some point, we need to think about why this is happening. Thank you.

All right, Council Member Jain.

I just wanted to respond to Council Member Park's comments. As I said, that the impact to residents from this expansion of 480 million will be $27 million. We get more than that to our general fund from the data centers. If we double the number of data centers, if we double the power, which is primary data centers, we will be getting another $30 million to our general fund, which will offset It won't offset electricity rates, it will offset taxes that our residents have to pay to provide services. So while it's not electric rates, it is a huge benefit to our residents, thank you.

I just want to say and congratulate the Silicon Valley Power for putting this transaction together. The fact that we had five responses to this refinance or this finance is amazing in this market, and it just shows the quality and stability of SVP out there in the business world. the reputation is out there and it's stellar. So I think this is an amazing deal. I'm going to support it. And I just wanted to say, you know, SVP is one of the main reasons that Santa Clara is so financially secure by having SVP in our city and having all the business that we have in Santa Clara supplying the funds to our, especially to our general fund. I mean, it's my understanding it's now number three. It has outpaced our hotel tax. so it's amazing what has happened and we are the envy of all the cities that i know of in terms of svp and what what it does for our city so um i know it's got a wonderful reputation in our city alone and this isn't about raising rates this not this item it's about being prudent with with our resources and using our um our resources wisely this is a wise thing for us to do so i'll be supporting that councilmember park i'm not looking for your comments about my comments so i'm calling for the question i wasn't going to comment on your comments but i usually do so i didn't want to well i usually try not to i usually don't listen to you at all i think we should let councilmember park speak i think so I already called for the question.

I think we should let him speak.

City Attorney, what is the rule if I've already called for the question?

There can be a motion and a second by the council in order to extend the debate.

Is it a super majority or a regular majority?

I think it's a regular majority, Madam Mayor. Let me look.

Okay.

I would like to make that motion.

I will second that motion.

All right, motion second and we'll vote because you're gonna repeat or just comment on my comments like you do every time and it wastes the public's time, it wastes everyone's time and I wanna continue on with our business of this evening.

That's true. The calling of the question can be challenged by a council member and voted on by the majority of council.

The question is, is it a super majority or a majority? Well, we can vote and then it can be determined.

I'm looking it up, Mayor. Go ahead and vote.

So, maker of the motion, Council Member Jayne, seconded by Park to extend the discussion. Is that correct?

To, pardon?

Extend the discussion.

Extend, yes.

Please register your vote. And that doesn't pass, it fails. So call for the question.

And Mayor, to note, it is a 2 3rds vote required. That's what I thought, thank you.

See, I know that. I've been pretty good in that policy. Yeah. So this is on the original staff recommendation. Please register your vote. And that passes five to one of those present. Thank you, and thank you all for putting this together in SVP. All right, next item we have is item number five, public hearing, action to waive first reading and introduce an ordinance granting a non-exclusive franchise to LS power grid California LLC for the power for the power for the power the South Bay and power the valley connector projects and adopt a resolution related to the power the South Bay project environmental impact report and is this is a public hearing correct city attorney so I'm going to open the public hearing city manager Thank you, Mayor.

LS Power was selected by the California Independent System Operator, commonly referred to as CalISO, to deliver two projects that will upgrade electric transmission capacity in the South Bay. Staff from the Public Works Department, as well as Silicon Valley Power, has been working with LS Power on these projects. Your action tonight would grant LS Power a franchise agreement to operate within the City of Santa Clara. The Public Works Director, Craig Mobeck, is here to present the item.

Thank you. Welcome, Director.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Craig Mobeck, Director of Public Works. And I just wanted to recognize staff from LS Power that is here. We have Lucy Martin and Casey Carroll. And then we also have staff from Public Works, Jing Ding. And then, of course, Nico and Chris from SVP who've been instrumental in this as well, as well as many of their staff. So, yeah, tonight is going through the public hearing regarding a non-exclusive franchise agreement. As you recall, back in June, there was an item before you that sent tonight as the public hearing. And so the... First slide here, city manager talked about the CAISO and their role, and then the two projects that have been set up through a competitive process. In 2023, LS Power was successful in obtaining the work for Power of the South Bay. And then in 2026, so just recently, they were also successful for the Power of the Valley Connector project. So large projects, portions of them are in Santa Clara. And I do want to emphasize that the portions in Santa Clara will be underground. And so you've heard a little bit about these projects in the previous presentation. But here is the Power of the South Bay project that will begin up at the existing Newark substation. That is a PG&E substation in the city of Fremont. And so that route goes through Fremont down around into San Jose. and then ultimately getting into Santa Clara, and that is the area boarded in the red dash box. It will end at the existing northern receiving station owned and operated by Silicon Valley Power. In terms of some of the key points of this project, it's high voltage transmission, 230 kV. Talked about the connection, it being underground through the route along Lafayette Street. And there was a SQL component for this project that was completed, and the CPUC had already certified that. Next project covered under this non-exclusive franchise is the Power of the Valley Connector. And so that would begin at the existing NRS station and go through Santa Clara in the area within the red box, travel down into San Jose, and ultimately end up at the existing San Jose B substation, which is a PG&E facility. So in terms of this project, again, 230 kV transmission. The route is tentative at this point, because this is the newer project that just really initiated this year. And so we've been talking with staff about Lafayette Street, Agnew Road, and Montague Expressway, as well as there is a CEQA component that is just getting started. A lot of coordination efforts over the past three years on the Valley Power of the South Bay project. And then in 2026, Ellis Power submitted for the franchise agreement. While they did that, they were also working with Fremont and San Jose to obtain the necessary franchise agreement there. And then in May 2026 is when we started the discussions on the Power of the Valley Connector project. And so in terms of the franchise, the City Code 5.2 requires that a franchise be issued, and that's in order for Ellis Power to install, operate, and maintain facilities within the public right-of-way. And so this would allow them to do that for the Power of the South Bay and Power of the Valley Connector Projects. I do want to point out that there are encroachment permits that are also required for these projects. So under the initial project, we've been working with them on that, pretty much getting ready to issue those pending this franchise agreement. And then we'll also be working on the next project in terms of the review and issuance of the encroachment permits. So some of the key franchise terms, we'll go through these. One, there is a franchise fee, so 2.3% of the Santa Clara portion of the gross revenue. So under that first project, we're estimating that's approximately $175,000 annually. I mentioned facilities in Santa Clara are underground. In terms of the term, it's a 10-year initial term with automatic renewals for successive 10-year terms up to 40 years. And then, as I mentioned, encroachment permits are also required. There is clauses in there that cover removal of facilities should the franchise be revoked, terminated, or if it expires. Under the maintenance, they are required to maintain their facilities in good order, and that does include the pavement and the trench restorations in the public right-of-way. Clauses cover relocation. Should there be conflicts with city projects in the public right away, we would work with Ellis Power for them to relocate facilities. And then there's other components as well that include insurance, indemnity, and then other security. In terms of the procedure, we had the initial establishment of the public hearing for tonight. That was done back in June. Having the public hearing now, if everything gets approved, then potentially July 14th, we'd come back with that ordinance so that council would adopt, and then that would take through August 13th for that ordinance to go into effect and then issue the non-exclusive franchise agreement. So in terms of the next steps, the Power of the South Bay project, you know, obviously waiting for Super Bowl FIFA to get completed. They're anxious to get started this summer on that, estimating probably a couple years, so completion in 2028. And then Power of the Valley Connector, again, working with them on the alignment. The SEAC was underway. And then potentially starting that project in 2028 and with potential completion in 2030. So a couple of recommendations here. The first one is broken down into three parts. It is related to CEQA. And so that is adopting the Power of the South Bay Project Environmental Impact Report, making certain findings as a responsible agency. and then also adopting the related mitigated monitoring and reporting program and construction impact mitigation plan that goes along with it. And then the second recommendation is just holding the public hearing, which we're doing now, waiting the first reading, and introducing the ordinance granting non-exclusive franchise to LS Power Grid California. So that concludes the presentation. Obviously, any questions, can take those and respond, and if we need to ask anything from Ellis Power SBP, we can do that too.

Thank you, so questions only, council? Council Member Jain.

I believe, can you verify KISO is paying for this line? And then the line is basically financed through tax charges? Do we have a guaranteed draw that we have to take from this line? Are there any penalties if we don't take the full capacity or if we take a certain portion of the capacity? Those are my questions, thank you.

Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. First off, I think I understand, I know on the, the water treatment plant area that there's a small section that would be above ground and my understanding is that's because that's over the drying beds which will not be sunsetted out for a while until the dewatering is operational completely and that's my understanding of why that's above ground until that, if I'm right. And then the findings that were being asked to approve from the EIR in the resolution, I had to go into the resolution to find those findings and I was just a little surprised that there wasn't a slide on just the findings. Thank you. If there is one or. if we should call those out so our public will understand.

Thank you, any other questions? All right, Craig, that's it.

I'll invite Nico up to talk about the first item related to Council Member Jane's question.

Thank you.

In response, Council Member Jane, you are correct. The ISO essentially pays for the line, and then the cost of that will then flow through what's called the transmission access charge, which all utilities pay for.

So it's kind of spread through around for everybody, which obviously is something that is very favorable to us as opposed to directly paying for the line.

line there are no minimum take requirements on the line so we don't have to worry about that if we don't draw just every year they recalculate the revenue requirement that goes into the transmission charge I will turn to Ellis power I think there was a question about the treatment plant thank you welcome

Thank you, Nico, thank you, Council. Yeah, so there is about a 1.9 mile section overhead on the regional wastewater facility. Currently, that is due to, that is the best route for current operations of the plant. We didn't wanna impact the current operations. We have agreed, once those are sunsetted, to underground based upon future development.

Okay, thank you. This is a public hearing. I'm going to the public. As it's open, do we have any member of the public that would like to speak on this issue? Edward, go ahead, Edward.

Yeah, I'm guessing that from what I understand, 2028 and 2030 are the completion dates. So I'm guessing 2030 at the very latest is when maybe that related project can start that manufacturing phase and then After that's completed, I guess the retail hotel phase will start. But that's just from what I might understand from what I've just heard. I'm not 100% for sure, but thank you. That's all I want to say.

Thank you, Edward. Anyone else? All right, I will need a motion to close the public hearing. Well, I'm still closing the public hearing. Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Move to close public hearing.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we have a motion by Vice Mayor Gonzales, second by Council Member Jayne to close public hearing. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Council Member Hardy, you had a follow up?

Yes, I just was hoping that staff would be real clear for our public what our mitigation, what the EIR did call out. Like I said, I had to go through the resolution very carefully to find that. And I was surprised that we did not show any of the EIR findings that we're supposed to approve when they weren't specifically called out in the report.

Thank you, Councilmember Hardy. So yeah, the CPUC cleared the environmental impact report. Obviously, it's in the city of Santa Clara, so we're the responsible agency. In terms of specific questions regarding those, I will invite Ellis Powerup, and they can talk about that.

Thank you. Back up again.

Yeah, do you have specific questions regarding that, or...

Our public hasn't necessarily read the resolution. I just think it should be really clear to them what we're approving because we're saying there's certain findings and there's a mitigation plan that it refers to.

Yeah, understood. And as Craig stated, so the CPUC is the regulatory agency that's in charge of that, and so they have been implementing that for us. And so that's certainly available publicly. I'm sorry that you had to search for it, but that is a publicly available document that we are following, and the CPUC is implementing as the lead agency.

Just for our public, if you could please not use an acronym.

So as a public utility in the state of California, we are regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission, and we have to obtain a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity, which was obtained in March of 2026, which included the CEQA evaluation with the final EIR certified with that Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity.

Thank you. That helps. Council Member Jane? Please make it.

Okay, I would like to make the motion to waive the first reading and introduce ordinance granting a non-exclusive franchise to Ellis Power Grid. prepared by the public, adopt the South Bay Project Environmental Impact Report prepared by the California Public Utilities Commission, making certain findings as a responsible agency for purposes and pursuant to the provisions of the California Environmental Equality Act, and hold a public hearing, waive first reading, approve introduction of an ordinance granting the non-exclusive franchise to Ellis Power Grid, California, LLC, on terms and conditions set forth in the ordinance for the Power of the South Bay and Power of the Valley Connector projects for the purposes of transmitting electric service in the city's public right-of-way, essentially staff's recommendation.

Second. So there's a motion by Councilmember Jayne, second by Councilmember Hardy for staff recommendation. City Manager?

Hi, Mayor. I just want to address a comment made by a member of the public. A member of the public mentioned that it appeared that the related project would be on the same timeline as the delivery of these projects. I just want to note for the record that's not the case. Related is actually on a different timeframe that is not dependent on these projects. And as staff noted, they're working with related on their system impact study and having conversations about both the power needed for the Northeast parcel as well as the primary parcel.

Thank you for that clarification.

And Madam Mayor, just one addition. Member Jane did a nice job of reading, I think, most of the recommendation. I didn't hear him call out adopting a related mitigation monitoring and reporting program and construction impact mitigation plan, and I'm sure he intended that to be part of his motion. He basically said staff's recommendation.

Yeah, then you went too short.

And that's why I said staff's recommendation.

I caught that.

City Clerk, when you're ready. Assistant City Clerk. Please register your vote. Council Member Park. Council Member Park. I voted. Can you vote again?

Vote again.

They're at work this time. And that passes unanimously of those present. Thank you, thank you, and thank you LS Power, Craig, everyone, city manager. All right, our last item on the agenda. is item number six, ongoing consideration and possible action on the Charter Review Committee's recommendation for placement of a comprehensive charter update measure on the November 2026 ballot, including consideration of a possible standalone measure that would update the city's public works procurement rules. City manager. Well, it looks like he's running, so city attorney.

That's not a good sign. Are you pinch hitting here? Mayor, when the city manager runs away and leaves it to me.

That's not a good sign. No. There you go.

I know he's with me on this, Madam Mayor. I appreciate the opportunity to continue the presentation of the recommendation of the Charter Review Committee for a comprehensive update to the city charter. This is the third in a series of meetings that we've had with you and We're getting to the final stretch. I guess we're in the second half, maybe, to use a World Cup metaphor. I don't know if we're in extra time yet, but we're getting close to extra time on this really extraordinary project with a lot of support, certainly from the Charter Review Committee, from a lot of stakeholders that provided input, and from really the entire range of the city's professional staff who is the most knowledgeable about the workings of the charter and has to live with, interpret, and implement a lot of the provisions of the charter. And so thanks again to all of them. Tonight... And again, what is likely to be the second to last meeting of you on this topic, the agenda we're going to go through is a brief, I'll try to keep a brief recap of how we got here. It's been a little while. I want to refresh the public in your recollection of the path to this moment in this project implementation. I'm going to talk about the CRC's charter project recommendation and the council direction that we received from you back on June 15th. There is a supplemental information memorandum that you received on... this past Wednesday to address, intended to address some of the concerns that were raised by the city council in your deliberations on June 15th. There's also the CRC recommendation for the public works procurement update that was discussed but deferred for further discussion to this meeting and we're gonna talk in depth about that. And then, of course, council questions, public comment, deliberations, and directions to staff on what you want to be brought back for final action on July 14th. How we got here? A quick version of this, because I know you've gotten a couple of versions of this already. The Charter Project origins, as you will recall, really began back in the spring of 2025, where the Governance and Ethics Committee took this project up. and ultimately recommended it for council consideration. The charter that we have here is an extraordinary document, but it was approved in its current form back in 1951. It's been updated here or there since then, but really not comprehensively. Even the year 2000 comprehensive update wasn't that substantial when you look at it, and so a lot of things have changed since then. The city has changed, how we conduct business has changed, the laws that apply to us have changed, and the feeling was amongst both the council and the governance committee that this project was warranted. Then the council, after considering this, took the action to create the Charter Review Committee by its appointment and adoption of the Charter Project Bylaws. This happened in the fall, September 16th of 2025. And then the CRC, with professional staff support, got into it. The CRC project implementation began on October 1st with their first meeting and really through June 9th when this was first presented to you. that the process began with some initial training of them, both in Brown Act rules and other rules that applied to the conduct of their proceedings, and a grounding in an understanding of what the charter document was itself as the constitution of the city of Santa Clara. The ad hoc subcommittee working groups were then formed. That you've heard a lot about. There were six of them. The charter was divided up by subject matter amongst them all together. They met 28 times starting in November 2025. through may 2020-26 with a lot of stakeholder input with a lot of benchmarking both from the 19 identified comparable cities that charters that were uploaded onto the website with some additional information about sunnyvale and mountain view that were engaged in concurrent comprehensive charter update processes sunnyvale much further along the line mountain view just starting And then there were developed levels of proposed changes that really we'll talk a little bit more about later that went into how the Charter Review Committee thought about the project and the kinds of things that they recommended to you for your consideration. At a point during the project implementation, it was clear that the changes that were being made were so comprehensive and that the charter was in such a state of really kind of clumsy organization that a full reorganization of the charter sections made sense. That was going to be renumbering of a lot of things and deleting of things and putting them in different places and the CRC thought it was appropriate as did professional staff to check in with the council at that point and provide an update of where The project was at and make sure the council was comfortable with that level of reorganization that happened back in April of this year and then of course Project implementation happened with ad hoc subcommittees meeting privately but reporting out publicly to 10 public meetings of the full CRC where they reported out on progress, they solicited public input, and frequently received direction from the full CRC on the work plan and how to go about, again, we talked about eating this elephant kind of one bite at a time. After all of that, the final CRC recommendation and the final report were completed with the recommendation coming together at the June 3rd CRC meeting and the report being put together after that, consistent with that recommendation, both by professional staff and with the assistance of yet another ad hoc subcommittee of really hardcore CRC members who helped provide input on that and suggestions on the form that would, we hope, best serve both informing the council on this and ultimately the public if this ends up on the ballot. The CRC recommendation that was set forth in this report and presented to the City Council starting on June 9th and then finished on June 15th was as follows. To proceed with a comprehensive update of the charter for consideration by the voters at the November 2026 election. to include all level one and level two changes and such level three changes that the council felt comfortable would be supported by the community. And this third one's important because there was clear recognition by the CRC, by professional staff, and expressed by all of you. This is a substantial endeavor, and it's really hard to capture it all, certainly in a ballot question, even an impartial analysis by the city attorney. So there was recognized an importance that if a measure goes on the ballot, that public information program should be developed to include annotated, clean, and underlined strikeout versions of the updated charter and FAQs on the city's website. Some of that's already been begun, but there should be a lot more done in order to make sure that when the voters engage with this subject, ultimately they have that at their fingertips, if you will, Potentially information mailers to be distributed to voters. You'll recall that as part of the program for Measure I, there were cards that were sent out with not a whole lot of information on them, but with reference to the city charter for additional information. You can't campaign to advocate for a measure, but you can provide information to the public. You're allowed to do that using public resources, and so that was contemplated. if the council deems appropriate the CRC members who can't get enough of this were willing to support public forums out in the community to share information and respond to questions you know that people might have again a significant project recognized at such and very much support from that from the CRC and professional staff as a necessary aspect of this to implement it going forward After all of that and that presentation, the City Council direction on June 15th was as follows. This was preceded by a lot of good questions by council and some spirited discussions about different aspects of this. But ultimately, council directed staff to finalize and bring back for council action a charter update ballot measure to include all proposed level one and level two changes. In addition, the Council directed staff to bring back for further Council discussion and action the CRC's recommendation for updating the Charter's provisions regarding the procurement of public works. And here we are. To take up that and a couple of other kind of issues. Again, as I pointed out, There were certainly questions and concerns identified by council in light of the substantial nature of this project that the CRC, in their follow-up meeting to your meeting on June 17th, thought were worth addressing. And so in response to all of this, i'm in the meantime a fair amount of additional work has been done again with the idea of facilitating your evaluation understanding and decisions on this first of all the supplemental information memorandum uh... my referred to uh... was produced it further explains the use of levels in developing the c r c recommendation by the level what the levels are with the thought process was in in triaging and allocating a level designation to the different recommendations. That supplemental information memorandum also summarizes the updated provisions in the charter that require new city council ordinances and policies. A point was made about there being a lot of them. It sounded like there was more than there was. As it turns out, there is a significant number, five, that we'll review with you. The memorandum also presented updated changes to the charter that were based upon further CRC and staff review of the charter document. A completion of the meet and confer process, you'll remember that was ongoing with respect to the provisions that related to the civil service sections of the charter. And some input from bond council on a revenue bond provision that we'll talk about in a minute. So I want to talk about some of these in a little bit more detail. And we start to do that on this next slide. The charter updates requiring implementing council actions. There were indeed a number of these. The ones that we identified are as follows here. The redistricting ordinance, section 304. You'll remember that the charter didn't have an express provision that set out the process for mandatory redistricting or any form of redistricting, and that was thought to be an omission, that there ought to at least be a placekeeper for that that outlined how that would work. There now is that section, section 304. It doesn't dictate the specifics of that. Again, the charter is a general guidance document, but it contemplates certain things to be included in implementing ordinance to be approved by council, including the use of a redistricting commission. That's considered a best practice. The council actually just convened a redistricting commission not that long ago in response to the 2020 decennial census. The 2030 is coming up. And so getting ahead of that process, developing an ordinance for how that should work, getting that group convened and starting that process is just around the corner. And so the charter contemplates that now. It also contemplates a policy for appointment renewal and removal of boards and commission members. If you remember, that was identified as something that was missing. We don't have a formal policy for that. City clerk's office, city staff, and definitely the boards and commissions thought that was appropriate. So that's an element of this charter update and contained in section 602.1. Also a policy for excused absences, another thing that is done in due course but without a policy as to what constitutes an excused absence. This is a matter potentially of some consequence because a certain number of excused absences, five for the city council over a period of time, I think it's consecutive, three for a board or commission member could result in your removal. And so to not have an excusal policy for that and have that potentially basis for a removal from office was considered a, bad practice and a and a best practice was to not specify that in the charter but at least to contemplate it and you'll see later on we'll talk about that was included with respect to boards and commissions we realized it really ought to be included as a reference point for city council members as well and that update has been made and is one of the policies requiring subsequent action if this measure is approved we'll talk about this next one of course in detail public works update ordinance uh... that with the idea of that being don't have specific provisions in the charter uh... instead have consistent with what's believed to be a best practice guidelines you know for how that would work and have that implemented by an ordinance and we'll talk about that in some detail and then an enhanced legal noticing you know provision was also contemplated the uh... charter review commission was very cognizant of the desire for developing elements to the charter that enhanced transparency and there is a belief that with different modern technology and abilities to communicate with people in different ways, the charter as a modern charter ought to contemplate that. not to decide it because you don't know what those things are going to be, but at least to say, hey, we're going to do the minimum legal noticing, but we're also going to develop a policy that adds noticing requirements so that traditional forms that don't necessarily get to that many people legal notices published in the back of a newspaper that a lot of people don't read could actually be communicated more dynamically in a policy adopted by the council. So those are the ones that we identified. There would be additional work involved with that, but wanted to address that because that was identified as a council concern. Then the charter itself was updated. You now have a draft that's dated 7-1-26. And a number of things have been done to your latest draft of that charter, both in response to city council concerns and questions, and as a final review with staff going through it. in order to scrub, you know, again, things that were identified as potentially missing or corrections. And another scrub round will happen even from now until your meeting on the 14th, because we want to get it right. For one, annotations that you'll recall that we hoped would be valuable that are very detailed for each section have been updated now to provide section by section categorization of proposed changes by level i think i told you and i think i told the crc that was going to be too much work i just couldn't do it we're going to give some examples of levels but gosh darn it when i got into it i said i'm going to do it because um it was again it's a lot right and so to have as many different tools and and ways for you and the public to access this proposal we thought was important. So with some substantial effort, there's now really a section by section and in some cases multiple references within a section to the level of proposed changes. Level one changes are marked in the margins with a green heading, level two changes in blue, and level three changes in yellow. Those haven't been screened out yet as you'll see but ultimately um the version of the charter that you'll get when will be consistent with what your direction to us and any of the level three changes that you're not including will be eliminated from that but for now in this draft they're highlighted The annotations were also expanded in a few cases to further explain changes being proposed and the rationales for that, again, to try to curate this to the maximum extent possible. And then some additional changes to charter text since the last draft, which you'll recall was dated 6-5-26, are also highlighted in yellow. And a lot of those were just little things, word missing, the punctuation not right, some formatting changes, but a couple of those were meaningful enough to highlight for you and this next slide does that. The changes of note, there is an added reference to the policy for recusal for city council members. I mentioned that earlier as one of the things. It was recognized in the review of the charter that the reference to that policy really only referred to a need to have that policy for boards and commissions, but of course it matters for city council people as well. So there's now a reference in the list of vacancies section, 205.17, that contemplates now that policy being something that the city council is required to adopt for recusals. There's also, and I had mentioned this as something that needed to be done, but I'm highlighting it again for you here, an updated reference down to the most recent redistricting map as the baseline for district elections, courtesy of our elected city clerk, who's been very attentive and supportive of this process and has added a lot of value to it. He noted that the reference to the judicial order for redistricting was outdated, that in fact a redistricting process had occurred. That is now referenced appropriately in that section as the baseline map with respect to which any redistricting would occur. There was also, and this thought was that sometimes the deletions went too far, a reinsertion of a reference to the notice requirements under the Brown Act for regular and special meetings. Some of the process eliminates detail There were a number of places in the sections regarding city council meetings that referred to specific sections of the Brown Act that have now been deleted. But this was the group thought, and all of these changes were tendered to this additional ad hoc subcommittee was a change that probably warranted being reverted away from. And so now, because the city charter may be a document people refer to, what is the notice requirement for regular meetings, that language has been reinserted to make it clear that regular meetings under the Brown Act require a minimum 72 hours notice and a 24-hour notice for special meetings. That's in 401.4, and that language should be highlighted in yellow. There was also an inadvertent deletion of, or a provision that the public works director would appoint the city engineer. That wasn't what the charter said before. It wasn't the intent to change the city manager's appointment authority in that regard. And so a couple of words were added to make it clear that the city manager, as he does for all senior officials other than the elected senior officials, retains the appointment authority with respect to the city engineer. However, as a best practice, the language was added that that occur in consultation with the public works director as a very informed and knowledgeable person about what that, the appropriate person to fulfill that role and what the qualifications should be. And then, finally, there is a variety of Oh, I'm sorry. No, this last one is a reversion to what ultimately are minor but useful, nonetheless, cleanup changes to the civil service sections in light of a noble but ultimately failed attempt to reach agreement on the more substantive changes to the civil service provisions. What's reflected now in the revision of the charter that you have is just those changes really update improving of language you know kind of consistency provisions but not the alignment that sue ruder described to you that was our objective i'm in those engagements this charter now reflects the more minimal but again still useful changes The last really change of note to highlight for you was proposed by bond counsel in his final review of the document. It relates to the special rules for the issuance of revenue bonds. The proposed change really does align utility infrastructure finance mechanisms with best practices. The existing charter, section 1321, requires a vote of the people to issue revenue bonds to finance utility infrastructure. Although electric utility infrastructure is exempted, you heard a presentation tonight about both the credit facility that was being proposed, but with the likelihood that amounts borrowed, depending upon the projects involved, would be financed by revenue bonds secured by electric utility revenues. Those are exempted and those don't require a vote of the people. the proposed language from bond council would allow financing by city council resolution for all city utility enterprises provided that the debt was secured only by utility enterprise revenues. In other words, not a tax, not the city's general fund, which is the kind of thing that would typically require a vote under the state constitution, but by revenues in the same way Revenue bonds issued for the electric utility are secured by their revenues. This is a common finance mechanism amongst charter cities, including some examples here, but many more. Sunnyvale, Los Angeles, Oakland, Anaheim, Pasadena, Redwood City, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Diego, to name a few. There are workarounds for this. But they're more cumbersome and they require a lot more documentation and delays in the ability to structure these items. It's a certificate of participation structure that you may be familiar with. it's a kind of an artificial sale of an asset or lease of an asset from one city affiliated public entity to another and then the income stream for that kind of artificial revenue stream is pledged to repay the bonds doable but not as deft or efficient as the revenue bond structure and so this is proposed by the the bond council as something that really would be useful. The workaround was used, some of you may recall, to finance the Trimble Road wastewater project back in 2016, and the city's share of the regional wastewater facility infrastructure improvements in 2023. It would have been better if we had the revenue bond structure available to do that, but going to a vote on that frequently is not practical. So that's also now tendered for your consideration. Not absolutely necessary, but again, the idea of this project is to go from the beginning of the charter to the end of the charter and look at the things that are out of alignment and to try to bring them up to alignment.

So now- Mr. Attorney, can we get through this and then you can answer our questions after? I will, Madam Mayor, I'll try to- You're advocating for each thing and it's a long PowerPoint presentation.

It is, Madam Mayor, appreciated. Again, trying to make sure you've got the information you need to be comfortable with it, but I understand your interest. I'll go quicker through this, Madam Mayor, the Public Works Procurement Update. This is a summary of the provisions that are included in the Option A Recommended Update. The essence of it is to replace outdated rules containing very low, if you recall, $1,000 thresholds for formal bidding and city council approval of contracts and the use of city forces with currently no provision for alternative procurement mechanisms that are commonly used, best value, design, build procurement processes. Option A proposes that these rules be implemented by ordinance. The procurement alternatives allowed include sole source, limited bid, and best value contracts, including design-build, amongst others, and other alternatives adopted as part of a city-wide program. There's other provisions there that are more technical. But in effect, it's to take the detailed provisions in the charter and have them implemented by ordinance. The implementing ordinance has all of these elements to it. Most of these are things that are in the charter already, but are listed as things to include in the ordinance. Really, the ones to highlight are the first one, definition of major versus minor contracts, with major contracts still approved by council. It consciously removes the dollar amount in the charter itself for that to be determined by ordinance. And then the last one, the alternative mechanisms, including sole source and best value, if appropriate findings are made with the ordinance to include standards for selection as part of a citywide program. You've heard this before. I'll spin through it quickly. It's an updated version of the slide you had last time describing design build and the value of that from the best value procurement standpoint. Design build and other alternative mechanisms are used throughout the state by both general law and charter cities alike. It's different, you'll recall, from conventional design bid build in that it's a single contract. There's not a contract with the designer. It's not a contract with the contractor. It's one contract with both. And that team is chosen based on best value. Qualifications and experience are typically the initial focus with the costs and terms then negotiated. And if no agreements reached with the group you identified as the best, you can go on to the next firm or re-bid the project. Potential benefits are many fold. You can prioritize for significant projects quality and performance, not just price. The design and construction phases overlap so you can improve implementation timelines. The progressive process also allows value engineering and more efficient construction methods, improving project speed and quality. This one's really important because there's a single contract frequently what you get involved or what can happen and triggers change orders. is the contractor being the designer, the designer blaming the contractor for things that go wrong, pointing fingers at each other. There is a single point of accountability in this, and so you typically can manage things with fewer change orders and other benefits as well. It's considered a very useful tool, but not for all projects. It's really designed for more major projects that have substantial design elements to them. You're not going to use this for street construction, for example, but for fire stations and electric utility projects, you certainly will. There are some potential drawbacks and mitigations. We can talk about those in the question and answer period. Again, this is a slide that we went over the last time. That was for you, Madam Mayor, skipping that one slide.

I knew you'd skip that part, the cons.

Go ahead. Madam Mayor, I'm delighted to go through it because... Oh, it's predictable. Go ahead. A lot of the cons have mitigations in them, and so I'm happy to present the slide. I'm going to come back to that.

You will come back to it, yes.

I'm going to go through this slide to identify what the potential risks are and the mitigations.

Well, I mean, it would be responsible to do that, I would imagine.

Madam Mayor, I've got a tension between you wanting me to go fast and wanting to give you all the information you want.

Well, I'd like to hear both sides of the issue, not just one.

Madam Mayor, I'm delighted to present this slide to you. Potential drawbacks and mitigations. One of the challenges with design-build type procurement is the project is not fully designed when the project team is chosen, so there is some loss of control in the process. You're relying on the fact that you chose a good designer as part of the investment in that. This can be mitigated with bridging documents or a progressive design-build process, so there's ways to address it. there's also potential administrative costs increased while staff comes up to speed with the process this is thought to be temporary in a couple of the folks here can speak to that uh... and could be addressed when standard document procedures are developed including of course in implementing ordinance that would need to be developed that would include the process for the competitive selection process, provisions to address conflict of interest potentials, and any number of other things that the council would want implemented as part of this. There could be increased cost due to awards to other than the low bidder. And that's absolutely right. This doesn't guarantee the lowest cost bid. It emphasizes quality and experience over low cost. Cost can still be a factor in the award or negotiated with off ramps. And a lot of the reports and white papers on design build suggest cost savings generated by expedited project implementation with fewer disputes and change orders make up for the fact that you're not necessarily getting the low bid. Best value procurements are subjective and invite favoritism. It's true, it's not the absolute low bid. You're making determinations based upon qualifications. We do this all the time, right, for when we choose consultants based upon their qualifications. So it's not a process that's unfamiliar to us, but there should be provisions for that to protect against on projects like this being fed to unqualified contractors within your implementing ordinance. And the award is still a competitive process, even if it's based on best value and not based on low price. The other potential drawback is that small local contractors can't compete, and that's probably true if in fact it's a small local contractor that's not involved in a major complicated project. Design bid bill, traditional projects would still be used for most contracts, and small contractors certainly would be in a better position to compete for those. So those are potential drawbacks and mitigations, and happy to share that with you. The Charter Review Committee in their evaluation of this was presented with some benchmarking relative to other cities. We've gone even a little bit deeper on that with you, so I wanted to share that with you. I'll click through the slides fairly quickly and get to the summary slide. The comparable charter cities that were looked at, in addition to a couple of others, are the 19 comparable city charters, you'll remember, that were identified for benchmarking purposes. With input from the Charter Review Committee, they met one or more of the following criteria. Cities from 100 to 2,000 people, populations similar to ours. I'm sorry, 100,000 to 200,000, thank you. Cities that have municipal utilities, cities that own stadiums or have stadiums within their jurisdictions. City of Chula Vista was listed larger than us, doesn't have a stadium, but it was one I just had an experience with doing a similar project, so that was included in the mix. And so these were those cities that were identified as part of that process. And benchmarking for Public Works Update was done for a couple different things. First of all, what these charter cities have for an allowance for alternative project delivery mechanisms. In other words, design-build or other types of mechanisms. We went through all of the cities in this list, Alameda, Anaheim, Berkeley, Chula Vista, Gilroy, hayward inglewood los angeles mountain view oakland palo alto pasadena redwood city roseville and sacramento san francisco san jose san mateo and sunnyvale We can go through that slower if you'd like, or you could look at your printouts if you have questions about that. In summary, 17 of the 19 comparable charter cities that met that criteria currently allow for alternative forms of procurement in most cases, and they're generally implemented by ordinance or adopted city policy. So that's a pretty substantial example of that. Interestingly, one of those two that doesn't have that, Sunnyvale, is actually proposing that on their updated charter amendment measure. They've actually got three measures that are going to ballot. One of them is this, to allow them to engage in that type of alternative procurement. I will tell you that they did a very nice job of analyzing this in some detail in their final report to council. Some of the arguments made there and their references to secondary and primary source materials were used in the input that we provided to the ad hoc subcommittee and to you in that summary that was presented on the pros and the potential benefits of that mechanism. The second kind of benchmark exercise that we went through was what these comparable charter cities did in how they handled key procurement thresholds. As you've heard from us, The $1,000 threshold in our existing charter just seems completely out of alignment with the kind of sophisticated projects and work that this city now does. And that's why the proposal is what the proposal is. But what do other charter cities do? Again, these same charter cities with some details here in the chart, it talks about the threshold used TALKS ABOUT THE THRESHOLD USED FOR COUNCIL APPROVAL AUTHORITY, FOR FORMAL BIDDING THRESHOLD, AND FOR APPROVAL AND USE OF CITY FORCES. IN EACH CASE, OURS IS $1,000. COUNCIL HAS TO APPROVE CONTRACTS OVER $1,000. YOU HAVE TO USE FORMAL BIDDING OVER $1,000. AND COUNCIL HAS TO APPROVE IF WE'RE USING CITY FORCES OVER $1,000. HERE THESE CITIES ARE HIGHLIGHTED. For council approval, only Pasadena provided a dollar figure in their charter. It was $75,000. And the remainder of the comparable charter cities were either silent on the subject or called for that amount to be determined by ordinance. Again, what's being contemplated by the proposed update here. Formal bidding. Four, defer to the general law standard for formal bidding. I believe that number is $220,000 for general law cities. 13, call for setting the formal bidding threshold by ordinance. Again, what's being proposed for you. And two, Roseville and Mountain View have a very low number that they index ordinances. up, I think one of them's 10,000 and the other one's 15,000, but it's grown over time, for when formal bidding would be required for public works. For use of city forces, 17 set no threshold on the value of the work required for use of city forces in their charter, or they address it by ordinance. One, Alameda, defers to the general law standard. I think the threshold in the general law is that you're allowed to use city forces up to $75,000. And after that, you're supposed to bid it out for a public work contract. and then one Anaheim allows in certain circumstances. So the benchmarking really kind of affirms this notion that what's being proposed to you is a best practice, at least as it aligns with the comparable charter that were identified. With this, I'm going to... be quiet for a minute and invite to the podium a couple of folks in your professional staff that would be the ones making use of this updated Public Works Ordinance should you decide to put it on the ballot and should the voters approve it. First, I'd like to introduce Chris Karwick, Chief Operating Officer with Silicon Valley Power. Then behind him, Craig Mobeck will also talk to you, your Public Works Director.

Welcome, Chris.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Thank you for having me. I've got a couple slides just to highlight what City Attorney has identified, and then I'll briefly speak about our existing projects.

There we go.

Design build, I just want to touch on that. So earlier this evening, we discussed financing of an additional $109.3 million for new projects. This is with the new 230 line coming in. So this is a prime example of where this will be utilized. I want to emphasize that design build emphasizes speed, collaboration, and single point accountability. It is particularly effective in complex, schedule-driven, and I want to underline that, or innovative projects where integrating design and construction can reduce risk and accelerate delivery. SVP's large electrical infrastructure projects are prime examples of where the design-build model can pay dividends. Our system expansion projects right now are completely schedule-driven. We are trying to beat LS Power to the punch. We have to have this work completed. Now, so again, kind of what Glen was saying, design build reduces risk and complexity by only managing one contract. The design build entity is fully responsible for the entire project life cycle, minimizing administrative burdens and communication gaps. Designing construction can overlap, which will allow the contractor to index, prioritize, expedite based on conditions encountered in the project. Every single project is different. I know we all know that. But by allowing the design build, the contractor can have some movement. Construction can begin before final design is complete, significantly reducing delivery time. Again, the contractor's managing the overall project real time forecasting and cost. This reduces change orders, scope gaps, and last minute budget surprises. Next, I just figured it would be good to talk about our existing projects. So the NRS, KRS, SRS projects that we're working on right now, those are all being done or executed under the design build model. So for NRS, the cost impact we're still determining, but we know that there's going to be an impact. We've experienced material delays, missed outages, and clearance windows. A lot of this was due to design issues where the initial design was thought to be correct, but as the contractor receives the design from the designer, there's a back and forth. And so a lot of RFI is going back and forth, creating trouble. For KRS, right now we've already identified $4.8 million roughly. And so what we found on this project, we had the notice to proceed was delayed. and which pushed construction into winter conditions, which raised the water table. So we've had a number of subsurface issues. The design issues that we've encountered have been significant post-bid civil, structural, and conduit electrical redesign requirements. And then for SRS, approximately $7.1 million in impact. Again, notice to proceed was delayed, resulting in winter construction activities, which is a higher water table. I wanna note that all these cost impacts, I don't wanna alarm you here, but all these cost impacts are within our project cost, and we're using contingency, so there's nothing to be of concern there. We are on budget, or within budget, and we are on schedule. But I do wanna identify that had we done this a little differently, we would've been faster, and less risk. So, that's all I have for these projects. Any questions?

We're not doing that now. Thank you. Welcome, Craig.

Thanks, Craig Mobeck, Director of Public Works. Yeah, and Chris identified some key points with design-build, so I'll try not to repeat what he's already gone through. But certainly, just having the tools available to utilize a method like this is really important because of all the future projects, the ones that we think we know about, the ones we might not know about, and it gives us the opportunity to do something a different way. As was stated, it's not for every project, and we wouldn't be advocating for every project, but certainly the ones that are more complicated, projects that have more risk, that have intricate phasing, or are based on tight schedules, or there's multiple contractors working in the same area. I've been fortunate to be able to work on design-build projects, and I worked out at the San Jose airport for many years on design-build, and I saw the advantages that we obtained by using that process. I've also been involved in a lot of big projects over the years that I think could have benefited from a process like design-build. When we look out in terms of public works, what are some of the projects that we could use it for? Obviously, future phases of the ISC. There's been discussions of fire stations. We talk about the potential of a new city hall. potential projects related to improving convention centers or large scale projects like that, all projects that warrant considering a design build. Again, it's just providing us the tool to do that. If we don't, there are other options, but I think it is important that we look at design build. So I will just leave it at that.

Thank you gentlemen, I appreciate that. So really in summary, the public works update is intended to align city practices for public works procurement with what are considered to be best practices. Design build isn't anything the city council would ever have to do. It would be done only in accordance with terms of an approved ordinance and only in accordance with standards that you yourselves would establish. It doesn't apply to every project, but you heard a few of the examples of where it would apply and could be beneficial. So next steps, obviously council questions, public testimony, council deliberation and direction with your final decision being brought back to you on July 14th. There is direction being sought by council in order to set up that. I'm sorry, direction being requested of council by staff in order to set up that item for your ultimate action. First of all, you've got the comprehensive charter update that you've already provided us direction on, We're requesting clarification or supplemental direction regarding a couple of items. You'll recall from the last meeting you had, there was a discussion early on of including within your level one and level two recommendation the deletion of the meaningfully outdated provision requiring newspaper publication and a last-chance bidding opportunity for disposition of city real estate valued at $500 or more I'm it wasn't clear when you got to the final recommendation on that whether that was intended to be included as part of the comprehensive update or not and so asking that question of the council if that was the intent or whether you want to provide that direction now and then Does the council support including the latest proposed updates? Most of them minor, but a couple of them meaningful, and obviously nothing you have to do, but the updated provisions that were summarized in slides nine and 10, and we can go back to that and look at that if you want. Is that something you want to include in the comprehensive measure that comes back? That would include the language for the updated revenue bond proposal. And then, most substantively in the intended focus of tonight, does council support the proposed public works update, the option A that was tendered to you either as part of the comprehensive update or as a standalone measure, and then any other direction? that you might provide to prepare you for your ultimate decision on July 14th. That decision will include the final version of the charter, ballot questions that you need to have, either one or two, depending upon the direction that you've got. I've got some preliminary drafts of that if you want to look at that tonight. We'd have to do an amendment to the call for the election to add this item as a formally added to the election. And there would be a budget approval also with numbers that I think we're looking like for two ballot measures in the $500,000 range, about 250,000 apiece, unless the assistant city clerk has updated numbers. And so all of those things would be coming back to you on July 14th.

with that mayor i'll turn it over to you for council questions thank you thank you thank you for that presentation um councilmember cox your first

Thank you, City Attorney. So, you know, understanding that this is our Constitution and kind of feeling overwhelmed by it, I spent most of this week really trying to deep dive into the full charter. And I think the easiest way to ask my questions is kind of in groups based on theme. so um i'll start with group 202 some questions that i had outstanding and i'd preface this by saying i'm really glad that we did the the color coding on it because you know we had made a motion about accepting those things and i think that later when i understood what some of those implications were i had further questions so I want to start with Section 202, which is about accountability of the council itself. I think that there's significant risk identified in this list because we're adding subjective duties while simultaneously weakening enforcement. And we again have refused an independent oversight in an ethics commission. So we call out acting professionally and courteously. We include in 205 misconduct as a vacancy trigger. So we're adding subjective terms like misconduct, professional behaviors, charter level requirements, but we've explicitly deferred the creation of an Independence Ethics Commission. So who then is the neutral arbitrator that will determine if a violation has occurred? And are we not just creating a system where a political majority then can determine professionalism or misconduct of a political minority? To follow up with that, 2022 reinforces council duties but simultaneously softens the penalty for something important right now like councilmanic interference and it removes automatic removal from office. So I'm wondering why we're trying to reinforce standards but we are reducing the deterrent for interference. And then also we talked, and I know you described some of these vacancies, special meetings, adopting ordinances. So specifically when we talk about what constitutes a vacancy, this is 2051, again, who's going to determine misconduct and what due process applies. There's a section in 205 about elected officials and we don't have a maximum time before voters can weigh in in that vacancy. And then again, I think just Section 902 talks about the violations and enforcement, but how is that going to be upheld? My second group, again, is about the fiscal procurement, and I know that we've got a lot of support for this. I don't think that I have any issue with that at all. But again, we're shifting the public works and financial authority to a future ordinance that hasn't been written. And so we don't have a fixed threshold right now requiring competitive bidding and city council approval in the charter would leave the definition of major and minor projects along with key procurement and conflict of interest guardrails to be determined later. 802 acknowledges that an ordinance implementing the sections required, we need to act on it right away, it says, but if we're telling voters this is a comprehensive modernization, how can we present a framework that leaves the actual dollar thresholds and transparency safeguards for our largest construction projects to a non-existent future ordinance? The best value contracts shift the award criteria from lowest competitive bid to subjective scoring. But before we ask voters to authorize this, can staff clarify what specific conflict of interest safeguards will be or will need to be included in the ordinance and who provides that independent technical audit to ensure the scoring is not politicized? Given that Santa Clara voters previously rejected an increase of the bidding threshold to 50,000, I wonder if we realize that leaving that number blank in the charter could be perceived by the public as a move away from transparency altogether rather than a modernization of efficiency, and how can we remedy that before to ensure that there would be success? I also wanted to talk about the two-thirds voter approval that was brought up today for the bonds. The proposed update removes this requirement, so I'm wondering if we remove the voter approval requirement for revenue bonds, what remaining structural guardrails are in the charter to ensure that the council cannot issue excessive debt for utility projects without a transparent, independent audit of those decisions? And again, I think we mentioned it. But would projects like we voted on tonight with TD Public Finance, which I think you answered as no because it's electrical, have been taken out of voter visibility? The July 1st memo acknowledges that Section 8055 removes this longstanding voter approval right. Again, if we're asking voters to approve a modernization of their constitution, why are we including the removal of one of their most significant guardrails instead of making this a level three ballot measure thing? And then one other issue that I think is significant with the new changes, this shift for the public works director, now listed as a public works director instead of public works and utility, is appointed by the city manager. But I think that the jump is unusual because it moves a technically sensitive and legally required position. As I understand, the engineer must be a registered professional in California, further down the reporting chain. Historically, the city engineer had an independent mandate. Measure C in 1958 specifically amended the charter to ensure the city engineer would supervise and be responsible for all engineering work of the city. So I'm wondering, because 5022 allows public works director to be appointed by the city engineer in consultation with the city manager, given that the city engineer is a legally required professional role responsible for the safety of our infrastructure, why would we move this appointment to a subordinate level rather than keeping it a charter-defined role? And second, the annotations state that the public works director will now implement and oversee public works procurement. If the same director who's also the person appointing and supervising the city engineer who then is providing the independent technical audit to ensure that the design approvals aren't being influenced, I feel like there's a layer of technicality removed there and that again could be a position that's easily influenced. Sorry, I'm getting to the end here. I again want to talk about the operating gaps that we have. I know you illustrated five core issues that were deferred, but there are also critical legal tools that are under construction. So like the definition section, is that going to be finalized before this goes to the ballot? We've included section 905 that's a bridge that keeps existing laws in effect until the new ordinances are passed. And I'm wondering if staff can provide like a transition table that shows the public what rules are going to follow state law in the interim time and what will follow local law during that gap period. But again, when I talked about deferrals, I mean, like you said, there were the five core, but I think there were over 20 that required some kind of action later. Those included reserve account policies, debt issuance procedures, budget reallocation, workforce and legal. So I'm saying if I were a voter and I understood that the proposed framework for my new constitution left major policy decisions, to be determined later, I would really hesitate to support that. So I want to know what we can do before the measure goes to the ballot to ensure voters have a complete understanding of the framework that they're being asked to approve. Otherwise, this is not only a waste of our taxpayer money, but it's a waste of the Charter Review Committee's time. We do want this to be successful, but there are huge, huge holes in it. And then finally, just some miscellaneous questions left on there. I want to know in the redistricting, I think you answered that, I'll skip it. These council meetings that we're talking about, the special meetings with the ordinance adoptions as well, I want to know whether major actions need to be limited to regular meetings or if at special meetings major actions can be that or if that's going to be something that has to be determined later. I want to know what qualifies as an urgent necessity for an ordinance at a special meeting. uh whether there will be a policy adopted for the boards and commissions i think this is one that's going into later but is this going to be something that applies to our boards and commissions now um i think that i've overwhelmed everyone so i'll i'll leave it at that i just i want to you know, not apologize for the lengthy questions. I think that this is a massive, massive undertaking. We're fundamentally changing how our city does business, so I wanted to be thorough about it, and if there was redundancies, I apologize, but thank you, yeah. Thank you. Council Member Jain.

Yeah, thank you, Glen, for clarifying some things. What I want to understand first is, Why did Sunnyvale separate out their procurement? Have you had conversations with them? Why did they feel that it should be necessary? And then I have gained a fair amount of experience with various contracting methodologies, having served on the board of VTA and looking at, you know, design-build, design-bid-build, progressive design-build, contract management, general contractor, target price, pain share, gain share models. So are you proposing, what you're proposing, is it only limited to design-build or is it expand to those other models? Does it leave the door open for other models like that? And then what I've learned is with design build, and this is primarily for progressive design build, was that you actually haven't agreed on a price. you actually do an RFQ, you find the right contractor that you think is capable of doing the job, but you don't actually have a price. And what that requires is that you have in-house expertise that can track the costs as they go along and object to costs that are exorbitant, like they put too many management people on this one project. So you have to have a certain level of expertise in-house to make this work, and I'm concerned that we might need to build that expertise to make this really work. Then the other issue that we ran into with VTA is that you're doing an RFQ, And so when you actually award the contract, like we on the board had to approve a contract award, but we didn't get to see who the bidders were. It was a pretty opaque process. And so I wanna make sure that we have address the level of transparency when we award RFQs. And the reason is that they have proprietary methods in their bids that cannot be exposed to the public. So that's why the contracts are not available to the public. And then, so, And then I wanted to address the issue of the councilmanic interference. So before I got on council, Councilmember Debbie Davis used to go and sit in directors' offices for hours is what I hear and take up a lot of their time. and apparently was never charged for councilmatic interference.

I object to that. I object to that. That's personal to someone who has passed on this council. That's hearsay. I'm giving an example. And you are, you're giving an example of something that you have no direct information about. She's passed away and you're disparaging her name. I really object to that. That's wrong.

I'm saying that this councilmatic interference is very subjective in the grand jury report I was accused by Deanna Santana of councilmanic interference, whereas I had done not even close to what other council members had done. It was extremely subjective and it is something that I have a concern about because it can be made political. The Charter Review Committee discussed at large, and it's in the reports, the discussion of the Independence Ethics Commission. That was thought to be a level four type of recommendation. And so those are my questions, thank you.

Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. I will say that when we did make the motion, my understanding was that notification should have been part of that, and that was the intent. I hope that council feels that way. Also, I noticed we didn't have the meet and confer concerns on here this last time, and my understanding is if the unions had approved those, then that would not show up, and I just wanted to make certain of that. When I go through, I will say the City of San Jose that we own the water treatment plant with them and they use design build and it made all the difference in the dewatering treatment plant that we are just about to cut the ribbon on because a very expensive piece of equipment did not work as it should, broke, in a trial run, and so they were able to, right away, there was no finger pointing, it was the contractor, and it's being taken care of, and I could see firsthand how that design build on a large project made such a difference. Now, when I look at page 32 and page 34, I did notice you had option A and option B over and option A was the one preferred by the city staff and recommended by group six and that's where you took out the specific numbers and in option B it gave the specific number of $250,000 as far as procurement. I liked the idea of taking out a specific number and doing that by ordinance, which is what you had talked about, because this is part of the struggle we have with our old, outdated charter, is we have a number that was appropriate then but is not appropriate, and I like that you showed us that most cities have gone to this pulling out the specific number on purpose. I thought that was a much better way to handle it. So when we talk about financing, Also, the water treatment plant, we are going to have a similar situation that we have now with our electricity. There will be financing required because of a new state law and a requirement, and we've had to pivot very quickly. They've only given us 10 years total to take care of a new requirement to reduce the ammonia content. But the idea is our portion would be rolled into our rates over time. And if I understand this, financing for utilities, that would allow us to do that and we would not have to, it would be part of our, public record it would be part of our explaining to our residents why there was a change but we would not have to go out for a vote for that financing because it is utility if i'm understanding this change correctly which i think would be in everyone's best interest thank you councilmember park

Yes, thank you very much. I actually was hoping that Councilmember Cox would continue because I think a lot of the points that she made were actually very good and spot on. I will not repeat them. But I will say that you cannot mandate behavior. Misconduct is misconduct regardless of how many, even if the majority decides that it's not. I think that this is something that's not decided by a council. It's decided by our society and ultimately our voters. And at some point, You know, I see that code of conduct on that wall. I used to sit right next to it, and I used to look at that all the time while it was being violated in council. But anyways, when you presented the mitigations in slide 14, will the mitigations be part of the charter changes, part of the ballot measure being voted upon? I want to know about that. When was Section 203.2 adopted originally? Why is redistricting based on a baseline at all? I mean, isn't it dynamic based on where people live? It has nothing to do with they're gonna slowly change. It's possible that after a census, after something happens, it may change drastically, and that should be reflected in the district, not based on some baseline. I understand that you met 20 times, 28 times during, starting in November to May. That's more than once a week, and that's during winter break. and spring break. How many changes were made between June 15th and now? At some point, we had a talk about a comprehensive charter review in governance and ethics, but if you go back to the governance and ethics committee meeting when it was discussed, that comprehensive look was likely to take years over several elections. Like, we have done so much work and we've compressed it into a time, you're bringing it forward I mean, I talked to people from Mountain View, their amendments were agreed on last month. You're bringing this literally to us at the last minute and bringing changes even on top of the changes, the last presentation you had less than a month ago. This makes me very concerned that this is a very rushed process. And have you gone over, you've reorganized, you've done a full reorganization of the charter and you said that this was a good thing. What are the consequences of full reorganization of this charter? I mean, have you looked at how we have to update section references and other documents that are not the charter? Have you done the full analysis? I'll talk again about the subcommittee meetings which were closed. You've stated that the closed sessions, we had 10 of them that were reported out to public sessions, but why were the discussions in the subcommittee discussions, why were they closed to begin with? When I ask, closed sessions are required when subject matter requires privacy, when you can't discuss the issue in public. It's not for efficiency or expediency or concerns that people are worried about being able to speak their mind in public. That's exactly what public meetings are for. And I would think that charter changes would be something that the public would want to see the discussions on, not hear the report. If you characterize the committee reports, and you've done this multiple times, in public as the same thing as allowing the public to be privy to the discussions themselves, that's disingenuous at best. My concern is, like you've spent a lot of time on this, it's been your pet project. You put in a lot of things like Chula Vista, because that's what you're familiar with. I'm really worried that you're taking something that you've done in a previous city and bringing it here without the appropriate time, thought, and effort put into making sure that this charter amendment is actually good. And my question is, why is it coming to council so late? I mean, if we don't approve it tonight, or we have one more council meeting, then it's not gonna go, and you've got a lot of changes that you've proposed, even for tonight. When we look at, why were there substantive changes proposed. I'm looking at, I had to go back to my notes from June 15th because you don't have them here. I think that having the strikeout view is very confusing, especially when you're moving things around. I think that a side-by-side would have been a better format to be able to compare documents. But seeing them in strikeout mode with different colors, I can't even read some of the colors because you've got black with a dark blue background. But why are we removing in 604.3, why are we removing the guard against working for the city or holding office for civil service? Why are we removing that guard? Why are we removing requirements for the mayor to provide financial methods when bringing up an item that has a fiscal impact? Why are we removing these requirements? I think these would be good things. Like why are we removing fines for council members for unexcused absences? You know, why remove the consequences for unexcused absences? And are special meetings considered for the purpose, considered for the purpose of unexcused absences? I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to be clear on that. Why remove consequences for dabbling in city employment? I mean, The consequences used to be that the employment or the employee could be removed in 202c. You remove the consequences of reviling provisions of the council duties. I mean, it used to be that you would be guilty of a misdemeanor and could be removed from office, but why do we remove that? Why are we taking the teeth out of this? Why do we consider these small changes? When we talk about the police chief qualifications, I compare them to the fire chief qualifications, and it says the police chief can now run the department. That's not what it used to say. It used to say that these are the duties, that this is what you're responsible for. but based on sheriff qualifications, but explicit is better than implicit. Why don't we just put those, write those down rather than have to wait to adopt sheriff changes or to adopt a new chief duties when the sheriff, if the sheriff changes don't, you know, are not consistent with what we want. Why don't we just make them what we want? I mean we talked about the change of length of time saying it has to be part of the management group I mean, that's one of the problems which is we don't have qualifications for the police chief because the police chief was not necessarily the best the most qualified police chief it was the the most popular and When I say most popular in some cases, it's one of the only one of the only few police officers that can run And that doesn't guarantee that you'll get the best police officer. And in a lot of cases, it completely removes from consideration the people in the management group that have the most experience. In fact, when we had this vote back in 2024, we had one of our chief, our most senior, police officers leave and become the police chief of another city because they could never, they had to obviously qualify to be police chief of the city, but there is no way that we would allow that. I think that's a problem that the qualifications for a duty are absent, then it's not logical to talk about the duties. But if the qualifications for position are not required, why do we even have that position? We don't even talk about that. We try to make the police chief more consistent with the fire chief without looking at how the fire chief qualifications are almost guaranteed because they have to be the best applicant. They're not the elected applicant. When we talk about governance ethics, I mean, I'll say, I had this discussion with the city manager. He said that, well, a comprehensive review was always discussed. It was discussed, but a comprehensive review was not supposed to be compressed in six months, in five months. The fact that we're doing this seems irresponsible to me. The fact that there are so many details that we've done a complete rearrangement of the charter without without thinking about how things are going and the fact that in governance and ethics we've had the city attorney tell me about things such as a redundancy in the the reconsideration process, which was not there, this level of detail, this level of care that I have concerns with because I don't see that it's there, makes me even more concerned when even as we talk about the changes that were made, the issues that were brought to us on June 15th, and now the changes that were made here because we missed this, we missed this, we missed this, I'll bet if we spent another couple of weeks on this, we would see a whole bunch of really important things that are missed. I would rather deal with Why are we doing this? Why are we rushing this? What is the big hurry that we need to do a complete comprehensive change that the public is largely unaware of at this time? We have a lot of different things. When we remove consequences for council members dealing with city employment, this is a problem. I'm gonna tell you a story. In 2021, I went to an event and I went to an event and I had a person when the mayor, Mayor Gilmore at that time was speaking, this person came to me and said, oh, I love that woman. I didn't know who this person was. This person didn't know who I was. And I just said, why is that? Oh my goodness, I'd like to know because I'd like to find reasons to love this woman too. And he said, well, I couldn't get a job. I couldn't find a job at all. And when I couldn't get a job, she got me a job with the city. And I think, oh my goodness, really? And he said, yeah, like I couldn't find a job and I got a job with the city. And now we're removing consequences for this. Like, why are we doing that, right? I mean, it's funny. I laughed.

It's ridiculous. I laughed.

That is so ridiculous. I laughed just as much as the mayor's laughing now. And I thought the exact same thing. I thought, that's ridiculous. That's exactly what I thought. So I'm glad you shared that. I'm thinking, oh, my goodness. But I mean, these are the things. Why are we doing this so quickly? Like at some point, are you trying to, you know, try to catch light in the bottle by doing what you did in Chula Vista and then trying to do it here in less time because you're much more confident and you don't understand?

These are questions only.

That is, Mike, that is a question. Thank you.

Vice Mayor Gonzalez.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I want to thank the... our city attorney and the Charter Commission for the work that they did. I think it's important. I think there's a lot of things in the level one and level twos that capture some of the things. But as far as, do you think that some of the changes, do they incorporate more clarity as far as the roles of the Charter? The vagueness of some of the things, I think it's sometimes more meaningful as far as being able to address that within this body versus having it in concrete in the charter itself. I think to have to go to the voters for every minute change is not meaningful, so does that, vagueness as far as, I know the staff had a lot of keen insight on this. Does that help with the runnings of the city versus having to go to the ballot more often than not? As far as the, The design, I know the city's doing a lot of construction work, a lot of things on the, with SVP. Does this new procedure for design build, is that something that the city looks to have implemented for next year after this election, or is that something that could wait and that looks to be more of a bigger lift? But how soon does the city want to see that or feel that it's needed to get some of these projects over? over the finish line The other question I had was as far as the the changes in the 200 section do you see some of the changes as being Reducing any authority that the counselor or mayor have or does it basically keep that in place just clarifies those roles and Do you, for next week, if we do look at passing something and putting something on the ballot, do you envision being able to come up with some clear document that would be able to be digested by the community as they ponder these changes to the charter?

Thank you. So I have some comments and questions as well. First of all, this was a huge undertaking, and I recognize that by city attorney and the charter review committee. I know we were gonna look at updating our charter, but as far as I'm concerned, and I think was even mentioned earlier, this is a complete revamp of our city charter. It's interesting when you actually dig into it and see all the specific items and you you look at what the positives are and the potential consequences of what are there it is it's overwhelming i have to say i'm completely overwhelmed by this um so i'm hoping that my fellow council members read through what this actually means but looking at it from a policy or our role as the city council is that our charter is the governing document for our community. And I know in the past that even some what would consider minor charter changes, they pass or some you know changing that thousand dollars didn't pass changing it to fifty thousand so people are going to look at what the ballot argument is and that's what is really important what the valid argument says and whether it's clear And what I see with what has been presented that I found 21 items that required further specificity, meaning that It's TBD. Everything's TBD in the future. And it's just not clear. And I'm concerned that our voters are going to want to see something that they want to know what they're voting on, to be very frank. And the more complicated it is, people tend to vote no on things when they don't understand. So I don't know how many of these things can be... clarified in the next week. I'm just not sure that it can happen. It's so comprehensive. I found about 26 items that are genuinely just cleanup items that I could easily support they make sense, they're easy to understand, there's no further discussion about them, they're just there. But I found items, about 12 items that reduce public transparency or accountability. And those are the ones I'm quite concerned about. And many of them are, you know, shifting authorities, but are not clear as to what's actually gonna happen. And then I see like the stadium authority is completely, it's not even discussed. And I'm assuming because it's a JPA under, that it doesn't, this doesn't apply to the stadium authority. I just wanted to be clear. sure about that and then with the design build there's five or more different types of design build that the city would contemplate so i was hoping that if we're putting design build out we actually put what we're going to do and what the thresholds are and i see that I don't know if it was from the Charter Review Committee or the staff that said, well, we don't want to put a number because it might sink the voters. It might sink the ballot measure if we put an actual number. Well, that's kind of... I think that is kind of telling that if you don't put a number, that leaving too much to chance or the voter imagination, that it's not gonna be a trustworthy document. So I don't wanna go into all these details of things, the 21 items, it's a lot more than five, the items that have not been teased out to what they actually, Actually are what we're actually asking for and I think I think the way you're gonna have to put this out is We believe this is a good charter cleanup but trust us in the future that we're going to look out for the community's best interest and and therefore Why even have a charter? Because most of it will be empty. Most of it will be lacking specific items because it would all be subject to ordinance and whatever council sitting here at the time. And so there's no like document that A resident would be able to refer to like we do now even though it's outdated You know we do now we know that the city charter says, you know this this and this but the way it's proposed And I agree. I agree with councilmember Park before he went very negative on me I agree with a lot of the things he said about you know people this this is so comprehensive that i'm feeling rushed i have all these documents i can't even put them all together and if i'm having a problem i don't know how a voter is going to be able to say oh yeah this is good um and i'm afraid the city will end up putting out things that may put us at risk because it's going to be so you know neutral yeah neutral um i i'm just worried i'm worried about it being um So as maybe Vice Mayor Gonzales thinks vague is good, I don't think vague is good when you have something on a ballot and you're asking the community to support it. And then my last question amongst all those comments is how... What does it look like for the voter? And so I asked you this last time, and you said, well, there's going to be a link in the voter document. So if you want to get more information on the 60 pages of changes, you have to go to this link. Is that legal? And is that really true, that a voter would have to go to a link to get the full information on the charter? They don't even know what they're changing unless there's a document that shows them how we're changing the existing charter. And I think that's it for now. Thank you. All right, city attorney, do you need some time? We have an hour and 20.

Mayor, I can probably start in, but I'm also okay with you going to the public and give me a minute to kind of gather thoughts.

And it might literally be two minutes, but okay. Yes, very good. We'll do that and take a little break because I think some of our comments are, there's some duplicates in there and there's a theme. Okay, I'm gonna go to the public now. We have Brian.

Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Go ahead, please. Thank you for clarifying. I read through what I had access to online here, and I didn't understand it, and I thought it was just me, but I'm glad it's not. It's hard enough to try to get people to vote. I mean, and that's all not on the council, but this could be overwhelming to them, and I would suggest... The side by side would be nice, as was suggested by a couple of the council people. What's the changes? And then you're right about the downside. And there's people out there that just live to sue cities. I'm sure you're aware of that better than I am. And so the more exposure you have to that, the more precarious it is for the city. And it needs to be clear to us as the voters what we're changing, because this is a document that'll, you know, for the next generation, really. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have anybody else that would like to speak? So come forward, please.

Good evening, Mayor Gilmore, city council, and city staff. My name is David Curtis, and I'm a resident of District 5. I'm very concerned about the possibility of placing a comprehensive charter update on this November ballot. First, I'd like to thank the council and the mayor. I think there's some great comments and questions that were asked. Some of those are some of the same bullet points I have, so that's great that everyone's really looking into this. There's still roughly 20 unresolved items, which means that this proposal is far from being settled. That was mentioned also. Once again, it feels like this process is really being rushed. Without transparency or meaningful resident input, this is a pattern that we've seen repeated over the last several months. This is also mentioned that residents aren't given clear information about the proposed changes. People didn't deserve to know exactly what they're voting on and how these changes are gonna affect them, not just now, but also in the long run. As drafted, this appears to be a complete overhaul, not just a simple change. And again, it's being rushed, but it looks like they're shifting the authority away from the city council and mayor and really pushing that more power to the city manager and city attorney. Placing this measure on the ballot is going to cost us over $250,000. If there's two, I heard $500,000. I think it's far better to spend this addressing actual residents' needs. For these reasons, I'm asking that the council vote no against placing this measure on the November ballot. Instead, we should all and the council and the residents focus on resolving the outstanding items and engaging the residents in a transparent, thoughtful process. Thank you very much for your time. Have a good evening.

Thank you. Number 4440 online. Unmute yourself. Unmute 4440. Last call 44, there you go. Hello?

Hi, good evening, Mayor and Council. This is Kathy Watanabe. I just wanted to share my thoughts on what has been presented tonight and also some of the comments that have been made by some of the council members. It's very disconcerting to hear Council Member Jayne disparage a former council member who has passed away. And based on comments that he's heard, I mean, that is basically hearsay, he was not there. And if you're going to talk about somebody, make sure you know what you're talking about. Council Member Davis always had the permission of the city manager to talk with directors of departments and to get information to be able to address the concerns of the city and to make sure that she had proper information. And so he was aware. And so to take this opportunity to disparage somebody who is no longer with us is really disrespectful. And thank you mayor for addressing Council Member Jane when he did call her up and tried to really just disparage a former council member who is not here to defend themselves. I will also add that listening to the presentation and everything that is being put before the voters for potentially a ballot measure in November. This is very disconcerting, and I'm very concerned that it's going to be very overwhelming to the voters, and there is not enough sufficient time to get this out before the voters to explain the charter changes and make this a success. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have anybody else on this? No? Do we? Is there some... Oh, Anthony, go ahead, Anthony.

Yeah, I think it's kind of ironic in the last caller who just called in to think about a disparaging remark. So I think it's kind of funny that, you know, a lot of this is being dismissed in the past when we had council members literally sitting at, I think it was a Denny's or a Panera Bread or something with Council Member Park committing Brown Act violations. You know, we have account, we have the mayor who goes and takes what the city manager did, which is filing a complaint against uh the city council i think it's not council member jane for councilmanic interference yet here's the mayor taking councilmanic interference in her own hands by going initiating investigations that nobody even knew about and nobody still knows what the costs were um so i mean i think the council members are right there is stuff being missing out of this there's stuff being withdrawn um there's you know It's very concerning that you know you have people who think that this is that the system is Rigged in this situation and I don't think that's the possibility. I think that the situation is that the charter review had a task at hand, and it was just way too much to accomplish. And this is a task that is a larger project at hand. So when we start talking about these things and councilmanic interference and all these other things, certain things in this charter review process. I have a lot of concerns. I think a lot of this council has concerns, and I think we're moving a little too fast. But when we start pretending that we don't have a history here of councilmanic interference from the mayor or Brown Act violations by the former councilmember Kathy Watanabe and Lisa Gilmore and the former councilmember Debbie Davis and Teresa O'Neill, Yeah, there's a lot of questions about that. And I think it's funny, especially the employee thing that Council Member Park brought up. I've heard the same thing in town. So there's a lot of questions we have. And I think the timing of this is just a little too quick. And I think this needs to be a lot longer of a process because this is just way too much for voters to take a bite of. But again, this is turning political consistently. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have anyone else? City Clerk?

right city attorney do you need some more time okay thank you and appreciate the questions I'm gonna go through an order hard to consolidate in that amount of time but I'll take them

Do you need an extra, some more time?

No, no, no, I think I'll go, Mayor. Starting with questions from Member Cox. The first comment slash question you had was about changes made that add council accountability but weaken enforcement. I don't quite see how that is what is happening with those changes. There are additional provisions added and the CRC thought that was valuable to make it more clear what city council members' duties and obligations were, including acting in the best interests of the city, and giving due consideration to input from the public. These are things that are natural obligations that you have anyway, and they're included in a number of your adopted ethics code provisions. There was one that was thought to be so subjective that it was actually taken out of a duty and responsibility and was converted to an expectation because there was concern that it was too subjective, and that was to conduct yourself in a professional and courteous manner. Important and valuable, and I think that the CRC kind of observing meetings has attached a particular value to that, and those that were wanting even more in an ethics commission, while recognizing that was almost certainly a level four proposal, didn't want to not have things that talked about council conduct. And so that was a lot of the thought that went into how those were drafted. But I don't think enforcement has been weakened uh there was a provision that in the councilmanic interference that talked about um you know a violation of that resulting in automatic removal but there was really no provision for how that would happen and who would make that determination and so instead of having something there that really wasn't self-executing again, the thought being consistent with best practices, violations of any charter provision and councilmanic interference would still be a responsibility of councilpeople not to violate that. would be subject to prosecution under the section that now makes it clear that there could be a range of penalties, depending upon the severity of the conduct, ranging from a misdemeanor prosecution for misconduct in office to an infraction. and that if you were convicted of a misdemeanor for misconduct in office, that would constitute a vacancy under the list of vacancies, and that would now be prosecuted not by the city attorney, which is what's currently provided because there really is substantial inherent conflict of interest in me prosecuting potentially counsel people who appoint me but either by the district attorney and if the district attorney wasn't available or unwilling to prosecute by a special kind of third party special in effect deputy that would that I would be responsible for silk facilitating the selection of but that person would be responsible for in effect evaluating and enforcing a potential violation of the Charter none of this exists now If there is a violation, there would be people throwing up their hands as to how it would actually work. And so part of this process is with that being an ambiguity and a gap is to fill that gap with some clarity. So I think on balance, what's expected of people is actually clear, and I think how that would be enforced is actually clearer, and happy to talk to you further about that if that doesn't get at what your question was designed to get at. Section 205.1, you say who determines what a vacancy is, again, wasn't defined before, now it is. Who determines it based on the process that's now been added is there would need to be a declaration of vacancy made by the council. So the council has kind of a threshold responsibility for making a declaration of vacancy once they learn of that process. But ultimately, if there was a dispute over whether or not that declaration of vacancy should be made or whether a person was qualified or not, or whether an event of vacancy had occurred or not. That would be subject to a judicial determination. That would interpret what the charter says and either an individual council person or the majority of the council could file that lawsuit or in effect represent either themselves or represent the city in determining whether or not a vacancy had actually occurred. So again, it was not. Described it all in the previous charter with my office left, and this is why some of this is selfish for me, figuring out how all of that would work. Now with a structure that at least to me makes sense in steps in determining whether or not a vacancy has occurred. And in fact, a process would be a judicial process for ultimate determination of that. Section 902, enforcement, how that works, I think I talked about that in connection with your other question in your cluster of questions. An ordinance for public works is not written and in general, there is a concern for you for us moving away from transparency because a lot of these things are to be determined, right? I want to step back for a little bit and just talk a little bit about what a charter is. As we've talked about, the charter is the constitution of the city. Just like the constitution of the United States, It is set up to determine basic things, structure of government and basic rules. And that structure of government and basic rules is implemented, and it already is implemented in dramatic fashion, by the city's city code. And if there is some ambiguity about it, by judicial determinations about what the charter might actually mean. And so a charter is inherently a document that is implemented in greater detail by the adoption of codes and policies. So that's what a charter is. And when you've identified, and I think a couple of others have identified, hey, there's 20 of these things, they're not five. There's 20 because there are 20 that are already existing. in the charter that haven't been changed because the charter contemplates the making of policies and ordinances in order to implement its basic terms and so by adding five more what the project is intending to do and what the CRC thought was appropriate was to fill some gaps where things weren't you know called for but to recognize that the charter doesn't have and our charter is this kind, super detailed provisions about everything. Some charters do, I think we've talked about some other ones that have hundreds of pages and they almost become municipal codes, but yours doesn't, and I think Santa Clara's strikes a right balance between being a basic document that provides good information about what the structure of government is and how things are supposed to work, but also recognizes that because things can change um over time that there are certain things that make sense to have implemented by specific ordinances and policies and so yeah there are a lot that are contemplated by it but there are only five new ones um and um they're they're other than the public works ordinance, a lot of them are pretty basic. What constitutes a recusal? What's the policy for appointing members and removing members of boards and commissions? These are basic things we probably ought to have policies about anyway and we don't and the charter recognizes that that's an important gap to fill. So I guess that's how I'd answer kind of that cluster of questions. You talked about the removing of voter approval, and I think that was with respect to the revenue bonds. It's actually not the, the memo that you read that from the two-thirds there is a two-thirds voter you know requirement in other in other sections there the revenue bond approval is actually majority you know of voter approval and so that's what this would be replacing his majority voter approval and as that uh... as you pointed out and was pointed out in the presentation There already is a mechanism for the city council by adoption of a resolution to issue revenue bonds in connection with the electric utility infrastructure financing. And so that's already recognized and is a commonly used mechanism throughout the benchmark charters that we talked about and throughout the state as a financing mechanism that doesn't need voter approval. So we already have a version of it. What this would do, consistent with what our bond council is telling us is best useful practices, is would expand that to other types of infrastructure financing. If you're uncomfortable with that, and the measure I think proposes itself, I get that how that's, removing you know a voter right and that's not anything to be taken lightly but to the extent it already exists in substantially other areas and it really is a relatively minor modification or but of that but viewed as a valuable one because how much infrastructure the city builds that's why it's recommended and so You can be uncomfortable with that and not propose it. I get that. It was even identified. Hey, this might be level three if you think this is going to be a sensitive issue. And a lot of this really is, and you've all pointed this out, how it gets presented to the voters and their level of comfort with it and your level of comfort with it and being able to describe it to them. You talked about public works director in 502.2 and some concerns about kind of the chain of command and oversight with that. This doesn't really change that. And I guess the point I was trying to make is it actually reverts back to what it said in the first place. It doesn't have the public works director appointing the city engineer. The existing charter had the city manager appointing the public works director and the city engineer. And in a revision that wasn't intended to change that, an earlier version of the charter had the public works director appointing the city engineer. That's not what the current proposal is. Instead, it retains the city manager's traditional authority to appoint both of them. but asks that he do that in consultation with the public's works director who will have expertise about these things. And so I think it actually is consistent with best practices. It has the appropriate chain of command. Those people report to the city manager. He's responsible for overseeing them. He has ethical responsibilities in how he does that. They have criteria and qualifications and responsibilities to acquit themselves. And so I think that aligns with appropriate current best practices. The definitions will be finalized by next week for your consideration. And the definitions are really an added value, right? This charter is currently devoid of defined terms. This, without substantively changing things, except where they've been identified, now includes defined terms, so people will be clear about what's meant when things are described. So I think the idea of an added definitional structure is a value add, and those will be done before it comes back to you for your final action. We already talked about the 20 things that contemplate additional policies and procedures. And I talked about how a lot of those already exist and how that's consistent with the nature of the charter. You asked about actions being able to be taken at special meetings. And that is proposed. There are certain actions that under state law can't be taken at special meetings. I don't think you can adopt a resolution of necessity for eminent domain at a special meeting. I know you can't approve increases in salary for a senior official you know at a special meeting and this provides for those things it says except as provided under applicable law right any action that you might take on at a regular meeting can also be taken at a special meeting That's really intended to be for efficiency's sake. If you think that compromises any transparency issue, you don't have to include that change. The thought was that that wasn't a material compromise. Special meetings are noticed. If you've ever felt as a council person uncomfortable with something happening at a special meeting, you could say, I'd rather have this happen at a regular meeting. and you've done that before right I'd rather I don't want to act on this yet I want to act on it at a later meeting and so a lot of the administration of that you know is up to the up to the City Council to oversee but from a staff standpoint being able to have the ability to take actions at a special meeting is considered to be a useful tool except where it's otherwise prohibited Boards and commissions policy for conduct, you identified that as a concern that that wasn't in place. They're actually your current city council policy 055. Once it gets finalized, already acts, with respect to boards and commissions for their protocol with the idea being that there's value in having the procedures and protocols for all of your legislative bodies be consistent so that there's no confusion about certain rules applying to one body and certain rules applying to another. So that already is in effect and this is consistent with that. I think that gets at most of your questions and happy to, because there was rapid fire. If there's some that I missed, I'm happy to follow up on those.

back on the 14th, so my follow-up questions to that, I'll either send to you guys or address them.

To have those in advance would be great. Member Jane, why did Sunnyvale separate out their procurement? I don't know the answer to that. I did have a conversation with the lawyer who was staffing that. early on in their process. They don't really have that many changes that are being proposed, only three. They're kind of in different areas of the charter, and so I think they thought since there isn't a full comprehensive update being proposed, they would keep subject matter issues separate. I don't know what the cost is for them. Smaller city, but not that much smaller.

And maybe cost is no object.

Oh, Sunnyvale's got more population?

Just less budget. But they're doing three ballot measures, is that correct? Yes. So they will have essentially possibly three times 250,000. Yes. We could be two times 250,000. That's right. Okay.

did design bill extend to other procurement mechanisms uh... absolutely yes in the measure itself it doesn't just list design build it lists or indicates other uh... i'm including without limitation you know other best value mechanisms and a number of them are listed at the time that you're describing and so i've just been using design build is kind of a shorthand and the one that people are most familiar with but it really would be that be intended to contemplate what you ultimately decide you want to include as flexibility in your charter implementing ordinance. And so those would be included. You asked about in-house expertise to track this in terms of how these projects are implemented. I can ask maybe Craig to speak to that. I know he's got some experience with it. He's got other folks in his office that have experience with it. We already have, even in the design bid-build structure, engineers that prepare engineers' estimates to manage costs, and so a lot of those skills already exist. But you're right, they might present differently in a design-build context, and having that in-house expertise, if we don't have it already, would be an important element of implementing this. You can also hire consultants to assist you, as we do from time to time with administration of things as well. So it's now a very common procurement mechanism. I think Craig can speak to his ability to staff up to that and or hire appropriate professionals.

Yeah, thank you. Craig Mobeck, Director of Public Works. Yeah, and design build, very common for agencies to hire an estimating consultant. So that way when you're getting the estimates through the different phases of the design, you have a third party who can review based on industry standards in terms of production, what the current market costs are, say for copper or different materials or things like that, and it goes through an extensive review process. Those consultants have much more opportunity to get all that data because they're experts in estimating construction costs. Obviously, agencies such as ours and other local ones it wouldn't make sense for us to have our own estimating specialists on board. We do very good at estimating the jobs that we typically run, and our consultants do well at that, but having a specific estimating consultant for design build is very important as well.

You pointed out that the process that you've seen when the bids are submitted, the other bid submitters aren't privy to the other party's bids. You're absolutely right. That's also standard with design bin build, right? It's a closed bid process, and no one sees anyone else's bid until they're opened. And even in design-build, there might be certain proprietary elements to that that aren't disclosed to the public. And so that can be managed through the ordinance and through the implementation of that process. Councilmanic interference, subjective, that's right. I mean, and again, the charter doesn't solve you know, this charter update's not gonna solve all the issues that any city might have or that any of you might, you know, have in either your relationships with each other or relationships with staff. The goal was to improve the understanding of what things mean and improve the ability to implement them in a kind of an irrational way. And I think in and around that subject, as I mentioned before, in terms of how that would work, I think this update does improve that, even if it doesn't solve everything in that regard. And Ethics Commission, you're right, was identified ultimately as a level four issue. And frankly, recognizing that that already was a matter that's been taken up by the Governance and Ethics Committee. Member Hardy, you indicated your intent was to include the deletion of the real estate provision as kind of an updated best practice. If the council in their deliberations affirms that, then that's certainly, that's what I understood your intent to be, but it wasn't like it was initially formally included in your motion, and I should have clarified that at the time, but it certainly can be clarified today either by the four that voted with you or by separate council action. Meet and confer, is it represented in the charter? Yeah, the language that's in front of you now, all is approved or didn't need to be approved if it's only minor by the labor groups. And so there's nothing in the language that's in front of you now that rises to any level of dispute or level three because it's supported by all the labor groups. You gave a good example of the value of design build. And yes, you pointed out that still in the charter is option B, with the dollar amount. The council could do that. Again, it's not recommended for the reasons we talked about. I appreciate the mayor's point. It's not intended to be deceitful. It's intended to recognize that there's really not a magic number, and that numbers could be targets. I think that's, you're right, there's a little bit of a, a hard choice in thinking about what's the best way to present this to the public. Ultimately, again, I think you saw with the benchmarking, other charter cities don't include the number for thresholds because They can change, and it makes sense to have it implemented by ordinance instead of by a vote where that number can be outdated. If you put it so high so you never have to change it, then the voters might go, what are you doing? That number is so high. If you don't get exactly the right number, and the thought is it's a better process to implement it by ordinance. But there's option B there if, in fact, that's what a majority of the council is more comfortable with. Member Park, yours were pretty quick too, so if I miss one or more, let me know and we can get into it. A couple of your comments were about things being kind of removed and wanting explanations for why they were removed. A couple of the things weren't removed. They actually just were moved to a different part of the charter. I think the idea that a person on the Civil Service Commission, for example, can't be a city employee, that was moved up to the general provisions for boards and commissions. It wasn't removed. With respect to civil service, it's now just a general prohibition that no member of any boarding commission can be a city employee. You talked about redistricting, and I think the idea that there could be redistrictings other than The circumstances where redistricting is mandatory, the decennial census, and I think there is an option for that. I'm not familiar with how that works in any detail. The charter wouldn't, as drafted, I don't believe would prohibit that. It's focused on the mandatory redistricting that would have to happen every 10 years when you actually get new information. How many changes between June 15th and now? And a concern about that. I presented those to you. They're highlighted in the underlying strikeout version kind of in yellow. There really aren't that many. I appreciate the idea that you don't like that there are any at all. Most of them are just minor things. But I did summarize those for you. at least the ones that were of any substance on slides nine and 10, I believe. And so happy to talk to you about those further. No, that's the wrong. Yes, slides nine and 10, changes of note that are listed there, intended to capture the ones that are of any substance. A lot of them aren't that substantive, but I wanted to make sure you saw the ones that were changed between that time and now. Ambitious project, rush process, reorganization of the charter. It is an ambitious project. It just is. And we talked about that. at the beginning of the initiation of the project. This was a lot to take on in the time period. I think we did it. You had a lot of really hardworking CRC members that you all appointed or were chosen by lottery, they were very engaged in the process, both making suggestions themselves, pushing back on suggestions. It was by its very nature, and this was said at the beginning, a professional staff driven process because we're updating a charter that talks about the workings of government and how city operates to align it with current best practices. I got input from public works, from the finance department, from all the boards and commission members, to the liaisons to the board commission members, from the elected and professional city clerk, from my office. There was a lot of review and analysis of what made sense to update and change. That was presented to the CRC. They really dug into it and gave us feedback on it, and you're seeing the product of that work effort. But it is ambitious. I don't think it's rushed. I think it's just a lot of work that was done in a short period of time, and that's why Even in the original, we said the work plan was to try to get it to you before the end of June. It was presented to you initially on June 9th, and then again on June 15th, and then again tonight, and ultimately for final decision on July 7th. I get how it's a lot and that if you're not comfortable with it, you could conclude I'm not comfortable with this. That's up to you to decide. I think the work product was substantial and I understand how you looking at that with the number of changes that were made are a lot. I'm sorry, was the city manager wanting to say something? No. Oh, okay.

I think I was going to respond to that. I mean, you just said that it was a lot of work for a short amount of time and you're making changes, you know, even now as we speak with more changes on the way and definitions and that we're going to vote on something where, you know, definitions won't be ready until next week. And then how do we know if we decide that we want to look at the definitions more? I think that is the definition of rushed. Like again, the fact that Sunnyvale.

Let the city attorney finish his questions, please, and then you can make comments.

So why were ad hoc meetings closed in the first place? I think I've spoken to that a number of times. I'll speak to it briefly again. The Brown Act specifically contemplates the concept of having an ad hoc subcommittee meeting with a specific assigned task for a limited duration to allow for meeting schedules and not all of the setup required for a public meeting to align with people's schedules and to allow for a certain type of discourse that couldn't be the same type of discourse that could occur at a fully public meeting. And that's what was done. I think it was any of the folks who participated in will testify to the usefulness of that process and the integrity of the process. The reporting out in public and the deliberation of all the issues in public fully reflected the kinds of conversations that were had. You know in those those private meetings and so I don't think with this ambitious of a project It could have worked any other way you can disagree. I I understand that Maximum transparency has a value to it But being able to schedule these meetings, you know to align with people's schedules to align with professional staff schedules and where rooms were open, the idea of having to actually have all those available for remote participation and open to the public would have been really an extraordinary, probably impossible thing to do with the number of meetings that were had and how things needed to be coordinated. And they weren't, I know there's analogy to a closed session, they weren't closed sessions in the sense that things aren't reported out of them. They were reported out every month. Pet project, Chula Vista, why brought here? I will tell you that my idea for this did originate with my very positive experience I had in Chula Vista with a similar project. Chula Vista there was a charter that also hadn't been of the same vintage as this charter that had a lot of the same really identical provisions as I mentioned before based on a model charter that was being distributed at the time they had also gotten out of alignment you know with what the current you know practices was and so it was an analogous situation And as I started to have my own experiences with the charter here when I started here with you in March of 2023, with the ambiguities that there were around certain provisions regarding elections, with the limitations imposed that were really out of alignment with any normal figure by the Public Works Procurement provisions. by the provisions in the budgeting process. All of them, it was a little deja vu in that there was this old language that just wasn't what we were doing any longer. And so, yeah, part of this is my experience down in Chula Vista, but it was very analogous. But I will tell you that the benchmarking that was done up here was with the cities around here. And so when you see The procurement, you know, provisions, sure enough, Chula Vista is similar and is one of them, but so are 17 other of the comparable cities that were chosen. So it wasn't a one-size-fits-all thing. It was just common, you know, a similar charter with a similar, like a lot of other cities, lack of attention, you know, over a period of time. And I think that that's the explanation for that. You talk about presenting this in a different way, maybe with side-by-side or a better format. I appreciate that. Boy, I've endeavored mightily with the number of changes that were made to have it be as communicative as possible to you with it being an underlying strikeout document. And in fact, Member Park, with your suggestion, you weren't comfortable with the way that the levels were analyzed in the annotations. I went and then did that for all of that to address a concern that you had raised about wanting to understand the context in which the changes were and the categories of what they were. If you all tell me you want something more than that, that can help the public understand it, that can be part of your action and direction to me. I absolutely want the public to understand as much as they want to engage in understanding what this charter is proposing to change. And I've tried to be very transparent explaining to you all the changes that were made and the reasons why with, again, full annotations in the charter on a section by section basis. And so if there is a different thought about how that can be done even better, by all means let me know and we'll endeavor to include that as well. You also pointed out why removing consequences for, I think, councilmanic interference. I think I explained that. There's now a general section about violations of the charter that deal with all the violations of the charter. Didn't make sense to have a unique provision there without it fitting into a structure of how that would be evaluated and prosecuted. And so now it is. So it's not gone. It's just now part of a general enforcement of charter violation language. You talked a fair amount about your discomfort with the police chief changes. Those, and I'm sorry, they're still in the version of the charter that you have in front of you, but council direction is not to include those. When the final version of it comes back, those will be excluded because the conclusion was reached even though those changes can be defended and are actually supported by the current chief and other people looking at them that you would think would be sensitive to it. Even though they make sense to add a qualification requirement, to add a current role and function of the police chief that actually is in the city code to professionalize that position and have that person be the head of the police department, which they are functioning as, all of that makes sense. But I completely understand, and I think the council concluded this, that the political sensitivity around the police chief qualifications and role and function was maybe too much to be comfortable in recommending those changes. And so those are not gonna be part of what's brought back to you.

City Manager, did you wanna, your light's on?

Oh, at the end, okay. I think that gets at the comments that you made that actually had questions in them, but happy if I missed anything to engage further with you on that. Member Gonzalez, do changes add clarity? We think so. I mean, that was part of the point of it, right, where there was ambiguity in a term. We've added defined terms where the language was either old fashioned or a little ambiguous. We've added more clear language and tried to do that throughout. Sometimes that's a level one change, sometimes it's level two. There's some stuff that kind of flirts with both characterizations, but endeavored to do that throughout. You pointed out not everything is in the charter itself. That's absolutely right, and I think I talked about that with the charter being the Constitution. And inherently, like any charter, the type that we have, which I think is a good type, doesn't have everything in the charter because if you need to change it, you need a vote of the people. And a lot of that really needs to be thought about and developed in a much more detailed way in public because amendments to ordinances and policies that are approved by the council are approved in public, but not requiring a vote of the people each time. I think you talk about design build and the value of having that now. I think you've heard from folks there is a value to having that now. There's a number of projects still to be implemented under the Measure I, including the International Swim Center, including not Fire Station 5, because that's already being designed too bad, but other fire station improvements and other facilities that do have that high value and design complexity where design build or some other similar mechanism would be appropriate. And so I think there is an eagerness to have that now. I'm sorry, Member Cox, you also asked about, back to a question you had, could we produce something that talks about what the rules would apply in the interim while we're waiting for, certainly we could do that. I think that we've contemplated that by that general section, but could that be better explained and included in one of the explanatory documents or FAQs? 100%. That would be the kind of thing that would be helpful, I think, to clarify. Do changes remove authority for the mayor and council? No, they don't remove authority and weren't intended to. I think there was a comment regarding why remove the provision that required the mayor if she was making a recommendation that required the expenditure of money for her to identify the source of the money and what other monies it would be removed from. Just thought that was just not necessary. Any one of you can make a recommendation. It's not for you to figure out where the money is. It's for us to figure that out, right? And to propose that back to you. And so it was just thought as an unnecessary restriction on an authority that the mayor has anyway. And in fact, in the list of the city council recommendations, and obligations even though that wasn't a list before that's been added for you as well that same ability to make recommendations because of course you have to be able to do that mayor huge undertaking absolutely I get that it's a lot I get the ballot arguments I think need to be clear and I think you put you you raise a point you know with this that's an important one You all need to be comfortable with this. You are going to be the ones advocating for it and identifying what the ballot argument would look like and providing support for a public information program with funding to make sure that if you decide to put this on the ballot, as much as possible, the public really understands what's presented to them. And we've endeavored to provide the tools that do that, but the CRC making themselves available and explaining the process that they went through, you providing support in ways that are appropriate, not campaigning and advocating, are really gonna be important to this, just like it was for Measure I. And you talked about item, 26 items are good, 12 items that reduce transparency and accountability. That certainly wasn't the intent, but happy to talk about those if you identify specific ones. The stadium authority, you're right, is not governed by this document, certainly not directly because it's a joint powers authority. There are things that we impose on them as part of this under our procurement ordinance. And so whatever our public works procurement requirements are, we impose them on them too. If you decided as a matter of implementing ordinance you didn't want that or you wanted to impose this or not, some other element of that, that would be within your authority. But it's not treated for that reason. But under the Joint Powers Authority law, there are provisions for the sponsoring agency that would flow through to the JPA.

So design build would apply to the stadium authority? I'm just asking the way you proposed it, it would apply to the stadium authority?

Without an express limitation on not applying it, and it would be available unless through the ordinance that you adopted to implement it, you limited its application. In thinking about it, the stadium authority owns the stadium. In theory, the value of adding things to the stadium that you get in adding infrastructure anywhere also could benefit from design-build, but it's up to you.

There's a JPA. There's supposed to be a firewall between the stadium authority and the city, but if you...

included then it you're eroding that firewall i just wanted to know if it was included in design bill it's um so i'm just i'm i'm we actually had this looked at for any jpa the rules of of how they administer different things are the rules of um either identified in the jpa or of any one of their constituent agencies and so to the extent that the city is a constituent agency of the JPA it's it doesn't compromise the firewall it's just that's how JPA law works I understand that you didn't mention it anywhere in these documents so I didn't know but now I know thank you I appreciate you asking the question there that is how it would work and again I the council decides that it doesn't want it to work that way you could either include it in the Charter although I wouldn't recommend in the Charter or in the implementing ordinance because you already have a procurement ordinance that the city adopts that applies to the 49ers so there already is provisions for that I mean in how that gets implemented

don't have design build now for the stadium authority.

And you don't have it as a city. So you're absolutely right, Mayor. Your point is a valid one. Vague is good, not good. I agree with you Mayor Vague. I mean, you talked about vague not being good. I agree vague's not good. The whole purpose of this project is to eliminate things that are vague. I think the comment probably was general rules that are implemented by more specific ones is inherent to the nature of a good charter. It's not the vagueness so much as it is because you want all of it to be clear. And then what does it look like to the voter? We talked about this at the last meeting, Mayor and Council. It is lawful to have a link for a measure that's very detailed. It is lawful to have a link or a reference to the full text of the measure. It's not uncommon. Excuse me for using a Chula Vista example, but that is what was done down in Chula Vista. There was a link to the document itself. Since there is so much to this and the real understanding of what's been changed would be the underlying strikeout version, that's really a hard thing to put in front of a voter and expect any reaction other than confusion. And so the thought was to have it described, to have a ballot question, have a link to the city's website, and have all of the versions and explanations for what's being proposed included there, both with the original charter, a clean version of the charter, an underlying strikeout version of the charter, all the annotations and FAQs in any way you guys suggest. So the tools will be there.

I don't think I've ever seen this before where a voter has to get information by going to a link. Certainly our residents are not used to anything like that. And what if they don't have access to that? to be able to do that.

Mayor, if you decide to put a version of the charter in front of them, you can also do that. Okay. Yeah, you're not prohibited from doing that. It's just, you're right, I would recommend that if you were gonna put something in front of them, you put the clean version in front of them, because the underlying strikeout, I think, would be very hard as a standalone document to decipher. But you could put as many pages of what's being proposed in front of them as the council directs.

Well, the ballot argument is up to 75 words. That's the ballot question? I mean, the question is up to 75 words. And then they'd need to know how the charter was changed.

That's right.

So if you just put the clean version, they're not going to know how the charter was changed. That's right. It's complicated because it's so long.

A comprehensive update like this is complicated. And again, communication to the public is important. I think both in the ballot question, which can only say so much, right? city attorney impartial analysis which is 500 words and only can say so much in the pro arguments you know for it I really think all of that is useful and important and frankly is typically even more than what a voter might look at anyway but that's why one of the actions of the CRC that I heartily endorse of a public information program that includes all the information on the website that includes public forums, that includes mailers, to get the voter comfortable with what's being proposed, it's a valuable, good work product. I think there is a good story to be told about it.

But you can't go too far in spending money sending out your... You know, we have to be really careful in what we do. We've been turned in before for things that the city's put out. If you're planning on a huge campaign, I mean, you need to tell us, okay, it's going to be $500,000 for two things, plus we're going to spend a blank amount of money on...

it's a campaign it's not that madam area and it can't be a campaign right it can't advocate for it again my analogy was measure i there was a card that was sent out that says hey on your ballot is this thing go to the city's website for more information that would be the kind of thing that would probably be communicated in addition to everything else i will be the first one to say you can't spend you know as part of my job and ethical responsibility you can't spend public money on a campaign advocating for the measure so you will need to be careful about that

Well, and it's a slippery slope because you're promoting this, but you're also writing the unbiased city attorney, which that would be questionable. And then you're going to advise on putting out the information. I just think we have to be super careful.

I completely agree, Madam Mayor. Yep, I completely agree. I understand that entirely. So I'm through the list that I had. City manager has his hand up.

Thank you, Council Glenn and members of the public. I just want to make a few brief comments. While no formal action on the potential ballot measures are contemplated tonight, I did just want to say that city staff have been a part of this effort, both the analysis supporting the Charter Review Committee, and I know the city attorney has been the leader and the lead presenter, but it would be incorrect to assume that this has been, that the full complement of your leadership team for the city has not been intimately involved. In fact, I think every department director, probably except for the IT director, has been intimately involved and is supportive of what is before you as well as the recommendations that will come to you at the next meeting. Also, I would like to say that I am familiar with the alternative procurement methods. The city of Berkeley, where I worked, is in your benchmarking list. They have them. I've also reached out to a number of staff in our neighboring jurisdictions. As you saw from the benchmarking, the vast majority have the alternative procurement methods. And I just want to say there was a comment made at our last meeting on this that doing this may limit the bids or would limit the bids be and in fact what I heard is actually Maybe not you might be surprised for some projects for example fire stations you you may actually get more bids because as contractors prioritize what bids they submit for they may be more likely to submit for a design-build project because they obtain both the design and the construction portion, and as they're looking at your neighboring municipalities that have design-build and they're making a decision, do I go for this project where my contract covers three phases or two phases, or do I only go for the Santa Clara's project that it's only design or it's only construction? So you may actually have more companies prioritizing your project because of the size of the contract. Also want to note, and it was just talked about, that certainly like any ballot measure the city council decides to put on the ballot, the city does have a responsibility for public education, not advocacy, and so we would develop a public education campaign, and given the comprehensive nature of this, it would be one that we would attempt to articulate what is in here and so that will take on various forms. And I will also say I understand that this is comprehensive and Santa Clara has not done this. The reality is we're not plowing new ground here. We're actually doing something that a lot of other cities have done and in fact your neighbor in Sunnyvale is doing a portion of that right now. Also, I just want to note councilmember Cox Had a question around the appointment of the city engineer. I think the city attorney addressed a large part of that I just want to respond to a few nuggets of that and note that as per the Charter the city manager is the appointive officer, right? Appoints all employees that are not directly appointed either elected or appointed by the City Council in that The current charter allows the city manager to appoint both the city engineer and the public works director. And in fact, it says the city engineer may be the public works director. So the change that's currently proposed, placing the authority with the city manager with consultation with the public works director is really no significant change. It says consult with the public works director. That's really normal and commonplace. I'll also note that the city manager here and in just about every other city appoints other positions that are technical in nature. Arguably, the building official may actually have more technical responsibility than the city engineer or at least on the equal footing that is appointed by the city manager. Your fire chief is appointed by the city manager, certain significant technical responsibilities there. Also, as a part of our normal appointment practices, There are subject matter expert panels, right? you don't have to be an expert in X to appoint someone with the expertise in X and Our recruitment processes have subject matter experts right when you're pointing a building official typically what you would do is you would gather a panel of subject matter experts building officials or community development directors and in other communities to provide the appointive Whether it's a department head who's doing the phase or the city manager with a recommendation on who of these have the appropriate? Technical classifications, so I just want to note having the city manager be the appointive officer for a person with technical expertise Is not atypical and in fact, it's commonplace both as the Charter reads now and the best practice in the landscape With that thank you

I have council comments, so I'm going to go there. Council Member Park.

Yes, I have a number of questions that were not really answered. I mean, I think that this is something we're going to do, but when you presented the mitigations in slide 14 for the procurement process, will the mitigations be in the charter changes? Part of the ballot measure being voted upon, I think that we could vote on that, but I want to be sure that that's the case. I also asked, when was section 203.2 adopted? And my other question was, what are the consequences of a full reorganization of the charter? I mean, section referenced by other documents, have you done the analysis for this? Where are the sections that were created to consolidate consequences of actions? My other comments are, again, you met 28 times starting in November 2025 to May 2026. It's more than once a week during winter break and spring break, which kind of gives me the impression it was rushed. The fact that you had closed sessions, as you said, because the Brown Act allows it for certain types of discourse, it is allowed as a terrible justification for removing discourse from the public. Transparency, not just maximum transparency, but any kind of transparency has a cost and I think that cost is sometimes time. And if you don't have the time for transparency, it tells me that it's rushed. One of the actions of the CRC was to create a public information program and forms and mailers to get people comfortable. At some point, getting people comfortable with the changes starts with the discussion of what the changes are. And at some point, if you don't have time to do that and you want to do that at the tail end, I feel like it's rushed. I mean, when you're looking, you said looking at the charter was a little bit like deja vu looking at your Chula Vista charter. There was language, things that we weren't doing. The benchmarking that was done, you know, it was real. And it looks like you're using procurement process to justify every other change. And at some point, I wanna know why the other changes were made, not just why the procurement. You had this analysis on the procurement. I wanna know if you made the analysis on every other change. We talked about mayor has to provide financial justification. You just thought that was unnecessary. So that as an unnecessary restriction on authority, mayor has anyway. I mean, we have a basic tenet in engineering, basic tenet, which is you do not remove things without first understanding while they're there. If you don't understand, there's so many things here that I don't know if there is an understanding of why they were there And I think that the understanding of why they were there is critical to their removal. Again, everything that you've said here, even the way that you've talked about the changes that you've made, tells me that we didn't spend enough time on this. The fact that you don't have the definitions here, and we're gonna have one day to go through the definitions and approve them, doesn't make any sense. Again, other cities have had charter changes, but they've had these, they were set in stone a month ago, two months ago. The fact that they're coming and they're still being changed today, and then next week, the last meeting before the break, the last meeting where we can make, we can vote on a ballot measure, doesn't make any sense to me. But I would like the other questions answered. Thank you. Madam Mayor.

Let me go to Councillor Jayne. Do you have questions or just comments? Okay, so go ahead.

Me go ahead or him go ahead?

No, you.

Yeah, very good. So a couple questions in there. Appreciate, you're right, I missed them. Did you contemplate actions needed after the fact? Absolutely, and that's in fact presented in the report, the final report that was given to you and in the presentation that I gave on the final report. There would be significant things that need to be done if this measure is passed to update both the city code and other policies that relate to sections of the charter that will now be renumbered and would need to be changed.

And my question was not that there would be work done. We understand that work done. Have you did an analysis of what the work necessary would be?

I've done the analysis to understand what would need to be done, but how many hours it would take have not done that analysis it would be a project that would be driven by the city manager's office and and in my office working with all the other departments and I think city manager and I both believe that And the CRC, without necessarily knowing any better, was supportive of the idea that the value of these changes is worth the exercise that would be needed in order to bring everything else up to conformance. So it would be a project. A lot of those policies are updated regularly anyway. And so this would be something that would need to be done. So, but I've not, I've not done a, how many hours is it going to take to update the other documents? I've not done that analysis.

Okay, because I would feel much more comfortable if you could provide an analysis, even a simple analysis, by the time that it's presented to us next time.

All right, the section 202, was it section 202.3? 203.2.

202.2 or... 203.2. Term limits? When was that adopted?

I don't know when it was originally adopted. There's history in the... the section that references when it was last changed, but I don't know when it was originally adopted.

I mean, I know the year, but I would like to know, if you can bring back for the next time, I would like to know the date.

Yeah, there's different, so when you ask when it was originally adopted, there was an original adoption of language, and then it was modified. So are you asking when was it most recently modified?

That's correct.

Okay, you actually, I will look at that and provide it to you. You actually have a document that provides that as part of the attachment to the report, which is the city clerk's history of all the changes that were made. So I will look at that and identify that for you at the next meeting.

Okay, but the other question is, there is a time that the change, was made, but then the question is, when did it go into effect?

Can you be more specific? What particular provision are you interested in knowing more about?

203.2. Oh, sorry, yeah, 203.2.

But because that's a larger section, is it an element of it? Is it the provision that talks about the grandfathered provisions? Is that what you want to know about?

I didn't think it was that long.

I'm just trying to get your particular interest and what your objective is so I can be helpful. If you have a particular question of charter interpretation, then I can provide you. my interpretation of the charter. If it's really, I'm just curious of when it was adopted and when it was effective, that's different. While you're looking at that.

Okay, so if I look at 203.2, I would in particular like to know about section A. 203.2, okay, all right.

Okay, I'll provide some information on that. You had a comment about the definitions section. The definitions.

My comment about definitions is that we don't have a, we won't have one until the day that we have to approve it.

So the definitions are, already in the charter itself. A lot of the defined terms are actually defined in the text itself. The definitions section at the end is intended to do is to aggregate all of those. They are substantially final now. I've got to do one last run through of them to make sure that I'm comfortable with what the definitions say because I had a staff person go through and do those for me, the latest iteration of it. I will absolutely make sure those definitions are complete and available to you before you take final action. They are not... They are very important and a value add, but it's not changing any meeting that's in the document. But I want you to have everything and be comfortable with it, so they will be final by the time it comes back to you.

Understood, and I think that your assertions cannot be proven until we see them.

Okay.

I have to say the definitions really control the interpretation of the entire charter, so I think they are important, the definitions.

I'm not saying they're not important.

I wouldn't take them lightly. They're very important.

Mayor, I created them. The charter did not have definitions before. I valued them so much, I recommended that they be created, and they will be final when they come back.

Yeah, and that was one of my 21 open items, so yes, they are important. Yep.

I'm not intending to disagree. So I think that was the questions that you asked. Available to answer any others as we approach the witching hour here.

The sections that were created to consolidate consequences of actions, you said that they weren't removed, they were moved. And I've been looking and I don't know why they've been moved.

The... The provision regarding councilmanic interference that created, I think is one you're referring to, that created an automatic consequence?

Well, that's one, but there are other things that have consequences as well. I can... Unexcuse absences, dabbling in city employment, violating provisions of council duties,

Those weren't moved. The enforcement mechanism for that is now contained in, as would any violation of the charter, be a potential violation that would subject the person violating the charter to enforcement. That's now in section 902. So, the, The consequences of violating the charter have now been made more clear with the system for evaluating and prosecuting that. The only thing that was moved that I think you're referring to was a specific remedy in the councilman interference provision that now is handled through the section 902.

That has the prosecuting authority being the district attorney or outside counsel.

That's right.

That's right.

And so there is now a more clear, complete version of how violations of the charter are prosecuted with a range of potential outcomes as opposed to automatic removal based upon the severity of the offense. which is how prosecution ought to work. And so that's what the best practice proposed update is.

Council, it's three minutes to 12. I don't think I can go till one o'clock, so can we set a specific time? We'll finish this item. 15 minutes, 20 minutes, Council Member Cox.

And Mayor, the actions that are being sought are on the slide there that I asked, so those are the particular things I'm interested in and need in order to bring back something for all of you to consider and act on next week.

Council Member Cox.

I'll make a motion to deal with the direction sought piece of this for 30 minutes.

30 minutes max. Is there a second? I'll second that. Thank you. We have a motion and a second. Council Member Jain, I know your light's on for other reasons. Is it on for this one as well? Okay, so I'll go to you after. We have a motion and a second for no more than 30 minutes on this item to specifically talk about direction taught, but no more than 30 minutes. If I can last that long.

So extend the meeting to deal with directions sought until 12.30 a.m. No longer then. No longer then.

Thank you. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously of those present. Thank you. Council Member Jane.

Yeah, I was reviewing the minutes from the June 15th meeting, and there was originally a motion made by Vice Mayor Gonzales, seconded by Hardy, to direct staff to develop and prepare materials and return on July 14th. And that had four yes votes and three no votes. And subsequently I made the motion to separate out the procurement portion as a separate ballot measure and that passed seven zero. So I would like to reiterate that I believe that we should separate out the procurement. I'm already hearing that there's the cleanup portion of it is complicated enough that procurement would further complicate it, make it more confusing, so I'm suggesting that we add a separate measure for procurement.

I don't understand the motion.

It's not a motion, we're just giving direction. Oh, I thought you said you had a motion, okay. No, I had a motion to extend, but now I'm just adding a correction.

All right, Councilmember Hardy.

Just as far as your direction thought if I understand correctly by separating out there is a cost of 250,000 for each Measure and it will have its own letter I understand that correctly and the cost of when talking with the Registrar of Voters is because of the translation, because it has to be done in so many different languages. My question would be, would it be easier to have that clean version with an explanation and then have a link so that people could see more information if they wanted My thinking is the translation online is often easier to do in many different languages, or is there a different cost for that? And with the charter being 35 pages, I wondered if that changed the cost, thank you.

I'll defer to the assistant city clerk on the costing for it.

I think the, I won't speak for you.

So originally, back in September of 2025, when I requested a cost estimate from the Registrar Voters Office, it was for one 30-page measure. That was $295,101, making the entire election cost with mayor's seat in districts two and three for an estimated amount of $587,582. I later requested an update because they did have fee schedule adoption. And city attorney said there would not be a 31 page and asked me to request for two additional ballot measures, so for a total of three ballot measures. This came out to one, so three six page measures, $139,058 each. again, including our seats that are up, for a total of $757,022. For three, three six-page measures.

What does six-page measure mean?

That's the standard number of pages that would, that a measure.

For everything for the city?

Each measure. Oh, each measure gets six pages. Mm-hmm, that's the standard that they provided.

What did we imagine? Well, we didn't. We imagined a link.

Yeah, the six-page, I think, would be with the link, Madam Mayor. With a link. Yeah, the 30-page and maybe a little bit more because of the length of the charter, if it's the clean version, would be the higher price because of the costs of presenting that.

Okay.

Yeah, so we talked about a number of things, which is having a clean version, as the mayor suggested, doesn't give people an idea of what changed. I think that I would like to see another method. I think that the strikethrough version is a terrible way to look at this. I feel that if we can do a side-by-side version, I mean, if you look at code, code editors, code editors often give you lots of ways to do, to show differences between documents, between, you know, changes in code, and some of those can be rather extensive. I'd like to look into other ways to show not just what the final document is, but what has changed. I would like clarity on the date for 203.2a, and I'd like an analysis of the work required by this comprehensive and charter breaking change.

With regard to the structure of the ballot question and how many pages, I do think that we can reach out to election consultants and the county registrar and find out what's normal and commonplace. Typically when cities do ballot measures, we like to align to how voters are used to seeing the type of information we're providing, whether it's a sales tax or TLT. And so I think that will be information that can inform the decision Making on that and so we will staff will endeavor to get that information because I do think that there is a best practice if not a common practice for how these are presented to voters and We may want to align with that and so let us give you that information and I hope we can get it within a week I

I was actually confused by Council Member Park's suggestion to provide us, if you do a ballot booklet, you have to match the format of the registrar of voters. So to do a side-by-side in the ballot booklet just doesn't seem practical to me. So I'm confused about what format you want the side-by-side. You could print the original and you could print the new clean, as separate documents in there, that would be 60 pages, or I don't see how you could do side-by-side in a printed booklet.

I was gonna say, I mean, if you've worked on code, you see side-by-side all the time. But I'm saying that you can print it out and you'll still see it side-by-side all the time. I used to do that often in code reviews. But I'll also state that at some point, I'm concerned that what the city manager's talking about are for small changes. This is a multi-dop, a 31-page document change. And at some point, you know, the best practice for a 31-document change, I don't know that that would be, you know, I'm worried that we would adopt a method for showing changes for smaller documents for a document that has 31 pages, and that's not, what I think would be there at some point I would like you to look into what other ways you can show not just what the final document would be but also what the changes are and right now if you look at the strikeout I appreciate the work that went into the strikeout document but it is very difficult to determine where you know what what some of the it's very difficult to read first of all and the second thing is for the things that have not been removed but have been moved it's very difficult to find out what's where it's been moved the annotations are nice and the annotations are no different from what i would see in a side-by-side code change for example mayor can i expand upon what so so um

What I was articulating is, again, we are not the first city to contemplate or even put a comprehensive charter amendment on the ballot. And so we would endeavor to talk to ballot consultants and registrar voters to understand how other cities have done it. Council Member Park, I understand what you're articulating with a side-by-side, and I think you articulated that that's typically, you've seen that in coding, in engineering. I would hazard to guess we might not, all voters are not coders or engineers, and we might not want to utilize that method. And so what I'm articulating is that we will bring you back information on how this is typically done, understanding that It is routinely done where cities put charter amendments that have multiple pages. I would hazard to guess sometimes more than 31 pages, sometimes less than 31 pages. But I understand the question. Staff will bring you back information to inform your decision.

So for clarity, I'm not suggesting that you use a code side by side. I'm offering that as this is a method. I would like you to look at lots of ways to do it, not just the ways that that have existed in the past. There are many ways to look at this. I'm offering that as a suggestion, not as a direction. But, you know, my concern is I'd like you to look at the best way to do this, not just the traditional ways to do it. And maybe we can come up with a better way.

Madam Mayor, if I might just add some, hopefully, clarity. The decision about what goes on the ballot needs to be made next week. the decision about how things are presented in the website for public consumption can be made next week, right? And we can start working on it, or it can be made after that. And I'm suggesting, as a matter of clarity, that that's where a lot of the best public information is going to be provided, not in the ballot itself. I think no matter what you put in front of the voters, if it's the entire charter, that'll be inherently flawed. incomplete not saying you can't decide to do that and it might be good to have some input as the city manager is suggesting from a from a consultant about that I'm not sure how many updates like this there there have been he's absolutely right there's certainly multiple pages of things that are presented that are presented for voters you know all the time so getting that input you know would be good but I wanted to distinguish between what goes on the ballot and And then what information, any number of different possible formats would be made available in the city's website as a matter of information and education to the public.

All right, Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. As far as the directions thought, I'd be comfortable with the deletion requirement of the publication and the changes in slides nine and 10, and definitely having the proposed Public Works option A and then choosing option A to be a different measure, right, in level three that we've talked about, I think, extensively. I'll make a motion to come back next week with those items as stipulated here, and we'll see what happens next week.

All right, there's a motion for that staff recommendation. Is there a second?

I want to understand the motion. You're saying staff recommendation of what's been placed before us.

Correct.

Because right here it says direct. But the comprehensive charter update with the deletions and then see there's other questions. So are you saying the first bullet? With the deletion.

And the addition, I understood to be recommendation, yeah, as presented on the slide.

Okay, I can second that.

All right, we have a motion and a second. Council Member Park, then Cox.

I'm going to withdraw my request.

Thank you. Council Member Cox.

I have a few more questions that I think I would propose about the revenue bond proposal, just because that was something that was voter-led in the past. So I'd like to understand that more before just saying that I would give support to it. I don't think I understand that quite well enough. Agree with the deletion of the publication understanding that we are saying that newspaper Publication is outdated and we can find better sources for getting that information out. It is not removing information It is trying to find a different source. I also agree with the Public Works procurement being its own measure so in that I am perhaps making a friendly amendment to the motion to have a little bit more time to consider next week the revenue bond proposal that was added today. I'm okay with the engineer piece of that.

Sorry about that. I think I'm fine with that. I think we can look at that next week whether we wanna, maybe if we can address that even further as far as the revenue bond. I think that that's something that exists in the facilities portion of it. Typically, I've seen it with COPS and things like that, but there's other ways that it can be done. So I think if we limit ourselves, then we're gonna limit ourselves as far as what we can do as we saw today earlier in regards to how we're looking at some of the methods of getting infrastructure completed.

Second concurs.

I'm gonna say that I'm not gonna support that. I am still working on this and trying to understand the 21, I think I'm down to 19 now, 19 unanswered questions or to be determined in the future. I'm just not comfortable with that. and I'm certainly not comfortable with the public works part of it because it's still all unknown. I wouldn't even know what to go out to the community and say support this because I agree with half of it, but the rest is I can't even describe. So I'm just gonna vote no on this. I'll see what comes up next week. I'm not comfortable with this at all. because I'm not sure this would pass. Council Member Park.

So I just want to be sure, how do we know that the other items that have been requested will be presented? Meaning we've talked about how we do, how we present changes. We talked about other specific questions on Section 203.2a. We've talked about You know, those aren't in the motion, but how do I know that they would be presented in the staff report or the city attorney the next meeting?

That can either be included in the motion or you can accept that I'm telling you I'll bring it back.

I mean, this staff, this executive staff has told me that if it's not in the motion, then it's not a direction. So at some point, I think I would feel more comfortable if it were in the motion.

To the mayor can I try and respond to that? Understand the point that is being made I would say professional staff is here and we've articulated a number of things that we intend to bring back to you and You know, we're saying that on the record and I think you can trust that we would do that on record I will also say I understand the point you're making because individual council members can make statements of what they would like and how they see things. That is not direction to staff, as you know, and I think you're articulating, and so it would truly need to be in the motion, and you would need the support of your colleagues. I think the city attorney and I have articulated the things that we intend to bring back to you to inform the city council's decision-making, but you're absolutely right. At any given time, any individual council member can make a statement, but we...

take direction from the body as a collective uh based on the majority all right council member cox i just want to clarify to the mayor's point i believe the motion that i made was only about the deletion requirement for the public chance last bidding supporting um slides nine and ten which was the revenue bond and the engineer which we delayed and then moving the second bullet to an independent measure it is not at all wholesale agreeing to what's proposed and I guess the rest would be under other direction yeah if I could just say I

No, I want to say something because the last time we talked, was this last week we did this?

I can't remember. It was June 15th, Mayor.

Yeah, June 15th. When we did this, this council majority voted to proceed with the entire comprehensive charter update. I voted against that because I'm not comfortable with it. This is just additional information. It's supplemental, but the actual charter update is proceeding ahead.

We're going to bring it back no matter what. I'm just hoping to get this clarification here, Mayor, so that we can bring back a thing that people are comfortable with. And just to be further clear, none of what you're doing right now is a final decision the final decision is for you to make on july fourteen this is really me trying to get you know direction and understanding from all of you as to what to bring back and so I've heard the different things that people are looking for I'm telling you I will do those things including some additional information or if you have questions in the meantime member Cox about the revenue bond you know measure that can be addressed we will bring back this for action, it's just helpful for me to have at least a majority or more of you saying, yes, please bring this back to us for our ultimate decision on the 14th.

Council Member Park, followed by Gonzales, and we have 11 minutes.

Yeah, I was going to say that I'm okay with you answering the questions offline and as long as we get them, but I'd like them to be part of the meeting materials. But again, I think that has to be in the motion.

It only does if you're not comfortable with me telling you I'm gonna do it. So that's your prerogative.

Well, it's not about comfort. I think that city manager has just said that is the way that you should do it if you want it to be.

That is your prerogative.

Okay, then I would like to make an amendment that we add, In addition of how we present changes in a document that's 31 pages long, it could be a side by side, not just a clean view or strikeout view. I'd like clarity on the date for 203.2a and analysis of work required to buy a complete charter change update. because sections will change, references will change, everything will change, and I'd like to know if you can give me a breakdown of, or give the public a breakdown of what those changes would be, what the work would be, and how much time it would take.

So is that, are you asking for an amendment?

I'm asking to amend it with those items.

Council, Vice Mayor Gonzalo, who?

Yeah, I'm not.

Did you have the original motion? Yeah.

I'm not comfortable with that. I think that staff has a lot on their plate in the next six and a half days or whatever they have left.

That was a no? Yeah. Okay. All right. Vice President Gonzalez, your light's on.

So I just wanted to reiterate the CRC, the 13 members did their work. Obviously, staff, the departments looked at this. Next week, we'll be able to decide what what if anything moves forward. Hopefully we get something to move forward. And one thing I would reiterate is if there's something that I can't tell the council what to do, but if there's something that you're going to be out there writing an argument against any part of this, that you state that next week for sure so that we can make sure that we don't have anything that's going to divide our support for this measure.

I just want to say that I have to be comfortable with it, and I'll see what additions or... what additional information comes out. Mayor, I'll make myself available. For me, it has to be clear for the community. And if I don't think it's clear, I reserve the right to oppose, and I will. So I'm just saying that I want to be comfortable because I want to support something that I can stand behind. But if I think it's going to harm the city or cause issues that I don't think is good for the city, I'm going to verbalize that and communicate it.

I appreciate that from you, Mayor, and from any of you. Anybody can do that.

Yeah, of course.

I'm available to any of you if you have questions in the interim to answer those questions as best as I can.

And that's possible that I may as well.

And what I will also do in the meantime, and I know we're out of time, but... I've got some draft of the ballot question. That needs to be answered as well.

Do we want to vote first before you go into that?

No, I'm just going to, I just want to, absolutely, I'm just letting you know.

Because you're introducing something with seven minutes left.

I will get out to you sooner rather than later. I want you to know I've already done a preliminary draft. I'll get that out to you sooner rather than later so that you all can start looking at that and thinking about that because we need that action on the 14th.

the reality is that the agendas come out on friday which is in three days that's why i'm yeah that's why i'm going to try to send it out to you even tomorrow madam mayor all right city clerk city assistant city clerk i don't even know where this motion is but so i'm sure you have it from what i captured is staff recommendation as presented on the slide and address the revenue bond at the next meeting is that correct maker of the motion

I'm sorry, could you say that last part again?

And address the revenue bond at the next meeting?

Yeah, and maybe additional information to be provided regarding the revenue bond as to whether or not to include it at the next meeting.

i think my motion my amendment if you heard me correctly actually said that we would not support right now including slides nine and ten without further information i'm sorry i didn't make that clear i'm sorry the engineering part i i understand i do not understand the revenue bond part so just the exclusive the revenue bond item i understand Yeah and then the other direction I think it is our responsibility to continue to do our work and follow up. So my motion had my amendment had nothing to do with other direction. just those bullet points.

Just to be clear, I appreciate that, just to be clear, the revenue bond item will be presented again to you, because it needs to be, but I understand your reservation, and I have no issue with it, yeah.

So would you like to repeat the motion again? Through the mayor, I think I.

There was a motion and then a friendly amendment that was accepted, so I, you know what, I don't know what it is.

Mayor, I think I'm gonna try and summarize. You've got five minutes, so go ahead. I'm going to try and take less than one. I believe the direction from the motion and the seconder for what to bring back next week is a ballot measure with the argument and all the supporting information that has a comprehensive charter amendment with the level one and two items that were previously identified, including the deletion of the publication requirement for the newspaper also including the... Just for real estate disposition. Just for real estate disposition, including the latest proposed changes on slide nine and 10, with the exception of the revenue bond changes. They will be talked about on the 14th, but not included, and you will make that decision on whether they're included. and having the public works procurement item as a stand-alone, a potential stand-alone measure not included with the comprehensive change. I believe that that is the intent of what was stated.

Do you have that, Assistant City Clerk? I'm gonna listen to that later. I will listen to that and capture it.

Okay, I'm glad you were, thank you. Please register your vote. And that passes four to two. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, City Attorney. You've been up there several hours. You must be tired. We don't have time for any reports. So with that, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you, everyone. Get home safely.