foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] awesome [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] testing one two three four [Music] one two three four testing one two three four one two three four foreign [Music] [Music] one two three four [Music] one two three four one two three four one two and yeah one two one two [Music] one two one two one two one two one two one two [Music] one two three four one two one two three four one two three four two two one two one two [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] 212 yeah one two one two [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we're going to go ahead and call this council meeting to order if I can please uh just have the clerk do the Roll Call councilwoman Allen present councilwoman price president councilman supernaw here councilwoman Mungo councilwoman sorrow present council member uranga councilman Austin vice mayor Richardson mayor Garcia thank you with that I am going to just a quick uh announcement we are going to not hear item 32 this week it has been pulled from the agenda I believe that I'll be moved to the next meeting um oh and with that I'm going to turn over to council member super na who is going to lead us in a moment of silence and our Pledge of Allegiance thank you please uh rise if you're able and join us in a moment of silence followed by the Pledge of Allegiance thank you please place your hand over your heart face the flag and join me I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America thank you um if I can have a motion any second for the consent calendar please okay I have a motion in a second I don't believe there's any public comment on concerns there is one okay please come to the podium uh my apologies mayor I didn't think we would get so early into the dance today but um I only have a question with respect to development services um uh with respect to the um the Anaheim Corridor zoning implementation plan development um um what respect to this contract that's going to a common then what are we doing with uh the height requirements that are uh coming in with this plan that was the only question I had with that and then uh with the other item I was also going to ask with regards to the black infant Health public awareness campaign I think this is a great opportunity with KJLH I was just curious also a question to have towards Health and Human Services I don't know if there's a representative here from there but um is any of the funding for this um is it coming it says that the discretion of city manager is it coming from any of the that one million dollars uh from the covid money I was just curious as if there could be a comment made or a response made that was it thank you thank you um I have a motion and a second uh Vice May Richardson and councilman Allen I do have councilman Sarah always gonna did queue up to say a few remarks I think on the Anaheim topic maybe perhaps yes that's correct thank you mayor I just want to thank development at that point I really appreciate the approach to Bringing on a technical consultant as well as a community outreach and engagement consultant so that we're taking a community centered approach that's really focused on capacity building and cultural competency in the way that we're intentionally bringing residents to the table particularly those living in the Anaheim quarter and that it's going to be a process to bring everyone at the table to figure out what this plan is going to look like so thank you so much thank you vice mayor Richardson thank you I just wanted to mention the question about the black infant health program it's actually a really exciting grant that our Long Beach like if the health program received from the state we're the only one in the entire state to receive it to do a Statewide marketing campaign around black infant Health led by Long Beach so it's pretty exciting incredible and at some point I encourage you talk with other folks of the black infant health program to tell you a little bit more about the program thank you uh with that we do have the we do have a motion and the second and I think the last part of that just I'll just adds and it was brought up I do believe that the funds for it are uh part of the Federal Government funding that came down the the one million dollars also the state I thought it was both it's only state okay okay thank you uh with that we have a motion in a second please cast your votes on the consent calendar Vice Richardson motion carries eight zero okay thank you uh we do have um three hearings tonight which we're going to hear in a minute but we also have our study session so we're gonna uh just from a timing perspective we're going to do the study session first uh then after the study session we'll go through our three hearings and then we will go into um our series of fun our funds transfers which we have we have a bunch of and then uh the other items on the agenda in fact and I'm not sure if there are are there are there are folks here for any of the funds transfer item items or not but we have so many of those why don't we just do those ones right now and just get those out of the way in case your staff in the back we have let's do item 22 23 25 31 33 and 34 are all funds transfers we can just read those all into the record and we'll take one vote it starts with item 21 did you say I believe there are items 22 23 25 31 33 and 34 I think are all the funds transfer items item 22 communication from councilwoman price recommendation to increase Appropriations in the city manager Department by two thousand four hundred ninety dollars to provide a donation to the Friends of Belmont Shore for summer concert item 23 communication from councilwoman price recommendation to increase Appropriations in the city manager Department by 460 dollars to provide a donation to children today for the annual third of July celebration Big Bang on the bay item 25 communication from councilwoman price recommendation to increase Appropriations in the city manager Department by 2 300 to provide a donation to The Community Action team for their annual community events item 30 1 communication from councilwoman price recommendation to increase Appropriations in the city manager Department by 6 000 for a community concert on August 1st 2021 item 33 recommendation communication from councilman Austin council member uranga recommendation to increase Appropriations in the city manager Department by 2000 to provide a donation to the Los Cerritos neighborhood association to support the summer concerts at Los Cerritos Park and item 34 recommend a communication from councilman Austin recommendation to increase Appropriations in the city manager Department by one thousand dollars to provide a contribution to the partners of parks to support the Juneteenth 2021 celebration item 35 communication from councilwoman sorrow recommendation to approve the expenditure of five thousand dollars and the general fund group as a reward for information leading identification uh I'm sorry is that that's not a fund transfer that's correct 35 needs to be heard separately thank you great that was it okay thank you we have a motion in a second is your public comment on any of these funds transfers no public comment on those items councilman price anything councilman sorrow anything okay then let's go uh we have a motion in a second please cast your votes councilwoman Mungo okay it's just from for the public uh the councilwoman's system is not working so she's sitting over in the eighth District I'm renting a seat in the eighth District tonight motion carries 8-0 thank you we're going to go back to our our study session then and uh which we have scheduled today which is a big staff presentation I want to I'm going to open it up and uh let me know Mr Modica when you guys are are set up and ready we're ready okay great uh we have um actually let me go ahead and first do you want to read the study session into the record please recommendation to conduct a study session to receive and file a presentation on efforts related to the clean Long Beach initiative thank you and I I'm thankful I've been uh talking to staff about bringing this study session forward uh and it's something that I know is not just important to me but it's important to everybody on this diocese and we've been talking about this for as long as we've all been I think together as part of this body uh the the cleanliness of of the city and ensuring that neighborhoods regardless of where they're located across across the city are clean and well maintained is incredibly important I also want to make sure that I think we're all aware that during the pandemic uh the um the impact that the pandemic had on cleanliness was was serious and we have gone through a health recovery we're going through an economic recovery and making sure that we also recover so that neighborhoods have the street sweeping on time the trash is being picked appropriately that dumped items are being are being picked up in they need to be the corridors are being cleaned up is also really important when you think about a year and a half now where you had much of your staff or many staff members whether they were sick or they weren't able to go to certain certain functions of their job it did impact cleanliness when you had more homes producing more waste that also impacts uh cleanliness when you have different patterns of travel that also impacts cleanliness when folks from your from from certain departments are unable to do certain work because they're out working at uh getting folks healthy or vaccinated or tested that also impacts the work that we can do as a city around cleanliness so we have had a difficult year and a half but I'm really proud that the the staff is doing a great job of of bringing this back and I look forward to hearing the presentation we want to make sure that Long Beach is uh is a clean Community for everyone that is here and I know there's going to be a lot of questions I have some as well that I'll uh I'll ask of of you guys as soon as the presentation is over I want to thank you guys for the work that you that you did with this and the memo that you sent to council earlier today and I view this as a very important Initiative for the team and for the staff as we move forward across this next year so Mr Modica thank you very much Mr Mayor I think that was a very good overview uh we are going to have a presentation that kind of has three parts today we're going to talk about a lot of the investment that this mayor and Council have made over the past four or five years it's been impressive uh considering where we started we didn't really have uh this kind of clean Long Beach program we created it and uh just about every year we added to it uh every year though we kept getting more and more requests so the better we did the more requests we got for our service and you'll see that today too you asked us to do probably 25 different initiatives as part of that over the years we're going to report on those today almost all of those are complete or we're going to be getting to a lot of those or a couple more of those as we do the Recovery Act we're also going to go through some of the data of what it's looked like over the last year that was one of the strangest years we've had from a uh from a refuse perspective and and the mayor mentioned it well just patterns changed and demand changed and the team really had to adapt to keep up with it and then we're going to talk about what's next we you have for at least two years we have some dedicated resources to really invest and do things we've never been able to do before so I will turn it over to Eric Lopez to dico maconian and to uh Chris Coons uh who I'm sorry Chris Hubert who will go through uh the presentation thank you Tom um I wanted to reiterate that maintaining a clean city is one of our Department's highest priorities we have uh heard loud and clear that this is a priority for the mayor and the city council and it's a priority for us as well so we've uh throughout the years we have built a strong clean team that continues to improve and evolve and the present the presentation today I think is going to demonstrate some of that Evolution and some of the improvements that that we continue uh to make so with that wanted to turn it over to Deco mcconnin our deputy director Tico good evening everybody thank you for uh having us here tonight to give this presentation we're eager to share with you some of the challenges we face and some of the uh some of these successes we have had and anticipate so with that I'll start it off the clean team was developed in fiscal year 16 2016 we were directed to develop and Implement a clean team operation with an emphasis on improving the quality of life and Aesthetics in our neighborhoods that included collecting legally dumped items dealing with cleanups of people experiencing homelessness encampments and bulky item collections litter abatement some public education as well in uh fiscal year 17 the mayor announced the clean Long Beach initiative and I'll be reviewing uh some of the items that were part of that initiative in a few moments um in fiscal year 19 the clean team took over uh cleanups for people experiencing homelessness in the park sites and in fiscal year 20 the operation absorbed graffiti abatement as well um initially there was a request for an illegal dumping action plan which I believe council member uranga had brought to the table at the same time that the mayor was also asking for the similar questions um what we did was we we evaluated what we were doing and looked at the the requests from the plan and we enhanced our staffing as a result of that we started promoting our no dumping signs that are available to residents for posting we worked with the L.A county and the L.A County sanitation districts to increase opportunities for household hazardous waste drop-offs going from once a month to twice a month at the facility on California we increased our we promoted our bulky item collection program a little more heavily and we increased opportunities at that time from two free annual pickups to Four free annual pickets and subsequently we have increased that to 12 annual pickups we developed a mapping system where we can track our hot spots if we're dumped items were being found so that we can proactively address those areas we evaluated enforcement options some of you may recall we did a project with The Graduate students from the Kennedy School of Management at Harvard University who did a lot of data gathering for us and provided us with some information that we helped use to target enforcement and Target um services in certain areas and um I would be remiss if I didn't mention our mattress and box spring collections which that data in and of itself has become an item when I remember when we were at uh about 15 000 mattresses a year I remember the first time staff came to me and said we did some analysis and we found it's 300 mattresses a week and I basically looked her and said go back and redo your work because that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever and she came back and showed me it was fifteen thousand six hundred mattresses a year so now we're over 25 000 mattresses and box springs a year it's a remarkable number we do track this separately because we do get some reimbursement from the mattress recycling Council which when I learned that there was a mattress recycling Council I learned that every industry has its uh has its Representatives out there championing your efforts and I want to just kind of highlight that I just think it's such an important number that the we haven't talked about with the public in a long time but the fact that we are that we illegally dump or pick up uh 25 000 mattresses a year in the city of Long Beach is is startling and uh that goes to show the amount of work and that is just one type of dumped item 25 000 mattresses a year and so um thank you for for that sure and to be clear it's it's both dunked item and and scheduled collections a combination but 25 000 is a huge huge number agreed um so the in the mayor's clean Long Beach initiative there were about 18 different action items that we will summarize over the next few slides and and provide some updates um a review the city's current cleaning efforts was obviously the Baseline that was was established and based on that we made some staffing increases um by reviewing our resources and our current efforts at that time um we looked at where our public litter containers were I apologize I forgot to advance the slide thank you Eric we looked at where our public container litter container locations were and have added about 200 locations since then and that's ongoing it's evaluated regularly and we do add where we find appropriate when we do get requests from some of your offices to make additions as well and thank you for being our eyes and ears on those um and we reviewed the graffiti contract and resources and I'm really proud to say that 99 of graffiti is abated within 48 hours and another statistic that I've I'm really proud of is that almost 98 is removed in 24 hours and we're really proud of that work that's done thank you um we have Community Partners we partner with Long Beach Transit Long Beach Transit works with US Weekly to do deep cleanings which I'll talk about a little later we work with the bids Citywide who has been very supportive and helpful we were asked to consider a revolving volunteer Corps based under the circumstances of the pandemic that's been delayed a little bit but we did use community service workers as support for a while we have not continued to do that again due to the pandemic and we'll talk about that a little later as well we created a litter-free Long Beach campaign that included schools and we'll talk about how that's coming back we're going to be renewing that program and we um we explore information marketing campaign and more neighborhood cleanups so what we did with these marketing campaigns is we identified what are the big items in our litter stream we found that that cigarette butts were somewhere close to 16 of what was in our litter stream so we did a targeted campaign on on reducing cigarette butts out there this Council approved an expanded polystyrene band which is also a large item of litter out there and we've been implementing that um neighborhood cleanups are put on hold during the pandemic but they're back and roaring and we will talk a little bit about that too um improving free on and off ramp cleanliness we are in discussion with Caltrans to establish an mou that will allow for a city of longreach to go in and do some cleanups on 22 targeted on and off ramps throughout the city we hope that this will allow for us to have a quicker response to requests um we asked to look at a lock dumpster policy we ran a pilot program on that in the East Village area we are planning another pilot program the results of that program were somewhat mixed some people really liked them some people did not like them some people found that it did reduce litter at their area some people found that people were unwilling to unlock and and created more bags filed so it's a it's a a great idea but it has its pluses and minuses and then we were asked to explore an empty private lot ordinance which uh development services and code enforcement did that and the city council passed an ordinance a few years back regarding FD Lots we are asked to modernize the go Long Beach app and we have done so if we use a Salesforce platform now which is uh known worldwide and this system integrates with our existing systems and from the back end of it has really streamlined our ability to create field assignments and um and issue them out to the field in a much more expeditious manner than the previous system allowed us to do um and provide a customer relationship management implementation system and the the Salesforce application allows us to do that and there are many tools currently available to utilize in that manner review shopping cart theft technology we reviewed what we were doing we had a contract with the shopping cart retrieval company and frankly what we determined was it was not being effective so we eliminated the contract and clean team crews are now responding to that and I will tell you we get a fraction of the request for for uh Shaw abandoned shopping carts than than we used to do um proactive code enforcement uh code enforcement partners with the clean team on our deep cleaning days they their Staffing was impacted and during the pandemic a lot of that staff was reallocated to do the um enforcement for the health orders and at the parklets and whatnot so while they are continuing now to get their Staffing back up we will hopefully see some more proactive code enforcement coming in the future and police department issued over 120 litter citations in fiscal year 20 we continue to work with them to see how we can enhance those options so now I'd like to talk about our current clean team activities as you can see on this slide we started in fiscal year 16 with about 10 10 and a half employees that includes management oversight since then fiscal year 20 we've increased the full-time equivalence to 31 and a half and based on our American Recovery plan uh funding that we're going to get over the next two years we are at we've been approved to add 20 uh full-time equivalent non-career positions to support that we are already in the process of hiring those non-careers and we have brought about 11 of them on board so far already um this is not to reflect that what the actual current Staffing is we do not have 51 people out there working I didn't want to make sure that's clear the goal is to get 51 people out there working um the responsibilities of the clean team remain largely the same as when they were originally planned illegally dumped item collection mattress collection bulky item collection homeless encampment cleanups E-Waste white goods which are appliances and tire Collections and the reason some of these items are listed separately is to make clear that we have to use different equipment to collect these materials we can't throw a TV in the back of a trash truck we have to send a different vehicle to do that mattresses have to be kept separate altogether so that we can get reimbursement from the mattress recycling Council so sometimes when you have a pile of stuff and only a portion of it portion of it disappears and then some of it remains it's because we have to bring a separate truck in to collect those items um deep cleanings which we'll talk about in a moment and graffiti abatement and litter abatement we wanted to provide a little bit of some statistics and some graphs because my mom always told me she likes pretty pictures and colorful stuff so that's what we did and what we have here is we see the orange bars are our special bulky item collections which are scheduled and requested by residents blue is illegally dumped items so we can see that while there's an increase of both we see a greater increase in in special Collections and I I believe that has a lot to do with us changing our methodologies a few years ago part of what we determined when we are working with the The Graduate students from from Harvard was that we got so caught up in responding to illegally dumped items we were collecting them sooner than we were collecting items for people who were doing it properly and scheduling it and we also learned that when we would tell people we'll come pick up your couch in three four weeks they'd say never mind and just take a picture of it and send it in as a dumped item in the go along Beach app so we had some challenges as we changed our methodology but I'm I'm proud to say that now we we get your special collections collected by the next week um sometimes at a worse we may have to schedule a Saturday crew to do anything that we missed but they're done by that next week that does increase a slight delay on our dumped items but our dumped items are still being responded to within five working days next map shows some of our efforts in areas where we do cleanups for people experiencing homelessness and also cleanups where we have our hot spots which aren't necessarily the same hot spots could be litter hot spots or have done item hot spots as well you can see there's been an increase in both um to be honest with you with some of this I don't believe this is the best metric in explaining how we deal with people experiencing homelessness and the and the litter and debris that remains as a result of that because a cleanup could be two items a cleanup could be massive and so we're going to try and find a way to provide a better metric for you guys so you can get a better picture of what's going on out of the field we talked about mattress collection you can see the increase over the last few years here next slide please and now we'll talk about moving to the pandemic and the covid-19 challenges we experienced over the last 16 months um first of all Staffing was obviously impacted by quarantine and isolation protocols when people experienced exposures you'll see towards the bottom of the slide our sick leave usage in calendar year 2020 compared to 19 was a 90 percent increase and you'll see the increase in calls for service that we're going to talk about in a moment while we have the experiencing this 90 increase in sick leave usage we also uh utilize clean team members when our refuse operation is is short-handed our primary core service is to make sure that the the trash you pay for to get collected on a weekly basis is done so so we do sometimes tap into our resources over at the clean team to support our refuse collection and and during the pandemic that happened quite often we are also utilize community service workers before the pandemic and to get this in perspective and our fiscal year 19 when we had a full year of community service workers we used we had 20 600 hours of community service workers that equates to about 400 labor hours a week that we lost in March of 2020 because of the pandemic and that all went to uh support the clean team we are working with the city's safety officer now to develop protocols so we can reinstate that program also we have daily sanitation Pro sanitization protocols that each employee had to do that impacts the time if it takes 15 minutes to get your additional safety gear wipe down your truck the interior the exterior 15 minutes over 50 trucks a day that's that's a lot of hours again that takes labor hours to get that work done and we had about a 30 increase in calls for service between 15 fiscal year 19 to fiscal year 20 which again we're being addressed with a 90 increase in sick leave usage I'd also like to add to that slide that during that time between March and may we suspended street sweeping operations which um street sweeping collects about 900 to a thousand tons of debris a month so you can imagine for two months we didn't sweep sweep any streets at all and then when we did return street sweeping we have been short staffed good news is that we have a civil service list now we conducted interviews today to hire some people on board so that's great news but when we did return to sweeping we were also had a parking citation forgiveness and so that we were issuing a lot more parking citations than we typically did and dismissing a lot more citations I believe we just missed somewhere in the vicinity of 25 000 citations so imagine for each one of those citations that was dismissed there was a vehicle impeding our ability to provide a quality sweep um additional challenges 49 increase in in calls for service in our hotline uh we had we'll show you that statistic uh that graph in a minute it was somewhere around 150 000 calls for service uh this past year 32 increase in go Long Beach request 22 percent increase in illegally dumped item reports 21 increase in special bulky item collection requests nine percent increase in residential refuse collected and I'd like to really talk about that for a second um when we discussed this briefly back in September last year we were experiencing a 13 increase of what leveled out over the year to be about a nine percent increase that's still about between 18 and 19 000 additional tons of trash that's collected at residential homes that's the addition of the equivalent of five and a half routes added per day which we didn't add we had to absorb with our existing team which again was being impacted by the um higher use of sick leave and furloughs for a portion of that time so it's really a commendable that that refuse operation was able to do what they did do during that time with the additional challenges they experienced a slight increase in graffiti square footage and a slight increase in our number of uh encampments that we had to work on this is a monthly chart and it starts in January 2020 pre-pandemic and you can see our base of March is lower than where our our start was before the pandemic the good news is you can well you can see where we spiked in July and the blue item is a blue line is illegally dumped items and the orange line is our special Collections and so while the special collections are fairly consistently even we did see a huge spike in illegally dumped items before May to July some of that balanced out and now as you can see uh we're lower than where we started in January in both illegally dumped items and go Long Beach requests and our requests for scheduled special collections continues to go up which is a really good sign for us also this is our hotline request you can see where we had the spike in the summertime but an additional spike in September October that spike in October reflects a time when we were really impacted with quarantines in isolation at one point in October our clean team was one person and everybody else was in quarantine or operation and even as recently as two weeks ago we had six people in quarantine or isolation in our in our clean team so um that increasing calls there is a reflection of complaints that were driven because of our inability to provide service next slide please thank you um so deep cleaning events we could we uh provide deep cleaning events weekly they were they were impacted by the pandemic like I said when we had people out in quarantine where our deep cleaning was impacted too code enforcement had reallocated their resources to the um to the uh work on the pandemic response so they weren't as available to support um other outside agencies like Long Beach Transit had their own impacts and there were times where they were unable to support so it was challenging I'm glad to say things are back to normal so we're glad to see the Deep cleanings continuing they include debris removal bulky item collection litter abatement graffiti abatement Long Beach Transit comes and does bus shelter maintenance when possible we have weed abatement included and code enforcement comes along and notes any code violations to Property Owners we've also partnered with some outside agencies I mentioned Long Beach Transit but also the Conservation Corps in the Los Cerritos Wetland storage where we'll identify locations that they can provide support us they can provide support for us to address this is a this is what we call a heat map this was revised in December 2020 this reflects the calendar year 2020 the yellow areas are the highest hit areas you can see that um the highest addressed areas correspond a lot with multi-family living areas as well and concentrated a large part in the downtown area although you do see areas west and north and a touch of other parts of the Cities so next steps the American Rescue plan act four million dollars we had initially requested five million dollars um due to other issues we didn't the city did not receive all of the funding we had anticipated it's at four but we do anticipate making up that uh additional million dollars with other opportunities that are out there we're providing some additional Staffing for two years including clerical support and 20 as I mentioned earlier non-career refuse operators and maintenance assistants um full-time equivalent so we'll probably have more than 20 bodies which is good um we're getting some equipment that's going to allow us access to areas that we didn't have before so we have six yard rear loader trucks that allow us access in smaller narrower alleys that we weren't able to service and other equipment that we can use to provide different services that will either be provided as part of our deep cleaning efforts or as needed around the By Request we are also getting pressure washers um I do want to caution that doesn't mean we'll be able to walk up and down all the different streets and just pressure wash the whole way this is really for spot use it'll be oftentimes associated with areas where we have uh people experiencing homelessness and we need an extra layer of cleaning and abatement in those areas uh commercial residential Corridor improvements we're going to be adding illegally dumped item cruise we have new equipment as I mentioned that'll make it areas marks accessible and we're going to expand the use of Our Community Partners we're adding additional support for neighborhood cleanups for litter abatement we've already began begun that we at one point we were only well at one point we weren't providing any support and then we would uh go and have neighborhood associations have drop-off locations for bags and our teams would go and grab the bags to minimize contact and now we're out actively out there providing assistance during cleanups again um deep cleaning we're going to talk a little bit more about that I know there's interest in that we're increasing the frequency of deep cleaning events and we're expanding locations for deep cleaning events and we're going to be promoting public awareness not just to the general public but also working with our schools um encampments for cleanup for encampments of people experiencing homelessness we will be adding staff to assist with that we're again adding equipment and pressure washers as I mentioned uh we are there are many occasions where we cannot handle the debris and the material that make up these cleanups in those cases we contact ocean blue for HazMat collection and we also have uh some trained assistants from Conservation Corps and the Los Cerritos Wetland stores we've also tried a community dumpster program which which is helpful where we place at Select Community areas dumpsters to contain waste rather than let people spread it publicly in the in the area I want to make sure and be clear on that you know the clean team does not do enforcement on encampments WE Post we ask people to leave if they do not leave we do not displace them so I just want to be clear about that we we're there to clean the trash and debris that's that's there um Street and right away improvements we are looking at removing impediments for pedestrian bicycle travel uneven sidewalks trip hazards encroaching trees and bushes replacing faded curbs and signs or repainting faded curves and replacing signs we want to do a comprehensive public education and outreach program continue to promote our bulky item collection we like to see that number go up that that graph go up on the free pickups uh we're going to be working with Long Beach Unified School District to reincorporate our school cleanups in fact we we did have an event where we gave 50 cleanup uh we have a program called Cleanup in a box and we distributed 50 clean up even a box programs for schools to start doing their own cleanups on campus in the surrounding neighborhoods um we're going to do an education campaign on uh refuse Recycling and composting similar to what we've had in the past but more up to date and we're going to do programs to help address illegal dumping and help ensure people are properly managing their household hazardous waste we also are going to continue our public education and outreach program we do have an adopt a street program where just similar to Adopt A Highway it's actually managed by the same people Public Works has adopted 12 stretches and we're going to work with our public information team to really promote this opportunity to businesses so that they can adopt streets in their areas and help with the litter abatement we have a no liver Zone Program or we partner with businesses that commit to keeping their storefront clean we have over 500 Partners in our no letter Zone Program um and then we're going to basically do some education on how people can help how can they participate and volunteer in a in a clean up or coordinate or organize their own we're working with outside agencies I mentioned earlier we're working with Caltrans to develop a memorandum of understanding that will allow us to maintain 22 freeway off-ramps this maintenance will be specifically to provide Outreach to homeless people people experiencing homelessness that may need Outreach and understand what services are available to them and it will focus on illegal item collection and illiter abatement we are also in discussion with LA County to address uh encampments for people experiencing homelessness along the LA River San Gabriel River and Coyote Creek we um we do really need to get those agreements in place to access those locations appropriately so here there are 22 different locations you can see spotted with red dots that identify the proposed locations we will be addressing with Caltrans they are all around the city um now I'd like to talk a little bit about deep cleanings back to the colors I mentioned if you look at your your um your map on the board and and we'll identify the locations in the next Slide the red lines are where we're currently providing deep cleaning services the yellow lines are where we which overlay some of the red lines are where we intend to increase deep cleaning frequency green lines are where we're taking an existing location expanding that deep cleaning boundary and the blue lines are new proposed additional deep cleaning locations the expansion and the proposed locations are based on where we tend to receive a concentration of calls for service so that's why we you'll see that we expanded some and not others and why we added some of the locations we chose we we proposed to add so these are the locations there's a lot I'm not going to read them all to you but you can see the majority of locations have been current locations have been expanded to a larger boundary next slide please and these are the proposed new proposed deep cleaning locations that we are we propose adding to the existing ones so the question is going to come up with what is the frequency of these of these cleanups currently they're done quarterly the goal is to get the current locations and to at least monthly as we expand our staff the proposed new locations which don't tend to be as uh as heavily needed locations will begin quarterly and we will increase those and monitor those to see what frequency we find it becomes more effective if it's increasing it are we spending too much time there and and all locations will be assessed on a regular basis so four million dollars for Citywide cleanup over two years what are we going to do with this money to uh to accomplish all these things we talked about we're adding staff and equipment we are going to address a public litter abatement campaign we are going to be um more proactive in in addressing issues for people experiencing homelessness including working with the Outreach team to provide services prior to a cleanup and ensure that we're not displacing people expanding the frequency and the the locations of our deep cleaning doing a comprehensive public education campaign and improving our efficiencies to thank you for this opportunity and the time you gave us to present and we're here to answer any questions thank you very much the very thorough presentation and we appreciate that I do have some some comments and then a couple of questions and then I'm going to turn this over to the folks that have uh queued up to speak um Let me let me just first start and I think I want to make sure that um we say this also for for the council and for the public uh the the cleanliness of the city and I think and I've said this before to the team like we have the potential to be the biggest clean city in California and that should be the goal and we should strive for nothing less than that as as as our Target and I think that one one thing that that a lot of folks don't don't know is that we have a lot of work to do I think still to to achieve uh what we find is acceptable for every neighborhood but the amount of innovation and hard work that has happened behind the scenes on this initiative has been incredible like I I will tell you like and you know this I'm so proud of all the work that the staff has put in over years on this initiative even long before we brought the clean Long Beach initiative forward and there were 18 points in that initiative you covered I think all 18 of them I mean the city council passed that policy uh we were working we brought the bloom we bought the Bloomberg Innovation team to do mapping to do data we brought in Harvard to do a study on how we can best approach our our collections we've I mean every every suggestion that uh council members that the staff brought forward as it relates to how we track a trash launching the go Long Beach app putting in the CRM system in place uh changing the way the expanding The Collection items the pilot programs we tested just the amount of innovation that went in to producing what is a very basic City function which is making sure the streets are clean and picking up trash has been to me very impressive so I just first want to commend just the entire organization for what I feel has been and and absolute success of where we are today now to them you should be satisfied with what we have today because we have a lot of work to do but you guys have done a phenomenal job number one the second thing I want to say is um if you can go to slide nine first of all and I and I definitely want to make sure we we get and maybe you have already have Mr Modica but can we get councilwoman Allen and councilwoman sorrow the initial clean team uh kind of agenda item and the kind of the 18-point plan that we put in place that you covered but it'd be great for them to see the narrative as well sure um and uh and that was that was it I mean we think we did that in 2017 or when we pass that um the clean initiative I believe is 2017. okay so uh and I'm looking at it obviously here in front in front of me here and um one of the things I want to bring up if you can go to slide nine please okay so to me this is also really impressive and you know right around of course when we were we made a commitment this Council created the clean team program through our budget process uh where we literally shifted to a pro proactive cleaning prior to the clean team process where we actually put employees on clean team trucks branded them went sent them out into the community we didn't have proactive cleaning on streets it was all by request and so the proactiveness has uh got us to a much cleaner Community than we were 10 years ago there's just no question and um and then I look at where we are from the amount of employees we had in FY 16 to where we are today which is triple I think where we were to where we're going to be next year we're going to be five times the strength of folks working to clean the city uh from uh from uh from from back in um in 2016. and then that to me is is very impressive and I think shows a commitment to us taking this did I get that right taking this on yes and um and I think what what's really uh impressive to me is we are in the process right now of almost doubling the amount of clean team resources we have today to where we're going to be in the next year or two is that correct that is correct so I just want the council to to think about the impact that this that we are making and why it was so important for us to set aside those millions of dollars in the American Rescue plan for cleaning our city and I think to me and I think to other people in this body this is a core function of the city this is what we should be doing right and what we should be doing and putting our our resources into is to ensuring that we provide this level of kind of basic service for uh for the for the community I also want if you could go to slide 11. I also just want to commend you like just you know dico Eric the team when I look at this orange bulky collection request number that increase is nothing but a massive success because you guys are working for years to try to figure out how to dramatically increase that number when we were first talking about this like 2015 2016 we wanted more people to report uh Pokey items to at their home and you guys have done a nice job of increasing that number and of using I mean we've you know we've been doing direct mailing we've worked with uh apartment owners we've uh uh put uh messages online we've increased the amount of requests we made it easier to request pickup so all of that has led to the success so I just want to just share that I really appreciate appreciate that work that you guys are doing and then we can go to slide 20 please um again the the what I love about what you guys have done here in the plan you presented is you're not just bringing in staff but you're bringing the type of equipment that we need to ensure that we that that our team has the resource the the modern equipment that we need so I appreciate that and then I wanted to go to um if you want to go to slide 30 as we as we conclude but uh because I'm not sure that the entire council is aware what what a deep clean actually is and so obviously all streets in Long Beach get cleaned and and they're street sweeping and and Crews go out and and do pickups what these deep cleanings are is they go by foot the teams most of the time most of the time and they walk the street and what they're doing is they're picking up all of those small hard to all that trash and and uh and cigarette butts and stuff that gets stuck in between businesses and on sidewalks and in gutters and uh we're doing weeding you're uh ensuring that um that the streets and I know why you the the streets that are selected are obviously the ones that get the most impacted by trash uh these corridors do so that deep cleaning that is happening right now a few times a year and we're thinking about increasing those to a month it is so important in the the quality and cleanliness of those streets has dramatically improved over the years like dramatically improved and I just think about just neighborhoods that you've highlighted as being the most um impacted by trash and illegal dumping have changed dramatically now we had a setback this year there's no question because of the pandemic and so you know I have you know been we have been less um well am I still frustrated but you know understanding why we're we we are where we've been and so I'm just really excited about um kind of doubling down on this and making sure that we continue to clean uh the city as much as possible and the last thing uh last things I'll just say is uh I want to make sure that um the council stays updated regularly on on our efforts on this because you guys are doing such a great job with the Innovation don't stop with the Innovation let's continue bringing in some of these teams and continue analyzing what we're doing and looking at the data how we can how we can improve things and then I had mentioned to to Tom also that I wanted to just conclude my remarks about just stop at the Go Long Beach app and we had a prior go Long Beach app system uh that maybe in some ways was easier to use but it wasn't connected to a back end so it was very hard it was people didn't realize it was manual like a go Long Beach a request would come in and somebody was manually taking the requests and getting it off to someone versus now there's like an integrated back end so the go Long Beach requests go to the right person um what how many uh unique users do we have today on the go Long Beach app someone asks bring a body to come up and talk a little bit about um that that is a little bit of a complicated question because we couldn't track from before to today but we have some of that stats uh while he's coming up uh I do want to highlight the changes in the app we've heard that too is that it's the other one was kind of point and click uh and again all it was was just enough to get to a person who then would enter it into all of our complex systems and when we had 10 000 requests we were keeping up but now that we have thirty thousand forty thousand it needs to be an automated system it's provided a lot of functionality we have it in four languages now which we never had go Long Beach in we have resource sections that you can actually look things up and a really neat function is the mapping function you can actually see who else is actually reported that already and what the status is and then if you want you can follow it and you can get notified when that gets closed out so it is a little bit of an adjustment uh we had some technical issues in the beginning as you do with any major new system uh a lot of those have been fixed and worked out and we're so working on some improvement so I will turn it over to barang to talk about the number of users good evening Mr Mayor members of the council my name is baranga body Bureau manager with technology and Innovation uh is city manager Modica said it is a nuanced question our old system did not have the notion of a user a user was anyone who submitted their email address along with a request our new system can also align with that methodology so a sort of Apples to Apples comparison would be a same time period from 2019 to 2020 so I'll give you the dates October 1 2019 to July 1 2020. the old system had 3225 cases with Associated emails and those are unique deduplicated email addresses for the same time period October 1 2020 to July 1 2021 the new app has 5899 unique email addresses the new system though it does have a well-defined mechanism for what constitutes a user so a user would be someone like myself or many of you I've seen your accounts that take the time to go in there you create an account and then you validate your account so it's not enough to say I want to sign up you actually have to go in there and log into your email and verify that you are who you said you were so so we have one thousand I'm sorry no no 1089 users okay uh so would you would you say that we haven't been more likely have more users on the new system than we had before we certainly have more unique email addresses so that's that's good and I think so I think that's that's a positive thing what I would my one request is going to be on go Long Beach app because I given some of my suggestions to Tom personally as far as changes but I would like you to work on putting together just a neighborhood user group of residents from across the city that can just be a group within your department that can just test the app with you and use it because I actually think there are some basic functional changes to be made that the person just making a request can just tell you versus you know the tech team making that change and there there is just some very practical changes that can be made to make it easier and more user friendly to to the to any neighbor across the city so if you'd be willing to put together a group of residents I'm sure that colleagues appear to be happy to recommend some few a few folks uh to test the app with you and they can go through it and give some suggestions for upgrades I would appreciate that can I get that that commitment we're going to do that yeah we can look at that um that could be never ending um I would like it to be a defined group and we could say let's get together sure it could be one from it could be one from every District but I would I would like there to be a defined group that it's a user group that will test the app we can do that okay thank you um and so I appreciate I appreciate all the work you guys are put into this and I'm going to turn this over to the uh the council uh uh maker the motion of Vice Richardson thank you Mr Mayor um so first of all I just want to thank Eco the entire Public Works team and the Reagan file who are out there cleaning stuff up we were out a few months ago on Artesia Boulevard um and I and they told me a little bit about the struggles over the course of the past year so really proud to see that you maintain your momentum and you're picking up speed picking up steam and uh and I just want to thank you for your efforts and thank your entire Rank and file team for all that they do to help over the course of a very difficult year um a few things on go Long Beach what we've done in the past we'll do knife District spring cleaning where we'll put out a contest to the neighbors and say hey uh you know we'll report you know the individuals who reported the most items over a certain period of time and schedule cleanups and do all these different activities and we'll give Awards and recognition to try to get more people involved I would love to see if there are some city-wide opportunities with the new platform to gamify the system and encourage more engagement there uh the second thing I would say is um I I know this is one clean team but a lot of us have business Improvement districts with clean teams I would personally love to see um us through this recovery effort and I know that there is some direct funding to bids and things like that I would like to see some coordination um and incentivize some coordination across uh like we use Conservation Corps at Uptown business district I would love to see um some some strings or some some way to incentivize them to work and coordinate with our clean team an example would be if I know that our clean team I saw two corridors in uptown business district area on your map uh Artesia and Atlantic if we were to have their schedule and then overlay that with what the Uptown business district schedule is then we can work with the local neighborhood associations to help fill the gaps and have one published maintenance schedule for the business district I think something like that in the Council Office can help coordinate that but I think it will go a long way for people to see exactly where our gaps are so we can keep up with it uh the next thing I would say is I'm I know that there was a period where we actually couldn't do neighborhood cleanups during the pandemic I'm glad to see that they're they're back uh that the neighbor Neighbors are getting the dumpsters and clean it up at some at some point I'd love to see um from prior to the pandemic to now are people requesting less cleanups or more um and do we need to do work to encourage more people to get out the neighborhood associations get out and do more um so that's something I'm curious about um next uh I know that uh graffiti has also been up during the pandemic particularly on our murals uh North Long Beach we went through an effort and we planted murals on most of our high graffiti walls and it significantly reduced graffiti in these areas but now a lot of them have been tagged over time and Mr city manager I know we spoke about um spoke about utilizing some of the recovery resources to actually get a team of artists to go touch the murals back up I don't and this and I don't need a big response here but is is that going to be included in this cleanup effort or you have some other way to address that that's currently not in this effort that is something that we'd like to do is to get more murals out there so the original plan was that we we couldn't find a way to fund that as part of the Recovery Act I think as we have found ways to use the Recovery Act in certain ways we can look at that but I don't have that funded yet but that's still something I want to do okay what I'm interested in isn't necessarily more murals the ones that we do have we need to go out and we need to tighten them up and I think that when we think about a clean neighborhood I think the availability murals people people see graffino and emerald they'll see weeds they'll see trash it all it's all connected and that is one of the priority uses of our percent for the Arts as well that the Arts Council has suggested is being able to maintain the assets that we have and be able to clean them and fix them okay because we we have we have some that need some immediate some immediate help now um next the train tracks on Artesia uh I think I didn't see it as a node or specifically called out it's not our property I know we talk a lot about Caltrans property but this is the railroad property and and Tom I've shown it to you uh we've gone out we've cleaned it up but it is a problem hot spot just the train tracks just north of Artesia what is that I think uh west of Paramount I believe um and then finally um I I want to make sure that we we address we debatement um at particularly at the pump station Artesia or any city property any City facility we need to put a lens on how often we're we're abating the weeds there this particular site I think it's one of those I'm talking about the mural is tagged the weeds are grown and this is city property so if we we need to maintain our own property to be an example for others thank you thank you vice mayor councilman sorrow thank you mayor I just I also want to add my thanks to Eric dico and all of the other Environmental Services team um for this really long hard and dirty road that we've been on towards cleanliness um so and it's just in a just an incredible amount of trash that's been picked up over the years uh I mean so just thank you so much for all the hard work that and it's been a work in progress and I believe that that's going to continue to be the the case um you know I've been having since I've been on Council you know maybe mid-December we've been having District dialogues amongst neighborhood and hands down it didn't matter what neighborhood in Midtown or Central Long Beach uh cleanliness was the number one issue that everybody wanted to address right and so I just want to make sure that our residents and as well as other Long Beach residents know that based on this presentation help is on on the way and Investments are being made to ensure that we're doubling down or tripling down the efforts um you know and I also want to just share too during the time when we couldn't do neighborhood cleanup that was really a challenging period because you know many people are home because of the pandemic and you know the trash is just visible everywhere and so it's definitely impacted people's kind of um I think attitudes I think sometimes towards the neighborhood so that's one of the things that I want us to Circle back on is just how do we ensure that we're inspiring people to clean up and I really like that idea earlier that about Cleanup in a box that was done with the school I'm actually interested in thinking about how do we incentivize people to just clean up within their front door and front steps not just businesses but individuals so how can we give you know people like a kit so that it encourages them to clean with a pickup tool to you know other gloves and trash bags and you know any other educational materials and I'm actually thinking about how we can put that together um as we you know go into this public education and Outreach phase where I'm thinking about fix the six kit uh fix the six kit in a bag or a box or whatever it is that makes it easy so that they just have it then and there and it's everywhere and I think making it as easy as possible to for people to clean I think um helps a lot just as I think the mayor talk it talked about making the app as easy as possible to use um and the other uh thing I want to say too is I want to thank our neighborhood association that's just really resume their cleaning and I want to think about ways we can offer support to them as well as seeing them kind of our you know neighborhood cleanliness ambassadors and where they're really encouraging people to use these go Long Beach app even educating them how to use it in other languages too based and just making sure that people know they don't need to just post it on Facebook or other social media they could actually use an app to report that right so I think constant communication and education and educational uh ways that we can encourage people is really helpful so um otherwise you know I'm just so thrilled that you know we're gonna have so much more um you know efforts and investment and tools to be able to really clean up and really get into it so thank you so much thank you councilwoman councilwoman price oh there we go thank you um so thank you for the presentation and um I I know that um my office is probably one of the offices that contacts you a lot on these issues and I I appreciate um the work that you do there's a couple of questions that I have that I think uh obviously I talk with Tom regularly about District specific issues that we have so I'm not going to use that time to do that tonight but city-wide um do our cleanups ever involve pressure washing sidewalks not often like I said what we're we are going to be buying a couple of pressure washers through these funds so that we can make them available uh pressure washing on a large scale is is difficult but um we are going to do what we can to incorporate some of those efforts into our cleanings I think maybe focusing on the business augmenting what the business corridors are already trying to do with their assessment funds could be a really good area good use of that and some of our major corridors I think would be a really good use of the pressure washers if we could incorporate that maybe a quarterly pressure wash on on some specific corridors the other thing I wanted to talk about is community cleanups we used to do those a lot where we would partner with Community neighborhoods and then kind of stopped doing that during covid what is the status of that now Community cleanups have resumed as I mentioned initially when we started supporting them it was simply the neighborhood association would tell us they're doing a cleanup we'd identify a couple of locations in their cleanup area to drop off their bags and we'd have a truck go by pick up whatever's there now we're beginning to actively assist in those cleanups and we're interacting with the actual volunteers so I believe I believe in 2021 we've done already 98 91 cleanups so we're back on track there people people are eager to get out there okay and yeah I know you touched on it but um is there anything specific they need to do to coordinate should they go through the council offices or go through you either way we we have a staff person that helps coordinate those cleanups and many of the council staff actually you call her directly for assistance as well so either way we can do it we do like to hear ahead of time we do have occasions we we recently had one for example where some people take it upon themselves to do something and then kind of leave stuff behind for us and we don't know what's going on we we went today in fact and collected over 200 bags of debris that that someone had left behind and again while we appreciate the efforts to to clean the city we we it's very Shotgun If we don't have some sort of coordinated understanding of what's Happening where and let me know what that is in some of these cleanups we could really use the council office's help and some of you are already doing this cleanups are more complicated than just putting stuff in a dumpster a lot of things can't be accepted in the dumpster it has to be sorted uh there it won't be accepted if we put in E-Waste and so we're looking going forward to really partner with the council offices to kind of help take that responsibility to organize neighborhoods and and designate someone who's in charge of appropriate disposal and that'll make us be able to go a lot further and do a lot more of these as we work in Partnership let me add something to that too councilman because I think um I don't know that I hadn't mentioned it but and it was probably going to be I think announced in the next few days but I think it's pretty close to being set we are going to launch a city-wide uh cleanup Long Beach day I think it's going to be August the 14th and on that day uh it's gonna kind of kick off kind of like our post pandemic like cleaning the city I think we're going to ask and toast events in every District uh in the city and try to have an event hosted by every Council office across the city to have cleanups uh happening everywhere uh and and Mr muddick is smiling because he knows it's going to be a lot of work but he's very excited uh I know to lead this effort um and uh and so I and I think all of us are uh are looking forward to that too so I think that's going to be on Saturday August the 14th and that'll be our clean up Long Beach uh kind of community kickoff and we'll have a lot of resources for all of our neighborhood groups to continue uh doing that work also and by the way a lot of council members you've already been hosting a lot of cleanups I think Congressman daycast I just saw I want to think that you just did I think this weekend um and so we'll we'll I'm encourage us all to put our efforts into the 14th and there'll be information on on that in the in the days ahead and if we can work on confirming that date we still that's a huge effort to do all nine all at once we normally move them around so we think we can do it we got to work on the actual date and make sure we can get all the resources there to support all your efforts but yeah we will get a Dayton I'm hoping it'll be the 14th okay right because that's the one that you mentioned to me today uh councilwoman uh councilman Mungo thank you um first I want to thank the team I'm I'm very fond of all of you but dico you've done just an amazing job I can't tell you enough how great of a partner you've been over these last six seven years from street sweepers to alleys to you name it your let's find a way attitude is really a really important thing for people to learn from I can't tell you enough that you're uh ready to take on anything in the city and I totally believe in you because of all that you've done for us when it comes to the clean team and everyone on the team is great and thank you for all of the work that you do uh mattresses so tires when you get new tires you have a tire disposal fee mattresses have been like the new rage I don't know if I'm like targeted I do streaming television but like I get a new mattress advertisement at least four times a day are there mattress recycle fees because people are now getting mattresses delivered directly to their door from all over the country what does that equate to in terms of is there a fee structure for that yes there is there's a um similar to what you do with TVs or tires yep there's and that's those dollars go to the mattress recycling Council which in turn we file a report to them annually and then they provide us reimbursement doesn't cover all the costs but but it covers a portion of the cost that's why we collect them separately and track them separately as well good that's good to know um graffiti you guys have been doing a great job I can't tell you enough I want to thank both your team and then also my Council office staff we have a lot of on-ramps and off-ramps so we have to work with Caltrans on and my team is on it and I appreciate the community for helping us report that stuff because the sooner you report it the sooner you can get rid of it you talked a little bit about 16 of litter is um cigarette butts I'm imagining that that's a city-wide number I'm gonna feel terrible I can't remember her name right now but I was out and about walking and one of our neighbors of 60 years his name Lloyd and his daughter asked me about the current trash problem we have with advertisements and specifically some of the non-subscription papers that have kind of really taken off in terms of their ability to throw these things into our driveway and a lot of them just end up in the gutter what percentage of the percentage of the city that receives these throwaway advertisements what are we talking about in terms of cost and I wish I could tell you that I don't know the the 16 number on cigarette butts was from a Statewide okay report um I do know that there is some freedom of speech issues it doesn't mean you're allowed to litter but there are certain speech issues involved in printing and distributing well there are people who leave them on your curb like at your door and there are people who just throw them into your Gutter and we should have some kind of structure for organizations that hire lazy Distributors that just leave stuff at the sidewalk to the street and figuring out how to ensure that those that are making money by advertising to our residents but are not spending that money for a proper distribution system should then be charging or paying for that cleanup they also cause blockages of water movement until the next street sweeping day which then causes buildup of water and mosquitoes and all sorts of problems go Long Beach app I just want to thank the entire team both in the city manager's office the rest of use Division and in the I.T Department a lot of you know I was a big driver of fixing the go Long Beach app I would guess that of your initial 3 000 people on the app a thousand of them were probably Fifth District residents where High users individuals who are in the park all the time fixing our water fountains all of those things so I would love to have a presentation in the next few months related to our next steps on the Long Beach app I appreciate the idea of the team I'd love a senior citizen on that team because I think that a lot of our retired senior citizens are the ones that are really helping us out by taking responsibility and ownership of certain areas they walk regularly to use the app I'd love to find out more we're hiring all these non-careers but we also have a lot of retirements coming I'd love to make sure that there's a pathway for our non-career hires to work towards a career position and how we work on that as a city um slide 11 we were talking about illegal dumping something let me see what we were on if you could turn back to slide 11. and then when you renew your annual license annually you have the opportunity to donate I think there are a lot of people who when they do their refuse cleanup if some kind of solicitation could be provided in their next water bill I think there's a lot of people who would be willing to pay and donate to the clean team I don't know if we can set up a non-profit account similar to what animal control has but I I appreciate the 12 free pickups I don't think that people always expect it to be free and so I'd love to get to a point in our city where we talk about the true cost of collection is and then those people that make an income of less than sixty thousand dollars a year it's free and then like a graduated pay structure for those that can afford it because I think that we continue to have this where we're subventing costs for people who aren't asking to be cemented and I think that those dollars could go much further and in the meantime if we could just give them the opportunity to donate you back to a program because if they wanted to have a pickup done you're talking 250 dollars people are happy to do it thank you answer super now uh thank you great presentation my favorite slide was 19 the heat map and since we were talking about um neighborhood cleanups I have to give a shout out to wesca that's the West East Side neighborhood association I think that might be the longest running monthly Cleanup in the city currently organized by Casey Carver and though that it cleans up um illegally dumped items uh bordered by PCH 10th Redondo and Cherry so it's a huge area and I noticed they're not on the heat map or they're just beside the heat map and I'm wondering if they didn't pick up that six to seven tons of dumped items a month they might be in that heat map so that's a very interesting graphic but on that topic um this is a monthly cleanup it's the the fourth Saturday of every month been going on for I guess decades now um 8 A.M to noon and they could really use volunteers and especially volunteers with pickup trucks and I noticed that these kind of third-party contractors were mentioned in your presentation Conservation Corps it sure be nice if if we could recruit them I've never been able to do that but it's a very consistent uh day of the month and time so we could really use some help there um also on the on the corridor kind of cleanups or quarterly Corridor cleanups um it would be nice if we could uh give you some very specific areas and I'll just mention the Anaheim Corridor in the fourth district we have um a no man's land between um uh business Improvement districts so where zafaria ends there's a couple of blocks stretched before the Midtown bid starts and so that's an area we could really Target and if there's a a vacant uh business and whatnot we have really no way to addressing that so I'd like to give you a more focused area and then more than a a quarterly Cleanup in that area that's all I have thank you thank you councilmember Durango thank you uh you know one of the things that I find interesting in that chart right there number 11. is that one of the reasons why I brought forward the illegal dumping ordinance was to lower your illegal dumping and and instead you know we've had a steady increase of illegal dumping as the years go by and that's an interesting phenomenon to look at right now when you're looking at the fact that you have more you have an increase in uh requests for pickups special pickups but yet illegal dumping hasn't gone down at all it's gone up which is interesting to to note um has there been an effort to find these people to to find them to cite them for illegal dumping I mean I know it's hard because you know they you know you're doing illegal dumping at two or three four in the morning and nobody's around but I think that we need to start looking at how we can cite these people for all the the illegal dumpers and you've talked about there's hot spots that you know where it takes place but maybe we could uh have uh some kind of uh camera or some kind of uh Patrol or or roaming team out there in those wee hours of the morning when illegal dumping is taking place to catch these people and that that's what keeps our city our city dirty is illegal dumping it doesn't matter where I drive like I could drive in my district to see an illegal dumping uh a mattress or a bunch of waste and and I could go to the next District whether it's eight or six or or write down PCH to uh District Four and and see some items out there that I just throw strewn in the middle of the street or in front of a yard uh you know are there any ideas that you have how we can lower that blue bar right there to down to near like 20 what's that 2016 uh we have tried a few different things in the past we did have a camera program um a while back um yeah but we found oftentimes was once people figure out there's a camera there then then they move the hot spot a block over or something like that so it would it kind of shifted people around we did have one prosecution that occurred um with that several several this is many years ago with that program what what we do is we're again we're trying to encourage people to schedule the bulky items and and it is an odd phenomena I I wonder about this often council member is why does dump illegal dumping continue to increase when people are obviously learning that they have legal options to to remove their waste but um you know sometimes I think maybe it's ease I still I think that we still have a certain percentage of people that take advantage that misuse the go Long Beach app and rather than call and schedule a clean up they just take a picture of it and send it in we do go out and if we can identify the location from where The Dumping occurred then we will we we don't have citation Authority on this but we can charge them for the service and so I recall I'm not gonna it wasn't this like this I think it was the past year we had gone from about 14 500 a year in added charges to over 65 000 a year in added charges so our field investigators and supervisors really started becoming more active in trying to identify where The Dumping occurred from so um so we do try and charge back and I think some of your offices will know and when you get a report I will often respond saying we're going to try and find out who did this and charge them for the service and and everyone's been very supportive of that I mean that and I'll add against members you really need to look at Behavior change um so that is part of what we looked like at with our Harvard students is we can continue to pick up the trash which we should do and we're doing but more every single year but that's where education that's we're starting with youth um and and getting people to really look at why is dumping occurring and how do we provide other options uh so that this doesn't happen if we continue to double like this uh that's going to be in a tremendous you know impact on our operations and resources so we are still looking long term about how to just get uh to be a a society that doesn't dump as much yeah well I think communication is very important obviously the education program that uh we have in place for uh keeping our city clean is very important and obviously I think we need a stronger emphasis on illegal dumping that illegal dumping is uh illegal plus the fact that it keeps our city dirty and and unwelcoming and I think that we need to push that that's part of the behavioral change that you're talking about one last thing and the uh the freeway on ramps and on-ramps the cleanups that we're working with Caltrans and I'm thinking also with the County of LA how's that negotiation going because I mean we still have it's still a bit of an issue I see a lot of material dumped right there on the on-ramps and off ramps uh sometimes it takes weeks to clean those up so how are we doing with that negotiation and and what's going to how we're going to be able to get a a faster response when we have uh items dumped about right there on the on the freeways on the freeway onwards for no off ramps we are further along in negotiations with Caltrans and we are with LA County um I think one of the challenges we're gonna we're trying to overcome is how is it going to get paid for so the to make it more expeditious the city staff will be responding rather than waiting for Caltrans to respond um but we're trying to develop a model that will allow for their support to do those cleanups so the dollars that we're presenting you tonight will allow us to start doing that so we were doing the final negotiations we believe we're having the the only type of agreement like this in the state where we're doing both maintaining some areas but also working on people experiencing homelessness so we would obviously like some of the State dollars that are coming down we're not waiting for though this though once we get through the mou we're going to go ahead and and start doing more of that work but we do think if there's new state resources that they should help compensate us for those costs that's all I have mayor thank you thank you uh councilman Mungo thank you um my theory on the illegal dumping is that the cost that you charge to come pick up an illegal dumping is worth it and I think that part of that is because people don't recognize you talk about the train change and don't plan ahead for I'm going to clean out my garage this weekend so I need to call in a request now for next week and the individuals would rather pay the illegal dumping fee and fine and get it picked up right now because that cost is still two parts one less than it would cost them to hire someone off of Yelp or rabbit whatever people use to task people to do things it's still cheaper than those two options I mean a same-day pickup minimum I can't think that it's going to be under 225 dollars and that would be for a small amount of stuff and I think our fines are less than that I think I saw one in my district that we worked on together that was 115 and so if the fee structure is incentivizing them to be an illegal dumper it is worth that cost to them for a same-day pickup so my call to action to you would be to find a way to come up with a fee for a same-day pickup that was closer to market rate because we are the legitimate option and senior citizens are more comfortable calling us and knowing that we're going to reliably be there there are a lot of these individuals who when you call them and you schedule them they come out they start the pickup and then they raise their fees on the individuals and so those are the kinds of situations that I've encountered that I think are contributing to the number of illegal pickups um we talked about Long Beach volunteer day I know I've done a lot of those I would love to see US expand to Long Beach volunteer month I just a friendly reminder we have a city-wide calendar and all of these things should be on there I think that every cleanup should be on the Citywide calendar even when the clean team is coming I think it's something for people to look forward to obviously we don't want to incentivize illegal dumping in the corridor that's getting clean but I think that it's it's important transparency for us I also just want to uh kind of give a shout out to our city manager we talked a lot about the go Long Beach app when you became the city manager and whether or not even every Department had had to go Long Beach app and whether or not they were ambassadors for the city in the way that we felt that it was important I don't know what that progress is I'd be interested to know who the the city staff member is that does the most reporting same with the council offices I imagine some of us do more than others and I think that that's a fun incentive based activity when you go into Yelp you can become the mayor of a restaurant because you're the one that goes there the most we need to find ways to make the go Long Beach app fun when kids are standing at El Dorado Park playing some Pokemon game on their phone I'd rather them be playing some go Long Beach app right you did you you played the Pokemon game um and then lastly we talk about on slide 23 the sidewalk issues and things that you're addressing but even some of the streets in the city that are in very good condition have poorly graded streets so we're still having the collection of debris and water and trash that the street sweepers can't get to so I don't know what our long-term solution to that is because those streets instead of being fully reconstructed were slurry sealed so now theoretically we're not going to touch them for 10 years we need to have a plan to address those grading issues that are causing debris collection especially on our Corners adjacent to our parks and things like that so thank you very much thank you councilman zendayos thank you mayor I just want to give a huge thank you to both dico and Eric and the whole team for all the incredible job that you've been doing this past year and a half it's just been a very trying year but you guys have managed um so thank you thank you very much and thank you for all your support for our cleanup in the first district this past Saturday it was such a successful event we collected so much so much so much trash which makes me happy that we collected it but sad that it was there to be collected but the community really enjoyed being able to participate so I look forward to many of those moving forward I know that the go Long Beach app has been an incredible tool for my constituents and for my staff as well and I know that you guys in this plan had a portion for Education are we planning on doing maybe like in workshops for go Long Beach aptitude for our residents to get more familiar with them I know I had um a presentation done for my check-ins for my residents and they really enjoyed it but maybe we can create and I know we have like a short video that that we have if you guys could correct me in that I think we do have a short video but are we planning on doing more Outreach on and education around the go Long Beach app I'm getting a nod of yes from Leah Erickson our director of technology and Innovation yeah so I'll address that so with any new system uh we kind of did a software aloud uh we you know this was a massive system it's not just an app but it is a customer resource management system that interacts with all of our work order systems and so there were some bugs to figure out uh we had one of the the premier firm Salesforce to uh to do this for us uh but in the in the months after the launch we were still working things out so we've never really done the big full promotion of it's ready it's here so that's still coming we're going to be doing more and more of that and more of explaining to people how to how to use it so we've gone to a number of community meetings and just when we talk about it for five minutes people just really get excited that there's these new tools that they have available to them yes what do you want thank you thank you very much um also was wondering um I know part of the strategy strategy is to um you know clean our streets and be be able to have a cleaner environment right one of the things that I wanted to ask is what is the feasibility of maybe adding like a tree watering program to this I know that as we all know here that our trees have really really been dying and I know that something like that would be really really important is there any plans for something like that through this program or maybe if you can recommend something else another program not currently but we can certainly investigate that and see what options are available thank you and I'd appreciate that a lot also um I know that it's been touched on before but I really like the idea of coming together and having like a um a clean kit to clean you know the neighborhoods um and it also would be really neat to be able to collaborate with our schools and our students I think that that would be very essential um is there anything in mind in this strategy to cooperate and collaborate I should say with our local schools yes absolutely we're we're like I said we've we distributed 50 clean up in a box um opportunities to the schools and as they as students return to in-person learning we will continue to expand that we've we've had other programs in the past that we're looking at potentially reinvigorating or seeing if there are new opportunities for litter awareness and education wonderful my office and is always in constant contact with your office in regards to this but um one of the most frequent calls that we get is about street sweepers and how maybe we don't have enough maybe you can say a little bit about that and what's what the plan is certainly um I think we have enough street sweepers if um the challenge is that we currently are short staffed in street sweeping um like I said earlier civil service has established a certified list for us to hire from and we started interviews internally today and tomorrow so we hope to be getting some sweeper operators on board um again one of the challenges we face this year in particular is that um in our in our Zeal to assist people that were experiencing covet hardships we were dismissing a lot of street sweeping citations and as I said there were about 25 000 citations dismissed and each one of those was an obstacle along the path of the street sweeper to provide a quality Street sweep now that's not to say that that's the only reason we are going out pretty much every day with at least one router Time Zone open and what we try and do is is move those around so we don't miss any one particular route two weeks in a row but recently for example we did experience that where a sweeper actually broke down on a route that had been skipped the week before so once we get these people on board we will have full Staffing and we will be sweeping every round every week amazing thank you for that thank you councilman Allen thank you mayor and just great job really just good work I love these cleanups this has been really important supporting our economic recovery supporting our residents supporting our businesses and tourism I'm just uh I'm so proud of cd2 a big shout out to a lot of my HOAs that are constantly doing cleanups I keep all the equipment in the back of my car because I know there's going to be one happening every week so I'm really proud of all the work that's being done in the community I had a question for you with regards to the trash bins I know we've had some cleanups are those available through this this project if we have neighborhood cleanups and we're going to need that I believe development services Neighborhood Services Bureau can provide you bins for if you just want a bin to be there at the location for cleanup and then also I love the low the go Long Beach app it's it's incredible um I do I have met with all of the scooter companies at least all of them but one and uh no scooters being left and especially in the downtown areas problematic um is there any way that we could incorporate a function in the go Long Beach app that would uh you could work with the vendors of the scooter so that those are picked up because I know it's really problematic especially like I said in downtown I'm getting a positive head nod from ti so yeah that's something that is now on their radar that is awesome that is going to make my constituents so happy and then also I did not realize that there was a training video I know when I'm out talking to a lot of my neighborhood associations um uh there's a lot of folks that are interested in using the go Long Beach app I'm always excited to tell people about it so if there is a video I'm not aware of that so I would definitely want to get that information and then I'll be able to share that so thank you very much and great job everyone thank you councilman sorrow yes I wanted to ask a question um I was wondering if you can pull up that map with the hot spot because you mentioned earlier that it's generally where it has the most trash is where there's families living and I would I take that maybe or multi-units um yeah I don't think that's the that's the map with the hot spot hotspot map I forgot what slide number is it 19. is it stuck on this yeah unfortunately our remote control is no longer functioning okay all right well that's good to know I just wanted to my question is really what are um because you know I live okay great so I live you know um nearby a multi-unit and I always know when somebody's moving out because all of their Furniture is like on the sidewalk so I'm just wondering what are the some ideas and approaches has come up to address this is it does it range from you know charging these apartment owners the fee for removing them because I'm always using the app and every week really it seems like there's Furnitures out so I'm just curious what are some approaches we can take because that's really kind of been the reoccurrence that's happening on a cycle with these large bulky items we can often tell the difference between um a move out and um just a dumped item based on the the composition of the the material that's out there and frankly we you know I'm a very firm believer in charging Property Owners back for that service because it is a business that they're running when they're when they're um have rental units and clearing out your tenants spaces is a cost of doing business and it shouldn't be a cost to the ratepayers it should be a cost to the person who's running the business so we do make every effort to if we can identify how and when and where that debris came from that we charge them back at this point we don't have um the ability to cite what we do is we charge for the cost of the service uh to collect those items there's no way to do that on the goal Long Beach app right as far as you know that you see something illegally dumped by site kind of like what we have I think when we're doing those firework right we have this app that you can download where the pictures of it people are literally moving things from the building into the sidewalk and then reporting that is there a function that does that you can you can add a picture in the go Long Beach app um you know and we've you know so many options out there now people have called circuit cameras they have the Ring app and they have all these different apps and people send us videos of all sorts of stuff anymore and more and more and more and I have to remind our team is like you gotta you gotta work as if you're on camera all the time because that does happen so people do provide that with regard to the go Long Beach app you can and you're encouraged to add photos in your report and you can add comments so if someone is aware that and we do get this sometimes this came out of my neighbor's place it's the address is this but oftentimes people are also a little um reticent to um kind of put their name out there and say they're reporting their neighbor because they don't want to create neighborhood problems either all right thank you thank you and councilman zendejos no if you think um it's because it's in locations where perhaps there's a lot of renters and my question is um Can renters call in for illegal I'm sorry for specialized pickup so yes there is a a correlation between multi-family units a population density and illegal dumping um so for the first question that yes there's a there's a Nexus there secondly it really is a it's a it's a challenging situation in Long Beach because we have certain accounts that are Master metered which means there's one meter for a multi-unit building and there could be say let's just say 10 units at that building but we know that there's one meter so it's one account whereas other buildings may be multimetered so you have 10 units each unit has its own meter and so there's 10 accounts so it's challenging for us to say that every renter has the opportunity for 12. every renter does have the opportunity but it's hard we don't have the ability at this point to kind of track when it's a master metered account to say how many did this unit get versus that unit get versus that unit get thank you thank you that makes sense and that's something I think that team's been working on for for a couple years because that's absolutely been been an issue so uh councilman Mungo and then we're going to go and receive and father report thank you um since we have so much data do we see that illegal dumping is most popular on certain days of the week or certain dates like the 15th and the 30th of the month when people might be moving out or getting a Payday and then going and buying a new couch and or are we thinking that it's related to move outs and move-ins in many cases it's related to move outs and move-ins and anecdotally we've we've noticed at the very beginning or end of the month is seems to be a little bit of an uptick so do we schedule um additional Crews at that time or do we have the ability to no we might we might allocate our crews accordingly but we don't have additional Crews available to schedule I'd be interested and I mean I'll touch back with councilwoman Zendejas and councilman sorrow who have also talked a little bit about the the move-in move out date I mean I I'd really strongly recommend that we provide a 30th of the month available for purchase 200 pickup because again that's below what it could be cost the landlord should could very well burden the price the landlord's the one who wants those items out of there for the new tenant to move in um and then I really think and I talked about this last week we need to do a better job informing the landlords of these opportunities the landlords don't want tenant a to move out and leave all their stuff on the curb and then tenant B and C be upset we aren't really informing those landlords a lot of them are senior citizens we really need to do a better job we need to pull the situs addresses of the properties from the assessor's office and then we need to do a notification based on landlord of what programs are available how we can support them better supporting their tenants and the penalties if they don't so I would I would love to see us work something out if either of you want to work on agenda item together as you can tell by my number of cues trash is really important to me and keeping the city clean I really appreciate mayor Garcia and all the work through the years one of the biggest things we've done through the budget process is these clean teams and I cannot tell you enough when I used to drive from the East side of town all the way down to City Hall meetings it was brutal and now it's just so rewarding to see how clean it is and the streets are clean I know we could get a little bit better coverage on the weeds in the winter right after that first rain we just have a huge pop-up of weeds and all of the sidewalks and gutters across our big corridors but other than that excellent job I drive all over LA county for my County job and you guys are just doing such an excellent job I just want to thank you so much I'm excited for the improvements that you're still striving for and I want to keep you striving but you're doing excellent work thank you thank you that concludes uh Council comments I don't believe there's public comment in the study session correct okay thank you guys for the report I know it's been a long uh two hours but a very I think an important one so I just want to thank you guys for the study session uh on this item so with that members please go ahead and cast your votes to receive and file motion carries thank you uh just as a reminder we have three hearings before the regular agenda starts still so those are going to go next I think I have one member of the public who had public comment that's on a non-agenda item is that right okay why don't we go ahead and mistress and I can't pay can you please come to the podium quite a riveting report there thank you Public Works and everyone involved um hoping that the Pacific Corridor can get included in there because that's my No Man's Land and uh you know with 30 plus empty storefronts it's a lot of trash that being said um public comment with regards to today as a resident in the sixth district in central Long Beach I'm inquiring any status report in this investigation on the desecration of the Statue of Dr Martin Luther King and hoping to get some compelling uh details on where that's going thank you thank you and there is an item related to to the Statue I think later in the agenda as well um thank you for that um let's go ahead and now move on to the hearings we're going to have uh item hearing item 17 first report from development services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record conclude the public hearing and adopt and impose the mitigation monitoring and Reporting program for the southeast area specific plan declare ordinance amending the land use District map to reflect the establishment of the southeast area specific plan read the first time and laid over to the next regular meeting of the city council for final reading adopt five resolutions amending the local Coastal program implementation plan land use map amend the post certification coastal zone map amending the local Coastal program and element of the city's General plan amending and restating the southeast area specific plan and authorizing director of development services to submit the ordinance amendments together with the resolutions to the California Coastal commission District 3. thank you and then we're going to introduce the city manager who's got the presentation first good afternoon mayor members of the council I'd like to introduce Christopher Coons the deputy director for development services he will start this presentation uh good evening uh council members and mayor for this item which relates to the southeast area specific plan and item 18 which relates to the pool we do have presentations available um to give you or if you don't want the presentation speak up now and let us know these are both routine matters after when actions take place in the coastal zone they go to the coastal commission they make changes to those items and then they come back to this body for you to conform those changes it's that procedural matter that's in front of you this evening and I have Patricia Defender for our planning Bureau manager to answer any questions and provide the presentation if you wish to see it Mr vice mayor good night sure council member price unless there's any objection by my colleagues I don't think we need a presentation on this particular item I do want to make just a few comments on it though these are some procedural steps that we have to take in order for this plan to move forward um I will share I know I have some new Council colleagues who perhaps haven't been as plugged into the history of this item but the southeast area specific plan csip was in its first formation in 1977 created as a specific plan for the southeast portion of Long Beach and over the past eight years that I've been in office this is a project that I've been intimately involved with my commitment to the residents throughout this process has been to work closely with City staff and I want to just acknowledge our assistant city manager Linda Tatum who's very involved in this project before she assumed her current position and was invaluable in getting this project moved to this place place and of course our entire city team led by Christopher Koontz this plan will allow the preservation of the wetlands for the decades to come as the plan was prior to this plan being passed there were portions of the wetlands that actually had development on them like an In-N-Out Burger that probably should never have gone on top of the wetlands and so the passage of this specific plan will ensure that we have the wetlands to be able to restore working with my colleague on the councilman uranga on the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority we do have a plan for the restoration of the wetlands and this plan will make that possible and a reality it will also place a burden on developers who wish to develop in this area to meet certain standards regarding environmental standards involving Public Access standards open Corridor standards and these conversations have been had and and some of them have been a long time to develop to get to the place that we're at now I do want to point out one aspect about this grant this this plan that I think we sometimes forget when we're talking about the city's requirements in terms of housing you know that there's often a misconception that that the southeast side of Long Beach is not contributing to the housing requirement of of the city and so I would just want to turn over to the staff you know this particular specific plan alone how many units does this create for the City of Long Beach good evening council members uh this is Patricia Defender for planning Bureau manager this plan does create capacity for approximately an additional 2500 dwelling units and and I'm sure as most can appreciate um that that is not welcome news to folks who who want to try to limit density but I think some of the the ways that we've gone about designing the specific plan and the requirements for developers is going to create um over the next 40 years a development and a community that will be filled with open space and Mobility options and wetlands restoration and wetlands tourism environmental tourism in a way that we've never seen so I urge my colleagues to please support this item it's certainly something that the council District team has worked very hard on not just this team but the teams that came before me and I'm really really grateful to be at this place so thank you all right thank you and I'll just offer my support I would say these long-range planning efforts are really really good thank you councilwoman price for your hard work and for highlighting the housing discussion you're absolutely right it is difficult to have a discussion about housing but I think our Landing settlement is 26 000 units and that's almost 10 percent of it so that is important to note and thank you for your leadership on that um so is there any public comment comment we have three public comment uh Anna Christensen and Cantrell and Marlene Alvarado there's a lot of trash talk tonight folks uh I'm here representing uh the Los Cerritos Wetlands uh Lantern uh I'm sorry uh task force from Sierra Club and uh I also live in the third and I got pretty much the same description that you just got of this um I'm gonna take this off of this rezoning uh it talks about it in one way but we I think of it in a very different way I think of the the zoning that was is here in place now c-dip which limits the height of housing to three stories of all buildings really and how from the very beginning and that was a community generated zoning from the very beginning it was attacked by business after business developer after developer who who's backed the community members who designed that for their desire to protect the Los Cerritos wetlands and uh I don't want this to come off the wrong way but you know when I went to the first csip meeting I sat next to a guy who was all in favor of it and he said I wonder I wonder about low-income housing I said go ahead and ask and someone from development services who answered that question says Long Beach doesn't do that and I think it's very important when we talk about our need for more density on our state mandates and all the units we need uh supposedly to provide for future residents that uh that we understand that we're we're really involving a lot of developers who really want to make a lot of money doing this and just like Wetlands restoration this is business to leave something alone to leave the land alone to leave the wetlands alone rather than to add more visitor centers more bike trails giant berms to protect industry that's already there and will come to call the in and out as this csip does a recreational area to Zone the in and out recreational is pretty stunning and you know we need housing for the poor we need housing for people who have very little income we do not need seven story high-rises in a liquefaction Zone in a tsunami Zone uh you know next to our wetlands and so I'm afraid this will perhaps solve some problems I realize today you know when the when the as the sea rise goes all the people who are living in Belmont Shore and on the peninsula can just move into the high rises because they they are uh you know above ground that's a plus that that's a plus for those guys who are down on the peninsula I guess but as for the majority of residents in Long Beach and those of us who fought for a long time to protect what's already in in the wetlands this isn't it's no benefit sorry thank you next speaker please [Applause] good evening Ann Cantrell speaking for the Sierra Club Los Cerritos Wetlands task force and I attended all the meetings on csip back before councilwoman price was on this Council when Frank Colonna held similar uh meetings on this and C dip which preceded which is now our zoning uh had some problems to it it allowed Housing Development on the wetlands and it allowed oil development on the wetlands so csip still allows oil development on the wetlands and it is creating 2500 new dwelling units surrounding the wetlands cdip only allowed three-story buildings sea sip will allow seven story buildings surrounding the wetlands um and the oil production is addressed briefly in csip as saying modification 9 will modify C chapter C sip C sip chapter 5 to incorporate the oil production standards recently certified by the coastal commission for C dip among other revisions the coastal commission staff said and I quote oil released into the wetlands area will contaminate soils and vegetation and result in a range of effects for wildlife from habitat exclusion to death required cleanup measures would likely result in the complete loss of affected Wetland areas Wetland channels could also provide a direct Pathway to Marine Waters if an oil spill reaches the San Gabriel River alamitous Bay or the Pacific Ocean impacts to Marine habitat and species Coastal Recreation and other Coastal resources could be devastating therefore because the ability to effectively contain and clean up an oil spill does not exist at this time staff finds that the proposed project is inconsistent with the second requirement of the coastal act this was when bomb wanted was getting their permits to for oil production in the wetlands thank you thank you csip has not solved anything thank you thank you next speaker please [Applause] hi I'm Arlene Alvarado from the first district and uh I have been actively involved in the wetlands for for many years and I see this whole thing part of a capitalist system that exploits the land uh and it's explained in the environment especially with the oil my God uh we're having catastrophic temperatures right now and and we're still producing oil out of a Wetlands the last sea water Wetlands here in Long Beach tragic and as with noted you're going to build high-rises of seven stories when the law had previously said they could only do three there's another item here uh that I want to talk about it has a lot to do with renters and um the problem is you can't make money off of poor people and so we're going to have expensive seven-story buildings in a dangerous Zone and uh you guys are going to go along with it but your whole deal Neil debris who really believe that capitalism is going to be the answer when it's really going to be our destruction because we can no longer exist in the system exploiting Wetlands exploiting poor people it's you know our city is a sellout to developers and real estate and that's what I want to say thank you all right I think that concludes public comment members please cast your vote motion carries thank you I think we have a hearing number 19 next 18 is next great report from development services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record conclude the public hearing and find the project exempt from sequa declare ordinance amending and restating the Belmont Pier plan development district and ordinance amending the use District map from the Belmont Pier plan development District read the first time and later the next regular meeting of the city council for final reading adopt three resolutions approving a general plan Amendment to the local Coastal program element of the general plan amending the implementation plan land use map and authorizing director of development services to submit the LCP Amendment to the California Coastal commission District 3. thank you is there a brief staff report on this thank you vice mayor and council member price similar to the previous item uh we have a Patricia Defender for our planning Bureau manager is available for any questions we can provide information much like the previous item this is a matter that has been worked on for many years and concluded it's a local process it went to the coastal commission the coastal commission made changes and council tonight is asked to conform those changes while this matter does relate to the Belmont pool it's important to understand the item in front of you tonight has to do with the Zoning for the pool and not the design of the pool itself or financing of the pool or any of the other matters related to the pool so with that we're glad to answer any questions or provide a PowerPoint if necessary to you council member price well I I think on this one if you could go through the PowerPoint it does I know there's a lot of procedural changes so it may not be the most exciting one but there's a lot of public interest in itself absolutely so if we could get that up in the back no offense but your area of expertise is not of mass levels of Interest so by everyone of everyone so the technical well it's very technical good evening mayor vice mayor council members Patricia Defender for planning Bureau manager as was already described briefly this item is essentially a local Coastal program Amendment to amend the land use and text changes associated with the Belmont peer plan development District which is a pd2 and will complete the final legislative actions needed for the local Coastal program Amendment these amendments are the enabling legislation that are needed to facilitate the the Belmont Beach and Aquatic Center project no see having some trouble with the next slide please okay uh recent actions on the project have included the planning commission's approval of the changes to the pd2 ordinance uh the council's original adoption of those changes which occurred on January 21st of 2020 the adopted changes to the pd2 required an amendment to the local Coastal program which is a part which pd2 is a part of the local Coastal program and the local implementation program the coastal commission took action on the LCP amendments February of this year approving the LCP amendments with suggested modifications as was recommended to them by the coastal commission staff at that time the coastal commission also approved the coastal development permits for the pool adoption of the LCP amendments with suggested modifications must be completed before August of this year that is the deadline to return the conformed changes to the coastal Commission the coastal commission provided nine suggested modifications to the local Coastal program via amendments to the pd2 um the staff has incorporated all of those Coastal commission suggested modifications to bring pd2 the pd2 ordinance into conformance with the local Coastal program Amendment as Modified by the coastal commission they largely are modifications to clarify pd2 and LCP policies and to establish a pd2 development standards and clean up the ordinance the zoning associated with a sub-area within the pd2 area none of these amendments would adversely affect the the pool project or existing land use as businesses or residences specifically the suggested modifications included changes to the zoning map which is uh shown here as well as text changes this slide summarizes the zoning map changes which is a change that will revert one area of pd2 to its previous zoning of r4r a previous zone change to pd2 was not certified by the coastal commission so this just restores the zoning that has been in existence there for some time with the deletion of the previous sub-area 4 the the remaining sub-area is renumbered uh so sub area 5 becomes subario four and that is the those are the changes to the map uh the changes to the text bring the ordinance into consistency with the coastal commission policy and language that was previously certified by the coastal commission that is some clarifications to the public and Recreation access purpose for example and the standard of review for projects where among those changes so just to summarize the five local actions listed here are needed by the city council tonight to complete the local Coastal program Amendment which was previously approved by the city council they include pd2 zoning ordinance and text map changes General plan amendments to the local Coastal program to implement the coastal commission suggested modifications and a resolution to direct staff to resubmit these changes to the coastal commission for final certification these actions are exempt from SQL as are all actions related to the preparation or adoption of local Coastal programs this project also had a project eir and eir addendum that it teared off of and those also are in effect and analyze the environmental impacts of the project activities including these final legislative actions these legislative actions do not create any new significant environmental impacts that were not already analyzed in that eir and so no further SQL documentation is required noticing was done in accordance with requirements of the zoning code of the city and the coastal commission regulations and all previous commenters were notified all comments received on this matter tonight were forwarded to the city council prior to this hearing so just to sum up this slide just shows the actions that are before the council again approving a zoning code Amendment to the pd2 ordinance and tax approving zone change to the pd2 zoning map approving General plan amendments to implement text changes and map changes to the local Coastal program and adopting a resolution to authorize the director to resubmit these changes to the coastal commission that concludes the presentation and again we're happy to answer any questions you might have well thank you I'm going to go back to councilman price thank you Mr Mayor and thank you so much for that presentation I take it back it was totally very exciting and I really appreciate you putting it forth it this is a much more technical presentation on this project than we've had but I really do appreciate you going through it um I want to thank um all the Long Beach residents who have been involved in this project for years and in the appellants uh even though the appeal um was not successful at the coastal commission it did provide an opportunity for us to have meaningful discussion regarding the issues raised in the appeal and to work uh with on those issues to obtain a project that is is a lot more more mitigated than I think what was initially presented I want to give a special acknowledgment to my predecessor councilman Delong my former colleagues councilwoman's lowenthal and councilman O'Donnell who's now on the assembly who really fought very hard for this project before I ever took office and were supportive of this project and setting aside some of the initial funding I want to especially thank councilman uranga for his work on this item with the coastal commission I have the opportunity to attend that Coastal commission hearing and I have a new level of respect for him because of the amount of work that is required to weed through some of these very technical issues this one not excluded among those topics and really appreciate his thoughtfulness in listening and meeting with everyone on all sides of this issue I want to thank the coastal Commission because they have worked with the city staff who are the heroes of this project the city staff worked with the coastal commission all during 2022 I mean 2020 to really address all the concerns and come up with a project that is smaller in scope than initially contemplated but certainly something that everyone can live with and feels very comfortable with moving forward and especially I want to thank them for some of their programmatic opportunities and Outreach efforts to provide this as an access opportunity for everyone throughout the city and through the region this facility is going to be an incredible asset for both competitive swimmers as well as residents throughout the city who are of all ages it's a place where high school and Collegiate athletes will be able to learn and master their craft a place where seniors can take classes to stay active a place where children can come for simple recreation in the Splash Pools and kids of all ages can enjoy enjoy our beautiful city at a very low cost this has been a long time coming and I'm so glad to see that this project has has finally made it to this point where we've been successful at working with Coastal Commission on developing developing a project that's realistic and feasible given its location and the funding so I want to thank everyone who was involved especially our city staff especially our city manager who's been a champion for this project and I want to and our mayor our mayor has been a wonderful wonderful Advocate I can't I can't talk about this project without talking about his support for a prudent and mitigated project that would be acceptable to all those who are interested as stakeholders in this in this project so I want to urge my colleagues to support this item and thank you for the time thank you councilwoman we do have a motion in a second do we have public comment uh ma'am I'm calling for public comment thank you so much uh we have 10 speakers Lucy Johnson Joe Weinstein W McCormick actually I'm sorry we just need to please refrain from all that to folks come up and speak when times allowed to we'll call the first five speakers up go ahead Lucy Johnson Joe Weinstein Debbie McCormick Jessica Payne Anna Christensen please line up good evening mayor Garcia and council members I'm Lucy Johnson the resident of the fifth district and I've been a proponent of this pool for since 1968. here we are again it's been eight years and five months almost to the day since the city closed the original Belmont pool Belmont Plaza Olympic pool eight years and five months so just so very thankful that we finally got to this point that the project is approved by the coastal commission and that this is just a cleanup item technically to match up language in various parts of the coastal commission approval and the city's ordinances as they have been so we appreciate that hopefully this is the next to the last time we'll be back in front of you with the last time being hopefully when you approve the contract for the construction so thank you very much for all your efforts um City staff Chris Coons Eric Lopez Josh Hickman Susie price all the council members that have been supportive of this and and council member uranga for the efforts on the coastal commission itself thank you foreign like my colleagues in carp we support the idea more swimming and other Aquatics the problem with this project is not the goal it's the specifics in particular the utterly irresponsible choice of the project site choice of this site for the former pool was okay in the 60s because no one saw threats from Quakes liquefaction tsunamis sea level rise but now knowing what we do this is an idiotic side Choice the site Choice makes Long Beach a leader in climate denial just see Melinda commitment's cotton Melinda Cotton's submission to you the site as a result imposes huge extra costs of operation and construction so that instead of a typical cost for such a facility like 15 million which they did in Torrance this is supposed to cost 60 million more and give us a site that will be less functional less life less everything and it's all due apparently to a concept that tidelines funds are to be used and need be used only for luxuries and Extras and Nostalgia and never mind the people who are now going to depend on those funds to be spent for defense against sea level rise not for defense of a swimming pool which will be in the midst of a flooded neighborhood but for the defense of those neighborhoods themselves [Applause] can I go okay hi it's nice to see some of you again some of you I I have met some of you I have not I also have been coming here for eight years and five months um I'm very passionate about this project so I want to thank mayor Garcia Council you know Susie price and all the rest of you my name is Debbie McCormick and I'm the owner and head coach of the McCormick diving team in Long Beach I'm also on the board of the Aquatic capital of America foundation and a member of the Long Beach Century Club in 2019 you honored our team in these Chambers for celebrating 51 years of Excellence now it's 53. okay we are Beyond anxious for you to start digging that hole I realize there have been many delays due to frivolous lawsuits personally I feel that those losing lawsuits should pay all those costs since every delay cost the city thousands of dollars more once this pool is built it will bring a lot of excitement for the public and all water sport enthusiasts especially with the city-wide access and multiple pools for all of fun aquatic activities while the majority of time this facility will serve the community the few times that it is used for major events will attract millions of dollars in tourism every delay in starting this project is more time that Long Beach Clubs like mine has to spend traveling to different cities to rent their facilities with the Olympics coming up there will be a lot of kids dreaming of becoming an Olympian one day one of my former students started at the old Belmont pool and just won the Olympic trials so I want you to cheer for Brandon losiavo I just know that there's a lot of kids that might want to be an Olympian one day okay okay well chair for Brandon thank you so much Jessica Payne Anna Christensen and Cantrell and Corliss Lee please line up thank you council member price thank you for the whole Council for actually getting through this project my children were deeply involved with the Belmont pool for the last 12 and a half years of his existence they went to major colleges because of their experiences swimming and Diving there and it was invaluable for five years we actually lived in Sydney Australia and used that Olympic pool but the community use of that pool was what I want to bring up to you it was amazing with the swim the diving the water polo but also all of the community features that we are adding to this pool that brought people there and yes it was closed maybe three times a year mostly for TV and film use not for competitive use they could keep it open for the the community and run major competitions it was an amazing thing and every time I went there I thought about why couldn't our Long Beach pool be more like this now it's going to be and I thank you I'm very sad though that the next it'll be at least 12 and a half years since it closed before we have another Pool thank you for keeping to work on this very much and cheer for Brandon thank you next speaker Anna Christensen from The Long Beach area peace Network um we still maintain that this is a uh let's see what did we call it well White Privilege it's a Castle to White Privilege it's in the whitest wealthiest corner of town black lives matter apparently didn't really sink in uh I guess the coastal commission is going to expect you to buy a bus and throw a few dollars for some free lessons that's about it but it's not it's not going to do what the other thing we ask you to do as long as I'm sorry peace network is build pools build pools in everybody's Council District costs about 2 million bucks a pop it's not a lot the excuse that oh we don't have any money okay well let me just say this you just spent two and a half million dollars to maintain the Queen Mary for six months 23 hours for artificial turf in El Dorado Park and and one and when seven hundred dollars to rehabilitate a duck pond uh you know 200 million for the cops and uh 94 million for the fire department we can find two million dollars it's getting hot it's getting hot in the ninth it's hot in the first don't believe that every Elder is gonna make it down to the Belmont pool this is delusional and my my final remark is beat illusional on your own dime we gotta face reality here [Applause] and Cantrell speaking for carp and the Sierra Club Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust you are being asked to approve the finding that the project is exempt from sequa even if the LCP exemption applies it does not apply to the zoning Zone code changes or the general plan amendment that are necessary for the project as portions of this project are not exempt from SQL the entire project is not exempt from sequa in fact a new eir is needed to study the effects of removing the roof and that the effects of removing the roof will have on noise light and energy use will blowing sand clog the filtering system and the movable floor will the disabled and elderly be able to use an outside pool there's been no traffic study since Ocean Boulevard was calmed there is no plan for special event parking alternative locations have changed because the Jehovah Witnesses and the Queen Mary land are no longer being under lease lastly by moving the pool North and taking a public park and public right-of-way there is not only loss of parking nesting trees and disabled sidewalks there is a violation of the city ordinance 905 which states Parks will not be alienated unless replaced with a two to one ratio thank you so much [Applause] cordlessly Marlene Alvarado Hank wise Sam Simmons please line up okay Corliss Lee here the first point I'd like to make is a judge pointed out to us not long ago that imprudent spending is not illegal the second point is that there is no objection from carp on building an exotic swimming facility that will allow the competitive swimmers and divers to train the objection is to the location looking at what the the coastal commission put together where they had nine items and 24 pages of what needs to be accomplished before they can approve the CDP you see words that you would not see in building a normal pool and more stable ground you see words like plinth that's a sea wall you see a 10-foot walkway foundations to account for High Ground groundwater levels accommodate elevated liquefaction potential associated with high water levels Beach fill programs plans for how each Foundation element will be removed so before we've even built it we have to have a plan to remove it because it's in the path of sea level rise the Tideland funds will be gobbled up by this asset there was a list of hundreds of competing priorities for those funds and that list seems to have been discontinued but can reconstruction on the Belmont Pier is surely on that list every day replacement of lifeguard stations needs to be paid for imprudence all right next speaker please uh Marlene Alvarado I'm actually with language area peace Network and Democratic socialists of America this pool is really not a very worse thing to do it is going to be affected by sea level rise and uh so we we can nature but I mean look at Florida um 10 story building how many stories fell down because of the liquefaction I think this is not why I said all and another thing too is I don't think too many I kids and uh councilman Rich Rex Richardson's area or probably L Austin's area would be able to go down to the pool and enjoy it because they live too far away uh public transportation isn't that great and maybe they kind of need more proof in their own area um actually I learned how to swim in Lake Michigan and I didn't need a pool that's what I have to say difference good evening Council my name is Hank wise it's nice to be in front of you again I was here a little while ago when I accepted an award from you guys for my Catalina swim efforts of which I've done seven of them and uh thank you for that award I'd like to just I'm basically here to celebrate okay when when the pool passed the coastal commission with all your hard work especially Mr urangas uh I was just like I was over the moon and I still am over the moon this pool will be used by the whole city it'll be used by every age group it'll be used in so many capacities and I'm a head coach of a youth a youth swim team a lot of development and all that and then the adults I have an adult team as well but beyond all that the seniors The Aquatic aerobics like the water aerobics people the the the free swim the late afternoon people that come on in from all over town park in their cars and just coming on in and getting wet it just feels good to everybody so this pool is going to be used widely widely by everybody in the city it's going to be a hub it was a hub before and it'll be a hub again thank you so much for passing this pool I love it and I know so many people that love it too thank you thank you next figure please everybody my name is Sam Simmons a four um I'm here to talk about the pier and about the restoration Rejuvenation of the pier in this area um I'm a swimmer I'm also an avid ocean swimmer more importantly I'm an ESL teacher at a community college and I'd like to talk about how the pier helps them um so it's not only my life's work ESO but also in helping students understand the importance of our oceans and the animals in it my students come from all over the world from all kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds and languages many have no knowledge of the ocean many have never seen the ocean they may fear it we have an assignment where they read a book about a gray whale and an ocean swimmer and um in that assignment they have to go to the pier and they have to look out at the pier write what they see identify the animals of the peer many of them when they come back say it's a remarkable experience to experience the ocean from a pier many are too afraid to swim so the pier may be the only way that they're able to experience it at all the comments that I have gotten back from them have been all amazing in that that is how they are able to experience the ocean it is my belief that um the peer can help individuals do this it gives people a stake in helping to improve our oceans we can't heal what we fear or we don't know thank you thank you and that concludes public comment for this item thank you I want to um just say a couple comments and then we'll switch over to councilman price to wrap us up um Let me let me just also just add that I want to thank the just the staff again I think you guys have um we've been talking about this project for for a very long time and uh it's what I've I've supported from the beginning I think rebuilding a historical landmark a place that so so much of our community has been involved with since they were many of them kids and the Olympians that have come out of this facility and just uh I think joy that so many Long Beach families have had as being a part of this community has been really important for us to to be committed to uh to this project I also and I appreciate obviously and I understand there's been a lot of appeals and there have been a lot of court cases a lot of this has gone to trial um and on each of those occasions uh the uh the city has been able to move for the project forward and I think that's important to note that what's happened not just in the courts but also at the coastal Commission have to have reinforced why this project not only matters to our community but meets the rigorous requirements that especially the coast commission puts on projects of this magnitude and I will share and I think most folks know this the coastal commission staff and the commission having been a former Coastal commissioner myself put these projects through an incredibly rigorous process and so I feel confident that the coastal commission has blessed this project they have an incredible team of of climate scientists and environmental attorneys and staff that are committed to this work and to the the coast commission itself is a body that has also done great work and so I appreciate all of the coastal commission's work in getting us to this point I think we all would have loved for this to have gone uh by a lot faster um but uh grateful that we're here at this moment uh and obviously to you know to Lucy and a Debbie and and Hank and everyone that's just been involved in the process I just want to thank you for guiding the process as well because it has been I know a labor of love for all of you and it's and it matters to Long Beach and I think we made a commitment I certainly did councilman price certainly did and her predecessor before her to get this project completed and that's what we're going to do I also want to just note that I uh have met personally um kids from across the city that are excited to see the pool reopen and kids that that are now no longer kids that use the pool uh and are off doing other great things you know in in college or Beyond um and they're experience in connection to to the to that facility is really powerful and I know it means a lot to so many people so I'm glad that we're finally here I look forward to seeing uh shovels in the ground and getting this project started and I'm grateful to the courts the coastal commission and the city staff for every step of the way doing the right thing and moving this project forward in addition to that I also want to just add or that one thing that I think is also important is that you're working also on an equity plan and that Equity plan and I understand that this is something that is work being worked on with the coastal commission and will I believe go to the coastal commission at some point and so I think that that that's something that I think is is absolutely important and I'm really I'm really grateful and glad that we're moving forward on that plan as well to ensure that the pool is a pool that's accessible to everyone because I can tell you right now that the Advocates and those that have that have been meeting with me or talking to me about the pool they want the pool to be accessible to everybody that is I know our goal behind the dice and it's certainly the goal of Debbie's and and Lucy's and everyone else in the community is for it to be something for uh for the entire city so um I strongly support this project and I just want to personally again thank councilman price for being such a great Steward of and leader of getting us to this point as well and we'll continue to get it across the Finish Line councilman price add to that Mr Mayor thank you so we do have permanent pools in the city of Long Beach they're not in the Third District maybe City staff can tell us where are the permanent pools in the city of Long Beach so we have uh two other pools um we have three pools total we have the Belmont pool um we have a Martin Luther King Pool which is in the sixth district and we have Silverado pool which is uh in the Seventh District we also have access to some of the community pools uh I'm sorry the school district pools and we do some joint Partnerships with them at Cabrillo is another one uh in fact almost every pool I can think of that we have access to where we've done is in an area uh that is uh that is an equity area that is an area that is uh related to communities that need access to facilities and so the Belmont pool is the largest it's a regional pool and it serves the entire region and it's been located there ever since the voters approved it back in the 60s um so thank you Mr Modica and I I I'm super excited about the equity piece we just started the equity rowing program in the Third District last weekend was our first weekend and you know without going I don't want to violate any of the privacy of the kids but these are kids who would never have access to a program like growing because it's so expensive and cost prohibitive and they're participating in this in this program and we had a difficult time recruiting because some of the kids don't know how to swim and they needed to have some basic swim lessons to sign up for this Equity program um and so we want to make sure that that access is there for everyone and I think the coastal commission wanted that as well and I'm super excited about that piece I will say I was per I was moved by the comments of the coastal Commission I think the title is president or maybe chair I don't know his exact title and I don't have his words written down but they hear from all communities all over the state of California and at the end of the Belmont pool comment he made an observation that I thought was pretty profound and I got to give it to Anna christensen's been really the only one that's talked about this Equity issue from day one but in the beginning the conversation was let's not build this pool blocks the views the building is too high it should be in other parts of the city and the coastal commission president made a comment about it's interesting when you have residents from the community that is the proposed project site saying we don't want those people here that the whole idea of equity and integration is bringing people together in different communities and that's a way of exclusion to say let's keep the let's keep everyone separated so that we're not integrating I I said he said it a lot more articulately than I did but I thought it was a very hey guys please please we'll let's actually we're not going to have the the Outburst right now so thank you very much councilwoman price continue I thought that that was a very profound statement that he made because the idea of bringing people from throughout the region to different neighborhoods actually uh now that's not that's not uh yeah Miss Christensen Miss Christensen uh there was time there's there's time to talk I uh there's time for you to do comment now the councilman price has the floor councilman price thank you okay Miss Christensen thank you very much yep thank you very much ma'am I ma'am you cannot you cannot continue to do that we're going to continue the meeting councilman price so thank you so uh one of the things that I appreciated was the comment of if you build facilities throughout the city you get people from throughout the city going throughout the city right now we have people going to Cabrillo or MLK um or Silverado to to use our free rec classes and that will be the case in Belmont pool as well and um as councilman aranga said at the coastal commission if you build it they will come and I thought that was a really great statement that that's a way for us to get people to get on the ocean and to access the ocean and I thought that was a profound statement that someone else made that it was important to highlight so thank you thank you councilwoman councilman uranga thank you mayor and since there's quite a considerable considerable discussion about the coastal Commission on a border that I sit on I just want to give you a little bit of a historical perspective that when this item first came to the city council to review it to develop the plan and send it out I didn't vote for it because I didn't see an equity component to it and uh it was uh pass obviously and it went to the coast commission and I I really tried to emphasize to staff that we needed an equity element to it to ensure that uh kids from all over the city in the region for that matter had access to the pool because after all the the coast commission is about access and that's what we that's what we want to uh encourage and want to pursue so when it got to the coastal commission they heard out loud what what it was uh supposed to address and it did and when it came to the coastal commission and I had my in fact several Coastal Commissioners make that very same point that we needed to make sure that that coach commission uh permit in order for the city to get it that it would include an element of equity to ensure that kids and people from all over the region regardless of their background had access to the pool and a statement that I made was you know if because people were also talking about why are you building it here in the Third District in one of the the most highest rent districts in the city why don't you build it somewhere else where more people that have more access they go well that's segregation we need what's the matter with integrating the Third District that's where we need to do is we need to integrate the Third District by having people come to where no others can guys I please can we all you might find that funny you may find it hilarious you might think it's a it's a it's a non-sequitur but you know think about it think about it think about having people come to the beach where they haven't been able to come before because they're excluded because don't come to me to our area because we have a pool here build your own pools over there and you stay there that's not what this is about this is about Equity it's about fairness it's about everybody having access to a pool in Long Beach now if you're and if you disagree with that then you know what you have an issue with Equity with Equity so anyway uh just to uh just to finish this out thank you actually actually hold on one second you have the floor if you want to finish up just to close this out uh the past the coast commission unanimously well actually ten to one and it was it was a good project they thought it was everything that was that the commission has uh recommended to be included is here now and it's going forward and it's and it's going to be reviewed Again by the coastal commission this opportunity to speak uh thank you councilmember and then uh vice mayor Richardson and then we'll go to a vote thank you Mr Mayor I just want to chime in and so a couple things so one we have certain Assets in the city that are city-wide assets our Convention Center our Civic Center our airport our Port the Belmont pool is designed to be a city-wide asset now that does not mean that we cannot also invest in community pools I tend to agree I think there's value both ways I think the conversations on integration Center my mother integrated schools 50 years ago when she was in second grade those are you know those are powerful powerful statements I don't want to oversell it but I think there is something to be said about there is a pool at King there's a pool at Belmont there's a pool let me just let me just finish my statement there's a pool at King there's a pool on the west side there needs to be a pool in North Long Beach we have access limited access to a pool of Jordan um limited access but there is no City municipal pool in 90805 which has more children than any other zip code in the city so I would say yes on Belmont pool yes I'm investing in pools in north and Central and West Long Beach there are pools in Central and West there needs to be a pool in north and the facilities in Central West need to be improved so I would hope that in this this obviously keeps on coming up so I hope that staff is listening that there you don't have to I mean you've heard enough we need to be making these Investments next time there's a big Surplus in the state let's see some proposals about expanding pools into these other so those are those are some of the uh some of my thoughts here thank you thank you with that members please go ahead and cast your votes Vice May Richardson motion carries unanimously thank you uh next item is item number 19. report from development services this is the last hearing also recommendation to determine that the project is categorically exempt from sequa declare ordinance amending title 21 of the Long Beach municipal code to amend maintenance of low-income housing in the coastal zone read the first time and laid over to the next regular meeting of city council for final reading and adopt a resolution authorizing director of development services to submit amendments to the California Coastal commission Citywide Mr Modica for development services tonight Christopher Koontz will make this presentation good evening Mr Mayor and members of the council in January of this year we were in front of the city council regarding What's called the Mello act which is how we deal with affordable housing that is proposed for demolition in the coastal zone we presented an ordinance to the council at that time and Council had a number of comments and requested changes that were all positive changes we spent the month since that time working with staff working with City attorney and working with outside Advocates to refine the ordinance and we think we have it correct now per your instructions back in January so Patricia Defender for is going to walk us through those changes and what's now in front of the council good evening again mayor vice mayor council members Patricia devenderfer as a deputy director Christopher Coons said this item was before you on in January of 19th of this year at that time based on comments from the public Council instructed staff to make revisions to the ordinance and that is the ordinance that is before you this evening it incorporates those revisions and I will describe them a bit later in the presentation just to provide some background again state law adopted in 1981 known as the Mellow act requires replacement of affordable housing that is demolished in the coastal zone it allows payment of in-lu fees as an alternative to providing on-site replacement of units in 1988 the city adopted its mellow act ordinance to implement the state law and establish the in-lu fee the city has adopted 2014-2021 housing element the current housing element identified updating the Mellow act as a a program to pursue and to update the in lieu fees while the city has not collected any mellow in Luffy's in the area because no projects have triggered it the fee is being updated at this time has previously noted okay the draft ordinance has been revised per Council instruction to better align the proposed mellow act amendments with adopted inclusionary housing and no net loss ordinances proposed fee schedule is based on the market study of current development in addition to updating the fees the zoning code Amendment removes exemptions for single-family houses duplexes and accessory dwelling units which are commonly among the things that are demolished in the coastal zone Planning Commission did approve the recommendations and recommended that Council approve this these amendments October of last year this slide shows the the revised in Lou fee schedule which varies based on the number of bedrooms and the affordability level of the unit these fees will be tied to the construction cost index to ensure that fees escalate when the index increases to keep up with the cost of the increases in cost of construction the changes that were made since the January ordinance that was before you are described on this slide here um both rent and tenant income will be considered in establishing replacement UniFi unit affordability level uh this ordinance will pilot that approach the revision eliminates alternative ways to comply with the affordable unit replacement requirement such as Rehabilitation or conversion of existing units to Affordable or off-site units those will not be permitted to count toward replacement requirements units to count towards replacement requirements will have to be constructed on site where applicants will have to pay the in-lu fee replacement units have to be at the same or greater levels of affordability the revisions further ensure that the in-lu fee maintains Pace with construction costs and the affordability covenants remain for the life of the project public Outreach was conducted on this project and and noticing in accordance with code requirements the proposed zoning code amendment is exempt from sqa foreign the actions before Council this evening are to determine that the project is categorically exempt from sqa to adopt an ordinance amending the chapter 2161 to limit exceptions to the requirements to replace affordable units and to modify the in-lu fees in the coastal zone of the city and to adopt a resolution authorizing the director of development services to submit the amendments to the California Coastal commission for its review approval and certification that does conclude the presentation and staff is available to answer questions I think you have a motion in a second I think we have two members of the public yeah Abraham Zavala and Sanai kenfei please come to the podium good evening city council um I just had to answer a call for my babysitter so I'm a little distraught let me gather myself it's been a long night um I want to urge city council to adopt this current ordinance the Mellow ordinance as one critical tool to address the city's desire or the dire affordable housing needs that we have specifically we support the following provisions of the ordinance that was recognized from February 2021 first point uh the alignment with inclusionary housing and no no net loss ordinances the requirement that affordable replacement units be provided at the same or Depot affordability level the requirement that affordable units be provided as net new units so that Rehabilitation or subsidy of existing units is not permitted the prohibition of op-site compliance for construction of affordable units so that all affordable units must be built on site or developers developers can pay the in-lu fee we also agree with the extension of affordability covenants for new affordable units to 55 years or for the life of the project whichever is longer and lastly we also agree with the inclusion of a pilot program to monitor the implementation of affordability requirements that are defined by looking at both the rent and income levels of tenants so once again we strongly urge you and maybe I'd introduce myself because I was so frazzled in with the babysitter call my name is Abraham Zavala and I'm with Long Beach residence empowered a group that's part of the housing Justice Coalition and we as a coalition support these amendments and hope you adopt them thank you sixth district I just want to say you know I respect all the seniors that were getting you know a little irritated there but with respect to the king's pool there was a shuttle coming from Belmont Shore during the covid bringing people to swim at King's pool that never swam there before in my 30 plus years I was flying at Silverado Fairfield YMCA Kings pool the YMCA that was used to be on 7th Street never swim at Belmont Shore so let's just get back to reality the reality of today has miss Patricia ma'am I don't know how to say your last name I'm trying to be respectful I I did read the about 80 pages of the 861 page uh report that you guys have available on your pit on your your your site with respect to this I think that you know we had a very spirited land use element debate for quite some time and uh the the years have come up and we're going to have some State mandates coming with regards to affordable housing and as you said it's 2500 units expected to come with this development I personally uh you know I don't really try to speak with regards to districts I don't live in um but with regards to overall the city and the housing mandates that are going to come from the state down you know I do have to speak to the fact that seems a lot of the development for affordable housing is is connected towards the blue line and the transit Hub Court corridors and uh so it's important that when moments like this come about that we support of affordable housing units and other districts besides City six eight and nine so I'm all in favor of this ordinance I just want to be mindful that we have a realistic relationship with the development of affordable housing units in the area so if there's 2500 maybe there you know we can get like I don't know like 15 you know I don't know what mandates that the locally you guys are allowed to do but it would be nice because um I don't want a tidal wave of pressure to be put on proper small property owners in the Third District which would then propel them to move uh further west maybe into the fourth district which would then Propel another housing crisis of some sorts that would then get picked up by the other districts and Company so thank you I think you'll have councilman Allen yes thank you mayor the Mellow was long overdue for an upgrade and I agree with you uh Abraham this is a critical tool I want to thank the staff for their work on this and for further revising the ordinance to incorporate additional changes I strongly support this ordinance and was pleased to see that it mirrors our inclusionary housing and no net loss policies more closely it ensures that we continue to have affordable housing options and that our coastal zones remain accessible to everyone so thank you very much and vice May Richardson thank you Mr Mayor just want to say first congratulations to the community Advocates who spoke up very clearly over the course of the past year but more specifically at the beginning of this year and talked about the needs to improve our mellow act and make sure it aligns like councilman Allen said with our inclusionary housing policy I want acknowledge City staff I think they got the scalping out scalpel out they said we're going to listen to you we're going to make this work and what what's presented from us received a very strong letter of support from the community and I think that's a testament to the good work that our development services team does and so overall this is a great ordinance and I look forward to voting for it tonight thank you councilman Zenday house thank you mayor I also would like to um congratulate all the community Advocates that have pushed this through I think that is it's very well done thank you staff for all the hard work that you've been doing working with the community also would like to thank the previous Council that did a lot of work on this even before I got on board but I'm really excited to support this item tonight thank you thank you uh we have a do we have any public comment on this I think we just did it correct yeah so um we have a motion and a second please cast your votes motion carries eight zero thank you we do have um uh so we're now completed with the three hearings we're going to the regular agenda I want to note that we do have a good group of folks here for the substantial remodel items so I do want to hear that item I know it's towards the end of the agenda we should hear that early however if we don't mind there are some folks here for the Ada item so I'm going to just move item 24 right now I know some of those folks want to be able to speak and then after 24 we're going right into item 30. item 24 communication from councilwoman price councilwoman Zendejas councilwoman Allen recommendation to request city manager to work with the parks recreation and marine department to report back in 30 days on the feasibility of a pilot Ada beach access mat at Granada Beach ramp councilman price thank you Mr Mayor thank you to the community members who have worked with my staff on this topic in particular Kim Wong and dika McLean this item is one that I'm super excited about for us to have here in Long Beach despite significant efforts by the city to ensure that all Long Beach residents feel welcome and have access to All City facilities and resources one area is not yet accessible to everyone our wonderful beaches are not accessible to Residents with Mobility limitations our sandy beaches present a difficult access hurdle for residents using wheelchairs Walkers or other Mobility related support with the goal of allowing all residents to have access to our Coastline the city should evaluate the feasibility of developing a pilot Ada beach access mat at Granada Beach lawn or other location that the city staff might recommend to better understand the opportunities impacts maintenance and products available with the goal of developing an ADA beach and park access program throughout the city the recommendation for Granada Beach comes from the makeup of Granada Beach and that it's already a launch and has a lot of paved area already which would allow for Wheelchairs and Walkers and other devices that can't Traverse the sand to have a further distance to go on the concrete before the mat would be rolled out to go to the water so I want to ask my Council colleagues for their support of this item it is long overdue frankly I'm ashamed that we didn't bring this item earlier it to me this is a no-brainer that we should have thought about earlier and I'm so grateful that we are now in the place where we can bring it thank you councilman Zendejas thank you mayor but a big and special thank you to council member price for agendizing this item we live in such a diverse and beautiful city that continues to grow and continues to be a leader in so many areas such as ensuring accessibility in City facilities and resources to um yet for years we as a city shamefully have discarded the fact that people with Mobility limitations and other disabilities have not been able to enjoy the main feature of our city which is the beach so I'm extremely supportive of this pilot program that will begin to change that and will ensure that everyone not just someone or some of our residents but everyone will be able to live work and play in their own City I had the personal experience of of having access to the beach all the way in Malibu because of uh wheelchair accessible map that was there and um I Just Want to Thank The Advocates my fellow Disability Advocates for reaching out and making this need known to us the council and and really stressing how important it is for us to be able to include everyone and for everyone to be able to enjoy our beaches here in Long Beach thank you councilwoman councilman sorrow thank you mayor I also want to thank council member price for bringing this item forward and Council memberson day has and Alan for signing on I really want to thank our Advocates um Kim as well as decas and many other who have been advocating for accessibility in our city and I agree that it's just long overdue and and so glad that we're able to you know that this item's brought forwards for us to do a feasibility studies to ensure that we increase accessibility in our city thank you thank you councilwoman Allen yes I also want to thank councilwoman price for bringing this item forward I think having access is so important and I've wanted to see expanded access on Ada access to our beaches for a long time especially that goes all the way to the water not just to like where the Lifeguard towers are I have spoken to City staff and with members of our citizens advisory Commission on disabilities about the need for this and I announced that I would be supporting such expanded access back in June starting with the pride Tower so I just look forward to greater access at Granada Beach and to all our beaches and just thank you so much councilwoman price and Zendejas and um also silly for bringing this forward thank you and then just before we start public comment I just want to also certainly thank everyone um uh that's that's bringing this forward but especially I want to thank all The Advocates I I know that I see um just Kim and and dika and so many others that uh you've been advocating whether it's been through the commission or just as advocates not just for this project but also for so many other uh projects as it relates to accessibility and making sure that we are accessible uh for everyone whether it's playgrounds whether it's beach access whether it's fixing infrastructure so I just want to personally thank you all again for all that work would not be happening without all of you and then let's go ahead and call public comment Gretchen Swanson and Kim vong please line up I want to make sure before I speak I think you mispronounced my name so you were trying to call Deke McLean correct yes sorry about that thank you I feel like my name has been mentioned quite a bit so I don't know if I need to come up here okay good evening my name is dika McLean I'm a former citizens advisory Commission of disabilities share person I've served for eight years on Cape Cod and I'm very very happy to see the council finally taking action on making beaches more accessible this was an issue that had been discussed and recommendations were written about it years ago but I want to make emphasis this discussion started in 2017 and it was discussed in at least three or four meetings of Cape Cod in one of those meetings our honorable mayor Garcia was there thank you thank you mayor and city council for supporting Beach accessibility in the installation of a moby mac at the district three-bit Beach last week you passed the cities for all Global initiative so not so let's not just talk the talk but walk the walk let this be a beginning for a more accessible and inclusive Long Beach that includes not only beaches at the waterfront but also our parks in public spaces all means all this is a necessity I see the mobile mat as the first of many steps not the only step it is no longer enough to just be do the minimum to just be ADA Compliant we need to expand the conversation in action to make our city more occlusive and accessible we need actionable items like these I end by saying this James Baldwin said it best not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced and today councilman honorable mayor today is the day we are facing you today with this issue we invite you to face the issue with us and always remember as it is said in our disability Community nothing about us without us thank you [Applause] Nubia Forest I think Kim's going to go next it's okay [Music] [Music] good evening honorable mayor and council members my name is and I live in the second district I also am a member of the citizens advisor Commission on disabilities for the city a couple of months ago I saw a post on the new beach playground I was the person who brought the need for more accessible equipment at the playground and an access mat on the beach to enable the people with disabilities and to be able to get to the water safely and comfortably foreign experience illustrates this problem I am an adult with cerebral palsy and I use a weird Walker for Mobility I have lived on the beach in Long Beach for 11 years and during that time I have never been able to get to the water on my own because I can know to use my Walker in the sand there are numerous beaches in Los Angeles County that provide access mats this spring the county unveiled its latest mat at Venice Beach in Orange County Huntington Beach recently began providing an access mat for beachgoers the cost of the man would depend on the distance but judging from the company websites it probably is a cost only a few thousand dollars foreign Ed up and stored when the beach is not open and they is remanufactured using durable materials that would provide many years of use according to the U.S census seven percent of the city population under age 65 has a disabilities and 11 of the population is age 65 or older since many of these residents have mobility issues providing a beach access map would be an investment that would benefit potentially thousands of residents and visitors to the city as well in addition to benefiting people with disabilities Z parents with young children would benefit as well of each mat can provide additional safety for a parent holding their young children as the sand is difficult to walk in it also would enable them to use strollers and other wheeled equipment more easily I feel that an access map can be a benefit to everyone that wants to enjoy the beach I hope you will support installing to access Beach mats in Long Beach people with disabilities Don teon live in Belmont and they may not be able to get to that beach using public transportation which many of them rely upon I would like to also request an access beach mat in the Alameda speech area thank you Kim let me take off my security blanket good evening mayor and City Council Members my name is Nubia Flores and I'm a proud District 9 resident and I'm chairperson of the citizens advisory Commission on disabilities I'm here to ask I'm here to speak in support of agenda item number 24. as the item reads now that in 30 days you will receive a report back on the feasibility of implementing accessible Beach Pathways to the water for our residents that require Mobility support like Wheelchairs and Walkers I would implore I would implore you to please also lay out actionable and Swift steps to have Mobility mats at our beaches as soon as possible these are long overdue and already in use in our neighboring cities I would also ask that you install these Beach mats in at least three of our beaches at least one in each of the waterfronts that cover districts one two and three we cannot just take into consider we cannot just take into consideration improved accessibility at the beach we must also consider public transportation and our most accessible walkways to these waterfronts take into consideration the travel time and accessibility for a resident of North Long Beach to Belmont Shores let's not just keep being about the minimum let's offer options give residents choices we know VR Cape Cod Commission that we have approximately 47 000 residents that identify as having as a disability from children to seniors last week you adopted the cities for all Global initiative a pledge that and directive to make public spaces accessible and inclusive the pandemic has showed us the importance of outdoor spaces like our parks and our beaches as we continue to make our way back to community let's take action and Make spaces like our beaches as accessible as possible and do it with urgency thank you for taking this first step and thank you council member price for leading this initiative thank you to the council members who have taken the time to meet with us Commissioners and listen to the recommendations from our commission we're in this together let's get this done for our residents of Long Beach thank you thank you so much and thank you to the commission again for all the great work there is a motion in a second on the items Swanson oh I'm sorry yep how many more public comments do we have that concludes public would that concludes public comment did you call another name she's not here okay all right so then let's go ahead and uh take a vote please councilwoman Mungo vice mayor Richardson motion carries [Applause] thank you uh we're gonna hear item uh 30 please which is the substantial remodel report from City attorney recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to termination of tenancies due to substantial Remodel and declaring the urgency thereof read the first time and laid over the next regular meeting of the city council for final reading Citywide I need a motion please I need a second thank you uh we'll go ahead and do public comment first please Catherine dioma Abraham Zavala Tamara Romero Karen okinawian can you please line up at the podium my name is my name is Kate dioma I appreciate all the hard work you have done on this ordinance but it does not protect those of us most immediately at risk I have communicated to you all my arguments countering the vested rights issue upon which any liability concerns are based I am convinced by current law and precedent that the council has the right to revoke permits already issued to remodel occupied units but I'm not asking you to revoke the permits I do request that you strike through the words quote on or after July 6 2021 end quote on page 3 line 19 of the proposed ordinance and allow all tenants at current risk of eviction for substantial remodel to be protected through December 31st removing the restriction and extending protections to all tenants is no more of a liability risk than the current temporary moratoriums in effect this ordinance does not include the permanent prohibition proposed to replace it after a renovation Administration program can be created so the date restriction only affects the temporary moratorium removing it would give Council staff and stakeholders five months to research and negotiate what terms may or may not be legally applied to existing permit holders under a new renovation Administration you have the ability to make that edit and proceed with passing the remaining ordinance today without creating an irrevocable situation that will put Long Beach families in the streets on December 1st right in time for the holidays thank you good evening uh council members uh so for my time I'm going to read Jesse Alcala a tenant that is with Liberty who who's in District Six I want to read uh his statement he had to leave to to feed his daughters also had an issue with the babysitter um but I'll read it nonetheless so it says good evening my name is Jesse Alcala I am a tenant in District Six I am a single parent raising daughters I work in the food service industry I've been on the front line during the pandemic to the present tonight I want to urge council members to adopt item 30. attendance like myself thank you for voting on this item last week however Council must think about their decision to exclude tenants with existing sub remodel notices many families will be evicted if you do not take action in some way I implore you to make the choice tonight to protect all tenants especially the ones with existing notices thank you thank you hi Long Beach city council and Long Beach City attorney my name is Tamara Romero and I am a district 2 Resident and organizer with Long Beach Tenants Union I'm here today to demand that a retroactive eviction moratorium for tenants who received evictions or unlawful detainers through the substantial remodel loophole be amended to be included in the emergency ordinance that will be voted on today within amendment to create the establishment of a renovation Administration program thank you [Applause] miles Paisley Aura Velasco Aurelia Ortega can you please line up I'm Karen okanion I'm a 40-year resident of Long Beach I've lived in nine different neighborhoods um I've been a renter for these 40 years I'm so happy that Mr Mayor and esteemed council members that you are considering passing this ordinance but the only question that I have the only concern that I have is uh line um let me find my notes is uh page three line nine um regarding the um the beginning of well let me refer to Kate um she said that uh she's looking she's concerned about uh July 6 through the December 20 December 31st I'm sorry I'm very nervous um that would that would really put people who have already been given eviction notices in a very bad situation um you've done a lot to continue to maintain and uh and hold forth low-income housing I know five other residents all of which are um are targeted for eviction as well and they're all disabled I think that you really need to pull that line from the ordinance but the ordinance is fabulous it's really terrific it's going to help a lot of people but I think you need to give temporary um protection to people who are presently under eviction for this kind of um sub this kind of remodel thank you for your time [Applause] hello I'm here to uh read for Aurelio Ortega who just left um uh to care for her children um hello my name is Aurelia um Ortega of District Six with the orange resistance I am a mother of four and I'm here to ask you all to support a retroactive moratorium for substantial remodel evictions we know that the city attorney's legal opinion uh has all the power to really protect us and we hope that you all go against that legal opinion that you were told at the last council meeting and uh go with the legal opinions that many of your Council offices have heard through other attorneys who really emphasize their work in protecting tenants my son my son's birthday was today and we are here uh fighting to give him um adequate housing and to show him to fight for his rights so that he lives a dignified life with respect thank you for supporting this item thank you foreign my name is Aura Velasco and I am from the orange persistence [Music] may not moratoria resurrective substances I am here to ask you please to help us um to stop these evictions due to this um remodeling situation that is happening right now and regarding the moratorium the foreign to protect us but we need you we need your faith in order to protect us from your offices followers [Music] and then you have to have faith in the attorneys that are united working for us because their opinions their legal opinions are the ones that are protecting us from the attorneys from the city we're doing this for our own rights and for our own children gracias thank you [Applause] Jesse Alcala Marlene Alvarado please line up the podium today in solidarity with tenants of Long Beach California who are facing violent eviction because of the substantial remodel loophole in the city's just cause eviction ordinance as drafted the emergency ordinance for substantial remodel reform does not include a retroactive eviction moratorium the exclusion of a retroactive moratorium leaves many families who have received eviction notices and unlawful detainers vulnerable to the violence of eviction the council should motion to amend the ordinance to extend the moratorium back to the initial passage of the Just Cause eviction ordinance the city possesses vastly greater resources than the tenants and receipt of eviction notices and unlawful detainers and should expend these resources in defense of Working Families the recommendation to not include a retroactive moratorium in this emergency ordinance comes from the office of Charles Parkin who in their one opposed run for office in 2014 received thousands of dollars from developers in real estate management companies due to this I perceive that we need to question the city attorney's capacity to provide an impartial recommendation regarding a retroactive moratorium you need a marginal City resources to protect hundreds of families from eviction so motion to amend the ordinance to include a retroactive moratorium [Applause] good evening my name is Alia Sheikh and I'm a community organizer with LA voice we are a multi-racial multi-faith organization spanning dozens of congregations throughout Los Angeles County including several here in Long Beach people of faith in our community are calling on you to close the substantial remodel loophole that landlords have exploited to begin eviction proceedings upon tenants exacerbating the housing crisis we need a retroactive moratorium so that no families are pushed out of their homes we hope that you all make the right decision and stand on the side of renters thank you Jesse Alcala Marlene Alvarado and Karen Harper my name is Marilyn Alvarado I'm with Democratic socialists of America and Long Beach area peace Network and I used to be an ESL teacher and I remember once I thought we were studying uh you teach it's called survival English and we were coming Upon A renters so um I told them they I told myself they had a certain amount of Rights legal rights so I this one woman said well my house is infested with cockroaches and it needs a lot of repairs I said well you have the legal right to do this so she went and she told her landlord that she could that she had the right to do this well he fixed it all up and increased her rent and she couldn't afford it and um granted this is not exactly what is happening with the new law that can kick people out but it's still the same kind of human tragedy that's happening with this restriction I really highly recommend that you ah extend the more the moratorium and look at the human beings that are suffering uh who are hard-working people because I've taught them thank you [Applause] my name is Karen Harper greetings to the mayor and the council people I'm with the Long Beach area peace Network a coalition of groups working on social economic environmental justice and we also are advocating for figuring out a way to prevent evictions of those folks that had the remodel permits but the work has not begun please figure out a way to protect them too thank you so much for your work we're really impressed with this ordinance and what it will do to protect people thank you that concludes public comment thank you there's a motion in a second councilman Allen in the comments yes just real quickly um I just want to say thank you to all the folks and for all your comments and your support with this item I also want to thank the staff and the City attorney for their work on this and for everyone's engagement throughout this process I know we have we're concerned throughout the process about the residents who have received eviction notices under previously issued permits and last week I know that we all ask in the motion for the city staff to report back on what the city can do to support these residents so Mr Modica I do have a question for you do you know when we can expect to have that report back uh good evening uh council member Allen members of the council uh so uh that initial report back will be within 30 days of your first uh hearing which was a week ago um and then I just want you and the members of the public to know um you know we we're sending out several million dollars of um rental assistance so that is one program but we also participate in the counties State housed La program which provides eviction defense services to tenants and that program is available to anyone who received an eviction notice and there is a website stay housed la which is where you sign up for that program so we'll be putting that in some other information in the report back but that is a service that's available immediately to those that may have received a notice addition finally if it's other landlord tenant issues repairs not being made harassment other issues and we have a contract with the Long Beach fair housing foundation and those services are available today and always to any tenants that may be in in those situations and we'll be putting that in more in that report back which will be in the next 20 days or so thank you very much um I do appreciate I appreciate all the efforts I know that that's really important I also really quickly want to recognize councilman sorrow for her partnership and for all the co-signers and colleagues that supported this last week the ordinance we see today is the first step in addressing the systematic issue and I'm really proud of the unanimous support that was received on this item and I look forward to the results of stakeholder meetings and to seeing the recommendations thank you very much thank you councilman sorrow yeah I just want to add on to the thanks to the organizers Advocates and tenants for sharing your stories and I think working so hard to ensure that tenant rights are protected and also the City attorney as well as development services for all your help and especially so council member Allen's leadership steadfast leadership and hard work on the item as well as the cosigners for supporting thank you thank you there is a motion on a second please cast your votes this item requires yes this is the first one the first vote will be on the urgency and the second vote will be on the ordinance thank you councilman Mungo motion carries eight zero thank you and the second we'll get a motion in a second please also for the second vote okay I have a motion a second for that vote and please cast your votes on that one motion carries eight zero okay great thank you very much that concludes item 30. we are now going to go back to the regular agenda and we will do item 35 next item 35 communication from councilman sorrow recommendation to approve the expenditure of 5000 and the general fund group as a reward for information leading to the identification and conviction of the individuals responsible for the desecration of Martin Luther King Jr statute on July 2nd 2021. councilman sorrow thank you mayor first I want to thank the Anti-Defamation League for offering 3 000 in addition to our 5 000 for finding out and catching the person or people who've committed this just awful hateful act and I just want to share this is one of the steps we're taking to take the demonstrate the seriousness of this act in addition to ensuring that we're getting up-to-date cameras installed at the park as well as making sure that we continue to honor the statue by looking into how we can better polish and better take care of the statue the other thing I want to mention that is also thinking lbpd for their assistance in continuing to communicate and work with our community on the ground as well and and I just want to share that you know this is um it's not only urgent that we address this hateful act but that we recognize you know there are many in equity issues that we need to address in the park and the surrounding area but most importantly how we continue to build Unity through ensuring that we create events that brings people together right it's been a challenging year due to covet that we've not been able to come together but I look forward in working with our community members to bring our various you know black community to our Latinos African-American as well as our Caucasian Community together so that we're able to ensure that we're promoting Unity as well as just getting to know each other to ensure that we just decreased a division that you know has occurred through various um you know through the pandemic and others so just want to make sure that we constantly speak about how great Long Beach diversity is but I want to make sure that we also work towards celebrating and ensuring we do education and of each other's culture and Heritage and and so forth so I look forward in doing that as a new council member of the area to bridging any divide that we continue to have thank you I also want to thank council member Rex Richardson vice mayor Richardson as well as council member Austin for supporting the item as well thank you vice mayor Richardson thank you just just briefly there aren't a whole lot of things that City councils uh a whole lot of tools that we have uh outside of offering a reward occasionally we step forward and we do that we have done some had some success with that so I want to thank councilwoman sorrow for offering up uh this this uh reward and it's in addition to the Anti-Defamation League um we've seen success in the past and this is an appropriate step if you want to help support an investigation in addition to of the efforts that our city manager is leading and that our police chief is leading and so I think this is an appropriate step and I'm happy to support it thank you thank you I'm gonna before I turn over to councilman's day house I just want to just add um I want to obviously just again uh just condemn uh this uh what was a absolutely uh both a racist horrible disgusting act on our Martin Luther King statue in King Park and again uh just note that this is a especially offensive and hurtful to the black community and to all those that respect and love uh Dr King's message um uh uh and that resonates not just in our community but but across the country in the world I also just want to thank I think I want to thank the Long Beach Police Department for I know that they're they're actively investigating this it is it obviously was a hate incident and a hate crime and it's being investigated as such and I want to thank the councilman sorrow and the and the members of the council for supporting moving forward with this reward and and the ADL for stepping up also to add to uh the reward as well so it is going to be important that we um continue to work to catch whoever or or the persons or person that committed uh these crimes let me also just add I think it's also important Mr Modica as I'm talking to some folks I know that we are we have already obviously made some adjustments to uh to the cameras just to put some fixes in place and we're looking at some lighting but I think what I'd like to see and maybe that's something you can put together and I know I think you're already working on is some kind of definitive timeline so that we can actually share with the community this is when the camera system will be complete and this is when the lighting will be complete so if there is a firm Target date that we can actually share with the community I I know that um councilman sorrow also wants a firm timeline so I just want to make sure we publicly ask for that and if you can let us know whether we have a date now or maybe you can get us a date just sometime in the next week or so that you think we can get these things finished yes you can certainly share a timeline for the whole project uh the rewiring of the camera that is focused on the Statue is already complete so that was done immediately and rewired and they created a system there the rest of the closed circuit system needs to be replaced and that's being prioritized and we can provide a general timeline great um and then I guess you'll do that you'll do that to us in like a memo format that we can get that information out sure great thank you um and then with that councilman Zenday house thank you this was an act of utter disrespect and hatred none of which represents the City of Long Beach as a whole we are a city of unity inclusion and love we do not stand for anything incited by or Affiliated by hatred and I want to applaud council member sorrow for her immediate response to this crime and everyone in the community who came together to reject this message of hatred and uplift a message of strength and unity Dr Martha Luther King Jr was not only a champion for social justice and unity during his time but continues to be a leader for many of us today in the sense that his actions his words and his legacy live on in our hearts today thank you so much council member sorrow for this and for the reward I I encourage everyone to participate in this reward to participate in this investigation if you know anything it is it is very important that we put a stop to these hatred hatred messages thank you councilman Allen thank you mayor I also want to say thank you to councilman sorrow for bringing this item forward this was just absolutely the right thing to do and we need to show our community that this hateful act this hateful crime is completely unacceptable and we have to do everything in our power to catch those responsible Mr Modica I do have a question so the cameras were down when this uh when this crime happened and their new cameras are going up there are there systems in place that we know if this camera is tampered with or destroyed or not working in the future um I don't know for that specific system I'm not the technical expert on that uh we do monitor our cameras regularly uh we had mentioned some information to you before a couple years ago our cameras were only at about 60 to 70 percent um operational uh Council put a lot of investment into that and as of last week we had 94 operational so this happened to be one that was down uh there were other cameras in the park that were working but they weren't actually focused on the Statue so um but I can ask the question about do we have automatic triggers that let us know if they go down when they do go down it requires investigation and ordering parts sometimes it does take some time to to replace them or even if uh cameras are you know vandalized for any reason and they're not operating properly it would be a good thing to know thank you thank you uh councilman price mayor and thank you councilwoman Sarah for bringing this forward um I wonder and I I think this is an incredible act to try to identify the perpetrator of this we just did this in my day job with the freeway shooter um a shooting that resulted in the death of a six-year-old boy on the freeway and I know that the reward kept growing because the County Board of Supervisors put some money in and then a lot of other people did so I'm just wondering I think the higher the reward goes the more likelihood that someone will turn in the perpetrator and I'm wondering if there's any way we could talk to the Board of Supervisors or other entities to see if they could add on to this reward to try to get the likelihood of someone being TR someone turning in I don't know what kind of leads we have but probably not appropriate for the police department to talk about that at this point but I do know that as the reward number went up the tips that came to our office went up as well and so to the extent that the city can help facilitate out and see who other interested parties may be to help add on to this reward I think the likelihood of identifying the perpetrator will increase so I think it's a great item and and I really do hope that the perpetrator is caught and held to the held accountable to the fullest extent of the law which really isn't enough and under these circumstances I think we would all want the full extent of the law to be implemented so thank you thank you councilwoman is there any public comment on this item there's one public comments and I can't fave I just want to say thank you to the office of the of our councilwoman uh Dr suly sorrow for leading the initiative with respect to offering a reward um as a councilwoman prices stated I think when a financial incentive is involved uh usually someone is turned in as a member of Massachusetts which is just a block away from this park I pray that The Long Beach Police Department finds you because we are looking for you that being said um thank you everyone for taking this as serious of nature as it is and and we appreciate the timeliness of this all and we'll be looking for that member uh Mr Modica thank you thank you and that concludes public comment okay so we have a motion and a second uh please cast your votes councilwoman price motion carries eight zero uh next item is going to be item 21 please communication from councilwoman price councilwoman Zendejas councilman supernaw council member uranga recommendation to request city manager to work with the city clerk to report back on the feasibility of allowing for telephonic public comment to be available at City Council meetings councilmember price thank you um I I want to just highlight that some of the residents who were here earlier advocating for the accessibility on the beach item we're also here for this item and I shared with them that I would let the public know that they were here but they couldn't wait um as long as it took for this item to come forth and I did commit to them that in the future when we have Ada items will try to move them to the Top If we could and that I would say that publicly because they asked me to say that um I'm very glad to be bringing this item before the city council as we look at way ways of making participation in Council meetings it's accessible for everyone throughout the covid-19 emergency there have been Creative Solutions to follow State restrictions around public Gatherings and social distancing we've seen the availability of remote public comment provided by telephone become an incredibly useful way of offering greater access and accommodations for everyone to have a voice and participate in the important discussions facing our city as we move back to holding in-person City Council meetings it's important that we ensure our public comment process is available to everyone this should include individuals with disabilities for whom attending Council meetings and providing public comment in person can be difficult as well as residents who are simply unable to attend the meetings in person due to work or school schedules Transportation needs child care the time needed waiting looking for their item to be called or other reason that may constrain someone from attending a meeting in person or present some other substantial hardship it's important that we fully evaluate the feasibility of continuing the use of telephonic remote access to City Council meetings our city council discussions and the policies of our city are improved when everyone has the ability to participate in our meetings and provide their public comment whether they can be present physically in the city council chambers or if they prefer to participate remotely by telephone due to physical or other limitations that make in-person presence difficult so I asked my colleagues to support this item and I'm hopeful that the city manager can come back to us with a recommendation that feasibly works with the limited budget that we do have to allow for Access even though that access may not be as robust and and as detailed as it was during the covid-19 pandemic when no other option to attend meetings was present some type of telephonic access can hopefully be accomplished through through a method that is within our budget so thank you thank you councilwoman Zendejas thank you vice mayor and thank you councilwoman price for bringing this item forward I think it's very important I also want to give a huge thank you to our city clerk office who Moved very swiftly during the pandemic to make sure that we had public comment access for our uh for our community for residents um during the pandemic while we were holding our meetings online so I know that you did a lot of research and a lot of hard work and I for that I thank you very much and we were able to give everyone all the residents the opportunity to be able to participate in our city council meetings that were being held online as we all know public comment is the opportunity for for our residents to participate in the decision making of of their City thus it is crucial that we look for ways to make it easier and more accessible for everyone to provide their thoughts concerns and ideas at our City Council meetings we know that there are many challenges to attending in-person meetings especially for people with young children people who work late or who perhaps do not have transportation means to be able to come to City Hall or or who may just feel uncomfortable doing so for either health reasons or any other reason I also know that there are a lot of challenges including costs but I am confident that we can find tools that will be able to provide access to our residents to be able to do public comments during our City Council meetings via telephone while being cost effective I know my residents will definitely benefit from it immensely therefore I am very supportive of this item and I look forward to receiving this report thank you councilmember uranga thank you very very happy to sign on to this item I think it adds to the transparency of the city and being accessible to us in in making their comments we got Child Care Child Care is an important issue as well for people to participate here it might have an issue with that so I'm glad to assign to the statement I know that the resourcefulness of our city manager and our staff will find a way to make it happen in a cost-effective way thank you all right thank you is there any public comment on this item [Music] I know that they needed to leave a bit earlier okay all right seeing no no further public comment sure come on down Welcome to The Late Show with vice mayor Rex Richardson the mayor had to leave uh or Nick at night whatever you want to call the show come on up hi Karen rayside proud resident of the first district and with Long Beach gray Panthers missed you all very much it's great to see you all in person and uh I'm one of those that was reduced to calling in for comments and I gave up I mean I sat for 45 minutes one meeting because the queue was long and when it was near the end I was just cut off so there's a number of issues with the telephonic system it is important for those that are disabled and uh but it is a valuable Service as long as there's some kind of Fairly um fairly Equitable distributed system I know I signed up many more times than I got an opportunity to speak because it was limited to the first 10 people that happen to be available at the time when you can call in and get in the queue so I wasn't able to get into the queue many times so I've just resorted to sending in emails but now it's busy legislative season so it's hard for me to sometimes get emails and comments in before the deadline of four o'clock during the day I also wanted to mention that it's been a year since people have been in uh Chambers and I was having a terrible time I had to speak to two groups tonight because they were having side conversations and I'm hard of hearing and when people have side conversations it doesn't allow me to hear the speakers particularly like the development services um person who has a very soft voice so I think we need to go back to reminding people to use their inside manners and to let them know that there shouldn't be any side conversations and also the applauding makes it very hard to hear and I was ready to get up and smack Anna Christensen I'm sorry that's just not tolerable behavior in a public meeting so um thank you for letting me voice my feelings and it's good to see everybody looking forward to seeing you every week again good to see you too thank you so much that concludes public comment members please cast your vote motion carries eight zero thank you I think we're at number 26 next is that right correct okay item 26 report from development services recommendation to approve the fiscal year 2022 action plan and substantial amendments and authorized city manager to execute all necessary documents with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Citywide thank you I know there's a presentation here but it is late maybe you could summarize what the amendments to the plan are certainly we don't need a full presentation on this sir good evening vice mayor and we will keep it quick I'm going to ask Patrick you're just to go through what's changing this year this is an annual report on our federal funds that are used for poverty alleviation and helping communities throughout our city it is just an implementation of our five-year comprehensive plan and I'm going to turn it over to Patrick to give you the high points thank you Christopher so all of the ongoing programs that have been going on throughout the con plan for this cycle will continue there are a couple of programs where not all of the money was spent and so we're proposing that those funds be reallocated it's about 1.5 million dollars and set aside to be used for an acquisition of a housing site and so with this if if you all approve this tonight we would make those funds available to developers to acquire a site that would become an affordable housing site thank you all right well thank you is any public comment on item 26 there is one public comment I'm foreign Mungo anything we love the development services team great work Chris and Patrick councilmember uranga okay my only comments are I I I look forward to the next five year update and some significant changes and we'll we'll be talking about that in the future and uh Christopher Coons I think you have a great voice thank you members please cast your vote motion carries eight zero thank you thank you that comment also goes for Patricia in case that was the person next we'll have item 27 report from Human Resources recommendation to adopt water salary resolution approving the compensation fixed by the Board of Water Commissioners and adopt a resolution amending the city salary resolution Citywide thank you moved by councilwoman Mungo anything council member yanga okay any public comment a comment okay members please cast your vote motion carries eight zero thank you next we have item number 28 and I'll make the motion on that one report from Parks Recreation and Marine recommendation to adopt a resolution authorizing city manager to submit a Grant application to the ocean protection Council for the 51st Street Greenbelt development project in an amount not to exceed 3 million District 8. thank you we know councilman Austin couldn't be here to make the motion of making that on his behalf it's a great project from North Long Beach any public comment there is one public comment Amy Valenzuela thank you thank you um I have prepared comments because I'm kind of verbose and it's late so um my name is Amy Valenzuela and I am the President of the River Park Coalition and also tongva and I want to express our support for the Greenbelt project River Park Coalition as many of you know because you've met with us or not met with us over the past months as we have formed as the first advocacy organization that's focused on the lower River as a community organization and the acquisition and development of land around the river in order to transform it and the Watershed into an asset for habitat and climate resiliency and open space for our citizens especially in areas where people have been impacted by Park inequity so we have about 2 000 members now and we're working with our first project which is four acres um just um south of the Dominguez Gap so this will be a great contiguous kind of experience for people who who need the river and walk along the river or recreate along the river the green belt will be a great addition to what people are already able to experience but it also represents the type of project that not only provides a benefit to the community but also creates climate resiliency and Water Reclamation practices along the river it's also a small step but an important one to creating more Park availability too an area that has historically not had a lot of access to park space so we are very happy to be working with the city now in this way to acquire additional potential park space along the L.A River but I do want to take this opportunity to just really push all of you the river is the river right it doesn't exist in in one District it really impacts all of us and it can be transformed into an amazing asset for us for climate resiliency and the decisions we make now because there will be flood events there are going to be impacts to our city and they're going to be pressures Upstream that will impact the way we experience our river that may not be the best for us here in Long Beach so now you have us at River Park and we just want to make sure that there is funding and attention and Leadership from all of you please to really address what the potential is for the river now and what that can mean for people who don't have a lot of access to park space and for our air quality and for our ability to manage the climate crisis that we're facing now so that's what we're about at River Park we're very very happy to partner with council member Austin and all of you as it relates to your projects along the river and um really everything that's happening south of South Gate to the ocean at this point so thank you for your time and we're very happy to support this project thank you members please cast your vote motion carries eight zero thank you I think our final item is number 29. report from city manager recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to Shared use cannabis Manufacturing in the city of Long Beach read and adopted as read Citywide thank you I see a motion is there a second all right it's been moved and seconded any public comment on number 20. members police Caster vote council member uranga motion carries eight zero all right that satisfies the agenda is that right there's no more items okay our final closing public comment any members of the public would like to address city council now will be the time yes I would like to remember oh sorry forgive me okay uh now that's done we will now go to our closing our market closing remarks I'm going to start with council member Sue lisaro item 32 has been withdrawn from the agenda back in okay may I begin yes um so I want to thank SUNY Lei Chang as well as her daughter Siri Chang for joining us tonight as we adjourn in her father's memory Mr crelay Mr crelay he laid the groundwork for many of those in the Cambodian community in Long Beach Mr lay was born on December 10 1941 in udon Cambodia he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and served for 12 years he was a theology student at the Buddhist University in cambodia's capital and he wrote three books Noble wealth power and unity religion and state he then studied in India where he attended University during which Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 the Takeover of the Buddha regime force Mr lay to seek political asylum in the United States and settled in Long Beach in 1975 with his wife he raised three daughters Sunni munica and suder Mr lay was the founding member and the longest serving chairman of the Cambodian Association of America where he served for 35 years he helped keep the Cambodian culture alive in the U.S by writing Pamplin pamphlet in English and kamaiya on the history of Cambodia Cambodian arts and culture and the Ecology of Southeast Asia he also helped so many countless cambodians assimilate or settled into um into America and American culture and Custom and he was also the co-founder of the Southeast Asian Learners project which is Seal for Long Beach Unified School District he will always be known in Long Beach for his wisdom compassion for those he helped and his influence in the Cambodian Community continues to be felt to this day because he's paved the way for so many cambodians as well as the future Generations such as myself we honor his life and his service and his contribution to Long Beach he is a true unsung hero thank you to Mr Craig crelay thank you I'll also offer my condolences to Mr lay in the lay family I see no there's no more closing comments art city council meeting is adjourned thank you have a great night foreign [Music] thank you [Music]