City Council Meeting — July 19, 2023

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Oh, God. Oh, God.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay.

They make you speak even though you said you were going to speak.

Okay.

I'm going to like what I saw.

Are you guys ready? Okay. Thank you.

Good evening.

We're going to go ahead and call our city council meeting to order.

It is exactly 635.

I want to thank all of you for being here tonight. I'm going to go ahead and get started with our city mission statement. The mission of the City of Monterey Park is to provide excellent services to enhance the quality of life for our entire community. And our land acknowledgement, we would like to acknowledge that the land we inhabit today was once known as Tongva Gard, the home of the Gabriolino Tongva people. We show our respect to the Gabriolino Tongva people, as well as all Indigenous people, past, present, and future, and honor their labor as original caretakers of this land. We commit to uplifting the Gabriolino Tongva people and invite you to acknowledge the history and join us in caring for this land. If we can, we're going to go ahead and get started with our flag salute. Today we have the Monterey Park Police Explorer, so if I can ask you to stand.

one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one

!

! ! one one

And if you can put your right hand over your heart. Ready, begin.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for

which withstands, one nation, and a god, indivisible, in liberty and justice for all.

Color guard, forward, color.

Color guard, outward, face.

Color guard, forward, march.

Feather guard, hold, feather guard.

Feather guard, elbow, feet.

Feather guard, dismiss. !

手指 If you can please take your seats.

City Clerk, if we can do a roll call, please.

Council Member Lo. Present. Council Member Yu.

Here. Council Member Ngo. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Wong. Present. Mayor Sanchez. Present. We have a quorum. Thank you.

Are there any agenda additions or deletions or changes?

Yes, Mr. Mayor, members of the Council, So we would like to add public works to staff communications if that's okay?

That's okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

And do we have any public communications?

Yes, we do.

First speaker, David Zapata.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah.

They do a job that is a job of service. They provide service for the city.

They are work long hours. I'm so sorry. Can you just just... All right.

Okay. Can I restart or should I start again?

You can keep going. Okay. So, again, my name is David Zapata. I work here in the water department for the city. I am one of the SEIU 721 members.

And today I'm speaking in Solidarity of Union 121, our nurses union, the local at Garfield Hospital. They are going through their negotiations.

And just like every other union that we see on the news, they are just asking for a fair wage for the work that they do. There are many long hours. And we hope that the city is able to provide their voice and their backing to our nurses back here who, you know, really deserve what they're asking for.

It ain't much from what I mean from what they've asked.

It's just basically a fair wage for the work that they do. If you can please assist them. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have any speakers?

Next speaker, Nancy Akuri.

Good evening you all. I'm here to congratulate Inez Alvarez for being hired as our interim city manager by our city council. I congratulate Diana Garcia for being hired as an interim assistant city manager by our city council.

So I have lived in Monterey Park since 1971,

so I remind our city council that our very best city managers were hired from within our current staff members at that time.

I hope that you city council members learn from our past history

and hire Inez Alvarez as our new city manager and hire Diana Garcia as our new assistant city manager. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker.

Next speaker, Sarkees Antonian.

Yes, Mayor, Council Member, staff, and congratulations on this. And I'll put an amen to that. Yeah, just hire her on, and that's it. And then to save the money.

Now, what they're talking about, about this. Hospitals, now, I don't know if they ever told you. Matthew Lynn Group owns seven hospitals in the area. Alhambra, Monterey Park, Garfield, San Gabriel, Santa Anita, and there's one more. So, any of these, anybody that dies, they put COVID on there to get federal funding. okay so at the gas station one woman one girl was helping pump gas she had the nurse's uniform they said where do you work at montoray park house but this is about nine months ago and then she says in that department of the covet department all seven nurses got covet received covet and then at one and then i spoke to another person with the nurses uniform on at Chase, and they say every single one, from what she tells me, every single person in that hospital received COVID. So if they're not coming to you as a city and telling them, yeah, we need help for these employees, and these employees during the COVID times, They were working record hours, but they're not saying that stuff. So write it down. Dr. Naomi Wolf, Dr. Robert Malone, who's the founder of the NRA, not this garbage they came out with, and Dr. Peter McAuliffe. This vaccine can kill people, women. If the baby is healthy that took the vaccine, the breast milk is black, and these heart attacks that the younger generation men are getting from this vaccine. So those three right there.

mRNA vaccine that came out with this stuff. So those, the Matthew Lynn group, whoever can contact them, they need to come down here and get negotiated with you people to honor them, to give them raises. Because if you own seven hospitals and they can't give these people raises, when, again, somebody dies, they put COVID, they get federal funding. if you don't know that. And what other things that I want to speak on, I'll wait until the next meeting. Because they have a lot better things to do than sit here and ask for raises. And that's what's been going on. That's what? That's seven, from them opening the seven hospitals, sure, that's like 15 years ago. It's not a no-brainer. I used to go to San Gabriel Hospital with my mom. I had surgery over there. They have all the plaques, all the people's names who is on that committee. So look at that. So that's one thing you need to look into. When they're getting federal funding, when a person dies of COVID, and if it's not related to COVID, they're getting paid extra. Meanwhile, these workers back here are working, what, 15 hours a day? Why? Because I follow up on stuff. I listen to a lot of talk radio, a lot of TV, what's going on. I got the time to do it. And that's what they're saying. So this coming over here, you need, every one of you up there need to spend a few minutes or an hour, not a few minutes, an hour and two, and find out what these hospital workers are going through.

So check it out. because I've been in the hospitals before with my mom, myself,

and you can see all the plaques.

Who are these board members? And it says Matthew Lynn Group.

And the Matthew Lynn was here in Monterey Park 15 years ago. That's why I met the guy. Yeah, look into it.

Next speaker.

Next speaker, Christina Smith of SCIU 121 RN.

Hey, good evening. I just want to thank you for your time and your attention for our issue this date.

So my name is Christina Smith, and I have been serving this community for the past 35 years,

working at Garfield Medical Center.

So throughout the years, I've gone through many changes, both good and bad,

but nothing, nothing compares to what the nurses have experienced throughout this pandemic we just had. And today, we are still struggling to just survive having to work more with less resources.

We are being pushed to our limit, both physically and mentally,

due to inadequate staffing that has become a normal routine for us. We now have to do the job of two people

because we lack most auxiliary staff, like not enough CNAs to help, not enough therapists to be there,

not enough hemodialysis nurses to treat patients so they're actually missing their treatment and becoming critical at times, and much more.

The nurses often work throughout their breaks.

They stay over time to complete their workload.

Just this week, I've had a co-worker who worked seven days straight. Now, those are 12-hour shifts, okay, just to help out because of the shortage. But how long can you keep doing that before you yourself would burn out? And you wonder, is it even safe for the patient? If you extend yourself to the point of exhaustion, we have to be awake, alert, and there for our patients. If you're going to work that many hours, how alert are you going to be? Are you just going to, like, barely get through the day after your sixth day? Do you want a nurse like that taking care of your mother, your father, your child, who's on his seventh or eighth day straight?

right we are also suffering with the hospital budget cuts it makes it hard for us to do our

jobs because we have outdated broken equipment the beds don't work our computers there's no um no batteries so we can't even do our charting or scanner meds on our computers our phones are outdated monitors are broken and the list goes on no hot water you know to be with our patients with We all feel the stress of working harder, but we also feel inadequately compensated compared to the higher wages being paid to nurses working at our nearby facilities. We do have a new grad program. Most hospitals don't, but we accept them. But we don't get to keep the new nurses because they're often going to leave for higher pay and wages and better circumstances.

I don't blame them. It's hard times right now.

I myself would be making $10 more an hour if I was at San Gabriel Valley Medical Center, which is our sister hospital, based on their wage scale for working 35 years at one facility. But I'm just here to tell you today that this current situation at Garfield can result in a possible strike at the hospital.

So as you know, SEIU Local 1 to 1, we are in negotiations with the hospital for our new contract ever since February.

But our sessions have been moving slowly with very little progress, even with a mediator involved.

So all we want is a fair contract that would help us serve our patients and community more effectively.

This would include safe staffing ratios and adequate support, competitive wages to recruit and retain the nurses, and to prevent dangerous floating to other departments just to plug the hole.

Every nurse has to go, like, everywhere. We want to provide safe working environments to prevent workplace violence. I myself is a victim of workplace violence. I was assaulted twice. uh once i was hit in the face with a cell phone that knocked me down and another time i was pulled

by the arm and punched in the stomach yesterday i witnessed a nurse being kicked in the chest okay so it does happen and um actually us nurses are assaulted more than police officers on their jobs, okay? And we're not being protected.

For us, a strike is our last resort. Am I time over?

Yes, time's up, but feel free to finish, please.

Oh, I'm sorry. A strike is our last resort that we nurses want to prevent, but the bottom line is that we can't afford to lose no more essential workers

due to the injustice of being overworked, underpaid, and poor working conditions. We just ask that if you could support to advocate for us nurses, just as we advocate for our patients, and to send a word to AHMC, the company that owns these hospitals in this community,

so they can hear us and come to terms with a fair contract that shows appreciation, respect that us nurses deserve for all the hard work that we're willing to do

to serve and meet the health needs of our community. And I thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Okay.

Next speaker, please.

Next speaker, Jack with SEIU 121RN.

Hello, everyone. My name is Jack. I currently work in the ICU at Garfield Medical Center. Also, I have been floated to multiple departments from CSU, CCU, 3 West, 3 East, and ER Overflow. I've been at Garfield at this November for two years and this November I've also been an RN for four but I've been in healthcare for over ten years at my short time at Garfield I have learned

that I'm working with exceptional colleagues who put them put the patients first and do their best to be a patient's advocate they are incredibly knowledgeable and they do their best but against odds. I would like to tell you a story of one of my patients. I was floated to 3East, which is our telemetry unit. We monitor heart rhythms. And they gave me the most critical patients because I'm a critical care nurse. All four of my patients' acuities are four. Four is the max. This patient came in for a stroke garfield medical center is a level one stroke center this patient came in for a stroke she failed her swallow screen a swallow screen essentially is done by a nurse upon admission to ensure that the patient can or cannot swallow we don't want them to aspirate on any of the food that we provide them it had been about four to five days this patient has been admitted and a swallow eval was ordered by a physician three days prior to me accepting this patient.

Now, with my four patients, all of them very difficult and very heavy, I unfortunately was not able to extend the best of my services to this patient.

And I would like to inform you guys that a swallow eval essentially is done by a speech therapist.

At this time, there was only one speech therapist for a 210-bed hospital.

This speech therapist was also spread too thin, and he was unable to do this evaluation for this patient to see if we can feed her safely.

So our alternative was to insert a nasogastric tube, which is a tube that enters through your nose, terminates in your stomach.

And we provide you with the most basic nutrition in the form of milk. and we provide you with medications through that G-tube.

This takes away the oral gratification for this patient. And ultimately it was delayed.

Now in addition to this patient dealing with this problem regarding a swallow evaluation, we have outdated equipment at our hospital.

That patient's bed shorted and left her in a 90-degree position for 30 minutes

until an engineer came to assess the bed and determine that it's not fixable at the bedside

luckily i was able to inform my charge nurse and she knowing the equipment was able to activate

the code blue bed release which flattened the patient prior to doing that though i must remove

all the milk and all the nutrients inside of her stomach so that she does not aspirate

we were able to transfer the patient and for nearly an hour there was this whole situation

taking place now lastly we have a outdated EMR system electronic electronic medical record

where it took me over an hour just to incorporate a few notes just to ensure that I'm protecting the

hospital and protecting myself the Garfield Medical Center has continuously over the course of the last one and a half years that I've been

there reduced the number of staff from ancillary staff to nursing staff and it

just shows to me that the bottom line for the hospital is not patient safety but more so profit.

My goal and every nurse's goal is to be a patient advocate and take care of them to the best of our abilities.

We have this knowledge of how to take care of it but we're literally limited with invisible barriers

that our hospital places on us.

so this is why the Garfield nurses

have authorized a strike

but the strike is the last thing we want because that's days away from our patients

days away from their care that they need

we would really appreciate if you can assist us and forgive me

if we would really appreciate if you guys can assist us in trying to have the

hospital agreed to our requests and lastly we do support and stand in solidarity with our sister local Union 721 thank you for your time I really

appreciate it and I hope that you guys will consider the things that I said

today and help give you some clarity as to what's actually going on in the

background at GMC. Thank you. Next speaker. Next speaker, Alexis Allen of SCIU 121RN.

Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. My name is Alexis Allen and I'm a registered nurse in the emergency.

City Room at Garfield Medical Center. And I'm also a Monterey Park resident. The biggest thing that I see in our ER as a result of inadequate staffing is that patients who should be moved to med surge, tele, and ICU units get stuck in the ER because those other units are not being adequately staffed. I get asked every shift by patients. When am I going to be moved to a different unit? and I have to tell them the truth, which is I don't know. It could be that day or it could be never. We have many admitted patients that are discharged from our ER after staying multiple days there. And while I as a nurse can give all the medications and provide care for these patients in the emergency room, there are certain things we just don't have in the ER. We don't have comfortable beds. We don't have CNAs to assist with eating and elimination needs. If you're an ICU patient, the ICU doctor isn't staying in the ER and monitoring you like he would in an ICU unit. In addition, ER nurses must prioritize care for critical injuries and illness. and if not equally important, people being stuck in the ER because of inadequate staffing takes beds away from new patients who may need emergency room assistance, causing long wait times. We have requested action from AHMC management to assist with staffing, and we really hope that they take these actions so we can give patients the care they deserve, and we hope that we can have your support with this. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Next speaker, Samantha Tran of SEIU 121RN.

Hello, my name is Samantha. I am a ICU nurse at Garfield Medical Center.

I started November of 2021, so I'm fairly a new nurse.

So speaking as a new nurse, my past experience at nine months is a bit, is very difficult.

Without a proper mentor, we don't have, we can't retain experienced nurses on the unit.

So it's been like, it changes me a lot in a way, mental health, physical health.

My process is supposed to be 10 weeks.

I was promised 10 weeks to be like a preceptor, like one by one with me on the unit.

But it was cut down to eight due to inadequate staffing.

I still remember one of my patients that I was on by myself

he really needed hemodialysis

but he was there for almost two days

because we were short there was no nurses coming to dialyze him

and I still remember family at bedside

the mother was breaking me to do something

and I just I don't know what to do

ancillary stuff

like x-rays labs takes an hour for an immediate for a stat order meaning

it has to be done right now for like a mental change or

any specific things that are related to the changes but it can take

I don't know when things will come I have to call

I have to make sure that it be done in a timely manner, but it's also very difficult on the ancillary staff because they're also short.

And then the only solution that I have been noticing is travel staff, but I don't believe that they are the answer. Travel staff is RNs that hire from a third parties that come to whenever we are short.

but the thing is the thing about tribal staff is they are not our um they are not from a hospital

they were trained in our hospital to use our equipment to use our emr to document on our medical record and they don't know our doctors they're just not familiar with uh whatever has happening at in inside gmc so actually what the staff have to do is to also we have to spend our cutting from our time to help them, to assist them when they travel to our unit. So it's cutting away everyone's time to solve a problem that it should have been avoided in the first place, which is retaining experienced nurses. As a new nurse myself, I can speak for all my new nurses cohort. there was 16 of us when I was initially hired in November and then right now I want to see 12 left and I believe that none of us are thinking about staying in Gulfview Medical Center because it was just too hard and then there's so much more opportunities out there but I as a local resident here I believe that I care about my community and the people that I'm serving. So I just stand with my nurses and my colleagues to ask you to support so that we can retain more experienced people at Gulfview Medical Center and we can serve our community better. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

We have one written communication

that I could read to you.

Yes, thank you.

Dear members of the City Council. Oh, sorry.

This is for item 3G. We could wait.

I'll save it for then.

Okay. Was that it for public comments?

That's it for public comments. No more speakers.

Thank you.

We'll go ahead and move on to the presentation portion. I'm sorry, staff communications, and I know we have one from the police department.

And before we get started with the chief, I just wanted to thank the nurses for coming and sharing your story. I know sometimes that's a little difficult, but thank you for enlightening us on your stories. Thank you.

Good evening, everyone. It's good to see you. I wanted to give you some updates on some things we're doing in the police department. If I could get the next slide. National Night Out is coming.

It's a nationwide presentation that's done in communities all over the country.

In Monterey Park, we have a rich history of putting on a display in front of the station.

This year, we're going to have a canine demonstration. We're going to have some vehicles out there.

We're going to have all the equipment, everything that we do in the police department. And it's basically a block party for the neighborhood to come out.

We give out hot dogs and refreshments, and it's a lot of fun. Next slide, please.

Is that the next slide? No?

It's okay. I'll wait.

It's been one of those days for all of us.

It'll start at 6 on August 2nd and goes until 8 o'clock. and I welcome all of council out there. The community is welcome to come. We have a lot of fun that night. A lot of our officers will be out there and like I said, there's a big demonstration that we do. So it'll be a lot of fun. Big canine demo this year. Next slide, please. August 1st, my bad. August 1st, 6 to 8, Barnes Park. We'll be in the large park area, not the front of the station like we've done in the past. We need the whole park for what we're going to do. for the everything next slide please also coming up is our golf tournament september 22nd it's a friday it's going to be at the almanza golf course up in alhambra i was up signing letters right now for the event it it's an every year we do this annual event and next slide please the proceeds go to our explorer post so they can do competitions so they can go to different training events we help subsidize their uniforms and things like that so it's a great program and this golf tournament is their funding source so we invite everybody to sign up and on our website go to the next slide now

gives out the times and contact information I think will be on the next one

the next slide is contact information I hope

Do you play golf? I don't play golf. I'm going to play golf this year.

There's the contact information for it. Sorry about that. You can contact Communication Bureau at 307-1215 or the email address there. They can send all the information about the golf tournament or any of our events that are coming up.

and if you want to sign up and play, we welcome everybody to come.

Also something that we're doing, go ahead with the next slide,

is I wanted to kind of introduce some of my new employees to council and to the community.

The next slide, well, there we go. So this is Officer Maynard Yancor. He is a brand new police officer. He graduated from the Golden West Police Academy a few weeks ago. He's assigned to field training right now. He has a bachelor's in criminal justice. And he was a prior police cadet and animal services officer for another agency. So he is one of our brand new police officers. He still has that smile on his face and hopefully will have it for many years. We can't seem to get rid of the smile. So every time you see him, he's going to have that wonderful smile. So if you see him around the station or around the city, for anybody in town, please say hi to him. next slide uh michael ibarra was a volunteer for the police department until we hired him as a police officer he went to golden west academy also and graduated he went to shir high school and cal state fullerton so he's a local boy and was an employee at one of our local restaurants here in town so he's a homegrown person that has worked really really hard to get to the point where he got through the academy and we welcomed him to the department. He's one of our new patrol officers also. Go ahead with the last one. And Andrew Knox. Andrew is one of our, we call them laterals.

So he was a police officer for L.A. County Sheriff's, deputy sheriff, and then he was a police officer in Orange County and lives up in our area and decided he wanted to transfer to a department much closer to home. He has a bachelor's in criminal justice, so comes with a degree.

and he's assigned now and he's been on field training now for about eight weeks. So because he's a lateral, we hope he doesn't have to go through the complete amount of training, but our training program is six months long before they go out on their own. So these are our three new police officers. And my goal is to introduce all of my new staff to you when we onboard them so everybody gets an opportunity to see their smiling face and learn a little bit about them. so that we can kind of introduce them to the community and to you at the same time. So I welcome any questions.

Thank you so much for sharing this, Chief. And if there's at any point some type of meet and greet where we can, you know, meet these new officers, please let us know. Any questions or comments from Council?

Council Member Lo?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to thank you, Chief Wiese, for presenting and also introducing your new officers

and also for thanking your department, especially during the pandemic for continuing to recognize

National Night Out, even if it was we're not able to do it traditionally. And I refer to the

police department's drive-through and National Night Out, which again, it was a little outside

box thinking unorthodox, but nonetheless it was a demonstration that we weren't going to let a

pandemic stop us from doing what this community expects its city to do. So thank you so much. You're welcome.

This one's going to be epic. It's going to be fantastic. It really is. It's going to be epic. You keep mentioning canine demonstration. It's my word. It's epic. It's going to be, planning is next week or the final planning. It's going to be fun. We're going to have a great time. Actually, Chief,

I know you keep mentioning very proudly the canine demonstration. How many canines do we have in the units? We currently have one.

Oh. And we are in the process of trying to get a second. We've always had two, but we have one right now. There was some legislation coming down the pipe last year that we wanted to wait and see how that panned out before we invested the time and money into a second canine. But we're looking at a new canine coming in now. Cookies is the current canine, and she's a fantastic dog. In fact, she won the top dog at last year's L.A. Police Canine Competition. So she's the top police canine in L.A. County. So she'll be there doing the demonstration for all of us. She'll bring a handler too, but she could do everything on her own.

Thank you.

The human drives the car.

Any other questions or comments from Council?

All right. Mayor Potemwong. Thanks, Chief. Appreciate the update.

And looking forward to an epic National Night Out.

It better be epic. You're setting the bar really high. Yes.

And just for future events, I'm curious.

of slowly but surely um the pandemic had a lot of impact on people um there are still a significant number of our community that are reluctant to get in groups and communicate even with their neighbors um a lot of our neighborhood watch block captains from the past are no longer around or interested in doing the program so it's it's kind of grassroots at this point we're hoping that our town hall meetings that are coming up our pop-up events that are coming up are going to stimulate people to want to kind of meet their neighbors again and that's really the essence of the program you're going to see some rollouts of social media campaign and some other events that try to get them out of their houses and into the street we've had a busy last couple weeks in the police department with operational stuff so we're looking forward to those things ramping back up again but it's a it's a sLor process than quite honestly i thought it was

going to be in speaking to the chiefs in the neighboring areas if they weren't already present the the neighborhood watch groups it's very hard to get new ones started up again everybody's

experiencing that yeah just on the in connecting to the national night out uh block party that we're going to have here at the park uh i know not for this coming national night out but as we hopefully reconstitute some of the neighborhood watch programs to maybe figure out how we can support them and having their own block parties in their own neighborhoods we talked about that

before and i looked into that um the larger agencies like a sheriff's department has done it or the larger police departments because they can split up their forces so to speak we're going to try to figure out if we can do something like that it may be a little bit difficult but it would be a lot smaller scale but it is something after you mentioned it in one of those other meetings I did start reaching out to some of my counterparts because I had seen it over the years some have had success some rolled it back into the center one because they wanted a really nice big all inclusive event so they brought everybody back together we're all kind of recovering from COVID when we did it drive through zoom all the different ways we did it so that's something we will look into for the future yes yeah and it doesn't have to be tied to the actual national

night out night right we can do it throughout the year and that's kind of what our pop-ups are going

to be like and our and our our block captain meeting quite honestly is going to be in the

middle of the street and that that kind of encourages people to come out and for one they

want to know what's going on everybody wants to know what's going on and then that stimulates

conversation then they find out it's not a crime then they want to stay and kind of talk to us next thing you know we've got them roped they're in the program yeah no and if i don't know if

what we have set aside in terms of budget or anything like this but to provide maybe some financial support for neighbor watch block captains or or whoever is leading these to help

buy some food to incentivize we might be able to find stuff like that i we don't pay our block captains we do help subsidize the signs that go up in the neighborhoods and some of the other

things that go along with it our community engagement bureau is at every meeting for the

most part so we do offer quite a bit of assistance for that yeah great i appreciate that uh yeah

thank you we're looking forward to national night out and uh i think you and robert are going to get into a friendly competition epic who has more epic events yes i'm going to need

costumes so I've got my staff working on costumes for me. We'll add it into the budget.

Throwing down the gauntlet. Yes. Get McGruff out of storage.

Any other questions or comments from Council? And just along the same line I'm glad Mayor Pro Temuong brought that up. Maybe at a future date if you can also share some information whether on how we can start a neighborhood watch just so that we are also informed so we can help people in our neighborhood how to do that.

That would be great.

Absolutely.

We'll put an informational flyer together and I'll do a presentation here.

Okay.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Our next staff communication,

Recreation and Community Services.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, City Council, Interim City Manager, Inez Alvarez.

I'm Christina Alotori, and I am the Recreation Manager for the Recreation and Community Services Department.

So first, we'd like to thank the community for joining us and coming on out to our movie in the park, which was Puss in Boots, that took place on July 6th.

In honor of Parks Make Life Better Month, we gave away free popcorn.

We had games for kids who attended the event. We'd also like to thank those community members who joined us for the Hollywood Bowl event. This took place on Saturday, July 15th.

We had two busloads of residents join us at the Hollywood Bowl,

and it was a night that was filled with music and dancing. the participants gave us a ton of feedback and we're very very happy about the trip.

Next slide please. Cooling centers. So with the temperature heating up we are going to be

providing cooling centers. So cooling centers are activated when the heat index is 95 degrees

or higher for two or more consecutive days. The cooling center will be located at the Langley Senior Center which is at 400 Emerson Drive and when the cooling center is activated the hours

will be from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. We will also have a cooling center at our local library and that

will be during normal business hours which is Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 12 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Next slide please. So in honor of Parks Make Life Better month we are celebrating with a movie in the park and that will be back to the future that will be thursday july 20th and the movie will begin at dusk with that being said we are having a special

photo opportunity with a delorean replica anyone who joins us that night or if you just want to

stop by and take a photo with you and your family alongside the delorean we will be providing that

opportunity in addition to that we will be giving out free popcorn again to those in attendance so it will be a fun night and again this is at Barnes Park and no registration is required.

Next slide please. In collaboration with the San Gabriel Unified School District we are still

providing free summer lunches for those 18 and under from 11 30 to 12 30 at the Barnes Park

picnic shelter. No registration is required. No ID is required. Those who come we will definitely

serve those lunches. Next slide, please. Our Langley Center offers regular services to those 50 years

and older. Currently, we have a jewelry making class on the first and third Wednesday of the month from 1 30 to 3. And again, that is at the Langley Center. In addition to that, health

screenings are offered by Garfield Medical Center, the fourth Monday of the month and health seminars

ours are offered the second Thursday of the month.

So our sold out senior trip is to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, but we at least wanted to present this to you and let you see all that we have going on here. So Thursday the 20th, which is tomorrow from 10 to 4, we have a

few buses full of people heading out to the Academy Museum of Motion pictures to check out the museum and see a variety of exhibits that are offered at the museum.

Registration was $10. Next slide, please. Langley Center will be celebrating Christmas in July on Thursday, July 27th from 1 to 3 p.m. Registration is $5. There will be live entertainment,

refreshments, raffles, and more. It is the happening place to be in the afternoon. If you have not had the opportunity to stop by the Langley Center, definitely do that. You will be in for quite a treat. Everyone is excited, off their feet, dancing. It is a really fun time for all.

next slide how do you rec so we are promoting our parks and we would like to know how our residents

participate in recreation throughout the city so this could be a variety of this could be

open to anything and anything that our community members really enjoy doing so all they have to do

is participate, send a photo to the recreation department through email, or message Monterey

Park and Rec on Instagram, and if the photo is shared, you will win a special prize. And I have an example of one of our Parks Make Life Better month, How Do You Rec? prizes up here. And as a

matter of fact, Mr. Mayor, one of your photos of your children was selected, and you are

a winner of the gift bag. So give me one second. Yes, your daughters definitely showed us how

they wrecked in this great city of Monterey Park and we would just like to congratulate them

for enjoying our parks and enjoying everything that we do here. That is the end of my presentation.

If there are any comments or questions I would be happy to answer them.

Thank you so much for that report and I know you guys do so much for our community but I want to give the council an opportunity to add any comments or share or have they have any questions.

No, thank you for bringing the DeLorean. I know I have friends who will be very excited to take a picture next to that DeLorean.

Well, thank you for having all these events and activities at the park. I've been circling around Barnes Park in the evening at least once a week just to jog or walk, and it is full. And that's a great thing for our city.

So good job.

Yeah, I just add my thanks for all the programming and events that are going on.

I have a quick question. Is this Robert's DeLorean? I mean, sometimes I think he comes back from back in time, travels through time.

However, it's not Robert's DeLorean.

We're able to get in contact with someone who has a DeLorean replica,

and definitely the flux capacitor will be on there. Hopefully it doesn't break down in the middle of the park. Hopefully it works.

Yeah, and maybe we can catch a ride into the future.

Great. No, I appreciate that.

I just wanted to share this.

At a town hall meeting on Saturday at Langley Center, some of the seniors brought up just some maintenance requests.

I was just curious.

I don't know if this is a question for Public Works or Parks and Rec,

but are we planning?

I know we have budgeted funding for some roof replacements for our facilities. I'm not sure if Langley was on there or not.

I just wanted to ask.

Yes, it is budgeted, and we are planning roof repair.

In addition to that, we're also planning roof repair at Barnes Park and Elder Park.

But Jim's right?

Yes. Perfect.

Yeah, thank you so much.

And I didn't realize how much our family had taken advantage of Parks and Rec until I started looking through all my pictures, and there's tons of them. So I really appreciate all that you do. to make events for families like mine. And also the movie nights are amazing. So please continue to do those if we can, even further into the future. I know that a lot of families are looking forward to that. I know a lot of my neighbors are always asking, like, when's the next one?

I'm like, go on Instagram and check.

But anyhow, they really enjoy those. And just like Council Member Ngo said, our parks are very highly attended, especially because of all the events that you do. So thank you for all the amazing programming.

Thank you.

Our next staff communications, Public Works.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and City Council.

Sean Igoe, Public Works Director.

This past Saturday we had a few different events going on at Garvey Ranch Park. A couple of you attended those events and we greatly appreciate the support that you showed us. The first event was the Community Climate Action Day where several trees and shrubs were donated and planted. This was done in partnership with Assemblymember Mike Fong's office. Next slide, you can see some additional pictures from that event. It was a great event. It was a little warm. I know that it was definitely a little hot for many of us. I showed up for a brief stint as I had some time. But again, this was done in partnership with Assemblymember Mike Fong's office and California Climate Action Corps. Thank you to Ryan Kagawa who helped coordinate this event with the city and the Assemblymember's office

Also a big thank you to all the volunteers

Council and also to recreation staff and public work staff that came out to help with this event The second event was our free composting event On the other side of the park near Public Works Yard At this event we passed out 40 tons of compost And had nearly 200 participants come through So a big thank you to Athens and the Public Works staff for this event again with that I'll answer any questions

Thank you for those events this weekend. I know they were attended by many of us any questions or comments from Council

I just want to thank the public works and recreation staff

Garbage Pride, we already saw setting up, you know, making sure that tents were up for the organizers,

California, climate actionable, California volunteers. But yeah, you're ready to go.

And so thank you so much for doing that.

Thank you.

Sean, thanks for doing that. I just want to add that we actually probably had the biggest two-hour influx of people at our historic museum by Garvey Ranch Park because all the volunteers showed up, got there, and instead of a three-hour shift, they finished it in about an hour and a half. So we just shepherded them back into the museum because it was so hot outside and they had to wait for the pizza, which was going to come after 11.

So it was a good day for them.

They got a sense of the city, about the park, and also historical museum of what went on in the city years and years ago.

So good job in getting that.

Thank you.

I'll just add my thanks as well for helping to put these events on. I know a lot of coordination had to happen for Public Works and Parks and Recreation Community Services Departments for organizing the tree planting. So many people turned out to help that we got done in much less time than we expected. so we got to get the hard work out of the way before the the real heat started to happen during the day i don't know if this is a question for you for police department but i don't know if you have a quick update on the gas leak that happened that i think is still occurring by

atlantic times square i can give you a quick update it's still going on um we're anticipating probably another at this point five hours before they complete it uh gas company did a a repair They had to do another repair on the other side. So unfortunately, it's taking a little bit longer than they'd hoped But yeah, it's hopefully we be completed by midnight tonight. All right. Thank you

Thank you so much for those events and and Sean I just have a quick question actually two quick questions

For the composting event How often do we do a composting event and usually a few times a year?

So we do yeah, we just did one actually in partnership with another tree planting event so it just happened to work out this way

but yeah we just did one a couple months ago

okay great and do we have a date

probably not yet right? Not yet

we have that ready to go all out everyone now

okay because I came home with a bunch of compost all my neighbors

were like why are you going to tell us but anyhow

as soon as you know a date if you could let us know

definitely will

just in terms of future tree planting events because I think it went really well looking at also other parks where we can do tree planting events to kind of spread some of the tree wealth throughout our community

would be great. You got it.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

And we'll go ahead and move on to the presentation portion. It looks like we have a presentation from the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority.

Thank you.

Grab the mic. Good evening, Mayor. Council members.

I am Mayor Robert Gonzalez from the City of Azusa, but I'm also your representative on C's pumping rights for the Water Quality Authority.

And as hearing your presentation from your chief, you're going to have an epic national night out.

Azusa is just trying to be good, but you're going to have epic, so I'm already jealous of Monterey Park, so congratulations.

I'm going to tell Rocky that the bar has been set in Monterey Park, so I'm going to let him know that.

Mayor Gonzalez, you're welcome to come to our national night out if you'd like to.

You didn't close the gate, so I definitely will take you up on your offer. But I appreciate that. But I came to you last year with an offer of doing a presentation, and I appreciate this body allowing us to do this for you.

I am, once again, your representative with cities with pumping rights. I represent 12 cities. Monterey Park, the beautiful city of Monterey Park, is one of my cities. So I thank you for allowing us to do this quick presentation and I'm gonna have

Executive Director Randy Shulerman lead the way, but I have some material for you So I'm gonna hand this over to the City Clerk and I'll turn it over to Randy

Thank you Good evening mayor city council members. Thank you for taking time to allow this presentation this evening I'm Randy Shulerman. I'm an executive director of the San Gabriel Basin water quality authority And let's go ahead onto the map. Thank you very much. So up here you'll see what's an outline of the main San Gabriel Basin, a large drinking water basin here that provides 90% of the drinking water to its residents here. You can see the colored areas. There's some groundwater contamination that's left over from legacy practices back in the 40s and 50s. Our agency was created in short to deal with this contamination, so I'm going to kind of cover that this evening. Next slide.

As I indicated, the contamination was first discovered in 1979 at the beginning of the Superfund process when the EPA came in and tested several wells in the basin upon that discovery. They divided the basin up into different areas for management purposes. State regulators went around the state and required additional testing so we were able to identify where the contamination was, which wells we should shut down, and we started having a plan on how we're going to clean up this basin. However, after all the regulatory agencies got together with the local water purveyors and local entities, they discovered that there was not one entity that existed that could take care of this contamination problem. So they created the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority

to address this issue. Next slide.

We were created in 1992 by an act of the legislature.

We opened our doors in 1993. Originally started as a five-member board. We're a local agency that's non-regulatory. There's enough regulatory agencies in the state.

So we plan and finance these groundwater treatment projects. The plan that we're mandated to create is called our Groundwater Quality Management and Remediation Plan, or 406 plan. You can find that on our website.

Very, very detailed plans about every single treatment plant that's a project that's been constructed in the basin. It gives a great history of who all the players are

and where all that remediation is happening. In 2000, we added two more board members. Next slide, please.

Here are our current board members. You just have a breakdown. You can see that we have two city members, one that represents cities with pumping rights and one without pumping rights. Mayor Gonzalez represents the cities with pumping rights, of which that's Monterey Park. We have three members from the municipal water districts, from Upper District San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, and Three Valleys Municipal Water District.

Council Member Wong was from San Gabriel Valley.

And two producer members, Linda Noriega from Cal Domestic Water Company and Bob DiPremio from the San Gabriel Valley Water Company. So you can see we have a broad interest that governs our agency. from different perspectives.

Next slide. So in general, our agency facilitates all the basin cleanup.

You can tell there's going to be lots of players. The basin is divided up in different areas, and each area has a different set of responsible parties. We haven't talked about that yet. But EPA's job is basically to come in and identify those parties that are responsible for this contamination. So there's a large contribution for the costs that come from those parties. We'll talk more about that specifically with Monterey Park in a minute.

Our agency was known for its early actions in the early days when we started in 1993. We had a motto of getting things done right away called early action

because when you're dealing with EPA and the federal government, things don't go quickly.

And we're dealing with groundwater contamination here. So we wanted to get projects in the ground. We were able to fund some early projects that got to those areas and contained that groundwater contamination before it moved on to other areas. We seek state and federal funding. We've been very successful in doing that. I'll describe that more in just a second. We also have a public outreach program, such as sitting in front of you.

You have been given some of our latest advertorials that we have.

You see in the centerfold is our things that we do several times a year to outreach to the public for different matters. One thing we like to express is even though here in the basin we have this groundwater contamination, everyone should realize that the water that you're getting out of this ground is 100% safe and clean because of the activities that water companies and cities with water rights like yourselves and your water staff take care of that to make sure that water is treated and it's clean and it's served to your customers.

Next. So talking about the funding here, we have our agency, we have what's called the San Gabriel Basin Restoration Fund. And we get money from, we try to get money from Congress every year. It's an appropriation. It's quite a bit of work. We've got $126 million from that, from Title 16.

state funds up around $60 million from various sources to help programs and help the city like Monterey Park. Responsible parties you can see have put in over $700 million which is obviously

the lion's share for this cleanup and that's obviously a good thing. But there are areas in the basin that don't have a responsible party to pay for this cleanup and that's why the other

funding is necessary for us to get next slide so i want to cover we've some of the past interactions and partnerships we've had with the city you might not be aware of some of these

happened in early starting in early 2000s we provided the funding grants up here on the screen for your well 12s well 15 construction your ion exchange units that were constructed

$2.6 million for the construction of that plus another $2.1 million to help operate it.

You can see well 5 construction, well 12 and 15 secondary barriers, those are treatment processes with granular activated carbon, the LGAC. And then your well system 1, 3, and 10 has gotten grants from us as well. 1, 3, and 10 is also getting an additional grant. recently we were able to get some Prop 68 funds and make them available to you to operate those plants for about five years that one three and ten we're also able to get a new an additional award recently which will be announcing to your

staff and amending our funding agreement with you for another probably two

million dollars for that project as well and the next slide shows how we were in partnership with you going way back to early 2000s when the modern park water Quality Authority, the San Gabriel Valley Water Company, and the Golden State Water Company sued

some of those responsible parties that existed here in Monterey Park. I mean, I shouldn't say Monterey Park, but what's called the South Armani Operable Unit, of which Monterey Park is a part of

that. There were upwards of close to 60 responsible parties. And so over a number of years, we settled

with those parties, and some of that funding went directly to the city. It helped offset your costs. Another chunk of those funds went to the EPA as part of the federal government.

Now, the EPA turned around is giving that money back to you in form of a cooperative agreement.

Now, the Water Quality Authority administers that cooperative agreement, and that assists Monterey Park, Golden State Water Company, and San Gabriel Valley Water Company

and helps offset the costs for your water treatment facilities here.

we continue to you're in what's called the South of Mane it's called a fund lead

which means EPA kind of oversees everything here and they're running that cooperative agreement

but after 10 years of the federal government being in charge they turn it over to the state that transition is about to happen so one of the main roles that we're playing right now in that transaction is making sure that that happens smoothly

and that the state takes over control. And the state here is going to be represented by the State Department of Toxic Sumptuses Control. So they will be taking over supervisory capacity of the operable unit. So the Water Quality Authority is very involved

in these processes. We've worked very closely with the staffs over the years of your city. And we've appreciated the cooperation and we've appreciated what you've done and able to help manage and contain the groundwater contamination in this area. So with that, I'll just leave it there for any questions, or if you have anything, I'm happy to answer any questions for you.

Well, thank you so much for that presentation, for coming back and sharing all this wonderful information. I want to ask Council to see if they have any questions or comments.

Mayor Portem Wong?

Thank you, Mayor Gonzalez. is appreciate you coming to our city to visit. And Randy, appreciate all the work that the WQA is doing to go after funding and make sure that all the cities in the Sangre Valley that are impacted by contaminants in our groundwater are able to fund the treatment and help offset some of those costs for our residents and our customers. I don't know if this is a question for you or for our staff, but we are I believe completed our new groundwater treatment facility right and I don't know if any of this funding is gonna go towards O&M for for that

facility good evening yes we will be receiving some funding for this we've

already received a lot of funding for the design and the build of it and we'll continue to move forward so we're getting close to getting it finally approved with the state we're literally hopefully weeks away um and then we'll be uh hopefully completing the construction work and then having a grand opening with for council great now we'd

love to invite wqa and our other partners that have helped make this a reality it's a huge deal right and and uh from my time on the water board i i think have an even deeper appreciation uh from my time on the water board i i think have an even deeper appreciation for what this means right ! first in the state and first in in many more than just california to do a treatment system set up like ! this to treat PFAS and other chemicals and constituents that are in our groundwater

! Absolutely we will that we have a laundry list of people that have been partners with us to get there so we'll have them all there

! Great thank you

thank you so much

and we'll see you on our national night out

It's gonna be epic that's right thank you

We'll go ahead and move on to old business items 2A, gun regulations.

Is there a report? Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. I'll take this one.

So I have, in lieu of a fancy slideshow, I've simply taken the staff report and taken the major portions out of that.

So that's presented for you on the screen. as I pull this up for you.

So as the Council is aware, following the mass murder event in January, the Council undertook a number of actions after that. One of them was a resolution that it adopted in March, which set forth a number of categories of things for the city management, for the city attorney to look at, the first of which was a gun buffer zone which is a different item on tonight's agenda this is more of an update on all the other categories of things that that particular resolution identified so what the staff report lays out it lays out for those in the audience that don't have the staff report in front of them it lays out exactly what that resolution stood for the city's police powers that enables it to enact some of these regulations and also lays out what the city can do and what it cannot do the latter is important because the city of as a general law city is preempted by the state of california to in terms of what it can regulate and what it cannot when it comes to gun regulations so i don't have this slide up here but let me go through what it the city cannot do So the city cannot register or license firearms, cannot regulate the manufacture, sale, or possession of imitation firearms. It cannot ban the manufacture, distribution, transportation, importation, and sale of assault weapons.

It cannot restrict handgun position in an individual's home, business, or private property.

It cannot regulate storing handguns in unattended vehicles.

And it cannot ban or restrict certain types of ammunition.

what you may do is you can regulate the display and discharge of firearms by police officers restrict gun dealerships to commercial areas and require land use and police permits which is the other agenda item that you're going to discuss tonight regulate the use of firearms in county parks and recreation areas there's a specific case law with regard to that and by implication that also means that you can regulate your city parks

California law also expressly authorizes cities to approve or deny permits to sell guns

The first, so I'm setting aside for a moment the buffer zone which is the public hearing item and simply dealing with the other items that are listed as 1 through 13 in the resolution that was adopted in March

Those are up here on the screen, the first seven are up here on the screen

All seven of these may be regulated with a conditional use permit if the City Council adopts the zoning regulations as proposed in Item 4A.

So these include all the ones that are listed.

I can read through them if you want to, but they are there for your reading.

So those are taken care of without needing, if the Council wants to adopt standard conditions of approval, and assuming that those regulations are adopted, we would place these standard conditions of approval into any conditional use permit issued to gun dealers.

Let's get to the more difficult ones. Next slide, please.

Number eight is requiring all firearms in a residence

be securely stored in a lock container or disabled with a trigger lock.

The Council may recall that last year,

the United States Supreme Court came down with a case that upended a long string of Second Amendment-related types of decisions made by previous courts. Based upon that decision and a subsequent decision by the Ninth Circuit's appeals court, which California is part of the Ninth Circuit for federal purposes, it's unclear whether these types of regulations would be legally defensible. So based upon that, I do not recommend that we go down the path of trying to enact these types of regulations. Keep in mind that these regulations were identified, again, back in March based upon items that the County Board of Supervisors were considering and had been considering for quite a long period of time.

But these court cases that I mentioned here simply altered that analysis, both at the county level and at the city level.

Next slide, please.

another thing that the city council considered in its resolution was to mandate liability insurance

for firearms owners in the city as mentioned in the staff report SB 8 if it's adopted at a state

level we'll do just that so my recommendation on that would be to wait to see whether SB 8 is actually adopted and go from there next slide please

number 10 is the feasibility of implementing a city firearms database i believe chief weiss has some information about that if you want to get delve deeper into the question on this one but it would require some additional study it's unclear between the confidentiality rules in california and those u.s supreme court cases whether such regulations could be legally defensible but we can certainly come back with additional information if that's something that's desirable. Chief, you were mentioning this morning that there are practical difficulties with this aside from legal ones. Perhaps you can go into that.

I made contact with the California Department of Justice, which currently manages firearms sales, firearms distributors, and is the registration point for firearms in California.

they are not going to share information with local jurisdictions they don't have a way of querying their database based on geographic area so zip codes they are more than cooperative with us during criminal investigations we can inquire and we have a database that can run a person to see if they have a gun registered to them but establishing a jurisdictional database is not going to happen with DOJ. They're not going to share that information with us nor the federal government. And their systems don't, they have three systems that manage firearms and not all those systems talk to each other. So it's an impossibility on the face and it's something that the state isn't willing to share with local jurisdictions.

So, again, we can come back with additional information if that's something that the Council wants to do. I think that's a huge practical barrier to setting aside any legal considerations.

Next slide, please.

Number 11, that the City Council considered in its resolution as banning the sale of .50 caliber handguns and ammunition in the City. Based, again, upon those decisions from last year, it's not recommended that the City adopt any such regulations.

Next slide, please.

prohibiting the carrying or possession of firearms on all city owned property that is supportable and it's actually specifically mentioned in the u.s supreme court case from last year so that's certainly something that the city council can do if that's desirable next slide please the city manager and the city attorney were also charged with coming back with additional things that perhaps weren't listed in the resolution or hadn't previously been contemplated and i think in and Chief Weiss can jump in if he has some additional thoughts on this. Some of the things that we've discovered, certainly, unfortunately, since January, are gaps, if you will, in federal and state legislation with regard to mass casualty incidents. And that's, in my cynical view, simply because legislators refuse to grapple with the reality of MCIs within this country. Some of those have to do with the whole reason that, for example, the Victims Fund was set up the way it was. Instead of being able to tap into a federal and state law simply stating that the city can set up a donation fund and we can operate it easily, we instead had to use all sorts of interesting ways in order to try to set up a Victims Fund that was tax-deductible and then encourage people to try to donate to that one rather than to other ones that popped up through other applications and other internet funds. Another example would be simply to have a database available for persons who were immediately affected by these incidents or secondarily affected by these incidents, for example, folks that have PTSD or whatever it is, to be able to log into those databases easily and receive the help that they need. Instead, the city's been having to cobble together various resources in order to try to meet the needs of that particular community. Chief, I don't know if you have additional thoughts on the matter.

Any event this size creates a burden financially for a community.

For a small city like ours, coupled with the amount of resources that were brought in,

luckily free of charge from federal and state and county agencies,

there's a significant amount of revenue that's spent out of the city general fund

to cover overtime and the investigative costs that go into an event like this.

Ours was limited based on the fact that the suspect won't be going to trial because of him taking his own life, but if it had been a trial situation,

there would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime spent

that's not reimbursable from the state. They reimburse state and federal governments for natural disasters,

but not for events like this.

And what about the overtime expenditures with regard to the visits from our friends from the White House?

That was significant also. My whole department was on overtime that day for the most part,

and I still had to bring in 50-plus officers from surrounding agencies to assist us.

The only saving grace was the weather that day, or I would have needed another 50 officers.

And all of them were on overtime,

and there's no form of reimbursement or anything from the federal government for those visits. out of our own pocket. So the reality is

as the City Council knows that the city is constantly trying to make sure that the budget is sound and trying to recover the money that it needs to. And although I think I can speak for everyone from staff that we were very grateful for the offers of help that we did get from both the state and federal and local levels, some of those came with price tags and we are not able to recover any of that money. I assume you sent a bill to, for example, the Secret Service and have not received a check back.

No, I haven't yet. Okay.

So these are practical things, and there may be solutions to them. And perhaps one of the things that the City Council may want to do is simply put together a wish list that certainly we can process and provide to our representatives, both at a federal and state level, to see if for other communities that are similarly affected, they won't have to go through the same type of red tape, if you will, on the backside of a terrible incident like we've experienced. One of the other things that the Council asked for in April was a what can we do about weapons confiscation.

I think that's on the next slide.

So we put together the bullet points of the existing laws that are in place. There's the Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5150. That is probably the most familiar to those sitting here. There's also the domestic violence and the gun violence restraining order. Some of those were discussed in April, but we're certainly happy to discuss them more. And the chief noted that Senate Bill 320, which was adopted in October 2021, amended the Family Code to allow for law enforcement agencies to confiscate firearms of persons found to be a prohibited person as defined. find by the law. One of the questions that was posed by the City Council in April was what could the City do more to try to encourage people to tap into these resources? I think from a legal standpoint, certainly

the City Attorney's Office can't provide services to folks that are needing to get, for example, a restraining order for simply ethical rule problems because the City Attorney's office represents the city and doesn't represent individuals however if that's something that the city council want to explore we could certainly try to come up with options in a budget for something like that but the court itself offers i think it has self-help centers where people can go in actually and be trained by the clerks that are there in the in the courthouse to actually get temporary restraining orders and those types of things so a lot of it is self-help by itself and certainly from the city's position or standpoint, we could make that information available on the city's website, for example, or even have a direct line person that could help people on the phone. I don't know, Chief, if you have somebody specifically dedicated in the police department that does any of this.

In the instance where there's a 5150 committal,

our NET team has an investigator, a detective assigned full-time. Part of that team's follow-up on a 5150 is to guarantee that there are no firearms in the residence or access to the person.

And then we work with the Department of Justice and go out and we confiscate those firearms,

either through a voluntary surrender or through a court order that we obtain as the police permit.

We also assist any victims of domestic violence in making sure that

them does not have any firearms and we take firearms away from them in those situations

based on the law also our city is very active when it comes to that we don't let a case go through

without checking to make sure that restricted persons or persons that can no longer possess

firearms based on current statutes that those laws are adhered to we do that on a regular basis

obviously whatever the city council would like to do there is a dollar price tag attached to to that so under fiscal impact we simply put we don't know because we don't know what the city council would like to do but certainly if the city council would like to go down any one of these paths or all of them that's something that we can put together when the time comes to actually adopt a policy so i'm happy to answer any questions with regard to this item again we will have another item that's related to this, but we wanted to go through the 1 through 13s, if you will, in that particular resolution before getting to the other one.

Well, thank you so much, Carl, for all of the help and Chief for putting all of that together and for bringing this back to Council. Are there any questions or comments from Council?

Yes, Mr. Mayor.

Council Member Liu?

Thank you, Carl. Thank you, Chief Lees, again, for this very thorough report back to the staff.

I've just been very informative and helpful. My question, well, my first question regarding item 8, requiring all firearms and residents peace securely stored in a locked container or disabled with sugar lock. Again, I understand what you're saying that because of recent Supreme Court decision, you know, it's unclear if they're legally defensible, but let's just say we were to enact such a ordinance I mean so what does it mean we might get sued or I mean

mr. mayor members the council I think it's not a question of might we get

sued and I'm fairly certain we would get sued if not from gun advocates than other types of civil rights groups the issue here is the u.s. Supreme Court said basically the second amendment says what it says and if you try to regulate the actual wording of the Second Amendment, you have a very high hill to climb. The Second Amendment, as you know, says that law-abiding citizens have the right to bear arms, period. And so the question becomes, well, if you're requiring law-abiding citizens to put their

weapons into safes with trigger guards or with trigger guards or what have you,

the government's argument on that side is that it's for safety purposes, not for accidental, to help prevent accidental discharge, accidental deaths, and what have you. And the counter argument to that is, well, the very purpose of the Second Amendment is for self-defense, and if you're now inhibiting my ability to use my weapon, if I need to use it for home defense, then you are in violation of the Second Amendment. I don't know where those arguments come out, which is why my advice on that was it's unclear whether those regulations would be legally defensible. but I don't want, from a legal standpoint, for the city of Monterey Park to be the test case. That said, you're the policymakers. If you want to go down the road, let's do it.

We already have cities in California that have enacted such ordinances, right? Do we know if any cities have seen legal challenges?

It's a brand-new case.

Okay.

I can't answer the question. There are nearly 500 cities in California. I don't know which ones have them off the top of my head, and I don't know which ones have been challenged.

I believe, for example, the city of Davis, I think, passed something similar last year, and I don't know if we want to find out, you know, like what has been their experience,

but I guess, you know, for me, I think, I mean, it's something I think we should still consider.

Again, this is a policy call from the city council. If that's a road that you would like us to go down, I will go down it and provide you with the best, most defensible language I can.

I'd like to add to this, because this is one that I also caught my eye and I think is very important. I know that a lot of the firearm and gun violence accidents that happen at home happen because a lot of the weapons are not properly stored. But my question is to you, Police Chief. How would this look like in a community like ours? If we were to say and pass an ordinance and say we would like to require that anyone who owns a weapon or a gun in their household that they keep it properly locked in a safe, how would we enforce that or how would this look like? And I'm asking more, I guess, from your end because I'm assuming that if we were to enforce this, a lot of this would probably come from the police department.

On an enforcement side, we would only be able to do anything about it if there was an accident. There wouldn't be any home inspections that we would do. We wouldn't have the authority to go into anybody's house and check their firearms. We wouldn't even know if they had a firearm in their house unless they came across us for some type of criminal investigation or there was an accident that occurred. There are still, as far as I know, there are still laws that prohibit gun owners from allowing guns to fall into the hands of juveniles. And if those kids end up hurting themselves or somebody else, then they're held liable for that. You cannot, police officers cannot store, we have a department policy that officers, when they have their firearms at home, have to keep them locked up. And we train officers on that. officers can't store their weapons in their private vehicles they have to be locked up so there are policies that cover that for us but there would be no mechanism for us to inspect the residents to see if they had their guns locked up in a lock box or trigger guard okay and and

just to add to what council member Lo said i know that the city of galetta in santa barbara Barber County just passed this week actually a similar measure so I'm kind of curious to see how that looks like and how that would play out but I'm assuming like you said that the only way we would know is if an accident happened so I'm assuming the law would be something more of a

repercussion for the parents probably? It's certainly something we can look into Santa

Barbara County and I previously represented Goleta so I understand the the sentiments in that particular city so that's something we can look at to to the chief's point though the regulations he's talking about regulate his officers and he can regulate his officers because they're his officers and they're employees of the city of monterey park what you're talking about and what this is talking about is regulating the weapons of private citizens in their homes and that's a much different than him regulating his police officers and i the reason i point that out is to the chief's point he's not going to be serving search warrants on everyone's homes to make sure that their weapons are locked up but to your point and also to the chief's point if he does go onto a crime scene and discover that the weapon was used and it was used improperly because it wasn't locked up there is an issue of civil liability and there's also an issue of criminal liability any violation of the city's municipal codes is a misdemeanor and so that is something else that that an individual

could be charged with.

But if that's something the council again wants to look at, happy to come back with proposed regulations for you to consider.

Any other questions or comments? Councilmember, you?

I have a question, police chief. When you cease the firearms, what will you do with it?

Firearms that are seized are destroyed. If it's a firearm that we need to train our officers on how to disable it or how to deal with it, we can get a court order from a judge to make that city property for the purposes of training. And then when we're done with the training process, we have it destroyed. But as a rule, all firearms that are seized are destroyed.

Okay, got it. And also another question is, what are the penalties if you own a gun but without a license?

Well, guns don't require a license. You're required to have a license to carry a concealed firearm. But owning a gun is not a licensable item. You have to pass a safety class to qualify to purchase it, and that's a state mandate. but there are no licenses to own a firearm in your home or to purchase a firearm other than the safety requirement that the state has.

But what if you find out someone who carries a gun and without?

If we find someone that's carrying a firearm concealed in public or exposed in public and they don't have a permit to carry an exposed firearm like a security guard or a concealed firearm like a citizen that applied and has been issued a concealed weapons permit, That's a misdemeanor, and we can arrest them and submit a case to the district attorney for criminal filing.

So you have a database that you can check right away if you find out someone that...

We don't have a database to check if they have a concealed weapons permit, but if we find somebody that's in possession of a firearm, we can check that firearm to see who owns it. And through time, that database has gotten better and better and better. There was a time back when firearms didn't require the firearm to be entered into the system like a registration for a car. So we're trying to, the state's trying to catch that up right now. But there's no concealed weapons database in California. It's a local issued permit that is issued by the chief of police to a citizen after they've passed the process to qualify for that.

I see. So, yeah, and I'm curious to actually learn more about the process. Maybe we can actually enforce that, you know, the license and the permit process.

We do. Our permit process here to carry a concealed firearm in Monterey Park is a significant process. We charge a fee, and there is a multilayered test that goes along with that to ensure that the people that we're issuing those permits to don't have criminal records, don't have records of domestic violence, that there's other safety measures. We do do a home inspection. We do ask them where they're going to store the firearm. We do talk about proper storage, all those things. But that's for those individuals that are requesting a concealed weapons permit.

Great. But then you don't require insurance, right?

We don't. We recommend it. and anybody who's applied for a CCW here in Monterey Park has learned that I have a very compelling argument of why it's a huge liability for them to have that concealed weapon. I want them to understand all of the ramifications of when if they use that gun and so they get the speech from me every single person in person. To date I haven't had anybody say know once they get through the process, but we don't require insurance at this point. We recommend it, but we don't require it.

Got it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Other questions? Council Member Ngo? Yeah, Chief. I think it's

probably safe to say if a responsible person goes through the process of getting a permit, that handling the gun is going to be the responsibility of the responsible person. I think from an impractical nature, you can't stop somebody because it's a privacy and an individual who wants to do some harm with a weapon, whether they got it legally or illegally, until they committed a crime. Then it's up to police to basically track it down and say, that's a no-no and here's the penalty.

Besides that, it's work that you guys

have to do to track it down. And unfortunately, when you run into those cases, there's a flashing yellow or red light because that's danger

at that point. Yes. Firearms have been at the root of

violent crime for as long as I've been a police officer for the last 36 plus years. I don't think that's ever going to

change.

Mental health coupled with firearms is the root of a lot of these problems that we're talking about.

and that's my opinion, and that's based on fact.

Mental health and firearms don't mix, just like alcohol and cars don't mix.

Mayor Patumwa?

Along the lines of what Councilman Ryu was asking on the concealed carry permits, the county sheriff can also issue CCWs for residents that hear here in Monterey Park.

Is that right? The process is that we would have to deny the permit for them to go to the sheriff.

When the permits were changed based on the Supreme Court ruling last year,

there was an influx of permits to the sheriff's department because they decided that they would issue permits regardless of where you lived.

I believe that the permit process got so big that they decided to follow the law,

which says they have to start with the city of residence.

They either work primarily in Monterey Park, they're here a lot, or they live in Monterey Park to qualify for a concealed weapons application. If they fail our process, they do have the ability to go to the Sheriff's Department and ask them.

Do we coordinate at all with the Sheriff? And I know that we have a new Sheriff compared to when that policy was reversed at the Sheriff's Department. I don't know if there's anything.

The Sheriff's Department gave us a list of all the permits that they issued to Monterey Park residents.

I believe there are 41 people in town that have permits issued by the Sheriff's Department.

They will continue to honor those permits and continue to...

current number of how many that we've issued, but it's, I believe it's under 10 that's been

issued by the police department to date. And those, do they need to come back for renewal

every so often? Yes, every two years. Judicial officers, judges, reserve police officers get a

permit for four years, and standard citizens have it for two. And then I know you mentioned earlier

that we destroy firearms that we seize?

It sounds like that number is probably pretty minimal on an annual basis.

Am I correct?

That we destroy or that we confiscate? We confiscate quite a few guns.

We take a lot of guns off the street,

and every single one of those at some point in the future will be destroyed.

I know that that's practice.

Is it city policy that we do not resell any seized guns?

It's up to me. Quite honestly, it's up to the chief, and I would never allow that.

That is, I believe, opening the city to huge forms of liability.

It doesn't offer any benefit that I'm aware of.

It doesn't provide any substantial revenue to the general fund by selling guns.

I would never I would never authorize it and I don't believe any of the chiefs that I know would either

we just don't do it they get destroyed on that note I would love to

if there's support among the other council members

to instruct staff to bring that back as a policy

for the council to pass

that the city for seized weapons will not resell

these weapons

in the marketplace. This is brought up to me in my mind because a few days after our shooting here in Monterey Park in January, L.A. County was doing a sale of seized guns that they had to claw back, from my understanding.

I think they were doing a buyback of guns, and that's a process where the cities obtained gift cards

and that they exchanged gift cards for firearms.

Those firearms are then destroyed.

so it's a way of bringing more guns in for destruction but it's not the sheriff's department

does not sell firearms to the public from that are that have been uh seized yeah no i support

gun buybacks and i think we should look at what those opportunities are for our own city to to

conduct some of those i believe there was a department in la county that was selling guns and the county

superpowers had to pull them back.

I misunderstood what you said.

I've been through four chiefs. I'm the fourth of all the chiefs that I've been through here. None of them

have had this process. Back to the 80s,

this was not something that chiefs of police were comfortable doing. I just want to make sure that

that continues going forward

beyond your tenure.

and if we can bring that back as a policy for the council to consider I think that would be great in regard to these measures appreciate Carl and your firm doing a lot of the research and work on these measures I for one right everything that you have determined is constitutionally defensible I would love to integrate and formalize right one through seven including in a CUP for any applications for new gun stores in the city. I would love to make sure that they have to go through a CUP process and abide by these requirements that you've listed. For those that are questionable given recent federal Supreme Court decisions, I would like to see how county, I know LA County is looking at moving forward on some of these. Let's maybe, I don't know that we need to take action. Maybe we let county take that first and see how that's handled.

So on 8, right, and 9, deferring to the state, hopefully.

And maybe that's something, I don't know if we've already taken action on the state bill for liability insurance for firearms.

We have. You have. So let's, yeah, keep watch on that.

Hopefully we can continue to encourage them to pass that. And if not this session and the next session to take action to support whatever bill that comes up as. on 10 database I understand some of the practical challenges that but maybe that's all there's also something we encourage the state to do better with and to help if it makes sense for us to be able to share that information for the state to share that information with local jurisdictions maybe that's something we advocate for as well you know 11 is probably not within our ability legally and constitutionally to do 12 absolutely we should if this is our not already policy we should absolutely bring back an ordinance to prohibit possession of firearms on city-owned property including our parks and other facilities except for law enforcement and those who actually need

guns 13 practical foundation for preventing MCI absolutely and I think

there's some recognition on the federal level given some of the cabinet secretaries and others that came to visit Monterey Park. I think this point was made in terms of being able to respond more quickly to these type of events just like other natural disasters for departments.

Whatever we can do to encourage more coordinated response as we know that more of these will

continue to happen in communities across the United States and California. Whatever we can do to advocate for a way or avenues for jurisdictions locally to respond more quickly and also to recover costs in the aftermath of these types of incidents,

just like natural disasters.

Absolutely, I support opportunities to advocate for that

and to call for that.

On weapons confiscation, I know that we've had conversations around gvros and we're gonna there's gonna be a press conference by congressman judy chu this friday in our city around resourcing language access for gvros that i think we've already taken position as a council to support um so proud to support that uh vocally um and i believe she's also going to introduce a bill to set aside resources for to support residents and others and community members who want to take advantage of GVRs to take guns out of the hands of people that should not have them. If we can also take that up if we still need to, to take a position of support on that specific bill, and hopefully that gets passed and we can be eligible for some of that funding,

I support us exploring whether it's engaging with a nonprofit

or approaching the cog or some other agency to look at how we can share resources with other cities that are neighboring us to resource and provide support technical assistance or whatever it is community members might need to go through the onerous GVRO process to take guns away from people that should not have them I know that's something that probably difficult for our city attorney's office in our city to take on at least on our own and to resource but But if there's a way to share some of those costs where you can have a person or some nonprofit, legal nonprofit or organization that's already doing some of this education effort in the area or in the region, that could also, through a grant from us and maybe some other cities that might want to partner on this, be able to provide that education in our community around this resource and the GVRO kind of pathway for people to remove guns from possession of people who should not have them to help do that education, but also to help them walk through the process of going through the court system and the complications that they need to go through to help remove guns from people that need them so that they're not just lost and they are taking advantage of this policy that's already in place.

I would support that.

And if you need a motion, I'll figure it out in a few minutes.

Wait, actually, hold on. Mr. Mayor? Yes, go ahead. I have a question, though. I mean, regarding GVROs.

Right now, I'm assuming the DA or the Department, there's already information posted out there, correct? On, you know, how to, the process for GVRO?

Yes.

So, Mr. Mayor, members of the Council, that was included with the April 5th staff report. Sort of the process of what needs to be done, what have you. And those were basically screenshots from the websites that go through that process.

Currently, do we, like on our city website, do we have a link to that? In other words, with the existing GVROs that exist now, is there a way in which we can, even simply as having it posted on our city information so that people can look it up?

I'll defer to the chief and to the interim city manager on that one.

We'll check our website to see what kind of links we have to that, and if we can make that link happen, we will.

I mean, I think at the rate,

at least have that posted on the website. And then also, since language is a little issue,

since, you know, hopefully the resources are out there

in some of the languages, but if not, given that our own website has the ability, you know, via Google Translate to translate this information,

again, I'd like to at least see, for now,

us making that information accessible to our residents

or anyone, for that matter, that wants to look up that information.

We will do that. Okay.

And then also, and again, I know it's been discussed by the mayor and I mentioned earlier,

but again, I'm still curious to see, like, on item 8 regarding storage,

and what have been the experience of cities so far?

Again, have they seen legal challenges or is there a holding pattern? because, again, I understand that several cities in the state have implemented such ordinances.

We'll bring back a staff report with regard to that specific item.

And to add on to that, I was looking at the Galetta ordinance. A lot of it is also education, so whatever we can do. I know this is kind of a, you know, might put us in some legal trouble in the future, So maybe the route might be more in terms of ensuring that residents have the, that we provide the education so that they can properly store and that we share that information either through gun dealers within our city or through the police department, through public awareness or social media or whatever.

Absolutely. Yes, Council Member, you. Yeah, sorry, one follow-up question. As far as I know, the gunman at the mass shooting, he has a permit or at one point he has a permit so how often do we check on people who has permit or used to have permit but still own guns to check with their mental health evaluation he did

not have a permit to carry a firearms concealed he purchased the firearms legally from a local firearms dealer who has since gone out of business many years ago his records were seized by the California Department of Justice and we were able to trace the origins of that firearm through the California Department of Justice and it was purchased legally by the by the shooter he did not update the registration when that firearm became part of the assault weapons ban in California it qualified as an assault weapon and he was required by statute at that point to fill out an assault weapons registration form he did not do that that's why that weapon became illegal is because of its of of how the weapon was manufactured and what it what made it an assault weapon in california but unfortunately he did purchase it legally back in the 90s and he did not have a permit to carry it concealed but you don't need a permit to buy a gun

and he had no mental health issues at the time he purchased it

Yeah, I just want to clarify.

I think we had a question about municipalities, police forces, reselling guns. I think Assembly Bill 733 prohibited that. Assembly Bill from Mike Fong did that just this year.

I forgot my thought.

But is that sufficient direction for Carl, or do we need motion?

I've got consensus direction from the council. I'm fine with that.

So we don't need to vote on any of that?

I think we've gone through it.

Okay.

I understand my marching orders, and I'll come back with the things that are definitely okay with proposed regulations. I'll come back with regard to number eight with a separate piece of analysis. we'll come back with a resolution with regard to policy in terms of seized weapons we'll come back with a resolution listing all the things that the feds and the state should do in order to make future communities have an easier experience trying to react to MCIs yeah I would

just echo mayor the mayor's point earlier around education too right we can enact all these policies no one knows about them. There's nothing. We can't do proactive enforcement on 20,000 households that are here in the city. So to the extent as we're looking at potential partners or nonprofits or other resources for helping to implement GVROs in the community, maybe we also look at people and organizations that might already be doing outreach around gun violence prevention and other efforts here in the county or in the region that we could potentially partner and

provide some efforts here in the county or in the region that we could potentially partner and provide some

! resources to have them come to some of this outreach in our own community both on mental health ! but also on gun violence prevention ! and safe storage and all those things that may not be ! whether we require them or not there's still good practices that we want people responsible gun owners to be aware of ! and to help them be responsible gun owners ! and i know too that all of these things are nibbling around the edges because of restrictions that the constitution and federal laws because of restrictions that the Constitution and federal laws currently handicap the ability for state and local governments to actually address the root of this problem. So that's unfortunate and if any way that we can continue to advocate for federal action to reduce access to guns for people who should not have them, let's continue to do that too.

Mr. Mayor.

Also, a question, if again, maybe you've already done this part of your research, Carl, or

Chief Wreath, but regarding, again, with GVROs, I'm kind of curious, do we know if, for example,

if the State Department, the California Department of Justice, is there funding available to,

again, because I realize, I just mentioned earlier, you know, for us to look at possibly

posting such information on our own website.

But again, I mean, even that requires, you know, time and staff time. And so I'm just curious, do we know or is that something that, you know,

we should follow up with the AG's office?

Is there funding for a resource to help promote awareness of these GVROs that exist now?

I don't know that we're aware of that, but definitely noted, and we can look into that and definitely make sure that there's more educational information posted on our website. but if there's funding opportunities available, we'll definitely...

And I would even suggest, too, that, again, you know,

I know the Attorney General did come visit us, and we sort of had contact, but at the same time, you know, we have our State Assembly Member,

our State Senator's Office.

Again, let's use the resources we have, the contact we have,

and see, you know, what's out there that we may not have possibly considered

as a way to, again, help us, as I think there's a consensus

that we want to just even educate the community about what...

But again, we talk about so much about how California has so many regulations and we're

concerned about a model for gun violence prevention.

But nonetheless, as I think a lot of us have also found out is that there probably is still

a lack of awareness.

Noted.

I think definitely we could reach out to our local representatives and see what programs are available and what nonprofit agencies might be able to come in and provide us with some educational resources.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right.

So we'll go ahead and move on to consent calendar items 3A, 3I. Council, are there any items you would like to pull?

3G, although I think wasn't there a request? I'm sorry, I could put a comment on the item.

3G? Yes. Okay.

Any other items, Council?

I'll pull 3E.

and 3

I. 3 E and 3 I.

Excellent. Any others?

Alright, so not hearing any others, is there someone who'd like to make a motion to pass the remaining

items? Move for approval of remaining consent agent items.

Seconded by Council Member Yu. If we can please take a vote.

Approved

unanimously excellent so if we can um i'm not sure if there's a staff report on item 3e the award for

award a bid for the purchase of two rescue ambulances i'll uh forego the staff report but

give uh public works director a little bit of time to or the fire battalion chief to get to the seat i just have a couple quick questions on it

appreciate the that this is being brought to us i just had a couple questions for

when we went out to look for ambulance replacements uh well one how long does it usually take uh so when i was reading the staff report there's a long lead time in terms of both purchasing uh right ambulances but also i believe retrofitting and making sure that they're set up, how long does it take from kind of ordering to actually getting in service?

Yes, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem. Currently talking to the vendor that we've selected in this bid, we're looking at possibly two years. So that's why we're coming to the council with trying to get ahead of this. You know, our ambulances will eventually need replacement. So we're dealing with two separate issues in that two-year timeline. We're dealing with one is vehicle acquisition, so the actual chassis that the manufacturer would make the box for the ambulance to sit on. The vehicle manufacturers are experiencing a very long backlog of production. and so that's one factor and then of course materials and getting the right spot in line for them for them to build the ambulance and put it all together long lead time how long do the ambulances typically last what's our expected lifetime we try and do an average of five to

seven years on an ambulance. And then when we went out to bid for these ambulance replacements,

are there any options for low emission or zero emission ambulances? Yes, we did examine that.

Ford does make an electric van ambulance. However, it's very limited in size right now. It's the size

of like a normal cargo Amazon, you know, or a sprinter type van, and we just require a

little bit more in compartment space for all the equipment that we have to carry being

dual function firefighter and paramedic.

Well, I appreciate that we looked at those options, and my hope is that the next time we have to go out for ambulances that there will be more options available that meet our needs for zero emission and low emission vehicles not only for these ambulances but across the board for all of our fleet for the city but encourage and hope that all of our departments as they're looking at fleet replacement are looking at what options meet our needs that and that will also meet uh zero and low emission standards that the state right is passing and that we want to

achieve as well. So, I mean, with that, I'll

be happy to make a motion to approve this item.

I wanted to add to what

Council Member, I'm sorry, to what Mayor Pro Tem Wong said. This was

also one that I had pulling, but

I think moving forward, we should start really looking at zero emission. I know

there's already cities that have

ambulances that are zero emission

or electric, so but I know that it's also

at times can be cost prohibitive as well and whether we have the the charging stations to be able to even charge these so moving forward also looking at the infrastructure that we might need if we are going to go move forward and purchase zero or electric vehicles that we have

the infrastructure that we need to be able to charge those as well but I know council member

Mayor Portem Blanco was going to make a

I'll make the motion to approve staff reports but really quick I want someone to echo

what the mayor was saying as we are looking at

we received

funding from the state for station 3 fire station

hopefully we'll cobble together the rest of the funding that's needed to replace

that fire station but as we're looking at design for that to make sure that the electric needs and other needs that we might need for future fire engines and ambulances and whatever equipment that we might need as we move towards zero emission equipment that we're sizing those properly both for that and then hopefully we'll look at and be able to fund retrofits for our headquarter station here as well and other facilities as we look at replacement and upgrading that we'll look at those making sure we size up the panels and other things that might need to be properly sized for the future as well, not just current state. But I'll make that motion to approve staff recommendation.

Second. Seconded by Council Member Ngo. If we can take a vote, please.

Approved unanimously.

Thank you.

We now have item 3G, authorizing the interim city manager to execute professional services agreement.

Is there a staff report for us?

All public comment first? There was a public comment?

Is that correct? Yes, that's correct.

One written.

Here, I'll read it for you. Oh, it's a written communication. Thank you.

Dear members of the City Council,

my name is Alexander Fung. I'm a resident of Monterey Park,

and I also serve as the chair of the City's Economic Development Advisory Commission.

I am submitting this comment to share my perspective regarding Agenda Item 3G.

I appreciate City staff for recognizing the importance of updating the City's

dated economic development strategic plan and I'm happy to express support for this item.

With the City Council's support, I hope that City staff will be provided

with the opportunity to begin updating the plan as soon as possible. The economic development strategic plan is a critical document that can help guide the City's economic growth

and the focus of the City's Economic Development Division over the next several years.

If the item is approved, I strongly recommend the City Council and staff to consider providing opportunities for the Commission, the business community, residents, and community organizations to provide input.

Community outreach is certainly an important component in the strategic plans update.

Thank you for your time and consideration, Alexander Fung. No other speakers.

Thank you.

All right, item 3G.

Was that, were there specific questions? Well, I'd like to hear a staff report. You wanted a staff report? Yes.

Good evening, Mayor, members of the City Council.

The presentation will be made tonight by Joe Torres, our Economic Development Manager.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Mayor, Pro Tem, Council Members. Thank you for the opportunity to present.

Staff is asking for the City Council's support in authorizing the interim city manager

to engage the Nathlisandale Group, a consulting firm, to assist the city in updating its 2010 Economic Development Strategic Plan

and to approve the appropriation of $81,620 from the general fund to fund the project.

Monterey Park's Economic Development Strategic Plan was last updated 13 years ago, 2010.

However, as you know, over the past 13 years, the city's economic landscape, and the world for that matter,

has evolved rapidly, intensified even more with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, Monterey Park has seen significant changes in its economic landscape,

including industry trends, technological advancements, and demographic patterns.

To ensure sustained growth, job creation, and enhance quality of life of our residents,

it is crucial that our Economic Development Strategic Plan remains relevant

and aligned with the changing needs of our community and to position our city for the future.

However, updating a comprehensive economic development strategic plan requires specialized knowledge, expertise, and dedicated resources.

Working with a consultant specializing in economic development strategic planning brings a wealth of experience to Monterey Park.

They bring a fresh set of ice and impartial judgment to the process, helping us identify gaps, untapped opportunities, and potential barriers that may have gone unnoticed by our internal staff.

Our updated economic development strategic plan will be a plan of the community for the community.

Therefore, an extensive stakeholder and community engagement process will drive the strategic plan development process.

Both staff in the Nathanson-Dale Group will coordinate outreach and engage with the Economic Development Advisory Commission, or EDAC,

and the Business Improvement District Advisory Committee, or DEDAC, as well as solicit input and conduct numerous workshops oriented toward Monterey Park residents

and workshops oriented toward the business community.

To ensure transparency and fairness, the City staff conducted a request for proposals, or RFP, using a rigorous qualifications-based selection process to identify the most suitable consulting firm for this project.

The RFP solicited proposals from multiple consulting firms with economic development, strategic planning expertise.

The staff thoroughly reviewed and scored proposals based on experience, qualifications, success in similar projects at comparable cities,

approach to stakeholder engagement, and more importantly, cost. As a result, the consulting firm selected the Nathalson-Dale Group, the merger as the top candidate due to its extensive experience, proven track record, and competitive pricing. Staff selected the Nathalson-Dale Group not only based on its expertise, but also with consideration for the most favorable price given the city's budget, while insuring high-quality deliverables.

The firm has extensive experience working with cities in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley area, comparable to Monterey Park, including a detailed 2019 market analysis for the Monterey Parks.

General Plan Update. By engaging the Nadelsondale Group, we can obtain the best value for our investment, combining their proven skills with a cost-effective approach that maximizes the impact of our economic development efforts. Thank you again, Mr. Mayor, Mayor Potem and Council members for the opportunity. A representative from the Nadelsondale Group, Mr. Alan Levinson and I are here to answer your questions.

Thank you, Joe, for that report.

Council Member Law, I know you have some questions.

Sure.

Again, actually, I will ask you right now. The gentleman comes up to the podium.

Can you describe in more detail about what this outreach is envisioned to engage our business community as well as those stakeholders?

Okay. Does that work? Yeah. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. Great to be here. and answer any questions you have about this process. And yes, we would have, this is for most of all of our economic development strategic planning efforts, we extensively engage the local community and local stakeholders, and this is part of a summit process. And in this case, since we have the advisory commission, there would be a series of three stakeholder meetings with them and going over the whole process of this strategic plan through each stage of it. And then in addition to that, we have the stakeholder outreach. We'll have three. We're going to do three meetings, one focused on residents, one focused on the business sector, and one more that we're going to define with city staff. And so that's a key part of the overall process to involve the local community and the stakeholders.

And will we be getting updates as you embark on each step of this outreach?

Yes, we have a detailed work scope where we lay out each. We have deliverables for each stage of this process. Okay.

And you said you will be working with our Economic Development Audit Commissioners?

Excuse me?

You'll be working with our Economic Development Advisory Commissioners?

Yes, they'll be part of the process and they'll be involved throughout the process with three meetings with them throughout the process.

And in those meetings, are you asking for input or are you asking for advice on how to outreach?

Yeah, we'll definitely use their local expertise and use their input as part of the process.

And will we be using any resources to do outreach, for example,

like send maybe something to businesses along our major commercial corridors or doing any surveying? Because I think it's – I mean, I appreciate that we're engaging with commissioners and the BDAC, but, again, the BDAC only represents the downtown portion.

Again, we have several commercial corridors,

and I want to make sure that it's a comprehensive outreach?

Yeah, that will definitely be part of the stakeholder process.

We are going to be engaging with the local business community, not just EDAC.

So that's definitely going to be part of the process.

And we're specifically going to be looking at integrating the business improvement district

as part of the plan and the effort as well.

Okay.

I may have more questions, but that's it for now.

Thank you. Okay.

So I encourage you to work with the Commission because they've been at this forefront for a number of years, been to a number of those meetings. I think we have a really, really loyal, smart group of folks who have been in the city for a long time and they're committed to the city.

That's why they volunteer.

So I think the feedback, the collaboration is going to help you get your work done probably

more succinctly and um will work for the city okay thank you that's great and i'll just echo uh what

some of the comments earlier from the other council members i hope and expect that this process will deeply involve the economic development advisory commission members and bidak members uh and other and engage our business community as well as our residents in terms of providing a vision for what the future of right the economic future and the business community should look like going into the future and how we want to accomplish that together. And I know that, Joe, you will be leveraging that. And I hope that not just for this process, but for all of our, just as with the library strategic plan,

leverage the library board of trustees

to help with the outreach and engagement with the community and gathering feedback that will leverage the commissioners and not just those two commissions, although those are very deeply involved

in our business community,

but the other commissions as well that have links to the community to make sure that we're soliciting quality and robust feedback from all corners of the city to the extent possible to inform this plan and make sure it's one that's inclusive of all elements in all parts of our community going forward but i'm excited to see that we're undergoing this process 13 years a long time a lot has changed indeed uh in the economy both here and and abroad and around the world um not not least of which the pandemic altering a lot of uh business practices and and we want to make this timely to have this process happen now so that we can help provide a vision for the future that will help inform the city's decision-making and regulatory

kind of framework going forward to support businesses

that we want here in the city and also to provide a vision for the community going forward too. So, thank you.

Thank you so much and I just will echo really quickly any opportunity we have

to engage our community whether

not just through our commission but also maybe just community feedback and town hall to try to be able to get the feedback that we need would be greatly appreciated and expected.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

And is there a motion?

Yeah, I'll go ahead and make the motion. Okay.

Seconded by Council Member Lo, and if we can please take a vote.

Approved unanimously.

Thank you.

We now have item 3A.

Was that you?

Mayor Pro Tem Wong, would you like a presentation or just had questions?

A very abbreviated update, if that's okay, Sean.

No problem. We'll give you a quick update.

So as you can see, we continue to do work on Monterey Pass. If you look at the attached map, it provides an overview of where we stand with the dual line along with the single line that's been done thus far. A lot of that were about 83% complete with that portion. We still have water services, fire hydrants, laterals to run. All of that work we're anticipating to be completed around November of this year. So we continue to do a lot of work. We're looking at, as it states in here, one of the tie-ins at Vagabond to tie in the transmission,

this new line to the existing main.

So there will be some work over the next week or so to tie in at that intersection.

With that, I'll take any questions. I appreciate that.

It sounds like we're on track for November completion of the water main replacement project. Do you know when we're planning to do the bike and sidewalk and other street improvements that we've been talking about?

Would that follow immediately? We're still looking at further?

That'll still be a little bit ways out.

Yeah, that's part of a different project. So we'll do some pavement work after this project is completed. and then after that we'll look at the actual bike enhancements,

sidewalk enhancements, and things like that.

So in the next couple of years it'll probably take between the funding, the design,

and then also the construction work.

Okay, so we are going to repave Monterey Pass then before bike and sidewalk and other improvements?

That's correct.

Okay, I'm just wondering about that.

Okay, I appreciate that.

I know this is a long emergency repair that's going on on Monterey Pass Road, And I know inconveniences a lot of people that have to go that have been driving through including the truck traffic and Residential traffic as well that goes through on Monterey Pass Road So continue to ask for everyone's patience and communities patients as this project gets done Yes, thank you and I'll make a motion to approve the staff report or receive and file a staff report

Seconded by council member you and if we can please take a vote

Approved unanimously.

Thank you.

We are now entering the public hearing section. So I'm going to go ahead and open public hearing on item 4A, consideration and possible action to introduce an ordinance adding Chapter 21.5 entitled Firearm Health Protection Zone.

Are there any speakers?

No speakers. Okay.

Carl? That's me again.

thank you mr mayor members of the council i have a prettier powerpoint for this particular item one of the items from the resolution that we were talking about in the earlier item or items one of the matters in the resolution that we talked about earlier was the this particular

buffer zone it's the firearm protection zone just as a matter of background which we all know but

I think bears repeating the mass killing incidents in 2023 alone. Next slide, please.

Didn't turn out as nicely as I thought it would, but in any event, you can see here, these are the graphs since 2006 in terms of mass casualty incidents in the United States. This is

from a recent USA Today survey. It was from July 18th, is my recollection, but you'll see that in

2023 we've had 31 this says 31 incidents but i know it's 146 so the data may be wrong i'm here

i am relying upon usa today information i apologize for that in any event there have been

an increasing number of incidents monterey park obviously next slide is one of the mcis that's counted in this in this data set far and above as you can see from this graph

the mass casualty incidents involve a handgun beyond any others these are all the data sets

from 2006 that were gathered by usa today next slide so these are the incidents that have occurred

just in 2023 i've highlighted the monterey park incident we were not the first but we certainly

were not the last next slide please so what we're discussing today is really adopting the potential

for adopting zoning regulations that would create a buffer around gun dealerships within the city of monterey park this slide shows that there are already two existing gun dealerships within monterey park assuming for the sake of this discussion that the council were to adopt these zoning regulations those two areas that are circled would become legal non-conforming uses within their zones. So to back up a little bit, gun dealerships are alLod in what are called shopping commercial zones, and we'll get to the zoning map in a moment to show where those zones are located within the city.

But these are pre-existing places.

One is the Big Five, which is there in Atlantic Square, and the other is a smaller private gun dealership, which caters really to specific individuals mainly related to law enforcement. What you see here on the radius is where the 1,000-foot radius would extend beyond those two sections, just to give you an idea of where that extends into.

Next slide, please.

So this is one of the areas of the zoned shopping commercial. This is over in Corporate Center, and that's where one of the existing gun dealerships is located. you'll see I have used Google Earth to put a radius around it which would be about a thousand feet.

This is not exactly to scale.

The way that the zoning regulations are currently drafted is we would actually measure from the parcel lines for each particular property that would be proposed for a gun dealership. So all this shows is a thousand foot really from the center of this particular property. So the boundary, which is the red line, would actually extend further assuming that a building within this area would be proposed for a gun dealership.

Next slide, please.

This is the area, yeah, this is Atlantic Square.

This is Atlantic Square around the Big Five area. And again, I haven't used the parcel lines. I've just put a dot in the middle of that particular location and extended out to 1,000 feet so you can see what residences would be affected by that 1,000-foot buffer.

Next slide, please.

This is the third place within Monterey Park that is zoned for SC. This is at the corner of Garvey and South Atlantic. And again, I've done the same thing with regard to the radius.

Next slide, please.

You have the option of expanding the radius or narrowing the radius, but I think based upon the opinions of this council, you're looking more probably toward expansion or keeping it at 1,000 feet. There's no magical formula with 1,000 feet, other than that was the one that was proposed by the county but there is no legal reason for a thousand feet or anything like that it's it's simply whatever the council thinks is appropriate for this particular zoning regulation if that's what you would like to do so the inner one is 1500 feet and the outer one is 2000 feet around from the existing area which is again the big five

commercial store next slide please this is the existing area in the corporate

center this again shows a 1500 and 2000 it's mislabeled as a thousand at the top but it it's again the 1500 versus 2000 next slide please and finally this is the zoning map so again the areas that are sort of a light purple which are encircled with the red radius which has no bearing on any buffer zone but just so you can see where they are within the city those are the only three areas where a gun dealership would be alLod within the city of monterey park and the two existing ones are at the at the Lor

corner of South Atlantic and Garvey, but that's what it would look like.

And that's the end of the slideshow, I believe. I'm happy to answer any questions.

In essence, what this would do would require both the buffer zone and would require a conditional use permit, and we previously discussed what kind of standard conditions would go into a conditional use permit if anyone were to come in. Again, though, I want to emphasize that the two existing gun dealerships, if these zoning regulations were to be adopted would be legal non-conforming so unless they sought to expand or relocate they would be not be subject to these zoning regulations and would not be required to come in and get a conditional use permit it would apply only to new ones coming in happy to answer any questions

thank you Carl for that and for all of the maps and for deep you know the

details that was very informative to see from an aerial view are there any

Any questions or comments from Council?

Council Member Lo? Yes, thank you.

I was wondering, given the several public schools that are in the City, would it be prudent

to expand as a union further so that they are encircled?

Again, that's totally up to the City Council. Again, with the radii that were shown on these maps are a little bit inaccurate simply because they weren't measured from the parcel lines of each particular gun dealership. So those lines, the radius will actually be larger than shown on this map. But you'll see, if you can back up to the Google Earth versions, yeah. But you'll see that all three of these areas, even with a 1,000-foot radius, it's going to affect neighborhoods. So practically speaking, it's going to be very difficult for any gun dealership to go into any of these areas. We do have two existing ones, so those would be unaffected again by these zoning regulations, which means that my other concern would be if we had no gun dealerships in town, for example, and by practicality you were preventing any new ones from coming in, that might be a problem. But since we have two existing ones, I'm less concerned about that. To answer your question, though, you can certainly expand the radius if you want.

I was just thinking, I mean, although I realize just if memory serves, we do have some schools that are in primary residential areas, but we do have, I believe, one elementary which is in a commercial corridor, and there are commercial spaces.

I'm just not saying there is a gun dealer there or potentially could be one, but again, I mean, given that we have at least one school, if my memory serves, that's in a commercial corridor, it may not be a valid to expand it, at least to include that area.

Is that the one over by a corporate center?

No. No, no, no, no. Inez is off of Inez and Garvey.

So you're probably about 3,500 feet from Garvey and Atlantic.

Okay.

I think we have a Google search of the Garvey and all that.

And the one by, the other one is probably. That one.

Yeah.

The school is probably on the outer edge.

That could be it right there.

That could be Kidfield, which is the blacktop basketball court.

Yeah, so if you expanded it out to, again, depending on where a proposed dealership were to go in, in that particular zoned area, the radius would go out. But certainly if you wanted to capture it, you should expand it to 1,500 or 2,000 feet to make sure.

I think we should. Why not?

And then, again, if, actually, correction, I'm thinking, actually, this isn't,

I think the council may have been wrong with this trip but Brightwood but I mean

again I know it's more than the chair but but if not I'm not mistaken on the

canyon there is a little shopping center again I I nothing does already want one

that's going to come in but there is a shopping center in proximity to Brightwood Yeah, the big five, that's the one.

The big five on the land square, right? It's just north of the hill.

Yeah, there you go.

Actually, isn't Highlands? No, no. Right.

By the way, what I'm saying, but isn't Highlands not too far away from a commercial?

No.

Just to emphasize, it's not any commercial center. It's only commercial centers that are shopping commercial.

well i mean this might answer it but i mean in effect even with a thousand foot radius

for sensitive receptors essentially no new gun stores can move in anywhere in the city correct so there's no need to expand from a thousand feet but for all practical purposes we can go even less like 500 feet from any of these shopping centers is already home so literally no stores no new stores can apply to come in Amari Park for any of the shopping center areas that they're alLod in.

Based upon this map and assuming that the council doesn't rezone any property to go to SC, that is correct, based upon existing zoning.

Well, to be safe and to Mayor Lo's, you know, maybe expanding to 1500 just to be safe or

I think my... Purely a policy decision.

Mayor, I think we need to be a little equitable here, and fair is businesses that's already in place, our grandfather in, so I think that's equitable. And then the other thing we have to look about is, and I think Pro Tem said this, even within 500 feet or 100 feet, you're basically the scope of business.

It's supply and demand.

I mean, you have two here. Really, one is really not inclusive,

because that's very exclusive. The other one's Big Five, and Big Five's been here a long time, and it's not really, it's a range of, it's air guns included, not just guns, it's hunting guns.

And the chief mentioned earlier, we have really 51 guns issued or permitted in the city here. 10 issued by, permitted by our police department, and roughly 41 by LA County.

So that's about 50.

with supply and demand I think if you do that a thousand feet that's a pretty safe zone here we've made it clear tonight and this council has that we're really not supportive of guns in this neighborhood I think we've made that pretty clear so I would be happy to make a motion to stick with the thousand feet buffer zone and have further discussion on that

I would also support the thousand foot buffer as suggested in the staff report.

I think, right, in all effects, that will stop any new,

and if Big Five wanted to move or whatever into a different space, they would not be alLod essentially to build out.

At least they would not be able to sell guns.

It would be extremely difficult, let's put it that way.

I support the thousand foot buffer. I think if we need to look at this some more, we can obviously bring that back to look at but the challenge right really is not with legal guns

it's with now illegal ones since uh council member goes uh point around supply and demand if someone

wants to get a gun these days they can order it by the mail and they're very easy ways to build

untraceable ghost guns right chief um and so it's not it's really not as much the legal gun stores that we are worried about not that we're not worried about them but there are much easier ways to get your hands on a gun if you really want one than going into a store unless i'm wrong

i'll defer to the law enforcement on that one so i i'll second the motion that councilmer go made on

the thousand foot buffer to sensitive receptors prohibiting uh new gun stores uh locating as

as the staff report indicates, but also would love to direct staff,

if there's support from the council members, to look at other options. I don't know what else we can do to address illegal guns like ghost guns and the proliferation of those in communities across the route everywhere. And if there are ways that we can restrict those kind of guns in the community, let's bring those actions back to the council as well.

Thank you.

So there's a motion and a second. If we can take a vote, please.

Before we do that.

Let's make sure what we're making a motion on.

There are two ordinances being proposed at the 1,000-foot radius.

There's an urgency ordinance, which requires a four-fifths vote to approve and adopt immediately.

And then there's the regular ordinance, which would have introductions tonight and first reading. That just requires three affirmative votes.

If we pass the ordinance, do we still need to pass the regular ordinance?

That's my recommendation.

As you know, I do everything on belt and suspenders.