City Council Meeting — November 6, 2024

We'd like to acknowledge that the land we inhabit today was once known as the Tovangaar,

home of the Gavaleo Tongva people.

We show our respect to the Gavaleo Tongva people as well as all indigenous people, past, present, and future, and honor their labor as original caretakers of this land. I commit to uplifting the Gavalu Tonga people

invite you to acknowledge the history

and join us in caring for this land

with that said I'll call in the order we'll invite the

fire explorers

to do the presentation of the garden

Forward march.

Present colors.

Please place your right hand. hand over your heart. Ready, begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States

of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible,

by the liberty and justice for all. Prepare to pose colors. Forward march.

Please be seated.

I ask the city clerk to do the roll call.

Council Member Sanchez. Present. Council Member Lo.

Present.

Council Member Yu. Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Ngo.

Mayor Wong.

Present. We have a quorum.

Thank you.

Any agenda additions, deletions, changes, adoptions?

Yes, good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. Two adjustments to the agenda tonight. we'd like to request to reschedule item 1A for Superintendent Denise Jaramillo's award. She had a conflict tonight and was not able to join us, so we'd like to request to reschedule on that item and not hear that item tonight. And in addition, item 6A, we'd like to request to move that up after public communications before staff communications, if that's okay with council. we have guests in the audience.

If there are no objections, we'll do that.

All right.

We'll go and start with any public communications. We'll open it up if there are any public communications for items not on the agenda.

Yes, first speaker, Marissa Castro from SE.

I know you're so used to calling Marissa Castro,

So Michelle and I go back a little bit further prior to Edison. So she just knew me as Marissa Castro without that Salvati at the end. So good evening, everybody. My name is Marissa Castro Salvati.

I'm the government relations manager for Southern California Edison. And it's like coming home. I had this city back in 2000 to 2015. So I was here for 15 years in this city and actually met our mayor here at that time as one of your community activists. And I think I know most of you here, with the exception of I got to meet Councilmember Jose Sanchez. I know Yvonne and Henry from past and, of course, Vin. But I wanted to just introduce myself and let folks know that I am back in the city of Monterey Park in the interim. We had some staff-free org, and I had actually inherited my own city back for whenever they decide to replace the individual that's going to cover this area. The city manager and I have already been in discussion in some of the items that are pending that need to be moving forward. So we'll be looking forward to a great partnership here at the city of Monterey Park, and it's just coming home. So thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you.

Byron, if you already have her information on some of the infrastructure. Cheers.

Yeah, good. We go back to Monterey Valley.

Any other public comment?

Next speaker, Al Sanchez.

Hello. My name is Al Sanchez. I grew up here in Monterey Park at 924 Summit Place. My mother has had our house since 1965.

The reason I'm here is that our neighborhood has been experiencing an unusual amount of house burglaries. My house has had two burglary attempts within the last, the most recent within the last 10 years.

However, these attempts have increased. My next-door neighbor has had their house burglarized twice. The most recent was last year. In January, there was burglary at Riddside Drive and Crest Vista.

The following month in February, the same house was burglarized again,

this time while the owners were asleep inside. it is likely that the burglars came back with the key that they had stolen from the previous break-in.

In August, another house was robbed on Ridgecrest. There was also a break-in that occurred on 829 Ridgecrest, which is a house under construction, but nothing was inside the house because it was under construction. Recently, about 100 feet away from there, about around October 15th,

there was a burglary at 794 Ridgecrest, where the burglars folLod the couple that lived there to Marie Callendars and slashed their towels while the burglars went back to the couple's house and broke in.

These guys are getting much more brazen.

Again, on October 22nd, there was another burglary on 1082 Ridgecrest,

which was about three-quarters of a mile away from the one on the 15th. This time, the burglars cut the power to disable the alarm system, but the alarm still went off.

Once again, the most recent burglary occurred on Friday the 3rd, this last 3rd, at 1 p.m. at 830 Ridgecrest, which is literally 50 feet away from the burglary that occurred at 794 Ridgecrest on the 15th and almost directly across the street from the 829 Ridgecrest burglary.

That is seven burglaries since January and four within a month. Three of the houses that had break-ins were within 100 feet of each other. These criminals are becoming more brazen. I call the police on cars in my neighborhood all the time, and the police are giving me some bad attitude. What are we to do? All we can do is call the police and take down license plate numbers, and we can. I want to know what the police, the detectives, and the city council are going to do to prevent and solve these crimes. This is not acceptable. The property values will plummet if this continues. My mother is terrified. It is only a matter of time before these criminals get even more brazen,

and enough to hurt somebody. Thank you.

Thank you. I know the chief is back there.

Maybe we can follow up with him directly.

I wonder if you want to head back there. Okay.

Next speaker, Mark Liu of the Righteous Quest Foundation.

I want to show you a bell. Sounds very handy.

On the bell there was a story. But actually I have another bell.

It's more than half a tongue. So big, so large.

2007 Dan King trailer. You will see part of that documentary film. We are thinking about now time close to Thanksgiving. We want to show American people that we Chinese American community would like to pay tribute to these 22 American citizens. To show our culture that we never forget the favor other people did for us. I supply the application to hope to get the grant to use the square in front of the city hall. But it's been a couple of weeks, and all the local community preparing singing chorus and their program.

Now I feel the heavy, heavy pressure was on me. So I come here to ask for a favor if it can be approved sooner, because this is something that we want to show how we appreciate

and how we want to pay tribute to these 22 American citizens. They risked their lives. They set up a safety zone, saved more than 200,000 refugees' lives. Watch it on YouTube.

You can find it. So another thing is if any council member or the mayor could spare some time to join us,

even procedure certificate would be so appreciated. That's why I come here. Thank you.

Sir, what space are you looking to reserve? Are you looking to reserve a space?

Yeah, the square in front of the city hall. So just the front lawn?

I applied.

You said you applied for a grant?

No, just a permit. Oh, a permit, okay. I already bought the coverage, you know, the event insurance,

and also everything that Mr. Chavez told me.

Yes. Chavez told me, don't worry.

It won't be rejected, but I'm still so worried. Oh, okay, I understand. Two weeks away.

So it sounds like you submitted a permit application with us, and so it's being circulated probably with our staff for approval. So any time we have requests to utilize the front of our city hall space, It is a special event application permit that we use, and the different departments do have to review it to just ensure that we understand what you're requesting. So as soon as we receive it, we'll definitely be able to provide you with this response very soon.

Okay, thank you so much. Thanks. When is your event planned for? When is the event going to be?

November 23rd, Saturday morning, 10 to 11.30. so it's only about maybe 17 days away and they owe the community organization up singing practicing chorus so that's why I was so worried

that if not approved or something that would be a disaster

I'm looking at them right now

I'm sure we will get you back an answer

very quickly thank you Thank you.

Any other speakers?

No other speakers. Thank you.

If there is no further public communication, we will go to item 6A,

resolution of the City Council of the City of Mario Park,

clearing, recognizing November 2024 as Native American Heritage Month. I don't know if Councilmember Sanchez wants to tee this off.

Yes. Yes, thank you. So November is Native American Heritage Month, and the mayor did an excellent job earlier in reading our land acknowledgement, which our city approved last year. and we also have a guest speaker here today to help us speak to the importance of recognizing November as Native American Heritage Month. So I wanted to invite up Ms. Mona Morales-Ricalde, who is an enrolled member of the Gabriolino Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians. She was elected to the commission in January 2023. Her family maintains tradition and continuity to their tribe by living on the tribal tradition land and knowing its precious history. Mona maintains connection and community through volunteering at the Kurubungna, participating in Native beating circles and singing traditional songs at events such as Indigenous Peoples Day hosted by the city and county of Los Angeles. And Mona has been active in Native American culture, maintaining her family traditions all of her life. And as a teacher, as an ethnic studies teacher. I had the opportunity to visit the Krumah village with a lot of my colleagues as well. So if you haven't had an opportunity to go in the Santa Monica area, it's literally attached to high school. But it's such an amazing and peaceful area. So thank you so much for being here tonight and for helping us celebrate and commemorate Native American Heritage Month.

Mija, thank you. Thank you for your partnership and allyship. One of the things that we often share about Native Americans and specifically Tongva is that there are not many of us remaining

and so we really look for allyship. And out of you doing the land acknowledgement and the allyship

that you guys have created, we are now teaching every third grade classroom in Alhambra School District based on the partnership that we have with you guys. So I want to thank you and let

you know that there's an impact that's being felt not just here in your city but also in the surrounding communities based on what you guys have done. As a small token of our appreciation

for you all. We have donated a book to the library about Toy Perina, which is one of our ancestors, and I actually have posters for you guys as well that I'll leave with the city clerk for you guys to display. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to my daughter. Miha Netwotnane, Ellie, Dancing Walker, Spirit, Morales, Recalde. City Council, I am a descendant of the first people that inhabited this land, the historic tribe of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians, Gabriela Tongva. Our story and history began since time immemorial. This is a land my ancestors have called home for thousands of years.

The territory of our people is commonly known as the Greater LA Basin, Orange County, and the Four Southerner Channel Islands. We have lived in community with the first people who cared for this land.

We are taught our connection to the natural world and everything we shared breath with as a relative. We understood the importance of balance and connection. We lived in harmony with Mother Nature for centuries prior to colonization. Today, the spirit of life continues in our tribe. As we stand on the Gabriolino Tongva land, let us remember how important it is to stand in solidarity, care for Mother Earth, honor our relatives, and know the importance of community, seeking balance and equality for all. Thank you for recognizing that November is Native American Heritage Month, a wish canohe.

Thank you. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you so much for that. So in honor of Native American Heritage Month, I'd like to encourage the City Council to support and pass item 6A to declare in Monterey Park November as Native American Heritage Month.

Sounds like a motion.

Yes. Is there a second or other comments? Second by Council Member U. Any further comments? If not, call for the vote.

Approved unanimously.

Thank you. And I'd like to encourage also everyone in the audience and everyone who's listening to find a way to celebrate and also learn about the First Peoples here in California. There are hundreds of native tribes here that are native here to California. In our area of Monterey Park, the Tongva Gambrelino people were our First Peoples here. And part of how we celebrate and honor their tradition and their legacy as caretakers but also First Peoples here in this area is by recognizing their existence, celebrating their culture and ensuring that we don't forget and we continue to honor them. So thank you so much for being here, Ms. Ricaldi, and your daughters as well, and also for helping us commemorate Native American Heritage Month here in the city of Monterey Park. Thank you.

I'll just echo thanks and appreciation. I know the library is coming up for staff report.

I don't know if we have anything planned for Native American Heritage Month. Sounds like we do.

so appreciate that and whatever we can do to continue to amplify the history of the native First Peoples here would be great to continue in that effort in the years to come as well all right if nothing further we'll move to staff communications starting with the city manager's office

all right good evening mr. mayor and city council diana garcia assistant city manager

this evening we wanted to let the public know about a couple events that we've got coming up

the first one being our first annual volunteer fair so this is going to be tomorrow evening

Thursday, November 7th from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Barnes Park Service Clubhouse.

We've got a lot of wonderful nonprofit organizations in the community, and we wanted to invite them all out to table so that they can share with the community about what they do. They can recruit new members and new volunteers, and folks can get involved and serve their community.

So we've got about a dozen groups signed up for that.

If you're interested in volunteering, you'd like to know more about the organizations that we have in our own city.

We encourage you to come out tomorrow evening.

The second item that we wanted to bring your attention to and invite our residents to is going to be our State of the City address.

So this is coming up very soon, November 19th. It's a Tuesday evening. We're going to be holding it right here in Monterey Park City Hall Council Chambers.

The doors will open at 5 p.m., and the program will begin at 5.30.

So this event is going to be a presentation by our mayor, Thomas Wong,

talking about the accomplishments that have taken place over the past nine to ten months in the city.

So we'll be sharing out some of our goals, talking about the different accomplishments in our city departments,

and potentially talking about some goals for the future.

So we encourage everybody to come out to that.

That's a public event.

And learn more about your city. that concludes my presentation happy to answer any questions

thank you any questions from

council not looking forward to those events we'll move on

to community development communications

good evening Mr. Mayor

Mayor, Pro Tem, and Council Members. I'm Joe Torres, your Economic Development Manager. I'm excited to share an update on the Taste of Downtown MPK program. Next slide, please. Officially launched last week on November 1st. This initiative aims to drive food traffic and support our downtown restaurants. Customers who dine at participating locations can earn a 10% credit on purchases using the Open Rewards app. To ensure program awareness in multiple languages, we've utilized all city communication channels, including an article in this month's November Cascades and personally visited each downtown restaurant as well. Customers can earn rewards throughout November and redeem them at any participating establishment until the end of December.

Next slide, please.

And these are samples of the flyers that were printed in Chinese and Spanish and distributed all over the city.

Next slide, please.

And last but not the least, and saving the best for last, the city of Monterey Park has been selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation 2024 Most Business-Friendly City Award. This prestigious award recognizes cities in Los Angeles County that have demonstrated outstanding efforts in supporting local businesses, fostering job creation, and promoting economic growth. The LADC selected Monterey Park as a finalist based on its commitment to streamlining business processes, enhancing economic development initiatives, and fostering a business-friendly climate. This recognition belongs to our dedicated city officials and city staff, our resilient business community, and our residents who make Monterey Park such a welcoming and dynamic place. Finalists for the 2024 Most Business-Friendly City Award were selected in two categories based on city population. We belong to the small city category. Most business-friendly small city finalists with 60,000 population or less are the following. Monterey Park, El Segundo, Glendora, San Fernando, and La Mirada. So we are in great company. And again, outstanding recognition, and the whole city deserves it.

Thank you. I'm open for any questions. Thank you, Joe.

Looking forward to active participation in the Taste of Downtown MPK. I encourage everyone to download the app if you haven't

and to start spending some money at some local restaurants and shops here in the downtown area.

And I'm sure you'll be – my understanding is the announcement for the award for most business-friendly small city. City Department. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations.

! Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Congratulations. Congratulations.

you, Joe. A lot of this is testament to a lot of the work that we do to make our city business friendly, especially within your department. So very excited to see even just getting a nomination is prestigious in itself, given the message that it sends. So thank you so much for everything that you guys do. Hopefully, keeping my fingers crossed that Monterey Park is selected, and if so, makes a lot of sense in terms of how would resonate within our city in terms of how business friendly we are. So thank you so much for the hard work that you guys do. And looking forward to hearing a little bit more within the council meeting, see what the results are.

I'll just again echo how even being a finalist by LEDC on this matter is a huge testament to how much you and the team here at City Hall have been doing to help support our businesses, particularly in the wake of the impacts, the very direct impacts of the shooting that happened that impacted a lot of downtown businesses. and all the work we've been able to accomplish in partnership with the SBA, federal government, and our state partners and regional partners in the county to bring resources to the community and the programs we are working on launching, including Taste of Downtown and BK, and others that are in the pipeline to be rolled out in the coming months.

So we really appreciate that.

And a great testament, too, to our year-plus-long effort to work and the stakeholders, There's the many community cycles that fit into our economic development strategic plan, so thank you so much, and kudos to the staff team. Really, this recognition is helping to recognize all the work behind the scenes that have happened to help support our business community here in Martin Park.

I actually have a friend who's at the event tonight, and I've asked him to text me as soon as they make the announcement, so I'll be sure to let everyone know.

Thank you. Good. Thank you. All right, we will move on to library.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and City Council. My name is Leonie Jordan, and I'm the Senior Librarian for Adult and Teen Services.

So each month, the library hosts a popular free legal assistance clinic with volunteer attorneys on hand to answer questions. This program is sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Bar Association and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Southern California. Our next clinic is on November 12, starting at 6pm. Note that there is an illegal clinic in December because of holidays, so this will be a popular one. For more information and to register, you can call or visit the reference desk.

Next slide.

At our new caregiver meet-ups, caregivers and kids are invited to the library to connect with other families and to learn from a guest speaker. This month, you can join Chinatown Service Centre for a workshop that teaches caregivers the developmental benefits of reading to your child. The event also includes a free book giveaway, likely to be very popular.

Next slide.

On Saturday, November 23 at 10am, the Neighbourhood Legal Service of Los Angeles County will present workers' rights training. Learn more about your rights in the workplace from employment law attorneys. This will be presented in English and in Mandarin.

Next slide.

On Saturday, November 23 at 2pm, please join us for a special screening of the short film Tequila Sunset, which promotes awareness of Alzheimer's disease and the challenges faced by caregivers. After the film, stay for a conversation and a Q&A with the writer-director-producer Jin Su Song and actor C.C. Lau. Next slide.

Elder Law Day is coming up.

On Saturday, November 30,

lawyers from the Asian Pacific American Bar Association will be providing free legal assistance in estate planning, including preparation of power of attorney for finances and advanced health care directives.

Registrations are required

and can be made by visiting or phoning the reference desk.

Next slide.

And returning again to Native American Heritage Month. so you can celebrate Native American Heritage Month at the library. In the book list section of the library catalogue, you'll find specially themed Heritage Month reading lists for adults, teens, and children.

Next slide.

At Honouring the Gabriolino Tongva People, teens can create Gabriolino Tongva-inspired art and learn about the indigenous tribe of the Los Angeles Basin.

Next slide.

On November 19, movie lovers are invited to a screening of Pure Grit, a documentary that chronicles three years in the life of a young Native American bareback horse racer. If you can't make this screening, you can visit Canopy to enjoy a curated collection of films that honour Native American history and heritage.

Canopy is a video streaming service that provides instant access to thousands of critically acclaimed movies, documentaries, TV series and kids' favourites in over 80 languages. All that you need to get started is your library card.

Next slide.

The LAMP Literacy Program is beginning their winter workshops in December. So these workshops provide supplemental literacy and English conversation practice for adult learners at all levels. Registrations begin on November 12, and the winter sessions run from December to January. For more information, you can phone or visit the Literacy Office at the library.

And lastly, if you're planning any trips over the holidays, make sure your passport is up to date. Our popular passport services are offered Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with appointments required. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Any questions for the library? Well, I'm just amazed by all of the programming. I know there's a couple things that I saw that I'm definitely going to participate in the Early Readers and program, but also just really amazed by all of the different things and services that the library offers aside from just regular reading. And so I appreciate all of the law and legal services, workshops that are being offered at the library. I try to make it to the library at least once a week with my daughter, and every time I go in there, it's just very vibrant and buzzing. So great to see that people are making use of the library and its resources. I will definitely see you on Tuesday because I need a passport. So I will be there between 3 to 7 p.m. Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, I also want to just, I mean, it's impressive. All this in one month. And I want I want to also just acknowledge how I appreciate very much the ongoing partnership with the Asian American Bar Association and Vesting Justice for the legal clinic that is so popular in our community. And I always like to remind people that the weekend after our mass shooting in January 21st of 2023, when many of us weren't even sure whether or not to continue, that it was very heartening to see a room full of attorneys there

and a long line of people who also were waiting to receive services.

And I think that was very heartwarming

and certainly, I think, alLod us to really feel that, you know, we would be able to overcome the crisis of the time.

It's definitely a very valued service.

Yes.

Any other comments, questions?

Not appreciate the library update

and appreciate how active we are continuing to be in the month of November.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

All right, we'll move on to police department update.

Mr. Mayor, members of the city council, Scott Weiss, chief of police. So I'm here tonight to talk to you a little bit about holiday safety and some of our crime prevention stuff we're working on. We'll talk a little bit about crime trends also, burglary as we go through. Next slide, please.

So our Community Engagement Bureau is the portion of the police department that's responsible for kind of getting the message out to the public.

We do it through Business Watch meetings, Citizens Academy, our Explorer Post, which is the largest one in the San Gabriel Valley with over 20 explorers, and our Neighborhood Watch groups. Go ahead, next one. I think we've talked about our Neighborhood Watch program. We currently have quite a few, and the next slide will show you where they are in the city and what group they're or what part of the city they're in.

we reach out on a daily basis and try to set up neighborhood watch groups within neighborhoods.

We do get calls from neighborhoods, and we try to link them up with current neighborhood watch groups to expand a group that may have already started to make it a little bigger.

Our goal is to create a partnership where people in the neighborhood look out for each other. That's kind of the purpose of Neighborhood Watch. We get them to know their neighbors. We now with modern day technology, we get phone trees together and we get text groups together. They share information. The gentleman that was here, I talked to him out in the lobby. Their neighborhood is organized and has the ability to kind of text each other when they see things. That's kind of what the Neighborhood Watch program is all about. Next slide, please. please. We've had four neighborhood watch this current budget year, so within the last several

months. We've had four neighborhood watch meetings with 85 people present, and we've had two business watch meetings with 25 people present. Business watch is kind of the same thing, but we tailor it

more toward a business area. And we try to set it up so that we understand the hours of the

businesses, the employees and the managers. So we try to tailor it so we come to them and they don't have to leave their business to go to the meeting. It's a little difficult sometimes, but that's kind of the difference between it. A lot of times you'd be surprised. Businesses within a certain area

never talk to each other. They open their business, they go about their business, and they never really communicate with the store unless it's right next door or they share a parking lot or something

like that. So we try to bring those groups together and kind of share similar activities and similar ideas. Next slide, please. We broke down our block captains by districts.

It's kind of sometimes arbitrary. We require, we ask our block captains to kind of be the voice

of that neighborhood, so we kind of try to empower them.

We can't be at every single meeting, so we start them off with a program. We give them the ability to ask for support as we go on,

but they can have as many or as few meetings as they want,

and then we kind of keep tabs on them to see how things are going as time goes on. If we get a new person that notifies us and says,

hey, I want to join an Haybridge Walk group, and there's where I live, we'll connect them up with a block captain, and then they'll start to join that group. Next slide, please.

we've had some virtual virtual meetings. We learned how to do virtual meetings after COVID. And some of them are very successful. Some of them we combine in person with virtual. Some neighborhood watch groups still are leery about meeting together and they want to do a virtual meeting. So we have the ability to set those up at the request of a neighborhood or a

group of people. Next one, please. November 13 is our next one. It's a virtual meeting,

and it'll be with detectives in traffic, and they're going to discuss in depth some of the things that I'm talking about tonight, but more in depth, and they'll be there to answer people's questions. And we take any question. It doesn't have to be about holiday safety. We'll answer

any question that comes up. Next slide, please. Some of the holiday safety tips. This went out in Cascades just recently. Obviously, they're common sense in a lot of cases, but it's important that people are aware of their surroundings.

They're aware of what's going on around them, and they do their part to secure their residences and secure their vehicles.

Sometimes that doesn't stop people from breaking in. We know that. Criminals are very resourceful,

and the burglaries that we see on a regular basis in our residential neighborhoods are what I would consider professional burglars.

That's their day job. And a lot of them are not from this area, not from the United States.

And they come up, and they're here on a holiday, and their holiday is revolved around breaking into people's houses and stealing stuff. And they travel up here as tourists to do that. That's a huge trend now that's starting to occur. And those organized gangs from Central and South America have hit houses up here in Monterey Park. There's a task force that works those cases. We cooperate with them and we try to pool our information and try to run these people down. But it's very, very organized. Next slide, please.

So this is something that I think is really simple. We all know what a ring device is. Most of us have them on our doors.

But it doesn't have to be on your door.

it's convenient because it's a doorbell, but it also is a motion camera

that you get activations of motion, right?

Depending on how you set it up, you get activations of motion. That camera right there, you can buy just about at any store.

out to dinner. It's on our phone. We turn on the activation. I save the non-emergency number for the police department of the jurisdiction I live in. So I'm not panicking when it goes off. And then if we're at dinner and it goes off, I pay attention to it. I don't mute it. I look at it. Oh my gosh, there's somebody in my house. Nobody's supposed to be there. Yeah, all my kids are here. So immediately, while I'm on this phone, my wife pulls up her phone and she calls the police department and says, we're at dinner. Our motion sensor went off. There's a burglar inside our house. We're watching him on the camera right now. Here's where we live. Every police department in Southern California will bend over backwards to get to that location and catch that person because that's what they want to do, especially the small ones like ours. My guys that are out on the street right now, they sit in their cars driving through neighborhoods looking for burglars to catch. They love it. It's their number one fun thing is to catch a burglar. So this is one of the easy ways for people to have a security system within their house. It'll cost you less than $70. I think the cameras are currently going for about $70 at Home Depot or Target. It's very simple. You don't have to have a video camera on your house inside while you're making breakfast and all those things. You turn it on when you leave. You turn it off when you get home. It's very, very simple, very inexpensive. You can take it on vacation with you, put it in your hotel room. You can take it to a VRBO anywhere you want to go. It's a mobile personal video system that you can set to motion that will protect you and your things. Very, very simple. This is a really inexpensive way to do burglary prevention inside of your home. But you have to follow the rules. You've got to call us. Don't call your friend and ask him if you should call us. You should call us. Save Monterey Park PD's number on your phone, the non-emergency number. Put it down as police so that all you have to do is hit the button so you don't have to go to Google and search for the non-emergency number. because if you're in Alhambra and you call 911, you're going to talk to Alhambra PD. The computer knows where you're at and is going to call the local PD. And you can ask them to transfer it, but are we really going to remember that when we're stressed out about someone in the house? It's much better to just have the line to the police department in your phone. Simple things like that will help you. Next slide, please. some of the ways we get out information are through the the our social media platforms the website cascades through community events and through collaboration with schools and other organizations pta meetings school events we're at all those when the school starts and throughout the school year we're in constant communication with our principals and our school districts helping get that information out to the parents next slide please so here's some of our crime Stratts for October 2023, we had three robberies in the city for October 2024. We had five. A robbery is when somebody takes something from your person using force or fear. Give me your cell phone. That's a robbery. A burglary is when someone breaks into your home or take something from you from a secure vehicle or structure and you're not there. That's a burglary. October we had 2023, we had 27 burglaries in the city. In October of 2024, we had 17. Overall, burglaries are down between the two years by 7%. Robberies are up by 19%.

Theft is anything non-burglary. It's anything from stealing a bicycle to shoplifting to anything that isn't classified in those other two sections.

This month we had 50. Last year, the same month, we had 77. We're down 7%. Grand Theft Auto, stealing cars. 18, as opposed to 20 last year, we're down 24% in stealing cars. And those are ones that occur in Monterey Park. Their cars are stolen from Monterey Park. Because of our flock system and our cameras, we are constantly pulling over stolen cars. When I read the daily, almost every single day, there's a stolen car being pulled over in our city. I've talked to police chiefs. We had our chief's conference last week. It's the same in every single city. The ALPR systems that we have in our city help catch people that are stealing cars and are wanted because the cars are in the system is stolen. And our officers get an immediate notification on their personal cell phone that a car just passed our camera that's stolen within seconds. And then they go out and hunt that car down.

Vandalisms are up 20 as opposed to nine. We're up by 14%.

We will see how things change coming up after the election, after the first of the year with Prop 36, and the prosecution will change when it comes to offenders. There are some things going on in the county level that are, you know, we're hoping because of Prop 36 and because of the policies policies within the district attorney's office are going to change. We're going to see more prosecutions. So we're hoping that leads to more deterrence. Drug offenses will come back because currently drug offenses are not prosecuted in Los Angeles County. They're not filed. We're hoping that that comes back and we start to get filings for possession of cocaine and heroin and all those methamphetamine because right now we never get filings on those. The DA doesn't want to file them. So they get released. We're hoping that comes back. Drugs is kind of the center point of a lot of thefts that occur. Next slide, please. Our contact information, anybody can reach us at any time. I have a lot of transparency within the police department. If they ask a question, they're going to get an answer. They might not like the answer because it kind of shows them what's going on in society, but we're not hiding anything from anybody in the public or anybody. We want them to be able to see what's going on. If I can share the information with them legally, I will share it with them. The gentleman that was up here tonight talking, we had a great conversation afterwards. We'll be in communication tomorrow, and I was able to give him some information on what's going on. I'll research it, and I'll give him more information tomorrow. I think we'll be okay. I'm here for any questions. Thank you, Chief. Questions from Council? Well, thank you. A lot of this was very informative, even just for us, so thank you for sharing that information. I just want to make sure that we're finding ways to, as much as we can, especially, I'm assuming during the holidays we tend to see perhaps an uptick in robberies. We will. It's cyclic. We put out a lot of extra patrols.

We patrol the area of Costco on a regular basis, like every day. And then Atlantic Square, we hit those areas with both undercover and marked units as a deterrent.

but we'll start those patrols up kind of the time after Thanksgiving

and before New Year's is when we hit those areas,

and the officers will be out. And some of it's high profile, it's a deterrent, and some of it is we're undercover and we want to catch the people that are doing it. We do a lot of analytics, so we look at crime trends

and we try to target areas because I have limited resources. So I need to be able to focus those resources on where crimes are occurring. So we'd use analytics to try to do that.

I like the education piece, Chief. So whatever we can do to try to educate and share a lot of this information with residents, in particular home burglaries, that would be amazing so that we can maybe see a downtick in terms of the home burglaries. But thank you so much for everything that you guys are doing and looking forward to seeing maybe a little bit more campaigning towards home burglaries. Thank you. Yes. Mr. Mayor? Thank you. Thank you, Chief.

Also, I agree, it's a very informative presentation. I'm getting curious, under the category of vandalism, does that include, like, graffiti?

Yes.

Okay. And has there been an incision of graffiti in the city?

We haven't seen an epidemic of graffiti. Graffiti happens. It comes from different groups of people for different reasons. Sometimes graffiti is one kid doing something because they think it's cool. Other times it's related to a gang. We don't have any organized street gangs that claim Monterey Park as their home, but we border areas that do. If you've been on the 10 Freeway within the last couple weeks, you've noticed an uptick in Lomas gang graffiti along the 10 Freeway, some of it 10 feet high. they're in the midst of conflict within the Lomas gang and some of the other gangs in the area. So they're going to use graffiti as a way of putting their point out there. We haven't seen an uptick of that in Monterey Park. We have the ability through some investigative means to take graffiti, analyze it, and then assign it to different people. Graffiti artists tend not to change their MO. I see. It's their patent. So they want to keep the same kind of graffiti because to that world, within that society, it's a status symbol for them. Once we identify who that is and they don't change, we can file charges on them, and we do. And it's over $900, we can get a felony charge. We've had successful felony vandalism prosecutions here in Monterey Park within the last couple years.

Wonderful.

And a follow-up question to, I guess, Public Works or city staff. But when graffiti occurs on, say, park or any public property, what is the turnaround time for abatement?

We put it into graffiti, Tucker. Yeah, Sean's going to address it, I'm sure.

Yes, Sean Igoe, Public Works Director, is making his way down. Usually, if it's put in through GOPK, I know we usually have a pretty quick turnaround, but I'll let him respond.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Yes, we do our best to turn it around usually within 24 hours, but it definitely depends on if it's after hours. So we do our best to turn those things around as quickly as possible.

If it's a Friday night, they won't get it until Monday. No.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, Chief. I have a question. Recently we have a friend, her house got robbed, and I'm curious that we saw a helicopter. I mean, do we have helicopters in my report or we partner with the sheriff?

We contract with the sheriff's department and we can request a helicopter. If they are available, they will come and assist us through contract. We also have drone teams. So a lot of times we'll launch a drone within minutes of the call from the scene so that we can get a kind of a real quick look down view. the helicopter the sheriff's department launches helicopters throughout the county there's I believe two in the basin and there's one up in the Palmdale area most of the time but they're affected by weather and they prioritize calls for service also but that's where when you see a helicopter overhead 90% of the time it's an LA County sheriff's helicopter that we've requested to come assist us

and also the follow question is she shared a non-emergency number that the same as the number that you just share. And for comparison, I just realized that the reason is when your location is out of Monterey Park, so when you dial 911, so the call will just go to the nearest location. But how fast it is if we just dial 911 and got transferred to Monterey Park and compared to just dial the non-emergency number, what's the response?

A lot of times it'll depend on how far away you are. So in our dispatch center, all the dispatch centers, we have quick dial buttons, if you will, presets. So my dispatchers have presets for Montebello, City of L.A., L.A. County Sheriff's, Alhambra, San Gabriel. They're preset. All we do is, boom, they come on and say, hey, Alhambra, it's Monterey Park. I'm transferring a 911 call. Medical calls that go to Verdugo to fire dispatch, we do the same thing. if it's like El Monte we may not have a preset for El Monte so the dispatchers will have to take a couple more steps in the computer to find El Monte's link and then send it so if you're in you know El Cajon in San Diego and your phone goes off and you see it you call 9-1-1 you're going to talk to El Cajon they're going to say Monterey where they may connect you to you know monterey california so it's always better to have our direct line in your phone but if you're within the local jurisdiction you can ask that dispatcher but you've got to be really specific with them i live in monterey park the crime's in monterey park i'm calling 9-1-1 i need you to to transfer me to monterey park pd and they'll do it um but it there is a there's a little bit of a time delay

i see so this number is same as the 9-1-1 in monterey yes same person answers the phone

Same person answers the phone. Got it. The better, the 911 shows you where, it shows us where you're at. The regular phone line does not.

Okay. Got it. Thank you.

And you can text 911, too. You just 911 and you write your text. It goes to dispatch within a second or two, and you can text back and forth to dispatch. And they know where you're at for the text also. We've talked about that here before.

Right, right. So for the text, it's actually also going to the neighbor. You can text also.

I wouldn't text this call. I would voice the call, not text the burglary in progress. But you can text the 911.

Got it. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Chief.

No, appreciate seeing at least some of the categories.

I don't know if that was the number of neighborhood watch groups we have now.

Yeah, that's the number of neighborhood watch groups in that district.

So the total for the city is like, I'm trying to do quick math, so like 25, 30.

25? 25. Yeah. That's down from over 100. Before the pandemic, yeah. Yeah.

But that's great progress from zero to 25 in a year and a half or so.

We keep bringing them back.

And if there is anything to do to continue to support,

I know we're doing a lot to support the Neighbor Watch programs. Maybe when we're kind of planning our appreciation event for city volunteers,

which I hope we will continue,

I assume we will include the Neighbor Watch block captains at least.

Maybe that's something we can highlight. We can look at that.

Absolutely. That's a good idea. Yeah.

And whatever else we can do to help them feel like.

I agree. We give them, you know, I give them guns. I mean, I'm kidding. They get police cars.

They get all these things. But I just can't get them to go out and actually use them. Wow.

Just kidding. Just kidding.

Some of them would like that. Yes, I'm sure. There are plenty of groups in town that want to be deputized. And that's a no-go. We still have a reserve program. We do. Yes. We absolutely do. We encourage people to join that also if they want to be involved.

But, yeah, there's some groups that are, you know, once you become a victim,

you really sink your teeth like the gentleman that was here.

He's sinking his teeth into his neighborhood. That's exactly what we're looking for, people like that.

Hopefully we did some recruiting for a future block.

He and I will continue to talk.

Great. All right. Thank you so much. If there are no further questions for PD, appreciate it. Thank you. I will move to Recreation Community Services.

Good evening, Mayor and members of the City Council. My name is Memo Chavez, Recreation Supervisor with the Recreation Department. Thank you for having me here tonight to share some upcoming programs and events. First, the Recreation Department would like to thank all the vendors, departments, and residents who came out to the Monster Mash event on October 17th. We estimated about 3,500 people that came out to the event. We also had close to 1,000 people vote for the employee pumpkin decorating contest. So thank you to everyone for supporting that event. Next slide, please.

Who won? We want to see the winning pumpkin. The winning pumpkin was... Who was that? Fire department, that's right. Fire and then recreation came in second, someone from the rec staff,

and then third was also recreation. Yeah.

Next slide, please. Yeah, there we go. Thank you also to UCLA Asian Pacific Health Corps on co-hosting, along with the city of Monterey Park, the annual health fair at Langley Center on Saturday, October 19th. The event saw approximately 200 people take advantage of health care services and information. Next slide, please. And finally, thank you to everyone that participated in the Dia de los Muertos community altar at Langley Center. There were 20 people who sent in photos via email and several others who walked in and placed items on the altar. Next slide, please. Letters to Santa are now being received at Santa's mailbox located at Langley Center, 400 West Emerson Avenue. Children are invited to send their letters to Santa at the North Pole. Letters can also be mailed to the same address at 400 West Emerson. Please include a name and a return address so Santa can properly respond. Drop-off hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 8 to noon. Next slide, please.

The City of Monterey Park is hosting the fourth annual Pickleball Tournament this Saturday, November 9th at Barnes Park. All participants will receive free goodies for participating, and winners of the tournament will receive cash prizes. There are currently 42 teams enrolled to participate.

The Veterans Day event is scheduled for Monday, November 11th at 11 a.m. at the American Legion Post 397. The event is to honor and express gratitude to all those who served in the United States Armed Forces.

and the City of Monterey Park will be celebrating Native American Heritage Month by offering a special event on Thursday, November 14th in conjunction with the Farmer's Market at Barnes Park. Tribe members from the Navajo, Dakota, Yaqui, and Thana Otham will be offering Storyteller and Eagle Dancer

along with a Fancy Dancer and Hoop Dancer. The event will run from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Next slide, please.

And last, the annual Snow Village event is scheduled for Thursday. You like that picture?

For Thursday, December 5th at Barnes Park, the event will offer games, sled run, snow play, entertainment, food, and photos with Santa.

The event will run from 4 to 8 and be in conjunction with the farmer's market. Thank you and remember to follow the Recreation Department on social media at Monterey Park Rec. Thank you very much. thank you any questions comments from council yeah well first of all thank you for all the

amazing uh programming that um i just can't believe that we're already talking about christmas but um but also very exciting because christmas is very exciting and i know that we do such an amazing job of engaging our community and having activities um like census village and all of that it made me think about the picture that you guys used uh uh just felt like it happened yesterday so thank you so much uh for the holiday snow village um i was i was at the um at the monster mash a lot of very well put together a lot of attendance and a lot of happy families and kids i saw so thank you so much for all the effort that you guys do uh between you and the library and i know i'm speaking right now i'm going to try to be like council member go a lot of hap a lot happening uh in in our community in the month of November and December. So thank you so much for everything that you do. It makes it a lot easier for parents like myself. We have kids. We have so many activities happening in our city. So thank you. And I really like your shirt. Thank you.

Again, thank you for just doing every month epic events for not just our community but for the region.

Again, much appreciation. Thank you. Ditto. Thanks so much.

Appreciate everything the Recreation Community Services Department is doing and look forward to all the holiday celebrations coming up.

All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. We will.

That concludes our staff communications.

We'll move to presentation item 1B, Ware Enterprises.

Updates on the transition to our new residential hauler. It looks like Sean is going to tee this up.

Just a quick intro. Yeah.

Good evening again, Honorable Mayor and Council. Shawnail Public Works Director. Tonight we have Ware Disposal here. They're going to give a quick update on how things are going and answer any questions you may have.

So with that, I will turn it over to Ware.

Good evening, Council Members and Mr. Mayor. My name is Leah Ding, and this is my colleague Eddie Lara. We're here to give an update. As of now, we are delivering kitchen pails. And kitchen pail delivery started on November 4th, 2024, and will continue through November 11th, 2024. Each residential property will receive a kitchen pail placed at the front door or at the front porch. We have delivered approximately 5,000 kitchen pails as of Tuesday, so the number goes up since we finished today. And we are on track. We should be finishing delivering all the kitchen pails by Friday. Billing updates. Currently, we have 1,229 accounts representing 10% of the total accounts that are 60 days past due. late fees were waived for all customers during the initial billing cycle. Customers have been notified about past due delinquency via invoices and separate notice.

For customer service, there has been a 30 to 40 percent decrease in the number of phone calls we are receiving,

with a fewer increase about sorting materials, service level changes,

and requests for disabled rollout services.

Customer care center continues to receive a steady flow of visitors

who come to make payments in person, access educational materials, modify service levels.

Customers can reach customer service via email, phone, or website chat. Voicemails are addressed daily. Next slide, please. Challenges we are encountered as of now. Adjustments have been needed to accommodate varying cart size changes.

Specifically, we have approximately 130 requests for 32-gallon cart services and 290 requests for 64 gallons. Additionally, there has been an increase of the number of bulky item collection between September 3, 2024, which is the day we started service, to October 31, 2024. We received about 1,300 requests for bulk item removals from customers.

and we've been participating community events and continue our outreach opportunities and we've been participating in National Night Out, Monster Mash, which was really fun, community cleanup events, Garvey Education Foundation event, Mono Park Women's Club Library Fall Classic Gala

and we are looking forward to the Snow Village coming up in December 5th.

And that concludes my presentation. If you have any questions, please let us know. Thank you, Leah. Any questions from Council? Yes, first of all, thank you for being here

and for the update. Sean, if we can go back to the last slide. I had just a couple questions regarding the bin requests for the 130 and 290 requests that were made. Have you guys been able to fulfill those requests? Yes, these are the ones that are done.

Oh, okay.

And then, well, thank you for that. And just wanted to make sure, and I think we would have probably heard from residents by now if they weren't being met, but I just wanted to double check. And then for, also wanted to thank you for being present in a lot of our community events. that means a lot to have a presence there and i see you guys a lot at a lot of our events and have a booth so thank you for for doing that i know that takes a lot of time um but also um it's a great way for you guys to be out there and for residents who might have questions regarding their trash collection services um for you to be there to have those questions answered so thank you for for being there you guys are very visible i appreciate that um and i just had one more question i think was the previous slide with the late charges yeah um thank you for waving those late fees for residents. I know the transition can be hard, especially with the billing, so appreciate that you were waiving any late fees for that first month. For residents who are still, I still had a question, a little unsure, are we still having large amounts of people with late fees? About 10% of

residents, they haven't paid, so those

I think we will are we gonna stop

Good evening counsel Eddie law Yeah, so what would happen was we would um

We'd put a tag on their containers and notify them about their bill normally when they see the tag They'll call in and they usually get it squared away and as long as they call us, you know same day before

Three o'clock we'll send them back the same day to service them and clean up any kind of mess

We try to take care of them as much as possible to avoid any kind of complications. I know they don't want trash all over the place, so we make sure that we take care of them immediately as soon as it's all squared away.

I'm just wondering if this is continuing, if there's a way we can, City Manager, maybe request a list of that 10% of people who are still maybe not making payments, just to we double-check so that they're not being discontinued service. just to have a form of redundancy, I would imagine, just to make sure that that 10% who might not still be making payments, their service is not cut, might be accidental, might be because of the transition. I just want to make sure that everyone is getting serviced. It's a new billing system for them, so we've been understanding with that because they were getting bills monthly, and now it's every two months. So it's a little, you know, we understand with that.

The separation of the water bill.

yeah no no I appreciate the the work that you guys are doing and just whatever we can do to help partner to make sure that we're continuing service with that 10 percent and is you know appreciated and then also you know just the community the education portion of this is is really great. My daughters are all into it. So I just had one question with it once we get the buckets. Are there specific like bag liners that you recommend that we should use for these little containers? Are we just dumping it into the green bin? Most people just they don't really put any in there. Sometimes you'll get people that'll get like those biodegradable bags and just wrap it and put the whole thing in there.

But mainly people just put the food directly in there and they dump it into the green bin.

Oh, okay.

That's normally what they do. And then they just wash it out. And there's like instructions in there?

Yeah, everybody that's getting the food waste pail, there's a flyer inside there.

It's exactly what's acceptable, how to dispose of it and everything like that. So it's inside every pail. Okay.

I have one like that at home that I'm using and I bought some disposable bags because it gets a little messy or whatever. Yeah, it can get messy.

Some people do that, some people don't. But they're pretty easy to wash out too as well. Okay, perfect.

Residents might be receiving a different color. So the bottom is a beige color.

Yeah, so this is beige and it's a different color lid.

Sorry, I grabbed the wrong one.

But it's a little bit bigger and it has your guys' logo on the side. Oh, cool.

Specifically for Monterey Park. We got those especially for you guys. It's different than this one. Thank you. And I just have one final question.

For the 1,300 requests for bulky item pickups, have all of those requests been met as well?

Absolutely, yeah. I get them 24 hours in advance. As long as they call us the day before their trash pickup day, we make it mandatory to get them taken care of it.

They don't want those bulky sitting in the streets to be hazardous or whatever, so we take care of them immediately.

Perfect. Thank you so much. That's it for me. Thank you for your help. A follow-up question.

If I understand correctly, so if the bulky item is near their trash pickup day, then usually within 24 hours the item is picked up or it doesn't matter?

As long as they give us a 24-hour, say their trash pickup day is Tuesday, right? They'll call us Monday. Monday morning before noon, I'll squeeze them in for the next day and get out there.

But then I mean, if it's, let's say the resident discovers the day after the regular weekly scheduled pickup, so does that mean it has to wait a week?

It's normally on the pickup, the next trash pickup day.

Again, if they say there's something very important going on where it's hazardous or it's in the way or it's blocking or something like that, then I would make the exception and just reroute a truck as soon as possible, if not the next day, the day after.

But normally most residents are okay with the next trash pickup day But if there's I can make exceptions

Quick question well one deco what councilman's actually said in terms of appreciation I think it's a very smart move in terms of waiving late fees for the first at least the first building cycle Is that only the case for the first building cycle or you plan to extend that for the next building cycle at all or just?

curious I don't believe they're doing that on the second billing cycle. I'm not 100% sure.

I could find out that information, and then I'll relay it to Sean, our associate. I'm not 100% sure on that, though, yet.

And then what is the policy for where in terms of nonpayment for those who are missing or delinquent in their payments?

Would trash service be discontinued, or is that something you would partner with the city on in terms of recovering costs, somehow or I'm just curious what happens when people actually don't pay?

We tag the container and then normally the customer would notify us, would call us because they're trashing and picked up

and then they square away the bill with the billing department. In the case where they just don't pay at all, then yeah, we would reach out to Sean

or she and then we'd work on it from there.

But no one's, we haven't gotten to that point, right? No, we have not gotten to that point yet.

If we do get to that point, I think I would personally appreciate knowing how prevalent that becomes

and if that becomes a bigger and bigger issue at all, if we can keep council apprised as we get further into the service period.

But thank you so much. I appreciate the update.

If there aren't any further questions, thank you for –

I know early on there was a lot of questions,

which is very natural for a transition like this, both billing and service and service provider in two bins or three bins. I think there's still a lot of confusion. I know we're working

on it together

and I think a lot of concerns have been

addressed in these first

month or two and

look forward to continuing on this

partnership in the next few years to come at least. Thank you so much. Appreciate your whole

team for all that they're doing to get us past some of these initial speed bumps.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. Have a good night.

All right. We will move to the consent calendar. Are there any items we are pulling from consent?

No.

3G.

3G.

And I will pull

3C for a quick conversation. Is there a motion for the remaining items? I move for to pass the remaining items. Second. So motion and second. Any further discussion? Hearing none, we'll call for the vote.

Approved unanimously.

Thank you. All right.

I'll just note before we get into 3C, Sean, for item 3F,

I noticed that all the projects we certified completion on came in under budget,

so kudos to Public Works. Really appreciate your hard work.

Moving to item 3C, receive and file Monterey Park bid number 1, 2024,

annual report and approve those bid assessment and budget for 2025 program here if there's a quick staff report on this item

good evening Mary Wong members of the City Council I'm Jessica Serrano

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

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Council Members. On behalf of the Downtown Business Improvement District Advisory Committee, or BIDAC, I am pleased to present the BIDAC's 2024 Business Improvement District Annual Report and the proposed budget for 2025 in accordance with Business Improvement District law. First, please allow me to share some of the key highlights of the bid in 2024. In 2024, the bid continued focusing on enhancing our downtown environment through holiday decorations on Garvey Avenue and providing consistent janitorial services at the Lost cost possible. It also recently implemented the Taste of Downtown NPK, as we had announced earlier, whose goal is to drive foot traffic and support local businesses in the downtown district. More importantly, the bid maintained a strong financial position with estimated revenues of $56,000 for 2024 and expenditures of $48,607. For this reason, BIDAC recommends maintaining current assessment levels for 2025 to continue supporting the following 2025 key bid initiatives. First is to collaborate more closely with bid businesses to enhance the attractiveness of the downtown district. Continue maintaining essential janitorial services and street maintenance. Ensure the continued installation and maintenance of holiday decorations. partner with the city to offer workshops and assistance programs, support city projects that benefit the bid, including parking structure discussions, wayfinding signage, and security initiatives. Develop and implement strategies to promote bid businesses, including events like the Taste of Downtown MPK, and I want to thank the BID Act commissioners who were very much involved in that collaborative effort. Mr. Mayor and Council Members, BDAC recommends that the City Council receive and file the 2024 bid annual report and approve the 2025 bid budget and assessment by minute order. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Open to your questions. Thank you, Joe. Any questions?

Joe, quickly on, well, we'll see how quick, but I don't want to set the expectation. but I appreciate all the work

and please pass on my appreciation

our appreciation to the BIDAC members and all the

members of the bid that have been helping to implement these plans for many many years now. My question on this is do you know when the last time the assessments for the bid businesses was adjusted at all?

Yes I do

Mr. Mayor it was actually

in

In 2017, it went up from $100.16 to $105.17.

Thank you.

I'm happy to make the motion here to accept, receive, and file the report. I would just urge, I don't think any bid members are here, but as you convene the BID Act in their next meeting or future meetings, maybe a discussion can be had about potential adjustments to the assessment rate rate going forward at some point. I know a lot of businesses are still hurting and struggling, so I want to be sensitive to that, but also want to be sensitive to the fact that inflation has happened since 2017, and the current dollars don't go, for everyone, not just them, don't go nearly as far if there's an opportunity to start kind of talking about what else we can do and what else the bid can do to make some investments in the downtown area. I know the Taste of downtown mbk is going on right now Cities partnering with them. I know part of their this budget is to fund the rewards part of the taste of downtown mbk so appreciate the innovation

innovativeness and

Thinking outside the box a little bit on that program specifically But maybe there are other things if that turn if we and I'm hopeful and very expecting that that program to be Successful in bringing more foot traffic to the downtown area as we look at other opportunities support the businesses and bring more business to the downtown area and the bid area for the bid and the bid act and bid members to start looking at continuing to reinvest and what are the resources they can kind of bring to bear for their own benefit down the line. I think part of that could be talking about potentially adjusting the assessments going forward. I think it's still a pretty good deal for

the businesses to be paying that amount. I hope

and hope they understand that I think they're getting more out of it than they're putting in individually. So maybe we can plant that as a conversation item for the BID Act going forward. The other question, kind of request, or food for thought is also, I know in the budget now is the purchase of holiday decorations for the New Year kind of Christmas holidays. Lunar New Year is also probably the biggest event in the downtown area every year that happens in the bid area. Maybe that's something we can encourage them to look at adding into their budget, or if we need to figure out how to do that not this year or sooner or later, potentially doing Lunar New Year kind of decorations and maybe helping and coordinating that with the World Journal, who organizes the Lunar New Year Festival and see if we can add to the atmosphere in the downtown area when we shut down those several blocks of Garvey Avenue for the biggest street festival probably in the area of the year. So maybe that's something we plant as a thought for them.

Duly noted, Mr. Mayor, we will bring that up at the next BDAC meeting.

Great. Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, members of the Council, we did double-check with our Recreation Department about decorations during Lunar New Year. So World Journal does help us to put on some decorations

along the street where we have the Lunar New Year festival.

And just as a reminder, we are asking World Journal to come back at our next council meeting to give us an update about how planning is going for this 2025 festival. At that time, if council is interested in asking them to maybe jazz up or beef up the decorations that they already are providing. That would be something that we can definitely coordinate at that time. So they do usually put up, like, street banners announcing the festival, but those banners are decorative. You know, they do celebrate the Lunar New Year Festival, but if there's more decorations that the council is interested in requesting,

we can do that at that time. Thank you.

Thank you. For the World Journal decorations, are those only up for the festival or are they kind of for a couple of weeks?

They do usually put them up. So we coordinate between the Christmas holiday decorations being taken down. And then depending on how early the festival is in January, we try to get them up in advance of the festival and the left through the festival. and we try to let them stay up for about a week after. But sometimes the coordination with the Lunar New Year holiday is very close to our holiday season for Christmas. So we'll definitely try to coordinate that to allow for additional time.

Great. And I totally agree. If we can do more, it would be obviously better.

and I think it would continue to help draw people and help help set great impression for the many visitors that come from outside Monterey Park to for the downtown area during the Lunar New Year Festival and around that time since a lot of people will be coming outside the festival as well. But thank you so much. Appreciate it. I'm happy to make the motion unless there's someone else that would like to make a motion to receive a file. I'll make the motion if there's a second. Second by Council Member Sanchez. Without further discussion, we'll call for the motion.

vote. Approved unanimously. Thank you. All right. We'll move to item 3G. We'll have the staff report.

I think we have a modified introduction to this.

oh and I just got word that we did win the small city

they're playing our video

that's great news

they're taught that Sean

good evening honorable mayor and council

shanagal public works director i also have sochi tupan um she is our administrative manager for public works here and we'll be giving you a quick update a slightly modified update on the report you have before you tonight that is going over some some options for transportation and we'll bring back another item at our next council meeting to wrap this up so

with that i'll hand it over to sochi tupan

Good evening, Mayor and Honorable Council Members. Sochi Tipan, Administrative Manager with the Public Works Department. Earlier this year, the city completed an evaluation of its fixed route transportation program, Spirit Bus. At the June 18th council meeting, staff presented council with the results of the study and also the service improvement strategies for a more cost-effective and efficient program. following that council meeting we went back and worked with our consultants arcadis ibi to further refine the service improvement strategies and to also conduct additional community outreach regarding the proposed changes so we released a community survey in august which was distributed through cascades newsletter social media we posted it in our city facilities we also shared it with their local school districts and there were a total of 174 respondents to the community survey 70 percent of them being spirit bus riders we did receive mixed feedback from the survey mostly people wanting to know more regarding on-demand service but overall the majority of the respondents said that they were more likely to ride spirit bus with the proposed changes And one of those proposed changes was implementation of on-demand service to complement our fixed route program. And that is one of the recommendations that I will be discussing today. On-demand service, or also referred to as microtransit service, is flexible transportation powered by technology to route and schedule trips in real time. Similar to ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, riders would be able to schedule, schedule a trip by using an app, like a smartphone application or even via the web, or by calling the program's call center, similar to like dispatch, and scheduling a trip. And so how the platform works is that they would take that request and they would look for available drivers assigned to our city and pick up the rider based on their location. It works on a corner-to-corner, so not necessarily like where you're standing in the middle of the street, but the nearest corner, and group you with other riders traveling in the same direction for more efficient ride-sharing and a seamless drop-off.

We met with different providers and looked for different options to provide on-demand service in the city, and we connected with Via Transportation, Inc., which currently partners with other local agencies like the City of Azusa, West Covina, Torrance, and they also work with L.A. County Department of Transportation. The program that is being proposed is a pilot program for one year, operating on the same days that Spirit Bus currently operates, Monday through Friday, and also the same hours, 6.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. Two vehicles would be assigned to our city, which would be branded and identifiable as a Monterey Park on-demand service or microtransit service. And with this structure, the expected wait times for riders is not to exceed 15 minutes. and the program also proposes free rides for the first six months folLod by $2 per ride thereafter.

VIA's platform is a one-stop shop, so the services that they would be providing the city includes driver hiring and training, development of the app,

they would be taking care of the customer service center, and they would also be providing marketing and promotion for the program as well. During this time, the city would also be collecting additional data to develop a request for proposals so we can solicit fixed route and or microtransit services at the end of the program, at the end of the pilot. As seen on the map, the proposed microtransit program would really supplement and work alongside our fixed routes that currently exist and service throughout the city for maximum coverage with both solutions and being more cost effective than our current program.

That concludes my presentation.

We do have Brian from VIA here, and also our consultant Steve from Arcata's IBI is online for any comments or questions.

Thank you. Thank you. Any questions, comments from Council?

I have a question.

And again, I want to thank for the presentation.

I'm excited about the pilot program because I know I've – many of my colleagues have said, you know,

there's a way in which we can increase ridership or adapt it to the needs of the community.

I think that's great.

I'm kind of curious, like, given that we are surrounded by, of course, other providers such as Foothill, Metro, not just bus, but rail.

But is there a, I guess, into the piloting, or are there models in which it can complement, especially with trying to encourage people to do more commuter transit?

I'm just curious

I don't want to encourage more commuter transit uses

Are you talking about just better partnerships with local agencies?

Right, especially with the microtransit

I think that's probably one way to really encourage microtransit

especially the expression to last mile

which is I think what's been a challenge to getting people to take public transit more

Yeah, so the point is, so VIA will help kind of connect that first mile, last mile.

They'll help connect that.

That's kind of one of the selling points for microtransit. But we can definitely look at other partners, such as Metro. I know we have Metro Access that residents have access to. But we can look at other partnerships. We're looking at trying to talk with Montebello because they have their own transit system. So we're looking at different options such as that. But, you know, sometimes those options take time. and it's not as easy to incorporate additional transportation within the city beyond what's existing. So, again, we try to work with Metro on those things. We're looking at working with Montebello because they have their own transportation program.

So we're looking at different options.

Okay, thank you.

Hi, I have questions about the offering.

You have first six months for free, and I'm curious, you know, how much the city has to subsidize for that.

So currently our spirit bus is 25 cents, and we use Prop A and Prop C, local metro funds to fund our spirit bus program. And so with FIA, we would also be using Prop A funds to help fund that during the pilot program. And so the annual cost for the pilot program is about $573,000 a year. and depending on ridership and the potential revenue collected the city would be using the fare to offset that but the the six months of free service is to encourage ridership to help promote help get the word out and get people to participate in the community to understand

the system and take advantage of it so the cost actually per ride is about two dollar

that how we don't have to subsidize or we still have to subsidize for that?

So we would still, the city would still be subsidizing a portion. The $2 is a recommended fare based on VIA's recommendations and the other programs that they've rolled out. Different cities do free fares, right, for the entire term of the pilot, or the fares may range from like $1 to $3. So $2 was the suggested fare.

for this for the city and and this program um actually wanted to ask a question so for example if you wanted to promote um the service um let's say if we can offer any newcomer for five free shares you know when you use the app i think you know instead of first six months for free then i'm afraid the same user will be using it every day let's say maybe 10 times 20 times a day for the first six months, then I think we're not encouraging a lot of people to use the app because that will be almost blocked by the whole same small group of people. So maybe we can reconsider some of the incentive. Hopefully we can promote the service and blast it to more people will be able to use the service, but without just a small group of people just to block off the service but another thing is 15 minutes or less wait time but we have only two cars so what if we have more people ordering the service so how do we we block them we tell them that we won't be able to service them and how does that work if we have more than you know yeah the people waiting

We'll have our representative from the

Thank you

Hello council members and mayor So the way that works in the app is a couple different options One, if there isn't a vehicle available for whatever reason We would just tell them there's not a vehicle available We are able to have the fixed route lines built into the VIA app as well so for the Spirit Bus or for any other local lines that are around, we could suggest those as alternative options. We don't foresee this as a particular issue in this area given the smaller service zone of being able to serve riders more efficiently. We're going to be operating them in minivans, so we'll be able to pull riders together along similar routes.

Oh, okay. So you won't be able to expand if we have more riders than you for two cars only that's designated to Monterey Park. But would you be able to expand the number of cars available?

Yes, absolutely. As a, you know, this is a pilot. So there's been conversations with the Public Works Department about expanding down the line. But for this purpose, we'll be using two vehicles.

Okay. Yeah. I'm just curious that I don't think it would be able to, you know, service a lot of people because we only have two cars available, right? But maybe in the future we can actually partner with Uber or Lyft and maybe they can give us some discounts and we can also subsidize a portion of the fare so that, you know, more people will get benefits from the service rather than just two. And hopefully it will expand that as well. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

I would echo what Council Member U is saying in terms of my hope is that we will have overwhelming demand for this service so that we get that data for this pilot

and know what parameters we ask for out of the,

hopefully out of the pilot, the next phase from the pilot to come into, sounds like from the staff report, we're planning RFP if the data comes back good, and obviously if there is a clear demand for this type of service in the community, we will look to expand the service based off of how the pilot goes and what the data kind of indicates.

Is that right? That's correct.

And then for this app, so the riders, it sounds like we can integrate our Passio Go kind of data in terms of the Spirit Bus. can we integrate the location of the Spirit buses in the VIA app, or is that something where we can only load in the routes of the Spirit buses currently in the times and schedules?

That would be a common question for VIA, yeah.

We can spread the routes, but I don't know about the location.

Yeah, so if there is a GTFS feed that Spirit Bus has, we could integrate that into the app.

Or if there's just a static feed showcasing the routes, we could do that as well.

So it sounds like Sean's going to look into how we can get live tracking of the spear puss.

Yes, we will look into that.

And I understand this is a pilot.

I know.

and that we received a few months ago as well on the spirit bus ridership that relationship is down significantly across most of our lines uh since the pandemic has not really recovered and to also council member use point we are subsidizing our spirit bus riders to the tune of many much more than uh what the subsidy would be for for this uh the microtransit program currently right we're running buses that have sometimes no one or one or two people in there at a time. And so that's something we need to clearly need to address in terms of what the subsidy is for our public transit options that are available for the community. And applaud our public work staff and our team here and VIA for partnering on this effort to be more creative and innovative and to meet the needs in our community in a different way that makes the best use of our limited resources for Measure A, Measure M, local return, and general fund dollars that might be going into this.

So appreciate that and really look forward to this pilot program launching.

My question, I guess more for VIA, is how quickly, I know from the staff report, it sounds like you need three months or so to launch, purchase the vehicles, get the drivers hired. Is there an opportunity to potentially, we just talked about Lunar New Year Festival, potentially launch this, I know it's a tight time frame from today, to maybe get this going and have this available in some way, shape, or form for the community to link up to the Lunar New Year Festival that will be happening in mid-January or so?

So we've been working with VIA.

We're doing our best to try to get it launched in January, but we also want to be realistic with what that looks like. So the goal is to have it launched in January, but, you know, there's several things to get in place. But VIA has been willing to try to get that January start date. So we will definitely keep the public and council informed on when this pilot is ready to go.

Great. Now look forward to it and hope that we can.

I think it would be a great opportunity to show local community members that will be looking for ways to get around the traffic, I think, in downtown Murray Park. around the Lunar Year Festival, and there's potential opportunity to connect them to the festival in a new way.

I think it would be a great way to launch.

I understand there might be some logistical constraints to doing that, but that would be kind of cool. In terms of this pilot program, when would we check in? because, I mean, if this is a 12-month pilot, and it sounds like we might still have to make some adjustments to the Spirit Bus kind of contract to align both terms for the pilot and the end of the term for the current Spirit Bus operator, when will we check in, when will we RFP if we want to move forward in terms of the data returned on this pilot and go to a more permanent program?

Okay. So we have one of our consultants online. He can kind of jump in on this. But, you know, the idea behind the pilot, I know we touched on the financial component of it, but the idea behind the six-month free and the six-month pay is to really get an evaluation of what people are going to use it for, right?

If it's free, most people will jump in and use this. If there's a fee, sometimes people will step away. So we really want to have good data. And so the reality is probably after the year when we would have a good data set to say, yes, this is a viable option for the city to move forward with on a full-scale program. So within a year or so. But I can pass it over to Steve, who's online, and he can give a quick schedule timeline for you.

Sure. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. members of council. In terms of the evaluation of the pilot, you know, and in working closely with VIA, this would be monitored on an ongoing basis. Background reports prepared already in terms of the service improvement strategies talked about the key performance indicators and what would be evaluated. In terms of going forward with the preparation of a request for proposal or RFP document, that would likely begin about halfway through the pilot in terms of starting to prepare all the foundational material with the assumption that some level of service in some type of hybrid format in terms of microtransit and the continuation of fixed route spirit service would continue following the one-year pilot project. And that procurement would likely take place latter part, fourth quarter of 25 into 2026. Thanks.

My real concern there is if we have a 12-month pilot, if there is demand for this from the community to continue this program, making sure we line up so there isn't a gap in service between the pilot and our ability to onboard whoever a more permanent kind of longer-term solution is for microtransit in the community. So I just want to make sure we're thinking through that, and if extending the pilot potentially is an opportunity to make sure that we're covering that gap, I want to make sure that's on the table because if people really want to use this, I don't want to take it away and kind of erase all the demand and the goodwill we've built up through the pilot phase.

Mr. Mayor, members of the council noted,

We understand the pilot is, yes, slated right now for 12 months, but understanding City Council's request is definitely to time it. So if we understand that there is a demand to continue that program, we need to bring it back sooner to the Council to make a decision to then continue it past the 12 months and then deal with what that coordination effort is. So understand noted that that is the request from Council.

Great.

I think fair to say we're interested in seeing how at least the first few months go and starting to at least kind of frame our thinking around what a long-term program might look like earlier than the 12 months, right?

Sorry, one additional thing just for clarification. So our current spirit buses do have the technology for tracking as people are waiting at stops. the Passio app does track spirit buses so that you can see where it is on the line so when you're waiting you understand it's approaching. I think the comment was to make sure that the Via app and the Passio app connect somehow so that people have options if there isn't a vehicle available is what I think I heard.

If there's an ability for the Via app to show real-time where the spirit buses are because the hope is to connect the via trips to a Spirit Bus stop, essentially, right, so that they connect there or to a metro stop or something else. So I think it would be easier and help with wider adoption by customers, right, community members, if they don't have to go through five different apps to complete their trip

or figure out how to get their trip done.

So the more we can integrate our Spirit Bus and even Metro, if we can figure out how to do this, that would be great. I know maybe not during the pilot, but maybe this is something to think about in the permanent kind of longer-term program if we move forward that way to see how we can make the user experience more seamless so that people can just get on one or as few apps as possible. if it's one app to make a trip using microtransit to connect to mass transit to connect to something else and get to their location, that would be super ideal and help with people actually utilizing the app and the service more, right?

Yes, we will definitely have those conversations with the VIA and see what we can do.

And then question, I guess, VIA or Sean, if you want to answer this, the VIA app, if customers, once we launch this pilot, when they down the app, they can request a ride, is there going to be language capability in terms of Chinese, Spanish, other potential languages available for folks that want to use that?

Yes, so the app will default to the user's language on their device or on their phone. And then also if they're calling, like the dispatch center to schedule a ride, we'll use a translation service, as we understand, to try to connect them and schedule that trip for them as well.

Great. That's awesome. And then part of, I mean, well, not to do with the pilot, I'm very excited to launch this

spot and really get it going.

I think for a more permanent program, if we're looking at the Spirit Bus, the fixed route mass transit options here, this first mile, last mile kind of connection for microtransit, if we can, if we haven't already kind of reached out to our neighbors about potential linkages and opportunities for more efficiencies for both the microtransit and fixed route services into the future as we're looking at changes potentially to our fixed route and microtransit with this pilot, it might be a good, I think it's a good time to initiate some of these conversations with our neighboring cities to explore if there are opportunities to integrate and find efficiencies for connecting our city-specific programs for microtransit and mass transit. uh to see if there are opportunities to align routes connect routes uh run buses on between cities as opposed to just within our own city uh and even run um which i think to one of council member use earlier points too uh right we've this pilot calls for two vehicles to to microtransit services if there there's potentially and very likely more efficiencies if we expand the service area for some of the microtransit options to other cities that where you can have more vehicles providing service for more area and have more efficiencies to be found there in

terms of costs and riders and all that stuff too and in my experience right

people want to go if they're taking transit they're going not from one part of my park to another mostly they're going from they want to go from a park to somewhere else where they want to shop or dine or shop or do something else and visit a friend so if there are opportunities to connect some of these transit services to our neighboring communities as we're rethinking a lot of those services here in our city to the extent we can and we can find cooperation with our neighboring cities, I'd love for us to explore that. And then just kudos on, I know in the staff report, we're going to explore options for

zero emission vehicles.

We want to continue to encourage that where possible and where these options are available

to integrate that into our own fleet.

With that, if there is a motion...

I have some follow-up comments. I'm sure when we spread the word out there, I think that will be overwhelming demand. I will be the first one to jump in, maybe use a few times a day. But I'm just worried about the two cars limits that it would just block off a lot of the services that we want to order. order. So I'm thinking that in the future, just something come to my mind that maybe we can really partner with Uber or Lyft. I actually checked the trip actually from if I order Uber to go from City Hall here to let's say Saturn Park is about $12. So if we can, let's say, get some discounts if we partner with, let's say, Uber or Lyft, 20% discount, and then split the fare, and it still can be $2 or $3 a trip to charge to the resident.

Plus, there will be plenty of cars out there.

So I hope to expand the service and really make it work instead of just saying that we don't have the service available now because what if someone taking the car and go out and need to come back and they don't have the car available to come back and I don't know how they will be able to afford maybe a ride on Uber or something else. So we have to think about how we can implement the whole thing with the full capacity instead of just limited services that will kill the deal. so yeah maybe we can explore more options out there but the the charge is not is not that expensive it's like maybe within ten dollars sometimes maybe twelve and so we get some

discount from them and then we split the fare with the resident and I think that will be good

benefits to the residency that two dollar three dollar trip within Monterey Park I'm sure everybody will be interested I can pick up kids I can pick pick them up drop them off every day and I rather use the service than driving a car and fine parking. So something that we should think about. If we want to make it work, I want to make it work long run. So thank you.

We can look at that. Another thing we can also look at is if we're seeing a huge demand from this type of a service, we can always talk with VIA, get the feedback from them, see if they're seeing those demand issues, and then we can always come back to council and look at amending their agreement

to see if we need additional vehicles.

So there are options, but we can definitely look into other options,

such as Uber and Lyft.

Mr. Mayor, members of the council, before you make any motions, may I ask that recommendation number two be continued until the next meeting. The concern there is that two council members have a potential conflict of interest

with regard to property interests,

and so I want to make sure that we have a quorum for actually voting on item number two when Mayor Pro Tem is back on the dais.

Yes, understood. And yes.

Is there a motion?

Moved for approval item with the exception of Part 2 which will be continued to the next Council meeting. Okay. Second? I'll second. All right. There's a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Hearing none. Call for the vote. Approved unanimously. All right. Thank you. Appreciate all the work that went into this and you know, let's get it going. Thank you.

All right.

We'll move to item 4A, consideration of possible action to adopt regulations governing data centers within Saturn Park, accordance with section 3A of Orman's 2198, Measure J.J.

Their staff report.

And there's public comment. We can start with public comment, sure.

Okay, first speaker is me.

And I'm sorry, I will officially open the public hearing.

Good evening, this is Michelle, I'm speaking as a resident. I just wanted to thank the City of Monterey Park and our developer for their willingness and their work together to preemptively address any residential or environmental concerns. While I do support this project, I have spoken to Mr. Marsh many times regarding the importance of mitigating any community and environmental concerns. And so we've discussed this, such concerns like noise impacts, so making sure that we site mechanical equipment far away from homes, insulation perhaps if possible, being mindful during construction to ensure that construction occurs during permitted days and times only. Also considering visual blight, undergrounding power lines.

I know that one's a tough one.

As well as efficiency, making sure your operations and your construction is as efficient as possible, especially when you're going through construction, this is the most cost-effective time to look at that. I know we looked at, we discussed air-cooled tillers, and so I hope you take a look at water-cooled one more time.

I know there's concerns with water use,

but there is a lot of technology that's in place to, you know, treat water and to increase your cycles of concentration so that we're not wasting water as much. Looking at heat pumps, economizers, immersion cooling for servers, so there's a lot of options there. of course looking at your advanced building automation controls so that we're running as lean as possible and we have that advanced control so that if there's trouble shooting necessary you'll have that as well and you can layer on demand response capability so that you can participate in southern california edison's demand response programs and then of course layering on On top of that, self-generation so that you can include maybe solar or battery storage so that you can take your consumption offline during peak hours or during major events.

That would be very helpful to the grid, very important for the grid for all of us.

So those are all items that you can look at as well as your construction.

We talked about the construction as well. So looking at the embodied carbon of your construction, not only in the materials that you select,

but also looking at trying to reuse part of the existing infrastructure that's there already.

So maybe even looking at your foundation, maybe being able to utilize some of that concrete because that will take down your materials costs, as well as also your waste. So those are all good things because I did see that they asked that you try to achieve LEED. And so all of these items, all of these measures will help you get there, right? I provided both of you, the city and Mr. Marsh, resources for that, not just funding but also technical resources, and I have a lot more technical resources if you're interested.

I don't think this is really your area,

but if you'd like to connect me with your architects, engineers, or any of your facilities managers, I can also get them in touch with all of those resources.

So thank you again. I appreciate it.

That's it.

Thank you. Is there another speaker?

Next speaker, Jim Pugh.

Good evening, council members. Good to see you again, and mayor, and not in Dodgers gears except one hat to the world champions.

So go for that. We submitted a letter.

I want to make clear right before I start even that our letter is focused on the data center regulations that are before you tonight, not necessarily our project. So we want to keep those guardrails on our comments. But we did submit several requests in our letter that we'd like you to consider. But I really wanted to focus on two of those in particular. And it's in the spirit of collaboration for sure.

We were able to look at the provisions that were in both of the ordinances,

which are essentially the same, the urgency ordinance and the regular ordinance,

and vet those to some level, at least in the short amount of time we had them, with our architect and our engineers to see what works and what maybe doesn't work. A lot of good measures, actually, in those ordinances, but we didn't have time to get through it to the point where we could determine whether all of them were feasible or not. So we would love to work with the city more and help inform the evolution of the data center regulations you're looking at to make sure, one, you have environmentally conscious regulations that work for the city,

but also that don't preclude data center development in your city as well.

Things like LEED certification come up.

What level is possible? What's not?

Are there other certification bodies? These type of things we would like to see the city take a little more time to look at with experts involved. So that brings me to my two points that I wanted to focus on, which are in the letter.

The first one really is to allow yourself more time to act on the regulations.

So I know you have two ordinances in front of you tonight. Our recommendation and suggestion and respectful request is that you take a little more time to consider which of the regulations can evolve to best fit the city's needs as well as data centers generally. So to be particular, the request would be to not act on those ordinances tonight and direct staff to keep evolving those measures to get a fine-tuned set of regulations that you can all be proud of. And if you are unable to do that and must act on the ordinances that are before you tonight, building in some level of flexibility, right? Given the short amount of time that we've had, the architects, our engineers have looked at it, but we haven't been able to drill it all the way down to is this feasible for data centers of this scale,

which is relatively small, on these sites.

So we're trying to avoid a situation where regulations get put in place now

that then later prove problematic for advancing any data center,

including the one that's being proposed by Brian and his company. And so that is our ask for tonight, is primarily continue your consideration of the measures to another meeting. Allow us to look at them a little bit more with our team, and we're happy to work with your staff and your city attorney to provide you any input we can from the brain trust that Brian and his company has, which has done data centers all over the country, and that may help inform your regulations. And if you can't do that, lastly, in closing, at least provide some level of flexibility in the ones you may adopt now.

and to provide that flexibility we actually attached red lines to our letter

For your consideration that provide a little bit of flexibility if you have to adopt something tonight We're here for any questions, but that concludes my comments. Thank you for your consideration

Thank you any other speakers last speaker Brian Marsh of Stratton

So good evening, Mayor and Councilmembers and City Clerk. I appreciate your comments.

And I do know a lot about all that because we work on a lot of projects and have dealt with all those issues.

So very familiar with them.

So I'm just going to add a little bit more context around the red lines that Jim sent over in his letter and his package,

just to give you some context of why we think that overall the ordinance is not bad at all. I'm just going to say that.

It just needs tweaking is really what we're saying. That's what we're asking for is to cooperate together to come up with a regulation that the city can be proud of. But first I just wanted to say there was a comment in there about data centers are aesthetically displeasing and provide few public benefits. Well, that's absolutely false. And so it's just one of those kind of comments that's just not true and is not deserving of being in an ordinance. I've built a lot of great-looking data centers that obviously provide a lot of benefits, and a lot of states are actively trying to get them to come here. So, you know, there was a comment about tying this to open space, and that one seemed a little misplaced in that there's really no public open space in Saturn Park. and as part of the SPARC hearings, you know, and the preferred use is open spaces.

It was really at the bottom of the list.

But adhering to the green building principles, it's a great idea.

We strive for it.

I've built lead gold data centers before, but it's really, really hard. And talking to our architects, Gensler, they thought it may even be infeasible for gold in some cases.

And there are also different parts of the building can have different ratings.

So you can have the shell versus the actual data centers themselves. So we did insert green globes, which is kind of where a lot of data center builders are going towards. And so we'd like for you all to consider that one also. As far as principal uses, again, we made this comment, But, you know, we did get a determination from staff that data centers are a principal use. So we thought that should be included. Under conditional uses, it said it talks about FAR not to exceed 1.0. I think the intent was conditional use would be for FAR over 1.0. That was not in our red line, but that was another thing I caught. it talked about we obviously added language about to the extent feasible because when you get into

lead you're really talking about points and and they're very hard to achieve sometimes and so

really I think most of the comments were related to the lead points and give you an example

in the water reduction for indoor water use, yeah, 30% is a nice goal in reduction.

You get this through low flow filters, toilets, that sort of thing.

But 20% is considered acceptable. So it's kind of like, you know, can we live with 20% versus 30%? On a construction waste diversion, you know, LEED will give you two points for 75% waste diversion, which is what's proposed in the regulation, but to do 50% is one point. So it's just one point difference between a 50% waste diversion and a 75%. So those are the kind of things we'd like to have a conversation about. And then as far as the design guidelines, again, some of this didn't make a whole lot of sense, like maximize daylighting.

I don't know what that means.

Is that skylights or something?

And that doesn't really work well in a data center.

nor a lot of windows because we're not looking for roof leaks leaking on the sensitive computer equipment. Parking, it said only like in the rear yard. Well, we've got, you know, proposed for a side yard. Is that acceptable with proper screening and berming and that sort of thing? So there's just, you know, it talked about monolithic scale. We're talking about creating articulation. We know we've got a lot of work to do with the city on the design. We're happy to do that. But again, these are just pointing out some of the issues we saw with the ordinance as it's currently written. So we'd appreciate having the time to work together with staff on this. So thank you.

Thank you. Any other speakers?

No other speakers.

Thank you. We will close the public hearing and we'll go to the staff report.

Thank you, Mayor Wong and members of the City Council. My name is Jessica Serrano, Community Development Director,

and tonight we're presenting the draft, the regular and the urgency ordinance to implement data center regulations and a resolution to adopt design standards that pertain to data center developments.

I also want to mention that together with me via Zoom is Juliet Arroyo, our principal planner from Wildan, who helped craft some of the technical aspects of this ordinance. Monterey Park. Just to provide some background, the City Council directed staff to draft amendments to Saturn Parks zoning to develop data center regulations and to conduct research regarding data centers at its regular meeting on October 4th, 2024. Next slide. As part of the proposed ordinance, the title of the zone for Saturn Park is being changed from OP Office Professional Zone voter enacted to SP Saturn Park

Innovation Technology Zone to align with the general plan.

Also, to clarify terms referred to in the draft ordinance, definitions of data center and data processing center are being proposed, among others. Next slide.

Utilizing the research found and also with the help of the city attorney's office and staff, we drafted an ordinance which helps mitigate the impact of data centers on both surrounding land uses and on environmental resources. Data centers in modern day are used for cloud storage, data transmissions, and other internet-related activities.

Data center buildings are generally used to store networked computer systems, servers, and other equipment, which require temperature-controlled facilities.

The proposed data center regulations require a development agreement subject to the review and approval of city council to ensure that community benefits are provided to the city and that impacts are mitigated properly. Design standards to ensure that data centers are designed to minimize visual impacts. and also minimum parking requirements are identified in the ordinance for this use, as well as public benefits are identified, which include sustainable building standards requiring leadership in energy and environmental design, LEED Gold certification to help alleviate the impacts of data centers, and also on-site electric vehicle charging stations, which would also be required for data center developments. in addition to what's required by building code. Next slide. As a separate document that lives outside of the city's municipal code, additional design standards with examples of strong design are included for your consideration. These standards are intended to help both developers and staff understand the elements of good design to ensure high-quality data center development in the future. And a final slide. City Council is recommended to consider after closing the public hearing and considering the evidence adopting an urgency ordinance upon a four-fifths vote amending Monterey Park Municipal Code Chapter 21.14 to add regulations governing data centers introducing and waiving first reading of an ordinance amending Monterey Park Municipal Code Chapter 21.42 to add data center regulations and adopting a resolution adopting design guidelines for data centers and taking such additional related action that may be desirable. I'm available, as well as our consultant is available for any questions.

And Mr. Mayor, members of the council, if I could just tag team on the presentation by Ms. Serrano. Let me just emphasize what this public hearing is and what it is not. This is not a project-specific public hearing with regard to two of the speakers, at least, were talking about a project. There is no project in front of you other than the general regulations that would govern data centers as specifically defined in the draft regulations for Saturn Park. So really the policy question in front of you tonight is, one, do you want to have data centers there? Two, how do you regulate them? And three, how do they apply to future applications, whether pending or anticipated or not even on the horizon? This has nothing to do other than with that policy question. The second point that I'd like to point out is one of the speakers mentioned that a letter was submitted by the developer for the other project that we're not discussing tonight. there is also a response from my office to that letter and I want to make sure that both the public and the city council were aware of those two letters that are in the record happy to answer any questions

thank you

start with any questions from council

so out of curiosity

and again I just want to thank

staff are doing research, but again, just look at the staff report. So

I know it's a

for the audience who's listening and watching

from home, but the regulations

what are we also basing it on? I mean, what has been

what have we been referencing in crafting these regulations?

Thank you for that question, Council Member Lo. The regulations were based on research that was done that evaluated the types of impacts that data centers have on surrounding uses and natural resources. Hence, you know, that's why there's inclusion of regulations such as design standards to make sure that visual impacts are mitigated, that, you know, equipment's properly screened, you know, the consumption of water for some of these data centers is high. And so there is a stipulation in there that talks about, like, recirculation of water and, you know, conservation. Also, the lead certification, so that would ensure that the building is built in a sustainable manner.

And, you know, that means future buildings for data centers would be built at a higher sustainability level than your typical building. Okay. If I could just follow up, Council Member Lo.

Frankly, per your suggestion from the last meeting when we last discussed this, we looked at the Virginia regulations that were included with part of the public comment,

adjusted those as I thought appropriate,

and looked at other progressive cities' regulations with regard to not necessarily data centers,

but buildings in general.

So I specifically looked at the city and county of San Francisco's regulations with regard to LEED certification for major buildings and incorporated some of that language into the draft regulations in order to bring them in front of you, cognizant of the discussion that the city council has already had with regard to the concerns about the environmental impact of data centers in general and specifically within the Southern Park area following the recommendations from the SPARC.

Thank you. So, again, these are based on already existing or real-world applications in other municipal areas.

So it's not, as the Speaker-May said, something we've done randomly or without much thought or research.

I took a lot of time and thought into it.

I'm sure you did.

I just want to say that for the record.

Yeah, I have some comments. So from my understanding, as we're based on the Virginia Data Center information or prerequisites,

and so we actually listed a lot of subjective, I consider quite subjective of those guidelines. And so if for a particular project, and if they're not, you know, meeting those guidelines,

We can always talk about conditional use permit when your project is being submitted and discussed.

So I think we need a general guideline for the data center. And I think this is actually a very good one because we don't have any in place.

So I think if we, based on other state or other area, they have a data center.

I saw the research paper that is really detailed and in-depth. I think they have done a lot of work. And if we can base on those, I think those are a very good basis that we have at least.

So I will say don't worry about it. I think when we go into conditional use permit, then it will be more detail into each particular project that you want. So I think today is a very good basis that we have. Thank you.

I'm trying to wrap my head around this, so I might have some questions here. Can we go back to the slide that had the original wording for the zoning in this area? And I think, oh, yes. So, and maybe this is a question for you, Carl, but currently this area is zoned for office professional, right? And this is based on measure, JJ, is that correct?

No, actually, so let me back up part of the history. I anticipate where you're going, why we're changing the name, those types of things.

I'm assuming that's the road that you're going to. Yes. Okay.

So, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. So, the original zoning for this area was adopted by voters in 1998, and I think it was Major D off the top of my head. Major D was actually put onto the ballot by the City Council following a series of activity that occurred in the 90s, mid to late 90s, at this park. There was a large protest, and much of this is laid out in the Planning Commission staff report from earlier this year about what happened in that area, which prompted the City Council to put zoning regulations onto the ballot. The zoning regulations were adopted by voters and have been implemented ever since. The reason that the current name of the area is OP, Professional Zone Voter Enacted, is because in 2013 the City Council adopted regulations that were entitled Office Professional that applied citywide, forgetting that this particular area had voter enacted regulations that were separate and apart and not part of the other Office Professional zoning regulations. And the reason that's important is we put in voter enacted so that nobody would forget in the future. And it differentiates from the rest of the zoning that was adopted by the city council for other parts of the city. What happened with Measure JJ was the voters adopted the land use element to the general plan, and that measure specifically renames this area as Saturn Park. So the implementation of Saturn Park is not something that we came up with just as a staff matter or as the city council or what have you. That was specifically enacted by voters, and we're implementing it as part of the recommended changes to this area. If that's the extent of what I anticipate your question was, great. Otherwise, I'm happy to follow up.

Yeah, so my follow-up question then to that, thank you for the history there, is I'm assuming the OP designation didn't anticipate at the time data centers in terms of what data centers are today.

So the current regulations talk about data processing facilities, but there's no definition for what data processing facility is. But just as a practical matter and as a historical matter, in 1998, the Internet was three years old. So I don't think that under any reasonable explanation of what a data processing facility was when the voters enacted it in 1998 that they anticipated having a data center, which is in essence a server farm, which are cropping up all across the country, including in the Los Angeles area. Those types of farms service the cloud. They service the World Wide Web, all of which were unknown and couldn't have possibly been known in 1998, which is one of the reasons that there are two different definitions that are proposed for this particular area. One is data center, and the other is data processing facility, the latter being something that's really an ancillary use to an overall office use, which would be what historically has been a computer room, if you will. For example, the city has servers probably right behind that door that you could open up, and that would be a computer processing facility. I think originally what was anticipated by voters is literally what you see from some films with everyone with a laptop or a desktop on their desk entering in data from pages, and that was the data processing facility that was anticipated in 1998.

Okay. So voters wouldn't have anticipated what a data center looks like today, because that technology didn't exist at the time.

I say that only with an educated guess since I was alive in 1998.

I was too. Yes. And I remember specifically the internet. I remember getting the CD-ROMs and buying hours from AOL. and so yes I know we're all dating ourselves here but but also technology moves rather quickly I would be remiss if I didn't say that I have some very serious concerns about data centers and I know data centers are relatively new and and I and I thank you for sharing a lot of those articles some of them which appeared in the LA Times and I just want to cite one of the LA Times articles that you shared, because of the cloud and because of the need for AI technology, there has been a large demand for real estate for specifically data centers, right? This is according to the LA Times article dated September 27th, which you shared. And according to the article, the jobs that are created at these data centers are very demanding and tough, but they're also not numerous. So, one of my questions that I have, and I know one of the speakers addressed earlier, but we're not addressing that particular project. We're just talking about data centers.

especially if there's not a lot of people being employed within the data center. And I'm also very concerned about the energy demand.

Given the increase in terms of heat, in terms of every summer, global warming, environmental changes happening, We've seen over the last decade especially an increased demand for air conditioning, cooling centers. I'm very concerned about the impact that data centers could potentially have on our electrical grid, not just in Monterey Park, but I'm just talking about in general. And as climate change, climate change is real, if we are becoming warmer, What are the impacts that these are going to have, specifically in the Monterey Park community? And when we talk about that, the thing that concerns me the most is the carbon footprint that data centers have in our communities. And so I know that our city passed an environmental sustainability plan, And I find it very contradictory to add a data center to our community that could potentially be in, could be very oppositional to the goals that we had through our environmental sustainability plan. I want to share some data about data centers, and this is according to MIT. according to MIT 40% of data center carbon footprint is left by the majority of the or great portion of it is because of the large use of air conditioning units to cool down their computers and that's not the only way they cool down computers they also use water and remember we live in a very drought we live in an area that suffers through drought and water is a high commodity in the San Gabriel Valley and in California in general. So I'm very concerned about the carbon footprint that data centers have in communities, and I wonder what type of footprint they will have here in Monterey Park and just in general if we allow a data center to operate here. I know that some larger data centers that are powered or that are controlled by Google, for example, are starting to switch to use solar and wind-powered energy to Lor their carbon footprint. I don't know if that's something that we can, if we move forward with regulations, that we can require that the data centers use wind and solar-powered energy. and just this is according to MIT, the average data center in this country consumes the same amount of energy as 50,000 single-family homes. 50,000 single-family homes. In terms of water, because water is a huge deal, some data centers consume lots of water and I'm going to mention one that they mentioned in their study that is in Mesa, Arizona. Many of the elected officials in this area have actually started to push back on data centers and not allowing data centers to come in and actually roll back some of their requirements because they are starting to experience not only a large use of water by these data centers but actually suffering from possibility of water shortages.

one specific data center in mesa was using 1.3 million gallons of water a day and i don't know i'm assuming this must be a very large data center and given the limited resources that we have with water i would think that we won't want to conserve a lot of this water and my other concern is noise a lot of the data a lot of the data centers that were being built a lot of the people in these communities were very upset and very impacted by this by the noise the humming that was created as a result of these data centers that came into their communities these had very serious and real health impacts on people. Some of these health impacts included an uptick in high blood pressure due to stress, anxieties over the noise pollution caused by data centers, and it also caused insomnia in a lot of people who couldn't sleep at night, elevated stress hormones like cortisol, hypertension, anxiety, and even depression. So as we think about data centers in our city and whether we wish to allow them and if we allow them, how we decide to regulate them, I would specifically be looking at the environmental impact both in Monterey Park but just also the carbon footprint that it would cause in our community, specifically for people who live within this area. I also want to say that as a parent and as a homeowner in this community, I don't think I would want to live near a data center. I don't think I would want to have my children inherit a potential problem like a data center in terms of the carbon footprint that they have. And data centers, even though they're relatively new and still building, currently have the same amount of carbon footprint as the airline industry. And they're just starting. So I have some serious concerns about data centers just in general. So I need to, as a public servant, make sure that I voice those as we move forward with this.

Thank you, Council Member.

I will say just say that I share a lot of the same questions I just don't know whether good or bad I don't know I've never seen a data center like this up close and personal and right I hear and read some of these concerns and and some of the positives right communities that have welcomed data centers as well have experienced and I just want to get to know and answer some of these questions I know we're setting up a tour of a local data center in Vernon next week or a up soon. I look forward to just learning more and seeing how some of these concerns can and could be addressed through

design elements. Appreciate staff for

putting a lot of work into getting us to this point. I do tend to agree with some of the comments earlier from the public comments in terms

of being able to engage. I'm assuming you probably

got this, the language in this proposed ordinance on Thursday when we

published this. I

I am amenable to some more time to review and work on potential. I want to make sure from a broad perspective, I agree with where we're heading on this in terms of what's proposed in this ordinance language, in terms of addressing some of the concerns that have been expressed in other communities around data centers in terms of energy use, water use, noise, impact, visual impact to that community and that neighborhood as well. I'd also encourage the applicant or any applicant for a data center project in the city to do robust neighborhood outreach to those that might be impacted or that will have to live next to any proposed project to make sure that you're doing as much, that they are doing as much as possible to engage with their potential neighbors about what they are proposing. but from our perspective

I

am amenable to allowing more time for staff to work with and engage with people who might be interested and have experience developing data centers not only here but anywhere to provide some potential comments on our proposed language not to say that we're going to accept everything and take whatever they say

but if there are

I understand details matter, especially in projects of this kind of size. And I don't want us to

inadvertently put challenges that we may not have intended to put in front of these kind of developments and proposals. And I want us to make sure that we're doing our due diligence on our side to make sure that we are working in good faith as well on our end to make sure that we're executing what we believe is the best interest of our community in addressing these potential concerns, but also making sure that we're not just saying no to potential opportunities as well for the city.

With that said, my questions are,

I don't know if it's for staff or probably for staff,

one, are data centers, as we're currently conceiving them,

project proposals required to have a development agreement

to move forward in the city and in the center and park area?

Thank you for that question, Mayor. Currently, that is not a requirement.

However, we do have one pending data center application that is subject to a development agreement per the moratorium,

and we are currently in the process of processing their application together with a development agreement.

But short answer is no. For other data centers, there is no development agreement that is required.

And if I can just tag team on that, we don't have a definition of data center, period.

So we have no regulations with regard to data centers.

The pending application was interpreted at a staff level to meet the definition or the expectation of a data processing facility, which is why we just had the discussion about how that could be from 1998. Ultimately, it's a city council decision of whether or not to process that application as a data center. That's certainly up to the council, but not for tonight since that application isn't before you. So one of the reasons that we've added the definition of data center and data processing facility into the draft regulations is to clearly differentiate the two types of uses. and, in addition, make sure that the regulations that the City Council is discussing in the past and is discussing tonight are clearly applicable to data centers if that's a way forward for you.

So I'm thinking out loud in terms of an approach to this,

one, to split the proposed ordinance today into one part where we adopt the definition of data center and data processing center as proposed, and then add the requirement for data center proposals and projects in the city to require development agreements, which I think is a basic thing we should do, which we do also for large other housing and other kind of projects in the city. I think that's fair to start today. I think I'm comfortable, but would love input from staff on the potential risks and impacts of this, if we separate out the other parts of this ordinance in terms of design requirements and water energy whatever other uses the other parts of what's proposed currently in this draft ordinance giving some more time for our staff to engage with others who may have experience developing data center projects to go over the language allow some more time for them to review others external audiences, third parties to review

the proposed language

and to bring that back in a future council meeting

whether that's two weeks from now or more time is needed

one of the December meetings

but also would love to hear if there are challenges to that

and risks to that for the city and for us if we're given these concerns around data centers what those risks might be if we delay that part of the or that all those other portions of the

ordinance by a couple weeks i'll jump jump in for that if that's something the council wants to do

we can certainly do that i'd ask for a 15 20 minute break so i can draft something up so you

can have something in front of you to vote on tonight with regard to adding in the definitions

and putting in basic requirements that a development agreement be put together. But I want to emphasize there's no urgency. The urgency is that a month ago we pledged to you that we'd have this on the agenda for discussion.

That's the urgency.

Beyond that, there have been discussions and there are speculation that there may be another data center that's interested in coming into Saturn Park. We don't have an application necessarily for that.

but certainly other than that there's no urgency

we have a pending application as we've

discussed which we're going

through the environmental process for and we will hopefully have in front of the city council soon

but beyond that

this is purely again a policy decision by the city council so if you wanted to

punt the whole

thing with direction we can

certainly come back at

your next meeting and have another discussion about it with some revised regulations Or like I said, give me even 15 minutes and I can come up with something for you to consider tonight.

Well, I would say I'm very ready to add the requirement for requiring a development agreement, just like we do for other large projects proposed in the city, to make sure that that applies to data center projects in the city. I think that's a basic thing we should be asking since these are very likely. I mean, people proposing data centers, these are huge projects and should be subject to a development agreement, in my opinion.

I'm comfortable moving forward with that

applicant on that and then giving more time for these other the other portion of this adding allowing more time for public community external feedback on the other portions of the ordinance I'd also ask staff to begin working on if we aren't already potential looking looking at if we're going to add more time for that too if we can look at potential restrictions on Right. But given our express concerns on data center impacts in terms of noise, water, energy use, potentially exploring buffer zones around data center projects and data centers that may be sited in the city, potentially, I don't know. but for other kinds of large impacting facilities, right, there are buffer zones to require minimum distances between these kind of facilities to allow or to require minimum distances between these facilities and sensitive uses like residential areas or parks or other public facilities or even other ways to make sure that if there are impacts that we're still not comfortable with in terms of potentially excessive noise, energy use, infrastructure impacts to public areas and visual impacts as well, that we're doing our best to mitigate those impacts and not letting them stack really right on top of each other in an area like Saturn Park. So if we can look at potential buffer zones or required minimum distances or other things as options to bring back as well and to, I think, engage with other external stakeholders around some of those potential limits or restrictions, I think that would be helpful as well to bring back to council.

Mr. Mayor, or Carl, so you only need 20 minutes?

Well, he said 15, so I don't know.

25. Well, I mean, Carl, I mean, whatever time you need.

I will go very rapidly.

I'll make it short and sweet. And the main thing will be I'll give it to Helen so she can make copies for you so you can see it in front of you and have copies available for the public as well.

So it doesn't go as an endless break.

Let's give it 15 minutes and try to be back.

Let's be back in our seats within 15 minutes and ready to start.

but we can give Carl time he needs. No problem.

That's good. I also need a soda break.

All right.

Thank you. We'll recess for 15 minutes.

Thank you.

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And I think, I'm thinking what the program is.

Oh, I know. I'm hearing your stories.

I love it. Well, I think I even .

I think I'm .

Yeah, heck yeah, heck yeah. I was gonna stick around and have a drink, but then I'm like, oh, man. I'm so pretty. I can't .

I'm going to start things up.

I'm going to start things up.

I start things up. I start things up. I start things up. I start things up. I start things up.

Thank you.

I'm going to start these things.

I start these things.

I start these things. I start these things.

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I'm going to start.

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I'm going to start. I'm going to start. Thank you.

I have to show you my picture of me in Times Square. Where my daughter's in church. I love it.

I got a lot of like other color. I don't know.

Oh, I love it. I've done a great job. That's a great job. I love it. That's a great job. I love it. I have a great job. I have to wear my jersey. I have to walk. I was on the plane there. So I did it at the fourth. Oh, no. So then after that, they call.

And so then after that, I was like, oh, no. Yeah. So when I was, I was, and that's when they were flying down. That's when I was playing a little bit over, and then I got to do it.

Oh. Yeah. It was what I thought I was a librarian deal of when they announced. Right in the little program. And you know what? Now it's only $5995. It's not bad. Yeah, that's not bad. I had a lot less.

why is

Thank you.

Thank you.

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All right.

Thank you.

All right, if we can all take our seats, maybe council needs a minute or two to look through the revised ordinance.

Carl wants to walk us through.

Mr. Mayor, members of the council, I tried to keep it simple. So you have in front of you a red lane version, which simply shows all the stuff I tore out and what I left. And then in addition, you have a clean version of both the urgency ordinance and the regular ordinance. So the recommended action for this would remain the same. it's just we've taken out we've changed the substantive parts of both ordinances from the standpoint of all I've left in is the definition section and the requirement that data centers be approved via development agreement

it seems to align with what we asked for I don't know if there's

well we could I don't know if there's something and just before mr. Pew points out that I made

errors in my 10 minutes of drafting, but luckily it wasn't up on PowerPoint. And I'll take a video of him pointing these things out so I can make it into a meme. But in any event, I did want to point out, what did I want to point out? I wanted to point out, oh, here's what I wanted to point out. So with the requirement that data centers be considered with a development agreement, The city council, obviously, any consideration of a development agreement is a legislative action, completely discretionary by the city council. So you can insert into that development agreement additional standards and public benefits along the lines of what you've been discussing. You don't necessarily have to have the objective standards in the code itself. So I just wanted to point that out before Mr. Pugh points out my drafting errors.

I'm sure he's here to agree with everything he did.

It's super simple.

I put in there that he had to pay us a billion dollars for data centers as a mitigation matter, but he wasn't too keen on it.

It's one technical thing. It's in the definition for the city council of data center. it says in the one, two, third line down computer systems used for data storage and processing for off-site users

I think I put in there on-site as well

I'm looking at the red line and it's not in there

so that's the only comment

some of the modern data centers

they'll push data to the cloud

off-site users and people are using it off-site but there's also data centers where the tenant itself is using the data on-site. So it's data for both off-site and on-site.

I added it in. I'm looking at the clean version.

Oh, yeah, on the clean version, it's listed as off-site users. Okay.

I don't know why it didn't show up on this.

And otherwise, Carl's drafting is excellent.

Wow, that sounds like an endorsement.

All right, the intent was I did actually add in on-site, so I don't know why it didn't show up in the printed version.

All right, well, it sounds like we're good.

If there's a motion from council to adopt the final revised clean version language

of the urgency ordinance.

and then you would introduce the regular one and just with the addition of on or off-site in the definition

because that was the intent.

Is there a motion? Motion by Council Member U. Is there a second?

I'll second it.

Second by Council Member Lo.

Any further discussion? Hearing none, call for the vote.

Approved unanimously.

Appreciate staff's quick pivot. Yes, thank you so much.

And everyone just, yes, working together.

That's what we do.

And look forward to staff working on bringing back to council the other parts of this ordinance eventually.

Just to make sure, I think there was, I think the motion included the introduction and way of bringing up first reading of the regular ordinance as well, just clarifying for the record.

Thank you.

Yes.

Okay. Sounds good.

And then do we know, is there an idea of a timeline for when we might expect other parts of the ordinance to come back? Or a second ordinance to come back?

So second reading for the regular ordinance would be on the consent calendar for the next meeting agenda. In terms of the longer-term regulatory oversight for this area, specific to data centers, I imagine it's going to be at least until the end of the year in order for us to fully explore that

just because of the way this today is the 6th, and we have all sorts of holidays in between.

So it's more than likely the soonest it's going to be is the first meeting in December, more likely the second meeting in December.

Ideally, it would be in January. Sounds good. Okay.

My other question kind of on there.

City Council for the nod and the wink, sending them back to Planning Commission for consideration and moving it through the CEQA process.

So we always like to go faster,

but I also want to manage your expectations

with regard to those regulations.

Whatever we can do to go as expeditiously as possible,

just to add some additional certainty for potential uses in the area, I think would be great,

both on the data center, potential additional restrictions or conditions,

and then also on potential expanded uses as well.

Message received.

All right. If there's nothing else.

Mr. Mayor, members of the council,

I just wanted to definitely bring up that the staff has been working on additional research around data centers. As Marissa from Edison explained, We are working to set up a meeting with Edison specifically around data centers and energy consumption in general, since we're obviously not our own utility for power. We want to work closely with them and try to answer some of the questions that the council has asked about energy demands and is there enough power to provide energy not only for the city but for a project like this. In addition, we have also met with the staff from the city of Vernon. Vernon, of course, looks very different than the city of Monterey Park as far as, you know, they're a very industrial community. But we did meet with them, chat with them. They also provided us with some information around data centers as well. And the scheduled tour per council's request is being coordinated. we're hoping that that will provide some information the council is looking for as far as what a data center looks like what it feels like the one that we're touring may not be a hundred percent we're hoping that's a segment of it will be ready to go and if we need to schedule additional tours after that then we can do so but I just wanted to follow up that the staff is working on the additional of answering additional questions that the council has raised

Thank you.

I appreciate staff helping to provide this research and these opportunities to learn and look forward to making sure we do our best to do our due diligence on the city side as we explore data center uses in the city. We will move on then if there's nothing further. We are on new business, item 5A, conservation possible action to introduce wave first reading of ordinance setting speed limits based upon certification of the engineering traffic survey i believe there are conflicts on this i uh but given past guidance i believe i can vote on this just to be clear i don't remember if there were others who had conflicts on this yes mr mayor

members of the council without getting into detail i think it's safe to say that this is a citywide application affecting sufficient number of similarly situated properties that you are safe and dropping into the public generally exception under the

conflicts rules all right sounds good if that will go do the staff report all

right good evening Honorable mayor mayor and council Sean I go public works director tonight you have a for you an item considering impossible considering and possibly taken action to introduce and waive reading of an ordinance setting of speed limits based upon certification of a 2017 Engineering and Traffic Survey for speed limits effective through October 2031 and the 2024 Engineering and Traffic Survey of 26 locations for speed limits through October 2038. In 2017, a speed limit study evaluated all streets and is used as a baseline for the 2024 report update. All prima facie speed limits remain the same at 25 miles per hour, such as residential streets. 45 segments are being recertified for another seven years until 2031. At that time, an engineering and traffic survey will be completed. 26 segments received an engineering and traffic survey. Out of the 26 segments, 14 segments will have a speed limit proposed to change. The other 12 will have no change to their speed limits. The 26 segments will need to be recertified in seven years and could also be recertified for another seven years at that time. With that, I will take any questions.

All right, any questions?

Oh, no, for sure.

I just want to say thank you so much for the study. You know, I know over the years that I've been on the City Council, we know we've been talking about this issue, especially because of residents and their concerns, And I'm glad we're at this point before us. I'm actually curious, like, as an enforcement issue, like, what do we propose as far as making sure that people are actually keeping within these speed limits?

Yeah, so typically that's going to fall within PD's realm. So they're going to be out there doing speed radars, enforcements, and things like that. That's typically how the enforcement will take place with these new speed limits.

I see. I'm kind of curious, and again, this may not be applied to what is before us, but I know right now in California there are limits to, like, say, speed cameras. I mean, with the exception of pilot programs that has been alLod by the state of California. But I'm kind of curious, does the state also have restrictions or limitations on, like, stop sign cameras?

I don't know. That might be a police chief question.

I know they still allow them.

I've seen them at certain intersections, but as far as law is concerned, I don't know where they stand now.

Again, I'm just curious.

Because, again, I know the state has very strict restrictions on speed cameras, but I'm just curious if that also applies to stop sign cameras.

I don't know if they have them as stop signs, but mostly stop lights or signal lights. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you, John.

I know a lot went into this effort, and it always bewilders me why there's there.

I understand, but I know it takes a lot to do even this amount of adjusting of speed limits to a minor degree, so I appreciate all the work that went into this.

Quick question.

One of the engineering traffic surveys is from 2017. Just curious if there's a reason why there's a gap or delay between when this study was completed and why we're addressing it.

seven years later so the study was completed back then there was and it was adopted but this is the update so we use the 2017 is the baseline and so you kind of modify and update that from from the 2017 baseline so because we have to recertify this or reevaluate them every seven years okay

makes perfect sense with that if there is there a motion to adopt the staff

recommendation move for approval there second Second by Council Member U.

If there's no further discussion, we'll call for the vote.

Approved unanimously.

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sean.

And we already did item 6A, so we'll move to future agenda items and close, and any council comments before we adjourn.

All right. I'll go first. Well, first of all, I wanted to congratulate the Dodgers. I know we haven't seen each other since a major Dodger win, and also recognize Fernando Valenzuela, who passed away, and the impact that he had on baseball for Latinos, at least in Los Angeles. I wanted to thank the Parks and Rec Department for organizing the Dia de los Muertos altar. I took my daughters, a couple of my wife, to go check it out. I had an opportunity to put a picture of my father on the altar as well. So thank you so much. It was extremely well done. I know. Is there any parks and rec? Thank you so much for that. I also had the opportunity to attend the Library Foundation dinner, which was very exciting, but also very exciting because it was an amazing night for the Dodgers. so thank you for that it was great to see so many people out there I think it was a record number of people that attended this year so all for good effort for the library and I did get invited to a happy HalLoen dog party at Barnes Park with I thought which I thought was pretty amazing I'm really cool. So I attended, and it made me start thinking about, and I know we don't have Parks and Rec people, but it made me think about maybe in the future having some activities that maybe our Parks and Rec department can organize for dog lovers. I know there's several of us on the council that have pets. We'd love an opportunity to have events like that. I know we don't have a dog park in the city, but really appreciated dog owners bringing out their pets and i thought that was pretty uh awesome i just wanted to share that just as a and then i know that thanksgiving is just around the corner um and we still have one more council meeting before thanksgiving so um for future agenda items potentially um having a i'm not sure if we normally do a resolution for thanksgiving

just to wish Monterey Park residents a happy Thanksgiving so if we can I can propose one as well or share one and then lastly just I know that our city thank you so much

that's it for me

I also

attended with many of us here the Library Foundation Gala and it was exciting because the team had a sports team, so I was very happy to represent my Otani jersey as well as my Dodger cap. And, of course, yes, it was there that they announced the Dodgers won the World Series, and so just very exciting. And, in fact, last Friday, because I work in downtown, I actually went to the parade and so trying to join our fellow 150,000 Los Angelinos to celebrate the Dodgers and their World Series win. And then I actually would like to just close tonight by also saying thank you to our residents because we had an election yesterday. And, of course, there were a lot of things on the ballot, but it was exciting to see that both measures BE and LG passed decisively with LG. I mean, I know they're still counting ballots and they won't be certified until the end of the month, but it looks really good. For LG, it's at 75.27%, and for BE, it's at 69.24%. And I just want to thank the residents for the support. And also, really, just I think when I reflect on the last four years,

I mean, from the update to our land use element, to Measure MP for the city's public finances, to BE and LG.

I mean, thank you, residents, for entrusting us and also for having faith in what we're doing right now to make the community better. And also, I want to congratulate, of course, returning Councilmember Sanchez. And also for Council District 2, it looks like based on numbers that Ms. Elizabeth Yang will be joining us on the City Council pretty soon. And again, just thank you for all residents for voting and for being part of our public discourse and also being a part of our local governance.

So thank you very much.

And also thank Councilmember Lo, who also has a decisive thing. Yeah, congratulations to Councilman Sanchez, Councilman Lo, and also Elizabeth Yang for joining the council. And so I also have an honor to attend the library gala.

and I won, I think my husband bid on some Dodgers tickets which I don't know what kind of tickets is that I still don't know I still don't know, I think it will be next year, sometime in April and also a few years ago my husband also bid on $8,000 to go up to the year blimp yeah, the blimp, I remember that, the blimp but my husband loved to

auction, so I usually hold off his hand but still

he raised his hand up. And last weekend, I had to get away to Tokyo, Japan. Yes, to celebrate my birthday for just four days. The round-trip flight was surprisingly affordable, only around $400. Since my husband is a foodie, so we make it a point to explore both old and new fish markets. I have to say the quality of food was outstanding. It's fresh, melt-in-your-mouth, raw fish and waku beef, six different kind of uni that I had. And the oyster is bigger than your palm, and they're all beyond anything that we have ever tasted. So we also discovered a new gem at the new fish market called Men Yol Club. They transport the real hot spring water. And that offers both day visit and hotel accommodations. and their buffet is also less than $20 but they offer, wow, amazingly their variety with raw fish with shrimp and wagyu beef so I can't recommend it enough for anyone

office know that it's not an easy thing to do and so appreciate everyone who does that and does the sacrifice to do that and to serve their own community and our community.

A couple of items. Well, I appreciate the Library Foundation board and everyone that helped, all the volunteers, everyone that helped put a very successful gala gear. I think best turnout as for the many years that I've been going. Great crowd, great engagement, and not just because the Dodgers won that night, but because people were celebrating as well the library and the great work that the foundation helps to do as well. So thank you and congratulations to the Library Foundation.

LADC announced earlier, most business-friendly city.

I would love to see if we can invite them somehow to present the award so we can officially receive it since we're all here at the council meeting.

Great recognition. I just want to shout out staff for their great work

in helping to put on many of these programs over the last few years

to help support our local businesses,

particularly our small businesses in the community. I know that there's more in the pipeline and more resources that we're continuing to develop and working with partners to make sure we roll out in the coming months and years, including many that were listed and starting to outlined in our economic development strategic plans. We really appreciate the community, not just the business community, but the community as a whole, helping to inform and put together that strategic plan that will guide our economic development growth and strategy in the years to come. So we really appreciate the teamwork and the community work and the staff work that went into putting that plan together and putting all these programs together that helped to result in this recognition by the L.A. County Economic Development Corporation, which is a huge deal, and hope that we will continue to leverage and help promote that to continue to bring good news and good businesses into our community as well and continue to learn from others that have cool programs, happy to steal and borrow any ideas that work.

On that note, and on the note of the election,

measure B.E. and L.G. look poised to pass. We'll wait for the official tally of the votes to make it official and formal and adopt those recommendations. Also want to thank, before I forget, all the election workers and volunteers. I stopped by the vote center at Langley Senior Center to vote this past weekend. Great to see so many young people as well. Some of Mr. Sanchez's students, I think, were volunteering at Langley Center. So great to see so many people part of the process and engaging and volunteering and making sure that we had a great, smooth election process in L.A. County and here in Monterey Park. But on that note, with the successful elections on Measure B.E. and L.G., I'd like to ask staff to bring back for consideration by the Council on Measure B.E. in particular, a reform of our business license tax, to bring back an ordinance to explore potential exemptions and restrictions and caps on Measure BE for businesses in the city of Barnes Park. The hope with Measure BE was to give small businesses a break.

I think I would love to explore potentially a first-year free program

for qualified small businesses that might need some help in Barnes Park. also want to make sure that we're not, for businesses that are extraordinarily successful in the city, and I'm thinking about some of our big box retailers, exploring this was not meant to be an endless tax, given how the language of the business license tax shifting to gross receipts was listed and approved, seemingly approved by the voters. if there isn't a cap on that we're going to have some businesses paying excessive amounts especially compared to what they're paying now. So if we can bring back a proposal for some sort of cap and exemptions on other kinds of businesses we want to support in the city for the council to start to consider as soon as practical I think that would be great for us to have a conversation around

and engage in conversation about.

with that whoever has been getting the Dodgers congratulations Dodgers great to see a World Series win whoever's been getting the Dodgers to do those videos for our police department if they can call in another favor to get some of the Dodgers to come to Monterey Park to visit post World Series win I will I'm sure many of us will do almost anything to make that happen so I'm just

putting it out there. Scott, if any of your officers or others have

some additional chits to call in,

I think the council would be interested in meeting some of the Dodgers

players and would owe someone

a favor if someone could make that happen.

If we can figure out how to get them here, we will give them something

nicer than a certificate.

Especially Shohei, but Freddie Freeman. but someone

figure that out, really appreciate

but with that, appreciate everyone wish everyone a happy

week until we come

back for our next meeting

before Thanksgiving, but as the holidays

are getting here, I would just encourage everyone to continue

to be safe, especially post election and then as the holidays approach

and as the weather's getting cold and all that stuff, encourage everyone to continue to

be safe, take care of each other and look forward to seeing each other here in this room in two weeks or so. That will adjourn the meeting if there are no further comments.

All right, we are adjourned. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.