Regular City Council Meeting August 18, 2015

0:03:21we're going to convene our meeting we like to start on time and finish at a decent hour everybody has a different definition of decent welcome to the regular city council meeting we will begin with the pledge of allegiance or observation of a moment of silence led by mayor pro tem greg lyman

0:03:43i pledge allegiance under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all next up do we have any council or staff communications all right zipping right along oral communication for any items that are not on the agenda or are on the consent calendar and we will be pulling the east

0:04:17shore parks item off the consent calendar just for ability to make a presentation there and i would like to pull the ordinance for floodplain okay great vagina was that 5d i think okay right and we have three speakers for general comment mayor friedman the first

0:04:40is tom panas followed by cordell hindler and ben choi good evening mayor friedman members of the council on city staff my name is tom panis and i live at [address removed] in el cerrito in 1775 juan batista ansa organized and embarked on a 1800 mile expedition that

0:05:06brought the first european settlers to california it was a monumental feat given the obstacles he faced i'm happy to announce that the most happening city west of the rockies is the first one to install commemorative banners that highlight the historic onset expedition

0:05:21a commemorative marker as well as six banners are the result of a joint effort by the national park service and the alberta historical society the park service oversees the 1200 mile juan batista onsen national historic trail the banners and marker commemorate the

0:05:36expedition as well as the fact that on april 1st 1776 also passed through the area that today is el cerrito there'll be a ceremony to dedicate the boners at city hall plaza one week from today on tuesday august 25th at 3 pm after this year the balance will become part of the city's normal

0:05:54seasonal rotation time to include the april 1st anniversary of once's visit on a different subject i've been on the alert ever since the rebuilding of castro school site was proposed why because in 1976 mervin belfast the dean of el cerrito historians wrote that

0:06:10there had once been a dump on the castro school site i was of course concerned whether it would be unearthed during construction if so what would happen i have to confess that once earth moving was done foundations were complete and building construction was all on its way

0:06:24the dump largely dropped off my radar but the alarm bells did finally go off the evening of wednesday july 22 when an email alerted me with what was very like the dump that mr belfast had described had been unearthed during the work on the castro play field what an exciting

0:06:39development i immediately sent an email to margaret carmel lynch and to lisa leblanc at the school district informing them of the situation the next morning margaret was all over it doing initial review arranging a proper assessment of the site by a company registered with the

0:06:55state historic preservation office and getting the site registered in chris even and even very thoughtfully working with the school district to allow yours truly and an archaeologist who is also a member of the historical society to do a new dig in evaluation at the site on the

0:07:09morning of july 24th in my opinion this was a textbook case of cooperation between the public the city and the school district i i acknowledge and sincerely thank margaret yvette ortiz lisa leblanc and the others who helped make it happen thank you for your time this evening

0:07:25thank you very much cordell hindler followed by ben choi mayor friedman council members my name is carl hendler i am the border direct director member of the richmond excellence serving our community i would like to invite the the el cerrito city council to our the richmond

0:07:45hour power festival next saturday august 22nd from 12 to 5 at the richmond greenway on 16th and ohio so i sent you all some flyers for that and also i'm also involved with the youth leadership committee so if you know anybody that um that is interested in this so they can go to this link

0:08:05tinyurl.com richmond ylc and um and then let's see what else i am i'm very grateful that the el cerrito police have not been coming down on my streets i'm very appreciative to that so so so let's just because i because my neighborhood associations they were like

0:08:23el critopedia on our block and i was like yes it's not it's not thrilling so as long as you like to you know work with us work with our neighborhood associates you know now we can keep them keep the police from coming down on our streets so they supposed to be supposed

0:08:38to be protecting uh our communities so so that's all thank you very much ben choi good evening mayor friedman and uh council members my name is ben choi and i live in just just over the border in richmond and i am here today on behalf of mce marine clean energy

0:09:04where i am also an account manager and i'm here to give an update on uh the mce enrollment here in el cerrito it's been really quite successful uh currently just under 91 of el cerrito uh customers have enrolled with mce so there's been a so it's a less than 10 percent opt-out rate very

0:09:27low uh and um the big news actually is that el cerritos unequivocally mce city with the most deep green enrollments now it's a moving target that we're somewhere around 450 enrolled in the city and uh that also makes el cerrito the city within mce service territory that has

0:09:53the highest per capita we're we're standing at about four four and a quarter no about four and a third percent so that actually makes us the highest city in our service territory so congratulations to all of you my colleague alex giorgios he wanted me to ask you a couple of

0:10:13questions actually because he feels that the next milestone is going to be will el cerrito become mce's community to have every member of the city council enrolled in deep green who isn't i would i think we're probably pretty close oh we all are oh you are a while okay well then

0:10:33we are my next question all right then this city council is california's first 100 percent renewable city council how many are deep green green [Applause] all right so um so with next steps um now deep green enrollment has been very successful but the majority of deep

0:10:52green uh customers are of course uh residential and we'd like to focus uh also on uh the commercial customers uh and we were going to continue working with the environmental quality committee uh and focus on local businesses um businesses use more energy uh and uh we also one thing i want to

0:11:13spotlight is the deep green champions that is free marketing that mce provides on our website and through other uh through other measures we do customized profiles on our web page and we feature our deep green commercial customers and ads as an example i think you guys have

0:11:36probably all seen pictures of the elevation 66 brewing company folks uh on on the notices uh that that have come out over the past few months uh and of course i also wanted to say that uh energy efficiency is uh very important to the core uh mission of mce because the best way to save energy is

0:11:57to use less of it um your time's up any questions no it was so clear thanks well thank you okay now we're moving on to a series of presentations which should be pretty quick but there's some important people will be recognizing and commemoration of important events so

0:12:22first up uh will be a presentation by our police chief sylvia moore you got the whole team yes it's a team sport fighting crime definitely so this evening good evening mayor friedman our council our city manager scott hannon in our community it's one of the exciting times

0:12:50for me as a chief because i get to recognize some members of our police department for doing extraordinary work and i have to say that if i were to be before you every time members of the el cerrito police department did extraordinary work i would be here every day but this is this

0:13:08is a special day for us because we are presenting and this council is presenting a proclamation to sergeant sean maples and to lieutenant steve benini and it is because they have been selfless and true examples of the strength of service and altruism in their volunteer

0:13:30service to support special olympics across the state you want to hear from them you don't want to hear from me so i'm going to turn it over to lieutenant steve benini and sergeant sean maples to tell you or give you an example of why they are before you today and why we

0:13:46are honoring them for the extraordinary things that they have done particularly this summer so lieutenant stephenie thank you chief mayor council thank you i'm here today to present a little bit about the law enforcement torch run and the final leg for 2015 that that we were took part in

0:14:08i was going to play a little video first it's about a minute and a half two minutes or so get you an idea of where we ended up and then we'll have a short little presentable short talk about how we arrived there which is the important part sean [Music] the law enforcement torch run final leg

0:14:44and international team of law enforcement officers and special olympics athletes carried the flame of hope to over 100 california communities spreading the message of awareness and inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities everywhere [Music] please welcome the guardians of the

0:15:11flame [Music] there's a lot inside of all of us it's never hiding you just have to light it it's the one thing that you gotta trust [Music] what you saw was a little uh brief introduction to what the opening ceremonies look like for the special olympics world games

0:16:42these world games are were the biggest sporting event since the 1984 olympic games in the state of california so it was a huge planning endeavor that sergeant maples was part of as the logistics team for this event so he'll plan the final leg the run portion of it so beginning a

0:17:00couple years ago that logistics team started meeting started working out the routes that we were going to run throughout california once they had the routes planned then we had to get the law enforcement officers and the special olympic athletes involved so selection processes took

0:17:16place throughout 48 of the 50 states and 27 countries to select the officers that were going to run along this final leg route so what we ended up with were about 100 officers and 10 special olympics athletes from around the world for me i was selected as a northern

0:17:34california representative and through the understanding and a very gracious uh police chief sean and i were able to attend this what turned out to be a truly humanitarian effort there are some things about special olympics that i was unaware of even having been involved

0:17:49with it since 1998 when we started as bike officers doing a torch run through the city of el cerrito i didn't know that free of charge special olympics provides all of the athletes with uh health screenings so we happened to ride down on a bus i was assigned to route one

0:18:07there were four teams on that bus so about 40 law enforcement officers and four athletes one of our athletes was having health problems throughout this this 15 day event so we got to la he asked we could take him over the healthy athlete clinic which was at usc

0:18:21i don't know if you guys have taken public transportation in downtown l.a but it was a monumental effort to cross that city on public transportation we end up getting him over to the healthy athlete clinic at usc and as it turns out he had a hernia so i was glad that he

0:18:37was able to get there had the diagnosis went home to jamaica had a surgery he's doing fine but those 1.4 million health screenings take place because there's such a large portion of the people at intellectual disabilities that have something that they don't know about there's roughly 37

0:18:54percent that have some sort of skin ailment or nail ailment there's some unforeseen medical problems that although the family might be aware they may not be aware of how complex they are as the person gets older so that's one of those humanitarian efforts that i didn't know about i saw

0:19:09it from the side of we're raising funds for special olympics it's a noble effort to be involved in or guardians of the flame but i had no idea how much special olympics and the funds that we raised go back directly to the athlete so it was a learning type of situation for me on that bus

0:19:27and that was one of the aspects i want to bring up i didn't want you guys to forget about now for the event itself it was unique it was a lot of fun they asked if i would fly down with our northern california athlete jonathan sparks he's from the sacramento area i said

0:19:39absolutely i'll fly down with him so i went from here to sacramento to get on a plane to fly to la about seven hours later i got on a bus to go back to sacramento so we get to sacramento i passed the car where i parked at the airport and from sacramento we started our uh run we went

0:19:57to tahoe now we ran my bus which was one route there were three buses that was route one we started in tahoe and ran south we got to the farthest point south of any of the routes which was the uh port of san ysidro which is right on the california mexican border and did a

0:20:13presentation there in total our bus ran a little close to 70 miles we traveled through some 30 some odd cities the event as a whole went through 127 communities in california and we ran a little under 146 miles altogether so that's quite a bit of travel the whole mission behind that was to

0:20:34raise awareness for those people with intellectual disabilities in each community that we went through our day started about 5 30 in the morning each day so we would run anywhere from one to three miles in each city and we did that five or six times throughout the day

0:20:52so at about 11 o'clock at night we were at our next destination went to bed turned around got up at 5 30 went out and did the whole thing again that was only possible because of our logistics people sergeant maples and some other law enforcement officers from around the country

0:21:05they erupt before we were they were planning the route making sure the route was clear making sure the people were in place for the ceremonies as we ran they were there with the water keeping the torch lit doing all those things that you don't really think about

0:21:18one of the big parts of that was providing for our safety so we always had law enforcement officers that were around us that were behind us so cars didn't run into us and all that was through the planning of our logistics team so that two-year effort culminated in this 13 days of running

0:21:33from tahoe to san ysidro back to los angeles we did roughly 38 media type of appearances so we either gave an interview for a local tv station did a local newspaper we met with many athletes many athletes families so it was one of those things that at the start of it i wasn't quite sure what

0:21:56to expect but at the end of it special olympics left me better than when i had started that event so it's it's close to me it touches my heart but it also provides one of those situations where we can give back to the community in a way where nothing's expected of us they're just happy to see

0:22:12us they're happy that we're there and i probably hugged more people in that 13 days through the athletes and their families than i have in my entire life so you can't get by one of those one of those special olympians without providing a hug or without them demanding a hug and as it all wrapped up

0:22:27we were able to go to the world games where you saw a brief thing about the opening ceremonies that following sunday we had our one free day for the whole trips we were able to attend some of the games and we went there with some of the athletes that were on our bus and they are

0:22:41absolute rock stars when it comes to the special olympics community we got off the bus we got into the uh the area where the games were being held and we went and watched bocce ball floor ball and a couple of things that our athletes were interested in as soon as

0:22:54they got into the place and people started to recognize them you would have thought it was the rolling stones out there they flocked to them it's one of those scenes whereas a law enforcement officer you think well i need to plan my way out but that's not what they want

0:23:04they wanted to come give you a hug get a picture with you get a picture with you in uniform whatever it may be so it was a truly humanitarian effort and i'm thankful for the foresight of the chief sylvia moyer and for those people that stepped up while we were gone to fill our roles

0:23:19and still have the police department operational on a 24-hour basis so thank you thank you to all of you thank you to the police department my co-workers and the chief of police for allowing us to take on this endeavor and raise some awareness for those 200 million people worldwide that have

0:23:33intellectual disabilities well thank you very much [Applause] just like to also say thank you to the council for the support that you've always given us to do what we do for special olympics without the leadership that we have in the chief and the command staff at the

0:23:53agency none of this would be possible i don't think lieutenant benini really patted himself on the back as much as he should have he was the only northern california law enforcement officer on the team each state has one representative and lieutenant benini was

0:24:08that representative for northern california being that california is so large we are split north and south so southern california had a representative but this was a tremendous event for el cerrito's name to be on there's a great likelihood that it will never be back in california again this

0:24:26is a once-in-a-lifetime event four years ago it was in greece for the summer games two years ago it was in korea for the winter games 2017 it will be in austria for the next winter games it will not be back in the united states for many many years so for the city of

0:24:42el cerrito to have our hand print all over this is tremendous for our community to show the level of support that we get to do this and the level of commitment we have to the special olympics to give back to the athletes to make their lives better so i thank you

0:24:55very very much thank you [Applause] sergeant sean maples and lieutenant steve benini really exemplify what it means to be a public servant and they recognize that the most important name on their uniform is the name on their shoulder it says el cerrito it is not the name above their

0:25:22right pocket that is their individual name but they are truly uh illustrative of public service and service before self what they gave in terms of their their personal time to do this was extraordinary and i also have to thank our city manager and this council for supporting us to do the

0:25:42right thing for others and a huge thanks to the men and women who stepped up to fill the void so these two could go off and not worry about how service was being performed in this community because we would never let service suffer here in terms of safety it is an absolute pleasure to recognize

0:26:05them and it is a genuine and authentic honor to work beside them so thank you for this proclamation mayor friedman thank you very much so i'm just going to read the last sentence of the proclamation when i was going to read go ahead you go ahead and make a motion

0:26:22i'm going to make a motion of the el cerritos city council proclaiming honoring sergeant sean maples and lieutenant steve benini the city council the city of el cerrito hereby recognizes you as 2015 special olympics torch run final leg participants for the special

0:26:38olympics of north northern california sergeant maples and lieutenant benini are examples of the strength and selflessness selflessness of volunteerism in the highest ideals of serving in in policing and serving as examples to members of the police department the profession of law enforcement

0:26:59and the el cerrito community thank you very much [Applause] why don't we vote on we have a second second second all in favor signify by saying aye hi motion carries unanimously now we should get this camera [Applause] thank you next up is a proclamation commemorating

0:28:15the 25th anniversary of the americans with disabilities act presentation will be made by mallory nestor brush the manager of accessible services at alameda contra costa transit district and i see we have some uh members of the board of directors of the transit district with us chris peeples

0:28:36thank you mayor friedman members of the council um my name is chris peeples and i'm an elected at-large director of the alameda contra costa transit district and this year i've this year i've been elected as president of the board i have with me joe wallace who is the board director for this

0:28:55district um also we have julie waters who's with our legislative and community affairs and so we're we're all here basically to support mallory who runs our accessible services and has been doing work with persons with disabilities for a very very long time mallory

0:29:23thank you mayor council members being here i don't have fancy music and a really great video for the special olympics but i have to tell you if you did not see the opening ceremonies you must see it it was just fantastic personal note my brother-in-law had horses that he works with intellectual

0:29:42developmentally disabled kids in arizona and one of his three horses won a gold medal we are here today to talk about it is perfect timing to have the special olympics in california in 2015. it's the 25th anniversary of historic legislation we so appreciate el cerrito recognizing this and

0:30:05continuing to commit to working with your community um for accessible services and i think ac transit over the the last year since it was passed in 1990 has worked very diligently and we're going to go just briefly over the accessible features of our coaches and more importantly the

0:30:24programs that we offer to the consumers those are the folks that we really want to reach out to to make their ridership on ac transit as easy as possible and accessible as possible and i think i probably owe uh council member abelson um a fee because she appears in most of our pictures that

0:30:45we do have so okay i'll catch up with you later um our buses again ac transit has uh accessible buses in order to accommodate seniors and folks with disabilities we have priority seating we were one of the first and the to operate low floor ramp vehicles with rear-facing

0:31:11securement they had already been in operation in canada and europe but with our van hools we did have the low floored ramp we'll be showing you pictures there is janet she's on a lift the initial lifts that we had were solid platform but they were subject to the road dirt

0:31:29and grime being kicked up as they were traveling down the road a lot of moving parts much more difficult to maintain what you see on the right picture is the low floor ramp vehicle the beauty of the ramp is that in fact it can be deployed manually so if in fact any of the

0:31:48hydraulic systems were to fail the operator can deploy the ramp and you see how our numbers are increasing and we're moving toward 100 percent ramp fleet in removing the lifts which are more difficult to maintain for onboard announcements we have both internal text messaging

0:32:10for those who can't hear it's a visual sign the bus is loud at times so you can see it and we have automatic vehicle announcements now i'm not going to figure out how to hit this button but i'm supposed to hit this button over here this thing you can do it thank you

0:32:30i'm like the i oh no the little speaker probably have to come to the computer i'm like the ittech dinosaur at ac transit so to leave reaching san pablo and manila el cerrito city hall thank you that's what our aba sounds like and no i don't record the announcements

0:32:55and also the external announcement so whenever the doors open up they will state the route and its intended destination i can manage this little button we have flash card kits which we provide to our consumers free of charge and what these k kits do and they're in multiple

0:33:17languages on the back you don't see them here they're in three different languages it notifies the operator from a distance of what they're requesting we have some second door ramp still in the fleet we have a front door ramps and we have mid door on our mci coaches so the lift ramp

0:33:35is bright enough and tells the operator where to position the coach that you're requesting the lift for the ramp so that helps the operators position the coach in the appropriate place in order to board the kneeler is for those who can't make a high front step if it's not a low floor bus or even if

0:33:52it's a low floor bus it still reduces the height of that initial step onto the coach for those who have ambulatory limitations and the weight is for those who are a little slower to get down the aisle and it lets the operator know that they want them to wait until

0:34:10they're seated in order to pull away from the curb we also offer and it's not shown here braille bus identification kits and those are kits that are a tri-fold that identify the route and a stop location and what we've found over the years it works not only with those with visual

0:34:29impairments but also those with communication disorders or communication challenges such as the intellectually disabled they use that in order to communicate with the driver if they don't have the ability to speak and we offer those free of charge as well uh we introduced this wheelchair

0:34:49marketing tether strap program in 2002 and i think that the whole campaign was very successful you'll see on the right this is in one of our coaches the priority seating sign is up and it gives you the six steps to wheelchair securement it's very catchy it's secure the back

0:35:10you know excuse me secure the back move to the front secure the front no rear back front slack shoulder lap that's the motto so we taught that to the operators that's how they're trained it now i'm going to stumble over my own words but what it does and we've provided over 600 tether

0:35:27straps to wheelchairs it takes the guesswork out of where to secure the chair as many individuals as there are in wheelchairs that's how many different chairs you have to secure on the coach very difficult for an operator to figure out where that place is this involves the consumer they let us know

0:35:46where they want the straps where they prefer to have their chair secured and we mark it so the driver does not have to guess where they're to secure the chair um this is a great story and we're celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ada and i think it's unique because in

0:36:051994 two of the three elected transit boards in the nation ac transit and bart were two of the three they're now four came together to provide ada paratransit which is known as the east bay paratransit that was phenomenal this is a highly visible service more visible because we have elected

0:36:27boards and to the most frail and vulnerable of our communities so we do provide we are one of the largest in california outside of la and we provide a great service to those who are unable to use bart or bus or who because of a location cannot access a location they can use

0:36:51paratransit so we're very happy about the relationship and our partnership with bart which has been going on for 20 years very successful this just tells us what we do with our relationship with bart again bart is a regional operator we connect with five counties

0:37:09and are the largest regional provider of paratransit trips they're the most difficult trips to make because you're working with another transit operator coordinating events they're the longest trips but we do a great job we do provide service directly into and out of san

0:37:24francisco uh the east bay pair transit we transport over 727 000 people about 2 500 on any given weekday we have been in an old building in oakland for over 18 years we've recently relocated just two doors down which is probably the toughest kind of move to make but we

0:37:46did relocate two doors down to a new facility we have over 75 employees that do all the eligibility the certifications the scheduling reservations and dispatching of east bay paratransit and what we will i'll be talking about later is we're going to do a grand opening celebration

0:38:07of which you will be invited to open this new call center and again recognizing the unique partnership that we have with bart providing the service key to our success is really the relationship we have with the accessibility advisory committee and our service review advising committee ac

0:38:23transit has their own internal fixed route advisory group they're directly appointed by the board of directors and the service review advisory committee advises us on matters relating to east bay paratransit exclusively again as i said in celebration of the 25th and our grand opening of our new

0:38:44call center we will be having a celebration from one to three on september 16th our keynote speaker is jan garrett very interesting history she's currently a program manager at the pacific ada center and was formerly the executive director of the cil in berkeley and i

0:39:02think it's an honor to be working in this area we are ground zero for the independent living movement uh for accessible services and so we're proud to work with communities like el cerrito i was so pleased to see lieutenant benini on the clips that you can go to the

0:39:19special olympics northern california site it was very impressive so you all should be very very proud so i'd be happy to answer any questions and again thank you for supporting our efforts for accessible services thank you very much i i think uh seeing no immediate

0:39:34questions we're going to turn to council member abelson okay the city of el cerrito uh city council uh hereby recognizes the significance of the efforts and advocacy of people with disabilities throughout the united states including the ac transit locally who have established an

0:39:55accessibility advisory committee and have recognized its efforts towards maintaining the district's ada compliance to secure access inclusion and independence for people with disabilities the city will continue to provide to seek the guidance of the disability community in the continued development

0:40:18and provision of fully accessible services and seeks and celebrates and recognizes the progress that has been made by reaffirming the principles of equality and inclusion second being moved in second and all in favor say aye motion carries unanimously thank you very much and thank you very

0:40:40much directors wallace and peoples for joining us tonight and for the wonderful work you all are doing [Applause] step right next uh next up is the renaming of the competition pool at the el cerrito swim center to the emory g weed the third lap pool and this presentation will be by christopher

0:41:44jones our recreation director [Applause] [Laughter] good evening honorable mayor and council members it's my honor and privilege to come before you this year i'm chris jones recreation director it's an honor to come before you this evening as you consider a resolution to

0:42:11rename the competition pool at the el cerdo swim center the emory g weed the third lap pool and also can the consideration of putting a plaque commemorating the new name this is in honor of a great man friend mentor and lifeguard of the el cerro swim center for over 25 years

0:42:32this is coming before you because of an application made by swim center patrons and residents rudy donafrio and former mayor norman leforce staff has reviewed the application and believes that it conforms with city policy on renaming before i introduce them i just want to

0:42:53acknowledge the several supporters today we have in the audience including bria weed or excuse me bria costello emery's daughter and uh emery's wife rosie weed who no pressure but it is her birthday today and she would like to speak to you after your vote so without further ado i'd like to bring

0:43:19former mayor norman leforce well good evening uh mayor and council members it's a pleasure to be here tonight um and the there's often there's many people in our community who do a lot of great things uh and do many good things for el cerrito and the bay area sometimes though there's there's a

0:43:51person just by who they are seems to embody the spirit of a community and i think for many of us that was emory many of us who were swimmers got to know him because he was the lifeguard at the pool particularly the morning hours that's how i got to really get to know

0:44:13him when we reopened the pool after we had rebuilt it um and i remember his booming voice in the morning i got worried that the neighbors were going to complain that it was too loud but he would just welcome everybody with such a joy de vivre and he was it was such a pleasure to be

0:44:33with him and swim in the morning and so we were very sad when he retired but we even more saddened when we learned that he had a brain tumor and brain cancer however we we had to smile a bit because when we were told that when he was at the facility for uh for his uh treatment

0:44:57how much the staff appreciated him because of the healing and comforting and positive spirit he seemed to project on all the other patients there and that was emory he was that kind of person it didn't strike me to come to present this idea until i appeared was part of

0:45:20the memorial service for him after his death and i was so amazed at the number of people who were there maybe about two to three hundred people but also just how many people had a story to tell about how emory had touched them and particularly as a lifeguard as as a

0:45:42coach as a swim instructor he just seemed to be able to touch people in a way that was truly amazing and he did it in such a way that it seemed to embody to me what this community of el cerrito is about and all the positive aspects that we have in our town and i thought you know

0:46:01emery's the pool and the pool's emery and then i know that um at least i know we all know that wherever you go in the bay area if people know about the el cerrito swim center what you always hear is the best pool in the area this is a great place everybody loves the swim

0:46:21center it it's a place that makes el cerrito in a sense it defines el cerrito as as a community and so i thought what better way to honor not only emory and who he was but to show what kind of spirit we have as a community and as a place than to rename uh the competition pool after him

0:46:44and so i really appreciate this i thank you very much for doing it i think this reflects just what a great community el cerrito is of course as a former mayor i'm somewhat biased i guess but it really does reflect just what what is so good about this community and how

0:46:59well we can get get along and work together and what kind of person emory was bringing people together and just being just a positive spirit and influence on everybody thank you very much [Applause] mayor and city council i'll just cut my little speech here by about 50 percent

0:47:25i'm a lap swimmer also and was also involved by the way as probably most of the people that are here in the room when we uh contacted local residents to rebuild the pool from the old one so we we wound up with a pool and thanks to all of you that were present and that were involved

0:47:43in that effort it really turned out to be uh a very big plus for the city of el cerrito as as rx mirrors talked about if i could draw your attention just for a moment to uh a little pamphlet we have here i hopefully they got that passed out inside is rules for being human

0:48:03on the first page uh emory's rules for being human provides an effective guideline for not only our youth but for all of us who struggle with life's daily challenges our efforts often leave us with jaded worn down and frustrated which which often molds an individual

0:48:23into accepting not being able to make changes in their personal life vocations relationships their communities and or their country it becomes easy to accept the status quo emery despised the status quo we had many conversations about this topic neither of us accepted it as a

0:48:43life philosophy emory recognized that all people especially youth and those with disabilities disabilities if coached properly could develop an attitude of overcoming personal challenges by adapting a positive mental attitude he introduced thousands of youth to this his

0:49:01philosophy with personalized coaching mentoring and encouragement when they faced failure or thought they couldn't achieve change emery proffered encouragement at every turn not only were his efforts effective i.e he taught thousands of people to swim to become lifeguards to become

0:49:22self-reliant emory also changed the lives of many young people with serious self-esteem issues that came to the pool or that participated in camping trips those individuals have gone on to pursue education various uh vocations and to meet life's daily challenges with

0:49:40emory's etic of accepting who you are and making the most of your assets recognizing that changing the name of any publicly owned facility is a serious decision by this council i would suggest that the residents of any community if exposed to emery's philosophy

0:49:58and over 20 years of contributions to ours and surrounding community youth would be proud to honor emory in this manner hopefully if the proposed pool name change and accompanying recognition plaque are adapted by the council on any given day some young person will

0:50:15read the plaque and ask the question who is that guy and hopefully someone someone will be able to provide the answer that guy believed that you can do anything in life that you set your mind to thank you thank you very much uh any speakers i don't have any records okay i think

0:50:40we're going to make the motion then we're going to hear from brianna so who would i'd like to i'd be pleased to move the resolution of the city council of the city of el cerrito approving the renaming of the competition pool at the el cerrito swim center to emery g

0:50:55weed third lap pool a second moved in second and all in favor say aye aye motion carries unanimously and uh let's hear from brianna and then we'll have our final gratitude i'm not brianna i'm rosie weed oh rosalind thank you i was reading and i got confused and city council members

0:51:22i would like to take this opportunity thank you um for renaming but with for accepting and proving the proposal to rename the competition pool at the el cerrito swim center as emory g weave the third lap pool and thank you rudy lofrio excuse me and also excuse me norman the force

0:51:44and i'm very honored along with my daughter brianna to be here today and he told me that water was his element he was a true believer that water is healing his philosophy or one of his philosophies was by facing your fears you must believe that the process of life is taking care

0:52:03of you and and to have confidence in your abilities emery applied his philosophy by taking someone from taking someone with the fear of water and transforming them into a swimmer knowing that this process would somehow be incorporated into into their life's journey

0:52:23thank you again and i wish you all good health love peace happiness and prosperity thank you thank you so much it's it's always wonderful when we get the opportunity to commerce commemorate someone who is such an inspiration to so many people excuse me and so vital to

0:52:44our community so thank you all the swimmers who brought this forward and thank you to chris jones and the weed family for all that you've done so thank you very much we have a signed proclamation on this uh the resolution oh just the resolution okay um next up is the consent calendar

0:53:13and we're pulling items 5 b and 5 d so it's where we'll be considering items 5 a c e f g h i n j point of order yes uh counselor do we need to read the titles of the ordinances that are on the consent title no okay then i'll i will move a a motion of the consent item uh approving five

0:53:46five a five c five e five f five g five h five i and five j second all in favor say aye aye motion cares unanimously uh now we'll move on to item 5b which is a proclamation in support of citizens for east shore parks 30 years of public service i think uh robert chaste former

0:54:11mayor of albany and leader and i'm not sure what your official title is with the with the east shore state parks but i know you've been a leader ever since the inception so thank you for joining us and please thank you mayor and council i'm really happy to be here i have with me two of

0:54:32our board members former mayor norman leforce and roberta nguyen and i'd like them to come on up and stand with me uh this has been a labor of love about 40 years ago i got involved with the idea of we should be able to reclaim the post-industrial waterfront spaces

0:54:49that we have in the east bay and i joined a number of like-minded people to do that it was just a little side project that we were going to finish in a couple of years we thought it's taken 30 years to do as much as we have but we were joined not only by former mayor leforce of el cerrito but

0:55:06mayor jean siri of el cerrito will siri we had the support of your council long-time support from council member abelson we had the pleasure of working with council member lyman to create the ball fields down near tom bates ball fields we had the support of people like

0:55:21supervisor john joya it's been a wonderful thing that we've all we've been able to count on the support of el cerrito to make this happen for our common shoreline and as you know our goal is to create a shoreline from crockett to san jose link together all the parks in open

0:55:38space so that you could walk the entire shoreline and we've got um we've got already in the east shore state park mclaughlin east shore state park eight and a half miles and this came about largely due to the effort of thousands of volunteers i mean we we work on this but literally was the

0:55:56thousands of people that worked on this to pass bond measures and to pass waterfront protection measures in each of the cities there are six cities involved el cerrito and then auckland emeryville berkeley albany and richmond all of whom have bonded together to make this happen

0:56:14so we're very appreciative that you're giving us a proclamation we hope you come to join us on november 7th when we have our 30th anniversary we'll be following up on that and it's been a wonderful opportunity to work with these thousands and thousands of volunteers thank you

0:56:31thanks okay yeah i'd be delighted to move a proclamation supporting the citizens for east shore state park 30 years of public service and we recognize your exceptional service to the east bay provided by citizens for east shore park and support its continuing work towards protecting

0:56:51the east bay shoreline thank you moved in second and all in favor say aye aye motion carries unanimously [Applause] thank you is the weed family still here i think we want to do a photo i was told they're coming in oh okay [Music] thank you thank you so much [Laughter]

0:59:13all right we move on to item 5d floodplain management ordinance yes mayor thank you uh to you and all the other counselors for doing so much work while i was gone i want to give a special shout out to mayor in listening through the audio video from that meeting several

0:59:32times you had to request speakers to speak into the microphone and it made a big difference so if you've not ever watched us on tv uh speaking into the microphone is is quite valuable i i am going to move this item forward but i wanted to pull it for a couple of

0:59:47things in listening through there were some questions that that i would have asked that potentially might have led to some changes one of them is on page two which is the accessory structure means a structure that is either and b is a small low-cost shed for limited storage less than 150 square

1:00:07feet and 1500 in value 1500 in value would be 10 a square foot in construction cost i would certainly if if staff is able to um if because it may be a fema or or some other derived number for this but if staff is able to focus on the 150 square feet that would be my guidance or request to

1:00:30staff as they process this ordinance that we'll pass tonight the the second item is that the map that we are we are adopting which will be published next month uh september 30th um when staff inquired about the the accuracy of the map with respect to reflecting

1:00:53development that has occurred since 1971 the response was not overwhelmingly uh definitive because they actually made some sounds in their response that they have not been getting information about development in this area since 1971. so or it's been not consistent or anyway that they

1:01:18made it sound as though that they would not necessarily be able to tell us if their model accurately reflected all the development since 1971.

1:01:27so to that end i would i would really through this motion direct staff to be sure to provide to fema um the the information that's necessary so that our development going forward is uh accurately reflected in any maps going forward so with with those two sort of

1:01:46instructions to staff i move an ordinance of the city of el cerrito repealing el cerino municipal code chapter 8.35 flood hazard areas and replacing it by adding and adopting el cerrito municipal code chapter 8.35 flood pain management no substance no changes at all tonight

1:02:05all second moved in second in it all in favor say aye aye motion carries unanimously thank you very much mayor pro tem lyman okay now we move on to a study session on establishing a local minimum wage and we have a very distinguished panel of presenters that we'll get to in just a

1:02:26minute i first have a few opening comments this is an issue that we've been working on for a while here in el cerrito and the city manager and i with suzanne ayala karen pinkos the assistant city manager have been closely researching and working to learn all that we could about what the options

1:02:49are for raising the minimum wage in el cerrito and so it's very exciting and there's also been a lot of community support for moving forward it's very exciting to be at this moment when we're on the cusp of actually moving forward with an ordinance i think i said when i was sworn in as

1:03:10mayor that the two greatest challenges we face are global warming and poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor and unfortunately we aren't going to solve either one of these issues just in el cerrito but it's imperative that we do all we can to be part of the solution

1:03:29we've taken quite a number of steps on global warming here locally i won't go through all of those but here tonight i think we have an important milestone in moving forward to do what we are capable of doing to be our part of the solution to helping alleviate poverty in the bay

1:03:46area and specifically in el cerrito and surrounding communities certainly just raising the minimum wage will not end poverty but it will certainly help those who are trying to support themselves and or a family on the wholly inadequate current minimum wage of nine dollars an hour

1:04:09i think it's an economic imperative and a moral imperative that we take a very close look at this and move forward aggressively and make sure that we be part of the growing movement to increase the minimum wage throughout our locality and throughout the nation and so i'm

1:04:27really happy that we have four people tonight that are very well versed in this issue and have uh a wonderful track record of working on this issue to help share with us information about what they've learned from other communities and what they've learned from research about contra costa county

1:04:47in our community so first up i'm going to introduce a man who's well known to all of us our county supervisor john joyah who has long been a leader in addressing poverty within our county and within our region he's co-chair of the rise together effort that was embarked upon united way

1:05:09to decrease poverty by half by the year 2020 and as well as many other regional efforts and he has been a champion in spearheading the efforts within the county to develop a model ordinance that can be enacted in as many communities in the county as possible so supervisor joy

1:05:28thanks so much for your leadership and for joining us thank you mayor friedman mark and first i want to recognize your leadership and the leadership of the whole council on issues on the environment like climate change and on inequality i mean it's a perfect example

1:05:43of thinking globally and acting locally and as you've said mark you're not going to solve these problems in el cerrito but you're showing great leadership on these issues and and that has a reverberating effect so that's great to see and this is just one of those so i'm

1:05:56really pleased to sort of kick off and say a few words about sort of our presentation tonight um and uh you're gonna hear from some uh folks who are gonna give you more information so i'm gonna keep my comments really brief so there's a regional effort going on

1:06:10here in contra costa and mayor friedman is part of this to look at how we come together as cities and the county to develop a regional minimum wage um you know why regional well residents in el cerrito work in other cities uh residents of concord and other contra

1:06:27costa cities work here in el cerrito so we all benefit from having a common minimum wage throughout all the jurisdictions clearly as you've said it would be better for this to happen at a state level it's not that's why we're acting locally and as you know mark this

1:06:42coalition has representatives from labor and business and community-based organizations and political leaders and faith leaders and the idea is to develop the political support in our county among the cities in our county of course it's it's uh it's already here in el

1:06:58cerrito so that's the good news you're going to be the first really out of the box as part of this effort and to develop the political support and link that political support to good policy and that's you'll hear from uc berkeley labor center which is conducting a study which will be out

1:07:14soon that you'll hear about um to the case that we can make on on minimum wage we're we're glad to have um ebace as part of our coalition providing information and you'll hear from course mariana moore mariana used to be the executive director of the human services

1:07:29alliance which were community-based organizations which are community-based organizations which do health and social services around our county i don't need to tell you again why a minimum wage is important you know there is something called the self-sufficiency

1:07:44standard here in contra costa county which is the amount of money that you need to make for a family of four to not rely on public assistance and that amount is about 72 000 yet two people earning the minimum wage earned half that approximately about thirty seven

1:08:01thousand dollars a year that's just not acceptable right minimum wage you can't even um you you're on public assistance so we all understand the importance of trying to build support so the idea is to be thoughtful about this and i know your own el cerdo democratic club has

1:08:17passed a resolution supporting this and that's great leadership as well so that's really the backdrop for this so let me turn it over to um marianna moore who will talk a bit about also the larger coalition of insuring opportunity that sort of hatched the minimum wage uh

1:08:33coalition and and you'll hear and then we'll have a chance for questions after you hear from all of us and i know that your city staff and we appreciate the hard work of your staff good evening my name is marianna moore i'm the director of the insuring opportunity campaign to end poverty in

1:08:55contra costa county just a small little goal um and i'm very happy to be here tonight and very grateful to supervisor joya for the incredible not just regional but really statewide leadership that he's showing around so many issues around inequality and and the climate which i

1:09:09know are two issues very important to mary freeman and the council um so we're very fortunate to have his leadership in this campaign what i want to do is spend a couple of minutes talking to you about the insuring opportunity campaign which is sort of the umbrella

1:09:22organization that is gathering some very dedicated passionate and well informed partners and very diverse group of folks at the table which i'll tell you who some of them are so tell you about the campaign as a whole briefly and then talk to you about some of the tenets of

1:09:36the minimum wage campaign that we are just gearing up to launch and that you are sort of getting a preview of here in el cerrito so i give you context for the conversation tonight so the insuring opportunity campaign actually grew out of a if you remember back in 2009-2010 when the economy was

1:09:53just in the tank and the demand for social services was through the roof and city and county and funder budgets were down in the basement it was a real crisis a structural crisis and so a bunch of folks from every sector in the county government local and regional

1:10:12funders nonprofit and county providers business labor we all came together and said how do we make the safety net stronger we spent several years working on that together and built some great relationships and did some really groundbreaking work to make that service

1:10:26that safetynet better and then we got to wait somewhat improving economy always as we all know it's not improving for everyone there's still that growing inequality so that's kind of one of the tenants that's driving us for this minimum wage increase and but as the economy started to

1:10:42improve and these relationships were strong and we were doing innovative work we looked around and said what's next and what we decided what was next is to kind of go to the source or go to the root and address the root causes of poverty because what we want is we don't

1:10:56want two or five years from now when the next great recession hits we don't want to have that happen again we want to prevent it meaning that we want to have every family in el cerrito and around the county have the resources they need and deserve to have their families

1:11:10thrive and so ensuring opportunity a lot of those same folks and then some new partners is a lot of excitement and movement across the county and i'm very proud of our county to say that have come together to like how do we put in place sound effective public policies

1:11:28and community level collaboration to help make that happen at the policy level so that's the focus of the insuring opportunity campaign we're focusing on six areas economic security is sort of a big one and that's where the minimum wage campaign comes in which i'll tell you about in a minute

1:11:43there's also housing security food security education safety and health and the reason we have those six areas as mary freedman said before there's no sort of silver bullet answer to poverty we all wish there was a lever you push and then you're done it's very interactive

1:12:01cross-influencing so we know we need to work in a lot of areas to make gradually these multiple solutions to put into place that then work together to build the strongest safety net which is a preventive net we have a leadership team of community leaders from every sector elected

1:12:19officials funders public and nonprofit providers business labor and the faith community so all of us are coming together on the same table with sometimes really different opinions but there to find solutions and to be practical and to be smart and then lastly about the can the

1:12:37insuring opportunity campaign we have sort of a big tent philosophy as i call it as you're kind of hearing so we don't have just one kind of advocate or one kind of opinion we are really evidence-based and data-driven so we do have a lot of information driving our

1:12:51ideas and our decision making but a lot of different ideas and approaches and opinions and political perspectives in the room because that's what community is and that's how you make good policies you have a a place to test ideas and to deepen understanding um so we also know that no one sector can

1:13:10do it alone we've all we're all in the sandbox together on this um so that's really our approach and sort of the insuring opportunity framework and then within that um within those six areas i talked about a lot of our work is supporting and amplifying efforts that are already

1:13:24happening and being a partner and then we also though are open to finding you know a single initiative and minimum wage is it for us right now where we are the driver leader convener resource provider to you know generate these exciting conversations so with the

1:13:38minimum wage campaign what we're advocating for and this very big group of stakeholders is driving together toward is a county-wide uniform ordinance and you're going to hear more about the model ordinance and the importance of doing that right and we have resources to help you

1:13:56think about how to do it well so county-wide uniform and simultaneously adopted in all 19 jurisdictions across the county and i have to say if we do anything close to that that is groundbreaking and there's a lot of folks around the country that are going to be looking are

1:14:12already looking at contra costa and el cerrito can be the absolute vanguard of because as you know if you sort of listen to the news i mean a lot of the bigger campaigns have been in bigger cities so seattle san francisco oakland you're going to hear about some of those in a

1:14:24moment and so this is the first time that there's sort of no one big anchor city suburban sort of county full of smaller cities without a lot of you know resources with a lot of collective impact and so how do we make a minimum wage county wide and how does that policy look and how do

1:14:42we enforce that so we have lots of ideas and lots of excitement about that model it's very groundbreaking so to do that we want it to be very simple in language in terms of the ordinance not a lot of exceptions and complexity because we know you don't have a lot of money to enforce this and

1:14:57it's got to be simple and workable we're very aware of that um what our goal is and what we're driving toward is a wage increase you know so step increase so when we get to 20 the year 2020 the wages 15 across the county all 19 jurisdictions very simple 15 by 20 20.

1:15:16um it's interesting that about six to nine months ago we started sort of these conversations um fifteen dollars was kind of at the edge kind of an edgy like wow 15. and just in the time we've been working within the county with each other it's become the norm in fact we

1:15:31have some members of our coalition saying that's not enough and it's not fast enough and we welcome those conversations but for right now we're looking at 15 by 2020 um as being the place that we think will have the greatest impact um and sort of balancing um impact for

1:15:47workers and for the economy without trying to push it too far too far too soon um and i think lastly i would say that we really are aware of the importance and are really committed to city by city engagement and it's really interesting because i've been a policy nerd for many

1:16:04years and you know a lot of policy happens at the state level at the national level that's kind of where all the media attention sort of goes i'm really becoming convinced and i'm talking a lot of other folks in the field the real change around inequality is going to happen at the city level and

1:16:19the county level and the regional level so as mayor freeman mentioned we have the rice together campaign at cut poverty that's bay area wide and then within that we have our county wide insuring opportunity campaign and within that we have nested the el cerrito you

1:16:32know groundbreaking campaign to pass the minimum wage and be kind of again of the vanguard of that local movement that is how social and economic change is happening right now there's too much division and sort of posturing at the national level at the state level it's just you know it

1:16:47gets very complicated to move the dial so at the local level we're really practical we want to move the dial and we want to work with you to do that um and i really want to acknowledge our partners you're going to hear next from the uc berkeley labor center which has

1:17:00been phenomenal in providing data and rationale and reality based conversation starters around the minimum wage increase in a number of cities and that we're very fortunate they're bringing their expertise to contra costa county and then also ebace which is the east

1:17:18bay alliance for a sustainable economy also here from jenny lin from ebace they have been on the ground working in a number of campaigns around the bay area and again we're very fortunate to have them with us um and then lastly i want to start uh thank uh mayor friedman and suzanne

1:17:33iarla um and staff for really making this process of coming to have a conversation with you be so enjoyable and so well informed it's just been a joy to work with your city so we're just very pleased and with that i'd like to introduce annetta bernhardt with the uc berkeley

1:17:47labor center her name is the top you know author line of many many reports around the nation actually looking at the economic impact of minimum wage increase and she's an incredible walking storehouse of knowledge so it's very um delighted to welcome her to the podium

1:18:05while annette is coming up the the format will be that we're going to hear from the panelists then we'll take questions from the council then suzanne will kind of wrap it up with a powerpoint presentation then we'll take public time comments and dialogue and then we'll seek direction from the

1:18:22council members so please proceed great and mariana thank you for that wonderful introduction um good evening mayor friedman and members of the city council and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to come speak with you today my name is annette bernhardt i'm a

1:18:36senior researcher at uc berkeley's institute for research on labor and education and i am part of a team of researchers that has been conducting impact studies for a number of california cities uh that are looking to raise their minimum wages to date we have conducted studies for oakland san

1:18:53francisco los angeles san diego and just recently sacramento the team is headed by michael wright who is a nationally recognized and very prominent scholar on the effects of the minimum wage on employment and then as mariana said we were asked by the insuring opportunity campaign to conduct an

1:19:14assessment of their proposal the study is still in progress so i regret to say i won't have specific findings for you today or specific impact estimates what i'm going to do is very briefly give you a brief snapshot of what we've learned from the studies we've done to

1:19:29date and a little bit about what we've learned from the larger body of economic research about the employment impacts of raising the minimum wage i just want to start with a couple of words on context my colleagues have mentioned that this is a new movement of cities adopting

1:19:46city minimum wage laws i think it's really useful to understand how sudden this has been in before 2012 there were only five cities and counties in the u.s that had local minimum wage laws there are now 24 the number seems to grow every day and 11 of them are in california

1:20:05california really is the front line of of this movement um and in terms of the economic context there's uh sort of no surprise as as mayor you have indicated as to why this is happening a couple of statistics just from your county and the east bay in general the east bay has definitely recovered

1:20:27from the recession we're seeing a strong rebound in employment growth uh unemployment rates are down to pre-recession levels in contra costa county uh unemployment rate is back down to 4.7 percent um i think el cerritos down to even 4.3 percent so by some indicators it looks like you know the

1:20:45economy and local economies are you know have gotten back on track but as we know uh inequality has been rising um in contra costa county between 2007 and 2013 median annual earnings adjusted for inflation fell by 12 for those who work in the county um income inequality in the county has

1:21:09risen by 3.9 percent and that's a faster rate of increase than even san francisco or the us as a whole so that really is the context for your deliberations um on this important proposal and i really appreciate how seriously you're taking this this idea and doing the study session

1:21:28and really digging into some of the policy details so just briefly in terms of some of the things we've learned from other studies i would say if you look at the contra costa county proposal put forth by the campaign it's very similar to other to other proposals and recently passed

1:21:45laws in the region in terms of the size of the increase the timeline of the phase-in and several other metrics so it's definitely not an outlier it's very much in line with what other cities have done or are considering uh doing um and in that respect we expect that the

1:22:04effects uh will likely look similar to what we've seen in other cities most importantly is that lots of workers will benefit these are not minimalist minimum wage laws across the other cities typically between a quarter to a third even up to 38 percent of the workforce

1:22:22are predicted to receive a minimum wage increase that's a very substantial impact on the local economy and on working poverty similarly we typically find quite significant increases in earnings what that means for the average low-wage worker in their family typically an

1:22:40annual increase between two to four thousand dollars a year uh that's quite significant when you consider that the median earnings of these low-wage workers hover around fifteen to sixteen thousand dollars a year right this is a very major impact on these workers lives and their

1:22:55families lives we are consistently finding that a very small percentage of the impacted workers uh are teenagers the large majority are adults most of them have families the impact will be disproportionately benefit communities of color especially immigrant workers and

1:23:16a significant portion of impacted workers across the studies actually have some college experience or even a college degree so these are these are very widespread policies they benefit um all parts of the workforce and then in terms of where the impact is felt in terms of the local economy we

1:23:35consistently find that the two industries that are most impacted are uh restaurants and retail uh no surprise there are some other industries that will be impacted but those are the two that really both have the largest numbers of workers that will be impacted as well percentage-wise as a percent of

1:23:54the industry and that raises the very important question that city council members like yourselves are asking all across the state which is what will be the impact on businesses and employment of uh raising the minimum wage and here i just want to briefly zoom out a little bit to the broader set

1:24:13of economic research and lessons from that research the impact of minimum wage laws is i have heard the most researched topic in the economics profession with hundreds and actually more thousands of studies over the last four decades the fast past 15 to 20 years have really

1:24:35seen a new wave of research on the topic that consistently finds minimal to no negative employment impacts of raising the minimum wage this has been such a sea change in the economics profession that it's often called the new economics of the minimum wage and my colleague michael reich is

1:24:53one of the main researchers who has been responsible for that shift in how economists understand the impact a recent book that did a very exhaustive review of studies said that today the employment effects in the u.s of raising the minimum wage have been quote both vanishingly small and

1:25:12not statistic statistically significant even in the most generous uh test so if that is the conclusion of this body of research a common question is well how do firms actually adjust to increases in the minimum wage especially ones of the level that we're talking

1:25:30about the lesson from research especially in recent years is that firms adjust in a number of ways one thing that happens when you pay workers more is turnover goes down and productivity goes up and in industries such as restaurants this is not an insignificant benefit

1:25:48some restaurants have turnover as high as 75 percent a year right and it's costly to replace workers to retrain them etc estimates are that businesses recoup as much as 15 to 20 percent of that increased wage bill because of the reduced turnover and higher productivity

1:26:05and that what we've learned is at the remainder a lot of it is passed through to modest increases in prices largely in the restaurant uh sector and firms can do that because the minimum wage affects all firms so if one firm decides to raise prices modestly all the other firms it's not at a

1:26:26disadvantage because every other firm is also seeing uh the increase in wage costs so in the studies that we've conducted to date we estimate we predict modest price increases mainly in the restaurant sector ranging from half of a percent a year to about a percent a year

1:26:44over the total phase in the total increase might be two to four to six percent but again that spread over you know four or five years um other high impact industries like retail we actually estimate very small um price increases because labor costs is a much smaller

1:27:03share of costs for the retail sector and for the economy as a whole again we estimate on net very small modest price increases and then finally i just wanted to talk about the impact on local economies zooming out again from individual firms to what is the overall impact

1:27:23it will be very hard for us frankly to estimate effects for el cerrito versus another city because of data constraints but i did want to share with you one lesson from the study we did for los angeles which was very exhaustive in los angeles we found that to the

1:27:42extent that there is any reduction in employment growth from the higher minimum wage we expect that it will be more than offset by the increased consumption by low-wage workers and their families from the increased wages that they are earning so that is a very important

1:28:00sort of cost benefit calculation that a lot of city council members are interested in and we find out that in the end it comes out slightly in the positive column because a lot of that money that low-wage workers and their families are getting is being put back into the

1:28:15economy but there is a leakage issue a city such as los angeles and a lot of cities here in the bay area have a significant number of commuters so these are workers who will be earning the higher wages but then taking some of those higher wages back to where they live and spending them there so

1:28:38this stimulative effect ends up being diffused throughout the region because of commuters and what that means is that it makes a lot of sense to think about a regional strategy if lots of neighboring cities act together then no city will suffer from having some of its

1:28:56higher wages being taken outside of the city and in fact i think probably el cerrito is probably benefiting a little that you have probably some folks living here who are working in cities that have already raised their minimum wage and so as others have already said

1:29:12policy makers are therefore really interested becoming interested both for policy reasons but also economic reasons for doing a regional coordination the bay area is effectively doing that in los angeles if you're following the news other cities are starting to think about

1:29:28following suit following los angeles and like mariana said we are getting calls from other regions in the country who are also interested in that type of regional approach so let me stop there let me just say one note of sort of caution being a good researcher which is that a

1:29:49lot of what i've told you is about research on past minimum wage increases largely federal and state increases and those have typically been smaller than the types of increases that cities are considering now and the impact studies we're doing are prospective meaning they're making

1:30:08predictions about the future and there is an inherent level uncertainty about that so we typically strongly suggest that cities once they've passed a minimum wage law monitor that minimum wage law monitor how it's affecting their communities both in in terms of how it's

1:30:25benefiting workers but also how it's affecting businesses because past research is only so much of a guide at this point given that these policies are being much more innovative in terms of the levels that they are considering thank you so much for your time thank you so much

1:30:44our cleanup hitter is jennifer lynn deputy director of east bay alliance for sustainable economy and they were instrumental in recent increases in the city of oakland in the city of emeryville as well as other communities you're working in thank you mayor feedman again my name is

1:31:00jennifer lynn i'm with the east bay alliance for a sustainable economy and i want to thank mayor friedman the council and the staff for a lot of the prep work that you're doing on the minimum wage issue here um just a brief background the mission of our organization ebace is

1:31:12to create a just economy here in the east bay based on good jobs and healthy communities and we believe raising the minimum wage is critical to that ebace has helped pass eight living wage policies across the east bay over the past few years and as mayor friedman

1:31:25said we were a member of the lift-up coalition that helped pass the minimum wage both in oakland and the city of emeryville it was a coalition of residents workers people of faith and small businesses just to take a step back as folks have said two years ago two years ago the

1:31:40idea of a 15 minimum wage was absolutely unthinkable and today it's unstoppable el cerrito would be joining a movement of cities incl here in the east bay including oakland emeryville and a number of cities that are considering an increase to 15 an hour the question now is about how fast folks

1:31:58should get to fifteen dollars it's even gotten some national play the issue of income inequality as folks have talked about is being discussed among presidential candidates and becoming a litmus test for the can the presidential race in 2016.

1:32:11so this issue of how fast should we get to 15 an hour if you ask workers as you will probably not be surprised most will say today workers can't wait to pay the rent to put food on the table to make ends meet in our high cost bay area and really if we think about it if minimum wage

1:32:28workers those who make nine or ten dollars an hour have been able to make ends meet figure out how to pay the rent and put food on the table then surely businesses can figure out a way and are being very creative and figuring out ways to pay their workers a few extra dollars an

1:32:42hour mayor freeman also talked about how the california minimum wage of nine dollars an hour is not enough it will go up to ten dollars in january but even in at that rate it's barely twenty thousand dollars a year not enough to survive here in the bay area and so that's why

1:32:57many of us have taken the leadership at the city level including elected officials um to push for local minimum wage policies and it's having a real effect we are getting to a tipping point large corporations like mcdonald's and walmart are actually talking about

1:33:11raising their wage and that's a good start but it can't end there we know that many corporations that make billions or millions of dollars in in profits a year can afford to do better and 15 an hour should be the new floor for them too so i was asked to talk briefly about

1:33:26lessons learned in oakland and in emeryville and i'll just say it is there is a growing consensus that is happening here in the bay area and the east bay and even nationally oakland's minimum wage measure passed by a super majority 82 percent and poll after poll uh opinion polls

1:33:43across the region show brought widespread support from minimum wage policies more and more cities even small cities including the small city of emeryville is getting to 15 an hour faster cities like emeryville and hopefully soon-to-be el cerrito are showing that raising the minimum wage

1:34:01means taking care of workers and their families between oakland and emeryville over 55 000 workers were set to benefit from higher wages and paid sick days both of these policies had basically no exemptions under the belief that no worker should be left behind when raising the minimum

1:34:17wage these two campaigns were possible because of these local grassroots coalitions of workers residents small businesses and elected officials who are taking leadership taking it into our own hands to raise wages for workers so briefly just a few things that we

1:34:32learned in those two campaigns one that businesses and particularly small businesses are coming on board there's growing consensus among businesses that we need to raise the minimum wage we talked to many small businesses that said i know my workers are like family

1:34:46they're part of my growth and my expansion and the success of my business and i know that if i pay them a few extra dollars that's actually going to recirculate in the local pizza shop in the ice cream store et cetera we also found that small businesses are are becoming incredibly innovative in

1:35:01how they're figuring out how to pay their workers more testing out new pricing models creating collectives to share payroll and legal costs and advice about hr so the reality is is that in these cities the sky has not fallen in many places that have raised the minimum wage

1:35:18in emoryville there was also a recognition in these campaigns that big corporations and national chains could get to 15 an hour faster in emeryville corporations like ikea that made 3.7 billion dollars in profits in one year could afford to pay 15 16 an hour faster

1:35:36we know that the el cerrito shopping center plaza shopping center has some national retailers as well cvs bed bath and beyond barnes and nobles ross some of these big corporations can afford to pay more faster we also found that when the minimum wage passed in oakland and we went to talk to

1:35:52employers and businesses in emeryville some of them had already pat raised their wage to 12.25 because of the regional impacts when one large city passes it others businesses will just raise their wages we also found that some larger corporations in emeryville that had to pay 1444 more immediately

1:36:10were already there and so the lesson is that this is doable that that we are able to uh find a way to raise wages and the new policy would actually level the playing field so that businesses that are paying their weight workers a fair wage aren't going to be penalized for it

1:36:27a couple last thoughts fifteen dollars an hour should just be a floor it needs to go up beyond that fifteen dollars an hour is only a little over thirty one thousand dollars a year that means a worker making 15 an hour will still be spending 80 percent of their income to

1:36:42cover the median rent in contra costa county lastly minimum wage raising the minimum wage is absolutely critical but we can't stop there if a worker makes 15 an hour but has no paid sick days can't find affordable child care or isn't being given a full-time schedule

1:37:00then we're not done absolutely raising the minimum wage is an important and critical first step but we need to take into account the reality of low-wage workers and i just want to tell two quick stories of workers that we met in the process of the campaigns in oakland and emeryville and i'm sure

1:37:14you all may know similar stories guadalupe salazar is a worker at a mcdonald's in oakland guadalupe was out there pounding the pavement to gather signatures to put the minimum wage and paid sick day measure on the ballot after the minimum wage increase in oakland she was finally able to take her

1:37:30daughter out to ice cream when she asked for it she was finally able to fill her her gas with her car with gasoline this is the reality of the impact of raising the minimum wage or workers like shonda roberts who works at a kfc in oakland i went to church with shonda before the minimum wage and

1:37:47paid sick day measure passed in oakland where she talked about her experience she talked about how she got a paycheck of 32 dollars one time 32 dollars because she had to stay home to take care of herself and her sick daughter she struggled the next month to pay rent

1:38:02to pay bills no one should have to choose between going to work sick and not getting paid so in closing i really want to commend el cerrito for taking this very important first step in in talking about and continuing to study the minimum wage we're very excited with the leadership

1:38:18that is that is here we look forward to working with the city with a coalition with our partners in labor and community organizations to create a strong effective policy that keeps at its core the needs of low-wage workers thank you thank you very much to all the panelists

1:38:35now it's uh any questions from council members i i think i have one please um and i think it's for um ms moore uh with regards to uh phasing in and in emeryville they're they're they have two different scales one for small employers one for large employers in richmond they have

1:38:59uh they provide some exemptions for for for phasing things in um is there an economic rationale for for not for having different tracks for for either size of employer or uh you know non-profits and and such is there any economic basis for that phasing in i think i think you said that

1:39:24the county's policy is that there would be no exemption so i'm just curious why why some of these communities did do exemptions or dual track or so just curious if there's any economic rationale thank you that's a great question you know if there's a real advantage of being at the point on the

1:39:41wave that's cresting right now around minimum wage and that we get to look at dissect and learn from all those you know first guard who are sort of stumbling through the wilderness trying to figure it out so we actually had an intern in addition to the great work being done by uc

1:39:56berkeley and the experience of ebace we also had an intern look at all of the um our eight campaigns around the country and analyze them very deeply to look at exactly that question among others what we found is that the more complex you make the ordinance or the ballot

1:40:10measure the more confusing and more divisive it becomes and the harder to enforce so i can't emphasize enough that i think especially in you know our county is made up of small to mid-sized cities without a lot of resources so we really just want to keep it simple that practical level i think

1:40:26in terms of the other the second thing i want to say is um to draw a distinction between exemptions and then phasing differentials which i know is very technical language but you know exemptions would be there are some cities that have said youth or small businesses or non-profits

1:40:43are exempt entirely from the wage increase we strongly strongly recommend not doing that it creates a two-track economy it widens inequality it's very hard to enforce it's just not good policy is what our research has shown us by contrast there are the possibility if carefully

1:41:03thoughtfully done in a limited way you know we're open to looking at perhaps being having slightly different phasing in timelines and i'll give you a couple examples that we're looking at very deeply right now one is a child care workers for subsidized child care that are paid by

1:41:20the state and there's reimbursement rates that are capped and it's all very technical the point being that child care centers are working very hard to get those reimbursement rates from the state increased and it's going to take some time and meanwhile they are running

1:41:33on a very thin margin so we're working very closely with the child care community and may be open to talking about a slightly longer phase-in period in order to give them time to both adjust as a business an organization and also to continue advocating with our support and

1:41:50engagement at the state level so that's sort of the policy interaction that might lead us to consider a slower phase in another example is that there are non-profit organizations there are service providers that contract with the public sector and they're locked

1:42:06into a one or two year contract and so they may need a little bit more time to kind of go through their contracting process and have those contract dollars increase to account for the increase of cost of doing business a third segment is small businesses again that's a whole other discussion

1:42:20that we'd be happy to consult with you on and there's lots of pitfalls around how do you define a small business and why this one and not that so it's kind of a not a landmine area but an area to be very thoughtful about but those are some of the areas that our research has shown

1:42:35can benefit from some careful consideration and openness to phasing but again the more that you have different tracks or phasing it just becomes administratively very complex we heard from some of the other panel members uh about other cities and what they're experiencing or what they're

1:42:52moving forward with and some of them are hitting 15 in 2018 some are asking uh emeryville's actually from larger players is going higher earlier um why 15 and 2020 in contra costa well i think you look at a community like emoryville um and that i may you know come and

1:43:13speak to this more uh in more depth than i am can rather but they have a lot of large sort of well-heeled employers like bayer and so forth and the economic profiling contra costa is different i mean when you drive down san pablo avenue there's a lot of smaller businesses and certainly there's

1:43:30big box stores you know both throughout el cerrito and throughout the county so as as in most places it's a mixed economic landscape but we want to be sensitive to the more suburban sort of mom and pop feel of much of the business community in contra costa and not apply norms or expectations that

1:43:48might not be realistic or appropriate we really want to tailor it to what's on the ground here in the county make it workable thank you um i had a question too just to add to that i think remember that this is sort of a coalition effort knowing that as it broadens and engages obviously you're

1:44:10the decision makers in this city um and those dates could change it could be an earlier date um but we also had to arrive on one dollar amount so that the uc berkeley labor center could do a study and that doesn't mean that you know the date changes and you may decide maybe

1:44:28you can do it sooner and ultimately it's up to the political leaders to decide that but the idea was to try to come up with some common ground and as mariana said it's developing and it's turning out to be a norm but that doesn't mean it's cast in stone thank you

1:44:44so much council member abelson what's next and council member bridges um i wanted to ask about the question of enforcement um so i've had i have five kids they're adults more or less and so they've worked in all kinds of jobs in the service industry and i've heard all kinds of tales

1:45:15about how they're being paid and how they're not really getting the money they're supposed to be being paid that the law says they're supposed to be to be paid you know they're not allowed to report overtime hours but they're required to work and all kinds of stuff like

1:45:34that i've heard about that over the years and so the issue that comes to mind as a question mark for me is enforcement and um so i'm really interested if anyone's could address that issue at all and i think that's one of the issues um to be determined we can tell you what

1:45:53some other areas are doing we in fact uh the cities in santa clara county are looking at a regional minimum wage and what some are doing like the city of palo alto has on their agenda next week the passage of a minimum wage that would also designate the city of

1:46:12san jose to provide the administrative structure to enforce it because the city of san jose obviously a large city has is developing an infrastructure to enforce theirs so that's one possibility that's developed instead of having every city especially smaller cities duplicate

1:46:30their own um enforcement mechanism i mean cities like palo alto right very sort of um well-financed city they have a good good good property tax base they're still looking at maybe contracting with san jose to um and provide the enforcement i mean that's an open for discussion i

1:46:47think we're going to be looking at what's sort of the best practice and the best model that it makes it easy so you have one infrastructure in place i'm not sure if that was my question i think my question is how do you enforce it i mean how do you think there's going to

1:47:03be some slides coming up in susanna ayarla's presentation that specifically addressed that okay okay so we want to hold off i can do that can we get there but it's an excellent question okay i can do that council member bridges yeah i had a question i think i heard you say that um

1:47:20in 2012 there were 12 cities in the country that had minimum wage laws and now there's 24 is that what you said 20 how many 24 now 24 now in the whole country so how many cities um perhaps their city councils tried to put a ballot on and the measure failed do you know

1:47:45anything about that other one um as part of our research we looked at all the cities in california the only one we found that had failed was in eureka and the interesting thing is they the cautionary tale honestly is that they had a lot of exemptions not just phasing in but exemptions entirely

1:48:04for small business for non-profits and it just exploded that whole community it was very very bad policy making and it just went down in flames that's a pretty progressive community so and i think your advice was really good because as council or mayor pro tem um lyman

1:48:22uh said that you know on the little graph we got in one of our reports um the large businesses particularly those large businesses and the very successful emeryville are going very steeply up well before 2020.

1:48:39i don't know what's happened in richmond but it looks like they've kind of peaked out at 2018 at 13 and i don't know if if they're waiting to analyze as you as you so stated which also dovetailed the question i was going to ask is we have a little city with very strained resources

1:48:58and we have a little city that balanced its budget for two past years on 15 vacancies we don't have anyone to do that so to hear um supervisor joya say that maybe there's going to be a regional approach to enforcement would be something that would be very good i

1:49:17also like the the fact that you brought up some points about nonprofits and small businesses because that was a question i had and i think you probably answered it but who else would be exempt schools so um the unified public school districts um are not covered by city minimum wage

1:49:36laws because they're different they're different entities can i just talk very briefly about the enforcement question just to flesh it out a little bit more um and i should say that um the uc berkeley labor center is right now drafting a policy brief with the ucla labor center that should

1:49:53be out shortly and we're happy to share a draft of that with you where we review comprehensively how to move forward to a model of robust city state enforcement of minimum wage laws and the brief was um occasion precisely by this question of as you get beyond san francisco and

1:50:15la who do have the means to put up together their own agency how do you actually enforce these laws and i won't go into details but it's there are three prongs to strong enforcement and one of them is there have to be very strong enforcement tools in the laws themselves

1:50:29um and i'm happy to share with you i won't go into the gory list but actually all of the california city minimum wage laws at this point are converging on a very good model of enforcement tools that are included in virtually all of the laws so that's number one

1:50:45number two is having a very strong enforcement entity and so for cities that can afford to do so creating an actual local agency because state enforcement resources are are really strained and um they're doing the best they can but you know adding a whole bunch of new city minimum wage laws is

1:51:03going to really is going to really challenge them and and i'll talk about small cities in one second the third prong is the lesson over and over again from states and cities is that it's vital to have a community group involvement in enforcement some cities san francisco actually gives

1:51:25grants to local community groups to aid in educating workers and doing intake on cases in flagging for investigators which industries are high violation industries community groups have their relationships with workers that are built on relationships of trust for a

1:51:43lot of workers it's very hard and risky to come forward on their own when they're working with a community group it's you see much higher rates of workers coming forward um so we would record we would strongly recommend that even for a small city like el cerrito that you likely would

1:51:59not set up its own enforcement agency there's going to be a slide in the presentation that we've put together that sort of lays out a proposed model that we've been thinking about about what small cities can do the functions that they can do themselves that should be done here like

1:52:17educating employers about what the what the minimum wage is for example and collaborating with state enforcement agencies and then the question is who actually does the enforcement who does the actual cases one model as supervisor joya just said is for a city to contract with another

1:52:36city but we're actually very interested in working with folks in contra costa county to think about a county level enforcement entity that cities can jointly support and that could do county-wide enforcement i think this is an area where california is actually at the

1:52:54cutting edge of public policy in figuring out what are the models best models for enforcement for smaller cities and um i hope we can be useful to you as you in your deliberations and helping to think that through as well as ebace and a lot of the other folks here

1:53:09who are thinking about that yeah follow-on question really quickly on on this enforcement um and i am cheating i'm looking ahead in the slides and there is you know rely on state contract with other cities if we were to contract with another city it strikes me that it would be

1:53:29more convenient for enforcement if our ordinance matched their ordinance so i so you know we the enforcement component could potentially drive the ordinance that we we elect so so is that or can can if we hired contract with another city or contract with a regional entity are they capable of in

1:53:57fort doing enforcement of multiple different ordinances that that that's really what i'm hoping you'll say yeah i i i think they are and and i would not um drive the shape of your ordinance uh purely from the perspective of making it um in concordance with another city i'm not

1:54:17sure that's the right way to go about it i think the coalition has been very good in terms of looking at economic indicators and what makes sense for contra costa county there are you know many government agencies enforce multiple laws with different levels that said i

1:54:33would really echo what mariana said simplicity is so important here it's fine if the laws have different wage levels and that to some extent that's a little bit inevitable but complexity in these laws adding lots of exemptions and phases that is the thing that makes enforcement hard and i

1:54:50should say not just for the agency doing the enforcement it's very hard for workers to know what their rights are when you have these incredibly complex laws and in the end you don't know whether you're covered or not which category you fall into etc so i think as

1:55:06long as you keep your eye on the simplicity goal um i think you should be fine in terms of contracting with another city that may have a somewhat different wage level great thank you very much do the laws that are on the books have uh provisions to prevent retaliation

1:55:24against workers who um petition or demand that they be fairly compensated as per the law so there are existing retaliation protections in the oakland and emeryville laws and i believe in some of the other east bay cities as well but it would be our recommendation

1:55:42that the city pay close attention to this issue of retaliation and as council member abelson said there are many workers who may face these issues who never file a complaint either because of fear of um getting fired that their hours are getting cut etc and so we would really recommend there are many

1:55:58things both in the law as well as in the regulations that cities can do to help protect workers things like when workers file a complaint that that complaint is kept confidential when investigations happen it happens for all workers not just the one worker who filed complaints

1:56:12simple things that cities can insure to make sure that workers who take as folks said great risk in stepping up to make a complaint are protected thank you councilmember quinto no one mentioned sick days yet will that be uh talked about uh as well sick days yeah miss linden

1:56:35so i would i mean this is a pro starting the process for the council to deliberate on what components to include there has been at least in the oakland and emeryville policy is a combination of minimum wage and paid sick days with the recognition as i mentioned that

1:56:48one you know without the other is not enough but certainly cities can choose to figure out is it what an ordinance that covers minimum wage and another one that covers paid sick day or a combination thank you why don't we hear from ms ayarla with her slide presentation

1:57:05because we've already talked about at least half of it i think but it's a really good synthesis of what we've been hearing and pointing us in the right direction and then we'll hear from the public thank you mayor and council members my name is suzanne erla and i'm the

1:57:23assistant to the city manager and as you've heard from our speakers tonight i'm regarding this issue i will very briefly just touch on a couple other facts and then also highlight some areas where the city council has an opportunity to give feedback to staff as we're developing a

1:57:41draft ordinance to bring back to you in terms of what you would like to see in that draft ordinance for el cerrito so as supervisor joya mentioned the poverty rate in contra costa county is about 13 percent in the in the county and that families with two incomes working at

1:58:06minimum wage aren't able to meet the self-sufficiency standard of the cost of living in the bay area demographics for el cerrito household income actually mirror quite closely the county-wide statistics so as the labor center is able to complete their report on the impacts of increasing the minimum

1:58:28wage for contra costa county workers we'll be able to extrapolate that information and relate it back to the city of el cerrito for example in these charts you can see that about a third of el cerrito households are considered low income and that's very similar to the the county

1:58:44average as well um just in terms of what industries workers are in that are receiving the lowest wages um it's not surprising to know that um it's it's food service it's retail trade and other support services so these are just some examples of median earnings by folks in contra costa county

1:59:09and as you can see a lot of those are not at the rate that would be sufficient for a household to sustain themselves in the bay area as mariana and other folks have mentioned the coalition is looking at 15 an hour by 2020 as the goal for el cerrito and other communities in contra

1:59:31costa county because that's a realistic number that will help will meaningfully help workers and and also seems achievable for businesses in contra costa county um so just briefly wanted to uh also reiterate some things that have been mentioned there will be a statewide

1:59:51state minimum wage increase uh happening january 1st of next year bringing the wage up to ten dollars an hour and looking at nearby cities that have already enacted a local minimum wage um looking next year the numbers vary a bit um and we can the council should consider

2:00:10you know what rate makes sense for el cerrito and phasing it in on this next slide you can actually see out a couple of years when emeryville passed their ordinance they stepped it in over a number of years and after which will be increased annually based on the

2:00:31cip and actually richmond will do the same thing so on this chart you see that the numbers go through to 2018 and after that year it will be increased by the consumer price index for our area most cities that have a local minimum wage ordinance do after they achieve a certain goal in

2:00:54a future date then increase annually based on the cpi so that that number isn't static and that continues to go up as prices go up so one question that staff is interested in hearing the council's feedback on during the study session would be is the minimum wage level of 15 an hour

2:01:15in 2020 the desired goal for el cerrito or do you think that numbers should be a different number or the year goal year should be a different year another question that we're interested in hearing your feedback on is should the city include an index after that goal year such as 2020

2:01:35for that minimum wage to increase annually with the cpi some cities have provided slower phase-ins for small businesses or non-profit organizations so would the city council be interested in seeing that in a proposed ordinance for el cerrito and if so i would like to

2:01:56hear your guidance in terms of how would you define a small business or what type of nonprofit organization would you like to allow a different phase-in period for total compensation i wanted to mention that richmond has a unique clause in their ordinance that actually allows

2:02:19the employer to credit a portion of the minimum wage that they're supposed to pay their the workers could be actually money that's spent towards health care costs by the employer however that type of element in an ordinance may create significant number of enforcement

2:02:42challenges for el cerrito but it is a discussion point that we would like your guidance on in terms of enforcement actually annetta mentioned this briefly looking at cities that have local minimum wage ordinances there are a number of best practices that carry throughout those model ordinances and

2:03:04those include private right of action by a worker including damages and other penalties having retaliation protections that jenny mentioned and really defining the noticing postings and record keeping provisions that the employers are being held to those standards so

2:03:21those are all kind of best practice elements that we can get from other communities in terms of some other elements regarding enforcement since el cerrito is a small city with lean staffing what type of approach would the city council like us to try to draft for you in a proposed

2:03:43ordinance and then we'll go back and continue to evaluate options that the city has look at what some other cities are doing as well and then move forward from there with bringing back to your proposal this is actually also something that annetta has already mentioned it's a little hard to read for

2:04:02folks but basically there are some [Music] suggestions based on the research and data that the labor center has compiled in terms of what are elements that a local small city such as el cerrito could likely handle on their own and then some other elements such as the

2:04:23investigation and other elements that maybe we should look at contracting that out or joining with a regional enforcement agency or that type of thing so we need to do some more research in this area but we wanted to share that with you in terms of just overall context

2:04:44wage liens is an area that a number of counties across the country and i think maybe a few states have also enacted it would be one of the enforcement tools that might be available if the council would like to see if that's possible for el cerrito we can certainly do that research that's

2:05:02another area that we would like your input on and then i just wanted to go over with you after the study session tonight when council gives direction to staff we'll continue to do outreach we are planning to hold a number of community meetings to give a presentation to the public and

2:05:22businesses in in particular about this discussion tonight and where we're moving in the future to make sure that they're informed of this process and to hear their feedback and it's likely that we'll have a forum with the chamber of commerce and we'll certainly um you know

2:05:38be sure to publicize this process uh with community members and then we'll be looking at the model ordinance that will be able to be provided by the coalition and then tweaking that based on the information that you give us tonight and then we'll come back to the city council for your

2:05:55consideration in a future month thank you very much i i just want to take a couple questions out because i'm kind of eager to hear from the public and get their input uh council member abelson i want to turn to you and make sure that your question was addressed through this

2:06:14information or is there more that you um well since i the lights were off when i actually had this document so i could see it i can't actually tell from that but maybe i could uh just sort of state my concern which is that there are lots of ways to thwart uh enforcement

2:06:35and i'm so i'm concerned about i guess not any particular rule in asking this question but rather in the overall process and i guess one of the things i'm wondering about there is um i i first of all first of all make a statement i keep hearing said that the simpler it is

2:07:07the better it is in terms of working and that makes sense to me and so that's a comment i guess if you want to say that but the um and i'm concerned about the complexity of the way payment is made to workers for example if you're a waitress or not let's say not a waitress but a

2:07:31sales clerk you might have a part of it is an hourly thing or it might be commission based or things like that so i don't know how to relate all of that to 15 an hour so there are for example there are some examples from other cities that have a local minimum wage where they have

2:07:57spelled out clearly whether compensation provided through a commission or other thing that's not salary would be included towards the minimum wage or not so we could certainly look at the best practices that have been happening in california and around the nation

2:08:17and put some provisions in there so it's very clear to the employers and to the workers how that wage is uh formulated okay and i'm also concerned that the number of hours isn't somehow adjusted so that to lower the total because that's the thing i've heard about from my own

2:08:38personal advisors my kids over the years is that they simply they'll pay the rate they just adjust the hours or they do something like you work for 30 minutes every hour you know and the other 30 minutes you're off well that's really your prep time you know on and off

2:09:00or whatever so they're all these mechanisms that employers have a lot of times i think those are small employers and i'm just wondering how we deal with all of that in this kind of a system and my goal would be to create a system that works for the workers the the system

2:09:24if that is clearly stated that's kind of what i was wondering about in asking my question yeah no and i i i really um i really appreciate your concern deeply um i i was part of a team that did the first ever study of wage theft in the u.s coming up with representative data

2:09:46la chicago and new york and the rates of wage theft that we found among low low-wage workers were astounding and like you said they take many forms it's not just outright paying less than the minimum wage it's screwing around with hours it's it's forcing people to

2:10:01work off the clock it's not paying them full overtime and only paying them straight time it's paying workers in a range of different pay arrangements that sort of obscure what the real wages and this is i mean the good news is that agencies that know how to enforce

2:10:20minimum wage laws this is part of the work and they get expertise in particular industries about what the prevailing types of violations are that and and violations will look different in restaurants versus the garment sector versus retail versus grocery stores versus day labor

2:10:39that's part of the reason to have trained investigators who have done this for a long time who who know the particular sectors they're working with i should say the the research evidence to the extent that we have it does not show um a marked increase in violations when the

2:11:00minimum wage goes up um so if that's part of your concern um at least to date we have not seen that this was studied extensively when san francisco first raised its minimum wage in 2004 and people were really looking for evidence that violations went up and they weren't able to find it but we know

2:11:19that there is a chronic steady level of violations in in the labor market and i would just say this is um this is the reason why the best practice model that people are coming up with enforcement does not just rely on workers coming forward to make complaints that is sort of a very

2:11:36passive model of enforcement that we know doesn't work one because undocumented workers have to risk a lot if they're going to come forward and may choose not to but also workers may not be able to see you know what exactly is my final minimum wage after employers are

2:11:54using these various different mechanisms to try to not pay it the emerging model of effective enforcement is that agencies also do proactive enforcement they don't wait for workers to come in the door they go to the high violation industries and this is where community groups can be really useful in

2:12:13saying here are the trouble spots and they audit workplaces enforcement agencies have the right to go into workplaces and audit them and audit their books and speak to workers to see if they're being paid the minimum wage and it's precisely because of this complexity of the different strategies

2:12:31that exist in the low-wage labor market that we need that more proactive enforcement in addition to responding to complaints as they come in [Music] thank you right i know that this has been an issue in terms of sort of monkeying around with hours in terms of paying benefits to workers and under

2:12:51the affordable care act so i think your question is partly related to that also i've heard people say with the minimum wages increase then businesses will lay off workers but i don't think there's any businesses that have more workers than they need to accomplish the job

2:13:07they need to sustain their business so i don't really think that we'll see and we haven't according to the research layoffs of people because of the minimum wage no workers are um you know extraneous in today's economy really um why don't we one more question then we'll hear from

2:13:26yeah this hopefully is a quick question on wage liens is wage lien is it it's i guess it's two questions one is it brought by the city against the property owner or is it brought by individuals against the property owner and and the second question is has it been tested in court

2:13:44to answer your second question i'll have to research if it's been tested in court yet but in terms of the mechanism itself so if an employer violates the municipal code it would be an administrative citation and one of the penalties that could be uh assessed against the

2:14:04employer once they're found to be in violation could be uh this tool of putting a lien against the property for the wages that are due back to the worker so it is a tool for the municipality not for the individual worker and i'll have to do some more research to answer

2:14:20your second question great thank you okay let's hear from the public how many speakers have we got we have eight slips perfect and uh since this is a study session if some of the speakers have questions for the panelists please feel free to ask questions of them

2:14:36fortunately they're all going to be able to stick around till the end so let's roll the first three is cordell hindlard followed by kevin o'neill and kiev smith mayor friedman council members my name is carl hendler and i'm a resident of richmond i would like to thank the panel for for

2:14:57a lovely presentation very lovely so so one of my concerns is um and one of the first slides um the country classic family of four i was like un to under 23 000 i was like most most account exec most accounting executives make more money than uh than any than any other um

2:15:20private sector in the in in retail so i know that for a fact because i because i looked at all these uh these jobs um in san francisco and i was like advertising is is one of those um private sectors that make more than the than this and i was like sixty thousand dollar

2:15:39that's a that sounds reasonable i say yes sixty thousand dollars to live on buy and i was like most people i know make more than uh twice as much in a lifetime so i'm thinking that the city council should adopt this uh this ordinance so everything will be be wonderful so

2:15:59thank you to the panelists for everything so i'll be happy to answer any more questions from you thank you very much kevin o'neill followed by kiev smith hello everybody hi could i just ask if i'm the only person here uh to speak in opposition to this well we won't know until we hear from all the

2:16:28speakers take a poll of anybody here is anybody here to speak in opposition to this ordinance is anybody here to speak in opposition to the ordinance no okay so as you might imagine i'm feeling really uh in the minority and uh kind of outgunned by the panel but we'll be channeled so well so what

2:16:53i'm what i'm gonna ask is can i have a few more minutes than three to to speak or ask questions since i've i've already been out talked like how many i don't know but i mean i just have a few well just just get rolling and see how it goes all right okay so um as many of you here know my wife and

2:17:16i opened our coffee shop and gift shop 10 years ago you know cerrito um and when we did it to use the same phrase that john used is we we started it thinking globally and acting locally um sorry i don't get up in front of people very often and we we saw opening business as the um

2:17:40the best way to do that and just give me a minute um and when i think of the impact that raising the minimum wage would have on us it terrifies me and i just want to to be here and tell you why over the last 10 years we've we've employed a lot of high school students

2:18:09and they always start at minimum wage as you might imagine they come in with no skills and we we we love our employees we love all high school students and um when the minimum wage started going up to like nine and now it's ten we've been moving away from from giving merit

2:18:33based raises because why bother you guys are taking over the responsibility it's not merit-based anymore why should i give my employees a raise right now when they're going to get or not a dollar raise in a year and a dollar raise again another year a dollar raised

2:18:50again another year that's a 10 raise every year i've never had that kind of a raise in my life annually have any of you without maybe jumping a job to another job and that's where the starting job has a place in our society okay these kids learn valuable skills a

2:19:14lot of them have gone on to very prestigious universities and some state schools had come back to us and told us the value of learning to work hard and and to be customer focused and involved in the community and um i just think i just i just i think it's going to be really

2:19:44hard for us to stay in business i look at our numbers and i look at your numbers and you're saying that we're not making it at seventy two thousand dollars a year well i work at my last year's tax return and i'll share it with you with sixty thousand dollars combined for me and my wife

2:20:04we work sixty hours a week you wanna do the math on that that's ten dollars an hour i'm on the clock right now okay i'm on the clock right now for ten dollars an hour and i wouldn't do it if i didn't love what i do where i am doing it in the community that i'm in

2:20:26okay now i'm here really to tell you about the unintended consequences of your actions that you might not consider and might not show it up in a study done by these professionals okay for one if we have to raise the minimum wage for people the people in my in my employment

2:20:55who are making more the minimum wage because they've earned it and they work hard they would stay with us and their pay would go up accordingly to whatever like so they would go up percent right and we would literally have to do away with the teenagers every one of them

2:21:17and i i employ two near nearly full-time employees and i want them to be full-time but they have other things so they don't work full-time and i work i employ eight teenagers and the school thanks me every year to employ those kids because nobody else will i've heard from their friends starbucks

2:21:38will not hire teenagers they will find a way to discriminate against them because it is a hassle pete's will not hire teenagers you know how many times i've had a parent no not even the parents call the kid just calls me or texts me and says oh sorry god i got a family camping trip

2:21:58can't make it into work today i have to scramble i don't have an hr department okay i do all the work to make sure that people are there to work to work in my shop and provide to this community i do it for for these teenagers okay if you raise the minimum wage what you don't see

2:22:27is that i will have to raise prices there's no way around it but i don't have what bigger companies have and that's called the economies of scale they have an hr department they have a marketing department they have lawyers they have way more resources than me and i can tell you as an aside i speak

2:22:48for other small business owners i invited giovanni's owner pietro here he said flat out i won't make it i'm going to be dog tired on my couch tonight you may do be doing research and studies but you're not talking to me i'm too tired to talk to you it's not your fault

2:23:12okay i'm just exhausted and so are the other small business owners in this community now i did that aside and i forgot where i was going can you begin to wrap up your we we gave you about eight minutes so far i i really appreciate your testimony and uh glad to give you some extra time because

2:23:36as you said you are the only person so far in opposition so please kind of wrap up okay so talked about the teenagers and that okay oh yeah i was talking about larger corporations and how what will happen is other small businesses like me will close and you will end up with other

2:24:04corporations or like larger corporations can absorb this they could do it but do you want el cerrito to be nothing but targets that leave and other big corporations or do you want small businesses like mine here we're competing against those businesses those large companies

2:24:26and my wife's gift shop is competing against amazon she has to compete against a humongous like shipping center in nevada that's paying people very little and then like an amazon thing just showed up at 7 11 across the street from us is what kind of city do you want here

2:24:50do you want one that's just big box stores and corporations and your your gifts delivered in the mail or do you want a place where you can go and shop and know the people running it and see your kids or the the kids that that played with your kids be on the counter

2:25:10i don't think el cerrito being a small town with limited resources of only twenty thousand people can support small businesses at that minimum wage at fifteen dollars an hour especially not as fast as you guys are talking about doing it and i'm not against a fair wage but el

2:25:31cerrito doesn't need to be in the vanguard i'm sorry it doesn't and it would actually be to the advantage of el cerrito to sit back and watch what happens and see what na what possible fallout there might be these people are not going to tell you the the negatives it's not

2:25:48their job they're not paid to tell you the negative consequences i'm not here to tell you what they are too but i just want you to sit back and wait minimum wage is going up but we don't need to be in the vanguard here thank you thank you very much i appreciate your

2:26:10courage of speaking against the tide of everyone and your heartfelt comments thank you next is kiev smith followed by carla hansen and dan jameson good evening my name is kiev smith i'm here to speak in in regards to supporting and endorsing uh the increase in minimum

2:26:38wage here in el cerrito and the the main concern for me is just when it comes to individual health i think it's not healthy for a person to have to work two jobs just to live and pay rent and uh live a sustainable life and i just think it's it's logical to have affordable wages here in el cerrito

2:27:03there's places in el cerrito right now that i have friends who have never they've never been to because it's just like they can't afford to go like eating dine there because of the the wages that they make and uh also like the the cost of renting of cerritos pretty high too

2:27:24so i mean yes we do have a lot of corporate businesses here but you know i think about the future too and i wonder you know once you know i think as far as people wanting to live in el cerrito i think that once like bart expands down to san jose like will people want to

2:27:46really live here in el salvador because we don't really have a lot of conveniences outside of like public transportation conveniences so i think there's a lot of logic when it comes to increasing the minimum wage and so hopefully you'll consider this and i think it's

2:28:05the progressive thing to do as well just in regards to principle thank you thank you for your comments carla hansen followed by dan jameson good evening mayor council members city staff members of the public my name is carla hansen i'm the president of the el cerrito dem club and

2:28:27before i get started i just want to thank the mayor and the city staff for putting together this discussion this evening and the great group of panelists i think this is a really good discussion so far and it's just as a resident of el cerrito i think it's really encouraging to be in a room

2:28:42full of supportive folks and speaking with a governing body that is supportive of this issue so um thank you as i mentioned i'm the president of the el cerrito democratic club we're a membership organization with over 150 members in el cerrito and we provide a forum for residents

2:29:01to engage and be active on local and national issues our club is leading the effort in el cerrito in supporting a higher minimum wage we've we've been building support for this issue in the community for the last few months you've seen me you've seen members of our club

2:29:21come to you every time you've had a council meeting to update you on our progress and our club is really supportive of a minimum wage that's no less than the city of richmond's that would go into effect no later than january 1 2016. and i think without being preaching to the choir

2:29:40here i think these presentations show this evening that a higher minimum wage is the right thing to do it's absolutely needed and it benefits our community and i'm here to just reiterate the club's message and the club's support of this issue and urge you to take swift

2:29:57action in drafting an ordinance and enacting an ordinance so i think the sooner we raise the minimum wage the sooner our working families become more economically stable the sooner our businesses reduce their employee turnover and become more productive the sooner we

2:30:16we improve public safety i think that's a something that we haven't mentioned this evening and the sooner our residents and our workers have more money in their pockets to spend locally and give a boost to our local economy so with that we've had we have a lot of

2:30:31support from our boards and commissions we have a lot of support from community groups uh local business owners um and local activists on this issue and we are very excited that the city is deciding to move on this and we want to see a local minimum wage increased january 1. so

2:30:52i'm trying to start a hashtag a higher rate can't wait it hasn't gone on yet but i think maybe speaking on television might work but yeah let's move on this issue thank you so much for for this opportunity and for this discussion thanks thank you very much dan jameson followed by reverend woodson

2:31:09and nicholas arzio good evening honorable mayor city council of el cerrito my name is dan jameson on behalf of the service employees international union local 1021 where i serve as president of the contra costa rank and file chapter were basically the front line folks on the

2:31:30social services safety net we're supporting minimum wages uh throughout the bay area because they are the single best engine of shared prosperity we can possibly bring to the table right now in fact it is so powerful it actually can make government intervention elsewhere

2:31:49in the economy totally unnecessary um i've brought a few points that we've derived from our own research and actually it's complemented by some of the same resources from the panel here especially from the uc berkeley labor center we were suggesting an immediate raise to

2:32:0512 25 an hour which we took from oakland we were looking at a minimum wage 15 by 2018 and we do want to add in um those sick days you know somewhere on the the order of you know five to nine uh and we want this everybody in nobody out no exemptions and you know i can give

2:32:25you an example because we've been hearing folks talk about the richmond case study we recently had a problem in richmond where our low-income families were devastated by the surge in the rental markets that ultimately started a chain of events that brought the um

2:32:42one of the strongest rent control ordinances to richmond which is a pretty huge endeavor and a pretty huge intervention but having smart policies like minimum wages that allow your workers to live and work in the community spend their dollars here makes that kind of intervention uh completely

2:32:57unnecessary and of course as you've heard before having a simple ordinance is much easier to enforce especially if you find ways to bring in non-profit advocates or legal aid that can actually recover their costs rather than having to rely on an administrative apparatus

2:33:15so again we support those issues in this minimum wage ordinance and we look forward to continuing to work with you have a great evening thank you very much good evening city council members mr mayor uh it's late i don't know whether i'll read my notes well but i'm reverend b k

2:33:38woodson senior i've lived in el cerrito for about 23 years i love it here i am a member of the faith alliance for moral economy and i'm also the principal clergy organizer for ebace and connected with pastors all over the county i i do want to say that from my holy book it starts with moses

2:34:02having negotiations with pharaoh over fair wages and then there's a another break where jeroboam has another conversation about wages so i just want to say that conversations about wages are not new um uh our our our point is just very simple and it is this that people who work for

2:34:25a living must be able to live off their work that's that's all that's all we're really arguing for that if you work here you should be able to live here and unfortunately we live in a world where that's upside down we live in a world where people who make more money

2:34:44than me by sleeping when they're sleep people who make money off their money doing nothing are seen as as the paragon of the right worker and people who slave and work uh make coffee or or make laws uh have to you know live 30 40 miles away from their work i want to just

2:35:06acknowledge and thank supervisor john joyah who this who today stood against the current stood against the tide and had a crucial vote at their board meeting so i want to ask you to also do the hard thing and not just go with the current i want to push you so you're

2:35:27talking about 15 000 in uh 2020. uh your staff has already showed you that 15 right now wouldn't uh would not you know make it affordable you wouldn't be able to live in el surio at 15 so 15 an hour at 2 18 at least maybe even sooner i would um push and advocate for

2:35:51and my last two words are this workers will spend the money here and make the economy move i also want to say it's not just about a number it's about life and so sick paid sick days are very very important uh tip protection is also very very important and uh to my small business

2:36:15uh member uh i feel feel this pain and i do understand and i do believe that there are solutions and but that no one should depend no business model should depend on the exploitation of anyone to survive and i think that is not how we have to do we don't have to do it and there are better

2:36:37ways so please push the minimum wage up thank you very much thank you nicholas arzio followed by helen dickey good evening mayor council my name is nicholas arzio i'm the executive vice president of the el cerrito democratic club i'd like to make three simple points the

2:37:11first is that our club passed a resolution urging council to do a couple of things the first point is that we we urge them to pass a local minimum wage ordinance with wage rates and annual increases no longer no lower than those set forth in richmond and the second thing that we asked for

2:37:32is that this uh local minimum wage be enacted by january 1st 2016.

2:37:41and uh what that means is that going back in just a minute to the first thing we were silent on all other subjects we decided that the staff could best determine other other topics like exemptions or no exemptions we were silent on that subject uh so the third thing is uh

2:38:02that we asked for a local a local ordinance that covers el cerrito and while i assume that a lot of our club members would also support the idea of a county-wide ordinance we didn't ask for it we asked for a local ordinance that's all i have to say thank you thank you very much

2:38:23helen dickey my name is helen dickey i'm um the things that i was going to say this evening have been covered so eloquently by other people that i'm not going to go into my speech i'm going to say thank you for taking up this issue it's dear to my heart and i've

2:38:59i've learned so much this evening and i've been very thankful to be here thank you for doing it thank you very much i have no other requests okay suzanne irla can you step back to the podium and sort of take us through those points where you would like some guidance from

2:39:20the council certainly and first before you do i want to thank all the speakers and i realized it's late and everybody's stuck around for a long time and i really appreciate that and hearing all the perspectives and every step of the way as we go forward to an ordinance i think we need

2:39:40your input so one of the first areas where we would like your input is um basically to understand does the rate of 15 an hour by 2020 make sense for el cerrito or would you like staff to research a different rate be that either the the dollar per hour number or the year

2:40:11at which that number is reached thoughts comments questions please council member able i would assume that the minimum wage that's currently in place at the federal level which is i think the minimum minimum wage right one can say that is well is projected at some level to go up

2:40:36so i don't know what if one did nothing in 2020 what would the minimum rate be so it would be interesting to see the comparison and then also see if not only with if it were 15 if it were say 18 uh or some other number around you know just sort of seeing what the difference is

2:41:05in the amount of money available to the employee um i guess what the cost would be but i'm mostly interested in the um impact that it would have for a an employee who worked let's say okay um i think that's all right go ahead and then council member lyman has a follow-up like it's

2:41:43actually miss bernard if you could come to the podium i got a question in light of mr o'neill's testimony um and and something that's in the study that that you prepared for oakland which considered a 36 minimum wage increase uh up to the 12 25 level and and there's a statement in here that

2:42:04previous studies found the minimum wage increases have little negative impact on employment that certainly is not the testimony we heard tonight from mr o'neill so i'm just curious if you know if you have some thoughts about about the this that might affect the

2:42:19rate upon which we whether it's 2018 or 2020.

2:42:23so i'm just curious if you would be willing to speak to that topic about small businesses in particular um about your statement that previous studies found the minimum wage increases have little negative impact on employment and how it how mr o'neill's testimony differs from that blanket

2:42:41statement yeah i mean i'm not able obviously to and i just want to acknowledge and and think is he still here oh there you are mr o'neill for um for sharing um uh the story of your particular firm and i obviously don't know the the details of the firm in your pace structure etc um what i would say

2:43:02is that uh the research literature that i referenced um largely looks at the restaurant industry in particular for effects um most of the research uh and that's because that is where most of the impact will be felt or felt most deeply and so uh the findings that that i've

2:43:22summarized are actually largely about the restaurant industry some of the other studies look at teenagers as another high impact sector um and so i i can only re reiterate that those are the findings there was a very good study done of san francisco's first minimum wage

2:43:41law in 2004 where the researchers actually surveyed restaurants before and after the increase and focused just on that sector and found no employment effects and in fact the industry grew somewhat faster in san francisco than in surrounding counties that did not have the minimum wage

2:44:02increase so i'm unable to sort of elucidate you know obviously these are net impacts and behind those net aggregate impacts obviously are lots of different firms with different stories about how they've adjusted but again i would i would reiterate that um the the modest price

2:44:22increases does appear to be one of the main channels by which restaurants are able to adapt um uh at least from the research evidence great so the third the report that we were provided in our our packet attachment to it's the impact of oakland's proposed city minimum wage

2:44:40law prospective study but deals with a 36 percent change essentially from the nine dollars the state level to a local level of 12 25 and again there may be specifics such as mr o'neill's business that may not fit that or but but indeed well i just want to make clear the

2:45:04oakland study is a prospective study right so we weren't able to actually assess the impact of oakland's right it only went into effect in march or something right right this is prior to it going right exactly but in essence the data would suggest that anything

2:45:22less than that or even that much would theoretically support your findings would support that type of a raise that's right and i would also say you know oakland did it in one step and you're um considering uh a slower phase in which would you know further argue that um um you know you are in

2:45:41you are targeting um what might be judged an achievable rate but i would say i feel uncomfortable commenting on the specific proposal until we finished our report we will be looking at a number of metrics of the proposal that the coalition has put out to try to get at economic feasibility um

2:46:05and how that proposal compares to others so i hope i'm not punting too much but i'd like to wait until we finish the study thank you um i would agree that we should set a goal of 15 an hour by 2020 i think politically we could go faster in el cerrito but i don't think

2:46:30neighboring communities in the county would so if we're looking for consistency i think this is good place to start maybe when we're preparing an ordinance we could look at 15 an hour by 2018 just as a comparison to see if that would be something that we could support

2:46:53okay the other thing yeah i want to echo that i mean along with councilmember abelson requesting for different scenarios to be evaluated i would certainly would like to have us evaluate as you just suggested a 15 dollar by 2018 as well as a 15 by 2020.

2:47:12that's my appreciation i'd probably be a little more supportive of 15 by 2020 because i think it probably is important for us to look at and see how this is affecting business um i mean our research is telling us otherwise but i do think that um comparing el cerrito to

2:47:30oakland isn't really it's really apples and oranges i think that there's a bigger economy that exists in oakland um you know every time i go to a new restaurant it seems to be in oakland um you know the trickle-down that's happened with rents and and also the economy is

2:47:50boomed a little bit more in oakland than it certainly has here i mean we've had some major businesses leave and i think it's even our big boxes are leaving you know we've lost osh we lost the guitar center we lost the the the party store where i used to buy all my kids balloons so

2:48:07i don't think we can compare ourselves to oakland i did but in richmond not elsa oh that's true but anyway it's still it's still on our avenue we still think it's part of us and you are right and i i stand corrected um so i think i'd be a little more um tuned in to

2:48:25take it slowly and kind of follow probably what richmond has done and that being said i believe on the chart that we received the state is going to go up to 10 starting on january 1st correct and then i had a question if i may to supervisor joya and that is for cities who have not yet in the

2:48:48county agendized any kind of comments about this how are how are the how is the county going to approach them and can we all be on board besides just el cerrito in richmond no good good question remember this is sort of a coalition of folks and it's building as we

2:49:07proceed and we're talking to other council members from other cities so clearly every city is going to have a different dynamic and i'll be honest i'm sure some cities are going to be less receptive and it's going to really take getting allies in those cities including

2:49:26um whether it's faith faith coalitions um community organizations labor organizations so you are the first obviously richmond's already passed one but this of this new model ordinance regional approach you're the first um and what you do could be helpful so um i'm not promising everybody's

2:49:45approaching us at the same time but i think that's the hard work that that will that it will take and um and getting council members to support it within many of the other cities um so councilman kington comments uh i echo what uh uh mayor tem lyman mentioned and that is

2:50:09going forward to the 15 rate to 2018 looking at 2019 so i believe that as a city uh and our medium income is almost compares to uh uh orenda and lafayette and i believe that uh uh we can do this and uh and i hope uh we can look and make sure that uh uh and study what uh small businesses uh have

2:50:43to go through when and what they're dealing with and and uh and it would be good to to research that more okay i think you have enough direction on that one let's move to the next one thanks one of the best practices from other ordinances would be to include an

2:51:08index uh whereby after the goal rate is set that the minimum wage would increase based on cpi each year is that something that the city council would like us would like staff to include in the draft ordinance yes i think that's an easy one yes um so as as you've heard tonight

2:51:32there have been other communities that have set different rates during the phase-in period or set different time frames for small businesses or non-profits there are a few communities that have provided exceptions for certain types of businesses would the council be interested in staff

2:51:52researching any of those types of elements well i think that we heard a little bit tonight that from miss bernhardt that the more complicated we make this the um the worse it could end up being so i guess the questions about phasing in for small versus large nonprofits and even

2:52:15maybe the wage liens you want to make another comment about that but i'm thinking that perhaps we may not want to be doing that and in phasing in yeah it simple as simple as certainly attractive uh however we heard from miss moore who who was very clear that exemptions that are

2:52:36bad policy uh but then then miss moore you went on to say that certain businesses such as daycares and public contracts and small businesses have real reasons why there potentially shouldn't be on that leap up to 12 25 or whatever and then a flatter curve that their their curve

2:53:00potentially would be steeper similar to emeryville's um small businesses so i i i would i think we benefit from understanding what businesses are out there that potentially might need a a phase in um but i'm simple is better i'm i'm i'm i can be persuaded but i we need to have

2:53:27the facts to to have the persuasion i'm not i'm not i'm not going to just jump to jump to do small businesses without more facts a you know a phase in without more facts so i'm i'm with you i have a question um perhaps from the researchers um if we were going to consider some sort

2:53:51of proposal for small businesses is it based on i mean we could call small businesses employees less than 10 people but we could also say it's people that are netting less than 40 000 a year i mean is it has it ever been identified in that particular way basically top top gross revenue yes top

2:54:13gross revenue of less than a quarter million as opposed to the number of employees probably a lot less than that but um and suzanne i think you you mentioned this so but um the the um we summarize is actually in depth in in an extensive policy section of the la report which i

2:54:34would um which uh you know i've shared with suzanne and if if you guys want to read through it we go through in gory detail each and every one of these policy decision points and under small businesses there really is no consensus on what is the right cut off um and it's all over the map and we

2:54:54searched high and low and there really is no consensus so that is part of the challenge in this is that you are drawing a line somewhere and there's there's literally no guidance on it if i could just offer um this as you're in consideration on this there have been

2:55:14efforts by other cities to figure out how to support small businesses and nonprofits and other entities to get to the wage that is set and there are for example ways where we can connect uh in terms of resources small businesses that have raised the wage in other cities talk

2:55:31about how they have adjusted their operations give advice to other businesses there's a lot of other ways to be able to support the communities that we want to make sure have the resources and the support to get to the wage i think that's a good point and i think we need to engage our economic

2:55:47development commission in that conversation because you know my prejudice is for home-grown small businesses as opposed to chains or franchises and i know some franchise owners or don't have a particularly good deal from the main corporation which is making billions

2:56:06but i still have less sympathy for them than i do for a small business like mr o'neill's who is totally integrated with our community and is really a great corporate citizen an example of a homegrown business so i think we should think about promoting our homegrown businesses and developing the

2:56:29uniqueness of el cerrito and of finding ways to promote them as opposed to just you know having more and more more homogeneity from franchise and big box businesses which dominate the market and as was very um aptly put by mr o'neal it's very tough for a home-grown small business to

2:56:53compete so i think we need to find other ways to help those businesses to thrive in our community uh anything else on this issue so that's a guidance where you want some yeah consideration of phase-ins slower facings not exemptions but slower facing i just wanted to mention an example that

2:57:19i think i just want to mention the example really um and then it actually goes back to what i understand obamacare does it says that if you're a small business under a certain size that um you don't have to be a part of um the program what that does to my daughter's boyfriend is mean he

2:57:44has no health insurance okay is that right that's the ques do you see where that no no that that's where that wasn't calling for a phase and i was just calling no no what i'm saying is that when we differentiate um something that has nothing to do with the employee

2:58:04like the number of employees is an example in my example right of that to say that they don't have health care um then you can sort of take that any direction you want and have it apply to any other feature uh including wage right or anything else and um they're really

2:58:28in thinking about it that way because i to me not having health care is just really bottom of the barrel you know it's scary bottom of the barrel and um so i don't like the discussion going to the place where we say okay so these people don't have health care you know is that

2:58:49that doesn't there's nothing to me that makes that sound good um and if we do that but it's some other topic i guess that's a place i don't want to be going i don't want to take away people's ability to survive and by that i mean also the employee i know my daughter my youngest daughter is just

2:59:14turned 25 she graduated from a uc school as did all of her friends pretty much none of them could get jobs okay they're they're the ones look out looking for these um jobs that pay nothing right now and they can't even find those most of the time so you know i've seen what happens to them

2:59:38they have no any things and um so how do they ever become part of society i think personally they're actually the lost generation they're called millennia millennials and um it's very scary and i think we need to not think of them as not being real they are real

3:00:02and seniors i guess are another group they're kind of in that category they're not getting to retire they're working in these same you know i've i hear all kinds of stories about seniors working in places like mcdonald's for example so the idea that they don't need money to

3:00:20survive somehow is i think a big fallacy and i just wanted to say that and okay so mayor i'm sorry i guess i put words in your mouth what when you ask for promoting homegrown businesses my request was for us to at least find out what categories might be uh eligible for a phase in

3:00:42um but are you supporting a phase-in for certain types of businesses um no no i want to see consistent policy and for all employers okay but i think that there are real concerns of small businesses that we need to address in other ways and certainly uh council member abelson

3:01:03um i agree with your comments and that i think every human being deserves um health care and deserves to have a living wage and to be fairly compensated work that contributes to the profits of a business and but i also don't believe that all that responsibility should fall

3:01:23on the business i think the government should provide health care to everyone in a universal system and that we shouldn't have a struggling small business have to be responsible for what should be a societal responsibility yeah i mentioned a couple things uh personally i do not believe in

3:01:43any exemptions and i don't believe in uh having people under 21 like 18 19 20 to make less um because they're under 21 and in my opinion you know teenagers when i was a teenager i i made minimum wage at ortmans and and i believe seniors got the same thing so if not more so

3:02:11i don't want to pick young people against seniors against minorities i i don't believe in any type of exemption at all thank you do you have enough direction on this one yes i believe so all right thank you um this slide actually uh references richmond's unique clause about a

3:02:35lawyer to attribute a portion of the minimum wage instead of through a salary but instead towards medical benefits i mean is that something that the council would like staff to look into um i'm gonna i'm gonna say no but i want to use this slide to bring up um the

3:02:52paid health care paid sick leave topic that ms lynn and pastor woodson both mentioned it it's not something i see a slide about but i know san francisco put something in place some time ago i believe it's on your slot one of your slides as well as oakland obviously

3:03:13marks having some form of paid sick leave so i certainly would like to understand what what that would do to the ordinance if that was an option we elected to put in yeah i agree i'd like to see when staff comes back that we have that as an option for our consideration does

3:03:33everybody agree paid sick days so the answer is no to total compensation no now the second question is do we want staff to come back with paid sick leave as something the ordinance may or may not cover or a separate ordinance i don't know the answer but but do we want paid sick leave to be

3:04:01something we consider and i'm saying i would like to at least know about it and understand what it what it does and what the ordinance you know what enforcement is for that and uh you know how san francisco did it how oakland's doing it so that we it's something that we potentially can

3:04:18consider in the ordinance if i may your honor karen hinkis assistant city manager i would like to make sure that the council is aware that the state law went into effect uh july 1st of this year that requires that workers in california that work 30 or more days within a year from the

3:04:34beginning of employment is entitled to at least 24 hours per year of sick leave we've been employed in the city it's it's implemented statewide so i would ask that if that were the case that we wanted to include this as a provision would it be in addition to the sick

3:04:49leave that is already mandated by the state of california that just went into effect yeah it's 24 for every 30 days worked yes if there are certain minimum hours of full-time or something like that i can't remember what the minimum hours was it 36 30 uh 48 24 hours or three pages

3:05:08three days of paid leave per 30.

3:05:12it's 30 hours for at 30 hours 30 days yes yes but i'm looking this up quickly no i understand but at what work level if they're part-time that's anyone okay yes so for example now for the city we have implemented that for all of our part-time and seasonal workers who might

3:05:32who never did receive sick leave benefits prior to july 1st anyone that has a sick leave that has already been accrued for a contract or a bargaining agreement or that has been implemented over time would already be higher accrual than the minimum but what i would like to see

3:05:51is that you do some research on this but i don't want it to slow down voting on the minimum wage and if your research shows it's pretty complicated given the new state law and maybe we should wait i'm fine with that as long as it doesn't slow us down thank you very great yeah

3:06:10thank you um in terms of enforcement um i just wanted to make sure that there was consensus among the council that we should include all of the best practices that are standard from all the model cities in particular these bullet points shown here on the slide i can read them if you're having

3:06:29trouble seeing them we've got them why is it that screen up there it looks like it's red or something you know what am i saying that's why it wasn't on yeah later in the presentation there was uh there was that very detailed uh slide and in that in that slide there's in the

3:06:52box number number two the green box issue citation and collect administration fees so i'm just curious where that is and also you also talked about the wage liens so i'm curious why those aren't on the list that you have so if you're going to go back to your list so the list um i assume are best

3:07:13practices that you probably do want to have included um i think they're pretty standard and would make the ordinance um very difficult to enforce and not be so meaningful if they weren't included actually of course a method of investigating and adjudicating complaints

3:07:34should be in that area as well the question of how the city of el cerrito in particular may carry that out has been a question so i think that's why it's separated from whoops the wrong way um from these four bullet points so if there is discussion um about any

3:07:53of these it would be great to hear your input but the other slides indicate areas that have been more of a decision point for other elected officials okay great thank you so do we all agree on these forum bullet points yeah yes yes we do um so in terms of the approach of how

3:08:15the city should carry out the enforcement activities as you just mentioned in terms of how would a complaint be investigated who would carry that out that type of thing is something that staff would like to spend more time on looking at an answer that would be relevant for el cerrito but would also

3:08:34like to hear your input on on what your your thoughts are what you would like to see uh happening in el cerrito um so going to that list where you have option one and option two right i'm assuming that that the columns are two different scenarios the columns are two different actions

3:08:56i know there's a lot on that slide but so the larger box on the left is the example from the labor center that it's likely that a small city could carry out the action shown on the left but that it might be worth looking at how a smaller city might carry out the bullets indicated in

3:09:21the box on the right and might we consider outsourcing that type of work or is there another city that we can partner with or is there a regional approach available to carry out those other more um technical elements right so everything every all the things that are next to

3:09:44what both the purple box and the green box is the scope of work that the ordinance would trigger and all the orange boxes are who might carry out those responsibilities and this is one sample of how it could be approached for a small city um larger cities like los angeles and

3:10:04san jose um would do it all do both of those all together and which so going back to your previous slide which was staff to will evaluate staffing needs you want to know are we staffing for all of that scope or just a portion of that scope we'd love to hear input from the council

3:10:27on what you would like us to be researching and looking at so that we can come back to you with a proposal so if the council has a sense based on the information you've heard tonight in terms of what you think we should be looking for we will try to develop something that's realistic for el

3:10:44cerrito that's in that direction um i think it should be in cooperation with other cities or the county the county if it does enact the ordinance very close to ours that would obviously be a good place because they have the whole department of social services employment

3:11:07division that would be a logical home we have no logical home to do this there's the edd employment development division of the state they have many people not necessarily always the most effective so i think we need to look at the options and if we don't have it figured

3:11:28out when the ordinance is passed i think we need to write the language of the ordinance with the placeholder to allow us to uh utilize one of these regional entities that probably won't be established when we pass our ordinance does that make sense yeah going to the next slide i would suggest

3:11:48that we in following up on your words mayor that we rely on as as as much as we can rely on external support for as much of this scope even if there's some things in the purple box number one if there are certain things in there that that we can outsource to another entity we

3:12:07should be uh considering that right and i i think some of the comments that were made before about the importance of community organizations shouldn't be overlooked that in terms of educating employees and employers about the new law that that would be natural and we can look to the

3:12:25philanthropic community to fund some of that work by community organizations because the city certainly doesn't have that budgeted so i think we should look creatively at how at least for the first two or three years that we intensively educate on this and hopefully once people

3:12:46understand it and it's rolling and we're in the phase with the consumer price index that we won't have as great a need for intensive education we'll still need ongoing education any other thoughts okay uh is there any interest on the council for staff to look into

3:13:11trying to include uh wage liens against the property of the employer as part of the ordinance in in some cases they're the they're not the i mean it would be the property they may not even have property because they're just a tenant so i'm not certain that this is going to be a

3:13:32a tool that we can use across the board although i see miss bernard putting her hand up yeah please ms byrne um wanted to mention briefly it's not just property it can also be um um other um other types of property so if um tenant improvements it could go against nasa

3:13:53like products like you know stuff on the shelves so it so it's a it's a it it's a it's similar to a mechanics lien then that's exactly right that's what these ordinances were inspired by okay so so it goes against the business not the property per se do the oakland and

3:14:11emeryville ordinance have that and richmond doesn't so the response was san francisco and la do that we'd we can look into it if it's something you want to look into and see if it would be um something that fits i think that consensus is um it's a level of complexity and

3:14:35enforcement that we don't really want to tackle right now maybe down the road if the county gets on board and can help with that if if we outsource the enforcement do we need to have this in place at the time of the of the ordinance or is this something that can be added to

3:14:58the ordinance later um it's my experience with um some other situations in which cities have entered into cooperative relationships for the enforcement of of significantly overlapping ordinances that is that they will make amendments at the time that they enter into the agreement so

3:15:16that they so that the enforcement officers are able to to enforce them uniformly yep look let's let's let's let's let the enforcer figure this out yeah thanks for that contribution that's good okay what else we got um is there any other guidance that the council would like to share or anything

3:15:37in particular they would like to see brought back in a proposed ordinance so i think one group that i'd like to see at it would be the economic development committee certainly and actually um staff is planning to make a presentation at the next economic development committee

3:15:54meeting as well as an upcoming human relations committee meeting and the chamber of commerce and city will hold an outreach meeting as i mentioned so we will certainly uh be working with the edc and hopefully outreaching to local businesses both through them and

3:16:11directly to get more uh feedback i'd like to build on something mayor that you brought up which is the promote homegrown businesses so if there is uh you have business groups out there if there is such a thing as a if we can form a business group that is homegrown businesses el cerrito

3:16:30pride businesses unique to el cerrito i'm thinking of elevation 66 mr o'neill's business things like that potentially we we should reach out to that subset to find out what their plans are yeah a homegrown do you mean one of a kind uh one of a kind uh started in el cerrito i

3:16:53mean yeah you might be thinking of nations right i mean i'm not talking about nations no i'm not thinking about nations but it you know for example one of a kind um is not um nations would not fall under that no not at all but but if they started here and they have one other

3:17:11storefront i wouldn't necessarily want to penalize them for that i so i if they've grown a little bit so they have a storefront in richmond i'm not i wouldn't want to necessarily penalize them but yes that's the idea one of a kind it's not i mean home i don't know

3:17:26what homegrown means that's the reaction to that term i think stuff is a picture of the type of people that we want you to reach out to the people who are embedded in our in our community and and not corporations but uh mom-and-pop stores home-grown stores sure

3:17:51okay um i think our work is done right it's been a really wonderful panel thank you so much to our panelists you really did a great job of educating all of us here tonight and those listening at home and it's not just your words tonight but the research that you've contributed and the work that

3:18:17suzanne and and karen pinkos and city manager have done on this issue i think we're well on our way to being able to come forward and pass an ordinance in a timely manner and i look forward to the next time we get together to discuss this and thanks everyone for staying up

3:18:36a little bit late for this really important issue good night oh sorry there it is this is another there is another item but it is council local and regional liaison assignment reports no all right so i didn't prematurely adjourn we are adjourned you