Regular City Council Meeting March 20, 2018

0:01:24oh see i councilmember abelson here councilmember fedele here councilmember lyman president vice mayor pardue okamoto present and mayor quinto thank you pledge of allegiance to the flag with council member abelson please join me in the pledge of allegiance or a moment of silence

0:01:56i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you okay any council staff communications i have a few okay um gone to a number of different things

0:02:25recently uh the latest one was today the chamber at the chamber of commerce there was a really interesting presentation [Music] i thought on [Music] let me get the thing out maybe it's not right here anyway it was on the latest irs rules and um it was done by um

0:02:54a former member of the chamber and a a former president of the chamber and a former pr and the current or former i'm not sure president of rotary and her name is blanking on her last name it will come to me in a few minutes i didn't bring the materials i thought i

0:03:18had anyway she um did a really interesting presentation but the irs part of it that was most interesting uh showed the new rules and the the difference between um how things are now and um how they she thinks they they will be and so i will um there's a handout that she gave us and i

0:03:43thought i would give it to cheryl if if you would please and to send out in our next packet you're bad thank you and um then um i went to the crime prevention committee and they had a quorum i had enough people to have a meeting but they really desperately need more people

0:04:09and the other one i noticed on the handout that we got in our packet that really needs it even more is the urban forest committee which is a really interesting committee to be on i'm not sure who's on it right now but i have been liaison liaison to it you're the liaison but i

0:04:32know i thoroughly enjoyed that one and um so if anybody's interested in urban forestry or trees then it's a great committee to be on a very friendly group and does educational activities this is not a pity this is not a committee where they pit one neighbor against another it's

0:04:59not that kind of thing at all it's more of a thing where they um figure out what would be good trees to have on public spaces uh in el cerrito so uh that you know that would uh that's one comment um the um then i also went to a breakfast that ac transit put on where they were talking about

0:05:29our district which is um ward one and um joe wallace is the who's the vice president of ac transit was there and he is our award director and um it was held at the nevin community center which i thought was a really nice location was could be reached by bus straight in

0:05:54fact you could get on a bus right here and it would take you straight there that i thought was particularly nice the but i gave you a ride to that channel so i get credit for that but it's i did i said you could take a bus if you want to say i did okay okay i meanwhile have found my guide to the

0:06:16uh 2018 tax changes and that may not be as exciting as some other things but it is very informative and i'll just pass it down to give to cheryl it's um a really helpful information if you're trying to do your taxes or anything which uh we theoretically all are

0:06:39and um then um i will leave the rest of the items oh here's the uh nope it's not i think it i think i found the percy giles that's it and i apologize for not remembering her name i actually know it really well anyway i'll leave that at that and leave the other things for

0:07:06anyone else okay in case we all went to the same thing okay uh yes greg yeah i'd like to report that we did have a meeting of the charter committee on saturday before last the 10th the committee is progressing with developing a draft charter for the council to consider

0:07:30there is a meeting two nights from tonight thursday night here at city hall seven o'clock at that time we will be reviewing um what should be a final uh or we will be evaluating the final draft and hopefully making a recommendation to council michelle i wanted to remind everyone that

0:07:54coming up on april 4th at 4 pm our library will be celebrating its first wednesday open in anyone's memory so we are having a celebration of our extended library hours and the celebration will include free frozen custard cookies music with games and balloon animals for

0:08:18children so it sounds like it's going to be a very nice event i encourage everyone to come i will be coming straight from work and it looks like it's going to be a good time and then second i wanted to do a little bit of an early report on my environmental quality committee because

0:08:36it looks like they have some nice announcements for the public first of all when i went to the eqc meeting they will be looking at how last time we were discussing possibly reevaluating the fees for certain things that are environmentally related so they have developed a policy subcommittee

0:09:03and they will be looking at that for us also a nice reminder that um meringue clean energy um the deep green is only about five dollars more and that goes for if you want to go from light green to deep green about five dollars more per month than a pg e would be and that gets you to 100

0:09:27renewable energy so i know before i got my own solar panels i was and i was involved in that and i think um all of the council members are we are deep green yes good so everyone at home it's time to go deep green um and then third i'd like to invite everyone to

0:09:51attend one of the public meetings for our parks and recreation facilities master plan there will be a public meeting on march 29th at 6 30 pm in the city hall council chambers and there will also be another public meeting on may 23rd and that time is to be determined but it's also in the

0:10:15city council chambers finally some upcoming events to mark your calendar for there will be a workshop on pollinators and monarch butterflies on 327 here in the council chambers as well as the hillside festival will be may 4th through the 6th earth day is april 21st and bike to work

0:10:44day is 5 10 and then i see here a film domain on 3 10 it does not say a time yet so when i get more information on that i will give it to you thank you okay and uh on march 7th i attended uh with my council members janet abelson and paul fideli we did attend the ac

0:11:10transit breakfast where uh staff gave us a presentation on the future of ac transit especially here in west contra costa and that includes the new l that goes down san pablo avenue and that will come online with double decker buses that will take us to the brand new sales force bus

0:11:35terminal and we're excited about that and so i'm sure wittec and janet abelson will give us an update when that finally goes online and uh also on that day i attended the uh gilman fields and the update there is that uh all the cities are looking forward to the plans of building a clubhouse there

0:12:02and as well as new restrooms and and expansion with the parking lot and the different facilities so berkeley albany el cerrito richmond we're all supportive of that and we look forward to showing everyone the plans uh of the renovation and the future of the gilman ball fields

0:12:26on 3 8 it was great to be here at city hall with my colleague paul fideli we attended the el cerrito police department swearing in and i congratulate our our new officers and uh our veterans and i thank uh chief paul keith for inviting us and having us attend um on the 10th i attended the

0:12:55environmental quality event here at city hall and it was standing room only it was great to see how popular our environmental committee is in el cerrito and and outside el val cerrito so we did have a full house and we had a sierra club booth there and i just want to thank john joya for

0:13:17joining and speaking at that event and i congratulate the environmental quality committee for having a an amazing event for that on the 11th i attended the camp herms graduation at uh for our uh boy scouts and our two eagle scouts from kensington so i congratulate uh

0:13:43the group and i ran into someone who i grew up in el cerrito who is volunteering has been volunteering most of his adult life with the boy scouts and cub scouts so i congratulate him for his service and it's great to see this continuing on the 12th i spoke at christ lutheran church

0:14:08and i spoke about our plans of a subcommittee working on changing from a general city to charter city and it seems like they will all support that and we'll look forward in having us meet with them and meeting with our other community committees on the 16th i attended as a guest of

0:14:37the golden gate business association i attended the luncheon there and it's great to see west county businesses prospering and getting awards for best small business and one of them is lanar electric a small business electrical company that now has the is working on the subway system in san

0:14:59francisco and they got best small business and today i attended at the st john senior center uh i met with a group at st john's and it's good to see many familiar faces there that i grew up with and again after that i went upstairs and had lunch with janet abelson and we uh attended the

0:15:26chamber meeting together so that's my update uh so um oral communications from the public yes sir can i get mine oh i'm sorry that's all right all right sorry i won't repeat the things that have already been mentioned except that i was along with uh greg lyman on the charter committee last

0:15:48saturday and again it was great to come down and have a double double duty here in the in the city hall where the environmental quality committee had an incredible event with a wonderful movie called tomorrow about climate change and it was just it was just wonderful to all be together

0:16:04talking about what we can do moving forward also on the financial advisory board uh last week we discussed the mid-year budget update that's going to be on our agenda tonight and i was at the police in the ac transit meeting that janet and the mayor mentioned i just have two quick items dealing with

0:16:23the arts um the first is that one month from uh today um the arts uh commission and our uh uh poet laureate mashin win will be organizing a major gathering of poets and local presses here at our community center uh she's organized the poet laureates of san francisco sacramento and berkeley to all

0:16:46come and give readings and there'll be an open mic for other poets to come and talk it's it was great the last time she did this and it'll be great i'll remind you all before that happens again in a month and finally the economic development committee and the arts commission have

0:17:00been working together to try to blend forces to make sure that the arts get out into our city that boost our economic development and you all may be noticing some restaurants that are having local musicians playing in local restaurants so that's an idea that's happened and it

0:17:16will be presented over the next few weeks and months and so i hope you all enjoy that and we'd love to get feedback from you on hearing music when you eat in el cerrito thank you okay thank you okay now uh oral communications for the public all persons wishing to speak should sign up

0:17:34with a city clerk remarks are typically limited to three minutes per person please kindly state your name and city of residence for the record comments regarding non-agenda presentation and consent calendar items will be heard first and comments related to items appearing on the public hearing

0:17:52or policy portion of the agenda are taken up at the time the city council deliberates each action item uh folks wishing to comment on any closed session item scheduled after the regular meeting they do so during this period so thank you mayor we have six speakers for

0:18:12this part of the agenda the first three are cordell hindler followed by brigitte turnipseed and doug merritt hold on so good evening uh mayor quinto uh council staff i am cordell hitler and i'm a resident of richmond i will give you an example so i have seen el cerrito police coming

0:18:32into our my area of richmond i'm on the park plaza side and we and because the reason i say this because one of my neighbors brought this to my attention she said that that she's seen el cerrito pd more than richard petey and i said unbelievable and i say because we've had

0:18:48this this issue being become i have come to you with this before and i said and i've still seen more el cerrito police than i see richmond pd so i'm like this is unacceptable so one and then number two is um i really commend the environmental quality committee a work

0:19:05plan that was on last month's agenda i really liked how they have the committee you know like figure out ways to like you know how can we like make our city more environmental friendly so that's one that's a second then number three is um next month i'll bring some flyers for a

0:19:21new show it's called vanya and sonya and spike and masha it's a comedy and i'll bring the flyers next month so it's really a funny performance so hopefully the i'll hear more about the presentation with el cerrito pd so i'll give my time to the next person next person is

0:19:41brigitte turn up seed good evening good evening my name is brigitte turnipsy and i live in el cerrito i'd like to address the el cerrito city council this evening in regards to the current condition of castro park while the baseball field and play structure at castro park has obviously been

0:20:06maintained the rest of castro park has been severely neglected of particular concern is the following the ground cover consisting of wood chips has had been distributed throughout the areas near and around the clubhouse prior to the opening of the new school and this has totally worn away this is

0:20:27due to much of the foot traffic as well as bicycle riders of the children on their way to the school grounds most of the ground cover in the vicinity of the stairs has slipped down to the sidewalk and the streets ending up in the gutter making the area very unsightly as well as hazardous for

0:20:46walking then the top area of the park the one that's above the tennis court is totally neglected the grass slash weeds is almost never cut and the entire surroundings is full of rodent holes the entire area is pock marked with holes in fact and lastly the garage located directly

0:21:07behind cameron's school and i know that is a school district owned property has four large doors which are in desperate need of paint this is our neighborhood and while the garage is school district owned it the painting of the doors would certainly provide goodwill throughout

0:21:26the community and also it would be great if the police could patrol the parking lot at night there some of the things i have found in the parking lot there is very unsightly everything from used condoms to broken glass bottles so i don't know what goes on down there late at night but it'd be

0:21:45nice if they could patrol the area anyway thank you very much for your time and mr um merritt has pictures to show you and he'd like to speak also thank you good evening good evening mayor council persons my name is doug merritt and i live right across my wife and i live right across

0:22:11the street from the castro clubhouse and brigitta walks her dog by our house and she was saying look at this and i said i just was thinking about it myself and uh seeing how insightly is and also not only is it a unsightly i think the city is at risk of a lawsuit

0:22:35there's a lot of children around there the plastic is showing it gets moist and slippery when i've gone out sometimes i've seen youngsters slip and fall on there someone's just going to put down your wrist and break an arm or do something so i not only would like to get

0:22:50[Music] a little more landscaping more beautiful but also to save the city some money as a resident i'm thinking about that i i stay back here and i give you the pictures okay first three or four are pictures excuse me sir would you please use the microphone but this is being recorded

0:23:18and streamed for the public sorry okay i'm a retired pastor and i like to get close to the people i'm talking to so um what else could i say uh the school district keeps its area very clean in front of the middle school and it's uh the trees were taken out and so it accentuates

0:23:49the shoddy condition of the castro street er castro clubhouse part and so i'm just uh giving you a heads up brigitte and i think it could be done i i would plant some kind of shrubbery there that's what my recommendation is thank you very much thank you are any questions

0:24:19i'll leave those pictures for you for the council al miller followed by susan schwartz and sherry drubner good evening good evening mayor council members city staff i'm here to amplify on council member okamoto's comments uh on the event that is now by a lot of

0:24:41people being called 4-4 at 4 april 4th at 4 p.m four four on four is easier the purpose of this event is as councilmember okamoto said to celebrate the ex uh the initiation of the additional hours that the council and then staff worked on and the council approved i think it was last june

0:25:08the big advantage that a lot of people don't realize is that under the old hours there were no full-time positions in the el cerrito library so even the senior library manager that most of us old timers called librarians had another library that he or she would

0:25:29work on in the fifth day to keep to get the 40-hour week going to the 50 hours we now have full-time positions not only for the senior library manager but for the adult librarian for a children's librarian that's one of the reasons it took so long to implement the expanded hours is

0:25:51that the contra costa county library had to realign what those positions would be and then go hire somebody and then train them in the county library system and we'll see the benefit of it monday and hopefully wednesday so i encourage everyone to come out flyers of this have been distributed or

0:26:14will be distributed to all of the schools in el cerrito from the principals through the pta ptsa presidents and to english teachers that indicated they would like them mr pokorny initiated the distribu distribution of these posters on the avenue today by getting

0:26:36almost 40 of them accepted and we were pleasantly surprised with how pleasant the people who how willfully the people agreed to post them they were all very supportive of the fact that our library is going to be open seven days a week the thing that uh the most

0:27:00benefit to people whose memory is similar to mine is i don't have to try to remember which day which hours the library will be open i now understand that seven days a week sometimes earlier sometimes it will close later but the library will be open from one to five

0:27:21and uh that's a welcome situation so thank you for the efforts that you've shown in making the library work better by approving the expanded hours and we hope to see you and your friends and your family and your neighbors and anybody that appreciates the library to come by

0:27:43wednesday thank you susan shorts followed by sheri dropner good evening good evening thanks for letting me speak i'm susan schwartz the head of friends of five creeks our all volunteer group has worked on reducing flood danger on cerrito creek for more than a decade and

0:28:04more recently extensively in reducing fire danger in the el cerrito hillside natural area in these projects we've seen firsthand that local governments can neglect long-term hazards you folks are busy with immediate pressures and regulatory demands staff turnover limits institutional memory

0:28:24evergreen thornless blackberry had overrun cerrito creek increasing flooding fire prone french broom dominated the el cerrito hillside natural area global warming is now gradually increasing another kind of risk from rising sea levels and increasingly intense mega storms

0:28:42the handout that you have has pictures uh dealing with the small relatively low income neighborhood it's sort of a westward projecting nose north of albany hill channelized cerrito creek in creekside park and south of central avenue in central park fema maps show that this is el cerrito's

0:29:01only flood-prone area it's surrounded by higher land on all four sides hills on three sides and pacific east mall on the west in richmond has been built up higher than homes in el cerrito this area is a low-lying filled tidal marsh and even normal high tides still

0:29:21rise and fall as far upstream as santa clara avenue all storm runoff from a wide fan of paved city up to the crest of the hills has to make its way through two channels edging the former marsh where they flow under pier street and i-80 even at current sea levels there is

0:29:40very little room for more water at various combinations of high tides and rain we believe that el cerrito should formally incorporate into all its planning consideration of how to deal with possible flooding in this neighborhood due to a combination of high tides and

0:29:59large storms which are going to become increasingly likely at our request there's a placeholder for this in the contra costa's new stormwater plan we have urged consideration in the new parks upcoming master uh plan for parks because both creekside and central parks could help

0:30:17deal with runoff we've spoken with public works director ortiz about incorporating it into the upcoming storm drain master plan we're making the rounds here we think it's important to make it part of the green infrastructure plan because facilities that reduce runoff pollution can do double duty and

0:30:34be given priority where they can retain and reduce storm flows we'll be speaking to the planning commission tomorrow night it's important to take advantage of all opportunities there will be funding for adaptations to sea level rise el cerrito could be a candidate

0:30:53so both to make sure that this long-term risk to a small neighborhood is not ignored and to take advantage of opportunities we hope that the council will pass a resolution or otherwise make sure that lessening flood rates from the increasing probability of high

0:31:11tides and coincide coincidence storms is part of all future planning and action for this small neighborhood thank you thank you hi excuse me good evening i'm sherry grobner resident el cerrito still getting over one of those nasty colds last week first i want to thank the police

0:31:38department and chief keith for a community meeting that we had a few weeks ago i attended and it was really informative and i thought it was very well attended and good outreach and people were able to share their concerns about public safety so thank you but that leads me to another question

0:32:00because i felt like at the meeting there is a lot of issue there are a lot of issues around um property theft and ways to handle it and it seems like not just el cerrito but a lot of cities are looking at more surveillance as ways to address the issue and i just wanted to note that last week

0:32:23the berkeley city council unanimously passed an ordinance on surveillance technology in order to protect the civil liberties and privacy of city residents as it's at its um tuesday meeting and it says berkeley is now required to analyze and report the effects of certain

0:32:41surveillance technologies before city entities are permitted to use them and there's more to that ordinance and i don't know if there's a possibility to have a study session or think about how we might in the future i know the city has a video surveillance ordinance but it

0:32:59doesn't seem to be that broad in terms of what it deals with more in terms of its you know as a protection for civil liberties so i just wanted to raise that point thank you i have no other request to speak okay thank you let's get to adoption of the consent calendar items 4a

0:33:22through 4d a is approval of minutes b amendment to city classification plan c authorized annual report for landscape and lighting assessment district d annual progress report on general plan 2017. i move that we accept the consent calendar second a through d second so i have a motion by uh pardo

0:33:50okimoto and second by lyman all in favor aye aye aye okay that's five zero unanimous uh presentation uh a is a pre-proclamation recognizing march as american red cross month good evening good evening my name is james lyons and i am on the contra costa county red cross leadership council

0:34:21and we're meeting for the first time so give us about two seconds i'm peter liddell here we go red cross volunteer and tonight we are here to receive the proclamation there are a couple of points that i'd like to read briefly in 2017 the american red cross saw a

0:34:43record-breaking year in dealing with challenging domestic and international response efforts through the support of our volunteers the red cross was able to respond within 45 days to six of the largest and most complex disasters of 2017 which included back-to-back hurricanes

0:35:00the deadliest week of wildfires in california history and the horrific mass shooting in las vegas during the northern california wildfires we sent 150 red cross volunteers from our contra costa county community to assist neighbors in the north bay many of our volunteers were deployed for

0:35:17two weeks or longer 30 contra costa county volunteers went to texas louisiana florida puerto rico and the u.s virgin islands to serve many drove our emergency response vehicles across the country to deliver meals and supplies in addition to our disaster responses

0:35:35every day we respond to local house and apartment fires we educate our community about fire safety prevention through a campaign called sound the alarm this campaign installs free smoke alarms that last 10 years in local communities we partner with local fire department and

0:35:50other community organizations to help families develop emergency escape plans if you have friends or family who need smoke alarms please have them contact our local office and we will schedule an installation appointment for them during the month of march we encourage

0:36:05el cerrito residents to become community heroes by joining the red cross to give back to those in need please remember that the american red cross is not a government agency we rely on the donation of time money and blood to do our work by making a financial donation to the red cross an average of

0:36:2091 cents of every dollar is invested in humanitarian services and programs is there anything else pretty well thank you do we have any speakers we have one speaker cordell hindler wow this i don't see the green thing so there we go so this is a wonderful presentation um i've

0:36:48learned so much about the red cross and uh everything that uh james lyons has said is like it's all true so when you hear about wildfires when you hear about mass shootings it's like you got to stop and think it's like oh my god i said they have done so much for our community and they have been

0:37:03doing this for a number of years so i said so hopefully you'll give them the proclamation and uh and like he's just stated we got like give giving is what we care about in our community so hopefully um that we ought to like take a lesson from this and uh do our part to make sure

0:37:19that uh though whether it was like donate time money or blood you got to make sure that um that it that's very helpful that you you never know can you you might say somebody might gone and then if you don't save a life they'll be gone so you gotta make sure that uh you give them their

0:37:35attention so i'm doing my part to donate to american red cross so if i can donate all of y'all should donate so that's it thank you discussion here any questions for mr lyons okay comment sure yeah um just thank you very much for all the work that you do and um i'm i'm proud to say for the

0:38:07first time in the last year i donated blood and i donated at the red cross i'm a nurse and i've been i've been i've been hanging blood giving people other people's blood and i knew that i had the type of blood that that you need it's o positive and i know that that is used all the time so um and

0:38:26i will do it again next year thank you i'd like to move uh proclamation of el cerrito city council recognizing march as american red cross month in the city of el cerrito i second that okay so i have a motion by lyman and a second by uh councilman fideli all in favor aye

0:38:45aye it's 5-0 unanimous so uh thank you yes just for me yeah let's go take a photo can we can we do a group photo [Applause] i definitely appreciate the photo i know we're recording this but uh the picture will let them know i was actually here okay smile i've got it right here

0:40:26um okay uh presentation uh el cerrito police department body worn camera program we have uh our chief of police here good evening good evening mayor and council members i'm your chief of police paul keith so i'm here to talk tonight about the progress of our body worn camera program

0:41:02so i'd like to start my slide shows off with the mission statement of the el cerrito police department the elsewhere police department's committed to service safety and enhancing the public trust through professionalism and leadership i start a lot of my my powerpoint presentations

0:41:15off with this slide and sometimes it's just up there and then i move on to the next thing but i think tonight there are a lot of components of our body worn camera program that really hit the heart of what our mission statement is all about so in terms of safety and the safety of

0:41:29our community body-worn cameras can serve as valuable evidence to help get convictions for crimes we investigate they also act as valuable training tools to make sure that our officers are using sound officer tactics while they're out on the street officers are also a great component of

0:41:45increasing the service our officers do the city increasing the level of service by acting as a tool for evaluation in a way for officers to reflect on how they might have handled a call and how they can do it better next time they also serve to enhance the public

0:41:59trust between us and our our agency and the community that we serve there's been studies that show that cameras can have a civility factor and can increase the professionalism portrayed by the officer on a call and also increase the courtesy and cooperation that a resident returns to

0:42:16the officer there's also a component of leadership involved in body-worn cameras programs i'd love to say that i'm on the forefront of body-worn cameras and that i was one of the visionary leaders to first put them into practice the reality is i'm standing in the shadow of really

0:42:31visionary law enforcement leaders that saw body worn cameras is an amazing tool for public accountability decades ago and started working towards implementing them so i'm happy to be benefiting from the hard work and vision of uh chiefs that have come before me like john carly in

0:42:48vacaville however in the process of creating our body warm camera program um there were some great opportunities for leadership in our agency in particular the el cerrito police employees association really stepped up to the plate and was one of the driving factors in getting body-worn cameras

0:43:07going in el cerrito almost to an officer in fact i haven't heard a single officer yet say we don't want cameras they all want body worn cameras to show the good work they're doing and to have that proof of the good work they're doing so i've been very proud to be the leader of

0:43:24an agency that is really embracing the present and future of law enforcement so i want to talk about some of the progress we've gone through to date to implement body-worn cameras in el cerrito and i want to say i'm also very excited to be at this point because i think

0:43:39we're on the cusp of deploying body-worn cameras on the street and i'm very happy to join my colleagues at other agencies around us and having body-worn cameras and having that accountability tool at our disposal so we've held two public meetings in our process of evaluating the camera

0:43:55program and making sure that it's right for the city of el cerrito our first meeting focused on general concerns about body-worn cameras that members of the public might have had it's been a little over two years since we had that first meeting so to say we were moving

0:44:07quickly would not really be an accurate statement we've been trying to be methodical about rolling out cameras in el cerrito so at that first meeting some of our residents and community members asked for asked whether or not we should be doing constant recording

0:44:20they asked about privacy protections and were concerned about privacy protections some had concerns over officers reviewing footage and we worked to incorporate the public comments that we got from that first meeting into a sample policy at our second meeting we focused on

0:44:36policy review we posted the policy in advance of the meeting and solicited comments from the public there were some people that wanted one person in particular wanted the policy to be set by council and not to be a police department initiative some wanted public release of our videos

0:44:52and we tried to work in public feedback where we could and we made several changes in the process from hearing back from groups like oakland privacy to make allowances for suggestions where we felt was appropriate our policy has been reviewed by the city attorney's office and the district

0:45:09attorney and we used guidelines from the international association of chiefs of police uh the guidelines presented in the president's task force on 21st century policing and best practices from around the industry to develop our plan for deploying body-worn cameras

0:45:24we also took into account concerns that the aclu has voiced in a white paper about body-worn cameras and i'll talk a little bit more about those in a moment in addition we also included the police employees association review of the policy to make sure that they were

0:45:40on board and supported the initiative we were putting forward so uh in the process of looking at bodywork cameras we've done really significant equipment evaluation to see what body-worn camera is right for us one of the nice things about waiting is the body-worn cameras have evolved a

0:45:55great deal since we started looking at them about eight to ten years ago and it was really important for us to find the right product that would meet department needs and would also come from a reliable manufacturer we didn't want somebody that was going to be out

0:46:08of business the next year and then we wouldn't have support for a very important piece of police equipment the camera that we've decided to deploy is the v-view le5 and i'm gonna pass this uh demo around so the le5 has the battery capacity to get an officer through a full 12 hour

0:46:28shift has also has the recording capacity to be able to record video covering that same time frame has a component called pre-event recording which means that when an officer turns on the camera it will automatically log the previous 30 seconds that the camera viewed so the

0:46:42camera is always on and always and always on and always recording but it doesn't capture that recording until an officer turns it on so it can go from 30 seconds to a minute and a half ahead of when an officer activates the camera and capture that video footage as well

0:46:58a function like that is important if an officer comes across a rapidly evolving situation where perhaps they're out on uh they're out on the street and gets suddenly attacked and don't have time to turn their camera on while they handle the situation at hand as soon as they turn on the camera

0:47:15the last minute 30 seconds a minute and a half footage can be captured so we can have that footage available to us the le5 system also uploads to a cloud-based storage it also has the ability for officers to add notes to video metadata as well as flag different footages with different

0:47:35categories that the police department will create there's no ability by the user to modify delete or alter the recording the cameras do not have facial recognition technology and we're going to talk in a moment about the storage capacity for the system we're looking at and that we've signed

0:47:52on with so the cost of the le5 to have a three-year deployment comes out to be 69 per month per officer so on an annual basis this brings us underneath the allocation of funding that the underneath the spending authority of the city manager and this contract was also funding for

0:48:12this program was included in the current fiscal year budget for the police department so the video for the bodywork cameras is stored on a cloud-based system it's a microsoft azure server system that is the microsoft's government server so each entity on the server has their own

0:48:35segregated data set it is not co-mingled with other data that microsoft azure stores the data is also replicated in at least two physical locations that are geographically far apart so that if there is a natural disaster at one server location it should not affect the data storage at the other

0:48:58replicated facility having a cloud-based system allows for a remote connection by our district attorney's office to help streamline the criminal case filing process um so when we do discovery requests we can do it directly from the system and not have to make physical copies of

0:49:12every single video that we record that's involved in a criminal case and the system also logs uh when the file has been viewed or when anybody has accessed the file so we have a an audit trail that shows who's seen the video and the reason that they put in the system for

0:49:27viewing it so our deployment plan is that we plan to have 100 deployment by field personnel so this includes all patrol officers our traffic officers our school resource officers community liaison officer and our csos who work in parking enforcement capacity we also plan to have detectives issued

0:49:51cameras so that they will use them when they're in uniform or in vests and those are at times where they might be serving a warrant on a location or otherwise conducting an enforcement operation they'll keep it on their tactical vest that they usually put on over their dress shirt

0:50:06we'll also be issuing them to administrators for when they're part of uniform deployments uh the policy that we've put together is a shall record policy so there's generally two different types of policies out there there's a policy where it has a high amount of discretion

0:50:20for the officer which are called should record policies and there's also policies that do not that allow for very little discretion on when to record and that would be a shall record policy so our policy is a low discretionary policy we identify a number of scenarios

0:50:34where an officer is required to activate their video recorder um so some of these uh times would be enforcement encounters dispatch calls for service traffic stops self-initiate activity involving dispatch contacts so an officer may be getting out of their car to handle something they've seen if

0:50:52it's something that they would contact dispatch about then they're going to activate their camera it might be a stranded automobile a piece of debris in the roadway anytime they're getting out of the car to talk to a dispatcher they turn it on there's lots of times

0:51:04officers get out of the car and they don't talk to dispatch like we're going to a coffee shop we're not turning on a camera if we're in cof we're for a coffee shop also probation and parole searches the service of warrants anytime a canine is deployed mental health evaluations the

0:51:20transportation of arrestees and detainees and also any time a contact that otherwise wouldn't be recorded suddenly becomes adversarial so that's where we want to capture that component to see what it was about the contact or if this is something later on that may become a citizen

0:51:37complaint or a claim against the city so we also had a number of policy considerations uh about prohibited uses of the camera so there are a series of scenarios in which uh camera use is prohibited that is uh for recording sexual assault or child abuse victims during their initial report

0:51:57is prohibited to record a strip search or to make recordings for personal use or to personally retain recordings we also prohibited recording meetings with confidential informants to help protect their identity and also the use of recordings for the purpose of embarrassment

0:52:13now the aclu wrote a white paper as i mentioned earlier that identified a number of concerns that they had that they wanted uh policymakers to keep in mind um when creating policy for the use of body-worn cameras so some of the things that they identified were recommending having a non-discretionary

0:52:32recording policy like the one that we've created a shall record policy that identifies those categories investigative contacts dispatch calls for service traffic enforcement stops as categories that must be recorded the acl was also concerned with the concept of continuous recording they did

0:52:48not want continuous recording because they do not want to develop a large government stored library of day-to-day contacts with citizens they only want people recorded in the course of police business and during a lot during the course of the day officers come across

0:53:03many people and would record many people just going about their day-to-day business that are not related to any kind of law enforcement contact so the acl had concerns about that and that is why we do not have a continuous recording policy they also wanted officers record those

0:53:18calls for service like investigative enforcement contacts the aclu recommended having a notice to citizens and while this is not initially in our policy we are going to examine that as we roll out the cameras and see if there's a benefit to having a notification given to citizens right off

0:53:36the bat for the for clarification the camera will be a visible piece of equipment on the officer's uniform and we want to get an idea of whether or not having a notice or not having a notice will hinder people wanting to talk to the police officer or whether it will benefit it so we're

0:53:55going to kind of look at it over the course of six months to see if having an up front notification like good evening i'm paul keith you're being recorded on the camera is something that we want to include as part of the policy or not um the aclu also called for no

0:54:09surreptitious recording particularly a first amendment protected speech so as i said earlier this is something that an officer is going to wear openly and not secretly the whole point is to have a visible camera on the officer and to have it be used so if an officer happens to be around first

0:54:25amendment assembly and it is fits one of those criteria for when they'll turn it on then they will have a turn on but it won't be surreptitiously recording it's going to be visibly on the officer there's also special consideration that they ask for for recording in people's

0:54:40homes so our policy does allow for officers to turn off their camera at a community member's request and we basically ask the officer to weigh the concern individual concerns of privacy against the greater evidentiary concerns of is this something that we need for the

0:54:57the complete documentation of a criminal investigation so there is a balancing act that we asked our officers to do but taking in the into account the privacy concerns of our resident it's one of the things we want them to do so if an officer is at a residence home

0:55:12and they're invited into the home to take say a theft report from the resident's vehicle out front that would be an a a opportunity for the officer to turn off the camera at the resident's request because the state of the home is not part of the investigation of the crime

0:55:32and i'm going to have time for questions at the end so i know i have a lot of things to get through um they also felt that recordings should be deleted quickly for most day-to-day recordings so there's going to be a lot of contacts that officers record that may not

0:55:46necessarily result in a criminal investigation we may not necessarily want to to use it for a later purpose our current policy has a timeline of 366 days before we delete just normal recordings that don't have any connection to an investigation the reason we said it at 366 days is

0:56:06that we want to allow time for um for individuals to make claims against the city or to also file lawsuits against the city and still have that footage available for us if a claim or a lawsuit comes through so we feel that if a claim is made within a year we want to be able to have

0:56:22that footage automatically on hand to review to see what the behavior of our employee was that may have led to a claim or a lawsuit the aclu felt that the policy should be posted online and we intend to do that when we roll out cameras our policy is not currently

0:56:40online because i didn't want confusion with the policy being online and people expecting there to be cameras on officers when our cameras are not currently deployed yet so i want them to be able to see the policy and know that there's cameras on the officers and not

0:56:56think that you know a month early our officers are wearing cameras before they really are so we plan to put the policy online contemporaneous when we roll out cameras and the main reason acl wanted that is so that people understand what criteria officers are using for when they turn

0:57:12them on and when they turn them off and also timelines for how long we plan to keep information so they know that later on if they do file a claim or file a lawsuit that footage will be available at a later time for review um they also want uh flagging of recordings and want a

0:57:29subject to be able to flag an individual recording but that's also in connection with having a shorter time frame for storage we feel that if we have a year and someone has a recording that they want kept that gives them a full year to be able to address uh the incident that they were involved

0:57:44in to file a personnel complaint to file a claim against the city and that a year would give them that ability without having the officer do a separate process for flagging something the community member wants retained that would really be done administratively and not necessarily in

0:58:01the field the aclu wanted strong rules about how recordings are used and i believe our policy has that they also wanted some public disclosure but the aclu also took into account that different states have different laws around public records some states are sunshine states and so

0:58:17any footage recorded by a body-worn camera is a public record california treats body-worn camera video as investigative files and as such it is not subject to public disclosure without an overwhelming need from the public to see the footage our policy currently treats recorded

0:58:36footage as investigative files and it specifies incidents that are going to be investigative investigative reinforcement actions that an officer is taking there's also tech controls that the aclu wanted in place for a good policy and we believe that the combination of the program and the

0:58:54storage type that we put in that we're putting into place meets their requirements essentially they want to make sure that there's encryption involved in the transfer of data and also that there's audit trails to be able to track who has access to reviewed video

0:59:10the aclu did not want body-worn cameras on non-police officers and for the most part that is how we're handling it however we feel that our csos are out there taking enforcement action and because they're out there contacting the public in enforcement mode we did want the body-worn camera to

0:59:25help with accountability for our csos as well on top of that our csos also carry pepper spray as a defensive tool so if a dog comes after them or if someone attacks them they do have a what's a classic force option on their belt so there is the possibility although it

0:59:45is you know hopefully very slim that uh they may be involved in a physical altercation we want to have the camera on for that purpose as well okay so um some of our next steps we have i as i said we've identified the camera that we're going to be using we've also identified the vendor the

1:00:07vendor is a company called v-view they're based out of seattle washington they're one of the two main manufacturers of body-worn cameras the other one being axon which was formerly taser so v-view is used by a number of police departments they recently got the contract for the new york police

1:00:25department which is a the biggest contract in the entire country over thirty thousand officers um they have a very strong track record they were one of the pioneers and body worn cameras and they continue to update their progre product over the year so our next steps are to evaluate the

1:00:41feedback from tonight to listen to counsel or to answer counsel questions and also listen to council feedback and feedback from the public after that we're going to work on over the course of the next months finalizing our training plan once we get cameras in the building we'll work on the

1:00:57procedural part of our uh program as opposed to the policy part the procedural part tells people how at the end of your shift this is where you'll actually put the camera you'll put it in here and the camera will upload this is how you go through the the motions of tagging camera tagging

1:01:12videos and this is how you assign them to evidence or this is how you assign them to a non-categorized category which would be automatically deleted after 366 days we also have to train our officers up in the use of cameras you would think that it's just a matter of turning it on

1:01:29but until you build that memory of this is how i do it every time it's not necessarily automatic so we're going to have a training period where officers get up to speed on making sure that they're turning it on at the right time for the right reason we still have to deploy the cameras and

1:01:44at the end of six months we plan to do an in-depth evaluation of where we're at on the program we are certain that we're going to learn things in our first six months and we plan to make adjustments based on what we come up with as learning points so this is a incomplete list of agencies that have

1:02:02body-worn cameras in the region agencies on the left side of this list are all agencies that use vue as their body-worn camera vendor oakland pd is listed on the right and they're kind of in the final stages of approving view as their contract as well the agencies on the right though

1:02:22predominantly just our agencies have body-worn cameras not necessarily from the company vivio i also should note that uh when i made this one i wasn't thinking of our neighbor right next door and i feel bad for that but albany pd also has body worn cameras as well

1:02:37uh so i hope that gives you a good overview of the decision making we've made around body worn cameras and where we plan to go with it i also hope it helps illuminate some of the policy decisions that we've made regarding body worn cameras and i'm available for any questions that

1:02:53you might have hopefully i had notes here so i hope i didn't miss anything important but i'm sure you'll let me know if i there's something big i left on the table thank you chief questions comments chief thank you very much for your presentation tonight um i know officer

1:03:10caputo has and i have had conversations about this over the years and it's impressive the amount of thoughtfulness and research that the department has put into this so i really appreciate the presentation and the thoughtfulness of it and how well you you presented and

1:03:27aligned with the aclu with with their points of of uh going down this as you were going through your presentation there obviously privacy is is one of the things that we take um our residents privacy very seriously and i heard you address that over and over as you talked about various things like

1:03:46storage um certainly the online storage is a huge thing and was one of the things that uh officer caputo you and i spoke about early on about the ability to have a secure storage what i didn't hear was a release of videos to for re i didn't hear how the policy is going to address

1:04:07release of videos to the public or to the media i didn't necessarily hear a policy touch on uh review prior to the officer preparing their report um i've heard i've heard various opinions in the public about you know when that should occur um so i was wondering if you could talk

1:04:27if there's these aspects are in the policy just for purposes of brevity you left them out uh of your presentation actually i missed a couple lines in here i think so couple things i want to touch on for privacy i'm one of the concerns out there i think i talked about touched on

1:04:45facial recognition technology and that this product does not have facial recognition technology built into it um also the we do not have any data sharing agreements with federal law enforcement agencies so any sharing of data would have to be on a specific case level so it would have to

1:05:05be on a case where we are collaborating with the federal law enforcement agency on a particular criminal investigation but there are no law enforcement federal law enforcement sharing components to that we are the only agency that has access to our data on the cloud server

1:05:21as far as officer review there are some scenarios where the aclu would prefer the officer not review video footage so in general the footage that an officer records they will be able to review while they're documenting the incident in the report i view body worn footage as just another

1:05:38item of evidence in a criminal investigation and it's important to me that an officer see the footage so that they can if there is something different than their recollection that's depicted in the uh just put it in the video to describe why that might be different and

1:05:55also so that they can see things that they may have missed the first time around that the video might have recorded and officers a person's attention can only be on so many things at one time and the camera has a wider has a has a different field of view than a human eye does and it has a different

1:06:10focus than a human eye so there may be things depicted on a camera that an officer may not have picked up on now in the case of a fatal incident where an officer has either let's say they've shot a person or that they've caused great bodily entry to a suspect we follow the contra costa

1:06:26county law enforcement fatal incident protocol so that protocol dictates when an officer whether an officer can view the footage prior to making a statement the current the current state of that is that the the district attorney's office and the police departments involved in those

1:06:44investigations our most important piece of that investigation is getting an officer's statement and so getting officers voluntary statement about what happened that led up to the shooting and the reasons why they used the force that they used so when an officer when we interview an

1:07:01officer in the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting we want a voluntary statement about what happened in the case now if we don't there may be some officers that there's recording they don't need to see it they know what happened and they're going to make their statement and there

1:07:16may be other officers that want to see the recording first the what our investigators have said and what the district attorney's office investigators said over and over again is that the highest value is getting the voluntary statement whether or not they see the video first they want the

1:07:30officer to make a voluntary statement the way i see it is the video is going to show what the video is going to show and the video is either going to show something that is conclusive or inconclusive and there's really nothing that the officer is going to be able to

1:07:45say to try to change what the video actually shows so i follow the guidelines that we've agreed to at the county level that when possible we try to get the statement before the footage is viewed however if that is the only way we're going to get a voluntary statement from

1:08:04the officer then it is up to the investigator's discretion and the agency's discretion at the time whether or not they allow an officer to view the footage first now there are some investigations where perhaps there is um the possibility or there's the the likelihood from the start that a crime

1:08:21has occurred that a homicide has occurred or manslaughter has occurred and in those scenarios we wouldn't allow an officer to see the footage first if we believe from the outset that there is that a crime has been committed by a law enforcement officer on duty um then absolutely that officer is not

1:08:42going to be looking at him the case will be but the officer's also probably not going to be giving a voluntary statement so those tend to kind of pop up in the beginning when the attorney says the officer is not giving a statement then that takes the investigation a different

1:08:54route so the decision at the time is up to the discretion of the investigators combined with the administration of the agency that officer belongs to great i've got just a few more um if i was listening correctly it's going to be one-to-one deployment so camera 35 is always going to be going

1:09:13out with you know officer caputo is is that is that the idea similar to the radios that we have the uh is it one-to-one deployment yes the plan is each officer has their own issued camera okay um the idea is that you have a little bit greater accountability also you're not trying to hunt down what

1:09:34officer was wearing a particular camera on that given day or that given night it's obvious who the camera belongs to correct that that's that's the logic behind the radios also so i wanted to make sure that we have the same type of accountability with our cameras well

1:09:48particularly with cameras you don't you don't want somebody else to be wearing your camera and then out there hey incriminating you um i noticed why i did turn it on and i noticed that there's a red light versus a flashing green light so which is like most people are accustomed to

1:10:06seeing a red light being record but it looked like the red light was the resting mode so i'm just curious which which is which is the uh is red light record or is red light resting i'm going to call on my technical advisor lieutenant lauren caputo to answer that

1:10:23one so the camera has a couple different features one is if the camera is completely turned off meaning it's not powered on when you slide the the slide action down it will turn the camera on but it takes about three to four seconds for it to power up if you have the camera on that is it's

1:10:44powered on that's the button that was on the side when you're in that standby mode you'll have that red indicator on the top and then when you slide it down there's about a one second time for it to start recording and that's when you see that blinking green but you also do get the pre-event

1:11:02recording that comes along with it as long as the camera was powered on and one of the things that we were looking at especially in the inception of this when i started back in december 2015 was how long are these batteries going to last back then there was we weren't too sure if they're going to

1:11:19be able to last a 12-hour shift which is what our patrol officers do every day not only 12 hours but maybe even beyond and maybe that we're here for a longer incident or later rest so this camera is fully capable of doing that where the light is located will be hard for a member of the public

1:11:40to know if it's on or not so [Music] i understand it's not part of the policy today but the notification to the to the resident um is something that certainly you guys would hopefully evaluate at some point because where that where that blinking light is located is not necessarily

1:11:59going to be particularly uh obvious and as i said earlier most people associate a red light or believe they're blinking or solid with recording and and so it's it could easily be confusing um but i just wanted to make that comment or question there's a there's a

1:12:17somewhat of a tactical reason for that too at night time if you're trying to come up to an area without being seen the last thing you want is a bright light admitting where your location is yep no i understand it that but i certainly want to make sure that it we

1:12:33i know we have not it's not in the policy at the moment about uh announcing the the device is on but i certainly would look look for that to be considered as something as you evaluate over time um chief last question or it's more of a i want to confirm what i heard and then

1:12:49make a request you stated that the policy will be posted onto our website and i applaud you for that the one of the comments is about making sure that any changes are are daylighted um to that end i'm going to use this exactly this this this notification of the resin as an

1:13:12example as you change policy because you've learned things about the camera you learned things about how to to categorize the images or or download it in a proper way and you've changed some of the implementation policies that are not necessarily around privacy

1:13:31or storage release or use i would hope that the changes to the policy would be updated online and there would be a revision date some sort of date that somebody can recognize when a policy has changed or when which policy is enforced today if they were on the camera and they

1:13:50wanted to find our policy they would be able to go to the website and find the policy that was in place at the time that their incident occurred so you may need to have a series of policies were on on the site at some point um or ability for somebody to make a public records request to ask for the

1:14:08policy that was enforced when they were being videoed um so that would just be my comment slash ques request question so thanks thank you okay uh councilman fideli yeah thank you chief good to see you um i have a few questions i'm i'm pleased with the progress that the department

1:14:30and you have made here because i believe on balance because of specific incidents that have happened in this country that it is beneficial to see what's happened and to demonstrate what's happened and i think that the shall wear policy is good because i think it's important for the

1:14:50public to know that they're being filmed and it's especially important for the police to remember that they're being filmed and when we talk about a notice i think that's critical whether it's a sign on you know saying you're being filmed right now possibly that our public needs to know that they

1:15:08are being filmed and i think that's just generally good for crime prevention process and conflict can you tell me when the printed policy that councilman lyman was talking about what when will we get the policy because we got a powerpoint here but we don't have all

1:15:28the details about what you're talking about and there's lots of issues here and in addition to whatever the policy is i'm hoping because the council isn't approving this that we will have adequate comeback visits to us to review how it's going out in the field well certainly

1:15:46yeah i'd be happy to uh after the six month mark when we re-evaluate the program to come in and give you an update of how the program is going and kind of what our outcomes have been um as well as any learning points that we've come up with in the process and as far as the policy i plan to have

1:16:04that updated on the website within within the the next four weeks or so before we roll the camera out and after i've had an opportunity to review the comments from tonight and talk with command staff to see what changes we might make to that final version so we have an active policy right now

1:16:23but we may be making some modifications based on community input tonight and will it go directly to our website or will we get be able to view this first and um so we would put it to the uh the plans to put on the police sub site so on the police page we put it we put it there in advance of

1:16:42the previous meeting that we had and then after we made changes from the meeting we took down that draft policy because it was no longer the policy we were working on we were working on a new version based on public input so we plan to put it back up like i said

1:16:55before we deploy but probably about three to four weeks out after i've had an opportunity to have command staff come back together and revisit anything that came up tonight in particular the theme i'm hearing is notice so we're going to be looking at notice of recording

1:17:15the other question i had is um you talked about police review of specific videos um my question and this was in the news today about the la lapd making a statement that review and release to the public the video will be 45 days for a an incident involving shootings an officer-involved

1:17:38shooting and then any incident that involves someone being sent to the hospital do we have a policy on when our videos might be released to the public we do not we don't have a policy on well i would say that the policy does address it currently it allows for release by order

1:17:58of the chief of police it doesn't have a set schedule or a set category for this type of video will be released at this time but it does allow for a release of videos by order of the chief of police and the the weight we would use is what the public records act asked us to use which

1:18:16is does the interest of the public outweigh the the privacy or the value of this as a confidential investigatory file so we would most likely make any decision like that in consultation with the city attorney but there is not going to be you don't anticipate one rule dealing with any kind of

1:18:36officer-involved shooting that there might be a public release like la has just done today la has a longer history with body-worn cameras than we do so i'd prefer to start um with a conservative policy and see how that works out and then see what changes we may make

1:18:56now in the case of an officer-involved shooting there are ways for that video to get out through discovery processes if there's a criminal case and also through uh action civil actions against the city so um when an attorney files a lawsuit against us they'll do a discovery

1:19:15request and the plaintiff will get a copy of the video no doubt is part of that discovery quest thank you um you gave a really good presentation to the human relations committee last week i thought it was very valuable has there been any input back from the crime prevention

1:19:30committee on bodyboard cameras what's their view of this so we had two public meetings um i don't believe that any crime prevention committee members attended those meetings and as part of the meetings we also want to make sure that if somebody couldn't attend in person they could still submit

1:19:46their feedback electronically by email or in written form and i don't believe that they took that opportunity to provide feedback on the body-worn camera program and they haven't asked for it to be agendas but if the crime prevention committee wants to agendize it in the

1:20:01future then we'll be happy to talk to them about the program and hear their feedback if they'd like to share it and last question you did mention that the cost of the cameras is included in tonight's update on the budget for the costs of yes and it was included in this fiscal

1:20:18year's budget uh we set aside a portion of one of the line items to cover the cost of this uh agreement do you know how much the cameras cost total so the total cost per year is i want to say forty four thousand six hundred but it might be it's forty four thousand and change for the equipment or

1:20:39for the use of the processing um so essentially what you're paying for is it's a storage agreement and the way the industry works is they basically give you the cameras and equipment for free for you to sign on to the storage agreement on the cloud server package

1:20:55deal it's a package deal every year that's a cost we will that is it's going to be an ongoing annual cost thank you very much sure okay councilman wilson uh yes um first of all i want to thank you for being so um hesitant to be the first one out the gate on this for lack of a better way

1:21:17to say it um sometimes that's a good thing to be first one out the gate um and sometimes it isn't and i think that this is a time when it isn't so i applaud you for um for not being the first one out the gate and um letting somebody else do that but i also um and it sounds like you've done a an

1:21:42enormous amount of work in the department on looking at all the different angles and um and you're basically still in the review stage and will be for during the six-month trial if that's the right word um and um it um i think that's a great approach now can you back out of the camera

1:22:12agreement so that six months or do you are you committed to what if you turned out for some reason and i don't think that's true because you said so many other agencies were using that particular camera but let's say that that were not true and um you wanted to back out of the agreement

1:22:35can you so our plan is to have a three-year agreement with the company to start with um and there is uh adequate time before the that agreement expires to evaluate whether or not to continue on and we do have some continuation language in there that allows us to continue with the same

1:22:52company if we want to um if we back out the main penalty is that we have to pay the costs of each individual camera so we have to actually purchase the cameras um so the cost for camera i think comes out to about is it seven hundred dollars a unit nine hundred dollars a unit at times how

1:23:09many times fifty units okay so we'd basically be on the hook to pay for the actual cameras uh but we wouldn't have to continue on with the cloud service so we would stop that annual charge but we'd still have to pay for the hardware we've been using the the agreement also

1:23:25allows for a replacement at the 30-month mark so the agreement lasts for 36 months and at the 30-month mark the company will provide us with all new cameras to replace the ones that we've currently been using i assume in an updated so we'll have the the most current

1:23:42version of the camera and then um we'll have that going into what would be the end of the contract to make the decision whether or not to continue with the same company or keep the cameras or go with a different solution reminds me of cell phones yes uh that is the way of the

1:23:58the cloud-based world now yes um so um are all of the uh officers being trained at the same time are you gonna sort of how are you gonna roll them out um to the officers all at once or a few at a time or our plan is to have the training take place over the course of a week so we're

1:24:22going to go kind of working unit by working unit unfortunately we don't really have an opportunity to get everybody in the same room together to train them all together so we're going to send trainers to each individual team to train each working unit up on how it will work and

1:24:39get them used to turning it on and turning it off and what their obligations will be to care for the camera and manage the data that the camera creates so this is sort of a backwards question perhaps but what are the things that can go wrong if you know if they were to go wrong

1:24:59what what could go wrong is during this six-month trial could they activate it somehow at the wrong time or have you thought about how things could go wrong i mean no one's going to get hurt because this happens i don't think right because it isn't that kind of a

1:25:22situation i would imagine so there are some wrong times to activate a body-worn camera um the the policy outlines some of those um but also in just day-to-day interactions in the office you're not supposed to record those interactions with your co-workers either

1:25:39and that is one thing that um the aclu said that they had some sympathy for for officers that if they're just you know in a coffee shop talking to a co-worker about you know just general day-to-day stuff that those people shouldn't feel like they're being recorded and that would be

1:25:55a wrong time to record an interaction um and and some of those other ones that i highlighted too uh you know first contact with a sexual assault victim we don't want that interview recorded there's uh there's kind of best practices around that so we wouldn't want it recorded during a

1:26:14strip search now could a person get hurt from it no but the officer would be subject to discipline if that was recorded um so there are there are wrong times to record so if these i would say that one thing that could change in the next six months and is something for um

1:26:31for city staff and the city council to be aware of is if we made changes about the release of video footage um we might need additional staff to make that happen so one thing that might change at the state level for example if the state passed legislation that said that all body-worn

1:26:48camera footage is a public record then depending on the types the amount of requests we get we might have to evaluate whether or not we have the staff available to respond to all those requests one of the one of the parts of the package that we signed up for it includes a redaction

1:27:07software that can help automate some of that process however if we got a flurry of public records act requests that we had to comply with because the law changed then we might have to look at do we have enough staff to make it happen i know in some larger agencies like in washington where

1:27:24they are considered a public record it takes dedicated staff to manage that request load that comes in from news agencies and uh private individuals so um that would be something that is gonna be continually be on our radar about body-worn cameras and we understand that

1:27:40that is a possibility going forward that uh state legislation may change how these are treated as as public records or not so what if an officer started recording something and it was when he started he or she started recording it it was appropriate to do so but then what was going on you know in

1:28:06the environment changed say say the person started stripping at some point you know so they went it went from a situation where it was appropriate to record it because of whatever was happening to a situation where you didn't want to record it does the is it possible do you can you

1:28:26just close it the camera so that it stops well i'm glad you brought that up so uh there's something i would add and that's a good example um and this kind of goes to the way we treat these files um this these cameras are going to capture people on really horrible days

1:28:43of their life it could be the worst day of their life could be the worst day of the year or the worst day of the week you know if you're getting pulled over by a police officer that could be you know maybe the worst day of the month for you depending on what's happened to you that month

1:28:56if you've just gotten shot by the police that's that could possibly be the worst day of your entire year or if your son has gotten or your son or your daughter has been shot by the police and that's been captured on footage that could be the worst day of your life and so we're

1:29:10capturing a lot of terrible things that happen both to people that are victims of burglaries or assaults or robberies or receiving tickets you know can be a horrible thing for a person and also you know things that involve use of force and we really would prefer not to be in the business

1:29:27of broadcasting people's worst day out onto the internet to be replayed by you know any person who wants to watch it on youtube so that is why we take people's privacy and we take the things that happen to people in the course of our job very seriously and really hold those things confidential to

1:29:45help protect their privacy and protect you know the integrity of investigations so your question about somebody that starts stripping in the middle of an incident um it's probably somebody's having a bad day it's probably uh going to be like a mental health committal potentially or maybe somebody

1:30:01is overdosing on drugs if we're not the ones doing the stripping of the person then that would probably still be recorded because we would use that as evidence in whatever it is we're doing whether to document the mental health committal or to add evidence to the to the arrest case

1:30:18if we're in a jail scenario and we're saying this person needs to be strip searched per our strip search policy we are not going to record that but if a person voluntarily starts disrobing in public then i mean that is some of the crazy things that happen in police work and so how that would

1:30:33probably be what happens to the use of the the body worn camera in that situation i was actually thinking the example in my mind i was thinking of is that the person was under the influence say of alcohol or something and the incident starts out as some sort of arrest on something

1:30:55and then all of a sudden the person starts disrobing because they're under the influence of alcohol and so the officer wasn't expecting that to happen and didn't really have any control over the such that part of the situation but the camera is meanwhile already recording because it was

1:31:15recording it for a valid reason so i just was wondering what you do with the what do you do what do you do then well um it would still be recorded and i think there's a lot of good reasons to record it one if you're all of a sudden dealing with a naked individual

1:31:31then for liability reasons i think you'd want to record it because a claim could come out later that an officer behaved inappropriately while the person was as disrobed also if it is an intoxication investigation for example that would also provide some evidence towards the

1:31:46person's intoxication level so you'd want to have that as evidence for a criminal charge later on normal people don't typically just you know take all their clothes off for no reason um so i think there's there's some compelling reasons why we would record that um however i think this there's

1:32:03also compelling reasons for why we wouldn't want to disclose a video like that to the public because of the person's privacy and the fact that it's part of a criminal investigation so i think that there's a there's a very compelling argument for why we wouldn't

1:32:15release video to the public of somebody who would you know disrobe during a traffic stop thank you sure we are part-time so at my place of work i'm not allowed to look at medical records of patients that i'm not directly taking care of who within the police department would

1:32:37be able to view the footage that is captured by various officers so the officer that recorded the video can view their own footage that officer supervisor can also review the footage for the purpose of auditing performance and also for reviewing reports because after an officer writes report

1:32:58they send it their supervisor and their supervisor has to review the narrative and review evidence collected to make sure that the totality of the case is documented administrators can also view an officer's footage however an officer cannot access another officer's

1:33:15footage so if i had a dui investigation and another officer was at the scene and recorded a different angle of it i can't bring up that person's footage only they can bring up their own footage of the incident is it um is there some sort of password that you input to bring up that footage

1:33:34or how how how does one access the video so basically uh each video is a permission based file so as the originator of the video your login gets access to view that file one of the things that is available to us in the administration side of the program is our body warrant camera

1:33:55coordinator can flag a file as something that is read only by the district attorney's office for example and that this attorney can use their login to access that file in a read-only capacity so they can't edit or delete it all they can do is view the file so it's a unique user id that controls

1:34:13access to each of the files and basically permissions within the program and then is that data also captured as to who was viewing yes yes okay all right thank you sure okay uh do we have any uh public comment we do mr miller al miller from el cerrito good evening

1:34:40again first i want a second council members lyman's comments about the amount of effort that went into the policy and the thoughtfulness of it and so on i think we're very fortunate that our own police force has many of the same cares that we do about privacy and

1:35:00about fairness and following laws and best practices two things came to my mind the journalists have seemed to have different requirements for dealing with people of a certain age below as far as disclosing et cetera we have officers as school resource officers that work in an environment of

1:35:24people of youngsters that fall into that category i'd be interested in hearing how the policy of recording not recording might be different for them the other question i had was on the discussion of can another officer view have access to another officer's recording

1:35:46and i was happy to say that he i can't at my own volition see council member lyman's video but a question i would have could i as one officer invite another officer to come in and watch my videos with me i don't you know there's circumstances why that might be something you'd want

1:36:09to do or you would never want it to do but anyway i'm very pleased with the attention to detail that we are hearing tonight and the amount of time that our police department has given to trying to explain the whole process and the reasoning of how the program is progressing to the

1:36:30our public so thank you very much thank you let's bring it back here to the council any more questions or comments yeah i'll follow up on that last question from the public uh chief is is it is it prohibited to share and this goes back to council member pardo okamoto's question

1:36:56is it permissible or prohibited or are there guidelines around sharing videos among peers um so this is kind of the can another officer look at a video over the original officer's shoulder that's a great exact question um so i can think of instances where it might be beneficial for officers to talk

1:37:18about what their camera recorded and to work together on the team-based level to see what might have happened the reason for having those individual logins and being only available to access your individual camera is so that minimally you have to be there if you've

1:37:34seen the footage five times you have to be present to log into the system what we don't want is people seeing video that they had nothing to do with on a case that they were not involved with but they're just going around sifting through videos out there and seeing

1:37:48cases that maybe they have no business looking at so there is the possibility that you know during a call let's say two officers are on a dui investigation and one officer may see do you see what i'm seeing the footage you know this is what they're doing did your camera capture

1:38:04that same thing from a different angle for example so i could see where as a co-worker component that another officer might view of officer's video in the course of documenting the incident however we want to make sure that an officer doesn't have the ability to just search through

1:38:23any video that's recorded and see whatever they want and certainly if an officer you know logged into a to footage you know 20 times that kind of information is subject to disclosure to the public defender's office and so the public defender may well ask that officer i saw that you

1:38:38watched this video 20 times over the course of five days why what were the scenarios that you should you looked at this video so our officers are going to have to make smart decisions about how they manage access to their files and one of the the components of the policy where

1:38:58someone could be held accountable for showing videos inappropriately is um the component where we're not keeping videos or showing videos for the purpose of embarrassment and um that is something that we take very seriously um so that is something that is on our

1:39:14radar but i can see a lot of reasons why an officer might have to see you'll physically see another officer's video yeah so if i'm if i'm listening carefully you'll correct me if i wasn't it there is uh misconduct guidelines uh that are out there that would cover

1:39:33this scenario of of um misusing the video but that in proper use of the video it would be appropriate for one two or three people to view a video at the same time my video for you and michelle to both watch my video as we discussed like maybe what was the proper response what should i

1:39:55have said you know what what are some of the training things that i could learn from this incident that might be an appropriate use there isn't a specific guidance over that type of view that type of appropriate use but there are guidances over misconduct around

1:40:14watching the video or sharing the video inappropriately so did i did i hear properly that there is misconduct guidance but not necessarily proper you know how to how to how to collaborate there's no guidance over on collaboration but there is guidance on misconduct yes so there's

1:40:32misguidance there's uh there is guidance regarding misconduct uh both in the body-worn camera policy and also in our general conduct policy um and there is no prohibition against working together in the course of a criminal investigation of collaboration in viewing a video great thank you

1:40:52and i could also cover the sro question that oh yeah that'd be great yeah sure so many of the things that school resource officers do don't necessarily result in a call to dispatch however some things they do do result in a call to dispatch and just as it would be important to

1:41:11have the accountability factor for an officer out on the street that same component is present when our officers are in the schools that the sros in particular are a great argument of why you don't want continuous recording of a video to just be to capture a whole

1:41:25day's worth of effort because you're going to have juveniles and you know a normal school environment and we really shouldn't be documenting them and maintaining footage of that for 366 days for no real reason however if they're responding to a criminal investigation or taking part in

1:41:41any of those lists of activities we do expect our officers to turn on we do require they turn on their camera while investigating that incident the potential misconduct of an officer in regards to the videos is that specifically in the body-worn camera policy or is that in a different

1:42:01policy in regards to police misconduct so there's there's a lot of catch-all conduct policies in our conduct policy that say you know how you will behave at work and what manner you will behave in um in the camera policy it specifically identifies um reviewing footage for the purpose of

1:42:22embarrassment is a prohibited activity so we're trying to account for that oh look at this funny thing that happened let's replay it a million times um some of those things that have shown up over the years on cop shows or on youtube channels that are you know put on the internet to ridicule somebody

1:42:42we want to have clear guidance to keep that from happening okay thank you both in our department and then for videos to get put out okay one more question yeah actually i had the um a meeting today with our security people um that we we you know at work and one of the things that that came up

1:43:03that just popped back into my mind is you watch it once but you take your phone out and yeah videotape it while you're watching it i'm assuming that that would be misconduct yes okay thanks you're not allowed to retain a video for personal use and i think that would be i could easily

1:43:21make that case the other thing that is an important thing to note is that the videos are the property of the el cerrito police department not the individual officer that recorded them so they have no legal right to take a video with them or make a copy of it or anything like that

1:43:38the videos officially belong to el strudel police department the city of el cerrito okay yeah just one more uh question chief and i wish you wish you luck in the coming months on this thank you um and it's a question for um council if i if i could um our city council um

1:43:56in a year worst case scenario there's something we really really don't like that happens in the city with this program what is our what is the city council's recourse to take action to change that are you asking me yes oh okay council or our council sorry yeah it's cil versus yes to the um how

1:44:20do we get involved and say this must change we need to change this so remember that um under the uh uh general law of city format that and the council manager form of government that the city uses that that the police chief reports the city manager the city manager reports to you

1:44:38if you have if any year you have problems with the policy you certainly have the ability to agendize a review of um the policy and how it's being implemented um and to voice the your concerns and um and uh desires regarding changes they'll be able to ultimately be up to

1:45:02the city manager and the chief to decide how to make those changes we could get something on the agenda but not necessarily change it i mean ultimately the city council can adopt its own policy regarding this um but you know that that's something that the council

1:45:19can do if if there's a desire to do it but yeah you can put it on the agenda and then decide from there how you'd like to proceed but we need a willing city manager to do that if you want to adopt an ordinance that that establishes this you can do that right now this is an administrative

1:45:36policy if you wanted to um if you wanted to leave it at the administrative level um you can voice your concerns and um desires regarding it and the city manager and the chief would would figure out how to make those changes if you wanted to elevate it to the level of um city council policy you

1:45:53could do that through a resolution or work all right so thank you very much okay presumably we have ultimate control by defunding it that is correct too you could simply choose not to fund it in one year's budget um you'd have to provide for the approximately fifty

1:46:08thousand dollars for the cameras um but you can choose not to fund the contract and it would then be terminated because there is the ability to do that yeah thank you okay anything else steve nothing else for me but thank you very much for your time tonight thank you

1:46:27very much and thank you is it captain caputo now or or lieutenant lieutenant thank you thank you for being here policy of fiscal year 2017-18 mid-year budget update good evening good evening honorable mayor and city council members it's my pleasure to be here and provide

1:46:58you with an update on the fy 1718 budget but before i do that by your leave i'd like to take a few moments to share with you a financial reporting tool that we've been using for the past couple of months and walk you through what we call open gov reporting again with your permission to do that

1:47:19and i will use the laptop over here okay it might take a moment to turn back on okay so just to give you a background open gov is an organization that provides approximately 1300 cities throughout the usa with financial reporting tools and we've contracted with opengov

1:47:53to use their cloud-based tool to provide fiscal reports performance measures budgeting and so on and so forth and we started doing this back in january and so some of the reports that i'm going to share with you are reports that we've been working with with department heads

1:48:09uh we've shared annual reports we've shared budget to actual reports we i've shared cash flow forecasts and a number of different things we've also got metrics performance metrics from public works to share with you again some of these are still in developmental

1:48:23stages but here is where opengov comes in and here is where the repository of reports exist and i'm going to just share three reports with you could you get the links mr rasad just is it possible is this is there anything on our website at uh the el cerrito website that would

1:48:52allow us to simultaneously get to the same sort of information so we have not shared this with the else website at this point okay we'll be at some future point so i'm accessing accessing this particular uh report here on the web through my credentials at some point once we make it public

1:49:10that will be accessible from any website [Music] so here's the first report that i'd like to put up there it's the annual report of budget to actual for the past three or four years this is what the report typically looks like and i'm just going to focus on the general

1:49:36fund because it's relevant to the mid-year adjustment that we're going to look at next and here is the report that i'm looking at general fund expenses and revenues so here we have it you'll notice that it's by personnel the different categories of the accounting

1:49:57system down here and i could use filters on the left to choose reporting by departments for example so this gives me the reports by departments and then i could drill down by any one of these departments so for example i could choose i'm just using fire as an example

1:50:18because that's going to be part of my budget discussion tonight then i go back here and break it down back again by expense type and that gives me the different expense categories within fire and if i scroll down it actually gives me the numbers so these are the numbers going back from

1:50:372014-15 actuals audited actuals and then 1617 are narrated and the current budget for 1718.

1:50:47that's the fire department budget to actual report and we can do this for any department that we choose i could go back i could pick a different view for example general fund revenues and these are by the different revenue groups within the general fund it gives me the actuals for the last two

1:51:06years with the unnarrated actuals for 1617 and the budget for uh 1718.

1:51:13so that's what it does now i can actually drill down further it permits me to do that using either the filters and let's me let me go back to the department of breakdown once again and these are the departments we have revenues expenses and again for the general fund we have i

1:51:38could also choose the revenues minus expenses option which tells me that over the last three fiscal years we've had revenues minus expenses an excess of fund balance of 216 474 000 and an unnarrated balance of 353 000 for the last 16 17 fiscal year budget for 1718 expects revenues over

1:52:07expenses of 225 000 so i'm just giving you a broad overview of things here and at this point i might also mention that this number that i'm looking at 353 000 when i was sitting before you last year this time i was optimistic having had just six months under my belt

1:52:28with the city i was quite optimistic on the revenue side and that worked out fine but on the expense side i think i underestimated expenses and i projected a close to a million dollar savings but that savings actually boiled down to just 353 000 due to a number of

1:52:44different over expenditures in certain categories so i just want to share that with you up front because that has relevance to what we have in the budget month that i'm going to show you next so that's the story behind this number it was pretty much an estimate

1:52:59and i was estimating revenues which came spot on give or take a few thousands but when you given the nature of our general fund balance given the fact that these are fairly 35 million dollar city with a plus or minus three percent margin of error we don't have that luxury of a

1:53:14plus or minus three percent margin of error at best we have a one percent margin of error so here 353 000 represents approximately one percent of your city budget right so that you know that and i'll re allude to this when i get into the uh budget mod uh document that i'll be tapping into next

1:53:34so that's one of the reports that i want to share with you which is the general fund report and this can be applied to any fund that i'm using the report that we have budget to actuals another report i'd like to share with you is uh let's see fiscal year-to-date report

1:53:51and this goes through february even even much more recent to us at this point i'm just going to choose a view here that says general fund once again cumulative through february and you will notice that all the departments on the right i could filter this down by

1:54:08expense type if i wish to as opposed to departments and that gives me that same exact breakdown and down here we have expenses here today through february for the last three years plus the adopted budget and the current position vis-a-vis 17-18 and you'll notice that from this just

1:54:32for the general fund with about 30 of the year left we have 33.49 of money left to meet that general fund need again as per uh accounting records we could drill this down further personnel can be broken down further and that breaks it down into salaries and wages taxes and benefits personal

1:54:56and non-position i could squeeze on one of these for example and that breaks it down even further so we can drill down as far as we can go in the accounting system using this tool so that was a year-to-date expenditure report that we have i could do the same with revenues as well by simply

1:55:14selecting revenues under the filter and here's what it looks like on the revenue side through the end of february looking at it from the visual side of things here is the adopted budget and here is the revenue as of february for the current fiscal year and this is

1:55:32how revenues have been over the last fiscal years three fiscal years for the same accounting period as well through february you're slightly ahead as you can see from this point here and it's likely ahead gives me a little confidence in the revenue projections that i made in the middle

1:55:48budget adjustment the revenue projections are approximately 560 000 not big but still just enough i think for us to be able to meet that by the end of the fiscal year so that was another report that i want to share with you and here is the last on the fiscal side that i'd like to

1:56:05share with you which is a monthly cash flow forecast so these are monthly cash flow forecast that shows us how much cash we expect to have in our checking account and our investment account life through the end of this fiscal year by month so the purple and the maroon numbers are actuals

1:56:30and the ones here on this side are forecasted numbers so we ended the february last month with about 6.043 million dollars in both life and bank i've got a question on this slide um obviously in the early part of december you are relying on our short-term [Music]

1:56:55tans or whatever whatever acronym they are now the the short-term loans that we get for the i'm assuming the dark the darker color is that correct so the short-term low on the trend as we call that trans yes please thank you we obtained a six million dollar facility back in july of 2017.

1:57:14so by the time we got through to december we had used most of it up but it was still sustaining us to the tune of if you look at uh the darker line here which well not the darker line the lighter the lavender line that's the leaf that's where the trend was parked

1:57:28okay the turn was parked in the lake that's why that's why the very first column is is so short and the the leaf number is so small is because of our cash flow constraints in december the other question i've got for you is i know my family took advantage of paying our

1:57:49taxes early but i'm certain that the county did not transfer those extra payments uh that they got to us is that correct surprisingly enough the county center is exactly the same amount that they attended the previous year and then they followed it up quickly with another

1:58:08eight hundred thousand dollars to make up for that oversight presumably of not having sent us the extra money that should have come away i'm saying that that there are many people who paid uh 20 they paid their april payment in december to take advantage of the of the

1:58:252017 tax laws did are you saying that that those extra those overpayments or those early payments were transferred to us part of it was transferred to us in february we did not get the whole thing in december all right due to the tax cha tax law changes people rushed out there

1:58:40and paid out their full property taxes up front before the end of the fiscal year to take it as a deduction because you can't do that in the current fiscal year and uh we didn't see that too we did the county the county benefited from that cash flow not us okay thank

1:58:53you and so we have this thing projected out for three years all the way through 2020 i think 1920 and i'd just like to show you what it looks like the outer ears are not as definitive at this point but here is 1819 that's what it looks like the forecast once again we see a dip closer to

1:59:14october november and december down here that happens and then here is our forecast for 1920 another deep down there so these numbers will get refined as we get closer to the date that one is negative isn't it yes so these numbers are further out there in time which means it becomes less certain

1:59:32at this point in time and it becomes even less certain when i go out all the way to 2021 which is this so as we progress through the fiscal year both 2018 and 2019 these numbers the preceding numbers will get refined and we would have a heads up if we expect a serious shot for at a future

1:59:52point in time so that would call for warrant a review of the tran itself six million is that it's sufficient for us or is that too much at that point in time so this gives us a heads up something that we do not have up to this point so that's an advantage in using open gov

2:00:06for this purpose so that's one of the reports i want to share with you and in the last report i just want to throw out here is something connected with uh performance metrics for the city open gov can provide performance metrics for pd fb public works rec and everybody else that

2:00:25he has to have metrics and public works here has provided us with some numbers on a sample basis while the report was created and here's a report that we have as my report hopefully there we go so here is a public work visualization of maintenance service requests

2:00:53and this goes back through 2014-15 17-18 the report is still in the building stages in the beta i might call that and so public works gave us a sample set of sample data set to be able to build this thing up together so once we get the real numbers in there these will be full

2:01:13now fleshed out and we'll have the same thing for pdft and everyone else and these are the same metrics that are in our budgets that is correct so these are some of the reports that open up permits us to have and we technically have i would say 50 odd reports we don't have

2:01:33all 50 reports right here but at some point we will have a certain number of reports for internal consumption and we will share some of the other reports with the uh website with public so that's my short spiel on opengo i'll be able to take any questions that you might have

2:01:48on that before i jump back into the media budget adjustments if i could jump in um i just want to elaborate a little more on mark's last comment councilmember lyman's question there were there really two primary reasons i think that we wanted to go with open gov one is

2:02:05internally um for our staff to be able to one be more productive as putting the budget together and in one place that's much more user friendly than sort of the traditional finance system additionally for internally for productivity measures that all of our departments track it's a way to also

2:02:27look real time and analyze the data the probably the more important piece which i wanted to re-emphasize was the significant pieces of this are going to go online and we're going to create sort of an open gov city portal that if you take some of the cities who've been using it longer

2:02:47we would if traditionally all of this information is in our 400 page budget book and it's just a flat document with sort of a general ledger you have to go through you know 400 lines of code what mark is doing essentially anyone could do and so once our goal is when the council adopts a

2:03:08budget you we'd still have a budget book but you'd also have this and so if a member of public wanted to know how much pd is spending on whatever you know in in professional services or what whatever we're doing or how our revenues are going or if any of you wanted to

2:03:25look at something the goal is that this would be meshed with our finance system so as mark said you're getting february's data today in a very visible usable thing going forward the additional things that we like about it is you'll be able through our gis system to

2:03:44sort of map our streets program map our capital projects so you would look at the budget and see oh we're spending this much on slurry ceiling and then click through and not just look at the money but look at okay well which streets are getting slurry sealed um and so i

2:03:59a real big piece is now that the technology is available and we see it working in other cities it's it's so it's the open piece of open gov i thought deserve maybe a little more emphasis if that's okay um and so mark wanted to take the opportunity to sort of say this is this

2:04:16is where we are internally and we're all he's sort of our teacher in how to do this and it's it is difficult to break the habit which i went through last end of last week of not hitting print on 400 pages but sitting at the screen and slicing and dicing and looking at graphs

2:04:35all in real time is actually very helpful so anyway i just wanted to re-emphasize the sort of public access of of the data the performance side and the budget side which we hope to have halfway through the year and mayor if i may as a data geek i'm really appreciative of this

2:04:54and i know that there are members of the public who certainly will be um very excited to be able to drill into this on that side of it do you have a like is this something that will be available in june of this year or is this something that'll be available after the budget comes out what what's

2:05:13the what's the timing that's thought out of now that you've now you've shown your hand you really can't hide these aces anymore so you're going to have to come out with them at some point let me also add that this was presented to the fab we ran it by fab first before we brought

2:05:31in council member for delhi uh witnessed that and fab was just enthusiastic about this whole thing and but one of the things that they recommended was that we provide a context right rather than just putting a link out there that says okay here is your annual report budget to actuals put a

2:05:50put some language in there explain what this whole thing is about and then present it and tell us how it's to be tell the knowledge to be used so do we get to that point i can see us throwing it down on the web right now but in answer to your question i would expect

2:06:02this to be up there by june latest great thank you okay great the questions rachelle not on this portion okay janet no i'm waiting to hear the other part go ahead and minimize this and i might come back to this at some point the other piece that i have for you tonight is the

2:06:28media 2017-18 budget update and the staff reporting i think pretty much outlines but i'll give you a high level summary here like i said before property taxes sales taxes utility user taxes have been trending upwards even marginally and we've captured that to the tune of 560 000

2:06:49on the revenue side of the general fund right that's the first number that we are proposing for amendment here the other pieces our license and permits have been trending up and we have reason to believe that that would be higher so that's being proposed at two hundred

2:07:04thousand unfortunately fines and four features have seen a decline of a hundred thousand dollars because uh we had two csos that were in enforcement retirees and um they had to be let go because of retirement uh plan considerations and those two vacancies while that's

2:07:27being filled uh retirement uh revenues and fines and four features we expect will be down by about a hundred thousand dollars so that's a decline in uh anticipated revenues for that and then the last item we are hoping to buy um well the inner governmental revenues

2:07:43are being upped by 690 000 just to reflect the reimbursements that we get from oes the cal oes for services provided by the fire department for the number of fires that we've had both in north and south so typically what happens is we spend some money on that it's oes over time

2:08:03and that's reimbursed at a 15 premium we don't budget for that thing we budget 50 000 hoping that okay it's going to be some substantially more than that and this year particularly it came back substantially more than in prior years so in previous years we would have 350

2:08:19000 in oes reimbursements but they say it came back well above 690 000. so we had to go back and make that adjustment to the budget so that's the other thing that i'm proposing it's a wash on the expense side of it we have six hundred thousand innocent expenses that

2:08:33are being reimbursed by the state with 690 000 which is 15 premium of that 600 000 so the net benefit is 90 000 just on that alone so overall it's a total proposal of 1.4 million in revenue that we are seeking amendments for of which 690 000 is a reimbursement so 560

2:08:54plus 690 plus an additional 50 000 that we have for developmental reviews that will bring in fees of that amount so that combined comes to the 1.4 million in revenues that we are proposing for adjustment to our existing fiscal year budget on the expense side like i said before the oes expense needs

2:09:18to be captured the budget was just 50 000.

2:09:21typically we've run oes at about 350 000 oh yeah i managed to bring the slides up i just have a few powerpoints on this which is exactly what's in your report and so looking at this this is the 1.4 million that's made up of the property tax sales tax and uut increase of 560.

2:09:45the oes reimbursement of 690 and the license and permits of 200 000 here is the reduction of 100 000 for fines and four features and here's the 50 000 uh developer fee that will bring in a corresponding uh cost to us as we hire outside expertise in getting the thing done so

2:10:03that's the 1.4 million i pointed out these numbers to you when i showed walked you through the open gov part of it so that's the open gov the first two columns are 14 15 15 16.

2:10:17here's the unoriented 16-17 the audit is over but we are pending the final final numbers on that so these exactly what's in our carrying system and these numbers might change by a little margin at this point with audit adjustments and so on but that's the audited revenue here is the

2:10:34adopted budget on this these are the proposed amendments to revenue and that's where we hope we land at the end of the year 36.883 million dollars 1.4 million over the adopted budget so that's on the revenue side of the business and moving on to the expense side of the

2:10:54story here once again these are the exact same numbers that we have in opengl that i just presented to you for the last two fiscal years here is the unrelated number the erupted figure and these are the amendments we are proposing the 1.4 that corresponds to the 1.4 increase in revenue and here is

2:11:11where we hope this whole thing will land at the end of the current fiscal year if i may break this one million down that consists of primarily over time firefighter overtime which of which six hundred thousand was on the oea side of things and typically in the past three or four

2:11:28years we've seen firefighter over time trending fifty percent more than what we provided for in the budget so the budget holds about six hundred thousand over time but we've trended 900 to a million bucks every year now we have six hundred thousand represents the

2:11:45six the three vacant firefighter positions that we have so on the one hand we claim that there is a salary saving on that and on the other side of the fence we put it there and that's the overtime that they have to cover for those three vacancies but in addition to

2:11:57that you have coverages for other things medical and other factors which add up to a total of one million dollars which is 400 000 in excess of the three firefighter vacancies that we have so that needs to be so that gives the true cost of the fire department and

2:12:11that needs to be reflected in the budget at some point and so this year i've chosen to capture that to make the fire department whole in that sense that's a true cost of that department in prior years we have not done that so for example in the last fiscal year we had

2:12:23350 000 in oh excess over time which was not captured which was not modified so that goes to towards eating that one media an estimate that i had for you as savings from last year because that comes out of that right so that's just one of those factors so we are preserving the same

2:12:44change in fund balance at 225 that we proposed in our adopted budget you'll notice that the revenues offset the expenses here and therefore the net change in that fund balance is 225 and you'll also notice that i'm not proposing a 1 million saving this year being that much more wiser and having

2:13:00been here year and a half in that time so that provides me with a lot more material to look back on i might also point out to you that this 330 000 in amendments that we are proposing down here is to a certain extent to help defray the cost of the senior center

2:13:18okay so here is our budget for property and capital 48 000 but looking back over the last three years we hit approximately 380 000 at most on this which i thought would give us about a 70 000 saving if we hit that same number and with that 70 000 combined with this

2:13:38330 will hopefully cover the cost of the anticipated cost of the senior center which is somewhere in the low 400 thousand dollars so that's the plan for that you'll also notice that there's 330 000 if i were to take these out that represents one percent of fund balance

2:13:52right there the 330 000 is approximately one percent of 34 35 million dollar budget so here is my fund balance estimate as of today not the nine percent that we thought we'd have in 1718 in the adopted budget more closer it would be around the seven percent because of this 330 takes one

2:14:14piece of it and then of course we have expenses that would take at least another percentage out of that so i would expect us to land with about a fund balance of seven percent by the end of this fiscal year now that being said i need to point out to you that this 1617 is an unordered

2:14:29number right so that could be subject to audit adjustments when the auditors come back to us with they go through everything that we have with the fine tooth comb and they come back and say you book something in twice for example or you you should not be capturing it in this fiscal year you

2:14:46should be taking it to the next fiscal year that's a possibility or else guess what you're you've been paying yourself your employees over the last 10 years and you've captured the last pay period in the corresponding the next fiscal year but it now needs to go back to the

2:15:01current fiscal year because of timing issues so it's not actually money going out the building but it's just a timing issue right i have this thing going on with my pg e bill for example i i have a flat payment plan so they come back every month and take 240 out of my

2:15:15checking account and then suddenly it changes they say hey you've been consuming more now the number needs to be 270.

2:15:22so over the next 12 months they recruit that but we don't have the luxury with the accounting system you don't have you can recoup that over the next 12 years you've got to take the heat now so that's a potential thing that would come back and bite us go ahead yep um so

2:15:38if i read this chart correctly um you are essentially saying we'll be 2.3 million at the end of 1617 in the ending fund balance as opposed to 3 million which was partly exuberance and and partly this accounting issue is that what i'm hearing so the the accounting issue has not been

2:16:04factored into this yet okay because it was just completed the carrying numbers have not come out but they have indicated to us that there are things such as for example the final payroll in 1617 should have been he's often pushed into the next fiscal year as an accrual but

2:16:23since the pay period closed exactly on june 30th unfortunately for us this year that needs to be plowed back now this happens once every seven to eight years right right it doesn't happen every year so this is that year that this change comes in now we would i mean that doesn't mean

2:16:39that we're spending an extra pay period it's already been spent and we don't budget on an accruals basis we budget on a cash basis so on an accruals basis that eventually comes back to us maybe three four five years down the line right now so that's an accounting

2:16:54adjustment that's that could be out there for us i just want to know that because we haven't got the numbers on that yet but they will provide us those numbers and when they come back to the draft cafe and i come back and sit in front of you with the budget proposal

2:17:06sometime in june i will have those draft numbers for you okay and then if if i again if i'm reading this correctly if we do the unaudited we're ending our fund balance reserve is seven percent even though we're going to put 225 000 towards that we're still going to be 7

2:17:26at the end of 1718 and and that based on and i do appreciate your open gov numbers but based on the open govern numbers that you showed up before um you know that that's not that's a fun balance it's not actual cash and seven percent is as you've pointed out in one of your earlier percentage your

2:17:48your presentation seven percent is not a lot of money from a a percentage basis or a cash flow basis so i was just wondering if you had an opportunity to think about or explain even though we're putting quarter million dollars towards the reserve it's not really changing the

2:18:05percentage and if you had a would love to take this opportunity to talk about your thoughts on the reserve so fund balance reserve is a snapshot in time right it's a measure of how much reserves you have as a proportion of percentage of your ex budgetary expense so that's what a fund

2:18:25balance reserve is it's almost akin to uh net worth someone's net worth right you can have two people person a person b with the exact same net worth a million dollars one of them could be the million dollars in cash the other could be the million dollars in real estate

2:18:42now who is more liquid the person with a million dollars in cash same thing applies in this case we might have a fund balance reserve of seven percent but the at the end of the day it's the cash that counts right so a three-year cash flow forecast that i have here

2:18:55while it depends on generating cash through increasing fund balance reserves over time that at this point is fully supported by the trend that's where my support comes from not from this 2.5 million which is a hypothetical number which is a snapshot in time great thank you

2:19:17any other questions yeah i um i i just i have a couple questions but i just wanted to say um bravo for two for two reasons for the for the open government program i think that's a great step forward for our citizens and transparency i think that's going to be wonderful when it's ready

2:19:42and second you know you you judge a city and how well it's run by how close it is to being a balanced budget in my view and this is pretty darn close had there not been certain circumstances and senior centers and those kinds of things that have caused us to spend additional

2:19:58money i wanted to also in the news the last couple days has been the city of santa cruz which is going through a 22 million deficit going forward because of pension issues and they're seeking a new tax we're not doing that can you talk to me give us a little update on our pension issue and

2:20:20those costs and how we're dealing with that in an easy to understand fashion if i might just dive back into open gap because the numbers are in there just as an example and i'm just going to use the annual report here for that purpose general fund expenses personnel

2:20:51and these just to support my numbers more than anything else and taxes and benefits i mean i'm looking at two lines here the pers contribution and the pers unfunded liability rights so looking back to 1450 the pers contribution was 3.6 and the unfunded liability was zero

2:21:191516 this 1.9 combined with the 2.1 tells us we are now hitting 4 million dollars 16 17 it's 1.9 plus the 2.6 now gives me 4.5 and for this fiscal year we are looking at 4.9 17 18.

2:21:40and i would expect that number to shoot up to about 6 million including the unfunded liability for 1819 which we have estimated to be about approximately 350 000. so just to give you a broad stroke of the brush here six million approximately six million dollars is your pension liability

2:21:58including unfunded plus the regular contribution the unfunded piece the amortization of the unfunded piece over the next five years for the first year is the lowest the second year is slightly higher and then the whole thing comes together at the third and the fourth year and then hits us really bad

2:22:15so the first year is about 350 000 and the regular contribution would work out to about 5.6 million so total of about six million there in the next two years so in the next two years we'll see two million dollars going out the door so what do you what do you see is the

2:22:31growth rate of our pers compared to like something like santa cruz what are we talking about so we had a presentation and you may recall this we had a presentation last year where we had the purse experts come to us and give us the five-year forecast of things and i made my own calculations

2:22:48which confirmed their numbers which pretty much tells us that we are going to see this thing climb by six million bucks over five years which is an average of about 1.2 million dollars a year which given a budget of 5 million 1.215 is about 20 increase each year just to

2:23:04give you a broad average a 20 increase from the current levels over the next five years cumulatively and then that tapers down that's the goal of pers and the the reason for this is they expect the discount rate that they use to drop from 7.5 to about 7.0 it could

2:23:22go low at this point it's 7.0 i hope that answers do you have any words of optimism about the city budget and our pension costs going forward i mean what how are we dealing with this where other cities i mean santa cruz is 20 almost 22 million over spending by 2022. what are we doing

2:23:43about this we are nowhere in the ballpark of 22 million on purse with anything with all this thing put together we probably end up around six seven eight million most in 2023 but that's always a burden that we as a city have in dealing with all the other expenses that we have correct i think i

2:23:59think where we see it is um and i think you're going to see this with the next next fiscal year on the following fiscal year's budget is essentially and we were talking about the hopeful development on san pablo avenue for instance and revenues going up those revenues rather than going towards

2:24:23you know a new senior center a new library or wherever they're going are going to be the reason we can cover our pension costs they're not it's not going to be for new services or new facilities or anywhere and may be a good reason why we're pursuing a charter city designation to

2:24:39find new sources of revenue because of this issue okay okay um and then i just have one picayune question in in the um analysis you give the hazardous tree removal for twenty thousand dollars small amount i i used to be on that urban forest committee and i heard a lot bigger

2:25:00numbers than that is this what was they came up with or who is this all the city needed after the storms that we had or is this all that we gave them so there's a budget for this purpose in uh public works for 350 000 and this happened to be i think a tree on jacinta

2:25:18that needed to be taken down and it was taken down and when this type of thing happens we don't wait for the budget to show up we get take care of things first and then come back with the budget amendment so this 20 000 is something that has already happened so it's not future

2:25:32pruning issues that we need as a city generally okay thank you okay any other questions comments i think you had answered um both the questions i had one was the discrepancy in overtime costs at first it said six hundred thousand and there was six hundred and ninety thousand but you

2:25:57explained that that was um the difference in which we were reimbursed and that was accounted for an extra ninety thousand dollars um and then the other thing i was looking at was the nine percent fund reserve versus a seven percent and i was wondering if it had to do with the

2:26:14senior center and and sure enough it was so i think my questions have been answered thank you okay a public comment and one speaker cordell so uh good evening uh mayor quinto staff thank you mark for that presentation um everything is well said so i hope you adopt this um

2:26:39mid-year budget and we can move forward with it thank you yeah i actually have a a comment um i i took the item 4d which was a consent item and uh took the opportunity to look back at our general plan um and and for those that are out there in the audience will wouldn't be surprised

2:27:04if i focused in on um city facilities which is in chapter six of the general plan for those are that are gonna do their homework on page 6-20 it is the goals and policies and that's where the various policy measures are are implemented or highlighted and i'm going to read two of them

2:27:30because they they speak to the overall budget and part of our budget tonight that we're looking at is that is the senior center and council member fidelity brings up some real issues about the future pers liabilities cf 1.1 safety this is from 1999. so this just to give

2:27:52you a sense of how long we've been dealing with this with this concept place the highest priority on ensuring the safety of existing community facilities especially the public safety building the community center and neighborhood houses including seismic retrofits and necessary upgrades

2:28:11and under implementation measures it says capital improvement program an asset replacement fund which i've not seen any presentation about an asset replacement fund the third bullet under implementation is special taxes as council member fidelity uh just brought up about his

2:28:30conversation about santa cruz and the charter committee and finally grant funds which i know we've been seeking grant funds for many of our structures the other one that i want to highlight in this context of annual budget mid-year budget reviews is cf 1.6 which is new facilities

2:28:52and it says build a new city hall which fortunately from 1999 we've done build a new public safety building a gymnasium teen center multi-purpose facility cultural and art center and children's art center in canyon trail and unfortunately this goes on to another

2:29:12page that splits in the document but again it focuses on how to implement this is capital improvement program which to the best my knowledge we don't necessarily we have a program but we don't necessarily have funding for it and special taxes so um you know i appreciate the

2:29:29presentation this evening but with that extra cost going to capital our capital budget going from you highlighted it at 250 280 300 000 let's say average a year to this year jumping up to almost 800 and some thousand dollars reflects the fact that we have a number

2:29:51of structures that were built in the 60s and that our deferred maintenance costs are going to only increase our ongoing costs and so whether whether or not we choose to become a charter city i would envision that that line item will need to increase to maintain what we have

2:30:12if not uh try and figure out how we more um such as some of the public spaces that uh again this 1999 report talks about buying more open space and doing lots of things and it all takes money um so i would encourage anybody who's out there um you know looking at what we're doing

2:30:39then we actually have a blueprint from 1999 that tells us what we should be doing and no one i i think i can safely say no one on this council was actually on this council in 1999 so none of us were the ones that that thought this up and so we're we are just carrying forward a

2:30:58plan that's out there and and i would just have it was a great opportunity to remind myself of what where our general plan is and how it can guide us on something as fundamental as our budget so um that that i did want to make that comment uh that that we are uh

2:31:21that our budget is a reflection of our general plan our general plan is a reflection of uh a lot of thought that occurred in 1997 1998 um and 1999.

2:31:34and and if you i will make the motion if you give me an opportunity to get to get back to the document that this is one i'm trying to do paperless but it's it comes with the uh yes i have it i move a resolution of the city council of the city of el cerrito amending the

2:31:54spending authority by fund for the city of el cerrito for fiscal year 2017-2018 second we have a motion by lineman and second by uh pardo okimoto all in favor unanimous ocean carries thank you thank you for your report appreciate it okay city council local and regional

2:32:26liaison assignments any reports yeah the solid waste authority met since we last met and is continuing to look at the [Music] the document that governs our joint powers agreement and at this point there's it seems to be moving forward smoothly at the last meeting we did look at a

2:32:55couple of things that uh on on what the reserve of that organization would be and the so this this discussion tonight about reserve policy certainly um is close to our discussion about reserve policies at the at recycle more uh the reserve the recycle more has um

2:33:16an annual operating cost of about a million dollars so that's their total budget uh that that's not they don't have the same fund balances quite exactly like we have the recommendation after by a third party and by the city managers who independently looked at it is to have

2:33:38about um two-thirds about an eight-month operating uh cost it with the idea being that there are risks and so they looked at the various risks that would be needed to be covered by a reserve policy and developed that recommendation they also have identified a a

2:34:03capital um budget or or a capital account and that one yeah i can't remember what we finally resolved it was quite high upon initial proposal of 1.2 million um after much debate with uh the other representatives uh we i believe if i recall correctly we set that at about

2:34:30750 000 so there is will be a there will be a reduction in the amount that recycle more currently is holding on to uh currently recycle more for those two accounts is something just north of 2 million and it will be reduced to something just under 1.5 million so we we have the opportunity to

2:34:56potentially see roughly 10 percent of that come towards us it won't be a significant amount for us but we we did do the hard lifting of trying to set uh policy around what reserve policies are needed at recycle more so i just wanted to report on that and then we

2:35:21the board of mce met last thursday and we continue to we have a good budget we have a good uh policy the expansions are going forward the all the nine new communities of contra costa will be uh becoming customers in i think it's april 1. okay good rochelle no further comments okay

2:35:49well done okay the next regularly scheduled city council meeting is tuesday april 3rd 2018 at 7 pm means adjourned you