Special City Council Meeting and Regular City Council Meeting May 15, 2018

0:01:46every roll call please councilmember abelson here councilmember fideli president councilmember lyman here mayor pro tem pardo comodo president mayor cainto here thank you next uh pledge of allegiance to the flag or observation a moment of silence please join me i please pledge

0:02:08allegiance 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 okay council staff communications we had a a meeting an interview with a candidate uh who's interested in

0:02:37streets oversight committee and i'd like to announce that uh vanessa hill uh will uh be part of the streets oversights committee and i welcome her to that committee um greg do you have any i i do i'm gonna build on your uh announcement and uh remind people that we still have

0:02:59vacancies on um our boards and commissions i there are two vacancies that are upcoming on the arts and culture commission uh this the same committee that the mayor just announced at one appointment to it still has two vacancies committee on aging has a couple vacancies crime prevention

0:03:20committee has vacancies design review board has one vacancy economic development committee has seven vacancies the environmental quality committee has couple and the urban forest committee has uh nine vacancies so we are uh constantly seeking good applicants for these boards and

0:03:38commissions you can find our applicant form on the website or by contacting the city clerk at two one five four three zero five thank you great rachelle i wanted to do an early report back from my alta bates save all debates uh subcommittee with mayor erigen's office

0:04:00we met this last month and we are going to be planning or we are in the process of planning another community forum and this time the forum will be held in contra costa county and it is scheduled for the fall there's not a date yet but that will be coming up and then we also wanted to point out

0:04:21the assembly member tony thurman has a bill assembly bill 2874.

0:04:28which could hopefully protect the closure and make it a little bit more difficult it's very similar to the bill sb687 which the council supported last year and we'll be hopefully looking at that bill a little closer here on the dais thank you okay janet i don't have anything okay paul

0:04:49fideli uh yeah i just wanted to throw a bravo on the hillside festival last week it was great three days a whole new concept david weinstein i think is here thank you very much for all your hard work it was a friendly beautiful day and it allowed all of us in el cerrito and

0:05:07people from other cities to find new trails in el cerrito because the program had beginnings from each different trailhead and it was just wonderful in human relations committee i wanted to make a note that we have some good news on loving day coming up in june there will

0:05:22be two events one will be at the off the grid uh venue that we have there and then we were lucky enough to get for at our theater our presentation from chris perry and and sandy steer the two locals whose gay marriage case came before the supreme court and they won and they will be there to

0:05:43talk about their book to show their movie and another aspect of loving day and why it's so important so thank you very much can i just add the loving day off the grid will be on june 13th great thank you okay thank you um let's see uh back in may 2nd uh so we did have a san

0:06:02francisco housing action coalition and i was joined by mayor tom butt and we spoke about our housing needs and what is uh what we're working on here regionally and it was great to uh attend that and and speak to uh folks that are interested in what we're doing here in west contra costa and then i

0:06:24attended a el cerrito mixer with the richmond rainbow pride as well as a contra costa pride um rainbow pride and that was with the el cerrito chamber on the third i attended the contra costa mayor's conference that was held at the cobra the ford cobra museum at uh

0:06:47in martinez and we had a speaker that spoke on uh racial justice issues and family law on the fifth i was joined by my mayor pro tem rachelle okimoto and uh we were we participated in the cinco de mayo parade in richmond and san pablo and participated uh by having rochelle uh

0:07:13i could not fit in the car but rochelle was able to fit in the back seat of my miata and we rode down 23rd street and i walked most of the way thank you for that yeah that was fun so on the 8th i was in sacramento for senior rally day and there were about 600 people that

0:07:34attended and i know i see here a couple people that that were participating and i want to congratulate i will congratulate them later for a job well done and we were able to have a long list of legislators in from sacramento senators and assembly members from up and down the

0:07:58state uh who spoke about that and uh also on the ninth i spoke uh at the berkeley country club with our el cerrito rotarians uh on the state of the city and i also had a chance to meet our next generation of rotarians on the 11th i attended the sixth annual api

0:08:23awards dinner that was last night and six on a raise were honored and then at this afternoon i attended the chamber luncheon with great food from the salsa restaurant on san pablo avenue and also we had our chief of police paul keith attending so oral communications from the public

0:08:54i'm yasmir we have two requests to speak cordell hindler followed by dave weinstein good evening uh mayor quinto council member of staff i am carter handler richmond so what i just passed around was um i invited and i'm cordially inviting you to the richmond promise scholar

0:09:13celebration on may 23rd which is a week from this this coming wednesday at from six to eight in the richmond auditorium it should be a lot of fun and our keen our our our mayor tom buss gonna like give the um keynote address so so you're all invited so and then the

0:09:33second thing is um i have a future agenda and a request for you all because i've been doing my research and then other cities around west county has doing like a travel policy and i said if other cities can do uh the travel policy i know el cerrito could do too so

0:09:49at some point if you're gonna like you know have it like you know uh agendize it at some point and then the third thing is um i have i did notice that um i've seen el cerrito police coming down on in around my area and i and then not only my area but other parts of the

0:10:05southern district of richmond and and we've had a conversation about this and we said we have seen more of el cerrito police than we than we do richmond police and i'm like this is unreal so hopefully this this issue will be uh be resolved so i'm done i'm gonna let dave

0:10:21take it away uh mayor and members of the council i'm here representing trail trekkers just to talk very briefly about the recent hillside festival that uh councilman uh fidelity had mentioned i think it was very successful this was the first time we did it as a three-day event it was

0:10:44the fifth time we've done it the other times we're all one day we decided to do it three days to spread out the activities we eliminated what had been a big group gathering area for several reasons one being that not many people ever ever gathered there and it's really

0:11:00a hiking festival so we had events coming in from different um parts of the hillside we had if you counted the people there which i did because i went to every event we had 350 people if you figure out how many came to more than one event we had 300 unique people which is maybe 50

0:11:1960 more than we had last year i think the festival is doing well we're at the point where we want to keep going like this you know 14 events averaging 25 per event we're at the point where we are refining it and before i forget let me just say it's not just trail trackers it

0:11:36was the city's environmental quality committee which not just helped put it on but paid for it okay so like for example all the speakers all the leaders really know their stuff really well and present it really well okay that's great we want to fill in drop a couple of events that

0:11:52were poorly conceived get a couple of other good uh um leaders on mammals and insects that kind of thing you know sure the geology hike doesn't have to go an hour over length and there's a few other things that we can fix up like that but really it's a great festival

0:12:08and what i really learned if you go to a lot of these events you hear about the geology you hear about the plants you hear about the plants again you hear about the indians the early settlers the rocks and then at the end of the day you sit on the dirt for 45 minutes and you

0:12:21meditate while it turns dark you end up with an appreciation for the hillside and really for the city of el cerrito that's way deeper than you get from just going to one event it really all comes together so we really want to keep this thing going and i like to thank the city for helping us

0:12:36do it we have to pick a date in may it's not easy so many things go on in may but we'll pick a date in may we'll do it again next year oh yeah one thing we want to do is to have some event that's going to be accessible for people with mobility problems we're going to work that out

0:12:50we're going to do that next year we're also going to have a photo contest for young and old alike so it should be a lot of fun thank you again thank you oh no other special okay good so we'll do uh adoption of the consent calendar and that's items for a24h a is minute of minutes of approval

0:13:13b is inclusionary zoning requirements for new residential development projects including fees in lieu of on-site affordable units c is consolidation of the november 6 2018 general municipal election d is national public works month proclamation e is on-call engineering and project

0:13:36management management services f is cash and investments report for quarter ending march 31st 2018.

0:13:44ge is support for assembly bill 1793 cannabis convictions resentencing h is support of the 2018 veterans and affordable housing bond act and do i have i wanted to pull g okay anything else you need a second on that what remains i second that do you have a motion oh second thing you

0:14:13know what you did the pull all right we don't need a second in the poll but i i think i think uh miss abelson you were making the motion i was going to i didn't hear that i thought somebody else i thought you had i just pulled g oh oh you didn't i'll make a motion okay

0:14:30i'll make a motion uh to adopt items um for a through four [Music] f and um 4-h okay here's a second that motion okay so i have a motion by ableton second by fidelity all in favor hi hi okay so bud gee support of us assembly bill 1793 uh cannabis convictions resentencing

0:15:04yes so we looked at this um the resolution for this assembly bill 1793 at the last council meeting and some of the council members had some concerns so i've spent the last um you know several couple of weeks since the last council meeting to try to address some of those concerns

0:15:23and i did bring forward some amendments tonight and i also have a member of uh assembly member bronte's office here to speak with us to answer any questions about the concerns that were raised at the last meeting you like to come up mayor if i may i'll i'll ask the

0:15:44question uh just so that uh you have a question to answer from can you tell us the status of the bill is it in committee where is it uh where is it good evening uh mayor council members the city of el cerrito um it's actually an appropriations committee right now um

0:16:02it is currently on a suspense file uh there's a little joke in the capital like where all good bills go to die but hopefully ours won't due to its price uh price tag which is uh considerable but uh we feel very necessary so it's it's in the it's in the appropriations committee in suspense but

0:16:24it potentially could come out and yes if it was to come out would it be revised because our concerns uh that we expressed two weeks ago is that it didn't necessarily address the the timing wasn't necessarily addressed it did discuss when all 500 000 cases needed to be reviewed and brought

0:16:42forward by uh the ag i remember correctly first i uh but it didn't say how long the da's would have to to process that large load so sure um you're right so initially when we proposed it it was it was 30 days we've uh since renegotiated that and we're still actually working with that

0:17:00timeline right now we are currently working with the da's association we're working very closely with them and we're trying to find a timeline that makes sense for everyone here the 30 days was something that is has been most likely shelved um we are looking at a longer time period right

0:17:16now that exact time period we're not sure of um that's part of what we're still negotiating um what we are thinking about is that there might not be one size fits all so for different counties we might propose a different uh a different timeline depending on the the

0:17:30volume of cases that they have so um but we do not have a specific time period right now um we know that it will it will probably be somewhere in between but we're not sure again between the 30 days and a year time frame to review the cases and those cases will be reviewed by prosecutors

0:17:48that have a right everyone will have a right to that and they they will be reviewed for certain criteria and then those will be eligible and if they are they can always bring them forward and they can challenge them and how would that be paid for uh paid by the general fund

0:18:06so the the um i believe the the da's are paid by the county yes so the gen so the state would give the count county money to do that with that's correct and how would they get the professional help um assigned to do the work do you mean so they would have to most

0:18:28likely increase staff both with the the the department of justice and at the the prosecution and at the the district attorney's office so how i mean how would they do that and so right now we've we've allocated money for for an increase of staff for the department of justice and we're also

0:18:44advocating for an increase of funding for a district attorney's office and maybe courts depending on where they're going to how they're going to be involved in this process we um we might be amending that as well in other words we might not be sending the records from the doj's

0:18:58responsible for finding any anyone who might be eligible and then sending those records to originally the courts which would then send them to the prosecution now we're thinking about eliminating the courts and just having the prosecution do that and so we want to send more

0:19:11money to both of those because they'll be doing most of the heavy lifting i mean are we talking about lawyers doing this um it could be it could be lawyers it could be staff what do you mean staff sort of maybe a paralegal maybe someone who works in an administrative role um

0:19:27through that through have a lot of um my daughter happens to be a just a deputy district attorney mm-hmm and they want her to work seven days a week you mean on because of this or just in general on a regular basis now already and so what i'm not seeing is where there's

0:19:51enough um professional expertise to get this done and there but the real issue is that they have other requirements that they have to fulfill like uh a prisoner you know somebody who's in custody their right to speedy trial for example i you know some about what

0:20:16i'm saying i get off tv i'm sorry but that's fine that's actually correct yeah so the uh but you know so people when they are arrested they have a right to a hearing within a certain amount of time and i know that my daughter because of that always has to be back

0:20:37bright and early monday morning because over the weekend there are three days and they takes a lot of time to handle these and they are under are very severely understaffed now because they of the lack of funds to hire attorneys so i'm having a hard time figuring out how

0:20:56uh this can um well the intent is you know basically outstanding the ability to actually make make it happen without um giving up maybe somebody else's right you know right to a speedy trial or um or something or you know or just you know they just sort of close shop and

0:21:29this is what they do until it's done uh you know just that's where i don't see it being workable um because it's all the system right now is very unworkable certainly i i oh sorry anyway that that's all i had you we now have gone through my knowledge based on the topic

0:21:49so that's the okay about all i can say on that but thank you yes um so this is obviously an evolving concept and piece of legislation but it's a concept that got a six to nothing vote in the public safety committee so it's a concept that's supportive i did check

0:22:08this last week the governors may revise did not provide any money for conviction re-sentencing even though they had a lot of marijuana cannabis additions to the budget to help with enforcement of other other issues um and the one thing i'm um believe is that it takes money and on the 25th is when

0:22:29suspense file will be determined isn't that correct that's correct so i think we need what i don't see anywhere is a message that this council wants adequate funding for this bill and i think conceptually we just need to say that somewhere in whatever we send here and i

0:22:44was coming prepared to provide that amendment to the previous resolution is that we we know it's in suspense we hope that the policy makers that decide to either keep it or take it out decide how much money it will take to get this done because that's the key to

0:23:00this so i'm ready to to move this with adequate funding comments added to this in some way that the city council supports adequate funding to get this done right now it's a concept thank you for your comments thank you well i'm going to ask the council member purdue okamoto

0:23:23you handed out something that potentially begins to address that so i was hoping that you could speak to this and most importantly could you tell us where the changes are yes okay so in order to uh i believe address the concerns of the council and still continue

0:23:46um in full spirit of what assembly member bonta is trying to do here there were a few amendments that i made to my original resolution and the first is in the very title of the resolution after el cerrito i wanted to in insert conditionally and basically conditionally is based upon the the

0:24:17further comments that i'm going to make here so i'm also adding three whereas clauses whereas the city whereas el cerrito city council has expressed concerns that the april 12 2018 amended version did not provide adequate timeline for each county district attorney to

0:24:43evaluate each case and whereas assembly member bonte's office stated that the bill is under collaborative revision with the california district attorney's office and whereas the anticipated revisions address the concerns the council expressed on may 1st 2018 and then there's a little bit of um

0:25:09cleanup to the last or to i'm sorry to the first now therefore be it resolved um there was a typo so to correct it's not he it is the um that was after city council or before before city council okay that's right it's right there which city council oh in the in here

0:25:37okay um and then and then insert following ab1793 as collaboratively developed with the california district attorney's office and following also following ab1793 we're going to insert in between district attorney and to review adequate time and adequate funding

0:26:17as suggested by council member fidelity a question about that you said um the california district attorney's office i don't yeah i was going to ask the speaker it's actually the district attorney association so they represent the state and they are working very

0:26:34closely with us and they do not oppose this as it stands right now so and is that a possessive district attorney's association yes it is they don't oppose this no um and what were they told would happen regarding funding for it um just what we're saying we are uh asking for

0:26:55well actually the senate appropriations just actually came up with a figure that they think will be adequate and it's it ranges from 6.9 to 28 million so that's what they're expecting that will be adequate funding for the for the measure so what are the da's um supposed to

0:27:12um what is the thing that they are what is the task that they are attempting to accomplish is it to um identify cases or um handle the case and you know make it is it look that's a great question so um so yes so the the department of justice will do the identification they'll the people

0:27:39who are eligible under prop 64 they'll say they'll write they'll identify them and they'll reach out to them and they'll also send that information to the district attorney's office the district attorney's office then would be able to review those cases and see if

0:27:50they would actually if they are eligible under their criteria which um would have to meet certain specifications and if they are not then the district attorney can say we challenge this and we are challenging it for x a number of reasons and they have the ability to do that and

0:28:04they'll bring that in front of the court so how do they figure that that the da's can process it because it seems to me from my uh observation of tv at least that um it isn't as simple as because they always bargain the cases down so that sort of sorted to bring things to

0:28:31conclusion i think so that if they if somebody was arrested let's say on five charges by the time things are said and done it might be three and part of the reason is because you have to be able not only to think somebody did something but you had to be able to prove it

0:28:50i mean that's what the d.a has to do so if they can't prove it then there's no point in wasting everybody's time um handling it so so all of that is wrapped into uh what would go on here so i i that's where i'm right so i think i think so in the stages you're talking

0:29:12about i think you're talking about sort of arraignment stages so when the police make an arrest and that then those charges are made out formally by the district attorney's office and they they have to be they have to be adequately proven like you said um by a certain

0:29:25amount of criteria before they're actually presented into a formal charging document and then that document goes forward and then those people and then they have the negotiation that you're talking about what we're talking about here is is a little less involved

0:29:36in than that um we are saying that there's a limited set of criteria that you are eligible for this the the department of justice will will identify those people who are eligible under that criteria then they'll send it to them and that's why we we we understand the

0:29:49times and the time issue because that might take some time to actually review those cases and say we want to review this and say you know i don't think we i don't think this is okay to expunge this record or to uh reduce this record and other ones i say yes this is fine we can determine pretty

0:30:05quickly that this will this is something we think is eligible for expungement but that will take some time so you're right that's why we are working with the timeline is an important issue which we are working on right now to try to get that and we're working very closely with the district

0:30:18attorney's association so i think they would be a good source to say whether you know what they can handle or what they can't handle where does it actually it just doesn't actually say where is that addressed in the in the words here what what are you referring

0:30:37to specifically so we just changed it to district attorneys association um this talks about time but yeah the district it says district attorney but no i'm not questioning those words okay um the um the cost where does it have the cost part of it in may or if i may because

0:31:04i'm actually going to recommend that we add it in two places one that uh mr purdue okamoto already talked about but we could put it in the very first whereas clause that is being inserted whereas the el cerrito city council expressed concerns that the april 12 amended version did not provide adequate

0:31:21timeline and funding for each county district attorney to evaluate each case and then council member rochelle perdue okamoto said added the words and funding so reduced sentence or expungement and allow the district attorney adequate time and funding to review and challenge

0:31:41the re-sentencing or expungement if the person meets the eligibility criteria so that that was that that and funding was already proposed it's not in the writing but was proposed so it would be an emotion that we would potentially make today okay can i just ask a question isn't

0:32:05the great majority of what you're talking about minor yes that a huge amount of these cases will quickly go through the process that's what we believe i'm i mean i can't guarantee that right now but that's what we believe based on the previous records that we've had um

0:32:20the people that have other convictions for more serious crimes as well they that's what's going to take the time exactly exactly there and they're not they wouldn't be necessarily eligible right away under the doj's criteria so they might not even make it to that

0:32:33first step and how did the department of justice did they talk any about drug cartels and how that would be affected if there was a marijuana drug cartel related offense um you mean like if someone's known to be associated in a cartel or some sort of like a major uh right because i think

0:32:56that was one of the other uh concerns of our own uh police association um yeah again if you have a if you're part of something like that that's a much more serious crime and i think that would certainly the red lights would go off and you would certainly be reviewed by

0:33:10the district attorney's association or sorry the district attorney and they would review that to make sure but i i we we again we're not really we're not really thinking that those are the kind of people we would sort of cover under this correct and i think just to

0:33:23reiterate the last uh sentence of of the first now for there be resolved that the criteria does not present an unreasonable risk to public safety exactly written into the into the ordinance or the the bill yes and you have to be again the criteria as you have to have you have to be uh

0:33:41qualified under those things so if you are a public safety risk then you won't be eligible for cri for expungement and this is mainly just to sort of correct if it you know correct law now what's legal now um you should not be punished for continually that's mostly

0:33:54what it's for thank you but the the actual language about um the funding is where that's what i was actually wanting wondering about i discussed doing an amendment that greg has talked about it and the vice mayor has said that we would insert it yes specifically okay

0:34:15because that is what goes along with having the bodies to do it yes right now they don't exist and to that point we i mean i also understand that i uh some of my friends are you know we worked as public defenders and you know they even in new york they had to be in uh court on

0:34:32saturday night till one one o'clock in the morning because of rules in new york city and how you have to have speedy trial and arrangement arraignment so we understand those uh those time constraints okay good would you like to uh read that motion again sure so i'd like to to make a motion that

0:34:53the city of el cerrito the the resolution of the council of the city of el cerrito conditionally supporting ab1793 cannabis convention convictions resentencing okay as as amended with your with your submittals as well as the additional amendments of changing adding and funding changing

0:35:15office attorney's office to attorneys association and adding and funding inadequate time correct okay funding of the to the da's correct to the county d.a okay is there a second i second that on favor hi i'll oppose i'm gonna abstain which carries for zero one thank you thank you very much

0:35:46thank you you've gotten some money to your daughter next is a proclamation recognizing lgbt month in the city of el cerrito and i believe we have a couple of people here from contra costa rainbow pride come on in uh mayor council good evening i'm jonathan cook from the rainbow community

0:36:18center of contra costa county and i'm robin kuslitz from the rainbow community center contra costa county um we the rainbow community center has been active supporting the lgbtq community center our community within contra costa since 1992 officially forming a physical

0:36:37location in concord in 1996 we were thrilled to be able to have a physical location here in el cerrito as of 2017 so thank you for opening your doors for being a welcoming and inclusive community and for the support that the city provides we're coming up on our one year

0:36:56anniversary of opening up our new thrift store in the wonderful city of el cerrito we're happy to be here we've been wanting to come to west county for a long time and we're hoping to be able to bring some more of our programs currently we have free hiv testing a

0:37:09food pantry and our thrift store and we've had counseling and case management services so we're hoping to bring some more of our programming over maybe work with ryze and bring some more youth programming out to west county um it's sorely needed and um i wanted to talk a little bit

0:37:24about pride month pride month is a really big deal for the lgbt community um it's a month to recognize the contributions of the lgbt community to the world um what we do what we strive for and for a city to fly the rainbow flag for pride month really shows the commitment and not only shows

0:37:44that they're accepting but affirming of the lgbt community and it really makes me proud to be able to be in a city that is affirming of the lgbt community thank you so much thank you very much any other speakers we do we have one speaker okay and guess who this is yeah

0:38:02so good evening uh mayor quinto council members this is this is a very uh a wonderful proclamation because as um as he uh he just stated um this is a commitment we want to teach our young people you know like they don't have to be afraid to express themselves freely so

0:38:22this is a wonderful opportunity so and i forgot to bring the flyers with me so you are all invited to attend a richmond rainbow pride um celebration on june 3rd it's gonna be from 10 a.m until three it's gonna be at um lucretia edwards uh park uh you're gonna like have some you're gonna hear some

0:38:41some some entertainment you're gonna hear like all this good stuff i say please do come it would be very helpful because we want everyone we want everyone to come not just we want el cerrito to come we want all these people to start coming to our events so it would be very helpful uh and it's on

0:38:57a sunday too so come and join us i very much appreciate you both being here and i want to congratulate richmond rainbow pride and contra costa rainbow pride for doing such a fantastic job and opening up the community center this it's been almost a year now so i

0:39:18congratulate you we had a large turnout at uh the rainbow mixer with the el cerrito chamber and to see uh our city uh starting this out i congratulate our council for uh supporting our community and supporting uh diversity and uh supporting our lgbt community here at city hall and

0:39:43city-wide and county-wide so i'd like to invite everyone here for a quick photo um actually i i neglected to call mr miller he would also like to speak i'm so sorry good evening elmer good evening mayor kento council members and staff i just wanted to add to the comments

0:40:04that you've heard about the rainbow flag i think that there's that's a very important thing that you're deciding to do because whether you're a member of the lgbt community or whether you're not the member of that community both of those groups are members of the

0:40:24el cerrito community so it's a reminder with pride if you're in the lgbt community that your community is supporting you for those of us not in that community it gives us a visible sight every time we go past city hall on the avenue that that's part of the values of our community and for

0:40:47those members of our community that might not share that values it's give them a reminder that they really should so thank you i urge you to do what you're intending to do all along thanks thank you you have a camera right yeah okay should we should we make a motion first yes

0:41:09okay make a motion for this uh proclamation can i make a comment for you sir i just want to say i was at that mixer and i just loved the space i had never been in there and the goods that you're selling but more important the services that you're providing i didn't know where you were

0:41:24providing those services to elsa readings thank you for that okay sure i'll move city council to the city of el cerrito proclamation recognizing june is lgbt pride month in the city of el cerrito second half oh i was gonna second it oh with a comment oh you're sticking with

0:41:45the comment okay that's okay um i uh want to say that i think even those of us who are not members of the uh uh community we but who live in el cerrito but for lack of a better way to put it we can also have pride in having in the fact that the um that it was in our community that you

0:42:12chose to relocate so i think that's something that we can be proud about that you wanted to be part of our the that you are as you are now right part of our community uh so you are the community we're all together i'm trying to ineloquently say and thank you okay being here and with

0:42:33that i seconded it okay so we have a motion by lyman second by abelson all in favor all right that's unanimous five zero okay let's okay [Laughter] okay so okay next we have uh an age-friendly community presentation and the presentation is by uh debbie toth welcome

0:45:01thank you good evening good evening mayor and city council members thank you so much for having me here i'm gonna forget to click through this just so you know hopefully you have it in your packet so you can follow along when i forget to click through it you should

0:45:16all have in your pack it's the slideshow as well as the um contra costa senior policy platform so um i am here um you are the 19th presentation we are doing um bless you i'm with you i just want you to know if you think i'm tired it's not that i'm allergic to absolutely everything right

0:45:39now um and i might scratch my eyes out during my presentation don't mind me um this is our 19th presentation in contra costa county so 19 cities and towns and i'm super happy to be ending here um in such an inclusive city um so i'm gonna back up and give you just a

0:45:57tiny bit of background so um in case you hadn't noticed there is this massively growing aging demographic in in our nation in our state and particularly in contra costa county and as we were starting to look at sort of some of these staggering statistics that we have 7 000 people turning 65 in

0:46:21the state of california every week it's pretty crazy if you think about that 20 of californians will be 65 years or older in 2030 and we've done very little if anything to adequately prepare for it and when i went and looked at the legislative and advocacy priorities

0:46:43for our county i found a 47-page document that did not include the word seniors or older adults and i was astounded and at that time we had a vacancy in our county in our director of aging and adult services and so at choice in aging we started working with the advisory council on aging and

0:47:04said let's let's do something about this and so we gathered together stakeholders and people who touch the aging population from transportation to homeless populations to veterans to the health system to public health to all of the different meals on wheels non-profit organizations for-profit

0:47:22organizations counties cities and we had representation from aging commissions and we came together and we were kicked off we had two of the members of the board of supervisors who participated als all board of supervisors had staff present and representation from west central east

0:47:39south contra costa county was in the room where we were guided through a planning process that took a day and a half we were led by professor taurus gill who's out of ucla he's a policy wonk he was a three-time presidential appointee who helped guide us through this process

0:47:56and visioning and we created this document called the contra costa senior policy platform and i think one of the things that helped us sort of push forward this messaging because you don't have to love old people i love old people that doesn't have to be your gig it's my gig

0:48:11but you do have to recognize that as a society they're included in our society and in contra costa county um the population and these are by the by california department of finance numbers not debbie toath numbers the population that's aged 65 to 74 from the years 2010 to 2060 is going to grow

0:48:31by 125 percent 75 to 84 is going to grow by 198 and people who are 85 and older are going to grow by 299 almost 50 percent of those people in that last age cohort are going to have alzheimer's disease or a related dementia again you don't have to love old people

0:48:52i do but in that last age cohort that percentage of the population that's going to have alzheimer's or dementia is going to cost medicare five times what somebody without alzheimer's or dementia costs and we're not doing anything to plan for it or provide services or allow opportunities

0:49:12for people to age in place and so that's why we came up with this process that's why we did the aging platform we created a shared understanding of the demographic trends that are happening what the living environment is like here and the health conditions in addition to access to care

0:49:28and janet can tell you all about access because it's not it's not equal for everyone we articulated our policy platform to improve service access and quality of life for seniors and we wanted to get the endorsement so we went to the board of supervisors and we said hey

0:49:46here's our policy platform adopted we went through their 47-page document that had children homeless veterans people who have substance abuse issues name any population they were in there except the aging population and so they added this into their advocacy platform and if you'll notice on the

0:50:05fourth point advocate the first part was to get the board of supervisors and the second part was to get city councils involved and so here we are at the city council part and what's exciting about the city council part is that we're inviting you to the fun part of it which is planning

0:50:22for a world where we have 80 cities what are 880 cities no it's not that freeway but it's kind of cool that it coincides with our freeway um so 880 cities are um sort of a vision of if we build cities and communities so that an eight-year-old can thrive in them or an 80 year old can thrive in

0:50:44them then anybody can thrive in them we have a problem we build our cities for healthy 30 year olds not everybody who lives in our cities is a healthy 30 year old and so we need to start addressing that issue and so we um working with the advisory council on aging we're able to get a grant through

0:51:02the scan foundation and we have some other supporters as well including carlton senior living who are going to help put this event on we're bringing down the professionals from 880 cities it's a nonprofit organization in toronto they're flying down and on may 30 they're hosting an

0:51:18880 learning lab and in that learning lab we have representation from city council members from throughout the entire county we're hoping to get a minimum of two city council members from each city to participate in this learning lab um it is a nine o'clock i think two to three thirty

0:51:37it is it is an all day thing and um actually when i presented in antioch i had this woman run out after me hey wait hey wait what she said i'm a city planner how come we're not invited and i said oh you are so um in the event that a city council member can't be there all day or if you

0:51:55think it would really be beneficial to bring a city a city planner i would encourage you to do that because the the conversation that she had with me outside was we're where it starts not at the city council level so when a developer comes in and they want to develop something be

0:52:09it a park be it an open space whatever it is a bench even in a community they have to come to us first and if we had a checklist that said you have to meet this this and this standard before they even started doing any of the work it would cut out a lot of that part of

0:52:23the process and heartache for the developer and for the city council or planning commission or whoever is addressing it so um in this learning lab um we're going to understand elements that create age-friendly communities public space transportation we're going

0:52:37to identify barriers because we have to talk about the elephants in the room because they're there and we're going to develop and assess ideas to become more age-friendly and we're gonna look at transportation project ideas i'm sure janet will lend some great ideas to this and public

0:52:50space related project ideas and we're actually gonna we're gonna learn about what age-friendly communities look like but we're also going to work in little workshops and breakout groups and work on based on our geographic area different projects that we can do and wouldn't it be phenomenal if our

0:53:05goal was to have age friendly community that is welcoming to all whether one is 8 years old or 80 years old so anyway um i imagine that you have the invitations as well and if all five of you want to come we'll be happy to have all five of you come um i know that that's very

0:53:24difficult for people who are working full-time in addition to being city council members but again you can if you think it would be helpful send city planners to join us as well but we really really hope to have you there and be a part of the process we were on our

0:53:38planning call last week and going through the detailed agenda and i'm just super excited it's going to be really fun and it's going to be really educational thank you great thank you um any questions for debbie okay yes um it's this event you're having is on north widget lane which i don't

0:54:01recognize where is that so it's it used to be called the shadeland's art center it's it's uh it's where typically like the alzheimer's association near where they do their walk in in walnut creek um off of ignacio not too far from where john muir is so how is it accessible

0:54:24the facility is accessible yes transportation yes you won't be getting off and bart and going directly in there you'd have to take a bus or you'd have to find somebody who can transport you here i'm sure that we can arrange for that not at that hour it's too far i'm sure

0:54:41that we can arrange for that i don't get up that early oh well i can't arrange for that you're right yeah so maybe you have somebody go in the morning and you come in the afternoon it's up to you okay if i might just suggest if you plant in for future events if you plant

0:55:01them in places that are that are more accessible to getting around throughout the county it would be more viable i i couldn't agree more which is a strong suggestion as to why we should have more age-friendly and accessible communities but that's what was affordable and available

0:55:23uh paul any questions no questions but can i make a comment yes um as a senior citizen i i will try to make this event and maybe janet and i can talk if i can convince you to wake up early enough i can give you a lift but thank you for this view on how cities should look i totally

0:55:43agree with the two transit and public spaces as being critical yeah i mean we have to as janet knows look at the cities through ada eyes as well but seniors deserve that as well and and i think you're right sometimes it may mean just a bench or two in a public place so that we you

0:56:03know uh we can take a breath and yeah move on from there so so thank you very much thank you michelle i just wanted to thank you for your work i i love the older generation myself i was raised by my grandparents and i saw the aging process very much up close and personal

0:56:23throughout my my childhood and my teenage years and one of my grandfathers had alzheimer's and it was it was it's very difficult a disease to live with my other grandfather had cancer and while i knew that one of them was in pain the other one i felt like we lost him before

0:56:42we lost him and so i just really appreciate the work that you're doing and it is something that i think about a lot so thank you thank you thank you for coming out tonight i'm sorry we were the last but i'm glad you saved us for last year i i didn't save you it was actually how

0:57:00it ended up working out but i'm i'm i'm actually really thrilled and i love having an engaged city council debbie i want to thank you thank you so much for last week and in sacramento and it was a fantastic rally and you brought folks from up and down the state

0:57:17including san bernardino county so meeting with many of the folks that attended and legislators in sacramento uh yeah i congratulate you and knowing that we do have legislators on our side in sacramento that are planning ahead and then with your help there you're letting everyone know in

0:57:39sacramento what needs to be done so i thank you for coming out here in el cerrito and thank you so much thanks for having me okay next is that annual crime report with our police chief chief paul keith good evening just give me a second to switch the powerpoint over okay were

0:58:00there any speakers for the last item no okay just making sure thank you okay good evening council members i'm paul keith your chief of police and i'm here to talk about the year of 2017 in review for the police department so to start off i'd like to recognize that the timing of this presentation is

0:58:32really fortuitous it's currently national police week and today is actually police memorial day so it's a day that we pay tribute to peace officers who have died or been disabled in the line of duty so i'm very honored to be here tonight to be talking about the great work that

0:58:47your police department has done on such a memorable day so once again this is the year of 2017 in review i like to talk about our mission statement because it brings us back around to the reasons why we do the things we do in el cerrito and the reasons why our officers work so hard to

0:59:03make our community safe we really are committed to serving our community to keeping them safe and also to enhancing the trust between ourselves and our community by acting in a professional manner and by showing leadership so our goals last year were to we had three main goals that we came together

0:59:22as an agency to really strive for our goals were to expand outreach increase traffic safety and increase the safety in business districts as i go through i think you'll find that i believe we did a really great job of expanding outreach and also increasing traffic safety in town and i think that

0:59:40there's still quite a bit of work to do on increasing the safety in our business districts and we're going to talk quite a bit about that today so to start out with in the our goal of expanding outreach we participate in a lot of public programs through the year in fact that was really

0:59:55the big push of what we did with our community we believe that getting out and meeting with our community one-on-one in a non-enforcement non-criminal investigative format really helps build understanding about where our police officers are coming from and also where our community

1:00:11members are coming from it's important for me and our administrators that our officers get the opportunity to view our community members not just as a traffic violator or the victim of a crime but also as people that are just like their neighbors in the communities that they live and we

1:00:27really want our police officers to view the residents of el cerrito in the community that comes here to shop and work as their neighbors as well so that is really the big goal of why we spend so much time doing events things like the taco tuesday event we did a couple weeks ago

1:00:44having pizza with the cops so that it gives people an opportunity to sit down side by side nothing's at stake in the encounter and so people can really be open about how their their perspective of crime in their community to pick officers brains and to learn more about officers and

1:00:58officers to learn more about our community this is a picture from a national night out this is really our main annual public event we did this event in partnership with the crime prevention committee uh this is uh you can kind of see in the background this is our barks and bells

1:01:12event last year in fact we just hosted our third barks and bells event on saturday at the el streeter plaza uh so barks and bells is an opportunity for people to come out and have a hosted event where we have security and alarm vendors for people to look at home

1:01:26security options this was actually the brainchild of one of our officers chris purdy he wanted to incorporate the component of dog adoption because he's a huge rescue dog fan and he wanted to give people the opportunity to increase their the safety of their home and also bring

1:01:42a new pet into the environment into their home environment one of the tenets of burglary prevention is that often an alert dog can deter a burglar from entering a house because burglars rightfully so are very leery of going into a yard or into a house that has a dog in it they

1:02:02don't want to be bit just like i think anybody else there's a picture one of our volunteers helping out at the pancake breakfast at recreation held last year a picture of one of our officers at the fourth of july event and this is an event our community liaison officer put together called

1:02:20santa reads it was at our elsewhere library and that's one of our police employees dressed up as santa reading books to the kids during the uh during the holidays um one of the uh one of the big components of putting together our outreach was creating a position that

1:02:35would really help us coordinate our efforts so before we had a community liaison officer individual officers would have programs they were trying to put on and events they were trying to hold but there really wasn't great agency coordination we all felt like we each

1:02:50kind of owned a role in promoting outreach but we didn't have somebody to kind of bring us all together and help focus us on events and getting the word out to the public about the good work we were doing so last year we created a position called the community liaison

1:03:04officer officer sarah perez is the person we selected for the position and she has really taken our community outreach up to the next level she she finds things that she thinks are relevant to the community and publicizes them through some of our social media outlets

1:03:20she's expanded our social media outlets over to instagram and she plans to do facebook next she also really helps officers put the pieces together for a public event idea they might have so an officer might say hey i want to have a taco tuesday for example and she goes and reaches out to the

1:03:36vendors during business hours to help make those things happen this was one of her events from last year it was a back to school water play event where basically all those kids got to have a water blaster battle with the police she also had a dunk tank so i'm off

1:03:53there kind of to the left and i look like i'm kind of wet because i think i got dunked about 10 or 12 times by kids throwing balls at the dunk tank um so these are some outreach stats we have for our current numbers for followers on our different social media accounts

1:04:07twitter by far is our biggest amount of followers one of the things that we notice is that a lot of times we get more bang for our buck out of things like nixle so nixle is a service that provides emails to residents that have things like our bi-weekly police blotter it also has

1:04:27press releases that we put out about major incidents and also public events we want people to know about we put a lot of the same information out on twitter but because of the format of twitter it cycles through very rapidly so we find that our residents don't always see uh police relevant things

1:04:44just because they have feeds that have many other people that they're following and so sometimes it's it's hard to notice uh things about the police department that come through but we find that nixle is a better way and we've found that a more reliable way of getting messages out to the people that

1:04:58are interested in what our police department's doing and instagram's relatively new to us it's more of a visual format and so we put a lot of pictures out there some are admittedly goofy but some are also very serious about the work we're doing so it's just another

1:05:12way for us to highlight the work of our officers so in traffic safety we focus on dui enforcement traffic education and enforcement collisions and also traffic engineering kind of with a smallie because the public works department really takes the lead role in engineering efforts

1:05:32so last year we held two dui checkpoints one on memorial day weekend and one during the winter holidays um the checkpoint on memorial day weekend was kind of an interesting one we did it at richmond street and uh we went through the whole event issued a couple tickets but nobody came

1:05:47through drunk and then as the officers were cleaning up at the end of the event this guy comes up and says hey what are you guys doing you know he drives up and then starts giving him a hard time about them putting away stuff well turns out that guy's drunk he just

1:05:59if he had just driven through going the other direction we would never even know him but he he wanted to make some comments about it and he turns out he was a drunk driver so that was the only drunk driver we got during that checkpoint um on the winter holidays we got quite a

1:06:11few more we did it in a more mainstream area we did it over by the don already bart station and uh had some better results from that last year our dui arrests were up 12 to 90 total um that is uh we did have a couple years where we had sort of a trough in dui dui arrests

1:06:29i don't know if you noticed on i think was ktvu either this morning or yesterday morning they were talking about the effect of uber on dui arrests and noticed that kind of across the bay area in particular dui arrests are down mothers against drunk driving were

1:06:43really wanted to bring home the point that people are still driving drunk so it's important to keep focusing on that but there probably has been some effect to ride sharing services cutting out some of those drunk drivers so that is a nice side effect of having more readily

1:06:56available ride services however there's still drunk drivers out there and one of the things we tell our officers is that your biggest opportunity to save a life in the evening is to take a drunk driver off the road i went to a class let's see it was early in my career i

1:07:12don't remember when exactly but i was a young officer and they said oh let's go around the room and raise your hand if you know of somebody who's either a family member or a friend or acquaintance of yours that has died as a result of a dui crash and so about half

1:07:25the class raised their hands i did it at the time because i didn't know anybody but a couple years later one of our former explorers was killed in berkeley by a drunk driver who ran a red light and t-boned their car and she ended up dying with some other she was

1:07:36in the car with some other cal students so dui enforcement also hits home very closely for me and i think a lot of our officers uh beyond that explorer also know other people that have been negatively affected by drunk driving so it remains a priority for the department

1:07:52so last year we also did internal training in standardized field sobriety tests which are kind of the statewide recognized field sobriety test to make sure officers are out there knowing what they're doing and doing it well last year we had an increase in traffic

1:08:06enforcement but that really doesn't paint the whole picture we also collaborated with public works and a number of street improvements to help increase the safety of our streets some of the bad news from last year is the collisions are of 22 overall from the previous year

1:08:22one of the things that we hope to use to get a better picture of why that is is some new collision reporting software which has a stronger analytical suite some of the questions that i have that we hope to answer about our collision uh trends are are there trends that correlate to the

1:08:42use of navigation apps um one of the things that i think i've noticed i i can't put a finger on it to know if it's real but it seems to me that if there's a major incident on the freeway then traffic in town is really negatively affected especially in our main thoroughfare which is where

1:08:57most of our accidents happen at san pable avenue so one of the things we want to see is that if there is a larger incidence of collisions on those days when the freeway is getting rerouted to san pable avenue and if so what are some measures we can take to help mitigate uh that

1:09:11effect from happening so we hope to perhaps at the end of this year have a better picture of why some of our collision trends are the way they are so in the realm of crime and uh obviously there'll be plenty of time for questions at the end but uh make sure to note some if you have them

1:09:28uh we did have one homicide last year it was a murder-suicide we're still working actively working on homicide cases from previous years including the gila land case and uh a case from la niv that involves a uh still outstanding fugitive suspect who we've identified and we've been working

1:09:44with the u.s marshals service to uh locate and i want to talk about these three other crimes i have listed here so i know council is familiar with the definitions of these but for those viewers we might have at home or those in the audience that uh are not familiar

1:09:59with the difference between robbery burglary and theft robbery is when you either target a person or a business and take something from them through the use of force or fear so you say something like give me your wallet or i'm going to shoot you that would be a robbery you don't have to

1:10:14actually shoot the person to make a robbery you don't even necessarily have to have a gun the threat alone is enough to make the crime of robbery robbery in a store might happen by somebody going up and holding a knife at the clerk and saying give me what you got

1:10:27robberies can also happen in other contexts so a petty theft crime which is when uh or shoplifting crime when somebody goes into a store and takes an item and tries to leave can become a robbery if when the suspect is confronted by a store employee they tell that employee

1:10:44get out of my way or i'm going to stab you or they physically assault the employee that increases the severity from a petty theft which is a very low level crime to a robbery which is a very serious crime people that are convicted of robbery will typically do a significant sentence in county jail at

1:11:02the least but will often do state prison time for uh committing the crime of robbery if they're convicted now a burglary is a crime when someone enters a building with the intent to steal so uh this is most common in a commercial burglary that might happen overnight perhaps somebody would cut a

1:11:21hole in the roof of a business and sneak down like a ninja and try to steal things from the business which believe me that happens people actually do cut holes in people in the rooms of businesses and sneak down into businesses to try to break into safes um it could also happen in the uh

1:11:36context of a residence where somebody will break into your house while you're away at work and steal things from your house burger is also a very serious offense it's a felony and um breaking into a house could also result in very significant jail in prison times

1:11:51you could do six months to a year in jail you could do multi-year commitments in state prison both robbery and burglary are treated as very serious offenses now theft can be both a minor offense or a serious offense based on the amount of the theft it's less than a thousand

1:12:06dollars it's a misdemeanor that's what's typically called petty theft because the amount is low um grand theft is anything over a thousand dollars so in the case of shoplifting that often is a case of petty theft because they're stealing an amount of goods less than a thousand

1:12:21dollars and we're going to dive into petty theft a little bit more in a second so let's talk about uh i should have called this theft trend but i called it larceny trend because that is the technical word for theft so this is a a graph of what our theft trend is looking like now the main

1:12:41driver for this is there there's this includes things like package theft uh it includes theft out of an unlocked vehicle but by far the main driver for this is retail theft so this is shoplifting incidents as you can see our number was kind of in the 600 to 700

1:13:01incidents a year until about 2014. after 2014 it began to spike pretty significantly so that last year with 1100 incidents was our 10-year high for a petty theft it's actually beyond our 10-year high i just there's only so big a chart you want to make here with so many years

1:13:20smashed together so i chose 10 years we had 667 thefts in 2014 and that bloomed to 1103 in 2017.

1:13:31now something significant happened in 2014 2014 uh california voters passed proposition 47. so proposition 47 took on a number of issues in the state it decriminalized some drug case drug offenses reduce their severity it also reclassified a number of crimes to

1:13:50non-violent offenses which would allow people to have shorter sentences and it also decriminalized a key component was decriminalizing the crime of commercial burglary so before proposition 47 if i was a habitual thief and i went into safeway every single day and stole something

1:14:09from safeway every day then we could make the argument that that person went into safeway with the intent to steal from the store and because they had the criminal intent that crime could be elevated to a higher level this is as opposed to somebody who's walking around the store and just

1:14:24decides on a whim i'm going to steal this item and leave so this is somebody who is a professional criminal and is making a decision before they go in the store i'm going to go in there and i'm going to steal it was is hard to prove intent some of the ways we improved we proved

1:14:38intent was through multiple convictions for theft if you're a career thief and you've got 20 convictions on your criminal history i would tend to show that when you go into a business you intend to steal or we would show it through repetition that the business would say this guy's

1:14:54been in here three days this week and every time he's coming and stolen 300 worth of stuff he's back here again today and we caught him we could prove that he entered the store with the intent because he stole the same thing every day for three days in a row so proposition 47 got rid of that as a

1:15:09crime so it's no longer a crime to purposely enter the store with the intent to steal from the store it also increased the threshold for how much you could steal with it still being considered a misdemeanor which is an offense that is often taken care of through probation

1:15:25um or yeah pretty much just through probation or maybe small stints in jail so it increased the threshold from 400 to a thousand dollars so now a person could go in with the intent to steal and could steal up to a thousand dollars of stuff and leave the store and really still

1:15:40face very minor penalties um so what we've seen is a real renaissance in shoplifting we we repeatedly get cases where thieves are going in and stealing nine hundred dollars worth of things and it is a very persistent and stubborn problem that we're really having trouble

1:15:58impacting um it's it's taken a lot of work trying to bring our business partners online to change the way they're doing loss prevention and it's taken more work from us to try to find other unique ways to deploy to try to make an impact on the problem just to give you an example and this is a little

1:16:17anecdote i tell some more stories but i'm not going to fill the whole night with them one of our officers was standing in front of safeway this is last year and uh he's standing from the safeway and he sees a guy coming in and this is somebody he he has previously dealt with

1:16:30as be stealing from safeway and so the guy is hauling a cooler behind him so the officer says you know what i'm just going to see how this shakes out so the officer just waits outside and about 10 minutes later the guy comes out and now he's obviously struggling under the

1:16:43weight of this cooler that he's coming out of the store with he's walked in with it seemed very light and easy to to haul as he's coming out it's now very hard to haul so the officer goes and says hey just uh just hold on one second the store employees come out

1:16:55and say hey that guy just stole a bunch of meat so sure enough he had about 600 worth of meat stacked in this cooler that he had just gone back to the meat department loaded up the cooler and now he's shipping it out shipping it out the door um so my purpose in telling that story

1:17:08is to kind of show the difference in sometimes how we perceive petty theft is in town versus the reality that our retailers see what our retailers see is really organized crime of people going in stealing a commodity that they know they can resell and doing it just under the felony

1:17:26threshold repeatedly one of the one of the images that a lot of our community members have in their head is that these are people who um they're just stealing food to get by so they can feed their family that night and that is not necessarily the case we do have some cases where people will go

1:17:43in and they may be obviously homeless and they'll take a sandwich and eat the sandwich in the cafe and not pay for it and leave that is kind of a low level crime that we have that's associated with homelessness and poverty then we have these other groups that really it's their profession to go in

1:17:59and plan the that plan the crime steal and then go resell the product so they can get money and it's basically just their alternate form of occupation um another quick war story on theft and then i'll move on to the next slide um just as another example to paint kind of

1:18:15the organization of how these stores sustain these losses we got a call down to what was kfc at the time it was closed the oil changer said there's a guy with a car and he's got his trunk open and something really suspicious going on over there can you please go check it

1:18:30out so the cops roll up and they go walk up to the guy and he's got a screwdriver and he's popping all the security caps off of bottles of alcohol and lined up along the trunk of the car he has little stickers that have safeway store numbers on them so as he's taking

1:18:44the security caps off he's taking the store stickers and lining them all up and he's got about 3 600 worth of alcohol sitting in his trunk the stickers that show us all the stores he got the alcohol from which was very convenient so that we could go back and check uh the security cameras and see

1:19:01that you know he didn't pay for them here he didn't pay for them here he didn't pay for them here he didn't pay them here his story was that uh he worked a liquor store had told him to take these off for him he was the liquor store was paying him money to take the caps off so that they

1:19:15could resell them and we do believe that he probably was reselling them to a liquor store we referred it to abc for further investigation i'm not sure what ended up from it but in our case he ended up having his case go to the district attorney's office for all of

1:19:31the cases of theft so there are some persistent problems with theft related to i believe related to proposition 47. and these cases are not limited to just el cerrito it's something we're seeing statewide there are other states that have uh have done decriminalization decriminalization

1:19:50efforts around petty theft and they have paradoxically seen crime go down whether through a lack of reporting or maybe crime just went down that has not been the case in california we've seen it a big upsurge in theft um so on the other hand burglary does seem to be treading downward uh since 2013.

1:20:11so um we already talked about the crime of burglary now this is just me speculating but there is a possibility that people see the major consequences of burglary and perhaps they're opting out of the severe consequences of breaking into a person's house and stealing from them

1:20:29and opting in to the relatively low consequences of retail-based theft i didn't even talk about stores like marshalls and ross where people just go in and you know fill up a duffel bag and haul all the clothes out but that's also a very frequent experience for employees at ross so it

1:20:46may be that people are seeing burglary as a more consequential crime and doing it less one thing i wanted to share about burglary and i apologize to the two council members that were at the chamber today i did say that i might have to repeat myself a little bit so they've

1:21:00already heard parts of this not all of it um so last year one of our big trends in burglary that we experienced and our realtors in community know this we had a number of houses that were broken into while they were staged for sale so we had about 18 to 20 houses

1:21:16where the burglars broke in during the day they bring a moving truck in the neighbors wouldn't think anything of it because they would just think oh well the house has been on the market for a week or two it must be the stagers taking the furniture out well it wasn't

1:21:28the stagers it was a crew of about two to three burglars that were clearing the house out of things they thought were valuable and taking it off so one of the things we talked about today is that the the burglars they uh it's not like they had some great black market way to sell

1:21:43all this stuff they were just selling it through yard sales in fact one of the the case kind of broke two different ways we identified suspects kind of independently of our neighbor community kensington but the way kensington identified the same suspects is one of the stagers

1:21:59was just going through some yard sales in san pablo and was looking for some items to replace some of the items that were stolen and lo and behold she found her own items for sale in this yard sale and that is how kensington kind of independently identified the same suspects that we

1:22:14were already looking at so it's an awful lot of work to move in to break into a house move all the furniture out drive it off move it to another location and then sell it in a yard sale but that was what this uh this particular crew was doing so we've uh we've since gotten charges filed on the

1:22:30on the crew and i believe two out of the three are in custody right now in this burglary trend mostly represents instances of residential burglary commercial burglaries do happen they're uh more rare compared to uh home burglaries um so this is the trend of our robberies

1:22:49so as you can see 2014 was also a modern low point in the crime of robbery we had one very significant robbery last year where a victim victim was shot in the process of the robbery it happened at atlas liquors so during that case the suspects came in to rob the liquor store ended up shooting

1:23:09the clerk in the process luckily it was a non-fatal shot and he recovered very quickly we ended up working with a number of law enforcement partners particularly in the state of texas to identify these suspects and coordinate their apprehensions so they were on a multi-state crime spree

1:23:28they went to texas and did a robbery and got robbed and came back to california where we finally tracked them down and brought them into custody so something to notice at least from last year to this year is a lot of this increase is due to the crime i talked about earlier which is a

1:23:44shoplifting crime that turns into a robbery so year over year we had about the same number of street robberies we had about [Music] oh it was about 47 to 49 incidents of people that are out on the street or in their car and become victimized by robbery now that's no by no means good that's that's

1:24:0547 to 49 of our community members that have been victimized by a violent crime um but a significant portion of these 23 in 2016 and 36 robberies in 2017 are the revo result of shoplifting incidents that go bad so this is when the store employee says hey you can't steal those

1:24:27and the suspect either attacks or threatens the store employee increasing the severity of the crime so most of that increase between 2016 and 2017 is the result of the increase in shoplifting related robberies shoplifting related robberies increased 53 percent year over year

1:24:46uh street robberies increased by two incidents um so about five percent but shoplifting related robberies increased a big amount so that is one of our big focuses for the current year is to try to have an effect on both the robbery rate for our residents as well

1:25:05as the robbery rate for our businesses because we had some employees at stores really get injured last year when they were attacked we had a lot of people pulling knives or telling people they had guns so that's something that we really want to have an impact on

1:25:20one other thing that i should mention is last year we did several operations to try to see if we could make an impact on theft we did some retail based operations especially around the donore bart station at safeway we also did some operations involving bart to see if there's a connection a

1:25:39significant connection between theft and bart and uh our although we have to do some more work which may mean more bart operations we did see um we did sense that there was a connection between us doing a major enforcement operation at donardi bart station and the likelihood that

1:25:54theft would happen in the surrounding businesses so one of the things we found is that while we were writing tickets for fair evasion and kind of saturating the area around dunnordy bart we had very few thefts that happened at walgreens or safeway i mean not not really a big surprise if

1:26:09you see a ton of cops around you're going to tend not to want to steal from there i would imagine so this year we're working more with our retail partners to see what other solutions we can put into place some of the things we've seen that are successful is walgreens as an example

1:26:25hired a security guard to basically man the door where they didn't have anybody before and that has had a beneficial effect on their rate of theft from their store we're working with safeway and safeway really is one of the prime victims for retail theft so we've been working trying to work

1:26:41with them on solutions one of the challenges that the chain stores face is that they have corporate policies and how they set up their store and how they staff their store and what their employees can or can't do so we've been really trying to work with the current

1:26:53manager of the store to try to come up with some location specific changes that we can put into place to have an effect so we're going to continue to do operations focused on retail theft throughout this year and we've also been working with regency to have an impact on some of the crime

1:27:10and disorder things that are happening there and i'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a second so i also wanted to take a moment to give you an update on our sanctuary city resolution and how the police department has been following through on our end so at the

1:27:26police department we did a series of trainings in the last year following the sanctuary city resolution first we trained all our officers on what the sanctuary city resolution was about and what our obligations were as police officers in el cerrito not long after that sb 54 passed and

1:27:45made california a sanctuary state and so we retrained our officers on the new sanctuary state law and one of the things that was very interesting for me is that what the state was instituting was very similar to what our city had already instituted through its resolution so for

1:28:05officers it was very easy to transition them from this is what our resolution was about and now this is what state law is about so a lot of the the same concepts were present in the state legislation um so uh some of the law changes limited communication between local agencies and

1:28:23uh immigration authorities and this is my official report out that during 2017 we had no collaborations with the us immigrations and custom enforcement on immigration related matters and really on any matters the only phone call we made was to inquire about a customs agreement that we had

1:28:40from about five years ago that was related to smuggling so we had no other collaborations with immigration and customs enforcement so i'm going to talk about the 2018 goals and i'm also going to talk because uh focusing on community quality of life is kind of a big topic

1:29:00and hits on a lot of things for us across the street there's a big safety component to that at the police department we believe that part of having a good quality of life is being able to enjoy your shopping experience without the fear of being robbed and without

1:29:17you know having to witness crime as well but one of the things we've been working on at the police department we've been seeing a significant trend in is in the area of mental health committals so looking at our numbers of annual mental health committals back in 2007 and 2008

1:29:36those two years represented a real low point in mental health committals now when i think back to that time i remember it being a time of high stress for a lot of people in our community a lot of people around the nation as we were dealing with a very significant

1:29:50financial crisis but kind of uh oddly enough that was a real low year for mental health committals we did 60 mental health commitments in each of those two years now since then as the economy has recovered the number of people we come across that due to a mental health issue

1:30:09are a danger to themselves or a danger to others has doubled between 2008 and last year so now we have about 120 to 130 on average that people they get committed for mental health reasons each year um there are uh there's there's are a lot of components to that some of these

1:30:28people are residents some of these people are visitors to our community some of these people are homeless and they're battling with serious mental health issues and may not have mental health resources at their disposal one of the things that we're working with with the regency center is some of

1:30:44the persistent problems around homelessness and how that relates to theft in the shopping center as well as things like assaults and things like suicidal or destructive behavior that doesn't rise the level of a crime but absolutely is a mental health concern that we want

1:31:01to address so some of the things we're looking at down there are identifying kind of routinely problematic people looking for solutions among the vendors to make sure that we're giving them good avenues of treatment and not reinforcing negative behaviors and we hope to

1:31:20hope that relationship is going to bear some fruit this year i don't have a lot of answers about mental health commitments other than it seems to me that our country and our state does not have the resources it necessarily needs to help provide services for the many people that really do need help

1:31:36in their everyday lives one of the focuses at the police department is to put money into crisis intervention training so this is where we train our officers to use de-escalation concepts to help bring people down and try to get peaceful resolutions when someone's in the midst of a mental

1:31:53health crisis we also through the chiefs of police through the county chiefs and our money from ab109 from realignment we contribute money to a mental health evaluation team on the west end of the county on the central part of the county and on the east side of the county

1:32:13and that team is comprised of a swarm police officer as well as mental health clinicians and they are tasked with doing follow-up on mental health committals when they involve violence or weapons so in particular they're looking for those people who maybe use a weapon during their

1:32:33committal and there's a concern that perhaps their family may be in danger when they return from their committal what the team does is they follow up to take guns out of the houses when someone's been committed for a mental health hold and they also follow up with family

1:32:48members to try to provide them with resources to help them work with their loved one when they return home and have a stable environment the supporter for the person who just had their mental health crisis so back in january the department met department supervisors and managers met

1:33:03to talk about our goals for the year current goals fall into three different categories we categorize them as community level goals agency level goals and employee level goals so the community level we want to continue to find new opportunities for community engagement

1:33:16and we also want to focus on community quality of life which means we want people to be free from the threat of violent crime and uh free from the threat of having their property stolen while they're out enjoying all that el srido has offered the agency level we want to reinforce

1:33:29communication and collaboration our agency is a bureaucracy and we're proud of it but sometimes bureaucracies can have challenges in communication so we like to keep that in the forefront when we talk about how we want to what we want to focus on as an agency we also want to embrace emerging and

1:33:47existing technology there's some areas where i believe we're ahead of the curve in our embracing of cloud-based rikers management systems but there's other areas where i feel like we're catching up like the body-worn camera program that we just started this year

1:34:01and at the employee level we want to focus on employee wellness and development and make sure that our officers and our non-sworn staff are getting the training they need to be able to perform their job at the highest level so there are some ways for people to get

1:34:15more information about the police department we just released our annual report for 2017. it was a couple weeks ago our new executive assistant elizabeth vera was the mastermind behind the report she says that this was her first year doing it and next year is going to be

1:34:31out much earlier and it's going to be much better but i think she did an amazing job with it anyway so if it's going to be better it's going to be truly amazing next year i put up the website for the police department just because linking to the actual annual report is a little tricky

1:34:46go to the police department's website you can click about us and you'll be shown a tab of options if you click annual reports it'll take you right to the newest annual report residents and community members can also follow us on nixel.com there you can sign up for uh information not just

1:35:01about the el street police department but about other law enforcement agencies as well on instagram we're called at el cerrito police and on twitter we're called at el cerrito pd because we like to keep people guessing um there are a lot of ways for residents to get involved in fact we

1:35:16have a very uh robust core of volunteers at the police department um at the neighborhood level people can be involved in neighborhood watch groups and get to know their neighbors and make a common commitment to preventing crime in their neighborhoods the crime prevention committee is always

1:35:31looking for dedicated members and we appreciate their partnership on many initiatives particularly neighborhood watch in national night out the community police academy is a class that we host uh one to two times a year i believe we're gonna be hosting another one in the fall it's an opportunity for

1:35:46residents to learn more about their police department and kind of pull back the curtains on why we do what we do most of our residents have done and said it's really kind of an eye-opening experience for them because you know you see cop shows but you don't always get

1:35:58to see kind of the inner workings of how a police department really works in some ways it's the same as the cop shows in some ways it's different from them volunteers in policing we get quite a few people who attend the community police academy then decide to stay on as

1:36:11a volunteer we also have an elsewhere police department police explorer post so these are young members of our community that are interested in a career in police work most of our current explorers are el cerrito high school students and they really are some amazing students and

1:36:27they're learning a lot about the profession of law enforcement and we have lots of job opportunities with the police department if you know a person who is interested in public service and has a positive attitude about how they can help their community we are currently hiring for

1:36:42police officer record specialist police cadet and a community service officer so police officer i have to say is my big one and highlights every police department in the state is looking for good police officers good candidates doesn't mean you have to have lived a

1:37:00perfect life lord knows i have but you don't necessarily have to but they do have to want to do service for their community and try to make the place where they work a better place so if you know people and you think well you know this person might make a good police officer encourage

1:37:15them to look into the career my email is at the end of this presentation it's also online if anybody ever wants to send somebody my way and say hey chief could you talk to this person they're interested in being a cop i always love an excuse to get out of the station have a cup of coffee so i'd

1:37:29be happy to talk to anybody and this is for people watching at home who's interested in the career of law enforcement and talk to them about our agency in particular okay i had a mandate to get us out of here in an hour i think i think i did pretty good on my presentation

1:37:45time wise so we have some time for questions and if you have them i'd love to address them if i can okay questions jim i guess i'll just ask the obvious question of the increase in crime uh which when i go to statewide meetings of the league of california cities i

1:38:13hear the same thing everybody's got the same problem but here we are now what's what do you think would be a journey to the fix well i'm glad you mentioned that because i had in my notes and i missed it in my notes as i was uh rolling through them so there are uh there is an initiative

1:38:32um this that they're attempting to put on the ballot in november uh it's called keep california safe and what the the planners in the initiative hope to do is kind of touch up some of the elements of prop 47 that they think could have been improved for example in proposition 47 there was a number of

1:38:52crimes identified as non-violence some of those crimes were actually violent crimes there was a battery on a police officer was one of the crimes they deemed nonviolent sexual assault of an unconscious person was another crime that they deemed as a non-violent crime so it's

1:39:05addressing some of those uh kind of housekeeping issues with uh prop 47.

1:39:10the other elements of the uh of the proposed initiative is reinstituting some of the penalties for a professional thievery so bringing back some harsher penalties for theft so that there's more prosecutors and judges have more teeth to address repeat problematic behavior

1:39:32it also brings some of the crimes back up to felonies to allow for dna collection and identifies some specific offenses where they would like to do dna collection crimes like domestic violence currently if you're convicted of the crime of domestic violence you don't have to

1:39:48we're police are not allowed to get a dna sample from you but they want to include crimes like domestic violence in the list of crimes where you have to submit to a dna collection so that is an initiative that's out there they're currently getting signatures for

1:40:03it we'll see if it makes it onto the ballot that might help some of the trend we're seeing one of the things that um that we talk about law enforcement is that uh there's not a lot uh that we can do on the intervention level when it comes to um a person who has just stolen let's

1:40:21use the 900 worth of stuff example when we go to the scene our practice is that if this is a person who has identification and doesn't have any warrants for their arrest is not a necessarily habitual offender then we issue them a citation at the scene and send them on their way

1:40:37if there's a person who doesn't have id um if it is a habitual offender that we believe may uh continue to offend then we'll book them at the l street police department but beyond that it's really just driving them down to our station and getting their fingerprints and then

1:40:50sending them out the door so it's about a 45 minute to one hour detour in their life and that's about the biggest effect we can have because we can't send people to county jail on a misdemeanor charge county jail won't accept them so you only go to county jail if the crime is likely to

1:41:05continue or if you've committed a felony so our level of our level of intervention is very low so having more significant interventions might be beneficial one of the things we talked about today is i don't know the solution for it but a lot of things a lot of our legislation focuses on this

1:41:23moment of police contact and how we can reduce the effect of that police contact and for these petty crimes there's really not much less we could do um as far as diversion other right now we only take about an hour out of their life and they have diversion opportunities through probation later

1:41:43but there's really as far as releasing people more or less immediately there's really not a whole lot more we can do diversion wise at that initial contact because a crime did occur really i believe that more effort should be placed in you know helping people prevent them from having to turn to a

1:42:01life of crime it's kind of outside of my wheelhouse at the police department but as police officers we really can't do anything about somebody when they've made the decision that i'm going to go commit the crime we can only deal with the aftermath of that so i do believe that

1:42:17the programs out there that help steer people towards productive lives and productive careers are really things that can impact crime overall on the other hand we do have a significant portion of people that are out there that have made the decision that this is the lifestyle they're going

1:42:32to pursue and uh i believe it'll be helpful to have some consequences that have more teeth especially for people that have dedicated their lives to to stealing and they're i have come across those people in my life this is just what they do they routinely steal this is their profession

1:42:51this is their job it's not a profession but this is their job and multiple times during the week they'll do this they'll go sell it here that's how they get their money for their food i think that geez if you just contributed that amount of energy and time into

1:43:05a job you could probably make better money just working the job but for whatever reason that that doesn't work for some people so i would love to see us as a as a state make more productive californians on the front end unfortunately the police department is in the position where we

1:43:22have to deal with interventions out after the point when they've decided to commit the crime but the keep california safe initiative is a promising looking initiative that i think may help address some of the vulnerabilities that prop 47 created for our retail businesses in particular

1:43:40okay rochelle i had a question so when they still say 900 dollars worth of things and then they come back the next day and still another 900 what happens then is it cumulative or is it just each time if it's underneath a thousand then it's just a new case okay um so yeah you

1:43:58can't say well now you've stolen 1800 so now it rises to a felony level it's a treated as a completely separate crime okay but no i i know where you're going i we've tried to think that one out too okay thank you okay i want to thank you and and our full force for their commitment your

1:44:20commitment to the uh supporting sanctuary city it was nice to get an update on the training that you guys have put in place uh to carry out that policy so thank you very much for that update and and the commitment to to fulfill that it's our pleasure with regards to you touched early on

1:44:38with regards to traffic enforcement i have to say that um once on barrett gone downhill once on arlington going uphill and once on richmond street i've been passed in the last month and i'm i don't think i'm driving any slower in the last month but for whatever reason

1:44:58i've noticed a tremendous amount of of much more aggressive driving in el cerrito and i i'm just i like the idea that you are continuing to carry out the traffic enforcement uh protocols do have we reinstated the traffic enforcement division well we have had some staffing

1:45:19challenges in the last year for our traffic safety unit we had one of our officers have a kind of a recurring injury that kept him from hitting the street for all of 2017 so he was only here for parts of the year and going into this year the same injury problem has been a challenge for us to

1:45:37bring people back on and we're currently hiring back up which is why i focused on openings and so our traffic officer position is currently vacant so getting those positions refilled is a priority for july when we feel like people are going to be at the right place in the training

1:45:55program to be able to refill that traffic safety position but it has been a challenge in the last year staffing wise our officers have as time allows tried to pick up some of the some of the slack left by just vacancies in that position and so they've been trying to be more proactive

1:46:13about particularly speed enforcement around town so we try to make getting our officers trained in the use of radar and lidar a priority so that they can get out there and try to bring speeds in town down but one of the things we've been working on with public works is

1:46:27that across the town and a lot of our neighborhoods we're seeing the uh the speed surveys increase in speed so we're seeing them go up five miles per hour here and five miles per hour there and so we are seeing just people are less patient and more inclined to drive

1:46:42faster in our neighborhoods and i mean i think that uh really it's a component of the congestion in the bay area and people are feeling the crunch more and people are using alternate apps as well to try to take shortcuts through our town we've had residents on ganges

1:46:56for example complain about the stack ups of cars they get there when the freeway goes slow then it just moves its way up the hill and people start freaking out about being late for work freaking out it's a technical term yes i know um you mentioned the camera program

1:47:11that we did authorized earlier this year or who we supported uh did you want to you did you said you started it this year but i'm just curious if you wanted to take a minute to update us uh where we are on the camera program we are planning to have it rolled out by the

1:47:25end of this month so um one of the june or month may maybe okay hoping the end of may beginning of june okay one of the components of that was getting a cell phone paired up with each officer so the way an officer interacts with the video to basically connect the dots on

1:47:43the event to add details to the video and add metadata is through an app on a cell phone so as you can imagine from public records act uh from the public records act we don't want people using their personal cell phones to interface with the work device so the first hurdle we had to cross was

1:48:02getting everybody up to speed on cell phones and making sure that the cell phones were functional and uh worked well with the officers next step will be to add the cameras into the mix so excellent thank you for that update um and then i just wanted to you mentioned national night out as one of

1:48:17the premier flagship events but you didn't mention the date and i just wanted to confirm it's the first tuesday or august 7th in august august 7. the first tuesday in august that's correct it is the first uh the first tuesday in august sign up for that event if you're

1:48:34interested having a block party is going to be uh happening very soon for people watching at home it's a great opportunity to have a free block party you get your road closure for free and it's a great opportunity to get out and meet your neighbors especially had

1:48:47new people move to your neighborhood to get to learn who your neighbors are and uh come up with common understandings about what to do in case somebody thinks something's happening to their house i always tell my neighbors that if it's not one of us feel free to

1:48:58call the police they're all my buddies they'll come they'll be happy to come it's also an opportunity to meet with city managers and city staff so we not only does the police department go around and visit block parties but key members of city staff as well as the

1:49:13city council and the crime prevention committee visit block parties and talk about crime prevention with our neighborhoods um and then last i heard you said that this is a police memorial day and mayor if we could have a moment of silence at some point honoring those officers had

1:49:27fallen in the line of duty that would be great yes false happy national police week these are not the easiest of times for community policing especially with de-escalation as the key i think in moving forward but i i have to say before i even looked at my packet and

1:49:46your powerpoint chief i was very happy because i thought our police are out there i said we are lucky to have you as our public face for our chief our lieutenants the police force because you guys are everywhere you were somewhere today at the chamber of commerce

1:50:05uh and that's so i was glad to see when i opened up the powerpoint that that is your continuing theme so the more you can do of that the better it's a great great thing so thank you very much for that i think it's going to be a recurring department goal for us every year all the time i think we can

1:50:19always do better so happen it has to happen i have more than two questions so really quick answers would be really great if we're going to meet our deadline here right but um the the two relationships that you were talking about um that are kind of important i think are your force with

1:50:35bart's and safeway and luckies is there anything we should know about that are you able to deal with the security guards in a ways in a way that benefits safety and is it is your relationship with bart good is is are there issues we should know about so um with the

1:50:54security guards at the various stores and store management they are supportive of doing better and so in that sense we do have uh good conceptual relationships on where we want to be some of it involves just the specifics of how we maybe change store employee behavior or change configurations to

1:51:13try to have an impact on reducing crime so i would say that all of them are interested in reducing crime in their stores it's just a matter of what are the right ways to go about that for bart we do have a very good collaborative relationship for for those that don't know bart has

1:51:28the responsibility for all crimes that occur on bart property so that includes bart parking lots and bart stations it does not include the ohlone greenway that uh the tracks do not count as bart properties so everything underneath the tracks belongs to the elstrada police

1:51:41department so we respond to all those calls but we do work closely with them on issues of station safety and we've collaborated with them on more than one occasion to do directed operations around their stations directed towards things like violent crime suppression and also

1:51:59kind of more quality of life things like fair evasion and drug dealing that might happen in stations i heard the fair evasion effort went off very well oh yeah we uh we had some folks got a pretty big impact on fair evasion i think the the main i don't know if we

1:52:13stopped anybody from going on and be evading the fair again but they at least got an intervention moment in their life for those who habitually evade the fair one of the biggest things we got back is the residents were just very appreciative that we were there trying to make a dent on it on traffic

1:52:29and collisions can you identify where the most collisions are on san pablo avenue and do we have synchronized light lighting for our lights i know there's kind of a big log jam around either cutting or safeway is that where most of the collisions occur um so most of our collisions occur on san

1:52:48pablo avenue um at intersections for the most part i if i were to kind of say in general we're looking at the south end around central to fairmont area in carlson at the north end it's cutting and hill area and a little bit of petrero those tend to be our hubs for collisions

1:53:08as far as synchronized lights really public works i think would be a better uh better group to talk to i know there are efforts to try to move cars through more smoothly from both caltrans and public works i don't i know that you know sometimes computers are finicky things as well

1:53:25though as far as your mental health issue homeless would it be helpful to work with core in our county effort at all on this so we do collaborate with core however the way core works is we it's not it's not like uh we don't partner up with them and go out and contact people

1:53:46core prefers to go out without law enforcement officers to help reduce that stigma of contact so when we do have uh people that we see is are are persistently uh homeless and maybe need some help we refer them to core so we ask core to come out and contact them

1:54:02and offer them some services uh one of the things they say about uh bringing people into the kind of embrace of care for homelessness is it takes 15 to 18 contacts on average before somebody will really start seeking out services for themselves so it takes a lot of persistent contact

1:54:22uh by homeless outreach to bring people in to to get them oriented towards where they're ready to accept help thank you is there any uh prep that you guys are doing on cannabis i think we're about to maybe soon have a permit yes so is there anything so a lot of our prep has just been kind

1:54:44of because we're we don't have anything finalized yet it's really more about if we had a business in town how might we what kind of crimes might we expect there and we're uh brainstorming about how we would respond okay um if we end up getting a dispensary at a specific

1:54:59location we'll do more kind of response planning around the specifics of the business okay two more um is the exchange zone being used you know sometimes yeah okay okay good and people talking out there every now and then with a couple of hours having lunch okay um and then final question

1:55:15and then i'll thank you again is why not facebook uh well that is actually on our list of places to go this year um one of the things about facebook is the demographic the biggest demographic is um older people and which is demographic well that's just fine this is back to

1:55:32the previous presentation i think um so uh facebook is on our plans and we're just uh trying to incrementally add and make sure that we have the bandwidth that facebook demands uh unlike our other avenues where we can put some information out maybe you have a couple of components

1:55:49um the common thinking around a facebook page is that you really have to be an active participant in it and responding to comments and making sure that you're addressing concerns as they come up so time wise it is a it is one of the more demanding social media platforms if you

1:56:02make the leap into it so you can also just post your events so people see those events in another place right that is true yes or outreach okay thank you very much appreciate it let's go to public comment then we have one speaker mayor cordell hindler so that this presentation was an eye opener

1:56:26so on that last slide i'm getting involved um i have attend the crime prevention committee meetings every single month and and i've provided them with some ideas on how we can get more people to join with uh neighborhood watches because neighborhood watches is always uh the key components of um

1:56:44working with law enforcement and getting businesses and families to come together you know what kind of solutions are we trying to fight are we facing here so i like the ideas of of crime prevention committee because people can come to these meetings every single month and uh like i do and i said

1:57:02we need some more young energy on that committee because they can bring a whole lot of knowledge to the table so i'm glad that councilman alignment brought it up at the earlier in the in the during the meeting so we need to get some more people involved so we're crime prevention so

1:57:18so hopefully that you love this presentation and that's it okay so chief keith i want to thank you for uh your thorough report and i thank the el cerino police department for helping out and we had a fantastic year one of the things i wanted to mention is that scott weiner has a bill

1:57:43that it's sb 916 that closes loopholes in auto burglary and i know we've had a lot of that many of my friends that i know have had their cars broken into at bark and when they go out to dinner in other cities and so know that our legislators in sacramento are listening to

1:58:03our chief of police so i thank you for looking at all this and letting us know what's going on with the police department and uh i thank the el cerido police department for everything that they do and protecting us and on behalf of the council here we know that

1:58:18public safety is number one here and this is our job as council members and as mayor and vice mayor and we are here to support you so thank you again thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight and really it is a tribute to the officers that work in the police

1:58:33department my job is easy because we have fantastic cops across the street and fantastic non-sworn people that really do all of the hard work i just get to come up here and brag about all their hard work so so thank you for the opportunity thank you thank you okay

1:58:53a city council local and regional liaison assignments paul do you have anything just that fab i think had a sneak preview of the new budget that we may be seeing and then at the next council meeting or not so we should be ready to think about two-year budget cycle okay very good

1:59:13janet um no okay right yeah i've got two um actually that i need to report out to you all one is from may 3rd i participate in mce technical committee which met on may 3rd and they just we discussed quite a number of things one of the things that is occurring it's

1:59:42an odd uh thing but as more entities as more community choice aggregation entities form they go out and they purchase clean energy and it gives pg e the opportunity to actually sell the energy that they would have that they purchased for us well they're selling um and not therefore

2:00:10they're selling it off to the the grid and not necessarily to uh their clients to their customers um and they're keeping the clean and the hydro and the uh the atomic energy for their customers so actually pg e's emissions are getting cleaner and so as cca come online and more residents

2:00:35participate in ccas pg e's emissions are actually getting cleaner um from a reporting perspective it's it's all good for the for the environment but at some point um we will we need to be prepared to tell people who are are saying but pg e is cleaner than mce this is about two

2:00:54years away um it and we need to be prepared and educated in order to inform them that the reason pg e is cleaner is because we're all cleaner um and so that's one of the things that i wanted to report on another is on assembly bill 1110 this is being considered in it may have

2:01:15uh moved into suspension i this this update was may 3rd this is called uh the clean net short is that's it's a shorthand name uh the problem with uh ab 1110 is that it undermines the investments that ccas have made in solar generation it penalizes ccas for generating clean

2:01:39resources during non-peak times and it would result in over purchases by ccas to avoid some of that penalization so the seat the cca uh community uh mce is watching that bill very closely uh because although it it has the intent of trying to sound clean it actually is a punitive to ccas

2:02:07and then finally mce is moving forward with an electric vehicle program and what i'd love to do it's it it talks about um pg e is doing a subsidy where if businesses put in um i think it's up to 20 or 20 or more stations or 10 or more stations charging stations

2:02:32pg e will subsidize that quite a bit and mc is going one step further and actually having a program to subsidize anybody who puts in between two and 20 stations and some low income what i'd love to do and this is a request to through the mayor to staff uh to reach out to jr killigrew who is a el

2:02:52cerrito resident but he's also an mce staff person who provided the uh the presentation on the electric vehicles and at some point in the future when it fits our schedule if we could please have uh mr kilgroup come and do a presentation on electric vehicles i think i think it would be very

2:03:12educational and and potentially very supportive of some of the discussion we had during the annual rate setting session on may 10th i represented us at the recycle more meeting and and i'm bringing this up now as a result of the potential impacts it'll have on our rate setting we do set our solid

2:03:36waste rates in december november december and what's of uh disturbing trend is that uh and this is good on a global basis but not necessarily good for our current uh recyclable markets uh china has is starting to tighten down the types of materials they they accept recyclable

2:03:58materials they accept and they're really expecting a much higher quality and our current recycling industry is not necessarily meeting the quality requirements that china has as a result there's a stockpile of recyclable materials that's accumulating within the

2:04:17united states driving prices down and we could see some significant loss of revenue to recycle more as a result of uh of the recyclables not essentially being for sale that coupled with the fact that the budget for this this coming year appears to be i'm going to say it's

2:04:42roughly between 125 150 000 more than the revenue that is projected to be raised by our current rates so we we could be looking at two different mechanisms that would drive up our rates and i just wanted to give you that heads up um and as council member fidelity said it is the

2:05:04budget season so this was part of a budget workshop that was held by recycle more the other item that comes out of the most recent meeting of the may 10th meeting is the joint exercise of powers agreement we did not um it was not an opportunity for us to do a lot of discussion on may 10th

2:05:28uh but it was presented to us the the revised uh joint exercise of powers agreement j-e-p-a or g-pa it will be coming to us this summer the jeep is is going to be coming back to us this summer and we will need to be making a decision about whether to sign it and remain in that joint powers

2:05:54agreement going forward there are some carve-outs for el cerrito as a result of our long-standing recycling center the fact that we have a different hauler so so el cerrito is certainly handled separately in many of the the areas we have been participating in the chipa

2:06:13and we've been trying to influence the terms and conditions over the last 18 months and there are still some terms and conditions that may not have been picked up in the most recent revision that we will be asking for um consideration again uh and then we'll be doing a full presentation on that at

2:06:38some point uh this summer the one thing that you may have heard me say in the past that is not in the current giba is the county the county has expressed a desire to be on a voting member on the joint powers authority the current gpa as a result of some of the things that the county is doing

2:07:00they're not necessarily as nimble as the cities so we are moving forward with a document that anticipates the county would be joined at some point but it does not address the county as a member at this time so there the the thought the thinking is to update our current gpa

2:07:20uh as the five member cities and then uh revise it to incorporate the county at a later date so i thank you for the opportunity to update you on those two critical ideas sure thank you i also would like to mention at the last month's meeting in ontario with the

2:07:40league of cities environmental caucus we did speak on the subject of a huge huge backlog of barges of our recyclables up and down the state in california just waiting to go somewhere and right now it's going nowhere because china is not taking our recyclables so but as our

2:08:03committee discussed we will be talking about it in our meetings in june to see if we can use cap cap and trade funds uh to create industries here in california so we can take care of our recyclables ourself instead of brushing it off to other countries around the world so i'm hoping

2:08:24that the governor will support what we do and we'll be working on that in the month of june that is a common thread that actually has come up even in recycle more that we potentially need to spark some industries that can use the local resource if you want to think

2:08:40of that way it's a local resource we should really not be shipping it very far in order to generate usable products that are recycling our products mr mayor i was just going to say on the chinese recycle issue the city gave a great monthly newsletter article about this if

2:09:02anyone's watching they should read that and i think the message is we need to clean our recycling better i mean there was the message it used to be it doesn't matter you don't need to clean it as much we need to clean our recycling wash it out and and get to that one

2:09:15percent as opposed to five percent that the chinese will take but thank you okay uh yeah i did have and then i guess it's really an announcement um and it's about uh what's called ebart ebart is the ex long-awaited extension of bart to eastern contra costa county

2:09:36and it actually is going to happen it's going to open um the ceremonial part of it is on the 25th and i believe that the um what i call real part where it's open to the the public is i believe the 26th um but um what ebart is is a different technology it's kind of

2:10:02you can liken it to the oakland airport connector it all connects uh via cross-platform transfers it's a diesel it's you can i didn't even finish my sentence i'm sorry and you know it's a cross-platform uh transfer much like the the oakland airport connector where you actually have to go

2:10:35up a level on ebart you don't but it so it'll take and it's what uh paul said um but it's a diesel locomotive technology but it's which is a green technology uh which is um good bart is also green it's i believe 100 green it's electric but the um the main uh thing of interest about it

2:11:03is where does it actually go and where it actually goes is to antioch so the last station currently in operation is pittsburgh bay point and so this will take people over all the way to antioch and then we have to find funding to take it any further but the uh hope is that sometime

2:11:28day and not too distant future it'll go to brentwood so this is really quite a big undertaking that um began really uh with the development of major j which that's the half cent sales tax that we now pay um and um so it's it's happening and it's very exciting i'm sure you'll see it in the newspaper

2:11:55okay i just wanted to report quickly on the urban forest committee which i went to last night there were a couple of common themes one was they were unable to elect officers at the previous meeting and i'm not sure if they did last night after i left but they they

2:12:16had a low number of attendees and so i think they are looking actively for more committee members so if anyone at home is interested we would definitely like you to participate in that and then second they're very much interested in working on the tree ordinance revision but it seems to

2:12:34be somewhat stuck right now with the um with the arborist who keeps getting pulled aside for city um you know business that he works on consistently i know we just had a tree that fell in heber park and so there's you know ongoing issues that keep coming up and so maybe some additional

2:12:57staff support could possibly move that along a little faster and then also i reported to them on what was going on at the city and shared with them the the possibility of a charter city and on our list of possible expenditures they were not included so they wanted to

2:13:17point that out and wanted to let us know that we should also be thinking in our budgeting about more trees for the city which i think is a good idea thank you thank you um so we'll be starting our our summer uh uh schedule the month of june and uh our next city council

2:13:36meeting will be on monday june 11th at 7 p.m in city council chambers so i'd like to end this meeting in remembering our fallen police officers for national police day thank you and good night thank you thank you you