Recommendation to request City Attorney to prepare an amendment to the Long Beach Municipal Code, Section 10.12.010, relating to the 30 miles per hour speed limit on Walnut Avenue, between Wardlow Road and Carson Street, as recommended by the City Traffic Engineer.  (District 7)
Okay. Thank you. Now we're going to be moving on to item six, which was pulled from the consent calendar by Councilmember Urania. I'll turn this over to Councilmember Durango. Thank you, Mayor. The reason I pulled this out, because I basically want to commend city staff for their efforts in helping the residents in the Walnut Avenue corridor and supporting the their concerns about the level of speed of drivers who drive down that street. It's a very unusual when you do a survey of a traffic corridor where the speed limit might be 30 or 40 or 35. Usually when you see any adjustments to the speed limit, it's usually something that goes up because the level of tickets, the speed limit cannot can allow something to go faster. In this case, we're looking at a situation where the speed limit is actually going to be lowered by five miles per hour from 30 miles to 25 miles per hour from the section of of Wardlow Avenue to Carson Street on Walnut. So I want to commend staff for their excellent work and service and working with the community along that walnut corridor and making sure that the safety of the residents and the pedestrians who are living that walk in those neighborhoods and ride a bike in those neighborhoods, that the speed limit is not going to be a major factor for safety because you're going to be going a little slower. So I want to commend traffic engineer David Roseman for his work on this effort and and appreciate it. But if Mr. Roseman has a comment or two, I appreciate that as well. Okay. Thank you. Are there any comments from staff? Yes. Honorable Mayor and members of the city council. The setting of speed limits is a very complicated process that's outlined both in state law and Caltrans procedure manuals. If we don't follow those laws and procedures, we not only can can't enforce the speed limits, but we can place our roadway maintenance funds at risk. We have about 400 speed limit segments in the city, each of which has been studied every five years in order for them to remain enforceable. A few years ago, there was a move by the federal at the federal level that was supported by Caltrans director at the time and a number of Orange County cities to change the way speed limits are set in California, which would have resulted in about 75%. And I'll say that again, 75% of our speed limits rising across the city. Working together, the city manager, the chief of police, the city attorney and US in public works said we had to fight back and we did so by creating alliances across the state with cities like San Jose, 8000 Oaks, Glendale, Glendale and others. Ultimately, working with Tom Modica and his staff, a new legislation was introduced at the state level that restored some engineering flexibility to the process of setting speed limits. The good news is that using that flexibility, we were able to retain our speed limits. And in some very limited cases, such as before you tonight, we were able to recommend a lowering of the speed limit. I would like to just take a minute and acknowledge a very special engineer in the audience with us tonight, Amir Kazmi . Would you please stand? Amir is a senior traffic engineer that's worked for the city for almost 30 years now. He'll be retiring later this year. Amir has been my right hand man in fighting the good fight with the state at the state level and with Caltrans related speed limits. He also came to me a couple of years ago and said, rather than using consultants to study our speed limits year after year, I think we can do better in house. We are the ones that know the streets. We're the ones that know the system best. He has almost single handedly reviewed all 400 speed zones in the city and solidified our study process so that we can retain our speed limits and have the documentation to withstand the test in court. Plus, he did in this case before you tonight, he has worked with the community in using unique engineering techniques, which I will not discuss to influence driver behavior, to get drivers to reduce their speeds and in turn allow us to legally lower the speed limit. Thank you, Amir, for all that you have done to make the streets of Long Beach safer. And that concludes my report. Okay. Thank you. So we have a customary ranga. Therefore, I would like to motion that we adopted the the recommendation to amend the code section ten 1.12.010 to lower the speed limit from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour on Walnut between Waterloo Road and Carson Street. Second. There's been a motion and a second, any public comment on the item? CNN members, please cast your vote. Motion carries eight zero. Okay. Thank you. Now we're moving on to the regular agenda. We'll start with item number nine. An item an item number nine is a recommendation to receive and file a report that from my office. So I'll introduce this this item and then we'll we'll get started with it.