Recommendation to request City Manager to create a comprehensive plan to recruit and include Long Beach businesses in all contracts and purchasing agreements. This should include but not be limited to; a review of current Request for Proposal process, preference points for businesses located in the City of Long Beach, preference points for businesses who are certified California Small Businesses, small/micro businesses, etc. Examples of existing programs throughout California include the "Pasadena First Buy Local" program, the City of Los Angeles "Business Inclusion Program - Local Business Preference", and the City of Oakland's Local & Small Local Business Certification Program. This program should be brought back to the City Council for review in 120 days.
Motion carries came. Back to item 13. Communication from Councilwoman Gonzalez, Councilmember Supernormal. Councilwoman Mongo and Councilman Andrew's recommendation to request the city manager to create a comprehensive plan to recruit and include Long Beach businesses in all contracts and purchasing agreements. Councilwoman Gonzales. Yes, thank you. I want to first thank my colleagues for joining me on this item. Councilmember Super Councilwoman Mongo and Councilmember Andrews, I think this first came about for a couple of different reasons. You know, Long Beach. First, I remember we put together the project labor agreement and we asked for a certain percentage of local hiring for our residents. And we also did the first source agreement that was also any city dollars that went to projects. We wanted to ensure local hire was important in. That as well. Now we're looking at what I'm intending to do with this item, is to research other policies and ordinances that other cities have done in relative to businesses. So as we've done with. Local hiring, just to ensure that we're also allowing local businesses to have the first chance at doing city work in the city with the city they love and have invested in. It'll strengthen our Long Beach economy and hopefully we'll also get local jobs as well. With this. So I'm hoping that we can get support in looking at these different cities. The one that I have liked and I think that they have a lot of metrics in as well as Pasadena. They have quantified their success by measuring measuring local procurement dollars and, of course, local jobs. I was also happy to see that the you know, about a couple of weeks ago, we were able to include three Long Beach businesses in one of the the projects and contracts that we had put out for public works. And so I want to thank our city staff for really being committed to that and just listening to, you know, the things that I had been saying and then implementing that. So I appreciate it and thank you very much. Thank you. Councilwoman Mongo has a business advocate who spent much of our business advocacy meetings over the last eight months working on a business's first component of the county of Los Angeles. I think this is the right time where the city of Pasadena is. Plan the county's plan, Burbank's plan. All the different local plans have been reviewed. And a lot of key things stand out to me as as priorities, certain things that small businesses need when dealing with large governments. And I do mean dealing with we work with constituents, but sometimes we deal with government. Right. This city of Long Beach is a more business friendly city. However, governments as a whole get a reputation for being hard to work with and to be slow at paying their bills. And so one of the main things that when we went out into the communities of L.A. County and asked businesses, why don't you do business with the county? Why don't you bid? They say the same thing about their local city government, which is it's very hard and confusing. The requirements for insurance are high and it takes a long time to get paid. I don't have that kind of cash flow. So specifically, I'd like us to look into quick pay price, preference and support for onboarding our new businesses to become partners. Furthermore, incentive criteria should probably include if the business is headquartered in Long Beach, if their main location providing the service or product is in Long Beach, and then specifically, a lot of our Long Beach businesses are great, but they're on the border of our city. And I'm council district along with my colleague Vice Mayor Richardson, where a lot of our our border city businesses recruit, but they don't necessarily only recruit Long Beach residents. And I think we should give a reward to those who employ our residents, because those are the people who we are looking to bring up and support and take care of. And so I would like to look at we do a annual reporting on your business license of how many employees you have. I think that categorizing how many of your employees are Long Beach residents versus how many total employees is is a big deal, too. And I think that increasing those percentages over time that perhaps we could put in some of those incentives again. So I think this pairs up nicely with the prior item we did about a year ago related to putting new businesses into the city. A lot of those new businesses, as they've spurred up, have even chosen not to take the refund of the business license because they're very happy, even though it's a one page, super simple plan, they're just super excited to be a local new business and they're focused on their business and less on the paperwork. So whatever we can do to support that, I think this is a fantastic start in the right direction. And I know that as business friendly as we are, we have to keep reminding people how much we've changed from 20 years ago and how much we're not the same as some of the other governments in the area because we are different. We are Long Beach, so come up in a business here. Councilmember Pearce. Yes. I just wanted to thank everybody that put this on. And thank you, Councilmember Gonzalez. The comments that Councilmember Mongo made definitely support any local hire that we could do on this. It's pretty interesting to look at some of the multiplier effects that happen whenever we employ local residents, whenever we make sure that we're contracting out with local businesses. And so as much as we could do. Looking at some of the multiplier effect numbers, whenever we're talking about how how many local businesses that we're trying to bring in would be really helpful. But yeah, just really thankful for this item. Good job. Councilman Price. I want to echo the positive comments. I think this is a fantastic item. I commend my colleagues for bringing this forward. I do think it's very, very important to promote and encourage growth of Long Beach owned businesses while at the same time making sure that the companies that are selected are those that can provide the best quality product for our residents. And I think that that balance can be had if we give a more stringent eye to recruiting local businesses for projects. So thank you for bringing this forward. And I think this is just a fantastic item things. Councilwoman Gonzales. Yes. And I just wanted to clarify, and I think my council colleagues for their support. You know, I had mentioned in here that it will review. Current request for the request for proposal process preference points for. Businesses located in the city of Long Beach. Preference points for businesses who are certified California small businesses as well. So I just wanted to make sure that we. Are clear on that. But thank you all for the wonderful comments and I hope we can proceed. And I've asked for this to come back in 120 days. Vice Mayor Richardson. Just want to chime in and say congratulations. Good job on this is an easy, easy item for me to support. I would just say, you know, the more we can recycle our dollars in Long Beach, the better. You know, when people have an incentive to move their their headquarters here or if they're, you know, have an incentive to hire more people and do those things, it really has a multiplier effect in our whole community. So thanks for continuing this focus. And I do want to acknowledge you're absolutely right. Play was a focus on local Long Beach. First was a focus on local and this continues that thread so so thank you for couching those together so that the community does see this is yet another thing the city council's leading on to keep things local. Thank you. Local. Linus, I want to call you from now on. It's better than disaster. Made me major disaster. Whatever that was. Listen, I actually love this I love this item. So thank you, Councilwoman Gonzales, for this. Can you can we can you also, Pat? So when the council passed its local point preference program for for non professional services. And correct me if I'm wrong here. This was I know a few years ago that we did do some kind of point preference program that's different than this, because this I think this is also speaking to professional services in all types of services. Can we review if that had actually any effect on local hire? The last the last time that the council passed something similar to this, by the way, that was much less in scope. And I think what this is being proposed. But can we look at that? I don't know if it's possible to get that data or not, but it'd just be interesting to see if that actually had an impact of hiring more Long Beach folks. Sure. Okay. Thanks. Any public comment on this? Great Castro votes. Motion carries an.