Recommendation to receive and file a report from the Third Council District Committee on illegal fireworks mitigation recommendations.
Thank you. Next up is item nine, please. Communication from Councilman Price, Councilman Super nor Councilman Austin recommendation to receive and file a report from the Third Council District Committee on Illegal Fireworks Mitigation Recommendations. Are we going to turn this over to Mr. Mayor? Councilman Price. Okay. Thank you. So I want to thank the third district fireworks committee who is here with us this evening to make a presentation. This group was formed about three years ago, and during that time, they've done a tremendous amount of work in terms of researching fireworks of enforcement efforts throughout the region, and they've done it all voluntarily . And so I'm going to turn it over to them to give us a report of what they've worked on this year and some of the recommendations. Mr. Mayor and council members, I have to thank you for allowing us to present our our report tonight. We feel that we're pretty excited about what we've done this last year. We've had a lot of inclusions from the different council districts and. I see that we have our Facebook page up and somebody's going to move the slides. There is a process or guide. We need to do that. Okay. This is a list of all our committee members. And we have five committee members on this list who represent or I should say at this point, we have five districts represented on this list and possibly six that we have unqualified out of nine council districts that participated in the formation of our recommendations this year. And we're very close to where were asked to try on what we're trying to accomplish. The next slide. Which is our community outreach side and what we accomplish this year. We work very closely with with Cal State, Long Beach in developing PSA both last year and this year and and also additionally with the Long Beach Veterans Association and the random VA hospital. And they were just amazing to work with. And you've seen the appearances. A month or so ago on present, at that time, we actually had an individual from the community come to us and and volunteer money to to do bumper stickers, which we did this year and did 5000 bumper stickers. And they just went like hotcakes. It was a very successful program where you we have a group of distributional partners and our list of partners this year grew by 10%. And it's a little bit a little deceptive in that you think it's only 143 distribution partners. But there are organizations and I, Boy Scouts of America, there's churches, there's homeowners associations. So it is really represented by a factor of X, which there's no real way to put a number to it. But we firmly believe that, you know, it could be as many as almost 100,000 people are are indirectly supporting what we're doing. We based the the static art on the convention center billboard again this year which is it was the art that you see on the slide here called Cal State Long Beach had to mind wanted on their billboard. The VA had language on their billboard. The League of Women Voters supported us. We worked well. None of us on our own on the committee are proficient at social media. But we, you know, tried the best we could to get the messaging up on social media. And and we believe that we did a fairly good job running. Gazette wrote several articles about what we doing and in the Long Beach Post ran an article. The Parks and Rec, to whatever degree they could used, are animations in both with movies and in their recreational programs. Our committee reached out to the news networks and we had some exposure there. There was very nice. I think one of the things that probably everybody on our committee is most proud of is, is the work we did with the homage to the Army Unified School District on that thing. And the pieces are now in the school district, district wide, and I've had discussions with them and they are willing to do that again next year. And one side benefit that we received late in the game was the school districts who had the chronic markings actually put a language up on our marquees that ran roughly from middle of June to about August 1st, which was a very nice thing. The Army private library system had to have the PSA and our are distributing them to young people in the library. We also this year experimented with putting the static art at the Catalina Express terminal in a lab in Long Beach, and both without outward bound passengers and in or around passengers had the opportunity to view that we were we were victims just like everybody else in the city with COVID virus crisis and that we had been talking to AMC theaters and we had struck agreement with them to have the static art and one or two of the pieces on the movie screens in Long Beach. And we all know what happened with with the movie theaters. And it was kind of too bad because that really kind of pushes over the top. With that, I'd like to introduce Jeff Davidson, one of our audience, and rather one of our one of our board members. And he's going to call out he's going to talk about our recommendations. Thank you for having us on their district. I request your committee would like to present the following recommendations. Add a fee to fireworks shows, block parties and special events to fund outreach and education. Increase messaging in and on Long Beach busses and bus stops. Partner with CSU. All the veterans services display messaging on Cal Worthington's electric billboard along the four or five freeway. Include a flier with the utility bill. Youth, street and neighborhood associations to spread messaging and distribute lawn funds. Place magnetic placards on city vehicles. Increase penalties to $5,000 and mandatory community service. Limit the decibel level of firework shows to 100 decibels. Provide long times for veterans. Partner with how to create an art project. Rap City trash cans with messaging. We've already talked with the Belmont Business Association and they will be providing messaging and all the big daily trash cans along Second Street. We're working with Susie Price right now to also include the ones that would be in Colorado Lagoon and and along that Marine Stadium. And then the last one is our committee, along with Councilwoman Price will be partnering with Chelsea Long Beach's animation department to create another animation for the coming year. Thank you. Oh. Thank you. Eric, would you like I believe there's a time limit on this, Eric, but if you wanted to quickly summarize your portion, please go ahead and do so. Councilwoman Price, there's one minute left on your presentation. Okay. Well, Eric, I'm going to take it over, if that's okay. So I want to thank the fireworks advisory committee from the third district for one, integrating with other volunteers throughout the city, and two, for the recommendations, which I believe many of them are actually feasible, affordable and something that we can implement. I know that this year we funded a fireworks task force, and I've already talked with the city manager to make sure that the work that you all have done over the last three years is included and incorporated and that you're integrated into our efforts moving forward. I really appreciate the commitment that you guys have made to this project, the immense amount of outreach that you have engaged in, and all the pieces that we've paid for our city property now. So any council office can use those. The city can use those in terms of messaging and outreach, and that's a great first place to start. So thank you, everyone, for the presentation. I appreciate it. And I hope that my colleagues enjoyed the presentation and the recommendations as well. Thank you. That's a motion to receive and file. Correct. Councilwoman and I have a second by Councilmember Superman. Yes, that's correct, Mr. Right. Britain's cut throat supermodel. Thank you. Just want to support the motion. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I want to appreciate the work that Councilman Pryce did in the task force. And then I also want to kind of reference that we as a city have a guide of all of the strategies. The strategies that we as a city should deploy when getting communications out to residents. I think that all of the things that were mentioned by this task force are in that packet. But I think that we really need to create a tier one, two and three where we as a council can say. Illegal firework prevention is a Tier one priority, and all resources in Tier one need to be explored and or executed immediately so that when we bring up ideas like these, a task force can look through that packet and say, Here are all the resources. This fireworks taskforce had to spend numerous hours and committee meetings going through and brainstorming all of the ideas that they've had by looking at other strategies that have been used on other campaigns. But we really, as a city have that. That framework available and need to utilize it more often and publicize it and make it available to committees like this that are doing great work on behalf of our residents. So once again, I'm in full support. Great work committee and great work council members. County Council Member or Vice Mayor Andrews. Vice Mayor Andrews. I totally support the site and I went back to council. To put this on. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Councilwoman Sun has. Mayor. And thank you very much, Councilwoman Pryce, and your committee for this. District one has had a problem with illegal fireworks in the past, but nothing compared to what we saw this year. So I really appreciate all the hard work that this committee has put into into trying to find solutions and trying to find ways to make sure that, you know, that our quality of life on 4th of July and the months leading up to it and the months after it, are not disturbed by the illegal fireworks that we see happening. So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you very much. And I look forward to being able to help in this effort going forward as well. And my office is here and ready to help in any way we can. Councilman. Actually, councilman, for your anger. And I want to thank the District Council member, Susie Price for bringing this forward. Obviously, we had a celebration the other night with the Lakers winning and there were fireworks in my area. Then we have New Year's coming and I was pretty sure that there's going to be fireworks then as well. So basically, my question is, what what are the next steps in regards to this effort? I to start at the ready to assist in any way that I can. I have my fireworks generally go a long time out. I put it out the other night because of the of the fireworks going on. So I don't presume I'm sure I want to put it out again. I'm a nurse. So is there a strategy for here on out? It's going to be coming back to city council for another type of a accrual. And in terms of the ordinance or strategy or just want to know what's going on, what what's going to. Councilman, you're Ranga. This is Linda Tatum. I would just like to give a really quick update on the work of an interdepartmental working group that's looking at this issue and is composed of staff from lead staff in the police department, the fire department, the city prosecutors, the city attorney, and and also in code enforcement. So we are looking at this issue really carefully. The tff of the memo that was sent out to council back in August gave a current status of that. We now have funding in the budget, so we are going to be meeting routinely for the remainder of this year in the with the the goal of bringing something back to the council early in 2021 to address this issue. And I just to quickly elaborate, we are looking at areas of collaboration with other cities, identifying some of the tools and strategies that they're using. We're looking at collecting data and the use of technology to make it a little bit easier for staff to address areas in the city where this is occurring, similar to what was used in last year through the prosecutor's office. We're also looking at an education and enhanced education and outreach program like what we heard in the presentation tonight. And we're also looking at increasing potentially increasing the fines and just a higher level of enforcement. So we're doing a number of those things using some of the city's budget, the budget that was identified for this effort in the current year's budget. So that's it. We'll be bringing something back to the council early in 21. Thanks for the update. That's all I have here. Okay. Thank you very much. We have received 5 minutes. I don't have actually, I might have one public comment. Is that right? She is not on the call maker. There are no public comments for this item. All right. Roll call vote. District one. I. District two. By District three. I. District four. I. District five. I. District six II. District seven. District eight. US District nine. All. Motion carries. Thank you. Next up is let's just the general public comment. I think we have one. She is not on the line, Mayor. There is no one for public comment.