Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Section 5.57 related to the regulation of nuisance motels, read and adopted as read.  (Citywide)
Washing Karis. Thank you. Item 26. Item 26 is a report from Development Services. Recommendation to Declare Ordnance. The language is for code relating to the regulation of hotels and motels in the city. Read the first time and lead over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Final Reading City. Do you want to? So should we start off with Stafford or. Mr. MODICA Stafford Port. Linda tatum will give a staff. Report for staff. Good evening, mayor and city council members. We will have our planner, the project planner, Alejandro Santos Lopez, that will make the presentation for this item this evening. Good evening, honorable mayor and members of the City Council staff is before you today to present an ordinance to address potential nuisance motels and hotels in the city and establish a review process for all hospitality locations in Long Beach. In October 2017, the city manager directed the Office of Civic Innovation to coordinate an interdepartmental team to explore strategies to address nuisance activities of motel users that affect the quality of life in the city of Long Beach. The departmental team at that time consisted of staff in the city prosecutor and City Attorney's Office and the Departments of Development Services, Health and Human Services, Police, Fire and Financial Management. The team subsequently developed and tested a Nuisance Motel compliance plan at six select locations as part of a nine month citywide pilot program. Staff presented the program findings to City Council in November of 2018 with a recommendation to develop an ordinance to permanently codify this program. The ordinance before you today accomplishes this through four primary components. Firstly, it creates an interdepartmental city team, also known as the ICTY, comprised at its core by the Department of Development Services and the Health Department with additional contributions as needed from the City Attorney's Office, the city prosecutor's office, and the lobbies, police and fire departments. Secondly, it establishes a process through which the ICC can assess complaints against hospitality locations. Thirdly, it codifies compliance measures the ICC can enforce to reduce nuisance and or criminal activity at or near the locations in question. And finally, it is structured to complement the existing nuisance regulations the city already has in place. The compliance measures included in the ordinance largely fall under three main categories security, health and practices or policies. Some of the sample measures for each are shown here. For security measures. Property owners might be required to install cloakroom and televisions at entrances, have gated property access or install lighting improvements for health measures, and may be pest control requirements. Additional measures to ensure clean and working facilities and to ensure plumbing utility improvements work as needed and for business practices might be requirements to maintain 24 hour staff on site and or post applicable signage as needed, such as for human trafficking. To provide a bit more clarity on how the ordinance will work in practice. The following flowchart shows a process to follow. Personally, the Act will review any complaint receive through existing publicly available channels such as code enforcement submissions. From there, the ACT will review additional data sources including but not limited to calls for service history at the site in question and assess if there is sufficient evidence to open a case file on the establishment in question. If this is deemed not to be the case, the complaint will simply be filed and kept on record. However, if the act determines that significant issues are present, it will determine which of the available compliance measures, if any, will be required and work in tandem with the business to achieve compliance. As long as the business is in collaborative collaboration and complies with the improvements required by the ACT. No further action will be taken by the city. It is only when a business refuses to comply and or meet with the city that the city will apply additional enforcement measures such as citations or business license revocation. In conclusion, staff recommends that the City Council approve staff's recommendation to adopt the proposed Nuisance Motel ordinance as presented. This concludes staff presentation and we look forward to answering any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Constable Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I'll be quick. Thank you for this. This presentation, all the work that's transpired over the last two years on this effort. Just as a reminder, this came out of a long conversation about the nuisances on Long Beach Boulevard, and we found that there's a greater citywide issue associated with grandfathered nuisance motels. The pilot was the short term solution. We described the ordinance as the medium term solution, but really long term solution is land use and updating the zoning to make sure that we're actually, you know, addressing outdated, underutilized motels. That may not be. You know, conditions have changed. We may not have need for so many of those motels across town. So I so I certainly support this. I just want to say, you don't want to acknowledge that. I know that the article over the weekend about this highlighted a motel, a particular motel that was not originally a part of this, this pilot. And so that had nothing to do with the city. But I will say to that hotel, to that motel owner, you know, we apologize if that if that motel was highlighted there, it shouldn't have happened. And, you know, the press should have been more responsible and fact checking and before putting someone's motel up there. But I fully support this. This gives us an important tool to clean up some of our corridors, particularly Long Beach Boulevard, Anaheim. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Andrews, because it appears. I'll keep it brief. I fully support this. I look forward to having some conversations down the road about, as Councilmember Richardson mentioned, land use and what role the city might be able to play as some of these motels might be deemed not necessary anymore. Thank you. Catherine Ashton. Thanks. And I certainly support this as well. We have motels throughout the city that that need attention. I just want to be clear on on the definition of a nuisance motel and how we get to determining whether or not a motel is a nuisance motel. Because as was mentioned by my colleague earlier, we don't want to paint every motel with with a broad brush. Tonight, there are some responsible operators out there, and I think we need to acknowledge that as well. So can you just staff identify and help us identify what are the triggers and what would be constituted as a nuisance motel? Sure. So this might help to provide some clarity on the process. The pilot program illuminated that there's not a one size fits all definition. So while the program focused on calls for service and police data in general to kind of determine the effectiveness of the program, we realized through site visits and conversation with motel owners and operators that there's contextual factors that also have to be taken into consideration. And so part of the focus of the program is to not have a rigid definition or a rigid threshold and to leave it to the act to establish what may trigger the program on a case by case basis. We know that there's many factors that go into play, such as proximity to schools, proximity to other motels and other sensitive receptors. And so it'll be open to the staff's interpretation and to work with motel owners and operators to remain business friendly with the city. And finally, Councilman Sun has. Yes, I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to support such item. I think that this is a very important step and a very necessary step in moving in the right direction, especially because a lot of these hotels are in the first district. So I am happy to be able to support this item. Thank you to Councilmember Richardson Andrews for presenting this. Thank you. Thank you. And there's a motion and a second. We have we have two members of the public is Laurie. Laurie Raimi or Yogi Patel here? Do they want to speak? Please come forward. Both. Please come forward. Please. Hi, my name is Laurie Raney. I am a resident of the city of Long Beach. I've lived in the seventh District for over 20 years. I also work in the city of Long Beach. I work for Miceli for the I am the Director of Outreach Services for the Homeless Outreach Program. I oversee six outreach teams and we cover 23 cities. And one of those cities is the city of Long Beach. We work in partnership with the city's team. In this capacity, we place a lot of folks in some of these hotels, and I kind of would like you all to think about this from a different perspective. We often use these motels as a form of crisis housing, bridge housing to get people ready to move into permanent housing. Sometimes people don't meet criteria for hospitalization, but it's a place where we can maybe stabilize them. We use them in a variety of ways. Many of the folks that we put in these motels really don't have any other option. We have established relationships with some of these motel owners and they've been very open to working with us. They have our numbers. They call us when there's an issue. We come out, we work with our folks. So I don't want that broad brush to be used on all of the motels and just to kind of look at them in a different perspective, because they can serve a vital service for the city. Thank you. And Mr. Patel. Yeah. My name is Yogi Patel. I've been a resident of Long Beach since 1981. I run Colonial Motel for last 40 years. I partner with serious Long Beach to put the homeless people at my motel. Harbor Interfaith. Catholic Charity. Disabled Resource Center Family Solutions Center out of Los Angeles path mental health lonely just booked about and other charity organizers and. This whole issue came up because one of the councilmen had an issue taking the baby home and had to stay out of his or her house was locked down because of one particular motel luxury in. Last meeting, we were all here and everybody were pointing at looks at him. No other motel was mentioned. If you guys ever record, go back and check. Next day, I call the Andrew. Then what's up with this? Because he is my councilman and he never noticed any problem with my motel. And my motel was painted as Nuisance Motel. I am out there to help City to take people off the street and not create problems. But by doing this thing, by publishing our motel as a nuisance motel, we lost a lot of business. So we had to make up for business by getting more voucher people here. So is that what city wants? If you want people off the street, you need to work with motels, not Gordon. You done wood paneled and all that. Before going public, we should talk. What is the problem? If there is a problem, we need to solve the problem together. So that's what I'm asking for. I have contact with the city. If we need to move forward with the contract, I will need protection that down the line. City is not going to come back and use these weapons to close this down. This is our livelihood. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes. For actually you have to be on this list. That concludes public comment. I have two speakers I've signed up to speak. And so with that there is a motion and the second member is going to cast your vote. I really called public comment. People that signed up to speak. You have to sign up to speak with the clerk for certain items. First, please cast your vote. Council members have been. Bush and Kerry.