Recommendation to receive and file a report and presentation on the City’s plan to recruit and include Long Beach businesses in City of Long Beach procurement opportunities.  (Citywide)
Motion carries. Thank you. Next item, please. 21 Report from Financial Management Recommendation Receive on file a report and presentation on the city's plan to recruit and include Long Beach businesses in City of Long Beach procurement opportunities citywide. There's a motion and a second. Is there any public comment? CNN Please cast your votes. Or you want to comment? We have a whole presentation. Oh, I did not know that. Don't mind. That would be great. Okay. Sorry. It just said it just said financial manager. So I didn't see anything else on there. So. Mr. West. Mr. Mayor, council members, we have a presentation by our finance department, our deputy director of Finance, Leah Erikson, as well as our purchasing manager, Sandy Sung Palmer. So I'm going to turn this over to Leah to walk over how we can do a good job, what we do with getting local folk in our procurement process, what we do good and what we can do better. Leah. And I'm actually going to turn it over to Sandy Sang Palmer, who will be taking us through the presentation for you tonight. Good evening, honorable mayor and members of the City Council. At its meeting on August 9th, 2016, the City Council asked the city manager to create a comprehensive plan to recruit and include Long Beach businesses in all city of Long Beach purchasing opportunities, as communicated in a memo to the Mayor and City Council dated April 13, 2017. Staff has conducted a review of the city's current efforts, completed a benchmarking survey looking at the efforts of other agencies, and identified a plan to further strengthen our existing program. And this presentation will give you an overview of staff's findings. Overall, what we have found is that Long Beach efforts are among the best of the agencies surveyed. We have a number of activities that are of direct or indirect benefit to our local business community, which I will outline in later slides. And that said, Council asked us to take a look for opportunities for improvement, and we did find some areas where improvements can be made, both from our own review and by looking at those other agencies. And those opportunities will also be discussed. First, it's important to note that all of the city's practices related to procurement are reflective of and coordinated with our specific regulatory environment. In addition to our own charter, there are state contracting code requirements that allow cities to advertise and do some local preference, but still require us to go with low bid and do not allow us to only use local businesses. Also, we have funding sources or certain types and scopes of work that may require contractors to comply with additional requirements. And some of those requirements may benefit local businesses and employees. And also, California law prohibits both discrimination and preferential treatment on the basis of race and gender. So that's sort of the foundation for some of our policies and programs here in Long Beach. The slide presents some high level information from the benchmarking conducted by staff, which included agencies identified by the City Council, along with others identified by staff's research. One of the major components we looked at was local preference. Under California law, local preferences intended to offset price disadvantages for local businesses when there is a higher cost of living and operating locally. The local agency, which is in this case the city, treats bids from local businesses as discounted by a set percentage for comparative purposes when determining the lowest responsible bidder. And as you can see from the chart, our local preference is the second highest percentage of all agencies surveyed. The acronyms in the last column, which are defined at the bottom of the slide, indicate that some agencies limit the reach of their local preference programs to certain sizes or types of business enterprises . And Long Beach offers a more broad based local preference that is a separate tool from our Small Business Enterprise program. Among broad based local preference programs, we have the highest local preference percentage. We looked at outreach activities of the agencies shown, and there was a wide range of outreach activities and levels. Long Beach has a strong outreach foundation that uses multiple avenues to reach local businesses. However, one aspect we saw through the benchmarking was that some agencies had branded their programs for better marketing of the services they provide, and this is an area that we think we can improve upon, and this will be discussed later on in the staff report. So regarding our existing program, we currently spend $88 million annually with local businesses. We do offer that 10% preference for local businesses that was outlined on the prior slide. We have an SBA program where we set contract goals to encourage small and local business participation. We also have a small business incentive program that provides credits towards business license, tax bills to encourage small businesses to start, expand and relocate in the city. And we have an online bitters tool that we use to we recruit local businesses to register in it, and then they receive electronic notifications for procurements that are relevant to them . We do targeted advertising to local businesses. This is through the Long Beach Business Journal and as well as to community based organizations via email blasts. And we make some special efforts for outreach at local events, including matchmaking sessions, where we meet with local businesses and help them identify procurements that are appropriate for them and help get them registered in our bidders database. We also conduct email and phone outreach to prospective vendors. We compile a list of prospective vendors based on the particular procurement, and that is out of our database as well as research specific to that procurement. We do direct outreach to vendors who have, after that point, access to our online documents to encourage them to follow through with a bid. We have developed written instructions and phone support that is targeting small and local vendors to help them navigate the procurement system and upload process that they might not be as familiar with. And we also have online resources that are targeting small and local businesses to help them meet the procurement requirements, such as help with insurance opportunities and that sort of thing to meet our regulatory requirements. And we also conduct PRE-BID conferences for complex projects to help vendors understand the specifications and the compliance requirements that apply to those particular procurements. Many of these efforts that were described as beneficial to local businesses also help support small businesses, minority owned businesses and women owned businesses. We specifically target these particular business types by doing targeted email blasts to a number of community based agencies. I've listed a few examples on the slide. The top two that are listed alone have a combined circulation of over 12,000. We also when we do these blasts, we explicitly state our commitment to providing maximum opportunities for these types of businesses, and we encourage them to register in our bidder's database so that they can become aware of our procurements, which are then provided on a weekly basis. We also, once we have businesses registered in our Bittar database, they identify as belonging to the various categories. And then when we come back to Council on particular Procurements, we then report back to show the effectiveness of that outreach for those particular procurements in the body of the council letters. So I would like to walk through an example procurement to demonstrate how some of these efforts come together. For a recent procurement that came to council, which was a vehicle purchase for multi-year, we would have previously already recruited businesses to register and planet bids. We would have taken a moment to see if there were any other businesses we could identify that we should also reach out to to get them registered in our database. We would then use that database and that research to develop a prospective bidder list that would include local vendors as they were available to provide the goods or services. And then we would conduct outreach prior to the PRE-BID meeting to inform them of the opportunity and to provide them any additional information or encouragement to compete. And then we would do additional follow up at the close of the bid window to encourage vendors to submit those responses. And this, we believe, is of particular benefit to local businesses to provide a bridge to help them get engaged in our procurements. And so I've shown some statistics here on that particular procurement. I'd like to note that I have a correction to the table on the downloaded bid row. I apologize that last second the last column should say nine, not 11, and then the percentage would be 27%. But what this is showing is the fact that we have reached out on a number of outreach calls and tried to encourage and engage those local SB and B and WB, which is minority and women business enterprises to get engaged in the process and be competitive in our procurements. And so what I show here to demonstrate the benefit of some of those phone calls, this slide is showing the real life examples of our outreach calls from that particular procurement. These outreach calls range from encouraging participation in the procurement to providing technical assistance to the vendors, to providing clarification on the procurement itself. And again, that's that bridge to help local businesses or who tend to be small businesses participate in our procurements. So as I mentioned in the beginning, we were looking for areas for improvement and we did find that there are opportunities and wanted to start with the fact that, as mentioned, some of the other programs that we saw had significant marketing efforts that ensured that local businesses were more aware of the resources available to them through the city. While we do outreach, we believe that creating more of a branding and marketing effort of our opportunities to make it more recognizable to the business community could provide additional benefits to ensure that those local businesses are aware of those opportunities, and that would help us reach more of them. And we'd also like to look at opportunities to coordinate with other city programs and resources in order to again continue to expand on how many businesses we are able to reach with our given resources. And both of these planned improvements align very well with the economic development blueprint and financial management has. We have connected with the Department of Economic and Property Development and will be looking to coordinate our efforts with them. And for example, we may be able to use Billboard as an opportunity to get out some additional information about our procurement process and get people more involved. We also are looking for ways to create more and better opportunities for local business participation, and we believe there's some potential to do that. A couple of ways that we think we can do so is to use our bidders database to help provide a source for our informal, quote, process. So our bidder database is primarily driven towards our formal procurements. But departments are engaging in a lot of informal procurements, and getting them our bitter database as a tool will help them reach more local businesses. And we also want to evaluate transitioning to a more detailed commodity and service type code, because the way that we match our vendors in our database currently with our procurement opportunities is that they self-identify with the types of procurements that they're interested in. And right now, those categories are probably a little more broad than they need to be. And there's an opportunity to go to more detailed commodity codes to better make those matches. And both of these improvements are integrated into our ERP project known as LP Coast ERP being the replacement of our financial and H.R systems. So these these are things we'll be looking at and have begun looking at already. And we're also looking for opportunities to we believe that there might be opportunities to simplify our documents and requirements to make participation for local businesses easier. And some of that might be to review our bid and RFP documents to identify ways to simplify, modernize them and make them more approachable. Also to evaluate whether or not we're using the appropriate requirements based on the risk level of the procurement. So essentially to look at possibly creating a sliding scale of requirements and where feasible to improve vendor education regarding some of our requirements that we have on our procurements related to state, local and federal regulations such as labor compliance requirements, so that they can better navigate that regulatory environment. We also believe that we can continue to support and strengthen local businesses ability to compete and succeed on our PS we. Many of the planned improvements that I just described are equally applicable to our PS as to bids and so they will directly benefit local businesses ability to compete on those RF PS as well as the bids. And while there are some legal hurdles to overcome, we will also be continuing to work with City Attorney to explore whether there are any additional ways to apply some form of local preference to RFP. So in summary, we have a lot of great efforts to support local businesses participation in our procurements, but we do believe that they can be improved and we have some work to do and we've already started making some of those first steps. And with that, I will conclude my staff report and I'm available to answer any questions. Thank you. And now we're moving on to Councilwoman Pryor. I'm sorry. Go back to Councilwoman Gonzales. Yes. Thank you, Sandy, for the report. This was a great report. When I first initiated the item back in August, I wanted to make sure that we were creating a definitely highlighting what we have existing, but also adding a bit more and making that more robust. And it seems that we're headed in the right direction. And so I thank you and the team for your work, Leah, as well. Thank you very much. So a few things, a couple questions. And I also have some suggestions just looking over a few of the of our adjacent cities and what they've done as well. I think we certainly can do more specifically the marketing as we talked about. I do feel that we need a name to this plan. Pasadena has a buy local plan. Whittier, I think Whittier is Whittier first something of that regard. And this could be anything I mean, Long Beach business is first. I don't know what that will look like, but I definitely envision a, you know, a marketing strategy in that sense to be able to allow people to know that this is a place that they can invest, but also that will be given preference. And so I think we're headed in that direction. In addition, there's a few other points encouraging city department heads to purchase local as well. Do we have that in our plan? It seems to be informal, but it would be nice to have that included as well, creating more of a culture of local procurement. And then, as we mentioned, it seems that we are doing quite a bit of business community outreach. Of course, our business improvement district districts, regional Hispanic Chamber does a great job of letting the general public know about the local opportunities available. However, I think we can push it a bit further. Are we offering this information in various languages? Not at this time, no. Okay. I would suggest that we do that through our language access policy, because I believe that this the Spanish speaking community, the Cambodian community, they only they feel more comfortable reading in their native language. And I think it's another opportunity and avenue for us to market to these businesses in that sense. I personally have a lot of Latino owned businesses. Many of them I can speak to in the language. But I think that they would appreciate having that information, especially because it could be so technical in a different language and then promoting the benefits of our successes. So do we have I see that we have a table here with our information. You know, the WHO has registered in Planet Bids, downloaded, submitted bids. And then do we have a comprehensive information as to how many have been awarded overall and over a certain period of time, are we capturing that data to know how many minority owned businesses, women owned businesses that we currently that currently exist and that are working with the city? Do we have that information? We have it available for procurements that we are conducting centrally. Currently, we do not have that information available at the department level for underneath the central purchasing threshold. And that is something that I believe we will explore whether there are opportunities to do so under lbe coast as we're looking for what abilities we have there. That's not something we've gotten into that level of detail on. So I, I'm not sure if it's there, but it may be and it's something that we'll look to do if it is okay. I would suggest that and I know other cities have a vendor list that they keep that is just ongoing, you know, based on the various opportunities available. But it would be good to have that information so we can quantify that. And as we're promoting to to be able to let the general public know that this is, you know, we have X amount of women business owners that are working with the city. I think that would be a great point for us to talk about. And then I know we're encouraging current suppliers to subcontract as well with local suppliers, so I'm happy to see that talked about the business strategy. In addition, I know there have been some other cities that have fared well with a vendor fair of sorts, whether that's held at City Hall or any general location. I think it would be good to have some sort of event of of sorts that invites local businesses so they can understand face to face with some of our city employees as to what the process is and how they can be a part of the opportunities available. In addition, as far as our website, where does this currently exist? Because I tried looking myself and it was a bit cumbersome to find where you would even find the process to look for opportunities. Councilwoman. I agree. When we were looking at our own resources, we found some immediate opportunities to realign the access online to our information. Specifically, there's some really great resources that are set up through economic and property development where they're they've consolidated the information available to businesses. And currently, our information is on the financial management page, which is not quite as intuitive to businesses that are coming on to our website. And that is something that through the branding and marketing improvements, we would like to look to consolidate and make more visible. Okay, great. That would be wonderful because it right. It's not very intuitive. You would often think maybe it's under economic development or some other place. So great. I also think there's an opportunity at our development services desk as people are coming in, applying for business licenses or they're asking about expanding their business, what have you, that perhaps brochures could be made that highlights this opportunity. So I think any touchpoint that we have here at City Hall to provide additional marketing, that would be great. And then lastly, the ways that we can work to incorporate local procurement preferences for RF piece. I know that we are working on that, but it would be good to get additional information from our city attorney as to what could be done in that respect. I know that there are legal challenges and hurdles that we need to, you know, work with, but any way possible that we can provide additional opportunities, that would be wonderful. Now, all of that said, you know, I don't I guess the intention of this item was not to make you know, to put it out there and not have anything happen. I would like actually for us to report back again on additional I know I don't want to continue prolonging this, but I think it's important that we report back with the implementation of all of these items. I think a lot of the business individuals that I've been talking to really want to see something that works for them. And it would be great to find out, you know, how we're going to market, who we're going to market to and including all of these recommendations , creating how are we going to create, encourage a better culture with encouraging city department heads, how are we going to promote benefits and data? So it would be great to come back to council. I don't I know this item took a while. I mean, I would say 30 days, but that might be too tight. So what would be I'm going to leave it open. I'm completely open to this. I know that it's not crucial, but I want to leave it open for a good time to come back. 120 days. Mr. West. Go ahead. Go ahead. Leah or Sandy. I believe that we can come back in 120 days and give you an update. Some of the items identified for improvement may extend beyond that time frame, but we could certainly update you on our progress on where we are on those items. Okay, great. That would be wonderful. And if it could be reported back here to the council, the full council, that would be great. And we can then go on to next steps and if you need to, I can also send additional recommendations in writing as well. Or did the recommendations that I included. I'm sorry. Thank you very much for the work, though. I appreciate it. I think our city is headed in the right direction. As I mentioned with this program in the beginning, it says a good program made better. I'd like to see this be a great program made better so I know that we'll get there. And I thank you both for your work in this. Councilman Price, let me go to Councilmember Wingard, who is the second. Thank you, Mayor. Very thorough. Councilmember Gonzalez, you've addressed a lot of the issues that I had. And I want to ask specifically, when you're talking about maybe women's small business, enterprise, women, own breed appraisers, minority owned enterprises skills are that's not reported here. And I didn't see any kind of strategy actually in how to address that need for representation and diversity in our procurement process. So you addressed that very well, and I will glad you did, because it's important to us. We have to know that. We have to let people know businesses that we are accepting of all applications that in fact we do not have. You know, that we have a nondiscrimination policy when it comes to procurement, regardless of race or gender. And that and I'm glad that that will be addressed. The other point that I wanted to to ask about was when we look at the types of outreach that is done out there, you named a few here in terms of the regional Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Black Business Association and other local maybe WEAVES and other organizations like that. Are you concentrating those in the Long Beach area or are you looking at it regionally? Because I think that would be important as well when we we're doing that kind of outreach. Council member the majority of the community based organizations that are on our distribution list are local, a few are regional, and we are looking for opportunities to expand that list. Yeah, because I think talking about if we're going to be making an impact and having more diversity in our vendors, we need to look beyond just Long Beach. I mean, there's a regional organizations that we can look at to help with in their recruitment and the procurement process as well. So I would want to see outreach in these areas, especially because, you know, when you look at when you really consider it, while Long Beach might be a large, considered a large city, some of these are procurement opportunities, are very specialized in nature. And you're not going to get that specialized vendor that is a a small a women owned or minority owned business or you stay within Long Beach, you have to go outside of that. So I want to see some outreach opportunities to go into those other other areas as well. And I'm speaking generally in terms of a regional effort. Tara, you made a great, excellent point in terms of, you know, getting a brochure ready. And a lot of times it's education. I mean, a lot of vendors are really aware of what our process is. And I've had a lot of and I'm sure, as all of us have, I'm on the city council. We get people, make appointments with us to talk about, to sell, to sell their business to us. And we always ask them, are you on our vendors list or have you talked to our. Managers have regarding getting on the list and what the process is in doing that. And I as I refer them over there and and I really don't know at this point if they actually contacted you or not and what the follow up was, if any at all. So I would like to see some feedback on that when I'm able to refer somebody to you a little note saying, I met with so-and-so, who whom you refer to us can, you know, we're looking at their application or we've we've guided them through the process, giving them some information just so that it could close the loop in terms of when I meet with with potential people who are going to who want to do business with us and knowing that they got they got served. Because there have been a couple of occasions where I've had small business people come back to me and says, you know, I tried to contact your people, but they never got back to me. So I would like to to have an opportunity to close those loops and perhaps we can have some kind of a report or at least a feedback in terms of who you talked to when he talked to them. And just to close the loop for for my benefit so that I know that they've already been they've been helped or assisted. And on page 11, 11 and 12, page 12, you have there your first bullets continue to support and strengthen local businesses ability to compete in success on RFPs. How do you what surprises you do that? How do you support and how do you strengthen their abilities? I mean, is there a is there a plan? Do you have a plan? Is there an effort that you're doing in terms of educating these potential contractors with the city in regards to the process? Is there are there workshops that you put together on a yearly, monthly, quarterly basis that would invite people to come in, learn about the procurement process of doing business with Long Beach? Do you have one now? You have a plan or can you explain that item for me a little bit? Councilmember your target currently we go out to a lot of community events that are local events to educate vendors on how to do business with the city. We speak at local vendor fairs and do outreach at various trade events, and that is part of what we do at those events. We do that equally for bids as well as for RFP, as a lot of our outreach strategies are dedicated towards both bids and RFP. And so we're capturing RFP in our outreach efforts. So we have not we have been engaging with the business community at those community events and through our phone and Internet outreach. Okay. So I so if I understand you correctly, then a lot of that is done through the RFP, RFQ process. Is there a you say a general is talking about the website? I would I would guess I didn't I haven't done it. But I would guess that if you go to Long Beach dot gov, there's going to be a link that would provide people with information on the types of procurement opportunities that are there with the city or RFP that are currently active or those types of those that type of information. That's correct. If once on our website, you're able to navigate to our portal for procurements where you can go in with inquiry access to see a listing of the current procurements, vendors can then register to see the details of those procurements. Again, and they would be also receiving information as to how to submit an application on our RFP, RFQ. That's correct. Right. Yeah. Those are my only comments at this point. I think that Councilmember Gonzalez had a very thorough presentation on this. It's her item. And right now I'm very, very, very confident that hopefully this this will I'm very confident that hopefully now I am confident they were going to come out with something that's going to be possible positive for our vendors and lobby. I'm especially and my city manager West knows that many times when we've come up with the awards of contracts that I'm always bringing up, how many minority and women owned businesses applied? Because that's very important. We need to we need to show that we are a business friendly city and that we do offer a lot of opportunities for people who are interested in applying with us that we are that we are looking at their application seriously. Thank you. Councilman Price. Thank you. I want to thank my colleagues for their comments on this topic. Very, very good discussion. The one question I have is if we adopt a policy at council, is every city department bound by it, including harbor or harbor department, gas department, water department, or does that have to be presented to them separately? The Harbor and water department will be separate their separate jurisdiction under the charter. Okay. And do we know I know for actor we do have a small business incentive and recruitment program and policy. Do we know if the harbor department has a similar policy? I believe and I'll have to double check, but I believe they do have a policy. There is an issue with the harbor department and to a lesser extent with the water department on the restriction of those funds, the being tidelands funds in the harbor department, they would be prohibited from having a local preference. Great. Thank you. I have nothing further. Thank you, Councilman Austin. Well, first of all, I want to thank the financial management department for a very comprehensive presentation. I think most of my questions have been answered. My colleagues have asked excellent questions. This price you just saw, Councilmember Price, you just asked the question that I had in terms of enterprise funds and if they applied. So I think the 10% local benchmark is something that we should be proud of. But, you know, I would just tell staff that we should be striving for continuous improvement. It's it's good to be good, but let's strive to be better and even the best. The L.A. County, the 15%, I think, you know, that might be a benchmark for us to to look to to get to in terms of local procurement. I'm next, but we don't have an AMC if you're taking over NBC. So. Councilmember Mondale, you have the floor. Thank you. A couple of quick. Things so related to the other departments that are not bound. I completely agree with Councilman Price. Councilman Gonzales and I wrote a letter to another commission to discuss potential options. Are we able to refer to other commissions or recommend consideration or. I mean, what is that process by which we can recommend that they consider local preference or let them know of our desire for them to to at least take a moment and consider it? Yes. That's been done in the past and certainly possible to do if it's a decision of the body to recommend to those commissions to consider a certain policy or direction. So I'd like to add that to this motion. And then additionally with language, I do believe we need to do a better job of identifying specifically within the city of Long Beach. And when you look at the language access numbers, the two categories that were utilized were our Cambodian. Access and our. Hispanic population and Spanish speaking. And so potentially we should target the businesses in those particular corridors and categories. In L.A. County and East L.A., they did a walking outreach. Where they took. Some of our Spanish speaking staff members and did the outreach as a walk campaign where they let the community know in advance so that the store owners or the procurement managers would be there on a certain day. And then they walked that corridor and provided them the information they wanted in small groups where they felt really comfortable . And then with relation to the local preference, currently at 10%. L.A. County has not yet had 15% for even a year yet. And so we don't know the implications or turnout of that percentage yet, but I think that we should keep an eye on it. Also related to our $88 million in annual spending, I think that's great. One of the other exercises that L.A. County did as a part of the budget process was they asked each budget manager before they after their ninth month budget status report to take all of the expenditures in their department and say, so take your household budget , for example. If your household budget is, let's say, $1,000 a month and you already know you're going to spend X amount on your mortgage and X amount on this, that or the other, you know, those are set aside because you're committed for multiple years. But then they found out what percentage of their budget was discretionary and available for purchases on an annual basis in the S.A. categories, certain things obviously aren't available. For instance, you pay your utilities as a department and so on and so forth. But outside of that, they said, here's how much could be spent on small businesses. And then they said what percentage they currently meet. And then they use that as an annual benchmark in their open data portal of where they show their budget. And so I think this is just another opportunity to talk about the open data portal and why it's so important. And then to loop in Councilmember your anchor's comments to the intention of the item as originally brought forth by Councilman Gonzales and myself. I think that we really want it to be focused on local and from the regional standpoint. One of the things I think we could work on is phase two. Of what I think Gina and I have talked a lot about is employ Long Beach. Employ Long Beach would be the next phase of a of a a buy local program. So we as the city of Long Beach need to buy from businesses within our boundaries. However, there are businesses that are outside of our boundaries where a majority of their employees. Are. Long Beach residents. And so that's that regional perspective that we could build that actually still benefits Long Beach and Long Beach residents. And so I know that within our statistics as a city, we currently ask every business owner, how many employees do you have? We could start asking that of our. Contractors and ask them of. Your total employee count. How many of them are Long Beach residents? And that will help us. Many of you read today that we're at a historic low with our unemployment rate of 4.4%. But if you're a business and you're willing to go out of your way to hire Long Beach residents or you're currently a Long Beach vendor , you should be hiring Long Beach residents even if you're outside the city borders of Long Beach. And so I know we're not there yet, but just something to keep in mind. I appreciate everyone's feedback and comments and I look forward to a report back in 120 days. Thank you very much. And I'll accept those friendlies, by the way. Thank you. So, Councilmember. Pearce. Thank you. You guys have said a lot. So I will say I agree. And I also want to echo the need to have it in multiple languages. We have a lot of business corridors, whether it's off of Anaheim or in other areas, that we just need to make sure that we include everybody that can be a part of it. So thank you so much. Councilmember. You want to? Yeah, I just I just want to make a brief clarification on gun control bongo's referral to regional businesses versus local. I meant that obviously for minority owned businesses and women owned businesses, because I know that we're not going to have the high number of of those kinds of businesses in Long Beach. So it would it would be it would behoove us to go outside of Long Beach and recruit individuals from those from those communities to to encourage them to apply for opportunities here in Long Beach as well. So I'm looking at regionally for those those where we will find them here. Let's extend the application process a little longer so that we could do an additional recruitment or effort to advertise to ensure that we have a good, diverse applicant pool when we're looking at these various procurements. And the other question I wanted to ask also was, does this outreach and data, does it include like consultants? I know a lot of we talk about procurement. We're talking about maybe cards or or tree trimming or, you know, paving or whatever. But we don't talk about much about consulting services or or legal services. Are we looking at that as well? Councilmember Yes. When we're doing formal procurements through central purchasing, we are doing outreach on on services as well as as goods and contracts. And that includes professional services, for instance. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify my comments earlier. I know I compared Long Beach to L.A. County. L.A. County is a huge behemoth county with a large, very large scope. And so I know that's a that's a big number to get to. And I recognize that I like to go public. Comment Now, is there any public comment on this item? Okay. It's been moved and seconded. Members, please cast your votes. The motion carries. Okay. Next up is item number 22.