Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the City Attorney, the Economic Development Commission and the Planning Commission to review and make recommendations regarding Section 21.52 of the Long Beach Municipal Code pertaining to Conditional Use Permits (CUP). Such review would include a written report reviewing the following: · Uses which require a CUP. · Efforts to make the CUP process more cost effective. · Streamlining the public noticing process related to CUPs. · Expediting CUP modifications for existing businesses. · Creating a simplified CUP process for existing businesses opening another location.
And we will now move on to. Yes. Wow. It's been a long night already. We're going on to 13 and then 24 and I see Rob out there. You're very patient. Q I. Am 13. Communication from Councilmember Pierce, Councilwoman Gonzalez, Councilwoman Mongo, Councilman Austin. Recommendation to request the city manager to work with the city attorney, the Economic Development Commission and the Planning Commission to review and make recommendations regarding Section 21.52 of the Long Beach Municipal Code pertaining to conditional use permit. Councilwoman Pierce. Do we have Amy here? I'd like to go ahead and direct to staff. We spoke. Mr. Mayor. Members of the city council. The item before you today is, is. To consider. An amendment to the municipal code looking at conditional use permits. This is something. That staff is very supportive of in diving into and trying to find a. Way to. Make the. CFP process more efficient and more transparent for both the applicants. And the neighborhoods who may be impacted by those businesses. We're very interested in this item and do support it. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them at this time. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Yes. I want to thank staff for their time and effort on this. And this is an item that really came to fruition because we had lots of conversations with small business owners, many who came tonight and had to leave. But lots of conversations with small business owners that spent the majority of their dollars trying to open up their business. And, you know, one letter that we got, I believe, an email today and I promise I'll try to make it quick was from a business on Fourth Street that had been open for nine years, wanted to extend their store up their their KPIs so that they could open later. And, you know, the stories of the process and the red tape and the cost just really tied their hands. And so we know that in Long Beach, we have a lot of great small businesses, a lot of great owners that have a lot of vision and want to be able to move forward with opening up maybe a later hour or a second location, but that sometimes the process is just a little rocky for them. And I know that we've got some businesses here. They're going to speak about their experience as we continue to have conversations with different council offices. Each district has a different challenge. North Long Beach is not like downtown. We've got a lot of diverse businesses that require different types of cups. And so through the conversations, instead of just talking about one part of that CFP process, we really wanted to say, Let's open it up, let's take it all apart and put it back together again. After we do some real diving in and looking at what other cities do so that we can be a city that is business friendly to small businesses and not just the very large ones. And so I think that this is just a direction to really take this apart and come back to city council with some good directions and some good ideas. It includes a process for economic development, for a different committee to look at this. And so I really want to look forward to hearing the comments from my colleagues. I would like to ask if we could go ahead and have and I'm new at this, you know, could we have public comment happen now so that these nice people can go home if they need to instead of hearing to stuff? Yes. I mean, we can do I'm going to ask the second or the motion if they want to say anything. And then we can always go to go to public comment if without any objection. Okay. Thank you, Councilman Mongo. So I too want to thank Amy. Amy and I started working on the U.P. amendments two years ago when I was elected, and so when Jeanine approached her, she said, Hey, have you talked to Stacey? Because we've been working on and talking about some things. So I appreciate staff keeping that in mind. Each of our offices often work independently with the communities that we serve until we get to a point where we know where we want to go and then we find out. Our colleagues are also thinking in the same direction, and I'm really excited to have colleagues that are being mindful of this process. A couple of key things that that have come to date recently, and I hope that we'll work on including it in this item as well. There are lots of businesses that get stuck in this process for a number of reasons, and those processes become very costly. Certain businesses think that they're going to be moving in the right direction. They get a pre inspection or a pre meeting. They do all of the things that they're asked and then they submit and three or four months later they get back dozens and dozens of comments that are completely contrary to their original meeting. And that's specifically something I've heard from a business that's still in the sixth month of going through a process to open their doors, actually , not in my district, but over in the seventh District. And so we've talked a lot about what other options there are. And I want to kind of put a few of those out there for people to know and understand if you've ever opened a business and need to do a remodel of an ADA bathroom. There are 700 different contractors and a thousand different inspector. I'm sorry, a thousand different architects. That'll draw those up for you and charge you an exuberant amount. And something that constituents have come to me about. And I've also discussed with Vice Mayor Richardson, because it was his constituent who owns businesses in my district as well. We should be able to have pre formatted plans like that online. You should be able to just download it and get it to go. I gave you the credit. But but he he came to me too and called me today about it specifically. And you should be able to just download it and go because a ten by ten A.D.A. bathroom should be a ten by 1088 bathroom should be a ten by ten bathroom and we shouldn't have to pay $1,000. I'm not trying to look to reduce the revenues of our architects and our contractors, but we should know and understand what those look like and we should be able to move forward quickly and those costs should come down. And so I hope that before this does return to council, that this does get time to be presented to E.D. enough. And today, my colleagues and I listen to Inspector Gadget and the new systems that we're putting in place to make the processes easier and to other apps that we've used. And so I hope that will have that timeliness in it as well. And I do look forward to comments from the community. Great. Thank you. Vice Mayor. Oh, I'm sorry. Excellent. There was. If there wasn't any objection, the council would like to do public comment first. Okay. See, not any public comment on this item. Come forward, please. Good evening. Council Members Mayor Staff Jimmy Harris, senior vice president of Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, will make this short and sweet. We appreciate this item bringing it forward tonight. Appreciate a seat at the table when discussing this, 800 plus members. 90% of them are small businesses. And we've heard story after story after story about this process. So a lovely part of the conversation. Thank you. All right, Jeremy. It's about college friend. All right, next, mayor, council members. I represent the Brit in the mineshaft on Broadway. These parts have been there 28 years and 44 years, respectively. So we've been through. This process with the cops. A lot of times I just I just wanted to come come forward and back the recommendation that this be revisited. It can be very grueling on a small business. Time consuming, costly. And in the end, you can often come up with nothing if if not more restriction placed on you. So I. I appreciate the council members bringing this issue forward and I support it. And I would hope that you would take the time to consider the small businesses when you're making these decisions. Thank you. Thank you. SPEAKER Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Members of the City Council, Craig Cogen with the downtown Long Beach Alliance have a chat. I've had a chance to. Speak with Councilmember. Pierce, as well as city staff and a few of our board members. And we're fully supportive of looking. And reevaluating this. Process and. Certainly look forward. To being part of the. Discussion as well. So we encourage your endorsement. Thank you. Thank you. Speaker. For a twofer tonight. I am on fire and I love it. Is working it tonight? No, I too have been in contact with. Councilmember Pierce and I fully support the evaluation on the up. It's just, you know, as a small business, you work so hard. And when you do have to come around. And cross that bridge. You know the numbers that are thrown at you, you know, you're talking about $10,000. And it's you know, you're a little weary. I've had pleasant experience with a great team and. Planning, so I wanted to give them a shout out. But I'm fully on board with looking at this and seeing if there's a way we can make it better. Thank you very much. Speaker, sir. Final speaker. Thank you. Surely beside with respect to multi-jurisdictional and agreement regarding Senate Bill two of the California housing element. I am finding not only in this city but other local coastal community cities are running into problems inadvertently and I don't believe intentionally when the community and the business community, the residential community does not understand that by right. Homeless services have zoning by right. And it does not require a conditional use permit when within a particular Jewish jurisdiction and locality, if the zoning does not meet the requirement of its its homeless. When is zoning? Jurisdictional does not meet the requirement of its population. If you have 4000 homeless people in a particular jurisdiction, but you only zone in an area where there's only 400, then you're going to run into a problem with your residential community and the business community because they're not going to be aware that by right. By right when you are not meeting your need. Homeless services are allowed to function within a commercial and a residential community by right. By, right? I believe it is an unfair. To the community of homeless people and the community of the business and community of commercial residential. When the three do not understand. That by right. Homeless services are allowed when you are not meeting your your zoning allowance needs. If you have 4000 homeless people in a particular city, you must zone by write. And there should not be. You should not be receiving repercussions after we move into a particular city. And then suddenly the community finds out homeless people are being assisted here and certainly we have a problem with it. I would say and I question I'm saying and I am also questioning whether or not as council persons representing each district, whether or not you have properly alerted and informed your citizenry that by right according to Senate Bill two, which augmented homeless services if the need has not been met. I'm finding this is the condition. This is the situation along the coast from Santa Barbara to Orange County. They're all having the same problem. They're saying we weren't told. So my hope is that you tell them. Thank you. Vice Mayor Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you to Councilwoman Pierce all the cosigners on this item. And it seems like copies of the thing that the council every few years or maybe every few months we come back and tweak. And what's excited about this motion is a real opportunity to get creative. So so thank you for taking the lead on this. Councilwoman Pierce. So given, you know, allow we've tweaked this over the years. We like some things. We want to make sure some of those things are protected. So could the process be changed and streamlined, maybe cheaper? Yes. Should we be impacting our protections on neighborhoods? No. We should still maintain our ability to protect our neighborhoods from some you know, some of the bad actors or the nuisance activities in neighborhood. Should we roll back any of the protections we put in our loopholes? No, we should not. I want to just have a just ask a few questions to staff quickly on how to approach a few things. So is some of that stuff that's important to me? Like, you know, we went through a whole conversation, actually got awards about alcohol, nuisance abatement ordinance. Liquor stores were a big conversation. We want to make sure that we we you know, we had a conversation about defining what is a liquor store, because it's the same it's the same definition, same liquor license as a pharmacy or grocery store. And we had to, you know, go through that process and define that. How are we going to approach that and protect, you know, the progress we made there? So the NRA ordinance would not be impacted by this because those that covers locations that. Do not currently have a copy and is an important component in our enforcement of those locations. So the NRA would remain as is. So the and I get that the question is like, you know, maybe two years ago there was a conversation about, you know, what is a liquor store and what in the grocery store is a Walmart, a liquor store? A grocery store is a pharmacy, a liquor store, a grocery store, same license. We respond to them very differently. The community response to them very differently, yes. So we had that conversation. I want to make sure that, you know, where we landed is preserved here. Understood. Okay. And then, you know, there was a conversation and a lot of good work was done in the health department and it crossed over into planning around healthy standards in liquor stores. And, you know, we started to see some standard conditions be crafted and all of that. You know, we got to a good place. And then we stopped getting liquor store applications for a while, which is a good thing, too. So are we going to, you know, make sure that we look at that lens, the healthy food standards that have been crafted over the years. Specifically. Related to alcohol? Sirups Yes, we can. Certainly. Thank you very much. And then the last thing that I think is really cool that could happen here, city of New Orleans, Decatur, Georgia, they created some like, you know, CFP and permit zones that in certain areas that they encouraged more entertainment or more activity. They got rid of the permit fees altogether. If you meet certain criteria, like if you're festival meet certain criteria or if your business is an area that really needs that activity. They had a special rate or special process that made it really easy for those areas. So like an incentive zone. In fact, the program, if you want to look up look it up indicator is called. There's a festival for that. And if you're on a certain corridor and you want to host a festival, if you meet certain rules, we get rid of that. I just want to just put on the table as we look at KPIs, let's, let's think about how we can also look at leveraging that and permits in certain areas to create some cool opportunities. And that's just a recommendation to, you know, just a recommendation of staff. Thanks. Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzalez. Just think you'd like to also commend Councilmember Pearce for bringing this forward. I think in many discussion, discussions with small and medium businesses were often talking about the CFP process and how we can fine tune it. And so. Just a couple questions for Amy. First, do we have as a city ombudsman specifically for small business? I know we have Saeed Jalali, who works as kind of a city wide ombudsman, but anyone specifically working with small business. So Mayor and council members, I answer that. We have said Jalali, who has been our ombudsman and the council in the FY17 budget, actually added a second position. So we will have a second ombudsman. We're doing the hiring for that right now. Great. And then how does the do we link the CP process currently with Business Port? I know as we're rolling that out, is that something that could be added in? Certainly. Yes. What we'd like to really do, though, first is to try to strip down. As one of the council members. Already has said, strip down the entire process and really see what is important to the community. And once we. Have that new process in place, it should be much, easily, much more easily disseminated through busy port. Some great. Thank you very much. I look forward to hearing back the report. Councilman Austin. Thank you. And I want to thank Councilmember Pearce for bringing this forward. I like to consider myself as a small, business friendly council member. I want to commend our Development Services Department for their excellent support, particularly in the business districts in my district, in support of small business. I think obviously there are areas that we need to improve, and this is why I signed on to this this item. I think we should always be striving for continuous improvement with our processes, particularly processes that that encourage or that engage commerce and economic development. I think, you know, we're one of the most important roles that I think I have as a city councilmember is is actually supporting small business and new businesses coming in with with with in conjunction with our business improvement districts. And we've we're doing ribbon cuttings, you know, once a week, it seems like, in my district. And so something is working. And so I want to commend you this biotech and your department and Pat West for for your support in my district. I did have one question in terms of process here, because what are what are we trying to accomplish? I did sign on, but I do see that this is a a process that that asks the city manager and city attorney to engage with the Economic Development Commission in Planning Commission to review and make recommendations on a number of areas. Is this in an effort to to actually go toward a change in ordinance later? And will this come back to forefront? I guess. Certainly because it affects Title 21, it does involve. Going to the planning commission and because it affects the municipal code title 21, it actually does have to come back to the city council as an ordinance. Okay. Thank you. I'll be supporting. Thank you. Council members, open up. Thank you. I'd like to echo the words of one of our speakers, Luis Navarro, owner of Lola's. I, too, have had some very good experiences with development services, so thank you, Amy, for your work in that department. We've talked about one item that I prefer, and that is as the cops are sent out. If the council office could get a heads up like 24 hours prior or something, as long as we're going to tweak this thing, I'd like to throw that in. Thank you. So you're talking about the noticing? Yes. I'm sorry. Yeah, the topic is noticing. I have no desire to pull that back. As was mentioned by my colleagues here, we what we owe to the neighborhoods. But we just like to get a notice just before it goes out. Would be very handy. So we're just not blindsided. Understood. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to clarify also, in addition to sending this to the committees, I believe that some of us council members would also like to put together a community meeting sometime in the next month or two months to get the bid's involvement and to really have a public process on this. And one last thing is just, you know, the at cost. I got a couple of questions about the cost of notifications. And so this will make sure that we continue to notify residents that the neighborhoods aren't being impacted, but that we're doing it in a more efficient way and really trying to have government work smarter. So, again, thank you, everybody, for your support tonight. Hopefully. Councilman Andrew. Yes, thank you, Mayor. I just want to thank Mrs. Bodak for really being there for my district because the fact that there's businesses going in and to really help in our community to look like a chair look and thank you again. This is what have. I'm not going anywhere. Thank you. Thank you. There's a motion and a second member. Please cast your vote. Motion carries.