Recommendation to request City Manager to identify opportunities to expand the City’s role as a leading municipality by exploring additional options to contract to provide services to other local cities and agencies in areas such as public safety, health, animal care services and public works.
Vice Mayor Richardson, i Bush and Kerry's. Thank you. We're going to item 13, please. Item 13 Communication from Councilman Austin, Councilwoman Mongo, Councilwoman Sara and Vice Mayor Richardson. Recommendation to explore additional options to provide services to other local cities and agencies in areas such as public safety, health and animal care services and public works. Okay. I'm going to have Councilmember Austin, please. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I think this item is pretty straightforward. Our city is growing and I think is recognized as an invisible leader in many respects. And we are surrounded by many contract cities. This is an item that that I have been thinking about and talking to colleagues about for several years, actually maximizing our resources and leveraging the resources that we have to extend our services, but also help our bottom line here in the city, our residents, as well as our potentially our our general fund. This is a direction to the city manager to begin having conversations with other cities about potential services that we can contract in. Right. That we can provide for neighboring cities and proximate proximity to. That makes sense, for example, and I will just put it out there. You know, there is a city that's like little early, right in the middle of Long Beach. Right. That that contracts would with the county RFP should be put forth to to to look at the services that we could provide, be it our health department public works, be it fire police resources. These are great resources that if if. If we are being smarter, if other cities are being smarter, we could we could we could really leverage our resources and provide great services to the residents and neighbors in Long Beach and around Long Beach. And so those are my comments. I would really love to hear from my colleagues to get your your thoughts on this. But I think this is a direction that we should be going in. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I am so excited to be supportive of this item. This is something that Al and I have talked about for years. Back when I was Budget Vice Chair in 2015 and we talked about some of the opportunities that we have. I know that even before I was a council person, back when Mr. Keisler was with Animal Care Services, we talked about even offering some of these services to L.A. County, as the fifth District has pockets of unincorporated areas that when a stray cat has an issue, L.A. County sends someone from Downey. And that's just not an effective use of their resources. It's not great response times for our residents and neighboring residents. Those residents believe that we are their city council, even though they live in an unincorporated area. Oftentimes my office gets calls and we kind of help triage and say, What color are your trashcans? Our trash cans are these colors, and if your trash cans are those colors, you live in the unincorporated area of Long Beach and they don't recognize that. Sometimes we may we kind of provide services even to Orange County in terms of animal services and others. So I don't want us to limit ourselves. Even L.A. County, in their contract cities model, does provide some services to Orange County cities. On our border, we have unincorporated Orange County of Rossmore, Cypress, Los Alamitos, and so many others. We're here to partner. I had a great talk today with a vice mayor of a neighboring city and a councilmember of a different city and just so excited that they are excited to hear what opportunities are possible. Long Beach provides first rate services and Long Beach staff are some of the best staff in the country. From public administration standpoint, we are just so fortunate to have so many great employees and as we expand these services, we'll be able to expand the number of employees we have on staff. And really the coordination between cities will be better. Many Border Council members like myself, that border other cities, we often have coordination challenges that we could improve if we were providing those services in both areas, it wouldn't be a this is their jurisdiction or our jurisdiction. The line actually goes here. And so enforcement issues come up sometimes. And I think that this would be just an amazing opportunity. So I enthusiastically support and bring this to the city staff and look forward to their creative ways of really growing Long Beach and our ability to provide high quality of life and improve the quality of life for not just Long Beach residents, but those in the cities around us who often work, play and enjoy Long Beach. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I really just want to take a moment and thank Councilman Austin for inviting me to sign on to this our border. I've said this a lot. There are five city halls closer to my district than my own city hall. We border Lakewood, Bellflower, Paramount, Lakewood. Bellflower, Paramount. Compton, Rancho Dominguez. It's actually six signal hills, technically closer to my house than City Hall. There's six city halls closer to my house. Then there's the downtown. And that that matters because, you know, when you're on the edge, when something happens in one city, I get a phone call about that issue, something, you know, there was an incident where there was a shooting on one border. The shooting occurred on one border. The person fell into our border. You had two agencies standing there wondering what was going to happen. How are we going to process that, you know? So I make it a point to work with these different city managers know the council members, because we'll have issues that sometimes are strong allies, the national issues. And there have been multiple conversations about fire services in Compton and other other services. And on top of that, like, let's be honest, we're signing right now our vaccination process. All the things we've done, the leadership our public health department has done looks good and people are interested. So I'm fully supportive of this. I think we should look at, you know, make sure, you know, my interest would be that we look at bordering cities and have some direct conversation with those city managers about what opportunities may exist, because it may enhance our own services here, particularly on the far outskirts of the city with respect to public safety and some of the other things. Thanks a lot. Happy to support. Thank you. Next up, I have Councilwoman Sorrell. Thank you. I want to thank Councilmember Austin for introducing the items and my colleague, Councilmember Mongo and Vice Mayor Richardson for supporting as well. And for they said a lot and I agree with them. And I think that I just want to add a few things. District six Borders Signal Hill And I think that it just contributes to regional cohesion and coordination. When we're able to explore what makes the most sense, sometimes it's more efficient to contract to another city who has that infrastructure set up. So for that reason, and for many of the things my colleagues said, that's why I support this item. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Allen. Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. I also appreciate council members Austin and Mango and Sorrow and Rex Richardson for bringing this item forward. And I would always encourage staff to look at ways to boost efficiencies and service levels in innovative ways. I know I talked previously at the Council meeting about opportunities to provide services like our police helicopter and to bordering cities, and we can look at opportunities to provide street work at our city borders. And I know that we had looked in the past for adding fire services to Signal Hill. So maybe there is an opportunity for us to explore that again. I just think this is just a great item. It's a great way to grow our city revenue and to hire more city staff and happy to support this. Thank you very much. I have customary ringa. I want to add. My voice to the support of Saddam. My district borders the city of L.A. and the city of Carson and the little cities north of that. So it would be a great opportunity to see what what we can do, how we can expand and grow out there. Also, I also wanted to see a lake as well. This is a way, I think. Thank you. And I think we have one member of the public wishing to speak, I believe. Yes. We have Dave Shukla. Hello. Yes. Again. Thank you. Good evening. As you heard. Earlier this afternoon in the budget study session and in the council discussion on the Recovery. Act passed. In item 15. Thank you very much, by the way. As we heard earlier, there's a clear need for structural funding solutions as we chart a course for economic recovery, particularly after the immediate. Disbursement of the Recovery Act money. We are a major city and we are a regional anchor, and it's important that this discussion is taking place, and it's important that the city look. To. The various services that it can provide when it comes to public works. Specifically, one of the options still open to us. When we talk. About things like street lighting is developing a community choice aggregation program of buy for from the city for this not only this city but for the greater Long Beach area, for the whole Alameda corridor. In fact, there are strong reasons, economic recovery reasons, emissions reduction reasons, consumer choice reason, but also structural budget realignment from our current municipal dependance on oil extraction and sales without a managed transition to a clean energy economy. A lot of our current assets are very quickly going to flip to liabilities uncovered risks. The city of Long Beach really should look at this program as a potential way to to move forward. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Thank you will go back to the council at that. Everyone that was queued up so we can go ahead and go to a vote. Let me go ahead and do the roll call vote, please. Councilwoman Sun has asked Councilwoman Ellen Fine. Councilwoman Pryce. I. Councilman. Have been asked by Councilwoman Mangum. Councilwoman manga. As women, Sarah. I can. So, Councilmember Oranga. Hi. Councilman Austin. Hi. Vice Mayor Richardson. Hope Bush and Kerry. Thank you. Uh, let's see. Next up is item number 14.