Recommendation to Consider an Informational Report on City’s Facility Condition Assessments. (Public Works 310) (30 minutes)
Recommendation to consider an infinite information report on the city's facility condition assessment. And we have a staff report. Do we have any speakers on this item? All right. Thank you. Madam Mayor, members of the City Council. I'm Liam Garland with the Public Works Department. Here in Public Works, we have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder about not having the most exciting items to present. Tonight, we're going to be talking with you about our facilities, condition assessment and also some changes to our municipal code regarding construction contracting may be in order to get this get our creative juices flowing. We've got a quiz to start off tonight. This is not a quiz that is public. Well, in a sense, we're being watched. So it's a pop quiz. If I had to. Have the audience participate and we have a lifeline. Is the smiley face significant? I apologize. You take it away. And if I had the Jeopardy! Theme music, I would be playing it right now. But I do not have. So tonight we're going to talk a little bit about facilities management and we're going to walk through three questions that test your knowledge of good practices in facilities management and a little bit about what our existing inventory of facilities, what the scope of visit it is. So here's our first question. City buildings cover 500,000 square feet. That's roughly the size of a the Golden Gate Bridge. Yes. There we go. That is the answer. That is pretty amazing, isn't it? It's not what I would have guessed. It's also three times the size of Oracle Arena. Now let's contrast that with the number of public works staff funded for city building. Maintenance is the answer 13.58.25 or 20. And I always wonder who those haves and quarters are. That's what I was going to ask. Yes. The answer is be. So it's a nice contrast. Isn't a lot of building to maintain, along with not a lot of people to maintain it. And one way to think about this is what if you were told that the Golden Gate Bridge only had three and a half people maintaining it? How safe would you feel going across that bridge now? These three and a half people, they actually they maintain a lot more than that in the sense that they're dealing with daily toilet toilets, overflowing, leaky faucets, all the sort of day to day maintenance work of facilities. Finally, and this one's a little bit of a giveaway. When in doubt, always go. Which of the following are best practices in facilities management? Well, we've got the condition assessment, which we're going to hit in a couple of minutes. Maintenance, management systems. I've been in front of this body before talking about our computerized maintenance management system, LUSARDI, that we're rolling out through all of our different assets groups while facilities maintenance becomes a part of that computerized maintenance management system. And then also long term capital plans. You might remember our capital budget from 2015 where we talked quite a bit about the facilities and deferred maintenance there and some of the long term plant plans we're developing. And so that's why for three, the answer is D. So I hope that got a little bit of the the neurons flowing. Now we're going to transition into our formal facility condition assessment presentation. Before we do that. I want to introduce Abdullah Ahmed, who's going to be supporting tonight. He is one of our newest project managers. He comes to us from Southern California with a tons of facilities management and project management experience, literally has taught the class on project management. So he is or has been instrumental in terms of getting these two items in front of us tonight. So thank you, Abdullah and Laura, we okay with the next presentation? Oh, yes. Yes, thank you. Maybe. All right. So this is actually pretty rewarding to be up here discussing this because back in 2014, if you would have asked us about how the the condition of our facilities and where the information for that condition assessment was can be contained, the answer would have been not in my brain, but in a lot of our staff's brains and in paper in quite a few different places. And so I just want to show you a little bit of a visual demonstrating that. Take a look at those systems. It doesn't strike you as a super reliable system for facilities, condition information. And here's where we're pretty excited about the new maintenance management system, because all of the information that we've gleaned through these condition assessments, which we're going to talk about, is now in our maintenance management system. So it's in one place for our staff to access, access, rather than all of these different places in paper or in people's brains. We think that's a a big step forward for for our department. Now, back in 2014, we and the City Council agreed to bring in a third party facilities condition assessment expert Notts Faithful and Gold. They looked at our 38 facilities, essentially identifying where corrective actions need to be taken and also importantly what the cost estimates for those corrective actions were. Here is a list of the 38 buildings. It's a long list. It's got 30 buildings. Yes. And so these are facility condition assessment reports, actually. Just give me one moment. This is up. Sorry. This is volume one of these facility condition assessments. So each building has its own assessment 52, a 75 page document detailing all of the different corrective actions that Faith on Gold has recommended. So fairly extensive. As you can see here on the slide, they're covering all aspects of building facilities, everything from the envelope, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, you name it. It's in these these reports. Now, the next thing. So if a member of the public or council wants to see what's actually being suggested per item, if we come and check out this, how does that work? Sure. Just reach out to me. Well, happy to share it. And a member of the public could always do the same thing. Thank you. The next two slides are not building by building information instead of their rolled up information. So in other words, if you take all of that data and the underlying condition assessments, you then roll them up. You come up with some good and some not so good news. So I want to share the good news first, which is that if you look at our current facilities, we've got about 50% of our facilities in good condition. So the building we're in now, the good news is it's in good condition and that really is good news. That's this is a building that's being accessed by the public frequently. It's where many city staff and our electeds reside. So it's important to have facilities in good condition. The other side of that is we have 50% of our facilities not in good condition. The number that I'm really hoping sticks in your brain coming out of tonight's presentation is that number in the lower right hand corner, that over $12 million in immediate capital needs. Let me explain a little bit about what that means. This is the number derived from faithful in gold. And essentially it it is a roll up of capital needs that need to happen without. And if they do not happen, we're going to suffer larger expense later. So you think about an H fax system that has a 20 to 25 year life, but it's it's actually 35 years in. And so we can either wait for that to fail. And if we do, our costs are going to go dramatically up in terms of its replacement and then lost use of that facility. Or we can replace it now and save that future repair cost. And so that's an example of those immediate capital needs. We're talking roof replacements where we have roofs that are leaking HVAC upgrades, substantial electrical upgrades. That's what's represented in that over $12 million. Now, I want you to imagine for a moment that coming out of tonight and the next year, we did nothing around facilities maintenance. So in other words, no further investments in our facilities. Oh, the picture would get dramatically worse in the next ten years. And again, this is where we're we're focusing on that a little bit above $12 Million number. That number would turn to nearly $35 million if we were to do nothing. Even more that remember where currently we're at, about 50% of our buildings are in good condition. We'll look at that number ten years out. That number is 8% of our facilities in good condition. It's all to say. This underlines the case for doing something sooner rather than later. And the good news is this council has already done some things. You approved about $2 million in high priority facility repairs back in September with some of those general surplus funds. Let me back up a little bit and just show a few photos of the kinds of conditions that are out there. You see a couple or a few slides related to water intrusion coming through roofs. Ironically, in the upper right hand corner, that's our maintenance services center. That's where our maintenance workers who come out to other city facilities to catch water or try to repair roofs on the fly. They're also getting dripped upon. That's what that that photo in the upper right hand corner shows in this next set of slides. You see, we've got lots of pavement and asphalt that needs to be repaired and lots of equipment that needs to be replaced. In the middle there you see the middle, lower middle, you see that missing downspouts. That's an example of something we would call preventative maintenance. So in other words, that Downspouts is helping protect that building's foundation from water running into it when it's missing. Obviously, that's not good for the foundation of the building. And so that's an example of the kind of work we want to do in preventative maintenance. We want to do more of this kind of kind of work. So what's next? Well, we propose to do is we're not asking for any approvals tonight. We want to come back in February of 2017 with some ideas for how we can bridge our facilities maintenance funding gap. And you may ask, why am I not asking tonight for that money? And for one, because that's what a capital and operating budget process is for. It's for folks sitting in your position to weigh the competing interests of different, different priorities and to make decisions around that. And so in February 2017, we will likely have kicked off the operating capital budget process. And we want to present options to you for first how to bridge that 12. Remember, I talked about that $12 million we're likely to raise over the next ten years or so, about seven and a half million that we can put toward those $12 million in repairs. That leaves about $4.8 million for those high priority facility repairs. We want to we want to propose a way to bridge that gap, probably with some general fund surplus dollars if they exist. The second the second part of that gap is a bigger one. That's about the deferred maintenance. It's not about the big projects. It's more about that that downspouts that needs to be replaced. It's also about painting or in fact, systems, making sure we get a technician out every year who checks that HVAC system to ensure that it's operating properly. That's not leaking out. That kind of year to year. Maintenance can extend the life of that HVAC system and save the city money over the long term. In some ways, what we'll be back in front of you proposing. It's a little bit like two spouses discussing a vehicle that they own that is in disrepair. So what the facility's condition assessment has done is it said what in the vehicle is working, what's not, what needs to be replaced, what's the routine maintenance that's going to happen next? And now the spouses are having a discussion about, okay, now we've got some dollar values for that. Where are we going to invest this money and where's the money going to come from? Is somebody going to get a promotion? Is there a will somewhere out there that's going to help us get there? And so that's what we're going to be back in February 2017 to discuss is with some direction from you on dollar values. We then can turn out the first two years of the facility's capital budget. We can then have the long term facility CIP plan and then as much as we can around that preventative maintenance plan. So that's what we're proposing to come back to you in February of 2017. And with that, if there's any questions that Bob Abdullah or I can answer, we're here to answer them. As a member Ashcraft. I had one. Thank you for that. Nice presentation, Mr. Garland. Can you tell us of the the list of the 38 facilities inspected and assessed? That's on page four of your presentation. Um, are all of these buildings projected to be in use in the next year to three, five years? And I had a couple of specific questions. So number 18, Building 76 pool is that the pool out at the. At Alameda point. To point. So it's not used now, correct? No, I believe it's not. It's not correct. So, I mean, what. How. Much how much money would we be putting into something that I think eventually is going to be replaced? Because, you know, we have plans for a nice recreation center at Alameda Point eventually. Definitely. Sorry if I interrupted. Especially because any dollar we put into a building that is that might not be used in the future is a dollar we're taking away from another building that's being used on a daily basis by the public. Those are definitely decisions that public works will make and also keep the city council informed about in terms of what buildings we might not invest substantial dollars in terms of facility maintenance. The buildings at Alameda Point, honestly, they're a bit tough, right, because we don't know over the long term where they're going to be and whom whose hands and how they're used. So that that's a question that honestly, we're still wrestling with. Okay. So we can take a closer look. And the other one I wondered about and it's, you know, very close to where we are right now. But the veterans building, what percentage of that building is in use at any given time? I've taken the occasional dance class there through an RPG. When my kids were teenagers, they were involved in the activities in the teen underground or whatever that nice program is at LAPD runs. But what percentage of that building is used in on a regular basis? That's a good question. I do not know the answer to that. Add that to our list. All right. Thank you. Any other questions? Comment My Vice Mayor. A minor question on your chart about the facilities. It'll still be good if we do nothing. You have a marina village there. What's that doing. There? What is it? So what? What we did was in some of our our what I call special districts, our landscape and lighting districts, homes, we have part of the components that relate to the public infrastructure out there. What we did was look long term what what needed to be replaced in those areas. So boardwalk, lighting, etc.. And so we're building that into long term plans and then running that against the revenue that's brought in through assessments. So that's what that Marina Village is about. It's about the landscaping lighting district, I think at zone five or six. And I don't know what I can say about that because I live next to the park. Can I say anything about that? Precious little. Okay. Never mind. Thank you. Any other. Comments? Just remember. Suck. Oh. Oh. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you very much for your presentation and for focusing public attention on the variety of facilities operated and managed by the city of Alameda for which continuing upkeep is needed in the short and a long term. Now, it seems to me that as we move forward on your the long term facilities planning and making sure to maintain these facilities, we might also have that discussion in the context of other CHP items so that we're not making the decision with regard to facilities in a vacuum. I know, for example, a lot of people are always asking me about. Frankly, their own streets. And that if you go down San Antonio Avenue, for example, I think that Street has not been paved in in a while. And it is it is getting to have some wear. And I just mentioned San Antonio Avenue, west of Grand Street as an example. But but. So there's a lot of tremendous needs that which when not attended. Will lead to even greater needs for the reasons that you discussed below. Something that's not invested in upkeep now. The costs go up. I don't know if it's an exponential going up, but it goes up at a higher rate than normal. But that just means that we have that that many more challenges so that. The thing that I would recommend for sure then is that as we move forward with your capital facilities long term plan, that we also have that conversation in conjunction with other items that are typically on our recipe for which, you know, there's been a lot of deferred maintenance. Absolutely. And Brody. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for the presentation. You know, I also echo the comments that my colleagues made, you know, to two quick points. You know, one, I know last year when we had our reserves and we allocated our excess reserves, we did tackle some deferred maintenance. I know the vice mayor has been a champion of tackling these deferred maintenance issues before they become worse. So hopefully I know you said February of next year we'll have a plan, but if there is some excess one time money that we can do this year, you know, I'd like to you to be prepared at least to give us, you know, what the high priority items are that we might be able to attack this year rather than next year. And I also agree that it's a good idea to get this plan and get this baked in our our ongoing budget so we can start addressing these these problems. Thank you. Member Ashcraft. Thank you. So I was just going to go back to the $12.3 million figure you gave us for rehabilitating or addressing buildings that were in poor the worst condition. So of that 12.3 million, some of these were buildings that we talked about or facilities like the pool at Alameda Point that might not ever come into use. So that's correct. Okay. All right. Thank you. Right. And I wanted to ask when this comes back, I'd like to know historically, for instance, for the last 3 to 5 years how much has been allocated for maintenance and deferred maintenance annually and then the occupancy of City Hall West. I know when you're evaluating the different buildings, that's another one. I was asked specifically about what's going on there. If you can try to share what's going on in some of these buildings that people may not know what they have, how the city does use these buildings. And then on the animal shelter. We did have a meeting with some finance representatives and they. And they may have met with you. I'm not sure. I just wanted to make sure that you coordinate with them. I know that they do have some serious needs in regards to the facilities. Thank you. Yes. All right. That being said at this point, is that all the direction you need or. This is for information. We're good. We can move on then. Yes. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Now we will go to six be. Introduction of ordinance, amending the Alameda Municipal Code by amending various sections of Article four and five contracts and administrative procedures and policies concerning conformance of all bidding procedures on public works projects to public contract code 22 zero 32 in California. Uniform Public Construction Cost Accounting. I'm switching it. Liam. Thank you very much. Again, Liam Garland from Public Works and these two items are intimately connected. And let me just explain that before we jump in, which is that one of the challenges we see with getting all of these facility projects done is that we've got some construction contracting, municipal code provisions that are out of date. And that's what this item is about, is about updating those municipal code provisions regarding construction bidding. So with that, let me give you an overview of what public works is asking and then we'll jump into the details about the request and why. So the first is you see that at the top of the slide is currently any construction project, over $75,000 has to come to City Council for approval before that contract can be finalized. What staff is recommending is that we update our municipal code, which has not been updated in about 26 years, to be consistent with what the state law is in the area. And that's $175,000. And I'll give you the reasons behind that in just a moment. But that's what our first request is. The second is to have the city council, and this is on the bottom portion of that slide. It's to have the city council designate approval of plans and specifications. I said that incorrectly. Let me start that over to delegate to the city, engineer approval of a project's plans and specifications. So without further ado, let's jump in to what are the goals for this. So this is not coming out of nowhere. It is obviously related a little bit more than a little bit to the work we're doing around facilities and seeing the challenge around some delays on the contracting side because of an out and out to date and out of date code. They're also besides just getting up to date on code, we think we can save about 10% on project expenses by having our code up to date. We think we can save for months on a project's timeline by updating the code, and that's quite a bit of time. This, of course, will enable us to complete the ambitious number of facility ships we do want to complete. We think there's going to be another benefit, which is that with the streamlined bidding procedures for projects up to 175,000, we believe that this is going to make that work more competitively, more competitive to be bid on by local and smaller contractors. Essentially, local and smaller contractors don't have an administrative wing of their firms to respond to cities of formal bidding requirements. The last two are really about the delegating the authority of the city engineer to approve plans and specs, and it's about increasing the city's immunity from potential legal claims related to those plans and specs . We'll talk in a little bit of detail about that. And then finally, we want to eliminate some unnecessarily unnecessary city council approval. So these are the goals of the municipal code update. You'll see here. This is section two, Dash 61 from our municipal code. It shows that $75,000 construction contracting threshold. In other words, we have to have city council approval for construction contracts over $75,000. You'll see the date here, February six of 1990. This has not been updated since then. This was also the same year that we opted in as a city to the construction. I'm sorry. California Uniform Public Construction Cost Accounting Act. I am not going to say that again. It's Koepka. I will say that a few more times. We opted into Koepka in the year of 1990. Koepka has since been updated five different times and we have not kept current with that. And so that's why the increase from I'm sorry, the $175,000, that's koepka's current contracting threshold. And the revision we're proposing is essentially to have our code point to Koepka. And as there are future adjustments to that code, our code will also be adjusted. Here. You can see websites from the state comptroller's office who's involved in the updating of the construction contracting thresholds, essentially looking at what construction contract costs, what's the direction of those which is obviously up and making sure that these thresholds are kept up or updated consistent with the direction of construction costs. Here where we take a look at what other cities in the bay area who are in Cook what they've done and you'll see that that the top 11 there they are all consistent with where Cooper Cooper is currently. You'll see there's another five that are not consistent with where Cooper is currently, but they're above where where Alameda is. This slide shows the four months that we think we can save on our typical construction projects should this item be approved tonight? And again, this is why one of the reasons why we're coming at this now is because we're looking at these facility repairs, a bunch of which will be in the range of that 75 to 175000. And we think this is going to give us and public works a real opportunity to get more of that work done in a shorter time. Let me clarify a little bit about what this item is not. We are not making any changes to our current code regarding prevailing wages. We're not changing this body's governing of the budget and the approval of all of the projects in our capital budget. Oh, this doesn't change that that obligation or responsibility of the city council whatsoever. There's also another important point here, which is a construction contracting law is pretty clear in California. You award to the lowest responsible bidder, period. It's why these items end up on our consent calendar. We don't have much discretion in the matter whatsoever. And so that doesn't change either. If that changes, Bob Abdullah and I walk out of here in handcuffs. So construction contracts have to go to the lowest responsible bidder, and there is no change to that. So now I'm going to turn to the second part of tonight's item, and that is a proposed change where we're having the city council designate authority to approve plans and specs to the specifications to the city engineer. Oh, and I want to start just high level. So what is this about? And if you look at the photos here, this is primarily about our annual maintenance capital project. So you've got on the left photo, you've got our street resurfacing project, on our center photo, you've got our sewer main replacements. And on the right we have several pump station renovations. And these are the kind of projects that come up every single year. And the council has the option options the wrong word has the authority of approving these projects first in the capital budget. Then, if they are either facilities or new parks, they go to the planning board and staff's committed, in addition that for new facilities and new parks, we'd bring those plans and specs to City Council to be another opportunity for approval. And then on contract award, it's back in front of council. So the change tonight is only on the piece for approval of plans and specifications and only for projects that are like these routine maintenance projects, the street resurfacing, the sewer main replacement and the pump station renovations. So then the question is, obviously, by the way, there's a gain in time for public works. We can get more projects done without having to gain the City Council's approval of plans and specs. When we've got a city engineer who's got the expertize in the area who can approve those plans and specs, something is different today versus a couple of years ago. Case law has changed and now there's increased risk of a later legal claim if there's any change in those plans and specs once the work is done out in the field. And so what those court cases suggest is those changes don't have the immunity that's garnered with this city council's approval of the plans and specs. And every set of plans and specifications change once you get into the field. So that's a that is a an issue, which is if we want to better protect the city, then delegating that authority to the city engineer when invariably there's going to be changes to those plans and specs that best provides the city the legal defense it needs for any claims of improper design or plan coming out of those plans and specifications. So with that, I'm going to leave this slide up here with the two changes. I should say one other thing, which is if you do approve this item tonight, we've got a typo actually in the proposed ordinance where we refer to a subsection of Cooper when that reference should be a subsection F. No. Reverse. We refer to a subsection F when the subsection should be referring to D. So as long as we can incorporate that into if there's a successful motion, then we'll be where we need to be. With that, I'm happy to take any questions you may have. All right. First, clarifying questions and councilmember clarifying questions. All right. I have clarifying questions then when you go back to your presentation, when you had approval by the city engineer as opposed to city council, does that mean that currently city engineer does not approve these along the process. City city and approves them, but then they need to come to city council for a final approval. So if you look at your chart. I. I don't know which page it had. You had four steps. Okay. On page ten. Yes. You don't have if you don't have a step there that shows the city engineer approving. So that currently happened. When does that happen? So it would happen before the plans inspects were submitted to the City Council for approval. Essentially that's a city engineer stamping the plans inspector saying These are good to go. All right. So it does currently happen. So we would still we would just continue that. So the. Question here is where you're being asked then to remove the city council as part of this process. But it would still go to the planning board and the city engineer. And who is our city engineer? It's great that you mention that. I am proud to announce Shriram Agami here, who I just if I ever have an opportunity to give a few words about him. As you could approach the podium so that the audience can see you also. So Shriram has literally decades of civil engineering experience, comes to us from over in Oakland, which is experiencing similar conditions in terms of a built out city with lots of aged infrastructure and also Shriram. Once you get to know him, you'll realize he's got all the engineering skills and he's got a personality to boot. He came through a really competitive selection process and was the 100% consensus choice. So I'm really happy to be introducing Sharan tonight. Thank you. Welcome. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Of. Oh, I, I it's I, I mean, I was really excited about joining the city of Alameda. I thought it would be very challenging. Task two to take responsibility for it. And I. I'm really happy to be here. And I. It's my first it's my debut session with the council, and it's been an exciting one. And I enjoy. The staff that I'm working with. And we have we have many interesting projects coming. Our way and we hope we look forward to working with the council on this. Thank you. Welcome and thank you for joining us this evening. All right. Any other questions or comments? No. All right. So then we do we have speakers on this item. No speakers on this item. Okay. So then we can discuss this item now. I'm vice mayor. I think. Increasing the threshold is just a reflection of how much things cost today versus how much they cost years ago. I'm still a little. Can. I'm not so concerned about the the relinquishing of the council approval of the plants and specs. I understand of the the intent. Um, I. I do think this chart that's on slide number. Is it or. Is is a little confusing to me still because I, I think you explain that the council and the planning board. Look at the plans for the new facilities and approve that. It's that one. Yes. But then there'll be when those specs come back reflecting that plan. What I'm understanding is there's no need to go to council with those engineering specs for council approval, and I agree with that. None of us are engineers. None of us can stamp that. So I think this is a good opportunity. And I'd like to move that. We. Adopt this consideration with the caveat that at the end of a year we have an assessment of Did it work? And what were the problems? So I think we can make these adjustments. But I'd like to quantify the result. The other council members. The member. Member. I'll second that motion with the technical amendment that you mentioned, if that's okay with the vice mayor. I don't really have anything more to add than Frank already said. Remember, Jason? I think the thing that I want to add two basic points. One is the shifting from the $75,000 threshold to the hundred $75,000 threshold. You know, I think it looks like a big number. And it is I mean, even the 75,000. But I think it's important to take into account that the 75,000 was set in 1990. So simply when you input the $75,000 into West Edgecomb, it comes out to be roughly 138,000 in today's dollars. So really, the the change is $138000 to $175000. I think in that light, while I did have some early concerns about the going to the upper threshold, I that's certainly something that I can live with. And having the reporting along the lines that vice mayor at RCN indicated in one year's time, we certainly like to see if it is, for example, true that there were that much more locally owned businesses that that were less able to participate. The second point I want to get to, though, is I am concerned about the city engineering replacing the council. One of the advantage advantages of having the council approve the plans and specs is that, you know, we have a lot of residents who are very engaged in our city, many of them themselves, engineers of one type or another who have on some occasions attended city council meetings to point things out that perhaps. You know, the public might want to know. So on that, frankly, because the city engineer still is involved in the process, I prefer the status quo. So I don't know how much more to say about. Remember Ashcroft. Thank you, Mayor Spencer. I think it's important for municipal law to reflect the current state law. And I'm married to a construction lawyer, so those numbers don't make me bat an eyelash. I agree with the vice mayor that I don't have a degree in engineering. And while I can read a planner aspect, that's about as far as it goes, but I would look to a professional. And also, while I understand that we have a very engaged population, I know that the professionals we have working for the city are. Working for the city. I know the standards that they are adhering to, and I have confidence in the fact that I expect them to do their professional job without it being politicized. Sometimes we have very well-meaning public members of the public, but oftentimes there's there's an agenda at work there, too. So I'm very comfortable with I'm glad that we finally firmly filled that city engineer's position. And I think we've got a good team on board. And I compliment you, Mr. Garland, you've done two nice reports for us here this evening, so I am fully prepared to support this motion with the amendment. And I and I just would also throw in that certainly come back to us in a year's time and tell us what you found. Give us another pretty presentation. But I don't know if a year's time will be enough to say that. And X-number more local contractors have now gotten work because I think it takes a little time for these things to percolate. So, you know, let's let's take a look, but let's also be patient because those results could take more than one year. Thank you. So I want to walk through this chart again. If I'm reading this correctly, the first time city council approves it is in the budget and our that our two year budget. Yes. So when I recall it's in there, it's actually posted. No, it's no information about a project. It would be a dollar amount. The dollar amount that we would be approving. It's fairly, fairly detailed. The Capitol had a copy of the capital budget here. It's definitely not insubstantial. So that so there's detail in the budget about the project that would be approved. Detail. Sure. In the capital budget work covering the number of sidewalk repairs we're going to do, the number of miles of sewer main replacement identified, the pump stations that we're renovating, etc.. That's all listed in there. All right. And we approve that as one agenda item. I believe in the last budget process you had a presentation from me about the capital budget specifically. That was one of the study sessions. And then in the final approval of the budget, it was both operating and capital budget that were approved. Yes. And there was some discussion of the capital budget within that. Okay. And then it goes to the planning board. If it's pertaining to a park or a new facility. A new park or a new facility. Yes. And the planning board makes those approvals and that does not come to council. That's why it would end there into this new process. It would not come to council. No, no, no. It would come to council. So staff is committed to making sure that new parks and new facilities come to city council. It's the routine maintenance projects that would not come to council for approval of the plans and specifications. Okay. And the projects that would be specified during the budget process. That's when we that's when council would approve each project. That's right. Okay. And then so this chart of the city council approving plans and specs, that is the items then that are in the budget. We will not have it come back again. Yes, you'll see them again when the contracts are up for approval in front of the city council, but not at the stage of approving plans and specifications. Unless it's a new city facility or a new city park. Okay. And now it's my understanding we. So you just introduced to us our new city engineer. But have we not had a city engineer? Or is he replacing someone or we've had a vacancy there? No, we've had a city engineer who is stamping documents, stamping plans and specifications. We've had that city engineer under contract. So there's. Your contract. Exactly. All right. So this process, if at some point we don't have an employee who's a city engineer, then we would still have this process of sending those out to whomever is under contract. Or are we planning to, from this point forward, have an in-house city engineer? I am ecstatic. Is that what's happening here? Yes. Yes. Shriram is going to be here. And it's my job to keep that position. Filling that position in house is not related to this process. No. A of regard. So we need a city engineer in house regardless of what the council decision is tonight. Well, that's what I would think. And I think it's I would agree that we need an in-house city engineer. And I would be but I would be concerned about approving a process that eliminates council that sends if, in fact, we don't have a city engineer, that then with consent, you know, as we have in the past. So I would agree that it is important to have a city engineer moving forward. That that's a critical part of this process. But remember, De Saag, it's. Just a quick question in terms of types of plans that are being approved in the third arrow in your design. Let me give you an example. Say, the city of Alameda approves it as part of its CHP redoing a street. So at the third arrow, is that the point in time? Would it be up to the city engineer to approve a plan or that street as to whether or not it's going to be treated with what do you call service slurry seal versus something more grinding and redo? So is the city engineer basically saying what kind of treatment is going to be done for a street? Oh, yes. That is a typical city engineer role in this instance. What the city engineer is doing is typically that decision has already been made, but developing the plans and specifications for whether it's a slurry, sealing, complete reconstruction, and then what the city engineer does is is approves those and they then can be bid they go out for bid. The lowest responsible bidder is awarded to after it comes back to council for that contract award to be approved. So just not to be mysterious. So what I'm trying to get at is in some instances, it's obviously cheaper just to fill a pothole or deal with roads with, you know, the I think there are three different types of treatments. I can't remember slurry, seal and whatever. But in the long run, it always ends up costing more if you do the short run cheap treatment. So what I'm trying to get at is that what treatment that needs to be used for streets is a decision of the council, is that correct? And then it is up to the city engineer in this process that you've laid out to to see how the plan is meeting whatever treatment is is agreed upon for a street. Is that correct? Oh. I can answer the question. Okay. So what happens during the budget process is that the city council will approve X number of dollars for a street reconstruction, x miles of reconstruction. The city engineer working with one of our senior engineers will come up with the plan for how to accomplish accomplish that. The city engineer in turn under this will approve those plans and specs so that they will go out for bid bid and then that contract will come back to you for approval of that doesn't covers, you know, essentially a small pothole repair. That's a whole nother a whole nother being. And my answering your question or. No? No, I think not exactly. I think what I'm trying to get at is there is a street that has a rate and that needs to be repaired. And the types of repairs that could be done on the street could be low level or maybe. But we because we do that, because it's cheaper or maybe we do a higher level, but we don't because it's more expensive. But then in the long run, it costs more. Bob Hahn, Public Works Director. The streets are categorized by the PCI, the pavement condition index. It's a program run by MTC and they evaluate all the streets. We feed them the information and they evaluate all the streets. So the treatment on any specific street is related directly to the PCI of that street. OC of the PCI is very low. It means the street has deteriorated. And beyond potholes, areas are coming up. You have complete areas that are failed. That is the condition where you would grind the whole street down and repave the street over completely. Okay. A slurry seal is appropriate for a street like ten year old. Okay, so with the ten year old street, it's still in good condition, it's still tight. And that PCI is probably somewhere in 68 or something like that. That street just by that number would get a slurry seal because there's no reason to tear up the whole street. We wouldn't tear up a street unless a couple of reasons. Number one, if we were tearing it up to put pipes in and I want to remind the council that we're on a very aggressive program right now of replacing three miles of sewer throughout the city for the next 23 years. And that is driving our pavement program because we have worked very closely with both East Bay Mud and PGD, and we have given them a 20 year look out of the streets that we're going to be replacing sewers. And we have invited them to the party and to jump into those streets in a two year period after we got our sewers down. Sewers are typically at the lower level. Okay. And then they will come in and do their infrastructure repair and then eventually that street will be repaved over completely because it will have all kinds of cuts in it. And then fine. Well, just to summarize then, it's the treatment for a street is driven by the PCI. And the role of the engineer is simply to make sure that the treatment that is being implemented is done engineering appropriately. Yeah. So if you have a PCI of 78, it would take a slurry seal. If you have a PCI of 60, you might want to grind that whole street down. So what I was trying to get at was that so it's not up to the engineer to determine it's the PCI. It's it's a calculation that every city goes through. That's how streets are prioritized. We are prioritizing our streets right now based upon our sewer program, but we also have additional money to address those streets that are deteriorating. We're not ignoring the streets where we're really trying to concentrate in a strategic manner, how to replace the sewer pipe , how to get everybody in. But we don't want to do is we pay the street and all of a sudden the next day, Piccini says, Oh, I need to expand that pipe down there. I'm going to tear up your brand new street. Now, we've gone from at PCI of of 100 down to a PCI of 80 something overnight because now PGE has come in and torn it up. And once you open up that asphalt water gets in, that's how streets deteriorate. Thank you. I have one question. It's on the redlined ordinance and I believe that would be up to I think this is the council on page four, the section two, dash six, 1.4 award of construction contract. It says the city manager. Is authorized to award informed contracts pursuant to lowest responsive, responsible bidder. And the word responsive is new. No is being added. Is that. Responsive? Has always been there. Okay. A responsive bidder gives us all the information that we have requested in the bid package. Okay. If the if a bitter left out a piece of paper that we needed in that bid, then he is nonresponsive and he's thrown out of the pool because he did not comply with all the the things that we requested to be submitted at that point. So that's a non responsive a non responsible bidder is somebody that maybe has a history of botching jobs over the past five years. We do a little history search on the contractor and find out. Well, the city of Walnut Creek said they're never going to use this guy again. That changes our attitude and that's a non responsible bidder. If that can be proven, a non responsible bidder has a right for a hearing. Thank you. All right. So we have a motion and a second. Any other questions or comments at this point? All those in favor, I suppose. I'm sorry. I just wanted to make one quick clarification, please, in case you need to revote. So this is the first reading of the ordinance. And so so I wanted to make sure that the direction that you gave to staff to come back with an assessment of how this works. Is a direction and not part. Of the. Ordinance, is that correct? So that's one. Institute? Certainly, that's correct. It's not part of the ordinance. Thank you. Wording to include in the code. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Counsel. Thank you. I'm going to pose. I, I prefer that the buck stops with it. All right. Thank you. So we have four in favor. One opposed. Motion carries. Thank you very much. Motion passes. Thank you very much. And now we move on to six C. Introduction of ordinance amending the Alameda Municipal Code by amending Chapter 30, clarifying text amendments to Section 3058 through 3050 9.3 of the zoning ordinance related to water efficient landscaping.