Recommendation to request City Manager to conduct a review of the city's hiring practices, and to issue a directive which prioritizes fully staffing the Permit Center as well other offices dealing with the review and approval of building permits; Request City Manager to provide a report within 30 days regarding the status of the city's permitting software and provide options for optimizing and expediting the building permit review processes; and Request City Manager to explore the creation of a "Development Shot Clock" for the review of local development in line with transparency, timelines, and standards consistent with state law.
Thank you. That concludes the funds transfers we have now. Item 23, please. Communication from Vice Mayor Richardson, Councilwoman Zendejas, Councilwoman Allen, Councilman Super Na recommendation to request city manager to conduct a review of the city's hiring practices and to issue a directive which prioritizes fully staffing the permit center. Provide a report within 30 days regarding the status of the city's permitting software and to explore the creation of a development shot clock for the review of local development. And Mr. Mayor, I might add, my thing is I'm working so I can not working. So can someone else. So I need to have someone queuing. Okay. Vice Mayor? Yeah. Thank you. So I think we have a presentation to queue up to help summarize the proposal. I can hear the clerk take a look at his system, please. Thanks. Okay, great. Thank you. So first first, it is great to be here in person to help make this proposal on this particular date. And great to see everyone. Today I want to talk about and propose a proposal called the MLB Build Initiative is building upgrades, incentivizing long term economic development. And this is focused on supporting our our team internally and creating a modern, efficient, permanent process within the city of Long Beach. I want to thank our city team. I want to thank our stakeholders. Building Industry Association, Base Fed, IAM, Southern California Association, Nonprofit Housing WHO submitted letters of support. And I also want to thank council members Mary's and de Haas, Sandy Allen, Darryl. Super so. So let's see. Okay there it is. Is working. So here's here's a bit of background. Last month on May 11th, our director of development services, Oscar Orsi, submitted a memo to the City Council detailing the challenges within the Building and Safety Bureau as it relates to issuing construction permits. The memo highlighted lengthy permit, turnaround times, lack of communication with applicants, a slow or delayed development review process, among other issues. During the pandemic, it's been hard on our permit center, and the permit center saw its fourth full time staff drop from 11 to 6, with replacement hours coming in the form of private contractors and overtime. This has resulted in substantial delays in the review process, which, although understandable, it can have and lead to substantial, significant impacts on our city. The situation has delayed our ability to approve permits and build housing in the middle of a housing crisis and make it more difficult for contractors to conduct improvements to homes, improve the habitat habitability issues within our city, threaten our ongoing economic recovery. So it's an important issue that needs to be elevated to the city council. So this chart shows a little bit about what we're talking about. So it shows the ratio of field full time equivalent positions, contractors and vacancies over the period of January 2020 to April 20, 21st. As we can see, the number of positions filled by city full time city employees is declined and the number of positions filled by contractors has grown. We want to turn that trend around. As a city council, we have a job to be responsive to our city's needs. This is important to elevate. We need to make sure we invest in our city employees. We make sure that they're adequately staffed and are able to do do the job that they're hired to do and that we trust them to do so. Here's a snapshot of April, April 2021, and it shows almost an even split between full time employees and contractors and vacancies and positions filled by other staff. And we need to we need to fix this pie chart. We'd like to see much more green. We're heading in that direction. But this sort of summarizes the issue at hand. Even prior to the pandemic. And this is this is a report, a study published last year prior to the pandemic. This this shows the 90 day goals set out by the state in SB 330. It's a goal, but it compares how long these fairs in comparison as it relates to how long it takes to actually approve discretionary projects within the city on smaller projects way beyond the state goal. But if you look across smaller projects from five or 25 units, 251 units and above, there is a big disparity between what the state set out and where we what we're achieving. So what we want to do is we want to make sure that I mean, to be hard to close that gap completely. But we do want to understand where we are from a benchmarking standpoint and continue to take steps take steps toward closing that gap. We have an opportunity ahead of us, and that's what this proposal is about. Despite these issues, affirmatively addressing this issue does present a real opportunity for us to create a modern, prevent permitting system that's efficient, transparent, accountable. If we get this right, this will help spur economic opportunity in our city, help support construction jobs, help support small business contractors. It will help eight local realtors and restaurants who are looking to make improvements to their businesses. It'll improve our housing spark stock. Help us address our aging housing supply and habitability issues. Although staffing is one contributor, expediting our house hiring process alone won't be enough to really spur the recovery or help solve the housing housing crisis fully. But let's use this as an opportunity to explore ways that we can not just fix the problem, but improve the system altogether. So this is what we're asking the city manager do with this proposal. So first we want to expedite hiring. I know a lot of steps have already been taken to start heading in this direction and we're supportive, but we want to support heading in the direction of expediting hiring, to conduct a review of our hiring practices and issue a directive that then helps prioritize fully staffing our permit center as fast as possible, as quickly as possible , and other offices that may be related to this this system. We also want to provide options to the City Council to procure a modern permit software platform that has the ability to optimize and expedite our building permit review process. And the third thing we want to do, we want to explore the creation of a shot clock of development shot clock. And this would prioritize customer service, accountability, transparency and how we deal with construction and development timelines within our city. So here are a few cities that are taking some very similar steps. These cities are right around the same size as Long Beach or around that, you know, around our very similar lobbies in many ways. And so what it shows is that the challenges we face this city are not unique. We want to look at some best practices and we want to, you know, ask our staff to really lean in here. Oakland implemented a quarterly permit tracking system to update assessment and update assessment. And as a result, they've seen a reduction in rent to income ratio from 51% to 44% between 2015 and 2018. And San Jose, they made an update to their software system and it's helped them remain resilient through the pandemic. It only received the city of San Jose after that, only saw a 9% drop in permits issued compared to their neighbors in neighboring San Francisco who didn't update their software. They saw a 34% drop in permits during the same period. San Diego updated its permit software and in in 2020, just last year, transitioning to a fully online system that prioritized customer full transparency in how it has the shot clock. It has estimated approve timelines while also making the permit process more sustainable by completely removing the need for paper. Submitting paper plans as completely online as more sustainable is what San Diego done laying some beaches planning, planning and building departments to transition to a new software in 2018. After 14 years without an update, their residents, contractors and interested people can can now visit their website up to date. Information on permit activity is live. They can arrange inspections, make payments, track the process of their project from home or their smartphone 24 hours a day. So as we can see, all of these cities took affirmative steps toward their, you know, to support their hardworking employees. And I want our city to our city council to make this step to to do the very same. So here's the shot clock idea. I mean, the shot clock and, you know, shot clocks, you know, some city some states have shot clocks. The state of California has a shot clock. What we're talking about is updating our software so we can help approve smaller scale permits like home repair improvements, bring some transparency to our our permitting system by providing top tier customer service and accessibility. We can align with state law on affordable housing shot clocks. We can also. So we can also, you know, regulate and improve habitability by better understanding and distinguishing between improvements to existing homes and businesses from the building of new homes. So you can treat it differently. The idea is to add accountability, transparency and better customer service by implementing a shot clock. So as the city recovers from the pandemic, I think it's important that we acknowledge, you know, we were we were dealing with a housing crisis prior to the pandemic, and that exists today. We're going to continue to tackle issues of economic equity. We should do all that we can to remove barriers that prevent us from building a healthy, safe and bright, vibrant city for all of our residents. We have an incredible staff, tremendous leadership, and we need to put them in a position to succeed. That means we need to make the investments necessary to bring, you know, bring them bring pride to their jobs, bring stability in the workplace, bring quality public service, quality services to our residents. So I want to thank you for this time. I'm happy to make this motion, and I want to ask staff to provide some updates on sort of progress since the memo on May 11th and then any reaction that they have on how they plan to respond to this request. Thank you so much. There's a second by Councilmember Austin. Thank you. And I'm going to defer comment and I'd like to hear from the public and my colleagues before. Actually a bonus. Thanks. Okay. So, what are we. Is there. Before we go to public comment, Mr. Market, did you want to. I wasn't sure if that was a good question. Okay. So Mr. Motorcar. Yes. And of course, he would respond for staff. Thank you, Mayor and council members and Vice Mayor, for the opportunity to update you and just to let you know our thoughts on the proposal. We have been making some tremendous strides since the May TFF memo to you all. Just to highlight a few of some of our accomplishments, we've opened City Hall back in April, May and and started with express permitting by reservation only in the next week or so where we will be accepting reservations to expand that even further so that folks can actually come in and process over the counter applications on a reservation basis only. We have launched today a new permitting software for certain express permits. So now we have a web facing portal that will allow us to check off several of the most frequently requested permits, like reroutes and certain water heaters and that sort of thing. As the Vice Mayor alluded to, we are continuing to work with our civil service department and our human resources to continue to prioritize the interviewing and selection of staff. We've done some great strides and we will continue to to work on that. We have an open enrollment process currently that will allow us to continue to interview staff or applicants as they come in. Lastly, we've made, I think, a significant amount of of improvements to improve our our backlog. We've reached out to our partners in certain cities like Oakland, San Diego, Tennessee, Huntington Beach. And we are essentially consistent with their express permit timelines, their minor project timelines. And we're working to catch up where about a week or so behind them when it comes to the major project review. So I think we've done a pretty good job and in reducing that backlog. We're not perfect and we'll continue to improve that. And I want to thank the vice mayor for his recommendations. I think these are in the order that were were laid out. I think these are things that that we will be able to report back to you in terms of the additional staffing efforts, the technological improvements, as well as the shot clock. I think we are. Generally speaking, we're in support of of those recommendations and as a precursor, having staffing and technology in place to be able to effectuate the shot clock proposal. So that's our thoughts. Thank you. And Mayor, if I can add just a couple more areas that that Oscar shared with me that I think would be important for the team to know in two specific areas. One was expedited, permitting, all those ideas that that actors talked about during the pandemic. Yes, we were certainly suffering. We had employees get sick, employees leave, contractors leave. We had furloughs. And so we were seeing response times in that area of about eight weeks or more. We were back down to 1 to 2 days in those areas. So there's been huge progress since May that we were even at a point where we were getting so many calls and emails, it was taking a couple of weeks to be able to respond to everything. We're back down to 1 to 2 days as well. So there's been certainly a lot of focus on this. We know that there's more that we can do and look forward to engage in some additional study. Thank you, Mr. Modica. Appreciate that update, Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I want to start by thanking the development services staff. Over the last six months, I've worked so closely with them because so many permits had been pulled on my side of town and there have been so many things that impacted residents. And I just want to say that not only has the management been excellent, but the staff that are there remain excellent. Some of the discussions that I've had with management about the implementation of the system that we've discussed, I'm thankful to hear, at least from our I.T. Manager, that. We are actively updating the current system to have those online submissions and this is kind of part of a bigger picture as well because other systems will plug into our system. So then there's a secondary component of the assessor's office and other things that really have a long term benefit in reducing the workload over time . And for those things, I'm grateful because I know it is a big lift and our city has many, many large IT projects at hand. We talked about during an Economic Development and Finance Committee meeting in 2016, the priorities of the city in terms of transparency. And we specifically talked about development services. And as I've tracked the progress with the department, I look forward to a time where this permit system is hooked up to a dashboard and whether it's called a dashboard or a shot clock, the transparency on all things within our city, whether it's the number of days it's been since an animal was impounded and receives its vaccination to the number of days it's been for a permit to be processed of different types. Individuals in our community should see what's happening at City Hall. As the mayor said when this was brought up the first time, 24 seven City Hall, and that was long before a pandemic that people should have access to that information. 24 seven. And so I look forward to us getting all of our systems to that place. And I know that the Long Beach Coast project has been a heavy lift and is a big piece of the resources that have really been a burden on the city to get us to this point. Other critical projects, including the Long Beach, one card and others, are making progress. But but slowly because there's so much going on. And I appreciate that. But one thing that I think we just cannot not address is the staffing shortages. Mr. Modica has done an excellent job both as city manager and as assistant city manager in trying to streamline. We had a presentation approximately two and a half years ago related to the changes made. However. On and on and on. Cities around the region continue to come in, cherry pick our excellent stuff, and they do that because they're able to get their training wheels here, learn the ropes, become excellent staff members, and then all these other cities are cherry picking our staff. So what I'd like to see is a friendly. A friendly. A friendly amendment. I can't even remember the things we used to say at the diocese, like looking down. Someone help me out here to dress and provide some ability for our executive team to whether it be with one of the committees of our council or independently be able to provide critical shortage recruitment rates. Critical shortage recruitment rates have been a very effective tool in the county of Los Angeles. Quite frankly, the county of Los Angeles has used them to ravage our prosecutor's office and steal them for the DA's office. And it's about time that we use those tools for ourselves. So the Los Angeles County Municipal Code, Section 6.10.050 outlines the critical shortage recruitment rate. I think it important to note that the steps in the county system are different percentages than the city system, but that the CEO, under certain considerations in that case would be our city manager, can provide between a one and four step increase during the shortage for both recruitment and retention of critical positions. And I think that hadn't Mr. Modica had that tool during this time, we would have been in a better position. Mr. Orsi and I and Mr. Koontz and I have discussed the specific item before this agenda item was even presented. It's something that we talked about back when we had the week shortages. Sorry. Speaking with a mask on. I'm like, totally winded in myself. But this is a critical part of our city's ability to stay competitive when we have the best of the best. And so for those reasons, I hope, Mr. Richardson, your vice mayor Richardson, will consider a friendly amendment to add in that Mr. Monica look at critical shortage recruitment options for this Council to consider. Right. These three ideas are a starting point. If there's other things that make it better, I think we're just sending the message that these are the types of things we want to explore to really turn this around. So absolutely happy to accept it. I thank you. Councilwoman the house. You think if I smear Richardson for this item? As we all know, many departments experience cutbacks in staff as well as a slower processes in some instances due to online transactions we had to make during during COVID 19. However, as as this item, stress and such changes created more barriers for our permitting center and others per many permit and building related offices, which translated to greater barriers to our affordable housing expansion efforts. And that is something that we cannot allow to continue. Anything that we can do to help ensure that our response to housing crisis and that are and that our pandemic recovery is as speedy, comprehensive and efficient as possible is something I want us to do. I am very supportive of everything that this item proposes and will continue to support this item and these efforts to make sure that we we are able to provide these permits in a timely manner. Thank you. Kathryn Ringo. Thank you. I am supportive of the item, but the complaints that I've received haven't been along the lines of the permit. It's the customer service that the individuals get their delays. Excuses are being made and using the using the understaffing as as a reason for not being able to provide the service. I think that while we get a solid chart, we have maybe just about equal amount of contractors and employees. I think that when you get contractors, you get what you pay for. The customer service is just not there. So I want to see that we can improve our our customer service in the area that we get up to, up to speed with our staffing. But I also want to encourage our department and maybe with h.R. To do maybe a compensation study in terms of where people leaving and where are we being cherry picked as a councilmember, Mungo stated, why are we going to other cities or the stimulus in general for our either better employment or better working conditions? I don't know. Might want to do a exit interview of these individuals to find out why they're leaving. We know some because they got sick and probably would didn't want to come back or couldn't go and couldn't come back. But for those that replaced them, I think we also have to include a training program on customer service, being able to deal with the public. Many of these contractors, we know, are not trained in that area. They're just trained to do the job and probably not sensitive to the needs of the community for to be responsive. So I'd like to also see some kind of customer service training that would bring these contractors up to speed. If we're going to be using them, let's get them. That's getting trained so that they can work in the municipal environment. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Allen. Yes, I thank you, Mayor. And I just want to say thank you to Vice Mayor Richardson for introducing this item. And I'm so happy that I have signed on. I have heard from so many folks in District two that are having or had issues with their projects. I recently, just last week, was talking to a personal friend who has done construction in this city for over 40 years, and he has never seen these long delays. And I know that were what happened with COVID. And I explained a lot of the issues that we've had. I was encouraged when I just heard city manager Tom Modica say that this would be a focus of his. I think that it's important as a city that we do everything possible to get things done in a timely manner and that we have good customer service. You know, we need to return people's calls. I know what we did as a city during COVID. I know the amount of calls that we were receiving then, and I know how responsive that we were to all those calls. So I'm confident that we can get this under control. With the commitment from staff. And I also think it's important that we hit you know, we hit the ground running. And that means, you know, all these contractors. So this is going to help us. This is these issues are going to help us really with our with a strong economic recovery. I also think it's going to be critical that we address address some of the staffing issues that we've talked about and then updating all of our technology as well. So anyway, this is good stuff. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Austin. Thank you. I also want to just first of all, thank our Development Services Department for. I'm just doing an amazing job of responding to just the enormous amount of development that's going on in the city at this time. It is not it's not normal times. Right. And I would believe that particularly over the last year with people staying at home or paying a little bit more attention to those household projects that we need to take care of in terms of maintenance of homes. There was probably an unexpected demand on our our our services here in the city. And and during a period of time probably that we didn't think there would be that demand. And so there were some factors that I think we need to acknowledge over the last year that that. That certainly led to a changing dynamic. In my view, this is a personnel and priority management issue at I that the I appreciate Councilmember Richardson for bringing up the graph showing the the disparity and the the the trend of contractors versus full time employees. I'm one that believes that employees actually have more vested interest in their work, particularly in a critical function like this in terms of permitting of for development services. I mean, there's the specific codes, there's specific institutional knowledge. That is, I think, very, very useful. Employees are going to have that grasp and long term interests more so than a contractor in the future. So so I guess I have a quick question of how did we get to this point with it? And I heard from my colleague, Councilmember Mongo, and it seems to be some some thought about pay disparities and people being kind of plugged off to other agencies. But to the director and to city manager. What, what, what, what? Because it was a drastic shift. I mean, literally 50% of the workforce in this particular function went away. What contributed to that? Councilmember First of all, you're correct. 2019, we had a banner year in terms of the number of permits pulled and issued. 2020 was not that far behind. I think it's our second highest permitting. So although we were in COVID, we did have a tremendous amount of requests for development. Uh, I think what, what we were managing some of the absences and whatnot throughout the better part of 2020. It's towards the end of the year 2020, the beginning of 2021, where we experienced delays or excuse me, vacancies, and they all seem to happen all at once. So it's kind of the perfect storm, if you will. We have the added development activity now. We have vacancies, and now we have to bring up staff contracts to have private consulting staff to train those. And we've we've done we've done well at being able to fill those positions. But again, those positions are transient in nature and they require training, which didn't help us in terms of our backlog. So that's essentially what what transpired and why we created these why these delays were created. And just add to that a little bit. We agree, we want most of our staff there on a daily basis to be our own city employees. That is our model. We then use contract staff to help on the surges and the supplements. And so we got to a point where people were retiring, people were leaving, they were getting sick or they were moving for other jobs. We are not known as the best paid municipality around either, so pay is certainly a factor, but that is something that we see in multiple different areas. One thing we did do is we've authorized over hiring. So they have the ability to now hire more than budget in order to get back up so we can get city employees. But just like other employees were, other employers were affected as well by just the limit of a labor pool. So this permit tech is one of the main positions down there. We used to get about 70 to 90 applications a year when we opened it up and about half of those would be unqualified. And then you get maybe 30 or 40 people to choose from. In this recent time, working with civil service, they opened it up and they got about 36 people and 63% of which were not qualified for the job. So that leaves you with about 13 people to then, you know, go through and make sure that they're a good fit for us and have all the qualifications. So we are just like other industries having a hard time finding people to replace them. So, um, it sounds like we, no matter where we get to, the bottom line is we're going to have to have adequate staffing to be able to improve efficiencies in our system no matter what we do moving forward. So with that, I certainly support improving our efficiencies and I think this discussion was worthwhile. I'm really looking forward to hearing from public comment, but also the stakeholders who who deal with our development services department on a on a daily basis. I think that is a. An. Important element. Thank you. Thank you. Next up becomes one person. There is no public comment, but Councilman Price. Oh, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think this is a fantastic item. I'm happy to support it. I do have in doing a little bit of research on the shot clock practices and legislation and in other. Parts of the country. One of the things that that I saw is that. Making sure that we have enough time and a. Process, a meaningful process from public input, I think is going to be important because that's one of the criticisms. Of other shot shot clock bills that. I that I've seen and read about. I think that's really important. So I'm. Hoping staff stays. Mindful of that. And also allowing staff to still. Have the opportunity to make meaningful changes and provide adequate oversight, I think is critical. Again, these are some and this is an area. Where we can really adopt some best practices. From unfortunate lessons learned in other jurisdictions. And I just want to make sure that moving forward, staff is mindful. Of some of those best practices and that's incorporated into whatever comes back to us. So that's kind of where I wanted to start my comments. I wanted to acknowledge our development services and our planning staff. I mean, they have done a tremendous job and just. Even in the short time that we really the city. Manager, has really put a focus on this, I've seen a major improvement. Too, to see that our response rates and our turnaround times have. Improved such that where we're on par with a lot of the other cities that were cited this evening and cities with within the region I think is very helpful and it shows just tremendous progress by our development services and planning team. So I want to thank. Oscar and Christopher really for their. Efforts in that regard. But but I'm wondering. You know, we've gone through the process of streamlining hiring and expediting our hiring process. You know, to what extent have those. Changes in our. Operations in the city changed our process? And has it been more efficient? Are we operating efficiently in terms of our. Hiring process so that we can get these positions filled? And maybe that's a question for the city manager. So yes, I do feel like some of the improvements that we've made have helped here. For example, this is one we elevated very quickly with civil service. They put it the test ahead of others, which they have been doing now for us when we see a critical vacancy. And they created what Oscar mentioned, open, continuous, so that they're not just opening it for two weeks and then it's whoever's on the list. It actually, if we find someone tomorrow who wants to sign up to be a permit tech, we they can get on the list do the qualifications and we can pull from that. So that certainly has been one. And on the other end, as we hire, we've been streamlining a lot of what it takes to go through occupational health and to bring them on board. That is going even faster. And we're looking at some additional improvements there to make that go quicker. There are certain things that you don't have control over, like, you know, a live scan and some of those where you have to rely on some of the other agencies for background checks. But the ones that we have control that we've made some progress on. Okay. Great. Thank you. I don't have any additional questions. Mr. Mayor. Thank. Councilwoman. Councilman. Mongo. Thank you. Councilwoman Pryce reminded me of something that I had read about one other jurisdiction, and I thought it'd be appropriate to ask. The vice mayor if he had that intent, because that would be something I'd like to learn more about. When you talk about a shot clock, that would be a timeline. And typically when the shot clock is reached in basketball, you then lose the ball. And then in your mind, would that mean that it's an automatic approval? No. I've had good conversations with staff about there's a lot of ways to get there. And I wanted to kind of close out some of those comments, though, so I'll explain a little bit further when I'm queued up next. Okay. I think it's critical to know that because I could not be supportive of a process that would allow for projects that have not gone through proper approvals and requirements to make it to completion. So I think that the health and safety of the community and their neighbors is just critical. So as long as it's more in alignment with the dashboards and transparency that this council unanimously supported in 2016, with you on the committee at the time as vice chair, I think that we can continue and I know that Ms.. Eriksson, with technology and innovation, is supportive of continuing down that path, though we all know it's taken a little bit longer than we had hoped. I know we can get there together. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Richardson. Thank you. I want to I want to just thank all the council members for their colleagues, for their comments. You know, as we started off with this presentation, we want to lift up our staff. We want to support our staff. You guys have done an incredible job. I see it. We deal with habitability issues in my district. We're doing development in my district. I hear it. I see how hard you work, how hard it's been to get development going in certain areas of town. So. You know, from things like a plan. We want to be in a place where implementing those things now. And that's why it's important to have this the system in place. A few things. There's there's a few things we're asking for here. I think the city council is really lifted up. Hiring is important. We want to see what you've done. We want to see what you can do next. The idea that council the friendly by councilmember mongo. I think it's a great idea if there is other tools be created the software. There wasn't a lot of discussion by the council but I know how significant the software and how expensive this could be. We want you to come back and provide those options. I think big think about having a best in class software system. That's what we want you to come back and put us in a position to support you and do. And in terms of the shot clock. I've been really clear with staff. What we want here is transparency, accountability. Now, at the end of the shot clock, again, something, something, something happens, right? There's already under certain laws and affordable housing is already a shot clock. Now, I'm not asking to add additional penalties. This isn't about being punitive. This is about understanding how we are meeting our commitment to the public. Are we? Are we meeting the shot clock? Are we beating the buzzer? Right. Are we constantly delayed in that shot clock? So there's so many ways to achieve it. The idea is the software can really open up the playbook for us in terms of having a shot clock and understanding what our commitment is to the public. So thank you to the city council. Thank you to the staff. Thank you to the again, to the machinists, the Building Industry Association, the Southern California Association, our private housing and L.A. County Business Federation for speaking up and supporting us. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to just to close. I want to thank Mr. Orsi and just the whole team at Development Services and Planning. I think you guys have really done a great job under a very difficult year. So I just want to thank you and the team. And I personally want to just also think I know I have encountered a couple instances with neighbors or folks, a couple of folks that stopped me on the street and have been waiting on a permit or have had some concerns. And you've addressed those very quickly. And when I brought those to the department's attention. So I just appreciate you for for doing that as well. And I want to also just note and I think I know Mr. Modica, you and I talked about this or have been talking about this as well. As a as a snapshot as where we are today. We are are we close or fairly close to being cut up as far as the amount of time it takes for processing as we were pre-pandemic? I think we're pretty close. Is that right? We're pretty close, especially on the stuff that really is kind of the smaller the minor ones. Those were taking weeks. They're now taking 1 to 2 days. One thing we didn't talk about here that I do want to add and I want to hear what Oscar has to say, though, is we changed the system completely when we send it went home. We went from a very efficient system where you touch every single city department all in one day on one visit to having to now interact virtually with dozens of different people in different areas that couldn't see each other. And it was all done on email instead of over, you know, in person. And that had a very significant impact on our efficiency. And so now getting that back open and as you heard, Oscar bringing more people in and being able to get even more services, indoor permit counter is really going to help. Oscar, can you talk a little bit about where we are just in terms of being caught up? Yes, thank you. Mr. Motorcar Monaco. As you pointed out, we had to pivot as we shut down and shuttered our city hall. We went from a largely in-person service to a digital process. And it's not necessarily the most conducive way to conduct business, especially when you rely on on the development community to provide the information that we need to process it so that when you don't have that and now you're spending most of your time, whether it's through emails or through phone calls, it's not the most efficient way. So technology will help and be able to control that and regulate that and hold both parties accountable. Councilmember Mongo, you mentioned what what shot clock ideas would be, things like being able to to not accept incomplete applications. We've done that as a courtesy to expedite the services, but then we find ourselves on the back end, waiting for weeks for folks to to respond to those, to those efforts. So having staffing, having the tech will allow us to effectuate a shot clock type program. But, but, but as I mentioned in my presentation or in my in my discussion points, we are caught up in some of those cities that were referenced tonight. We are within their ranges and the only improvement we need on our on our LA, our large projects and we have we have seen development activity continue even during during this this pandemic and coming out of the pandemic. So and we're making, again, great strides in getting those. But our timelines have been cut down to what used to be eight weeks to one week, what used to be several days to return a phone call to a day or two. And we'll continue to do that. And and this effort, this program will just help us be kind of the leader among those communities that we that we identify today and throughout southern California. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think also I want to just note that throughout the the, you know, 15 months, 14 months of the pandemic development has continued to boom across the city. Projects happening at every scale, housing, affordable housing projects, large market rate development, retail development. And I just want to commend also all of you for just continuing to shepherd all those projects through. It has been a huge task. And in fact, in talking to a lot of mayors and other cities, we have not seen there have been some slowdowns in other places. And I feel I'm from a large project perspective that you guys have done a really great job of just maintaining those and moving those forward. I do I do agree that losing a big chunk of our workforce like we did and changing the whole system like you all had to do, it did cause absolute disruptions for particularly, you know, folks who were just trying to do additions to their home or smaller changes to within their own neighborhoods. And so I think that's that's absolutely correct. And I think that our planning and our development department, just like it was impacted, just like public works and or trash pickup was impacted, just like fire service was impacted, just like our hospitals were impacted. I think that all of our departments were impacted in a very in a very real way because of the pandemic. And so, again, just to you and your team, I think you've done a great job. And I want to just note, I don't I and correct me if my date's wrong, but I think we we we implemented the new plan check system just like two years ago. Wasn't that like two years ago? Yes, it's a recent implementation and I know that that and so we've it's it's that's been a huge benefit to to the planning process, an enormous change. And so that software and that system is just two years old, correct? Correct. And Mayor, just wanted to let you know that the developer community has not taking advantage of that EA plan software like we wanted them to. So we are trying to revisit the EA plans offered as well as our in for permitting system. They work they both work in concert to improve efficiencies and to upgrade our technology, including our E plan. We had a multiple phased a plan process. The most current one that implemented the online portal was a couple of years ago because I know we've had some folks use the plan process, but you're saying that we need to do a better job also of getting it out there and promoting it and making sure people know about it, correct? Correct. And we have been but it's just the community is typically likes to stick with the traditional process. Right. Right now, I think. Definitely understand. So thank you. Look, look, I think we all look forward to being fully staffed up and opening up the counters fully in city hall and letting folks come back up to do the planning. I want to make one more note. I think that the ability and you said it to Mr. Modica, and I think it's critical, the ability for staff to be in the same room. And to be able to share plans with each other or to walk across the hall and get get a plan checked or walk over to an engineer or walk over to the traffic department or to sustainability department and be able to collaboratively work on a project was dramatically hindered in during that year. And I think that we should and I think we have learned a lot of lessons. We have to be prepared for how we would how we would operate in the future if we were to have to have this type of closure in the future, which hopefully will never happen again anytime soon. But I think we we learned a lot of lessons on that because that back and forth is really critical. So thank you for getting things back to almost where they were pre-pandemic and will continue to make real improvements. So I appreciate all of your work. Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I appreciate you giving me an opportunity. Once again, I take a lot of ownership of this. This is something I've always been very passionate about. I want to kind of just say two additional things. Some of the bigger projects that I know are coming or have come, and a lot of the bigger developers from housing on Norwalk to the Amazon 360 or fresh or whatever it's called now in spring to the senior facility that is going through a process to globe master plan. I'm working with people that work in a lot of cities, and despite what we've had as a challenge, I will tell you that they consistently say that we are. The cream of the crop staff to work with. I know that occasionally a staff member might have a bad day, but on the whole, working with you and your team, I get rave reviews all the time, so I just want you to hear that again. And then in talking about some of the things that Ms.. Ericsson and I and quite honestly, her predecessor and I discussed related to these systems, there are a lot of tools. A lot of you talked about the pausing of the permit process when you accept incomplete documents. And you and I have had a lot of talks about this in the last two years because I got a complaint that no one's gotten back to them. And there was one email that let them know that X, Y and Z is missing and no one's responded. And so I really love some of the systems that that technology and innovation and I have discussed, which really have like a couple of major components to them. One is that you can get multiple approvals from multiple division simultaneously when a plan is at a certain phase. And that really gives you that online one stop shop that I know that you guys are striving for. And so I want the community to hear that that's in the works like long before today in this meeting, but that you guys have really been thinking about the developers and what they need. And then secondarily, when a plan is paused because of a change need or an issue or a request that there is a drip notice of notifications to all members emailed, which means that it says today your plan check has been put on hold because you are missing A, B and C. It has been three days since your plan check has been put on hold because you're missing an agency. It has been five days since your and that is an automatic in the system that doesn't take staff resources and really continues to put it back on the staff of the companies that are coming to the city and asking for that help so that they are reminded because often these architects, engineers, developers, they have 70 different projects in 30 different cities and they don't always remember and they forgot about a set of emails that came from our office. And so I just want to thank you again for that. And I know one of our council members asked this question as a series of questions, and they did it so politely that there wasn't an actual direct response. But I've heard some of the rates of our competitor cities. Is there anything you want to comment about the the variance of those rates and what we're really talking about? Or the cost. I'm sorry for the the pay to staff in other cities versus ours. Cause I just don't think people know. I think we're going to have to get back to you one time. Once we get that. I've heard in some cities it's double digits. Yeah. Some of them police staff have gone outside the organization for four or $5 and up for the same position. Yeah, significantly more worth a move and into areas of Southern California that have a significantly lower cost of living. And I think that that's important to recognize. And I appreciate our staff that stick with us, train and retain. That's my motto. And I appreciate you and and the staff that have been with us for the long haul. Note that you will be rewarded. Thank you. Thank you. There's a there's a motion in a second. Please cast your vote to call. District one, District two, high district three. I. District four. District five. Yes. District six. District seven. District eight. District nine. All right, Ocean Cares.