Recommendation to request a report on the possibility of preparing a City-wide survey on the prioritization of City services and citizen/user satisfaction of existing City services. This survey process would be open to all Long Beach residents and employees and would specifically emailed/mailed to citizens who come into contact with the City through any of our City Departments. The City of Long Beach currently offers a brief survey following a submittal to the Go Long Beach application, however, it is unknown what other survey mechanisms are currently being utilized. As part of this agenda item, staff should prepare a report on what other City departments currently utilize a survey process to gather data that can assist in budget allocation decisions. The report should consider all options including on-line surveys for residents who have pulled building permits or obtained a business license or a survey on our community outreach efforts from residents who provide feedback through "Speak Up" Long Beach. Additionally, the City (1) should explore a City-wide resource on servi
Thank you. Thank you for being here tonight. If we can go to the regular agenda item and start with item 14. Communication from Councilman Price Councilmember Super nor Councilman Andrews. A recommendation to request a report on the possibility of preparing a citywide survey on the prioritization of city services. And citizen user satisfaction of existing city services. Is there emotion? And a second place. I'll do it. Councilwoman Price. Thank you. I wanted to bring this item forward, and I thank the council colleagues who have signed on to the item with me. I think it's very important when we approach budgeting season and the process involved with determining what city services the public views. It's critical that we do a study to determine whether or not survey tools can be used to help us gather information about what citizens actually believe. Many, many years ago, when I was in grad school, I wrote my thesis on the purpose and utility of citizen satisfaction surveys. And in support of that thesis, I prepared I created a citizen satisfaction survey that was supposed to be modeled after a business government, a business customer satisfaction survey to determine really what the residents felt about the city services that they were getting, what city services they believed were critical, and provide the city with opportunities to enhance and better improve its service delivery models. I know that the City of Long Beach has in the past embarked on a very expansive survey analysis of its residents. And I know that some of our departments currently have surveys associated with the services that they provide. For example, I know that we have a survey mechanism available through Go Long Beach. This particular item requests staff to really evaluate the purpose and utility of surveys and to provide us as council members some information regarding what it would take for us to have a survey tool in place that would help us prioritize city services with the understanding that we are going to be entering budget deficit years and we're going to have to make some difficult choices regarding what services we are going to fund and invest in. You know, every single week we get requests from different organizations for various programs, and oftentimes the folks that are bringing the request to us are not completely aware of our financial situation. Our financial situation going into the next three years specifically is dire. It is not a positive financial situation. So when we're thinking about programs that people are presenting to us. Sometimes programs are wonderful and they provide a lot of opportunity to improve the city in any one particular area. But we may not have the money to fund it. And I think it's important as council members that we gauge really what do the residents and the taxpayers of our city, the people who live here and and contribute to our tax base, what do they expect to see from us in terms of government services? That's where our focus should be. That's where our emphasis should be. We should be focused on the specific services that the residents believe are the required services that the city needs to provide and figure out how to make those better and improve upon those and allocate our precious resources to those areas. So that's the intent behind this particular item, is to request staff to come up with long term survey methodologies that we can employ. And also short term, our budget cycle is coming up I think in August is when will have the budget release to recommendations released. And I think it's important for us to try to, even though it's a very short window, try to develop a short term survey methodology to allow us to be able to reach out to residents. Perhaps we could do it on Speak Up, Long Beach or SurveyMonkey or some other survey tool that would at least give us a small baseline of what our residents are thinking in terms of core city services that we can use to guide us, not to direct us entirely, but to guide us during this year's budget process. And then looking on into 2017, I'd like to see us have a more detailed and thorough survey methodology in place that we can use to find out how we should prioritize our services as we enter into even more significant deficit years. So that's that. Thank you. Councilmember Turanga. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I am concerned about the costs associated with a program of this magnitude, given the likelihood that the surveys web based. Am also concerned for the ability of lower income residents in my district to have equal access to the survey. Also, given our recent passage of a language access policy. For the sake of equity, we would need to include other way to use languages in Long Beach, in industry and the survey's methodology, including Spanish, Carmi and the Gulf. Lastly, if we are currently asking departments to make proportional cuts, can we really afford to fund a survey program to be able to financially implement any suggestions brought forward by our residents? Most of the time, when a series initiated is done with the idea of changing or implementing a new policy, and I feel that it brings a false sense of expectation from our residents and I am unable to support the same at this time. Thank you. Councilmember Andrews. Yeah. Yes. Thank you, vice mayor. You know, I think it's a good idea to provide our constituents, you know, with up to date information on the city and city budget by conducting surveys. I also think that it's very important that everyone has access to this information by having these surveys put it not only in English, but Spanish , Kumai, Tagalog, Vietnamese, just to name a few, since everyone is not the access to computers. We should find other ways to reach out to our constituents, whether it is by fliers, brochures going door to door, community stakeholders like the churches. We need to make sure that we reach our four corners of Long Beach. This is a way for people all, including into this process. And I would like to thank you for bringing it to the diocese, Mr. Wise. Thank you. Councilmember Alston. I thank you. And I just wanted to, I guess, get some clarification either from the maker of the motion or from staff. Does this item actually have a cost associated with it or is it asking for a report? The item is asking for a report. It specifically says there's no fiscal impact. But in regards to survey technology, there's also free surveys that are available. The intent behind the item is to develop a methodology to find out from citizens where they want the city to spend its money. It's not really designed to target a specific survey methodology or a range in terms of what the survey methodology would cost, because there are free surveys available that staff would also explore as part of the study. So right now, as it reads, there is no fiscal impact, but there could be. And it sounds like you are thinking in or directing staff to look at the free option. Absolutely. Especially for the short term survey. But the particular item that we're voting on is asking staff to explore what the cost of surveys would be and what methodologies available. I would add, there's going to be obviously some some time and cost associated with exploring the cost. I don't see a real problem with that, but I will just just just say that since this is looking toward our budget and you have expressed and I think express very eloquently the challenges that we face in coming years with our budget. If there is any real cost associated with this, I'm going to have an issue with that. But tonight, I'll go ahead and support it just to ask the question. Thank you. Councilman Austin, I wanted to ask the city manager what would be staff's next steps with an item that would indicate that there's no fiscal impact at the time, but may anticipate one depending on your research. Would you let us know how you would bring that back? I'm. Vice mayor, council members. We certainly would expect some type of a fiscal impact for a long term strategy that would go citywide and deal with the things that Councilmember Urania talked about. Maybe a consultant or maybe a new team or something like that. But that's something that would probably come back to you probably in 90 days or so. I don't think that it would come back to you quick enough to be utilized for the fiscal year 16 budget. That said, part two of this item would be for us to quickly look at one of our existing survey tools, as Councilmember Pryce talked about. And it might be something that we could just simply be web based and get out as fast as possible without a cost or a minor cost. And we would put that back to you on a two from four on what we would be able to do. Our Memo to the City Council and see if the council would want us to get to go forward with a tool like that so that you would have something before the fiscal year 16 budget actions. Thank you. And with the Long Beach Go app. When someone uses Long Beach Go, the government outreach app to report whatever they see graffiti. Is there a feedback? There's a feedback item that comes back, and I'm not sure if every council member was aware that when our constituents use that, they get some way of being able to say what what their feedback is to the issues that Council member Yarrawonga raised regarding language access. Are you and your staff prepared to incorporate that as part of your review based on the commitments that we've made to include as many of our non English speaking residents as possible? I Vice Mayor, I don't think that we would ever consider coming back to you without adhering to all the policies that we've adopted. So. Absolutely, yes. I didn't think so. Thank you. Councilmember Councilwoman Pryce. Guys. I was cued back up. The other thing that I wanted to point out is this is a very common methodology that municipalities are using all over the nation. It's there's books written on how important it is before people vote on policy to understand what the needs of the residents are, what the priorities of the residents are . There are numerous standard surveys that are already in place and available that the city can use and modify so that they would reduce the cost that would be associated with utilizing such a survey. I believe there are already sample surveys that the City of Long Beach could actually tweak to tailor it to the specific services that we provide in the city of Long Beach. So it's not like we would be reinventing the wheel. This is a methodology that is being utilized throughout the nation so that people can basically have some support in budget period prioritization. So I think it's important it makes the budget process a lot more objective and it makes us a little bit more able to make decisions not based on the specific group that's asking for an item, but rather what the values of the community are in terms of the core services that they consider to be vital to a city's function. It's basically quantitative statistical data that says what the residents of the taxpayers of the city want to see from their city government. Councilmember Mongeau So speaking to the the value of such a tool in the graduate program that I attended and have continued to work with over the last decade, and they have a course that actually the second year master's students do these surveys for local governments and nonprofits at no charge and they come out and they do an interview. My current full time employment has utilized them. I have had many of those students as interns in my council office to gather the information from our residents that I'll be presenting at the June 27th State of the Fifth. But I strongly encourage the city staff to explore both the Long Beach State and USC UCLA options that we have available to us, because they, year after year can use the work of the prior class and see the types of tools that have been used. And many of the budget directors across the region have used similar tools so that there would be no costs, in which case I would be supportive. Councilmember Urunga. Thank you. Vice Mayor I have to respectfully disagree in the fact that there is a cost associated with it. There's staff costs. There's a cost that staff has to do in terms of doing the research necessary to find a tool or an instrument that is going to be as extent as as wide as it needs to be to contact all the portions of the communities that are going to be impacted by any policy decision that we make here in the city council. It's going to be a survey that it has to be comprehensive. It has to be complete. It has to be strategic. And it has to be one that is going to be realistic for the citizens of Long Beach if they're going to be responding to this survey. If I heard that the city manager correctly, this is a survey they would not be able to put into implementation right away. It's a it would be a survey that is not going to be effective for the current budget year this year. It would be something that would be used next year. So in that consideration, that is the reason why I'm not able to support this motion at this time. Perhaps next year, perhaps in a new budget year once we already completed this one. But I think that moving forward with a survey, even if it's just a report to come back to us, I think that we're not ready for that at this time. And that and even if it's a short term one, it would be incomplete. I mean, if we're going to do this, let's do it right. Let's not just do it half, half way, short term only, not long term. We need to be as comprehensive and complete as we possibly can. And that takes time. And I'm not ready to support it at this point. Thank you, Councilmember. Your Honor. And I wanted to share I don't think anyone disagrees here that we should not receive resident feedback or stakeholder feedback. That's something that we all do through council offices. But as a city on policies, there is value to opening up as many mechanisms as possible for feedback and reports do costs money. And I will ask all of us to consider that everything we do, even the items here that don't that say that there is no fiscal impact, there is because staff has spent some time preparing the item. This entire book has cost money just by the level of the number of hours every staff member has put into it . So that's the nature of public service. There is a cost. We have many, many, many. Public servants in the audience that provide a tremendous amount of service throughout their careers here. So that's that's our business. We provide service. It's not free. It's never been free. And I understand with Councilmember Durango saying that we are in tight budget times, we will continue to be in tight budget times. But there is tremendous value in opening up the ability for residents to communicate with us in a manner that's relevant to them. And I'll give an example, which I think many of you are aware of the national civic. The National Civic Day of Hacking, the hackathon that is on the sixth, I believe, the city of Santa monica is participating. I would encourage the city of Long Beach if we're not already participating to do that and put out a challenge to students and developers and all the individuals that love working with data to come up with something that we can use that is minimal in cost, that is usable on a web enabled device where most residents may have access to a Web enabled device. Not all residents, but most, and will figure out a way to capture those that do not have those devices to bring them in as well. So there are opportunities and I think there's great value in considering them and being as flexible as possible. And I think that's what this council is supportive of and that's what we intended when we discussed the language access policies, access to as many people as possible, which also means communicating in the tools that are relevant to people, not just the tools were willing to provide. And and I think that's what this council means. But I do I do appreciate the prudence, the fiscal prudence, especially being chair of the Budget Oversight Committee and knowing that we're coming into budget conversations and I appreciate the city manager's notation that we will probably not be able to take this up with this fiscal year. But something that we should look at now united your head. When I mentioned the hackathon, are we doing that? A hackathon is scheduled on Saturday, June 6th, was going to be at the Expo building this transition to the aquarium. So it'll be a marine based hackathon at the aquarium on Saturday. So is your ISD direct your is it I.T. department here? Is the IT department in charge of that? Not they're not in charge. It's we're an ancillary use. We're trying to hook up wi fi for the hackathon at the Expo building and it's transitioned to the to the aquarium and will be involved somehow. So what I was recommending is actually the city participating in opening up whatever data we may have already opened up and offering that as a challenge, not just a venue. We're certainly happy to offer venues, but it's the civic day of hacking. And so that should mean that our civic center participates as well. And this would have been a great opportunity to submit that to these genius brains that will show up. You know. So that would address, councilmember, your biggest concern. They're willing to give free consulting and free expertize, all for the privilege of working with our data. I think so. Thank you. Councilmember Price and Councilmember Richardson would like to add something. Thank you, Vice Mayor. We've I've heard some good arguments about this, both in favor and against. And I'm going to I'm going to support this. And just a few points to note, I support feedback and surveys, and I think they can be a great tool. In my experience and surveys in my particular area of town, online surveys really capture only the engaged people, folks who have access to a service and familiar with the service. But for those folks who may not have access to services or may not be familiar with the services, you have to take an additional step and actually have a one on one personal connection in touch with that person to actually better understand and better engage that that that survey. So I'm confident that city staff is going to evaluate sort of the language barriers that Councilmember you brought up and then access issues. The other point I want to I want to say is, you know, I was able to watch the last round of cuts that the city had to do. And people can say what they want about about proportional budgeting. But the fact is, certain departments we still have today because we didn't deviate from that, we were able to protect some libraries, some parks and other services that are really a drop in the water compared to a drop in the bucket compared to police and fire. And I will be want to just be careful that we don't one way or the other, sort of have some unintended consequences by having more surveys in one department, then having, say, one survey for fire and one survey for for the larger departments, whereas these other smaller departments do a number of different programs. So those are just a few things I would want to just pay attention to as we move forward in the survey. So I'll be I'll be supporting this. Thank you. There's been a motion and a second. Is there any member of the public that wish to address the Council on item 14? Biosphere. So after Gary comes forward, would you like to come forward? Good evening, Madam Vice Mayor and members of the City Council and Staff. My name is Gary Shelton. I believe my address is on file. A survey, you know, complete. There's 240 some odd thousand households in the city. So completion in that respect could be a lot of surveys. I believe that the wording of the item in the first paragraph is that the process would be open to all Long Beach residents and employees and would specifically be emailed or mailed to citizens who come into contact with the city through any of our city departments. And that made me think water, gas, trash. Again, we're back up to 340 some 8000 households. It would be a very, very big survey. Now, that doesn't I'm not trying to say that's bad or good. I'm not even trying to come down on one side or the other of this motion. I'm hoping that maybe there's even more communication behind the rail as to the feasibility, because the possibility is what requested here. But in every in all expenditures of time, effort and money, we talk about feasibility when something is going to come out. The other end is a project or a program. Council member Urunga expressed that he would hope that it would be complete and strategic and realistic. And I think that was a good triumvirate of points to be thought of. As you move forward on to this, I'm only concerned that you would be asking the city manager to come back with a report that gets us nowhere. That's really my only concern. I think a survey would be great idea too, but I'm not sure it would really get us anywhere, you know. And lastly, surveys always have a sampling methodology, but we've already kind of ruled out are we talking about one in ten are going to be asked questions or one in 100 or maybe one in a thousand or maybe only one in 10,000 people in the in the city asked any of these questions to get a plus or -3.4%, you know, range of error on this thing that would make any sense to us. But it's just I have concerns and I'd like to hear it fleshed out a little more from behind the rail before you ask the city manager to try to flesh it out himself. Thank you. Thank you, Gary. Next speaker, please. Good evening, Vice Mayor. This is an excellent motion, I think, brought forward by Councilmember Price. My name is Kim Rising. I will be addressing a separate issue this evening. However, I have a master's degree in political science and a bachelor's and also have done post-doctorate work. One of the required courses, of course, is statistics. When you're a graduate student and I've had experience working in both the city of Tacoma and the city of Flagstaff, and I'm dating myself here. My master's degree was 1975 prior to the city swarm, and we did very effective surveys without the help of the current statistics. And it's further in my career, I've worked for the Democratic Party, where we've measured ideologies and political psychology, and we have not used necessarily I.T. responses. There's a variety of universities and colleges in this area, especially Cal State University, Long Beach, USC and UK, that graduate students in political science. And I wish Dr. Garcia were here because he could back me up on this in order to get their degrees, they have to do this type of volunteer work. And indeed, even if you ignore the i.t and the language issue, statistically, this is something that people would be readily able to volunteer and pass the data further on to ongoing classes. I thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good evening. My name is julian morales. I'm a student at Cabrillo High School and I live in the the Craftsman Village area. And I'd like to add a lot to what Mr. Unger said in my specific neighborhood. Most of us are Spanish speakers, and I talked to a lot of them. Not one of us knew there was an election happening a year back. And I think addressing these people on the fact that there's going to be a survey is going to be a lot harder if it's not done in person, because a lot of these people don't either trust or understand what's happening in the government. And I still think they deserve a word on what's happening. And on another comment on the. On getting people from the hackathon to work. I do a little bit in programing and I can tell you to create a survey of this magnitude would take between weeks, two months. And I do believe they're going to get there even though they're going to charge to do this. It's not something that any program would just want to do for free out of charity. And if you do find them, you still have to find people that speak in other languages spoken in Long Beach, which still creates even a bigger challenge. So. I would say that I'm against it solely for the fact that I do believe is going to cost too much to be able to get this running and to get it running in all languages. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your feedback. Are there any other public speakers? I would like to address the Council on this item. Okay, so we have a motion and a second members. Please cast your vote. Motion carries eight one. Thank you. And members, if I may take one more item prior to taking item 25, I would appreciate that. Item 15.