Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) to strengthen partnerships between the City and LBUSD in order to address ongoing parking and traffic issues at Long Beach schools impacting local residents and neighborhoods.
Communication from Councilwoman Mango Councilman Price and Council Member Super Nnuh recommendation to work with the Long Beach Unified School District to address ongoing parking and traffic issues at Long Beach schools impacting local residents and neighborhoods. Before we go there, too, I also I think there's there's folks here for item 34. I know we haven't had any requests to move that up yet, but I'm going to move that up after. We're going to do we're going to do 235, then we're going to do 21 and then we're going to do will move up 34 after 21. So next up is 35. Yes. I'm excited to bring forward an item tonight where we can strengthen strengthen the partnerships between our Long Beach Unified School District and our neighborhoods in addressing some of the traffic concerns that have come up through the years. Several of our schools have needed to make changes to adapt to the changing environment of our students. Some places where we used to have junior highs, we now have high schools, and some places where we used to have bussing. We now have neighborhood schools. And so there used to be a committee that would work on these types of things with our neighborhoods. And I feel that the time has come to work hard to put citizens back in touch with the school district through our our city process to ensure that we have a safe place for children to go to and from school and to get in and out of the cars and to ensure that when we get in and out of our cars were being safe and that we're not putting any of our children at risk. Okay. So you're making the motion as presented in this item, correct? Yes. I'm expecting some friendly amendment. Okay. Councilwoman Price making a second to that Councilman Price. Thank you. Is someone else going to make the friendly or should I go ahead. What did you want to make me? Go ahead. I'd like to make a friendly amendment that we reactivate the joint. Powers Task Force was the committee called. Joint Use. Joint Use. Joint Use Committee. I apologize. Sorry about that. I would make or recommend I would make a friendly that we reactivate that committee to allow the partnerships to continue. I think that would be great. Okay. In regards to this item, I want to thank Council Woman Mango for bringing it forward. I do want to say that our office works very closely with Long Beach Unified. We attempt to and they have been very receptive to our office in terms of working with us, coming up with solutions. And I say that knowing that there are some constituents in the audience here today who have not liked some of the recommendations that Long Beach Unified has made. And just within the last few days, some of the recommendations that we've made to support Long Beach Unified in terms of some of those recommendations. But I view our partnership with Long Beach Unified to be a very positive one in terms of our council office, and that's all I can speak for. And so my hope with this item is that we can continue to work in partnership as we have been through a more formalized setting, which is such as the Joint Use Committee. So I want to thank you for bringing this forward. And I think this is a conversation that it's appropriate to have. But again, I think that the partnerships are very well in place, and I hope that they continue to move in a positive direction. Thanks. So just to be clear, the the motion on the floor is to bring these items forward to the already established Joint Use Committee. Is that is that right? Yes. Reactivate. Okay. And just as we're clear, the joint use committee members are appointed. The council members are appointed by the mayor, I believe, and the district then appoints district members to the Joint Use Committee as well. There's a make up of that already set to well, we'll go through that process. Council Member Austin. So I'd like to volunteer first to be on the Joint Use Committee, Mr. Mayor. We'll see about that. And and I'd just like to say, you know, parking and traffic issues around every school, I think in every neighborhood in the district is is a concern. We all certainly hear about them. I have been working very closely with our school board representative, Megan Kerr, who's been a great, excellent partner to to raise these concerns with and to, you know, kind of put our heads together and strategize on solutions in and around in the neighborhoods where we have school, school issues and traffic in our community. And so that's it. I'm looking forward to this issue, going to the Joint Use Committee and, and building that, that sound partnership or improving upon our partnership with the school district to address concerns and what we have. I'll just say this where we have active PTA is I can't go can't can't not commend the PTA that that are that are out there doing the valet parking situations and have great volunteers. We have active participation, parental peers of participation at our schools. These issues are much easier to to to address. So I just wanted to make those comments. Thank you. Councilor Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Councilmember Mongo, for for beginning this conversation. I just want to chime in and say that, um, just over the last five years, I've been, you know, working here in the city of Long Beach. We've, we've worked hard at the relationship not only with the district, but with the schools. The ninth District obviously is home to Jordan High School. And there's no I guess the point I want to say is there's no way to legislate good relations. It takes hard work to go out, meet the principals when there's a new principal, meet that principal and have conversations about the community's concerns and local solutions to those concerns. I've seen how we've placed things on the city council agenda, and it's actually diminished some somehow some of our relationships that we might have. And what what I'd like to see and don't use is great, but I think I've seen better results when you can pick up the phone, call your principal or your school board member and work out a solution with your neighborhood association and maybe parent groups. So so I'm going to I'm going to support this tonight, but I would just encourage us to have a more informal, less legislative relationship and more informal personal relationship to work out some of these issues. And those are just my thoughts on this. Thank you. Councilman Ringwood. I want to echo Councilmember Richardson's comments. I think that it's a good thing that we reestablished. Just I want to thank Councilmember Price for making the First Amendment, because I think that's the appropriate way to to be able to deal with this. I want to also thank, um. Chairwoman. President. President Carter, I guess. I'm sorry, Adam. Diana Craighead. Diana. Diana. Right outside. I was just at your board meeting yesterday, and I was making comments here. But welcome to our two hour council meeting here. Sorry to keep you so late, but looking forward to having the grow that relationship because it's a relationship that needs to be established or reestablished and grown. So thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzalez. I just want to say I'm glad that we had the friendly because I think that's certainly a more appropriate avenue for us to tackle these issues. And we, you know, in the First District, we have a variety of different schools with the same issues. And I know we've often contacted our principals directly to ensure that we're just engaging in a conversation about that. But I have a question for city staff. I know this is sort of related and I know Council member Austin brought this forward some time ago and I'm not sure when it will be back. Is the crossing guard item it was. When do we expect that back? Because this is some, you know, some somewhat related as well. Are a million will respond to that. He's running the peace committee. Honorable mayor, honorable council members. Councilmember Gonzalez, thank you for asking that question. We have finally reenacted the pedestrian safety committee. We have full membership now from all council districts. And unfortunately, our second meeting was supposed to happen on Thursday last week. And due to the blackout, we canceled and will postpone that meeting. But the meetings are moving forward and we will report back after we had our second meeting. The first meeting was just to establish rules and regulations, identify what needs to occur. And in this meeting, we're going to discuss specific intersections that need to be addressed. And we will reschedule it within the next couple of weeks. We have to find the most appropriate time for the participants because we had already notify them. We will have three meetings in this fiscal year. We buy by charter. We are supposed to have two. We will have three to make up what has happened in the past, but will definitely come back when we have the second meeting. Wonderful. And I want to thank you. And I think some of the concerns may be addressed through that committee. I see maybe some crossover in that. And then lastly, I just want to thank President Craighead and School by school board member Megan Kerr just for your continued work with the city. And I just saw you yesterday as well, so we're certainly there and we go back and forth with discussions. So thank you for being here. Thank you, Councilmember Super. Thank you. I also wanted to echo Councilmember Richardson's comments about just the neighborhood coalitions. A couple of years ago, we had tremendous impact set back from school and neighbors got together. And again, all mentioned board member Craighead. She showed up at one of those meetings, I think it was two years ago. I remember it was that triple digit day. That's that's the biggest part. I remember it's about 103 degrees in a elementary school cafeteria. But the school board and the school district came through and actually put a parking lot on the school grounds, which I thought was pretty amazing. Also, speaking of crossing guards, don't forget to use them for intel. We get our best intel. I'll mention Deborah Willard, who contacts her office and gives us a lot of good information about traffic concerns. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Andrews. You know. Yes, Mayor. You know, I really want to thank everyone for being a part of this, because being in the educational field, I think it's extremely important that we do strengthen our partnership with the language Unified School District, you know, to address this issue at the schools, this traffic issue. You know, my office has struggle with Lafayette School days for many years. And even after I've had to park inside, I had to change and a one way street added for certain hours. But hopefully this item will bring new insight to to the reoccurrence of issues that might that the neighbors have had faced in doing this year . So I'm really hoping that this will bring some more help with our neighbors and with the school district so we can get this issue taken care of. And thank you again for being here. Thank you, Councilwoman Mongo. I just wanted to address some of the comments that were made. First and foremost, the quality of life for our residents and our citizens and our our students is of utmost importance. And the informal process is in place. There are lots of neighborhood associations that already have meetings and work with our neighborhood principals and work with our PTA presidents and sitting in this seat. There's an advantage to being able to see that there are certain things that work really well at certain schools that can be shared. And while it's great for our school board members and ourselves to make those those correlations for our community, it's also really a powerful thing to have that open forum and this more formalized committee for some of the issues, as Councilwoman Pryce mentioned, related to how sometimes the recommendations that we put forward aren't always the recommendations that the community feels are best for them. And so just having this additional process, I think, will strengthen the informal process that we've had in place for a very long time. Several times during my my leadership as the neighborhood association president, we invited our school board member to our community meetings. And Diana has already been to a community meeting in a neighborhood adjacent to a new school that's changing. And so these are great things, and there's always room for improvement. And I just look forward to this opportunity to have that more formalized process. Thank you. Thank you. Any members of the public like to speak? Please come forward. As they come down, I want to thank both of our school board members that are here tonight. I think it shows your commitment to the city and vice versa. I think, you know, I love you both very much. And I want to thank you for being here and showing your interest. And if you're even really interested, you can be on the Joint Youth Committee. But thank you. I think you all know we have an all star school system. And I want to thank you for that. Our public speakers. Yes, sir. Hi, everybody. James Craig Bishop. I'm a Long Beach resident and the founder of the School Neighbors Association here in Long Beach, which you can see online at school neighbors dot com. It's established with the goal of reducing the traffic dangers here in Long Beach that we all live with to ensure the safety of our kids and their schools citywide here in Long Beach. The traffic and death injury rates on our streets are basically. Doubled around school zones. School traffic. Kills a person in Long Beach every two of three. Years above background levels. School traffic causes 72 injuries a year on our streets and 12 collisions with students or pedestrians anywhere in vehicles occur each year in our Long Beach school zones. There are two contributing factors and main reasons that I attribute to these high death and injury rates in our school zones. One, the map that was up just a moment ago showed the School of Choice traffic that's produced in the city. The school choice program produces about 40,000 vehicle trips per day, mostly in the neighborhoods that are designed for pedestrian. Traffic. As students are driven across town instead of walking to their local schools. East Side schools are hit most by this traffic, with production of over 1100 vehicle trips per day at schools and at some as many as 1400 per day. And that's just from the school choice program. That doesn't include background levels from from other events and basic local traffic for the school. The second main reason is the initial design capacity of many of the schools has been expanded and in the process the traffic worsened through bungalow additions because when the bungalows were added, Long Beach Unified did not comply with the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act when they put the bungalows in which would have required them to take a look at traffic concerns from adding the bungalows increased demand they cause and to mitigate the issues that come up from that. Briefly, I want to mention an example from where I live at ten shore. Preparatory. School traffic comes in from the north, drops kids off and has a desire to turn around and go back and exit where they came from. In the process, they make U-turns in the street and turns into our front yards and across sidewalks, often while pedestrians, including my own kids, are present, it's a real danger. They immediately change direction to back up towards pedestrians in the street, toward kids on the sidewalk behind them, and very often don't see those in the way. It's a serious issue, not just at my house, but up and down our street that all of our neighbors are concerned about. The response we've received from Long Beach Unified has been a little bit different than what was described here tonight. The transit director, Paul Bailey, calls this issue a chronic citywide problem. The school principal has identified the safety issues as a big concern of hers, but nonetheless, neither of them has been willing to even discuss ways to fix it. And I'm about out of time here, so I just want to offer my support. I did a few changes I would suggest, but generally suggest the proposal of compelling some communication on this. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Next speaker, please. One meeting I just found. So, Professor. Dr. Stewart, Dr. Farber, I didn't recognize your. First 350 Monrovia. My wife and I have lived there for about 35 years. I am not coming here as Dean or as professor, but I'm coming here as chair of the Community Watch Program. If I might be permitted. I can save a lot of time if you let me pass this out. I have one for every person here. Good professors like to save time. Um. First of all, I'm very pleased to be here and pleased to see former good students and all-American athletes that once. Gracious to our halls at Cal State University, Long Beach, to his former student body presidents and one as an all-American halfback. And they're all sitting right here smiling. What about the adjunct professors? The adjunct professors? Oh, yes. Traffic congestion is a problem. Ed Rogers, let me paint a picture for you. Rogers Middle School and the elementary school borders right up to each other. Monrovia Avenue to the east and the ATO Avenue to the west. Broadway and Appian Way. It's a box. Oops. Get me there. It's a box. And the traffic problems that exist there are paramount. I've asked Mr. Reavis. I wanted to get an actual count of how many cars we're talking about going from north to south on Monrovia Avenue, which fronts Roger's middle school. My wife Trish and I live directly across the street from Rogers, so we're constant observers for the last 35 years of what's been going on there. Mr. Reavis, who is the engineer associate city of Long Beach, took a count on the traffic 815 to 9:15 a.m. on Monrovia Avenue, and the count was 1058 cars. 1058 cars in a period of. What time? Killed 58 vehicles. He said it ran about 18 vehicles per minute. 18 vehicles per minute coming down Monrovia Avenue. Either stopping at Rogers or continuing on to Lowell Elementary School. The congestion part of the congestion we have when we paint the picture for you. ROGERS And law schools do not provide parking space for their employees or their guests. Look that let that one sink in. So, Dr. Farber, I know a rep that I'm going to let you wrap up because times are ending here, but. Could do a little. Bit. Just real quick, think your. Parking space is the resident's parking. So when they take our space, we don't have it. And so that's part of the major problem we have there. We've tried to consider that one and get over that. Monrovia is a rather narrow one way street. And so when parents come in to drop their students off or other parents are parking their too long, it blocks the traffic. Then because the faculty and staff have taken their spots across the street at further blocks of traffic. Dr. Farber Yeah, and I hate to do this to you because you're my former faculty member. But I have to follow the time rules. So I request another couple of. Minutes. I actually am not able to do that because I have to do it for everyone. But I'll let you kind of wrap up what I did. You were able to. Were you able to pass out what you needed to pass out? Okay. They can see all that. Absolutely. Let me get to the suggestions that I can't. We do that for a couple of minutes. Just just the suggestions we're. Actually prepared to give away. Well, we're pleased that we I think this needs to get out of here because we're talking about cooperation between schools. So. Dr. Farber. Yeah, I guess what I'm going to do is I can't actually extend the time, but it's 3 minutes and I have to be fair to everybody. So what I would like to do is I will add this item is still on the agenda. I will possibly ask a couple of questions and we'll we'll get some of that information from you in just a minute. Okay. So if you just just hang out right there, Dr. Farber and I will make sure that we're able to get some of those recommendations. Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Next speaker, please. Good evening, Mr. Mayor and council members. I'm Ken Weiss and I live at 378 Q Avenue in and third District, right around the corner from Rogers Junior High School and Law. And the parking and traffic issues are basically gridlock. We have parents that are parking in the red zones in front of the fire hydrants, in the intersections to drop their kids off. There's a lot of potential accident waiting to happen. I live on the on the corner. So my my garage and the alleyway are the ramp for the garage to call. It is right on the beginning of the alley. They park and leave their cars and run from my garage door. And, um. As I said, one of the big things is parking in front of the fire hydrants, which is a safety issue. They're parking in all the red zones. When we call the law enforcement to come out, they send the meter readers and they say, well, the zones aren't red enough today, so we're not going to write tickets. And the school, both Rodgers and all Lowell has been better and trying to work with us. Rodgers has been horrible in terms of the traffic issue and the parking. And I, I really support this agenda item and I just hope that you're really going to for those of us in the third District in Belmont, you're really take a hard look at what's going on at Lowell and Rodgers because it's really pretty bad. That's it. Thank you, sir. I close the speakers list, but Vice Mayor Lowenthal. Or Councilman Price. Dr. Farber, I'm curious, do you have any recommendations for us in regards to the suggestions that you raised? Thank you. Yes, I do. Great. You're prepared. I'm not going to take a lot of time. You have it. You have some of it in front of you. We would like to encourage students. To bike and walk more as they already have begun. We would like to encourage more students to bike and walk. That would take some of the load off of the cars that are traveling up and down the street. Picture there's just the one street and the cars are going all the way up from Monrovia, all the way down to lower. Um. We would like some signage. We were like, Thank you. We would like some signage that that indicates loading and unloading 10 minutes from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.. The current signage doesn't doesn't. Doesn't account for that. We would like Monrovia Avenue repaired, please. It's a major street. Currently, there's approximately a 30 yard length of street with a breakage offset of 1 to 5 inches. And this has caused many bikes. And I have personally assisted three major injuries that have cut off bikes, one just last week, and that street needs to be fixed. We've asked for that for quite some time. Rogers needs to provide adequate parking for the numerous, and they have a lot of programs there for the evening programs, PTA concerts, open house back to school night and other special programs. We suggest using the Gate School entrance off Appian Way that allows cars to come in and use the blacktop. On Sundays, we observe the Sound House Church, which is currently leasing land on Sunday for their church at Rogers. They use this entry and I've counted as many as 40 cars there. That would be more than enough for faculty, staff, students to be able to come in there in part and take them off of Monrovia Avenue. There's a need for a crossing guard. And I'm glad to hear the committee is back in operation. We need a crossing guard badly at the intersection of Vista and Monrovia Avenue. There's a pile up of cars that go through there, and we need a park guard to help the kids get across so they don't just have to dodge cars to make it across the street. So these are the kind of things that we're looking for. I'm glad to hear that there's increased cooperation anticipated between the schools. Personally, I have seen a little bit of a break in the last ten years between Long Beach Unified School District and and the board. And the city of citizens in the city. Along these things we try to get done. One is apt to point to us and say, I'm sorry, we can't do that. That's that's a matter for them. We go to them. We can't do. That's a matter for them. These two teams and I've heard Mayor Garcia talk about this and he's right on. They must work together. They can't just stand back and say, no, we can't do that. The Long Beach Unified and the council and the people at work must work together. Many of the problems we have as counting the price, those are the result of lack of working together. We've tried as parents, as faculty, people who who've run these board meetings and we're just, you know, being sold out. But I think I see a break and I with your help and your help, Dee, and your help, Susan. I think we can get some work done, so I look forward to it. There are some signs, Patricia and I've gone round to other schools. There are schools within Long Beach that do what we're talking about. They have signs up to talk about when you can park. This particular one came from another school, middle school, just down the road, not too far from where we are. There are signs limited parking in other areas. So I know it can be done. I think you have to find. A way to start. Thank you for your help. Whatever we can do. Thank you. And make sure you give Trish our love, particularly from Susie and I. So did you have another question? No, I think I'm good with the questions and thank you. Thank you. You never ask a lawyer that question. Your father. Thank you. Thank you. We have a motion on the floor and members. The motion is to reestablish, not reestablish, but begin a conversation of the Joint Use Committee. Please cast your votes. Motion carries nine zero. Thank you. Item now. I think it's. 2121. Communication from Councilman Austin. Councilwoman Gonzalez. Recommendation to refer to the Election Oversight Committee to study the merits of developing an 11 member appointed Citizen Redistricting Advisory Commission. To research the possible mid-decade and future redistricting processes. And request the EOC to report back within 90 days.