Recommendation to increase appropriations in the General Services Fund (IS 385) in the Technology and Innovation Department (TI) in the amount of $40,000 offset by the First Council District one-time District Priority Funds transferred from the General Fund (GF) in the Citywide Activities Department (XC) to support the development of the Digital Inclusion Roadmap.
Motion carries. I have item 33 last week moved. Up. Communication from Councilwoman Gonzales recommendation to increase appropriations in the General Services Fund in the Technology and Innovation Department in an amount of 40,000 offset by the first Council. District one time district property or. Funds to support the development of digital inclusion roadmap. Councilwoman Gonzalez? Yes. Can we have a staff report, please? Thank you. Yes. Leah Ericson and Rebecca Calma. Good evening, Mayor and members of City Council. I am pleased to briefly. Summarize the progress we have made. In advancing digital inclusion in Long Beach. Since City Council provided policy direction a year ago. First, our. Technology and Innovation Commission has been hard at work. At the request of Mayor Robert Garcia to analyze the impact of the digital divide in the city of Long Beach. The commission designed and. Administered. Two surveys in order to understand. How residents. Access and use the Internet. The analysis. Is intended to help inform digital inclusion efforts to make Long Beach a truly. Inclusive community where all. Residents have access. To affordable, internet. And capable devices. The surveys were administered both online and in-person at 12 libraries, 26 community centers, and at 14 community events. Including focus. Groups, Community Forum, and other multiple community events. Grant funds from the California Emerging Technology Fund helped support this outreach. The commission's findings from the survey analysis informed a series of recommendations 22 in. Total that address digital literacy, access. To device and broadband connections, infrastructure deployment, and also recommend ongoing research and evaluation, applying rigorous standards and advocating for local control and privacy standards. At regional, state and federal levels. These recommendations will. Be used to inform the development of the city's digital inclusion roadmap. In addition to the work of the Commission, the city has made progress in other areas too. Including hiring an economic and digital inclusion project lead. Convening stakeholder roundtables that include community partners, city departments and internal Internet service providers. We also celebrated International Digital Inclusion Week. In October with a social media campaign that reached thousands. And the outreach included an. In-Person campaign where city staff visited over 60 community hubs like laundromats, barbershops, restaurants and libraries to provide information about digital services, resources and tools that the city already has in place. Our work continues in other areas as well. And the development of a digital. Inclusion roadmap will provide a blueprint to provide equitable access and use of digital resources, services and tools for all residents. I will now turn it over. To Rebecca Kwame Koroma, the CS Economic Team Digital Inclusion Project, lead to talk about the digital inclusion roadmap. Development process and how we will use the funds that are proposed today. Thank you very much, Leah. Good evening, honorable mayor and members of the City Council. The Technology and Innovation Department will be using the funds to co-create a digital inclusion roadmap with the community and local stakeholders. The focus areas of the roadmap are capacity, connectivity and technology. With the funds, we plan on hiring two consulting firms to assist the department with stakeholder facilitation, community outreach and engagement for the development of the roadmap, a collective impact approach and equity lens will be incorporated into the governance, planning and development of the roadmap. Some of our process actions for the collective impact process and equity lens are first and foremost recruiting cross-sector stakeholders to join the stakeholder committee. This committee will include city departments and commissioners, community based organizations, colleges and universities, internet service providers and technology businesses. We will amplify best practices and assets resources from our stakeholders, including community members who are most impacted by the digital divide in the government's governance, planning and development of the roadmap is key. It is imperative that low income communities and communities of color are involved in the decision making process for setting the common agenda and developing shared measurements. We want the community to have ownership over the roadmaps, vision, goals, objectives and strategies. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data is critical for understanding the digital divide landscape. We will disaggregate data to reveal digital inequities by race and ethnicity, geographic area, age and other relevant characteristics. We will acknowledge and understand that root causes of the data with the goal of prioritizing communities most in need when developing and implementing this roadmap. We also plan and plan on incorporating an equitable and inclusive community outreach and engagement process where communities who have been historically underserved and marginalized in technology will be uplifted. We will draw upon the assets, knowledge and lived experiences of the community as we define the strategies. And most importantly, it is important for us to empower the community in the decision making process so that they have ownership over these strategies. The strategies will be rooted in equity and will focus on communities experiencing inequitable outcomes. The strategies will also focus on collective program and system change and largely upon the best practices and expertize from subject matter experts from other cities and local stakeholders. We are excited to kick off this process to ensure that everyone in Long Beach has equitable access to digital resources, services and tools. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. And this concludes my staff report. Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzalez. I just want to say thank you so much to both Leah and Rebecca. We have, as I mentioned in this staff report, we've engaged hundreds of residents regarding digital inclusion. And this was a an idea I had some time ago. And we finally put it into momentum. And the responses that we've received so far, in addition to the work that the Technology and Innovation Commission had already been doing, has really put this policy in a good place and it still has yet to see its full implementation. So this $40,000 will be a great commitment and a great step forward in ensuring that we close the loop and find out what other gaps that we have. I can tell you at these roundtables, President Ramarley from Long Beach City College was personally there. President Connelly has also provided her personal commitment as well, and we had engagement from Virgin Galactic, we had engagement from EPS and of course our departments here in the city and many stakeholders across Long Beach who are really invested in ensuring that kids, families, the 50,000 that we've quantified here in Long Beach that are off the grid , that do not have access to broadband, will finally either have access or we can at least improve educational outcomes. And that's the goal for this. So again, I want to thank you very, very much. I know that the work is still up ahead of us, but we're, in the meantime, getting a lot of analysis where we're ensuring that we're creating more data points and sets that will put us in a very good place. And what I always tell people and with this is that you cannot have a smart city without being a smart city for all, and that really means being inclusive. When we talk about digital access, thank you very much. Okay. Thank you, Councilman. Mongo. I want to send my appreciation to Councilman Gonzalez. I know that when we talked about this many years ago, we didn't know where the money would come from. But she really put her money where her mouth is tonight. And I think it's a big deal. And I think we should all stand up for what she's done tonight, cause it's not been the money has not been spent on something small. It's been spent on a plan that will really change the face of the way we look at technology and inclusion. So congratulations. Thank you. Councilman Richardson. Just wanted to chime in, offer some congratulations. And you have followed the digital inclusion conversation from the news articles to Councilwoman Gonzales, his leadership. And, you know, obviously, Rebecca and Leah and I just think that this is very well done. And I look forward to seeing where it goes. Thank you. Councilman Pierce agreed on everything everyone said. I think it's great that you really came with a lens that some of us haven't had on council around technology. And I think it really demonstrates your commitment to the entire community. And I'm looking forward to seeing what's next and how we can continue to engage with corporate sponsors and those to ensure that we do close that digital divide. So thank you. Vice Mayor Andrews. Yes, thank you. I want to congratulate Council Councilwoman Gonzalez for this item because I think it's really going to wind up in the direction she would be going. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I just want to thank you, Councilman Gonzales. I know digital inclusion work has been a priority of yours. I want to thank the the Tech and Innovation Commission who's been working on digital inclusion. We just received a pretty significant report on their work around really bridging the digital divide across the city. There's significant information in there that I think will be coming to the council for a presentation at some point in the future, which we're excited about. And really, again, I think this is a work that's happening here at the council, at the university, the commission, and so many other places. And so we're very excited about it. And with that, let me open this up for public comment. Hello. Good evening, Mayor and members of City Council. My name is Gwen Schaefer. I chair the Technology and Innovation Commission and Lia and Rebecca already highlighted many of the points in our report that I was going to mention, but a couple of things that I wanted to highlight some of our key findings that I think are. Worthwhile. And that have policy implications. So when we asked residents who lack a home broadband connection why they don't have it, not surprisingly, 80% of them said that it was a cost barriers. Either they could not. Afford a broadband subscription or. A device. That was the main reason why they didn't have it. The vast majority of people we and that participated in our survey said they could not pay more than $20 a month for a home broadband connection. And we know that Apple's typical subscription far exceeds that. We asked people, if you had home Internet, what would you use it for? The number one thing people said in the response was educational purposes, followed by work and access to city services. So all things that we would benefit from as a city. And the other thing I wanted to mention was the very critical role that our libraries play in providing broadband access for our residents. When we asked people, Ed, in light of the fact that you do not have home broadband, where do you go to get online? More than half of them said they rely on our public libraries. So we do hope that this is a resource we will continue to invest in. And then the last thing I wanted to mention is that members of our commission will be getting in touch with you if they have not already. We would love to meet with members of council and just briefly spend some time talking about some of the key findings. In our report and. How we might be able to implement some of the recommendations that we worked really hard on creating. So thank you very much for your support and for your efforts to make Long Beach a more digitally inclusive city. And especially thank you, Councilwoman Gonzales, for your efforts. And again, and one I think the commission and obviously another one of our amazing Cassie Long Beach faculty. So thank you for your work and contributions. I want to just also add that oftentimes I think people, you know, the council does it work week to week on a variety of issues. And it's important at moments where the commission is this is a substantial report the commissioners are working on for over a year. Yeah. So we spent. All summer doing data collection and then the fall writing in the report. And so it's just a lot of work and I really hope the council takes the time to review it. That's really important policy recommendations. It's really important for us to really be a connected city. And so I just want to thank the commission again for for for that work. So thank you. And I'm one last thing. I'll say that the report we don't see it as a final or an end point in our work that we see this is ongoing and we want to make sure that we move forward on digital inclusion. Okay. Thank you. You have a good night. And Councilwoman Mango. I also wanted to thank the commission. I've met with some of the commissioners already and I am so impressed with the commitment and dedication and the detail. It was really important to my side of town that seniors were included and I really appreciated that the report really went out and informed the data and it was excellent. So thank you again for. All your work. Thank you. Thank you. There is a motion and a second members seeing the other public comment. Please cast your votes. Motion carries. Thank you very much. We have a hearing that we haven't done yet, so we want to make sure that we do the hearing. And so let me read the hearing really quick. So this we don't. If we don't just do a just a I'm sorry. You know, Councilman Price is actually here very kindly, but is actually not feeling well and hasn't been. And so she has one item which shouldn't take too long. So let me hear item 23.