Recommendation to: (1) Receive a presentation on the Proposed Long Beach Recovery Plan, provide input and policy direction, and approve the Long Beach Recovery Plan and its priorities to address the public health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic utilizing Federal, State, and County relief funding, with approval subject to confirmation of compliance with American Rescue Plan Act regulations, when issued, with direction to return to the City Council if there are required material changes; (2) Adopt resolution authorizing City Manager, or designee, to execute all Block Grant award documents on behalf of the City of Long Beach (City), and any documents necessary including necessary amendments, to accept State Emergency Rental Assistance Program funding for the City’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program; (3) Increase appropriations in the Community Development Grants Fund Group in the Development Services Department in the amounts of $13,754,734 for the Federal Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) and $16,404,412 for the State ERAP, for a total amount of $30,159,146, to provi
Okay. Thank you. And item 15, please read. Adam, 15, is a report from City Manager Recommendation to receive a presentation on the proposed Long Beach Recovery Plan Adobe Resolution to execute our BLOCK Grant Award documents on behalf of the city. Increase appropriation in the Community Development Grants Fund Group and in the Health Fund Group and approve the Economic Recovery Strategy Report citywide. Well, thank you. I'm going to go ahead and begin by more briefly giving an overview of the Long Beach Recovery Act. Broad proposal and one that we gave last week. And then we're going to turn this over to our city manager, who will then be giving the staff report, which is most of the details around the Recovery Act report. And then, of course, we will go to any public comment and, of course, the motions in the council and go and go from there. So I'm going to go ahead and start us off now. Let me just start by saying that the Long Beach Recovery Act is probably one of the most significant pieces of legislation and proposals that we've had in front of this body and certainly in the last few decades. It's an opportunity for us with a significant amount of federal funds, to make a bold impact on the future of our city. We know what that this crisis is, and it is the most difficult challenge that we have ever faced. Next slide, please. I'm going to have to ask the court to do the slides so we know that we are facing this enormous COVID 19 challenge, the biggest loss of life we have ever had in the city of Long Beach. And certainly for us, it's also been very tragic. We have now almost going to be at 900 lives that we have lost. That's more than the earthquake. That's more than any year of violence. And that has brought us with a very serious challenge and one that this this body has to take up and has to take up take it up in a way that is that is serious and that is important. Let me let me go ahead and just note that the city itself in your next slide has done an incredible job of response. We've tested two 5000 people a day. I mean, hundreds of thousands of tests. Hospitalizations are down, of course, which has been great, and our positivity rate is lowered. So all our response has been fantastic. Next slide. And so now we have a real plan in front of us. And as we go into that plan, we have a national model and vaccinations currently in place. The fact that we're almost 70% of our seniors vaccinated, which is higher than Orange County in L.A. County and our partners, and we have had so many firsts around teachers and vaccinated people, disabilities. It's really been a model and our health department is in a fantastic job of leading these efforts. Next slide. And so we have in front of us is the Limbic Recovery Act. And initially, of course, this was a $207 million plan. There's an additional 12 million, which I'm going to talk about here at the end. And we've divided these buckets up into three areas. It's economic recovery, healthy and safe community and securing our city's future. And I want to start our next slide with economic recovery. Let me just begin by acknowledging kind of where where economic recovery actually comes from. The city council actually took action on an economic recovery plan late last year. The Economic Development Committee, I believe Vice Mayor Richardson was chair at the time with that committee, began that process in the community. And then as Councilwoman Mongeau became chair just recently, she also helped lead efforts with within within within this current year by attending a variety of groups as has been involved other members of the committee. But believe it or not, our economic recovery efforts there has been probably close to 20 or more roundtables and groups of businesses and nonprofits and folks engaged. And so I do want to thank both the former chair of the committee and the current chair of the committee for all their work on on this piece of the plan. And it's and it's robust and includes a lot of the work of the other committee members and the full council. Quite frankly, in this in this plan, there's, of course, money for for testing and contract tracing. Next slide. We have all the investments have already been made by the council, the restaurants and breweries. The personal services were adopted. We cut more and more money for nonprofits and arts. There's moneys for future which have been important to so many of you on on for businesses and nonprofits. Business Improvement District, which are so important to us, are receiving additional support and additional money for tourism so we can get folks back into our hotels, back into our driving that economy that's so important for economic recovery. Next slide, there's support for economic inclusion work, which this council has been really focused on economic empowerment zones with a lot of conversation around what those could look like. We talked about the Mercato a few a few weeks ago. We've talked about other zones across the city, maybe north Long Beach, Central, that can really bring some of these zones together. Small business development is in this plan, the digital divide. And, of course, additional support for our youth. Our next slide and also in this economic recovery work, something that I'm pretty really very passionate about is this includes a significant amount of resources for a major clean Long Beach initiative. We have to recognize that during the pandemic, we have not been at full speed when it comes to cleaning up. People produce more trash in their homes, 25% more in their own homes. There are trash folks have had to pick up. We have a lot more debris in the community. And so this will allow us to double down on graffiti and trash abatement, invest in quarter cleanups, get our business areas looking, looking sharp, and really focus on the loose, clean team programs that we have. And so that's, I think, something that is really critical for us. Moving on to the next section of the plan is really are healthy and safe community resources. Nothing more important than having a healthy and safe city. And we, of course, again, have money for for the health work and then money for so many of the programs so many of you've been advocating for. I mean, we've heard consistently for. From Councilman's in Dallas and in Councilman SA about health equity and reaching out to communities that are impacted. And you see that here. You see mental health programs that so many of you have advocated for that is also here and that we've heard from the community. Our next slide. And then around food security and basic needs. I know that. I mean, Vice Mayor Richardson, you talked a lot about the needs of the funding on basic needs. But we heard this from all of our churches, from our community members. How much how much people are suffering on issues around hunger or access? We have support for truly early childhood education and child care. Again, something that a lot of you have advocated for, particularly in the last few days. Councilman Allen, I know you've been very vocal on that issue and intended assistance for not just for for for tenants to ensure that they don't get evicted and have money to bridge the rent, but to ensure also that the folks that that are housing providers and landlords can actually pay the mortgage. So they're able to actually take care of their mortgages and take care of those important payments. So those are all really, really critical. I want to talk about next slide about people experiencing homelessness. And these are some of the items that we have some additional support from direct allocation, by the way, from the American Recovery Act to get new modular temporary shelters, additional housing options, outreach showers, all the things that we've been asking for in our homelessness work. Next slide. And then I think something that's also really exciting, a lot of programs around violence prevention. So I think one thing we have to recognize as a city is that the pandemic has increased violence not just in Long Beach, but in cities across the country. Kids are in school, more people are unemployed, less people are out on the street. A lot of loss opportunity for folks. That has created opportunities for there to be increased violence within the city. And so part of our recovery has to be making the city safe. And a lot of that are going to be kind of doubling down on our be safe programs. I mean, Councilmember, your engagement engagement supportive of those in the past? Councilmember Austin. I bring up in a basketball court. It's been a big something. You've also brought up a lot in the past, but all these programs that were that are here and are listed are things that a lot of us have been have been talking about and are part of the violence prevention safe city piece. And I want to turn to the last piece that is really, really critical, and that's securing our city's future. I can't tell you how important this part is for our recovery. I want to start by saying that the fact that and I want to thank everyone that's been involved in the budget process currently in in the past . Former budget chair Mungo current budget year Austin. The members of that committee the fact that we are going to able to we drew down our reserves because we had the money there we didn't spend our reserves. There are councils and cities across the country that spend their reserves. Any given year that we saved our reserves and actually saved it for an emergency is really, really important. And so we we can respond to the emergency because we had the reserves to do so. And now part of his plan is to replenish that for the next pandemic or the next natural disaster. And so this is critical for us to do is to not spend this money on programs, but to put this money into the reserves. So I want to also talk on this reserve issue, and I want to thank Councilwoman. Councilwoman Price. She has been also a strong advocate for the preservation of reserves. And I want to thank her again and know her and I've been talking about this over the course of the last few weeks. Moving on. Also, if I can have everyone else mute their. I think. Thank you. Next, I want to talk about the deficit. We just heard a budget presentation. We we have been expecting a deficit in the budget. We don't want to be having debates about what we're going to cut in a year that we need to rebuild. And so instead of having conversations about which library is going to get cut or what street, what streets we being service we're going to dial back on or what park we're not going to be able. Eliminate that deficit that was caused in large part due to COVID, due to a decrease in revenues, and really double down on recovery, which is what we're trying to do. And the last piece of the plan is really about after losing our employees. We have we have when you tie this furlough elimination, where with our removing the deficit, we can focus on programs that are important, on public safety, on fire and customer support. Now has been a strong advocate for ensuring your fire safety programs are in place and furloughs will allow us to bring people back and to get our resources back to where they need to be and get people back to work. So our employees deserve to get back to work and the city deserves to have that support in place. So that's a big overview. I'm going to now turn it over to our city manager. If we're going to go into specifics in all the areas. This is a a a hardy presentation, but also one I hope we consider the amount of money that's in here is is significant. And it's almost like a mini budget that we're getting on top of an event of a normal year. So thank you. Let me turn it over to our city manager. We're going to get into the details of the recovery proposal. So. Mr. MODICA. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So we'll be bringing up a presentation. I think the mayor did a great job, given the overview, and I'll try not to be too repetitive and kind of take a deeper dove into some of the specific programs. So I really encourage the public to take a look at the full plan. We've certainly done some summaries, but there's a lot of work that our city team has put together. Can we get the presentation of police and has really done some thought about how best to help our economy, to help our businesses, to help our residents , and also make sure that we're not in cutting critical city services at the same time. So as we pull up the presentation here, it's great. So in terms of where we are, our team's done an amazing job with COVID 19 response. We are testing. We have the ability now to test up to 5000 people. We've performed more than 725,000 tests. As the mayor mentioned, our hospitalizations are down 86% and our positivity rate is down as of today to 2%, which is one of the lowest you've ever had on record, compared to a high of about 17.4% during the pandemic. We have done 160,000 vaccine doses administered citywide. Over 68% of our seniors have been vaccinated. And we were one of the first in every category where the state allowed us to vaccinate. We were one of the first, if not the first in the state to do educators, to do school staff, to do emergency workers, to to do people with disabilities, people with underlying health conditions. And so Long Beach has really been a leader in the vaccination arena. The reason we're in front of you tonight is the council gave us some very clear direction in December to basically get ready to develop an economic recovery strategy, knowing that city dollars were going to be coming and that we really needed to have a plan. And so we did some economic studies as well, getting real economic data, five different studies utilizing our CARES Act funding. We went out to the community over about six weeks with 30 intense community listening sessions, contacted over 350 community leaders and representatives to really listen about what is needed through this pandemic and how we can recover. And then we had very good input from our Economic Development and Finance Committee and our WHO and who attended a lot of these meetings as well, and also gave specific committee input. And then we also had a hearing last week by the Federal Legislative Committee, where we also took some additional public testimony before we got here tonight. So what did we hear out in the community? We heard a number of things. These are summarized here. One, we heard the importance of service sector vaccinations about how in order for people to rebound quickly economically, we need to really be vaccinating that sector as soon as the state allows us to. We heard that, you know, people will trust to come back to businesses when they feel healthy, when when they're safe . And we really need to focus on public health. We know that our community based partnerships can really help us as as the government. It can't do it all alone. We need those partnerships. Business is asked to really restore trust, to create a defined set of rules so that they're not opening and shutting and opening and shutting based on case rates, but that they can plan for the future. We very clearly heard about the need for both tenant and property owner assistance. We heard that we should be making needs based decision making and really studying the data that businesses and residents need revenue generation to be able to thrive. That we should be looking as we spend our our federal dollars and our local dollars to be as inclusive as possible through our procurement processes, that we should be efficient and we should cut any red tape, and that we should really not just start from scratch, but be incorporating all of our past plans and all that great work that we've done over the past couple of years. And so throughout this whole plan, we really have grounded it in equity. We know that there are historic economic and health inequities that have exacerbated COVID 19 and the impact on our community, and that we really need to focus our resources on the areas of the community that are most impacted by the pandemic. We have to protect public health and relaunch our service sector, and we want to create a more prosperous, resilient and inclusive local economy for everybody. And really build that economic foundation for the next generation of residents so that they can compete. We also know that the things we do in one area of the plan need to be correlated and intersect with the other areas of the plan, and that we have disparate impacts across all communities and that we are really trying to create that intersectionality and have those impacts on the pandemic really be thought through and then addressed through our programs. And so the programs you see tonight are not independent strategies, but rather are a coordinated approach to support that long lasting economic recovery and equity in public health. And of course, we know that there's other programs out there, lots of federal and state programs. So we want to try to avoid duplication. If through these processes, we learn that there's a program that's doing one that we were going to do as well. We'll be coming back to you to adjust and make sure that we're doing this effectively. Foundational to the plan is also language access. We know that we need to communicate with our community in the language that they're most comfortable in and can communicate back to us. And that in means that we're doing multi-language translation, that we're having interpreters that can really speak well and understand our community and also help explain the concepts of city government in in a way that is coherent and, and really impactful. And so in every single program, we have included a language access component. So you won't see a line item in the staff proposal for just one line item on language access. It is really embedded in everything that we are doing. And so we also are really paying attention to those existing city plans as council did a lot of work through racial equity reconciliation, through our economic development plan, our everyone home task force, our, you know, everyone in play on digital inclusion. And so our team, as we were putting together these proposals, really looked at all of those plans and those objectives and tried to move those forward with the dollars that we have available. So the dollars that we have, we had estimated in our city staff report last week about 207 million. And as the mayor mentioned, we are now up at about 235 million across three different funding sources. So those funding sources, the first one is the American Rescue Plan Act, which is 178 million, which has now been signed by the president. We expect 153 million in flexible city funding in the original staff report that was at 141 million. So tonight, we're looking for additional council direction on that $12 million increased 12.35 million. We have a dedicated tranche of 10 million for homeless services and prevention and then a dedicated amount of approximately $15 million for our airport to help pay for operations and debt service. The funding is fairly flexible, but not infinitely flexible, and the eligible uses are the following responding to the emergency and addressing the economic impacts, responding to workers, performing essential work, providing government services address affected by that revenue reduction resulting from COVID, and then making infrastructure investments in the areas of water, sewer or broadband infrastructure. We expect the money to be 50% will come within 60 days of enactment and then the other 50% will come 12 months later. And it all needs to be spent by December 31st, 2024. And so the mayor mentioned the additional $12 million and we had put out a memo to you. And I think we're going to hear some direction from the council tonight. And there's also a letter from the mayor with some additional proposals, areas for the council to consider. So a couple other funding sources. We have our emergency tenant assistance program of about 30 million. The council saw this about a month ago, and we have not yet launched the programs that we are including this into the program because this is really a big part of our response. And then we also have negotiated with the county about $26.7 million of their share of public health funding. This is called epidemiology and laboratory capacity money. It can only be used really for those functions, including testing, data collection, workforce capacity and as our epidemiological arm of the health department. So the three areas are economic recovery, health and safe community and securing our city's future. So the first in the area of economic recovery, unemployment is it continues to be troubling. It was almost as high as 30% during COVID. It is now at about 12.1% and it is up significantly from just before the pandemic at 4%. And we know that it's had unequal impacts on our low income workers, on business owners and service sectors, and that to be successful, we really need to address those economic inequities. These are the categories, and the mayor talked a little bit about those, so I'll just dove right in. So in the area of public protection for businesses and nonprofit at 13 million, that's that county money. In order for businesses to be successful, they need to be COVID free or as free as possible. So we're going to be providing free COVID testing, will provide free contact tracing, will be able to go out to businesses and do if there's a hotspot, be able to do the investigation and make sure that we're addressing that as quickly as possible. The biggest category that we heard from the economic from the business community was that of that section, the vast majority should go to direct business support, which is exactly what we've done. It's about $25 million. These include things like $5 million to restaurants, bars and breweries, $5 million for personal services, including fitness and personal care services like hair salons and others that were impacted. We have direct funding for administrative support grants for our nonprofits of $3 million. We're going to be doing fee waivers of three and a half million dollar program to be able to waive some of the city fees based on need. Our business improvement districts are a huge part of our plan at $2 million. They did amazing work with the CARES Act, dollars of a million. And so we're doubling that. We also want to make sure we're getting back to marketing ourselves and bringing back customers. And so our CVB will be assisting with that at $1.25 million. Those are just some examples of the of the projects there that will be funding. Under the area of economic inclusion, $7.5 million. That's this, you know, another huge category of this plan. And so we're looking at digital divide, $2 million for both resident and commercial sectors combine to really address being able to get online, to get computers , to be able to run both businesses and access services for residents. We're going to be funding our economic and digital inclusion coordination programs at $450,000. We've got economic empowerment zones where we can really do a focused approach on areas that need additional economic assistance at two and a half million dollars. And we're looking at service worker programs, customer protection programs, youth workforce development programs, and the list goes on and on. We want to really invest. As the mayor said, in our clean city, we've seen a huge increase of trash and also impacting our ability to really address that as our workforce was affected by COVID. And so for $5 million, we're going to create an aggressive, multi-year strategy to expand our illegally dumped items, our collection crews, special collection programs. We're going to have dedicated groups that can go up and down our commercial corridors and do litter abatement in order to make sure those customer those quarters look great as our customers come into them. And we also want to help our partners. Both Caltrans and L.A. County have really struggled on keeping their areas clean. And so be able to, as the council directed, take over some of those areas that make sense for us while they do the others and provide some assistance there through. In my view, we want to also support our businesses through technical assistance and keep our business best care call center. Our pop up service centers provide that technical assistance and also fund economic equity analysis to really be informed by data. The next big category is health and safety community. Healthy and safe community. Excuse me. And so before I get into the dollars here, I really want to just show some of the impacts. And we know that are disadvantaged communities or minority communities have been impacted at a significantly higher rate than our white and our affluent communities. And so I just want to underscore that you see the data here. For the example, for example, in our Latino population, the cases are two and 2.7 times higher. Hospitalizations, 3.3 times higher deaths are 2.9 times higher. In the black population, it's 1.4 times higher for our cases through 2.3 times higher for hospitalizations, deaths, or 1.8% or two times higher. So there really isn't an equity in the way that COVID affects our communities, and we want to be very intentional about that in our response. So these are the major categories in healthy and safe community, and we'll dove into those a little deeper. Our residents, just like businesses, need access to free testing, contact tracing, education funding, community partners to be able to go out and speak about the importance of COVID 19 protections and getting tested and so and funding that in different languages. And that county grant is going to help us with that. These funds can't currently be used for vaccine administration, but we're really going to press the federal government to allow us to do that, if at all possible. We know that basic needs is one of the biggest areas that just the ability to call somebody and ask where they can get food, where they can get meal and grocery delivery, how they can get access to senior services, how we can support, you know, our youth as well. And so in this area, we're going to be looking at $4 million for food security. A right to counsel program and housing support in the area in the amount of $900,000 older adult supports and supporting our seniors through mental health and those types of programs. That $800,000. The next category is physical and mental health equity. $5.3 million to create dedicated health equity fund to fund direct grants to nonprofits. We are going to do this based on data. It's going to help us with physical and mental health services. This is where we'll do Latino health programs. This is what we'll do dedicated black health programs. We'll work on programs in the Asian Pacific Islander community, Cambodian community. And we're really going to be leaning into our nonprofit partners to support us with that. We'll also create a $900,000 promoter, a community health worker program, which the council is going to talk a little bit later tonight about people who are able to go out into communities and be trusted community partners to really reach those hard to reach communities. And then we want to provide ongoing mental health awareness and capacity resources as well. We know how important childhood education is and child care support. So there's $2.1 million in this category to both offer supplies and developmental services to expand child care, creating 28 additional slots at the with the west facility of the health department, and also to enhance some of our library programs that deal with bilingual parent engagement. We all know that we've seen an increase in violent crime, not just in Long Beach, but throughout the country. And, you know, we we are concerned about that. And we want to make sure that while our police department is responding and doing everything that they do when there's an increase in violent crime, there were also investing long term in creating programs for our youth. This includes creating new park programing and teen centers, doing B safe type programs. We want to invest in youth health and safety programs like Midnight Basketball and potentially even a police athletic type league program, gym operations, virtual recreation programing, mobile recreation programing. We also have a community interventionist program currently going on in Washington neighborhood that we want to roll out citywide. We also are looking at reentry programs, pilot programs, where we have people coming back out of incarceration that need to get integrated into society and start on a better life. In the area of homelessness, we have $12 million. One of the most exciting programs here is creating tiny homes, 50 modular units that we would set up a lot of them at the Multi-Service Center to create actual housing opportunity right there for temporary housing. We would also want to use some of this money to partner on all of our different assets, whether we're buying additional hotels or we're expanding some of our of our shelter spaces. And we have some flexible dollars there. We also need additional motel vouchers for clients who, you know, we see at the mercy. And we want to get into an immediate housing option. We want to expand our mobile outreach so that we have two mobile outreach stations, something we've never had before. So we have the MSI, and then we'll create basically mobile nurses staffed with a combined six outreach workers for case managers and partner agency representatives that can even be open when the MSI is closed. We're going to support our Heart program, which is being reformed with public health nurses and mental health supports. And we also want to bring mobile showers and restrooms out to encampments so that we can address their services there and help get them services right on scene. And we also want to really address the the people who are not quite who are done with the permanent supportive I'm sorry, with temporary housing, but aren't quite ready for Section eight housing and address that gap and create supportive housing services for that interim bridge. The mayor mentioned tenant assistance. That's $30 million. And the council has directed us to move forward on this. We're going to be launching it in the next probably 2 to 3 weeks. And what we're looking to do is basically help pay 80% of past due directly to a landlord, if that landlord agrees to forgiving remain and the remaining 20%. We'll provide additional details on this specific program as we roll it out. But this is going to be the biggest tenant assistance program we've ever had in our city's history. And it's going to help a lot a lot of people. So the last category is securing our city's future. As we've talked about, COVID 19 has caused severe impacts to our city budget, and we ended Fy20 with that $21 million shortfall. For the first time that we can remember. We've had to draw down on both our operating and our emergency reserves. And we also had some pretty significant department cuts. And our staff took up to 26 days of furloughs, you know, for the 21 fiscal year. So all in all, all of our reserves from all of our different funds has been about $48 million that we have either draw down or would project to draw down in FY 21. And so I strongly recommend that we use this money to replenish those reserves to be ready for the next emergency. We also want to make sure that we're not impacting our residents with through additional service reductions. And so our plan, as long as the federal funds can be used for this, is to use $30 million to balance the Fy22 budget for one year so that we don't have to take those significant reductions in the middle of a pandemic. Also to return our staff so that they can be at full strength to serve people, and so that we would be meeting, conferring, to eliminate those staff furloughs and then make sure that we're and that we're preparing ourselves for the future. We know that there's additional funding out there, that the money that we've outlined here is just the direct allocation. We're still going to be very aggressive in addressing any other pot of money that can help us. There's specific money for vaccines, about $16 billion in grants to health departments that we'll be able to pursue. We also know there's tenant and homeowner assistance. There is emergency rental assistance, help with utility payments, homeowner assistance to prevent mortgage defaults, foreclosures and housing loss. There's also childcare grants that are out there that we're going to pursue as well. Another big component that is coming up is funding infrastructure and it's called the big back build back better plan, excuse me. And so we are preparing right now a list of infrastructure projects that we're going to be pursuing to really both kickstart our economy, invest in our infrastructure and create jobs. And so tonight we're asking the council to provide input. This is really your plan. Staff have created our best recommendations, but it needs to be a document that the Council is very comfortable with and gives us that high level programmatic overview of where you want to invest these dollars. Couple of other quick things. Just please remember, we must really wait for that official guidance. We have some general outlines of what we think the money can be used for, but we expect in the next 60 days to get specific regulations and that we really should not be committing these dollars to anything that we can't undo before before those regulations are out, so that we know that everything that we're planning to do is going to be supported by the dollars. There are some risk areas, so we don't quite know whether restoration of reserves or services is consistent with revenue reduction. We believe that is the case. And so we'll be looking for confirmation there and also that, you know, some of the uses of funds, you know, may or may not be eligible, depending on how narrowly or broad the regulations are written. And we're hoping it's going to be very broad. I strongly encourage the council and the community to think of this money like a two year grant. It really isn't money that we can use to expand services long term because it's not going to be here for very long. And so we really should be thinking of these about two year grants. So any staff positions you see being proposed are really funded for two years and then they would go away. And that's because the City Council's fiscal policies prohibit that, which is a good, sound financial policy. And so the next steps really would be that once we get your approval for these larger plans, staff will really get into the detail of creating specific program budgets. To come back to you with how much staff we're going to need, what are the contracts we're going to be looking for? How are we going to support our nonprofits and ask them to help do that work? What are the individual line items for each one of those buckets and start to create those both outreach plans and the ability for people to apply. This is going to be an incredible undertaking. And as you mentioned, we have, you know, very, very limited staff resources left. So this is going to become one of the big things that we do because of its importance. But it does mean that we're going to have less ability to do other types of projects out there. But this you know, we clearly are going to be staffing up as well with some of these dollars. So I know that was a long presentation. We actually have a lot more detail in the documents. We have all of our team here who helped create all this work and they'll be available for questions and just thank you council for trusting us to bring you a recommended plan. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to really get back on our feet. I think our approach has been intentional. It's been listening to everything you've been saying for the past year about your needs and what you're hearing from your community. And we hope that we've met your your goals and objectives, and we look forward to the changes you're going to make tonight. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Want to go ahead and just add a few things and then we will turn this over to the Council on the Public. So let me just also add, I think Tom alluded to this. It is there when we when the plan was originally being developed, we took a conservative approach to how much money we thought we would have in the plan. There ended up being an additional $12.3 million that when the final bill was signed. We're in that plan for Long Beach. And so I think you'll probably all have a memo that was sent earlier today that outlines some broad strokes and some areas of where there could be need for for those resources. And I want to just kind of list those for the public since they weren't part of the formal presentations. For the additional 12.35 we've got. I propose on the economic recovery section an additional $2 million for micro and public transit pilot programs. That is a program that's been brought that the council has adopted but has not been funded. And I want to thank Councilwoman Price for her advocacy on that program. There's an additional $2 million for direct income pilots. These are happening now everywhere. The state is funding some. The feds are to our ability to micro target communities that need additional direct direct income support. So that's very supportive of that. There's an additional 1.25 million for economic empowerment zones, and most of you've been already advocating for these, but it allows us to grow that pot of money so we can really have some great zones. I know I've been talking to Councilman Austin for particularly his interest around the African-American Cultural Center and the Mercato, which I know has been brought up and so many others that are out there. And so this gives us an opportunity to increase that economic empowerment zone opportunity. There's an additional 1 million for child care in early childhood. Add in here that under the healthy and safe community, there's an additional $5 million on housing support, which is really the big need right now in the city, particularly around down payment assistance, which would be a big chunk of that which I think we all have talked about, is getting First-Time Homeowners the ability to buy their first home in Long Beach. And that's something that's missing in the plan, particularly want to think. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I know you brought that to the council last year. That was supported by all of us. We've all been kind of talking about that, that as a as an initiative. And the idea of beginning a public land trust, I think is very exciting. Also also in here and some rental housing navigation and then and then some other items. Councilmember Durango, Councilwoman Price, others have talked a lot about libraries and the item that just came forward. And of course, from your wrangling, you've always talked about eliminating library fees year after year. So we also set aside some dollars from this additional money to wipe out library fees for the next year so that our folks that really depend on our library system can have some additional support. So not having to pay fee after fee after fee and then there's additional support in here for the justice fund at 300,000 and 500,000 in additional support for language access translation. Our staff did note that while language access is spread out across the entire proposal, which we're glad we could use some additional funding for direct translation of meetings. And so there's an additional 500,000 for just that piece so that we can get all of our meetings translated on the spot. And so that together the micro transit money, the direct income, economic empowerment, child care, housing support, language access, library fees and just as fund rounds out the additional 12.35 million for the full package. So with that, I think most of you have been are queued up here. Let me go first and then we'll go to the public as well. I have Vice Mayor Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I want to go ahead and start this. What I want to do is I actually want to want to just give some brief comments, then go to go to the public before we get into motions . But it's been a very difficult year. We all know that we've had a crisis on our multiple fronts here. And what we have today is comprehensive. That's the key here. It's comprehensive. There's so much in this plan. It's focused on the people. There's equity is baked in throughout this this process. We've learned from the CARES Act program, the Long Beach Racial Equity Reconciliation Initiative, lots of our plans, input from the council. And I think what's here is incredibly comprehensive. I think is what's important to note is this is one of the largest investments, one time investments into a grant program, a two year grant program in our in and in a generation. And so we need to make sure that these investments stand the test of time and are here for future generations. So I love that there are significant investments into the future. This has been incredible leadership by our mayor as president. This guy can tell you in the entire six county region, there's one city that has an actual plan on economic recovery in advance of these funds. And that city is the city of Long Beach. So, Mayor Garcia, you've done a fantastic job. The entire region pays attention to that and delivering on time the resources that we need as a community. And, you know, until the entire council and the budget, the Economic Development Committee and the Fed led committee, everyone who's played a part in this, you've certainly helped to put our city put our city in a strong position for the future. So so I want to as vice mayor, as chair of Economic Development, I'm honored to to make the motion here today is based on community feedback. These the economic roundtables and all of these things are factored into the staff recommendation. Staff done incredible job here. I also want to acknowledge Councilman Congressman Alan Lowenthal and that barragan are Senators Feinstein. It would be a for making sure that we bring these resources, these federal dollars back to the city of Long Beach. We also want acknowledge the region, a lot of regional leadership, the mayor, so a lot of regional leadership, regional partners and involved in supporting the proposal for $300 billion, $350 billion in flexible funding, which pay to pave the way for this to happen. So we're talking SCAD, we're talking to colleagues. They all National League of Cities, California League of Cities all advocated for this effort. So all of you have been involved in these regional boards. Thank you. So in terms of in terms of sort of acknowledgments, I know that we need to I know that the council all contributed. I know councilmembers Mongo and Sandy Allen spent a lot of time in the roundtables and off village committees being engaged in this, but staff really has done a great job all year. John Cox, Keisler and Kelly, cowardly ality where you need to have both those departments, a health department and an economic and economic development department. We're talking two sides of the brain. So this proposal really represents sort of the economic future situation within our city, but also the social and the health status of our city. And so I really want to want to thank those two members of our staff and entire staff for helping put together what I think is a great starting point on this on this proposal. So that said, we'll take a deeper dove. I'll accept the mayor's recommendations and talk a few more details after public comment. But I'm happy to make this motion today to begin this to begin this discussion. And after public comment, I'll clarify my motion a bit and then we'll hear from the rest of the council. Thank you. Okay. I have a motion in a second. Let me know if there's no objection. I also. We should go a public comment. So let me go to public comment and then I have everyone queued up. So we'll go through all the queue. So, Madam Court, we can take it away and do public comment. Our first speaker is Beth Sibley Solis. When I started this. What? Afternoon. Hello? I was nominated. I mean, this is a list that I was holding a loaded treatise on federal in. My name is Bits of Sleaze and I work at the Doubletree in San Pedro. Or is it a pyramid anywhere through the them in the they a la pandemia. Today's the first anniversary of my firing due. To the pandemic. Amy Premiere the other I on. My first day coming back to work. Durante La Pandemia. Are you the only seahorse in this glitter? During this pandemic, I was able to help my children through the school year. Poem Mi Familia Interlock computer. There are no clear slices. I supported my family in everything I could, but it was not easy. There is also the noise considerably. Their rent is extremely high. And really the way of life is not really something we can trust very much these days. System. I'm not to a joke on the honor system, Ramos. The system failed. The time when we needed the most. Pursuing as I am, is companeros the trabajo. My concern really now is about my coworkers. Get ready to. I would like them to go back to work. Lott allocated Lott artillery support plus oakamoor. It'll be me. I mean, as opposed to me, that label will throw our whole. Short term rentals like Airbnb, it really put at risk my opportunity to go back to work. Based on Rovaniemi Travel. It's like this. They're stealing my job. This is damage on the moratoria calculator, of course. So we need to have a moratorium on those short term rent places. Our motive for not moratoria. So I ask you, please vote for a moratorium. Yes. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker is Hilda Gaytan. Let's hear this in the portfolio, Senator. I think it gives you an idea instead of coming under attack of every minute, every one day. When I arrived at this country, I was walking around and I got lost and I called my brother to help me. L mi proponents of understanding the complexities of evolutionary languages. They hope we are one. We can not look where there will be that. He asked me where I was and I told him I was at the corner of Hope and one way. And he was laughing so hard. You're Puerto Rico. That said to be here in west with the Sierra Nevada, the supreme leader coming in here. And I recognized like how the lack of access to our own language, really, it's a way of oppressing us. It's a way of eliminating our opportunities and forcing us to work only one way. Navigational trackers and some points of improvement. You know what I'm saying? Even the president. And that one way is one way to failure is where our dreams are destroyed and everything is really a test. Your production times in these stories are viable sources of revenue, in this case extraction, etc.. I love you very much. I think I can tell you a countless number of situations where there is abuse and suffering from people that is going through these very difficult situations. It is, as you know, can be rented for two or more. But I'm presuming luckily they. But those stories are not going to change their future or change the situation in which they're suffering. When the state is Mr. meeting communicate with Carolyn Turner with David Niven opportunity valley and understood to be. When you give us an opportunity to speak up in our own language, you really are giving us opportunity to use all your services. Tambien was an opportunity that they never pressed internal control on Camino Puntos. And, you know, I think it's up to the. And also you give us the opportunity to represent ourselves together in a government that is really more equal for everyone. Only theater can be open and institutionally shattered in that case. Walking past the process of that. And if you stay busy and come from a theater. So I ask you to. They should really institutionalize language access in order to create a more equitable society like you are really intending to create. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker is Billy Brown. Billy Brown. Please limit yourself. Hello? Can you hear me? Yes. Please begin. Good evening, Mayor Robert Garcia and Vice Mayor Richardson. In the City Council. My name is Billy Brown and I'm the director. Of Violence Prevention and Reentry. For the. Ronnie's house. And I'm also the focused founder of Safe Passage. I am a resident of the sixth District. I went to all of. The. Long Beach Unified School. District Elementary, junior high and high schools here. I graduated from Long Beach City College in Cal State, Long Beach. And I really care about Long Beach and. I really care about the community that I serve. As we can see, there's been a spike in. Violence and my family personally has been affected by this. And I won't. Go into detail. But this speaks of the. Large issues in our community and. This. Equity. We know how to take care of my village at one time and the sixth district. I remember that the youth. The youth programs, they were thriving. And we surrounded a lot. Of the youth programs around sports, and that's why Long Beach is known for their athletics. If you think about the history of Long Beach in their athletic programs, in their academic programs. But we need you to invest in the community. As you invest. In other communities. Thank you. Our next speaker is Darlene Mejia. Hello? Yes, darling. Please begin. Okay. Good evening. Mayor Robert Garcia and City Council. My name is early in the year. I'm 21 years old, born and raised in Miami. I want to thank the economic development for allowing me to be part of the Economic Recovery Roundtable that brought attention to our re committee that needs for recovery. I'm working with one to also focus on younger justice system impacted individuals like myself who has been impacted and understand the struggle of overcoming the stigma that comes with making a mistake. Navigating my way back has been challenging as it has for so many without housing and jobs and basic skills, which are challenging for anyone. We have no starting point. Thousands of men and women are coming home each week and we need to ensure we come together as a community to decrease recidivism while we ensure a mother or father stays, while we build healthier communities and ensure children have the pace of parent which decreases their said, We love going to prison. I support the economic recovery plan and encourage the city to continue to engage the community in the work and solutions to support our impacted better than ever. Thank you for time. Thank you. Your next speaker is Fred Sutton. Brett Sutton. Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, please begin. Oh. Hello, honorable. Counsel. My name is Fred Klein with the. California Apartment. Association. We thank you for everything you do. This comprehensive proposal is a critical step in directing resources to those most affected by the pandemic and has rightly garnered national attention for the vaccine rollout and previous recovery efforts. We appreciate the expediency in which the Rental Emergency Assistance. Program is being implemented. We urge navigation, the navigation portal, to include an ability for a rental operator to nominate a resident in need who may not have applied or qualified. We do have concerns regarding the use of these funds for an expansion of the Right. To counsel program in the county. Distributing critical relief funds to. Lawyers for only one party in a private dispute unfairly favors one side. There are alternative. Solutions. These relief funds can be used to expand. Emergency rental subsidies would help residents stay in their home for the long term and would help more people rather than use these funds that encourage protracted litigation. Use them to fund a. Pretrial mediation program that assists all. Parties to come to a mutually agreeable resolution, or use these funds to direct towards a robust education program, ensuring every resident knows their rights. We urge the Council to put precious recovery dollars to. Uses that will be most effective. We request a few lawmakers to meet with housing providers. I think your next speaker is Karen Cervantes. Good evening, mate of the council members. My name is Karen Francis and I work for Irani's House as a director of outreach and support for the beauty industry. I called in today to voice my support for item 15 and the letter submitted by Ronnie South and the LBC Beauty Association, which was signed by Oprah Bath and Hair Salon. Barbershops and beauty salons are. Closing in record numbers. They've been closed for most of 2020 and most of 2021 and without, and have received little to none technical support and proper funding to overcome the losses. I ask you today to invest and create a plan solely for them so that they can get back on their feet and so that they can also get and rehire their . Employees that they've lost. Please consider also adding vaccines so that they could feel safe and that their clients can also feel safe when they are visited. Thank you in advance for your support. Thank you. Our next speaker is Manuel Navarro. Hi. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. How you guys doing today? My name is Manuel Navarro. I'm the owner of Benny's. Barbershop in North Long Beach. I support the letter submitted. To City Council by the LBC. Beauty and Barber Association. For a. Beauty industry recovery package. Our industry has suffered tremendously, and the investments, in my opinion, has to make sense with our losses. We need help to make our businesses, our businesses and communities stronger. Thank you very much. Have a good evening. Thank you. Our next speaker is Maria Grollo. Maria guerrilla. Well. Do you hear me? Yes. Please begin. Okay. My name is Mario Loyola, and I work on the Doubletree Hotel Osaka. I've been working there for 18 years, but it's for a year that I'm the work and I had to take care of my kids during the pandemic. I had to take the hard decision to move to Arizona during that. Election. And it was hard also to. Very difficult. But I feel so proud of her body. But now we need to we need to work. We need to open up a job because we are very bad. So I. I like. Urban bias affects light pollinators. And we need like a moratorium for death. We need support enough to get a job. But in both, life will be normal and many people are waiting for. I'm ready to go to work, but I don't know when that's possible that I go back to work because everyone is starving as job. And we need we need support. We need a moratorium for that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next speaker is Mike Berge. Mike Birch. Good evening, Mayor and city council members. My name is Mike Murchison. On behalf of hundreds of rental property owners in Long. Beach, including organizations that you are. Familiar with, such as the Small Property Owners Alliance and the local apartment association. We want to commend the mayor, the vice mayor and council and Mongo for their for their presentation on economic recovery. Specifically, the mayor recently announced a 29 million to terms regarding deferred rent out. I strongly encourage you to consider innovative technologies versus the traditional application method, as tenants all over Long Beach are not truly incentivized, nor is there a high. Percentage taking advantage of this particular. Program as seen in the first round of CARES Act. This technology encourages tenants and landlords to give and work together. This is not something that either side is going to be successful. Unless the other. Side gives in. And that's for both parties. I'm asking you to support an innovative approach as we move forward to allocate these funds out to the tenants, but ultimately to the landlords or all the money on the deferred rent. Let's come up with creative solutions that make sense for both sides so we can avoid evictions later on down this year, which will happen if we stay with the current process. Thank you very much. For your time. Thank you. Our next speaker is Raven McDowell. Hello. Hi. My name is raving about the evening. Mayor Rob regarding city council. My name is Ray McDowell and I am a resident of the city of Long Beach and I have the impossible justice justice system. I would traffic at a young age causes movements for our father. I attended school and working 50 hours a day and working for my son that I am not alone in this struggle. I'm here to support a solid representative to ensure our reentry community has the investment to get back on our feet. We need housing, jobs in health and family reunification services. Please consider the challenges we face being released without support and thousands of logs locked in against us when you are creating programs to support us. Thank you for your time and support. Thank you. Our next speaker is Mike Berg. Good evening, Marion City Council. My name is Mike Birge. I work at the western Long Beach for 23 years and I'm part of a unique community that has fought for good paying jobs with good benefits like health care. During the pandemic, I have had to rely on my wife and I started dipping into our savings account. We are depending on you to make a good decision for us as workers. Until business comes back to our hotels, there must be a moratorium now. Repeat moratorium now. Prioritize. Prioritizes workers like myself. Prioritize my coworkers who are without work because of companies like Airbnb voting moratorium for short term rentals. I'm born and raised here in the city of Long Beach. I love our city. Let's take care of our hotel workers. Hotel workers lives matter. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Clarke, before we go to the next speaker, I just want to make sure that these speakers are in the right. I'm not sure they're signed up for general public comment because I know we don't have, you know, staffers or any sort of moratoriums or anything else on the agenda on this item. So I'm not sure if maybe they that was meant for the open public comment section. So I just want to make sure you double check that as we have speakers moving forward. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is Ricky Thomas. Ricky Thomas. Good evening. Mayor and City Council. My name is Ricky Thomas. And I'm the owner of the barbershop. In Long Beach. Bought the letters submitted by the City Council by the Beauty and Barber Association, the beauty industry recovery package. Our industry has suffered. And it has it has to. Make sense what our losses. Our businesses are suffering and we need assistance. Our businesses were stopped, but our bills never stopped. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Our next speaker is sentencing. Good evening. My name is Matt and Sam and I'm with. The United Cambodian. Community. UCC is part of the Language Assets Coalition and even before the code with our community has been impacted by the lack of language support service in the city. So our NDP residents were really. Struggling and. Even hit harder during the pandemic. In. Order to access the city services, the meetings. And getting documents and. Even like critical COVID related information. So like for example, like with the digital inclusion. Program, the city has. Partnered with UCC to have reach out to the community. We have help out. The community applying to get the device help, translating over the phone with the Internet service provider on issues with their Internet connection because those communities and also the services. Also for the code, we receive about 30 calls every day. Seeking help on. COVID related, ranging from finding the test site to making appointments for the COVID test. To getting appointments. For the vaccine. Because when they call the city phone line, it took at least 24 hours to get those answers back. So language access policy has been mentioned generally in the Economic Recovery Fund, but there is no specific funding to support that. So we asked the Coalition asked that the city should dedicate some funds to address those gaps. And. To hire staff to implement the LDP within this. Thank your next speaker is Sharon Sinegal. Cynical. Cynical. Our next speaker is Susanna Seguin. Since a union. Two tips on about mayor and council members. My name is. Dennis Mam and I'm the executive director of United Cambodian Community. As city manager, Modica. Shared during the pandemic, economic and health disparities were exasperating communities of. Color. Many of the residents in my own businesses. That make Cambodia town great are at. Risk of displacement due to eviction or closure. In Cambodia town, we already. Have seen one Cambodian. Large restaurant. Permanently. Closed. And in June, one Cambodian grocery store will be closing. Not only do we need to recover from COVID. 19. Impact, but also invest in new infrastructure and build new systems that will work better. For our communities. Redlining and other racial policies have create disinvestment in communities of color. With this opportunity of recovery, the city can move these areas invest in equitable development. UCC has a business center that has been operating for three years and provide each year business counseling to over. 90. Businesses. As folks are losing jobs. Community members. Are being resilient and starting their own business. UCC has already helped two businesses stepped up to open during the pandemic in alignment with Cambodia Town Thrive and the People's Recovery, UCC urges the City Council to adopt the following recommendations. Some community. Specifically in Cambodia town. With mixed use projects that have business incubators on the first floor and affordable housing in the in the other fourth. Create a rental housing division and specifically fund a right to counsel program to prevent unlawful evictions and invest in minority small businesses, specifically to support community based organizations that do not have beds in the corridors. Thank you. Our next speaker is Suzanne Brown. Good evening. My name is Suzanne Brown, and I'm a senior attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. We submitted a letter, along with our community partners, that include our funding recommendations for recovery dollars. We appreciate that. Some of our recommendations are included in the staff report, but we urge the Council to make adjustments to further fine tune the document and address the community's recommendation. I will highlight a few of the missing items. First, we asked the city to create a rental housing division to act as a point of contact for both tenants and landlords. The housing landscape has become increasingly complex in light of the pandemic and the myriad of new housing laws. And we need the city to play a role in issuing bulletins, answering questions and assisting those in need. The staff report refers to the creation of one new position and the Housing Services Bureau. But we are hopeful that the. Money in the mayor's. Letter means that we will get more for this division. We asked that 700,000 be allocated annually for the creation of a rental housing division in the city. Second, we asked the city to fully fund the right to counsel program a proven program of success. We anticipate a tsunami of evictions as a result of the pandemic. We appreciate that 900,000 was allocated for this, but a fully funded program would cost at least $3.6 million. Additionally, this program is needed to prevent displacement of our most vulnerable residents of color. Third, we asked the city to allocate funds to create a community land trust. The staff report proposes to study them. We would like to see money dedicated to get one off the ground. Thank. Thank your next speaker in Serene Senegal. Good evening. Mayor Robert Garcia, Vice Mayor Richardson and City Council. Thank you for bringing the investment into Long Beach to help us with the economic recovery. My name is Sharon Senegal, and I'm the executive director of Rodney's house and the co-founder of the ABC Barber and Beauty Association. I'm here to support a $5 million recovery package, to support the beauty industry with no less than $25,000 per shop, license fee breaks, rental support, technical support and support for individual barbers and stylists to ensure the industry recovers. We must make a sound investment in the industry. Mayor Robert Garcia I would also respectfully ask you to make a recommendation to the State to ensure that our beauty industry receives vaccinations based on their close contact with their customers. We have submitted a letter outlining our ask from the beauty industry, signed by 100 active barbershops and hair salons in the city of Long Beach. Thank you so much for your support and I look forward to working with the city on the economic recovery. Thank you. Your next speaker is Victor Sanchez. It's a mayor, vice mayor, Councilmember Victor Patches. Of the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community. I want to uplift three elements community. Organizations believe are vital. To be included as part of the economic recovery process. We hope the full. Council to support the first has to do with housing. We asked the city to create a rental housing division that is fully fund the right to council program and to study the creation of a community contract. I want to thank Mayor Garcia for proposing. The city matched its previous investment of $300,000 to the Immigrant Justice Fund. Missing from the initial. Proposed recovery package was any direct relief from our community, many of whom are ineligible for federal benefit or released, yet make up the core of our city's essential workforce. They have been among the hardest hit, and we owe it to. Them and their families to ensure that they have critical legal representation during this difficult time. I hope we can. Count on the rest of the Council. Support. And lastly, I want to ask the. Council consider as part of this recovery process, some additional policies such as a moratorium on. Short term. Rentals. In order to fully support the hospitality sector in recovery. Hotel workers need their jobs to provide financial stability. For their families during this recovery. PR don't provide jobs, hotels do. We must help this overwhelmingly immigrant part of our workforce with the help they need to get back on their feet. Don't let short term rentals operate until hotels can rehire. Their workers back in time. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Thank you very much. We are going to go ahead and go back. So the list I have so I have I have the motion which is made by Vice Mayor Richardson, Vice Manager of additional comments before I go to. I do that. I do so well. First of all, thank you to all the folks from public comment. I think a lot of the comments are already reflected in what's here. And so you may get questions from from from staff, maybe get questions from me or from others on how those things are are reflected. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and jump into this motion. So staff did a high level plan so that the motion is staff's recommendation. We're going to go ahead and include all of the mayor's recommendations, and I'm just going to go through them quickly. 2 million micro public transit pilot program, 1 million for direct income pilot programs, an additional 1.25 million for economic empowerment zones. Additional 1 million per child, child care and early childhood education, 5 million for housing support. And I'm going to ask city manager, how would you break out that 5 million housing support? So if we had an additional $5 million, we would look at a couple of functions. One, we're looking at adding some additional positions. About three, to do our housing navigation. That would be about $1,000,000 to fund them for two years as a two year grant. We would look at about $1,000,000 for the Community Land Trust to get that program started in about 3 million. The balance for for mortgage assistance. Fantastic. Going to make sure that's reflected in the motion. There's 500 K here for language access interpretation at meetings, 300 K to waive library fees. 300,000 in additional support to lobby justice fund. I want to make sure all of those included in this motion. I also want to make sure that the motion reflects there's some things that has as a result of placing in the mayor's thing mayor's recommendations. It frees up additional resources here. There's $900,000 for housing, navigation and right to counsel in this budget since we just placed a million into navigation. Mr. City Manager, that free up this 900,000 for right to counsel. It could in that bucket we had one position for two years at about $400,000. So if that position is not needed because we have three on the other side, those funds would be available for other uses in housing. Fantastic. So I want to make sure that's reflected in this motion. There was also a request on immigrant communities to make sure that there's some direct component support, support on immigrant communities. It's not called out here, but there is a health equity fund. And we want to make sure that a portion of there's, I think, $5 million in health equity. That's where the intention is. It's not called out, hey, this group or that group. But that's where the black health equity work, the Latino Health Equity Access work, the Cambodian AAPI health access work. I think the direct support for immigrant communities kind of belongs there. It's want to make sure it's reflected that 500,000 of that 5 million is reflected in direct support for communities. So those are the changes to my motion here. Now, there are some just questions and some questions here that I want to kind of clarify. So, one, I love that you framed this as a two year grant. And when I think of grants, I think about a grantmaking process. And in that grantmaking process, you really want to ensure that sort of the strategies are coordinated in a way that there's evaluation, there's measurement, there's strategy around the allocation of these investments. And our health director loves to talk about this term collective impact model. We did something like that with $1,000,000 and he'll grant North Hills on North Long Beach. It was over that two or three years. There was a lot of collective impact. I see that there are a number of strategies here that are already sort of aligned to hardest hit communities like violence prevention, food insecurity, economic empowerment zones, health equity. These strategies are already sort of targeted there. What I don't want is a process that's not coordinated. If someone's dealing with housing insecurity, if someone's dealing with, you know, violence issues or food insecurity. They're all interconnected and we need to make sure that it's coordinated with a collective impact model. So necessity manager or maybe Kelly, can you speak to that? Are we are we are we going to utilize the collective impact strategy here? So, yes, you made the point that you raised. There's a number of different buckets that we are looking at to fund, but we realize that they can't work independently from each other. And so the areas where we have food security issues are, you know, in a lot of cases, the same issues where we have violence issues, where we also, you know, have, you know, want to be able to lift up kind of the economy. And so we do see a couple of these buckets of money are going to be overlapping. And we want to take a coordinated approach in the strategy. Again, we're not at that level yet where we program every single dollar and how they're going to go. But we do see the ability to kind of focus a number of these programs on the regions where the data shows that we have the most need and we can make the most collective impact. I think that's important. And so yeah, I want to make sure that that that we do that. You know, another thing, you know, I was noticing there was an opinion editorial to talk about it didn't invest this plan didn't invest enough into equity. And I disagree. I see equity lays throughout the whole plan. We learn from CARES Act. We saw that we implemented a an equity lens through CARES Act. We tested it and we've learned from that. And I see that reflected here. So excluding redevelopment, if you think about it, this represents the most significant investment that we have in these areas in a generation. And we need to make sure that the impacts are felt for generations. Can you speak a little bit to your approach and what you've learned in how you approach an equity lens? Yes, I actually have Kelly, call me, talk a little bit about that. Sure. Evening, Councilmember. Yeah. So we know that when you look at the data across the city, the impacts just generally we see very different outcomes for many in terms around health, around economics, around many, you know, violence prevention and others. And so when we built out the, the sort of the ideas behind the funding, um, partially with CARES Act, but also going forward, we focused very clearly on the areas where we were seeing the greatest impacts. And then and then start to build the basic needs in those spaces, investing more around violence prevention and youth development and others. Really working to make sure that we are sort of creating opportunity and creating opportunity for prosperity across the city. And that that was built into all the efforts that we were looking at, as well as the health equity fund more specifically. Okay. I mean, that 5 minutes. Vice Mayor Richardson, I think, is the make of emotional content for the governor. But I'm almost done. That's have 5 minutes past, mayor. The maker of the motion gets ten and then the rest gets five. But these are what I don't want. I don't want to argue that the technicalities I think the maker of the motion gets ten if it's more item. But not if it's a staff item. But it's okay. Let's just continue. I mean, it's just a few things. I don't have any other amendments. These are clarifications I think are important. So there's a question about the 27 million in rental housing support. Two questions on that. To be clear, some of that goes out to direct rental support and some of the take her back payments on rent zacharek. Yes, that is correct. Okay, great. And when is that going to be available? At the time. But I'm sorry, but the time is up. You only get 5 minutes unless it's an item that you're proposing. That's fine. So I've got to move on. You just. Please, sir. Okay. Thank you. So next. Next up is Councilman Ciro. Thank you, Mayor. Sorry, it took me a moment to unmute, so I want to talk a little bit more about the economic empowerment zone, just to kind of explain a little further. I do appreciate that we've taken an equity lens to to this and really thinking about how we're making investment in our hardest hit and the areas with that that's that's had the highest COVID rates because I really think that this is a way that we can accelerate our long term kind of plans that we've been wanting to address around generational poverty. Right. I think this is a way where we can accelerate economic inclusion because we've heard that we've had the highest poverty rates , you know, during COVID, but we've had them very high in the north west central area prior to the pandemic. And yet at the same time, we don't have these workforce development centers in the west, north, south, central areas, nor and especially in the west side, we haven't we don't have computer labs. So it's a really important we've talked a lot already earlier about closing the digital divide, but I really want to make sure we tie it in with the cultural center while there are cultural centers like the African-American Cultural Center. And then recently we talked about the Latino Cultural Center, that it's important that there is an economic piece to it, which is ensuring that we tie in the economic inclusion and also with the central area. We certainly have a designated Cambodia town and I hope to also talk about cultural center there as well, adding to it. So I think that, you know, again, these are not just centers for cultural activities, but also about how we're addressing the economic disparity that's existed in these communities. And so really wanting to make sure that we think about how it's centered on increasing home ownerships, supporting our small businesses and diverse entrepreneurs, to thinking about local inclusive procurement and contracting, as well as our youth development. Focusing on youth in these work development sites as well within these empowerment zone and ensuring that we also have a strong community development, economic development, so that we can do this possible land trust pilot that that, you know, would land trust. And then also starting our bids and business associations. So that's something that I just wanted to explain a little further as some people wondered, well, what exactly is that and what does it mean? And I think this is important about how we're really building infrastructure to address long term, longstanding issues that existed in the north, west and central area of Long Beach. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilman. Bingo. Thank you, Mayor. Lots of great things in this plan. I want to kind of talk through several of them and some ideas and thoughts that I think are important for the staff to consider as we move forward. I appreciate the comments about our. Our empowerment zones and our cultural diversity zones. I think those are really critical to the discussion. But I know all our colleagues will have a lot of comments on different components of the plan. I do want to talk to a couple of things that I know I've heard, both from the community and some from my colleagues. I won't spend time on giving credit to each colleague that mentioned them, but I think that they really need to be addressed. I appreciate the memo from the mayor today that identifies the micro and public transit pilot program. I think that's really critical in our ability to move people across the city as we try to really engage the community in. Taking opportunities for development of healthy lifestyles and other activities that really help contribute to the overall life expectancy in any one person and then collectively as a community. Some of the amenities are not currently available in some parts of the city. Because of geography, I mean, the ocean is only where the ocean is. We can't drop an ocean in the fifth District, and I know that. But if there were kids that were underprivileged in any part of the city and they wanted to participate in certain programing that's only available in the ocean, we do need access to and affordable ways to get there. I talk a lot about violence prevention and a lot of, you know, the work that I did with the 10,000 Job Summer Youth Program. And I really feel like this summer is an opportunity for that for us. I don't really know which bucket to drop it into. There are so many buckets that it already fits into, but from a violence prevention standpoint, getting our youth to work. I remember one of the roundtables from the barbershops and the Personal Services Division talked about the ways in which they could employ youth throughout the summer as marketing analysts, social media analysts really building up the part of the strategy that talks about by Long Beach shop, Long Beach, spend your money in Long Beach. And so I would love to see us set an aspirational goal similar to the ones that the mayor really led on several years ago of getting thousands of kids internships. I'd love us to do a mirror program similar to the 10,000 summer youth unemployment jobs where we our funds really lifted that up and if possible, added to it with these additional American Rescue Act funds. We talk about our health activity support. So there are only so many facilities in the city and I hear a lot of comments from communities. I'm throughout Long Beach. When I see them in the parks on the east side, 43% of the parks are in our district by square footage . But a lot of the activity of activated space is not always available. Soccer fields are rented at capacity, and so our tennis courts and our pickleball courts and our basketball courts and our are all of these places where kids and youth and teens can go to stay out of trouble and stay active. They're at capacity. And so we really need to look at what is possible today in terms of our investment in additional space for organized activities, so that even if we were to use majority funds or infrastructure funds, we need to do that now so that some of the violence prevention funds can pay the activity fees and the enrollment fees and the league fees for participants in these programs. But we can't grow those programs if we don't have the space for them to do that. So I think we need to really look at what that looks like. There are ways to do it very inexpensively and in a semi-permanent manner. Whether there are drop on arena court like they have in San Diego or repurposing some activity space and just pouring the concrete to get it done. We need to talk about child care. When I when I look at the chart of where you can't even see the chart on the screen, when I look at the chart of where the money is being spent, I think it's great that we're investing in child care. And I really want to recognize Cindy for championing that. I think it's also important that we don't just do what we've always been doing. We appreciate the health department. They run a great program, and the way that they run that program is supporting child care systems that exist already. But what we've learned by listening to the dominant female head of households that have really been holding the economy together is that they work nontraditional hours, and the current childcare available to them through that program does not meet their needs. And so we really need to look at some of that child care money being put over to the economic development side for a re-imagining of how child care can be provided. A lot of that lack of supervision that's in our communities these days is because female head of households need to be at work. There are only so many jobs available and they're taking that investment in themselves to go back to work. But that leaves our youth and our teens at home alone. And we need to talk about our seniors and whether it's through active living, like the senior programs that have been championed at the art center or adding activities across the city like Pickleball. There are small investments in getting people active. I know the seventh District has a walking path that's been pretty great. How we are able to invest that money into a program that's. Five more connections and not one and longer. Thank you. And hold seniors accountable is really important. And then I'll just end by saying and I know Tom knows this mental health is so critical. The county of Los Angeles is launching their 711 program. And we really need to find a way to be able to connect our community to emergency mental health services through programs that already exist. Thank you for all that you've done for this mayor. I may have additional comments, but I'm very supportive of the plan, though I know over the next several weeks many adjustments will need to be made. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Next up is Councilman Price. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to thank you and staff for putting together the proposals tonight and giving us a framework from which to start our discussions. I think that was a very professional way for staff to approach this because it allowed us to be able to have some general ideas of where the funds were allocated will be allocated, and I personally appreciate that. I also want to take a moment to recognize my colleague, Councilwoman Mongeau, who I believe is the current chair of the Economic Development Committee. And she was on that committee with me. And I know that a lot of the things that we are really advocating for today are things that have been priorities for her for a long time. And so I want to make sure that she's recognized for her work, both on that committee currently and also for her work as the Budget Oversight Committee chair for many years . There's a couple of things that I want to highlight about this budget that I think are are really fantastic are this proposal. The first is the the money that we're dedicating to the mobile outreach teams, you know, throughout the nation, prosecution agencies that I'm familiar with and law enforcement agencies are really looking at alternative response models when we're talking about people that either have mental health, substance abuse or co-occurring disorders. And I'm very excited that this the money that we are receiving through this, a federal relief package, is going to allow us to be able to pilot a few different models. I know Councilwoman Allen and I and I know council woman sorrow and I have talked about some of the different models that perhaps our police department could be involved in, because some of the issues that we're facing in the city with individuals experiencing mental health are not police issues and not issues that police officers should be expected to manage. So I'm really hopeful that this mobile outreach program that we're going to start in this alternative response model includes some data compilations so that we know where to structure our funds moving forward. So I'm asking the city manager to please make sure we have some sort of data collection on the number of people we encounter , how effective we are at linking people to services. It's really important and I think it will form our our budget commitments in the future. I want to thank my colleague, Councilmember Ranga, for his partnership with me in the area of prioritizing our city's libraries. I know every member of this council has been actively supportive of libraries, so I don't mean to single him out because you've all been champions of it. But most recently he and I had the opportunity to really work on the city auditor's report, and I'm hoping that some of the funds that will be allocated to violence prevention and language access will be utilized to enhance the library's digital divide opportunities. The access to services in terms of the number of hours or the days that they're open, and also language access receiving books in other languages. I know as someone who learned how to speak English later in life, English is my second language. I know that my community has reached out to our law library director asking for resources in my native language. And so I'm hoping that we're able to use some of this money to provide that access. I'm really happy for the mayor's recommendation on the micro transit service. I want to be very clear with city staff that I'm hoping that we don't take a whole year to develop a program. We've had numerous reports that have been brought to the council to ask for a micro transit study in the Belmont Shore area to get people from Belmont Shore to Second and PCH to Alamitos Landing. Because right now with the PARKLETS, we've lost a lot of parking spaces. And I know that those business improvement districts where we're willing to help pay for this program, but because of. Or pay for some of it. But because of COVID impacts, they weren't able to because they lost meter revenue. So I'm hoping that we can look at that. And also for the downtown area, the shuttle service that we had, that has to be ADA accessible. Those services were really great and I want to be able to do to collect some data on user ship so that we can plan for the future. So I'm hoping that we can get this process started immediately. And then finally, I want to thank the mayor for prioritizing the importance of having a healthy reserve. We, as a result of COVID, we had to burn through a lot of our reserve. We simply were not in a place as a city to be able to cover the costs of testing and the health response that we needed to deal with COVID. And so we burned through a lot of our reserve, not because we're responsible, but because an emergency hit our city and we had to react in order to protect the welfare of our residents and our businesses. And so building that reserve is prudent. I know that some people think we should not build the reserve to the level that we are. I think that's reckless because we don't know when another emergency situation will hit our city. And I want to make sure that we're prepared for it like we were the last time. So I want to I want to thank the mayor for his leadership and staff for being very mindful in terms of the priorities, and I'm very supportive of the motion. So thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Thank you. Counsel one. Next I have up is Councilmember Austin. All right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And wow, this is really, really quite a lot to digest. You know, over 200 pages of the staff report on this matter. It wasn't done in a in a week either. A lot of hard work has been recognized here. A lot of great leadership on from our mayor. Great execution from our city manager and city team, but also a lot of thoughtful consideration. This this document and this this item motion before us is really a summary of our dialog as a council with community literally over the last year, recognizing the needs of our city, the vast needs of our city. And this is a really, you know, from a public standpoint, a public official standpoint, we won't see these type of windfalls for our role model. I don't expect to see anything like this in the near future. And so this is this is certainly extraordinary. And I'm very encouraged by the presentation and the direction that this economic recovery plan is taking. I think that this has to be really, really viewed as a relief. It is a sigh of relief that allows us to breathe over the next year, year and a half. I think it's ambitious, even what has been laid out in terms of the amount of resources and the what we can actually deliver. And are we actually ramped up and prepared to deliver over the next three months or six months? It's going to be quite a colossal effort to even pull this out to the to the extent that that we want to do this. And I think we need to be clear with what the expectations on that. I am thrilled that we are eliminating furloughs for our city employees. We went to them first when we realized that, you know, this pandemic was going to set us back $30 million in our budget. And we went to our city employees and said, we need to renegotiate, we need to ask you to take sacrifices. And they stepped up first. And so I'm glad to see that we are restoring or eliminating the furloughs that that impact our city employees. I think the empowerment economic empowerment zones are going to be critical and strategic for us to to really improve economic development in some of our more economically depressed areas. And again, this package presents opportunities for our city that were not there before the pandemic. And so that is a great thing. And I think we should be focusing on those areas and taking full advantage of those areas. And I know our our team is aggressive and looking forward to doing that. Somebody mentioned in public comment about rental assistance. You know, we were able to put about $5.3 million toward rental assistance. We were able to assist about 2000 families in the city. This adds to that significantly. $29 million, we're going to be able to help a lot of families and deal with back rent, as well as housing providers who have missed their rent over the last several months year. This this will help help breathe a sigh of relief. It may not cover everything, but it puts us in a better we're in a much better position today than we were last week or two weeks ago. And so I'm encouraged by where we're headed with this. I do. I think that the BA and I agree with the motion on the floor in terms of budget oversight. I would just say that, you know, we're not out of the woods. We still have to think about the the resources that we have as temporary and then manage expectations as we are rolling out these programs. Because the hardest thing for any body to do is to cut, you know, and so while we are have the position or have the ability to to recover, to for relief, we have the ability to to do some creative things for our community. We still have have had to come to grips with, you know, 2023, 2024. We may have some very, very difficult decisions before us. And so I think we need to be mindful of that throughout the process and and also planning for contingencies. To Councilmember Price's point, yes, we we drew down on our reserves. And it's important for us to, if at all possible, to replenish that for our financial standards or our ability to finance and be able to to provide the services that are at the level that our residents deserve. And so those are my comments. I'm happy to support this item. And again, great work, everybody. We still have to roll our sleeves up. We still have a lot of work to do. Thank you, Councilman. Next up is Councilman Zendejas. Councilwoman Jan de Haas. I think you're on mute. Maybe. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to give great thanks to to you, Mayor, for bringing this forward to our incredible staff that has been working tirelessly on this recovery plan. I think you've done an exceptional job in considering all of the needs of all our community members and really listening to the community and the needs that we have. And it is very important that we continue this process in a very thoughtful and deliberate way and most importantly, in an equitable way. As we as we decide through this process, we want to make sure that we build ourselves stronger than ever before so that we can go through the next year or year and a half. Two to come. I know that. We are definitely looking through an equitable lens through through this process, and that makes me very happy. One of the things that we will see is that as no secret to any of us, the Latino community has been hit very, very, very hard through COVID. And Latinos keep a dying every day of COVID. Still to this day, I know that we went through a very rough patch, and I'm so grateful that our numbers are going down right now. I know that I've been very active in putting together a task force that Latinos contract, COVID task force, to address some of the issues on why and what we can do to stop the spread of COVID within the Latino community. I know that I have an item coming up later on, and that is the meet up with the Latino Health Initiative, which I'm happy to see that $5 million have been allocated aside for four equity health initiatives. And I'm hoping that at least two mil 2 million of this will be set aside for the Latino community because of the fact that data shows that this is the community that has been definitely affected the most. Also looking forward to the empowerment zone, economic empowerment zones, where we can really focus on the item like and like it was mentioned earlier. And that item is so necessary right now, especially when recovering from from this economic crisis in the Latino community. It's going to provide so much outlets not only for our youth, but also for so many of our Latino residents, especially in the first District, who have continuously lost their jobs. And to some of the workers that haven't been able to go back to work, including single moms and single dads, because they have had to make the tough decision of staying home with with their child because they're not in school yet. So I'm very happy to be able to support this plan and and look forward to hearing the rest of my colleagues comments on this plan. And again, a huge thank you to everyone that has worked so very hard on this. Thank you, Councilmember Ringo. Thank you, Mayor. And I, of course, want to thank you for all the efforts that you've done putting this together. You and city manager have put a phenomenal program together in terms of how we're going to address is comprehensive. It hits all the buttons that that are important to me. I want to thank the Councilmember Suzy Pryce from the third district for her shout out. It was a good effort that we put together, and I think the library is a very important event for our kids. And it addresses what are the weather, the motions that we want to address, that violence prevention, and how can you prevent violence when you have kids in libraries learning as opposed to being on the street and doing it, doing the things that they should be doing when they're out there. The other thing, the other components of it is that, you know, we're dealing with those other items that are important to me. Language access. I've been mentioning that for a number of years, Don, and it's been my desire to have language access integrated and baked into our into our culture of the city so that we don't have to have these issues about contracting out here or contracting out there with the different translation services to get bilingual, to get medical services. I think that if we are able to integrate, integrated within the culture of the city, I will be done with that. We need to get more, more staff, bilingually, tested and trained to do the translations internally and not have to always rely on outside sources for that. It addresses, of course, the the economic empowerment zones, which is very important. But there's another point to point of me is to look at our digital divide. I know you addressed it somewhat, but I think that's highly important that we address the digital divide that exists in certain parts of our city and in and of course, having one of the largest impacted areas that does not have Internet in the West Palm Beach area. I think it's very important that we look at getting access to everybody everywhere as soon as we can because we're important. If there's anything that we learned about this this pandemic is that we discovered where our weaknesses are and where we need to focus in and some of our some more resources. And of course, we couldn't be anywhere else, anywhere without having our Parks and Recreation Department with our health department. And I really want to I would say the fact that I want to say it again, I've been saying it for a long time now. We need to institutionalize our health department. 95%, if not more, of their budget is grants oriented. And this grant that we're getting here is a part of that. How do we do that? That's the million dollar question or the multimillion dollar question about that. But I think that if there's anything that came out of this pandemic is the fact that having our own health department was a tremendous resource, a tremendous help, and actually put us out there nationally. And thank you, Mayor, for all the representation you've been out there. I think I saw you on NBC so many times. You should have your own show there now. And when you were all, it seems like every time I turn it on, you were you were saying something about about our COVID response or recovery rollout or our economic development. I mean, great job, Mayor. It was it was it was very proud to see I was very proud to see you there. And again, I mean, you should get your own show on there. It looks like we have a consensus building from everybody to to support this. The motion on the floor. I think it's a it's a great motion. Thank you for putting it forward, Mayor, for working with it. And, of course, our city manager and and his team were rolling aside and like said, it's comprehensive. It's got almost everything we need in there will probably be tweaking it here and there because it needs to be. But other than that. Thank you again and thank you, everybody. For supporting this. Thank you, Councilman. You'll be my first guest. How's that? I'm just kidding. Councilman Allen. But thank you, Mayor. This is. Just a historic day for this city and the beginning of a new chapter. I'm normally not a person of a lot of words, but I do have a little bit to share, so I'm probably going to get that five minute. But I do want to start by just thanking the mayor for his leadership and hard work and just a love for this city. I know that your efforts and advocacy on behalf of our city has empowered us to make major investments in critical areas, and it's just much needed for this economic recovery. So just. Thank you, Mayor. I know how much you care. And just to all my amazing colleagues, this is really an incredible moment for so many people in this city. And I'm so proud of this moment. I was excited from the moment we got word that this money was coming. I just was just jumping up and down. And I'm just so proud to be sitting on this virtual diocese with all of you. So thank you. And I also thank you to the staff. John Keiser, city manager to so many folks. I know how much work and effort and countless hours that you all have put into this. And as we all know, the COVID 19 pandemic has caused more hardship, hardship in this city than anything I can think of in the history of Long Beach. And so many of our neighbors and friends are struggling to get by. Small businesses closed. Our essential workers and health care staff are working harder than ever. In our city. Our crime is up. Homelessness is widespread. And I mean, our city is is dirty. The pandemic has also brought into focus so many systematic disparities in our city. When I ran for office last year, I made a commitment to the second District that my top priority would be to rebuild stronger than ever. And today, I'm so glad that we're able to begin that process. This is truly, truly, truly historic opportunity and a once in a lifetime event that will reshape the future of our city. And it's also an opportunity to honor those that we have lost in our city and make investments that will matter the most. We will be assisting renters, businesses, workers, and directly assisting working parents with more childcare and resources that they desperately need. And I'll also be increasing the much needed resources to address homelessness. The pandemic has shone a light on the and significant. Support for our neglected communities, including our immigrant communities, and which some of those have been hit the hardest. As a member of the Economic Development and Finance Committee, I participated in over 36 hours of roundtables with diverse businesses and community leaders from every corner of the community. And I also want to thank Chair Mongo and Vice Mayor Richardson for their leadership. And most importantly, I really want to thank the hundreds of people who participated for their insights and their perspectives because it was critical in developing this plan. I know all of us understood the pains, the struggles, the needs and the hopes for this recovery strategy. We had so many conversations with businesses and community members. And with groups that represent the interests of so many of our neglected community members, including Lane Black Lives Matter lobbies, forward laughter, child care providers, and just, just so many . And I have to say that this listening process was one of the best experiences that I have had since my election. There's no better way to serve your community than to listen what they need and really try hard to provide it. So business and residents and residents have been hit the hardest. And they need a major lifeline. And we definitely heard that we need to focus on residents and businesses and organizations that need it the most. And this is what this plan does. So I'm really proud of that. I'll queue up again because I have some more comments, but I'm very supportive of this motion and I'm so proud of everyone that worked to make this happen. Thank you, Councilwoman. Next, Councilmember Supernormal. Thank you, Mayor. And I'd like to recognize the mayor for a couple of recognitions. I actually had the Fed Pledge Committee. I recognize his strong advocacy to get the funding here, and he could have taken a break after that. But now he's working hard on on where to spend those funds. So we appreciate that. And staff's time also. Also, I appreciate a mayor for recognizing my advocacy for fire services. At times it sounds like that's that was my obsession. But I was such a strong believer in this. And it's not about this agenda item tonight. I read many, many areas in this item that supports keeping our fire services restored. But I think that this body might be on the cusp of what would be a paradigm shift from where we were in the past. And I have a strong feeling that this group feels that the last thing you should cut in an economic downturn would be fire services. There is such a strong need during times of economic challenges. When you think of folks on the street, arson and just the violence that you might forget that fire response to all those incidents of violence also. So I feel very good about what is stated in this item. But moving forward is probably a separate agenda item that I'll bring forward at a later date that that kind of has a statement saying that we want to maintain these resources and and not balance our budget by cutting those. I'll be very brief and the rest of my comments. But but I just thought of something as Councilmember Arango was speaking about that digital divide. And one thing I'm not sure that we've done is reach out to the school district to see where they are with with this issue and what gas money we might be able to fill. And I think partnering with them like they have a, you know, program where every student gets a Chromebook. And I think we need to take that into our own inventory as we move forward, because that's a huge piece that I think we were all asked about as councilmembers. We're getting school district questions are opening of schools all the time and we need to be there in support of our our partners there. I'll defer the rest of my time to my colleagues. But thank you again to all the are working hard on this. And and I think Alison said this is a daunting task. I'll tell you one thing. It sure beats the alternative. It sure beats the fact that we could be sitting here making huge cuts. So thank you for all of everyone who advocated for this funding. Thank you. I'm going to go back to folks. I have councilman mongo. Thank you, Mayor. So many great comments tonight and so much to build on. But I can't spend any of my 5 minutes telling you all how great it was because I only have 5 minutes. So thank you. And especially to the staff. Cindy's words regarding the staff were just so right on and I just appreciate it. They were so helpful to our committee. I mean, just relied on them and spent hours with them every week. So going back to something that I know the mayor and I talked a lot about, and 2016, 2017 is people's access and ability to get to city hall. And I know Councilmember Orengo, when you were on EDI and you really pushed hard for economic inclusion to be a part of the Blueprint 2.0. And part of that goes to what you said tonight, which is the language access piece. And we talk about coming up with a way for everyone to access City Hall 24 seven. I remember the mayor would say we want access to City Hall 24 seven. We want everything to be accessible. We really championed transparency. But I don't know that the things we had online at that time were the things that people needed. I think during this pandemic, we've really seen an ability to transition to that. We put vaccination numbers, we've put phone numbers and access. We've put the the COVID numbers, and we have that dashboard. I'd really love to see us double down on that 24 hour access. Our goal Long Beach app needs to be expanded into our Long Beach passport. We talk about banking. We talk about. Access to city services. You should be able to go on your app and you should be able to click, okay, here's how I get utility assistance. Here's where I can get food, here's how I can register for a tenant assistance support program. Here's where all that should be in the palm of everyone's hands. The Obama administration worked really hard to get cell phones in everyone's hands. And even I was talking to a homeless gentleman the other day. He has a cell phone. It's a way to access services and now is the time. The agenda item we brought about the the one card slash long passport go along with pulling it all together. Now is the time for us to take a big step forward. So I hope that we can see that I'm kind of expanded as we look through this list and as the programs are developed. And then I want to talk a little bit more about the Down Payment Assistance Program. And this is something that came up. I remember John Edmund was reading the names of these individuals who went through programs in the sixth District and how empowered they were. And I was talking to a sixth District resident and a fifth District resident. Both of them were very low income and gone through the program. And they want to stay where they are. They don't want to leave the sixth District. They don't want to leave the ninth District. They don't want to leave the fifth District. But the homes in those areas or the places where they currently live would not be affordable. I would love to see a part of this $5 million in addition to a down payment assistance program to really facilitate so many multi units, especially small property owner multi units are really turning over as people are not being able to pass on their Prop 13 value to their children as those change hands. We need a program that incentivizes and provides the down payment for the people living in those apartments or multi units or duplexes or triplexes to be able to turn that into a condo association, even if it's only two or three units, and that that down payment would let them by their property. So you try to buy a single family house in the city. You can read the reports online. You're talking $600,000, $500,000. Even for a two bedroom, you can get a triplex for 750 800,000. Now, for you to buy your own destiny of one of your units, you're talking about 250,000. You write about 300,000. So in Mr. Richardson or Vice Chair Richardson. Last week talked about the down payment assistance program and how 25,000 can make a difference. Well, 25,000 makes a lot bigger difference when you're purchasing a unit for 300,000. Because now you're talking about higher percentage, 10% of its 250,000 and so on. And then you can really potentially buy down that risk of the the mortgage insurance and that money that a lot of people feel is essentially being thrown down the drain or not. So or if we as the city can provide that mortgage insurance, if we could be that backer. So they don't have to make that extra $400 payment a month. And that would make the affordability really come down. So. So much good here. But I just want to add those two things. I know that that was also in your Everyone Home initiative, Mr. Mayor, and kind of just we talk about pulling all these plans together, whether it's the blueprint of the everyone home or the everyone in or that there's so many of them. I really am looking forward to seeing how this money can activate not only our city as a whole, but so many of the plans that have been. Little seeds and grow them into amazing gardens. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilwoman Sara. Yes. Thank you. I won't be very long. I was just so excited earlier to talk about the economic empowerment zone that I did not have a chance to share my gratitude to you, Mayor, for your hard work and advocacy from the vaccination rollout to our recovery plan and then future conversation about infrastructure. So thank you so much as well as to Vice Mayor Richardson for his leadership as chair on the Fed Legislation Committee. I'm a member of that and also I just want to thank staff so much for their hard work. I know John Kaiser attended every one of those session and wrote the report himself on a very short timeline, as well as our city manager, Tom Monaco, for leading us through this process as far as just, you know, ensuring that, you know, that we're getting making sure we're being comprehensive about it, that we we put a little bit in a little bit of everything to ensure we have this kind of full recovery. But making sure that we also narrow into our hardest hit and high need community as well. So just wanted to share my gratitude because I didn't get to do it earlier. So thank you so much. Thank you. Sorry, Councilwoman Allen. Thank you, Mayor. I just have a couple more comments and I won't be really long, but I had a couple of things that I want to say. As you know, that 30 million in rental assistance is going to be huge. You know, our community should not have to decide whether to pay rent or buy food. And I think getting that to build them as quickly as we can is going to be really important. I love the additional 5 million for housing support that provides the rental housing navigation assistance, which is going to be a huge help. And and I love the idea of offering a down payment assistance for first time homebuyers. It just is going to level the playing field. It's a great equalizer, creating wealth in our new our neglected communities. And I just I just love that. And we talked about childcare a little bit. Thank you, Councilwoman and Mongo. And but one of the one of my ask on that is I know we're creating an additional one in sports that is that that goes directly to providing child care services to our working parents that desperately need the help. And so I just I know there's 2.1. And so and there are some other buckets that's going into. So my ask is that any of that additional money goes directly into child care services. And so I'm city manager. I'm not sure if I need to make a motion on that, but but that is that is a ask. And also, with regards to one of the things I did advocate for, too, is, is just making sure that we have funding for our convention center because our tourism, as we all know, is the nexus. And it drives so many jobs and to into our our city. And then I and the $12 million that's being allocated towards homelessness is huge. I think this is a this is a game changer. I never understood the Multi-Service Center, and I know, as one of my colleagues talked about earlier, is is grant funded. And that is a problem that was on council council member Urunga. That is a problem. The way that is funded. And and so we definitely need to work on that. But the multi-service center not being available longer hours, you know, after that Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 has always been problematic. So I like that we're addressing that and the existing modular units as well. So again, and also one other thing that I wanted to I wanted to ask is with regards to our clean streets with that money, can we also, if there are that there are bids that are currently providing clean streets like the LBA that could jump in immediately and help and some of that money be used to expanding their programs. So that was that was a question that I had. Thank you again, Mayor. And council member to answer the two questions from from that one, the childcare. Yes, we do believe that if there is additional money for child care, one area of the plan that's that could use some additional resources is to directly fund child care services so that people who need to go to work at night and need someone to watch the children or or during the day or any other time that they're looking to be employed, that they have access to those types of services. We do believe there's going to be direct money for child care as well out of the stimulus package that would be able to go to child care providers. But until that money is there and we know about it, we'd like to really focus the 1 million on those direct services for child care. The second question was on clean streets. Yes, we're still developing what that exact plan would be for that $5 billion over the next two years. But we do believe part of part of what we want to do is make sure that business corridors, major corridors, are really clean and picked up and that we're doing these these kind of deep cleanings. Some of that will be done with city staff. But if we have partners that can help us, we would like to engage them. Anyone from the Conservation Corps to potentially some of the bids that are set up to do some of that work. So yes, we would be interested in exploring that and can continue to work through that. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Councilman Allen, do you have anything else? No matter where that was at. Thank you. Okay. Vice Mayor Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I thought this was a great conversation. It's great to see so many people on board with so many great ideas. Ready to land this land, this plane here. You know, I talked a lot about the broader stuff, but I wanted to touch base on how you talk about my district. I want to make sure I touch on a couple of things I think are I'm excited about. Two things I'm excited about. First is I'm glad to see so much support on the economic empowerment zones. This allows us to invest in our communities, implement strategies for the racial equity plan. This is an ambitious plan. We have had have funding to implement those things. Things like cultural, cultural centers and cultural districts, special districts. ERISA needs cannabis equity pipeline or equitable procurement processes in our city. All of these things are they're called out in the reconciliation plan. And this allows you to think about those long term investments. Secondly, down payment assistance has been something I've talked about a long time. Other councilmembers talked about made a motion that came back, said, you know, we just don't have money. If we had a pot of funds to start it, you can leverage it and create a larger fund that over time replenishes itself. I think this is a smart investment that makes sure current generations and this investment can be felt for generations to come. So I'm really excited about that and I just want to recognize and find, you know, it's been a lot of thanks on the council and all that, but I really want to thank the speakers and particularly, you know, a lot of these meetings we hear from a lot of the same folks. I was really impressed to hear from so many Barbara. And, you know, I've been going to the same barber. I've been on the same barber since I moved to Long Beach in 2007. And and it's true, these are the community anchors and I'm really glad to see, because they were hurt and they were hit and they really haven't been organized historically. But that's the that's really the heart of it's an important part of black and brown communities. Barbershops and hair salons. So the fact that they were so organized and I was surprised that there was the organized, I think that's important. I think you should know that a lot of your asks are already reflected here. Now you have a standalone category for investment into salons and hair in barbershops, all of those things. And it's and it's a good fund like the Max Max Grant is up to $25,000. So that's significant and I encourage that. Just make sure you capitalize on momentum and make sure the businesses are, you know, seldom represented, you know, that you're working with them and that you get that in. But I think this is a great motion. I'm happy to I'm happy to vote for this and support this. I'm going to ask and I'm going to ask staff to just restate the motion just for the record, restate what you have after you've had everybody's comments, and then and then we can move on with the vote. Thank you, vice mayor. So we certainly were listening. We heard a lot of comments, a lot of what the council has talked about is in the plan and it will be kind of fleshed out as we do the rest of the detail, and we'll do as many of those as we can. And what we heard it for the actual motion was one to adopt the city staff's recommended plan to you two to adopt the mayor's changes as outlined in his letter, with the clarification that the $5 million for housing would be $1,000,000 for a navigator is $1,000,000 for land grant or land grant and $3 million for affordable housing land trust. Thank you. $3 million for additional down payment assistance that then the $900,000 that's outlined currently in the plan for housing legal support would be for right to counsel. Exclusively. That under health equity of the $4.9 million we have for health equity, about 500,000, not about but exactly 500,000 would be supporting immigrant support services and that we would be looking at this through a collective impact type approach and create dedicated areas that align the empowerment money, the food security money, the youth prevention money, and a couple other areas that are location base that are overlap and create the collective impact model for those areas. Thank you. I'm going to I'm going to go ahead. And I think also and obviously, I think every separate of the motion, there's a lot of comment from the council about different parts of the fight, and I'm assuming all those will be coming back in different ways. Mr. City Manager So I know that you're going to be incorporating kind of all of the comments made by the council and and the community. So we appreciate that. I want to wrap up and we're going to go to a vote. I'm going to say a few last, last things. The first is to our business community. As a reminder, what we're doing today on economic recovery is just a piece of what's really happening around economic recovery. We want to encourage folks to remember that the state has set aside $2 billion with a B for recovery grants and economic development. The feds also sent specific dollars in this same bill for economic recovery. Separate of this, President Biden even created a fund just for restaurants within the American Recovery Act. And so pleas from from the business perspective, what we're doing, of course, is to supplement all these amazing grants and work. But I want to make sure that Mr. Modica and our economic development team, that we're ensuring that all of our businesses have access not just to our grants, but when we're promoting our grants, that we're also promoting them to try to get a state grant or a federal grant so that they really have all of the opportunities in front of that. It's really, really critical. I also just want to just want to note that from a from a thankful perspective staff, the team you guys did such a great job of, number one, listening to the community. I mean, you hosted 20 plus roundtables and what you guys put together to present is really what you heard from from so many community members, business owners, nonprofit leaders. That's where this plan is coming from. It's really from from the community. And then at the same time, when when Mr. Moynihan, when you were kind of walking me through what staff wanted to present and some of the ideas, what I really saw was you guys carefully listening to what this city council has been saying for the last few years on what different priorities were. You know, you you focus in on issues around businesses and digital digital inclusion and around equity and around funding types of programs in our parks and violence prevention that have matter to the council or ensuring that certain reforms were in place. So I really saw in this plan just a real listening to the body that is really speaking on behalf of their constituents and speaking on behalf of what they're hearing out in the community. And I don't I there is. There's so much in this plan. Then I have heard all nine of the members talk about for the last few years consistently and for some of the newer folks just in the last, you know, obviously few months. And from what I've heard from the community. So I just want to thank you. I do honestly believe that this proposal is a creation of what we've heard from the community and what we've heard from the city council. And it's also a creation of, quite frankly, being fiscally responsible. And first and foremost and Mr. Markey, you you know, when we talked about this earlier, I told you today one top priority is reserves and making sure that we put money back. Did we prepare ourselves for that next emergency? And I just want to also think the council, for taking that seriously, because I can't tell you that if we didn't have that money set aside and had we been spending that down, we would not have been able to meet the moment of this emergency. So I think that's a great opportunity for us. And then finally, I can't I can't leave the conversation without thinking. President Biden, Vice President Harris and the Congress, we're actually passing this plan. This is a proposal. To be clear, this is a proposal. Of President Biden's. He put this plan forward in front of the Congress, and many of us have the great honor and opportunity to meet with him and members of the administration to craft what this plan would look like, including many of my colleagues from across the country. And so I'm grateful to him. We're grateful to Congress and everyone that actually passed and voted to adopt this plan that's in front of us here today, or this would not be possible. So we're very grateful. And and with that, we'll go ahead and call a roll call vote. Councilwoman Zendejas. I. Councilwoman Ellen. I can swim in price. I can spend subpoena. All right. Councilwoman Mango. I transwoman Sara. I can't remember. Oranga. Absolutely. I. Councilman Austin? Yeah. Yes. Vice Mayor Richardson. I'm Bush and Kerry's. Great. Congratulations, everyone. That's it's going to be a big year for us in recovery. So congratulations. A lot of great work by the staff. Amazing. Amazing. We're going to move on. We're going to take just like a one minute just break, and then we're going to start with item 11 and then I'm sorry, public comment and then item 11 will be first up. Okay. So just one minute break. Thank you. Okay, everyone, we're going to go ahead and restart the the meeting from the recess. We are believe that we do have a quorum. So I'm going to just have the clerk call the roll call to restart the meeting again for the quorum. Councilwoman Sunday has. Both. Councilwoman Allen. Present Councilwoman Pryce. Present Councilman Sabina. I'm here. Councilwoman Mango. Here. Councilwoman Sara. Present Councilmember Ranga. Present Councilman Austin. Vice Mayor Richardson. Here we have a calm.