Recommendation to adopt resolution calling for the placement of a General Tax Measure on the Ballot of the March 3, 2020 Special Municipal Election for submission to the qualified voters of the City of Long Beach an amended ordinance to extend and adjust the rate of a Transactions and Use Tax, and making findings of fiscal emergency pursuant to California Proposition 218;
Six, seven, eight and nine. All right. Okay. Next up will be that motion carries what we're now doing. Item 30, please. Communication from city attorney recommendation to adopt a resolution calling for the placement of a general tax measure on the ballot for the of the March 3rd, 2020 special municipal election to extend and adjust the rate of transaction and use tax and making findings of fiscal emergency pursuant to California's Proposition to 18, adopt a resolution providing for the filing of primary and rebuttal arguments and adopt a resolution requesting the Board of Supervisors to consolidate a special municipal election for one local initiative measure to be held on March 3rd, 2020, with the statewide primary. Okay, thank you. There is. And we have it unless there's any objection. We want to hear the staff report again from last week and no one's less. A customer wants to hear it again. I think we just go and go to the second vote. So why don't we go ahead and if the public comment on this item. Casey to members of the public. I'm going to close the speakers list. After these two three members of the public. And then I will close the speakers list. Okay. Thank you, sir. Jim Foster, president of the Long Beach Post. I come before you again to give my full support for this measure, really on five different levels for us staffing, equipment, facilities, technology and our mission and our mission being a community hospital and all the services that it provides not just to us but to fire . Also, the staff report last week was fantastic. It describes a number of staffing positions that we will lose as a result of the loss of measure. It impacts us on multiple levels in each of your districts. The equipment that we're getting with body cameras, the radio systems that we have to have our facilities with specifically for me is the academy, which needs some desperate help. Our technology, which is coming in droves from the state and unfunded mandates of things that we have to do to accomplish, in fact, a requirement from the federal government that provides some compliance with our technology systems that we have to do. These are all items that the community benefits from. In fact, I can't think in my history here of any other measure that where the taxpayers got more bang for their buck and just things they can touch and hold and see and feel the impact of where these tax dollars are going. So again, I encourage your vote on this. I think this is a great event for the community, really, something they can celebrate in the future to see all of the benefits they gain from these dollars being spent. So thank you, sir. Thank you very much, Mr. Foster. Next speaker, please. Get my notes here. My name is Randall Chesky. My address is on record with the city clerk. I'm here. Thank you for having me. Honorable Mayor and City Council. I was actually here for another item, but this. Was very much related to what I was here. For. I am speaking on behalf of the permanent extension of this, the measure A This provides essential resources to many of our infrastructure improvements, our parks or recreational activities or libraries, and provides very important funds for making making repair, necessary repairs, improvements. It's essential resource for when we're looking at grants outside of our general fund, when we're looking for local dollars. To make competitive. Applications, whether it is for parks, whether it is for a street. Improvement at the federal, state, local. Level. So I encourage you to continue with this resource. It allows our our departments to. Better. Plan and make strategic investments for improvements, whether it is for MacArthur Park or I think there is another park plan ahead of you on this agenda. These are really important resources. I do encourage you to continue supporting it. Thank you. Thank you. Roski. In our last speaker. Rex Pritchard, President, Long Beach Firefighters Association. I can't thank you enough for staff council and the mayor and bringing this item forward and making this measure permanent. I echo the same sentiment President Foster had with the poet. This is vital for all of us. Now, as you drive through Long Beach, you see the improvements that are being made with measure, whether it's the restoration of Engine eight, Rescue 12, homeless engagement. In response, our Hart team the countless. Every budget this council has brought forward has been restoring public safety resources. And this council has been very responsible in using and spending those dollars. This is a proactive approach of keeping Long Beach dollars in Long Beach. And for those people who may not be supportive of this and some of the naysayers out there, and a year from now, they are going to be coming back saying thank you in bringing this forward, because if this council wasn't acting in the fashion they are and getting ahead of this, there will be other governmental agencies who are going to take these sales back, sales tax dollars that we're paying now, and they're going to get moved to another agency outside of Long Beach. This is a proactive approach and ensuring Long Beach Dollar stay in Long Beach. And I am just thankful that you are bringing this forward and I encourage our residents to vote for this because this is going to be vital in everything that is going on. You drive down 15th Street in seeing what is going on, on 15th Street, everything that's going on on the east side. And the most important thing, community hospital, that is a vital, vital part of the 911 system that we need to have your Long Beach firefighters and paramedics and EMTs as we are driving East Side residents all the way to memorial across town. Community hospital is vitally important to the nine 1 to 1 system. It's part of our team. So thank you for bringing this forward. And we look forward to the residents making this permanent. Thank you. Thank you very much. That concludes public comment. Councilman Richardson. No. Vice-Chair Andrews. Yes. I just want to say a lot of individuals, I especially when you have your two heads here, come and speak on something so important. When we talk about infrastructure and we have a person from the community letting you know that our our money that's going into $8 is just showing you what they do in the community. A lot of people ask, what is all this construction going on? That is your taxpayers money at work? And I just want to thank everyone for just letting you know that what you're doing. Don't think that we're just taking your money and just running away with it. We're doing things with Measure eight is a reason for that. And I want to thank our public for voting on that measure. Thank you very much, Mayor. Thank you very much. Councilman Price. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I do have a question. I know that when we voted on measure the last time I'm putting it on the ballot, we had a resolution. Can staff give me an insight into whether or not we'll be amending that resolution to include community hospital and when that will happen? Mr. MODICA Yes, Councilmember, you're correct. There's a number of actions that you take. The ones right now we're doing this the same way we did measure, which is you're putting this agenda, this on the ballot, and then there will be a second resolution that is the intent to spend. And so if we get direction tonight for this to go on the ballot and one of the staff recommendations was to include community hospital, we would bring back that resolution to the council at a later date. And like we and it has been set yet maybe a month or two. Okay. And the other question that I had is, will we continue to have an oversight committee to ensure that expenditures are consistent with the intent of the council and consistent with the resolution that will be adopted in the future? Absolutely. That has not changed. They've met ten times already in the past three years, and every single year they not only review and give us give us input, but they also take actions and votes to make sure that when we are proposing that to you in the budget and you adopted, that those are consistent with the resolution . They actually have their next meeting already scheduled for August 29th, and we're going to continue those meetings. Okay. That's great. Thank you, Mr. Moto. So I do have a couple of comments that I want to share. Um, I'm going to be supporting this item tonight, and one of the multiple reasons why I'm going to be supporting this item tonight, first and foremost, is going to be our need to contribute our portion to the reopening of community hospital. That is a new development since the passage of Measure H that the east side of Long Beach has now to deal with. We know that we had 27,200 emergency services. Consumer prices. Have increased. Yes. We we lost you there for about 10 seconds, but you're back on. Okay. So ambulance transportation times have increased 10% since community hospital closed. We know that in order to reopen the facility, we are going to need to be involved in a cost sharing with the network provider and we need to make sure that we have funding in place for that. As we move forward with those discussions and that process, which itself is a very lengthy and multiple regulatory agency involved process, and so we need to have that funding set aside and a plan in place of how we're going to continue to meet our responsibility as a partner in the endeavor to reopen the hospital in 2016. When the voters approved Measure A. One of the biggest concerns that my constituents shared with me was that we were going to be having the highest sales tax in the city of Long Beach as compared to cities within the region. And at the time, what I shared with my residents and something that I'll continue to share today is that, you know, we're looking at as well, we're talking about our sales tax measures, our sales tax numbers. We're looking at a point in time. If you look at what's going on throughout the state of California, the challenges and opportunities that have been presented to the various municipalities throughout the state, it's not surprising to see that sales tax numbers have changed not just since 2015, but that the trend is that they're continuing to change. In fact, in looking at the cities in the region that have a 10.25%, we've got Burbank, Compton, Covina, kind of. Hey, Culver City, Glendale, Glendora, Hawthorne, Lawndale, Monrovia, Pasadena, Pico Rivera, Pomona, Santa monica and South Gate. These are all cities within the region that have the same sales tax measures that we do. And the reason for that is because they have a lot of the same opportunities and challenges that we're seeing with our budget and with the the the needs of the community. I think one of the key factors for me in deciding to support this was that because state law places the total cap on sales tax at 10.25% for local taxes, an extension of Measure A, we need to take that cap into account. The proposed extension would levy a point 75% tax from 2023 to 2027. Then when Measure H expires in 2027, that rate would be 1%, the same amount levied from 2017 to 2023. We know that there are other government agencies considering sales tax ballot measures, which is an act that would use up to 0.25% remaining under the cap after 2023. So the sales tax rate in Long Beach after 2023 would continue to be 10.25. But the 2.25% increase would not be spent locally. And that's a huge, huge consideration for me. We have restored a lot of services in terms of public safety. For me, that's key. The fact that we're going to be able to finally have a body worn camera program in the city of Long Beach is it's just so long overdue. I cannot say enough about the need for us to include that technology in our current policing model. The fact that we don't have it right now is disappointing to me. And the fact that we are going to have it is very for me, it's a very positive step in the right direction. So for me, the fact that we have restored Engine eight and multiple other fire resources throughout the city, the fact that we've continued to add police officers every year and fire resources has been a tremendous benefit to my resident. You know, one of the things that the residents tell me all the time is we need more police officers, we need more police officers to address the issues we're dealing with, with a lot of the homeless unintended consequences of homelessness that we're seeing. And what I tell residents all the time is, you know, this is homelessness is not an issue. That is a police that has a police solution attached to it. Enforcement is not the solution. But I do know that it gives at least the residents in my district a lot of comfort to know that police officers are out there, ensuring that people are offered services and ensuring that people are held accountable when they violate the rights of others, whether that's in the form of theft, whether it's in the form of quality of life type crime. And so seeing more police officers out there patrolling the streets, seeing more police officers be proactive in enforcement action, has been something that has been very positive in my district. And we cannot we absolutely cannot afford to go backwards in terms of our resources. We need to ensure that we maintain the resources that we have restored. And finally, I mean, when I took office in 2014, we were paving about two strips per year in each district. It was very, very depressing to go to a community meeting and tell them that no streets in that neighborhood were going to be getting paved that year. It was great if the community meeting that you were at happened to be one of the ones where the streets that are getting repaved situated in. But for the for me, there's 21 community organizations in the third district. So we were able to pave one or two streets per year, which which meant that somewhere between, you know, 19 to 28 community organizations, there was no good news to share. That has changed a lot since the passage of Measure eight. We've been able to pave so many streets and address a lot of immediate needs in terms of street repair that we were not able to do before. Of course, I hope that measure funding in in the future is used for alleys and sidewalks throughout the city. I do not believe that it is fair to persistently tell residents that they're going to have to wait on alleys because there are alleys and worse conditions, because I do believe that we need to figure out a way to allocate that infrastructure money equally throughout the city so that every district and every resident feels the benefits of the measure. $8 in their neighborhood. And so for me, making sure that alleys throughout the city are given priority is important, because I understand that the condition of alleys is very much something to be evaluated in perspective. But when you have an alley with multiple potholes and flooding, it's hard for you to say, Well, you know what , I'm going to drive through this flooding and I'm going to drive through these potholes every day because there are dirt alleys that need more attention than than my alley. While I understand that concept, that sounds fair. I think people have a hard time supporting attacks, as they should, when they're not seeing the immediate benefits of it. So that's one area where I hope that the resolution will include equitable distribution of funds for alleys and sidewalks. With that, I thank my colleagues for indulging me and allowing me to share my comments on this very important issue. This is an issue that I have received a lot of feedback from my residents on. I am a broad currently, but it was important to me to weigh in on this issue so that the record is clear in terms of my desire to continue to maintain the resources that we have restored and to do whatever we can possible to ensure that our contribution to the reopening of community hospital is secured in the form of a future revenue projection. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Councilwoman. Let me let me just cut to close. Let me just add, I want to just first thank the staff and the attorneys. I know you've all worked very hard on getting this. I particularly want to thank Amy Webber from your team, Mr. City attorney, who's just a superstar and your office and consistently does a great job. Can we just give her a round of applause? Because, see, this stuff is actually it's a lot of hard work. And, and she does a really great job for you and your team. Mr. City Attorney So I just wanted to thank her. I also want to thank our our departments, I think particularly on police and fire and public works. You have all been great stewards of some of these resources in the past and what we've done, including the other departments that have seen the benefits and we know that will continue. And so just excellent work and we look forward to ensuring that these resources stay in Long Beach and don't go to other outside agencies. And I think that's critical for us moving forward. And so thank you for to all for for moving this forward. So with that, I'm going to do the roll call vote. Before we get started, could Amy stand up about 20 minutes and speak to us? Thank you. Thank you, Miss Weber. And so with that, let me let me go into the roll call vote. So District two, District three. I. District four i. District five I. District six. District seven i. District eight. And District nine. Thank you. Motion carries. Thank you for for passing that. And we will be moving on to the next item, which is going to be item 41.