Recommendation to respectfully request to receive and file the 2019 Long Beach Fire Department Recruitment Report; and Request City Manager to identify the resources to establish a full-time, sworn Diversity Recruitment and Partnerships Manager position in the Fire Department to complete the strategic diversity recruitment plan and report back to City Council with the recommendations for sustainability in August 2020.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate that. Well, thank you. That that concludes public comment. We're moving on to item 33. You know, I think. So you were you were signed up not to speak on general public comment, but I did call your name. You were signed up to speak on the on the item before, which was already adopted, which was often some sort of consent calendar. So I already passed the consent counter. Okay, great. So now we're going on to item 33. Communication from Council Member Richardson, Vice Mayor Andrew's Council member who ranga recommendation to receive and file the 2019 Long Beach Fire Department recruitment report and request city manager to identify resources to establish a full time sworn diversity recruitment and partnership manager position in the Fire Department. Councilor Richardson. Thank you, Mayor. So I think this is a pretty timely and a good conversation to have. We've been discussing diversity within our fire department for a number of years. I remember my first conversation with our new new chief. He told me this was going to be, you know, something really central to his agenda. And there's been a lot of work, you know, in the community as well. The recent graduates of the Economic Policy Impact Center, who I see are there and holding up signs. There's a little bit of work over the last few months and help publish a study on the very issue. And internally here within the city, our chief has done some pretty amazing work with our innovation team and taking on this issue of diversity as well. And and so so the goal tonight is to really hear about some of the efforts that are taking place to diversify our police, to power our fire department, and to sort of lift up. I noticed that that both reports, the economic policy impacts and a report in the chief's report both lift up the need to really have a full time person dedicated to focusing on diversifying and recruiting and really going deep into our community and recruiting. And so I wanted to lift that up. A city or a city our size, you know, with a, you know, a city where it's in a unique position where both our police chief fire chiefs are both Latino. And I remember hearing Chief Espino recount his early years in the field talking about the sense of ease the community felt when they received aid from responder who spoke the same language to them. I think these things are important. And so the idea tonight is we're going to hear presentation and I want and the motion here is going to recommend to the city manager to go ahead and explore how we can better support this effort by committing to a full time sworn diversity recruitment and partnerships manager within the department. And so let's go ahead at this point and get our presentation from Chief Espinal. Thank you, Councilman Richardson. Good evening, Mayor Garcia and members of the city council. This evening, I'll be providing a brief overview of the Long Beach Fire Department's 2019 recruitment report. In April of this year, we began a review of our recruiting and selection process that was completed in July. We partnered with the city manager's office and the Civil Service Department to analyze data from Long Beach Fire Department applicants, perform qualitative interviews with current firefighters, survey the previous three cohorts of fire recruits, and review best practice research from other cities. Here are the current demographics for the Long Beach Fire Department. These numbers are for sworn staff, only, of which there are 389 total because of its size. Small changes. Changes make a big difference. In the Long Beach Fire Department, for example, the addition of just five more females in the ranks would reflect a 30% increase in females . Here are our five recruit applicants identified by race and ethnicity over the last four recruitment cycles. Long Beach Fire Department receives an average of 3263 applicants for each fire recruit recruitment cycle. However, from 2014 to 2019, Long Beach Fire Department's black applicants have been reduced by half from 15% down to 8%. Meanwhile, its Hispanic applicants have increased to a level similar to white applicants. The Long Beach Fire Department's applicant breakdown by gender is 5% female. This also reflects the state of the department as a whole, which is 5% female. Best practices. We looked into a lot of other fire departments across the country and found that we already employed a lot of their best practices. And here's an overview. The fire science program at Jordan High School, which we will be starting in fall of 2019, the Long Beach Fire Department will partner with the Long Beach Unified School District to start a fire science pathway at Jordan High School. Our application window time. The Civil Service Department's Fire Recruit application is open for two weeks, which gives people enough time to apply as opposed to some departments which are only open for a day. Standardized test. Instead of administering its own written exam, civil service and language for our department, use a standardized test. Our Test administration. Which is our physical built ability test. The Long Beach Fire Department administers its own physical ability test at no cost to the applicant. Standardized oral interviews. The two rounds of oral interviews measure different applicant qualities and are standardized. Community involvement stakeholders from the community are invited to participate in the first oral interview. Our team came up with research strategies that fall along the following five categories selection process. Recruitment. Staffing, recruitment programs. Communications and data processes. Our selection process has been developed from best practices. However, as in all processes, there is still room for bias. Sending all BFD staff that participate in the selection process through implicit bias training would give them the tools to identify and mitigate any potential biases. We got a head start on this and it's happening this recruitment cycle for all of our staff involved in the selection process. We also want to implement, monitor and evaluate pilot studies to make adjustments to our selection process. In pilot study number one, we would invite all of a band list to the patty currently in the selection process. The Long Beach Fire Department receives a band of applicants from the Department of Civil Service and reaches out to the air band for their resumes. This pilot study, which switch that step with the invitation to the party and analyze to understand the effect in diversity. Pilot Study two We would be adopting the city of LA's test or develop an independent written test. The Long Beach Fire Department does not currently currently have anyone assigned to work on strategic recruitment. This report strategies rely on having appropriate staff to develop, implement and monitor programs and policies for recruitment. We are proposing a diversity recruitment and partnerships manager classed as a fire captain. We're establishing a cadre of five rotating firefighters that represent the diversity of the Long Beach community as a crucial step in building a recruitment team. These firefighters would be funded by overtime and would help in targeted outreach events as directed by the recruitment staff mentioned above. The Support Services Bureau, Civil Service, personal personnel analysis analyst and recruitment staff will meet quarterly to refine the recruitment efforts. This will ensure cross departmental collaboration. Long Beach Fire Department will utilize Instagram, Facebook and the city's website to promote recruitment efforts. We will also update our website, so to best utilize it as a recruitment tool. This is already happening, so stay tuned for a new website coming soon. Long Beach Fire Department recruitment staff will use technology like Google Forms to manage applications for programs and to track every recruitment effort. The Long Beach Fire Department recruitment staff will also develop methods for increasing the reliable reliability of the selection process, which includes established establishing highly structured processes for all steps and conducting reliability checks. Long Beach Fire Department will develop an internal survey to understand the culture of the organization and how they will receive these programmatic changes. Long Beach Fire Department Recruitment. Recruitment staff will also develop a community survey that measures the community's perception of the fire department and how likely they are to see a fire department job is feasible. The Long Beach Fire Department will establish a comprehensive mentorship program. Recruitment staff will set up a short application for interested applicants to fill out and posted on the Long Beach Fire Department website. Overtime is not planned for this. Recruitment staff will partner with Long Beach City College to develop a one day event that begins with a panel of female firefighters in the morning asking them questions about how they became interested in the fire service and describing their path. This event will be open to all but target females. College athletes and veterans have been proven to have the necessary physical training and discipline to be successful. Firefighters targeting recruitment toward local college sports teams and recent veterans will help the Long Beach Fire Department reach a more diverse candidate pool while also recruiting highly qualified individuals. Recruitment staff will develop a recruitment engagement outline based on best practices found in the city's participation in the Government Alliance for Racial Equity, or Geer, as well as several other city wide engagement efforts such as economic developments. Everyone in strategy and development services. Climate Action and Adaption Plan. Long Beach Fire Department is working on strategies to fund the implementation and implementation of key recommendations, such as the Diversity Recruitment and Partnerships Manager with cost savings. This concludes our Long Beach Department recruitment report, and we would welcome any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr.. Fire Chief. Mr.. I'm going to go back to the counselor. Just to wrap it up. So we saw, we all saw the EEO presentation and, and, you know, behind the rail, a number of us looked at the numbers and said, hey, you know, we can do better here. And I think this is this is great. Lift up two things here. The Jordan Highway Pathways Program. Congratulations. I've been tracking and following that. Really excited to see that program get off the ground this fall. And secondly, I thought your presentation was amazing and the fact that you tie in so many current efforts and how it aligns from our governance alliance, racial equity to our economic inclusion work, this this connects all of it. And so kudos to you. The last thing I'll say is one I want to recognize and thank the two letters of support, one from Long Beach firefighters, Local 372, who's been a big advocate for this work, as well as a Lumbee City college trustee, would walk Joe into who's involved in some of the Longview City College pathway stuff. So thank you so much. And those are my remarks. Thank you very much. Concern re oranga. Thank you, Mary. And I want to thank you, Chief, for putting down this report for me. This is like deja vu. As you may recall, I was the city's recruitment officer for 14 years, 15 years with the city of Long Beach and the civil service department, until I had an opportunity to work with this as a team where I had a crew of assigned firefighters to work with me to do the recruiting up and down the state, even in regards to going to fire science classes, our academies, jobs, job fairs, community colleges and universities, I think that that resulted many times. We used to have about 7000 applicants come to apply for jobs in the city of Long Beach, where we had maybe 40, maybe 60 positions. And with that many applicants, it made it very, very tough. And that's why we went into the banning of the of the list, which was something that created greater opportunities, obviously, for the city to pick from that from from the best the will you would have a larger list, you have more opportunities and I think we need to maintain that. I would venture to say that I think we have to stop you in that and just go by the rule of the list. If rule less meaning that if you take a test and you meet the cutoff, give the whole list to the fire department for you to look at, at the candidates that are there. And that would also provide greater opportunities to look at the people who are there. Go to go through the patty. I don't probably you don't have to said all of the patty but the ones that you think are the ones that based on the interview that you think would be more compatible to to do the job and deal with the rigors, I think would be very helpful. It creates more work, I understand, for you, for the department, because you would have to assign more people to do these extensive interviews because they do take days. I know that I was part of that once upon a time. So, I mean, we have to look at other ways now. We're in the 2000 when I was doing this, it was back in the eighties and nineties that 19 it seemed so long ago now, the 1980s and nineties. But, you know, with social media and Twitter and and. Facebook. You know what? It makes it easier now, of course, to reach out and make contact because a lot of people are into that. And so one of the surveys that I did back in the day was to survey the candidates and say, how did you learn about this job? And a lot of them a lot of them was word of mouth by relatives, friends, acquaintances, referrals. So I think that that needs to be looked at as well in terms of how you can expand on that. And certainly Facebook and Twitter provide another those kinds of social media platforms provides that opportunity. But there's nothing that says success, like pressing the flesh. Being there, going to community organizations, CBOs community based organizations, talking to them directly about firefighters and having the recruitment team reflect the community, which goes a long, long way. And I, I had a lot of positive contacts on that. They would see a female firefighter with me and just felt felt inspired to apply for the job as well. So you might make sure that you include females and people of color in your recruitment teams. And I'm also very pleased that you're going to look at assigning a person, a a uniformed personnel, to be the full time recruiter. That's that's great because it's it it makes a real good commitment that it registers the commitment that the fire department has to this effort. So I want to commend you on that. I also know that civil service has had a great commitment with that, too. And you also have to look at the test itself. The test itself has some negative aspects to it. People aren't always ready to take a test. Test anxiety is is high. I used to be an examiner myself back in the day. So I know how how impactful that can be. So I'm glad that you're reviewing that. Look at it in turn to analyze it and see what what what better examination instruments you can use to cut people out to get the people to to apply. So with that, I ran out of time, and that's about all I'm going to say for now. I might relying on a baton. Thank you. I thank you very much, Councilmember. Next up, right on time, Vice Mayor Andrews. Yeah, that's all right. Thank you, Ms.. Thank you, Mr. Super. Not for that legislative item. 5 minutes. And I'm going to real quickly go to this, because this is very serious, because last week various media outlets broke the story about the lack of diversity in our fire department. And similar to those stories was the commitment from our chief, who has increased diversity in the department. And I believe that we can, in the city, need to back up our chief to give him the tools that he needs to get the job done. So I am supporting this measure because diversity and opportunities are a key to what makes our city so special. And I ask my colleagues to join in with me. Thank you. Thank you very much, Vice Mayor Councilmember Pierce. And for those of you in the audience that don't see it, we have a timer on our end, too, to make sure we don't talk longer than 5 minutes. So that's why we were laughing, because I don't see it up on the screen. I just wanted to say I appreciate the efforts, the lens, and any day that we have department heads talking about implicit and explicit bias and trying to make sure that our departments look like our community is a win for me and and my constituents. And so I fully support this, whatever we can do to make this a model, to make sure that we're using this in other departments as well. I know Public Works is not as compensated as our fire PD, but I know it's another department that lacks a lot of diversity, particularly when it comes to gender. And so hopefully we can continue to work with EPIC and with our departments and our city manager to to make this a good model. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Councilwoman Price. So I want to thank the chief as well for all of his efforts. So before I was at my current job, I Orange County Fire Authority was one of my clients when I was at Woodruff. So I'm very familiar with their inner workings. And I and also the City of Orange Fire Department was one of my clients. And so diversity in the fire department is always a challenge. And so the efforts that we're doing here are amazing. And I applaud them and I think it's great. And this this item, the concept of this item is fantastic. Of course, we're going to have to figure out what the details of it come out to be after we get a report. But the question that in terms of fiscal impact but the question that I have is do we have a position similar to what Councilmember Randall . I used to hold a recruitment officer for the city. Mr. City Manager Do we have anything like that now? Sir West. I mean. Mr. Stout That would be a question for the Civil Service Department, but I believe they do that. But they certainly do that. I'm not sure if they have a position strictly related to that, maybe. Mr. HONEYWOOD. No. The former or the current acting director. Good evening. We do have a deputy director of civil service who. Oversees our recruitment and selection division. So that's one person not. Dedicated to managing, just recruitment, but also oversees all the work that our test analysts do. Okay. And do any of our other departments have recruitment officers in the departments like this? Police. Do we know yet? Police. The police department does have. One at least one dedicated staff working on recruitment issues. Yes. Okay, great. Any other department in the city? Each department has an administrative officer and that person is responsible for working with H.R. and also civil service to do this job. Yes. But fire doesn't have that. Fire has administered. OFFICER But not a not what? The Chief is asking for tonight. I see. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Well, I hope that when if the when the report comes back to council, we could include a little bit of kind of historical nature of what we've done for recruitment and some maybe some models of what others are doing and maybe even some other departments. Because I imagine, you know, we want to have diversity in the city and in all aspects of the city. This is probably an issue that's not unique to the Long Beach Fire Department when it comes to work as a firefighter. But I think that if we have a sense of what is going on throughout the city, we can determine whether there is a central approach that's better or a specific approach within the fire department. I think we just recently submitted a report to the city council about three or four months ago, and pretty much all the departments were looking good. The fire department was an outlier, though, and that's why it's here tonight. Well, it was an outlier compared to other city departments. But do we know if it's an outlier compared to other fire departments in the state? Chief. In regards to other fire departments in the state, we're actually doing very well with our percentages. And the difference between that report that the city manager's referencing and our report is that our report only looks at sworn firefighters and not all admin and civilian staff, all of that. Okay. All right. Thank you for that information. I look forward to getting the information back. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilmember Soprano. Thank you. Happy to support this item tonight. And and also will be happy to support the efforts through our council offices, social media, whatever. But many have touched on it here. I just would like to commend Chief Espino on your work today. Great job. Thank you. And if I may, I'm just going to take this opportunity. Thank you all for your support. And it's I know right now it's directed at me, but I really do need to recognize Stephanie Zavala, who just stepped away from the dais. But for three months, she put her heart and soul into this and really brought this all together for us. So I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize her in front of everyone today. Thank you. Yeah. Don't. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. So the conversation, the questions actually prompted me to look at my recommendation and see if I need to make it a little more specific. So, Mr. Chief, in your efforts, do you currently have have you identified currently funding to move forward with this position? We have not identified any funding at this point where we're looking through our budget, but we haven't identified anything yet. I think the hope here was that we could, you know, help the chief identify those funding, that funding, and then come back with a report later next year about how to make it sustainable. So if I need to amend this to include also recommended to the Budget Oversight Committee, I'd love before we finish this budget to take a look at, you know, what we can do to help support to support the chief here. So I want to I just want to amend this. I'm directing, requesting the city manager help identify resources as well as the Budget Oversight Committee. I would like for both to look at what we can do to help move this along in this fiscal year so that we can have a conversation, a more fruitful conversation next summer, next August 2020 about sustainability of it. So that's what I'd like to recommend. Thank you. Councilman Ringo. I had to rely up. Ran out of time last time. But I do want to acknowledge the comments that Councilmember Price mentioned in terms of other recruitment efforts. I words at that time the general recruiting officer for a city law meeting and that was all employment but the specialty was public safety, police and fire. But I think that one of the things, if we want to look at the possibility of a year round recruiting program, we need to look at how we're going to fund it for one and two. Where is it going to be housed? Where it was housed before in civil service was one part of it. We're now in 2020, coming up in 2020, and we need to look at things a little differently. I think that we need to look at it in terms of diversity as a as a whole for the city. And I think that every department has a commitment to it. So I would look at maybe having a conversation with our financial office with John over here with regards to growth do in regards to how we can provide a sustainability model for our recruiting division, if you will, or or recruitment officer or whatever that would be sustained by all departments because all departments have recruiting needs. We need to, although the city as a whole is, as the city manager stated, that we have a lot of departments are looking good. They're looking good in some areas and not so good in others. And I think that we still need to look at diversity as an overall goal for the city and perhaps looking at how we recruit our employees and where we get them from and and what efforts we put out there makes a big difference in terms of where we find people and how we get hired here. We're always looking for the best. We want to say that we hire the best, but if we don't make an effort to find the best, we're not going to get them. And I've always said in the past, if we don't get them through the front door, we're not going to we're not going to get them out through the back. So that's that's get them through the front door by providing front door meeting, testing, interviewing and getting them to get him on the list or whatever. And in, in, in hiring them and then promoting them and the back door being retirement. Okay. Hey, you get the analogy. Didn't work too well, but for whatever it's worth, I think that this is a city we should make this a city commitment to towards diversity. And nothing speaks volumes about that commitment we have there, making a city commitment to diversify our city by having focused and a general recruitment effort that attracts all our employees here we had before and we've done the city has gone phenomenally. When I first started, I had three police sergeant, three Latino police sergeant. Now we have a Latino police chief. And because of the efforts that we did, we had very few police captains and battalion chief of the fire department. Now we have a Latino police chief because of those efforts that we did before that came in through a targeted recruitment effort. So we want to really put our money where our mouth is. Let's put our money where our mouth is. Let's put money into a recruitment division or a recruitment effort that is going to diversify the city. So I'm hoping that in future discussions, we could emphasize that a little more. And like I say, we could find the funding mechanisms to do that. Sure percentage of funds that could go from every department into a employment, if you will, employment. Basket bowl, whatever you want to call it, pot. There you go. Not that kind of pot. Pot. In terms of money, pot to waste to do this efforts. Hey, man, you know, if you can't have fun here, why not? And so anyway, let's let's look at that. I think that's that it's an opening conversation that I think we we should continue. And I know we're going to be looking at getting a new city manager. Perhaps that will be something that that we could discuss as well with with a new city manager. No aspirations to the current one, of course, because, you know, you've been here a long time and and thank you for your service. And we also need to look at moving towards a future. Thank you. Thank you very much. And now we will move on to public comment. We have five members of the public and I can say Adrian Sias, Stephen Contreras, Brooklyn Wilson and Devin Abad. Please come forward in that order tonight. Ken Fay, Adrian Sias, Steven Contreras, Brooklyn Wilson and Devin Ballard. Please begin. She's in here. So I just want to make sure, you know, I don't want to join real quick. I don't want to be part of the Scooby Doo and the gang over there. But, you know, there is no speak there's no sound system outside that's stipulates that you're calling, you know, speakers to come to the role. You know, in the previous city hall and our old one, seismic one, they had that system, you know, and you have a bathroom that's over 400 feet away. So you have to run to the bathroom, go back through police check to come back in. So if we could figure it out, I know we just started in here. We can figure that out. It was a good request. Thank you. Thank you. That being said, I want to first say I appreciate the and commend the efforts of our fire chief. This is a very progressive moment in time where we have a city department admitting that there are flaws in the system and they want to do better. It was amazing to see a slide admitting that there is implicit bias in relation to any hiring, especially here in the public sector. That being said. I saw that the African American presence has gone from 8.5 to about three and a half. I would assume that's because we're in the the age of the baby boomer, the great baby boomer retirement. That's literally, you know, everyone who was hired probably in the seventies and eighties due to targeted hiring and court mandated , you know, an unfunded mandate, you know, whatever wants to be called, you know, those those opportunities that occurred in the seventies and eighties. You know, now we have the, you know, the gradual decline that comes with people retiring. So we need to figure out a way to not only offset that, but also increase it more to be more reflective of the diversity that we live in. A suggestion that would come to mind for me would maybe be reaching out to the L.A. chapter of the Stentorian, which is a group that advocates for black firefighters across the nation. There's a sizable chapter in L.A., and I'm sure they would love to have a conversation with you, fire chief, if you could reach out to them. Also, you know, I grew up next to a fire station and on 23rd and Long Boulevard, I think that's I don't know what number that is, but it's ten. Yeah. And, you know, the only fire, the only person that look like me that I ever seen in the jump and the get up. And he came to my school when I was a kid was Mr. Wayne Chaney. So, you know, I know I don't know how many years he's got left, but it'll be great to see for the next generation of children that look like me and go to the public school system. You know, we can replace three more of him. That being said, thank you, fire chief, for your efforts and I appreciate to see where we go forward from this. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next speaker. Good evening. Oh. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Okay. There we go. Now hear myself. Good evening, Mayor Garcia and members of the City Council. My name is Adrian Sears, and I'm a. Proud resident of the great city of Long Beach. Tonight, I am here on behalf of the inaugural class of Epic. Leaders, the class of 2019, in support of Councilman Rex Richardson's recommendation to hire a full time sworn. Diversity recruitment and partnerships manager. For the Long Beach Fire Department. Long Beach is the seventh largest city in the state of California and is ranked among or is ranked number ten among the most. Diverse cities in the country. As such, we need our first. Responding agencies to reflect that diversity. As you well know, the Long Beach Fire. Department is not. Alone in its struggle to. Increase diversity in its workforce. Over the past 20 years, I have worked with first responders throughout Los Angeles County, and they all grapple with the best ways to diversify their workforce. But progress is being made. For example, I worked with the City of Los Angeles Fire Department to create the Crenshaw. High School Fire Academy. The Academy's goal was to create an interest in a career in fire service among students of color. We actively recruited males and females and spent the next three months mentoring. And training them inside and outside of the classroom. Every Saturday, we transported. Busloads of students from Crenshaw High School to the L.A. City Fire Training Academy in Elision Park. They participated in physical training to prepare them for the physical demands of the department. They also participated in classroom learning and hands on. Exercises to gain knowledge and the manipulation of tools and equipment. At the end of that three months, each participant proudly received a certificate of completion at graduation in the presence of their family and friends. These kinds of recruitment strategies are only successful when the positions are fully funded by the department and the city, which it serves. We have we have to make a sustained investment in diversity and inclusion. Chief. Congratulations on the best practices that are already being employed by the Long Beach Fire Department. We appreciate your efforts. To that end, again, we strongly support Councilman Rex Richardson's recommendation to hire a full time sworn. Diversity recruitment and partnerships manager. As Jesse Jackson wisely stated. Inclusion is not a matter of political correctness. It is the key to growth. Thank you. Thank you so much. Next speaker, please. Good evening. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor and council. My name is Steven Contreras and I'm with the Epic Leaders Institute, and this is our culminating project. I would like to ask for your vote. Yes. In support of the recommendation for full time diversity, recruitment and partnership manager, someone who is as someone who has been through the hiring process with public safety. I know what it is like to be a minority and not have anyone around you who looks like you during the process. This would add to the diversity, inclusiveness of the fire department. Thank you, Chief, for all of your work and thank you for your time, Mayor and Council. Thank you so much. Next speaker, Brooklyn Wilson. Good evening. Good evening, Mayor Garcia, all the council members and everyone in this room. My name is Brooklyn. Brooklyn Wilson. I'm 13 years old. I'm a student at Hughes Middle School. I'm an avid reader. And some of my favorite subjects are science and health. I'd like to share a quick personal story of myself. When I was around ten or 11, I had a major surgery, and about a month after that surgery, I was in an accident. A car accident was my mother. And because of that major surgery, my mother wanted to make sure I was okay. So she called the ambulance. And when the fire department came and made sure that everything was all right that day, I realized that I meant that I met real life heroes. And I thought, how cool would it be for me to work in that profession? But the reality. Is, I've never seen anyone that looks like. Me fighting, working as a firefighter or a paramedic in our community, as a young woman and the as a young woman of color living here in Long Beach, I can speak on behalf of youth like me and say that we need access to programs that show us how to succeed in pursuing careers with the Long Beach Fire Department. And we need to see that it can be done through examples that we see working in the fire department today. Thank you. Q In the last speaker of bar. Hello. My name is Devon Abla. I'm also representing the Economic Policy and Impact Center as one of their inaugural graduates from their leadership class. So obviously, I am here today to ask you to vote yes on this item. But first, I just wanted to say there's a lot of different opinions on a lot of different subjects coming from this dais. And the one thing I notice, I worked for city council for two and a half years, and as a resident of Long Beach, there's a real commitment to diversity on this council. And I want to thank all of you for that commitment, because our diversity is really our strength. But I really want to talk today because in Epic, we all sort of split up into different groups to tackle different issues going on in the city, from automation at the port to diversity in the fire department to the wage gap. Now, I know that the wage gap was said, well, all right, so the fire department, a couple other places maybe, but for the most part, everything is fine. And you know, I applaud the city because women who are doing the same job as men are roughly getting paid the same amount, but they're not getting all of the same jobs. And so as we vote yes on this fantastic item that I really do appreciate, because it's so important. I want us to look forward and to see how it's successful, how it is not successful, and how we can carry it on into other departments. We need more women as engineers. We need more women as bureau managers. We need more women as department heads. And I think that there's a lot of ways we can accomplish this. And I think that this program or this position right here is going to be a great way for us to measure the effectiveness of some of those programs, whether it's going into our high schools, going into our communities, our universities, and making sure that we are letting people know that, you know what, you do have opportunity here in the city of Long Beach. You do have the ability to run a department. You do have the ability to be a traffic engineer. You don't have to look a certain way to achieve a certain thing. And I also want to say that this isn't just about women. Obviously, ethnicity is a big deal. And I also want to throw out to our LGBTQ community. I want to make sure that as we're doing this, we're looking at them as well and making sure that they can get into high paying careers as well. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. That concludes public comment. Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I'm sorry I wasn't able to be at the dais during the first part of this. Many of you know I'm a pumping mom, but I did want to make a few comments. I appreciate that we're moving forward on our diversity and inclusion. And I think that it's also important to recognize that a lot of great strides have been made by other agencies across the country and even in the region. I know Chief Osby has made a commitment to diversity at the L.A. County level. We have a women's academy, pre academy that we run that has helped with both recruitment and retention. We've changed the way that we advertise for our vacancies. When we are doing a recruit academy, we advertise in movie theaters and other places throughout the region and pick those locations by the diversity groups that we're looking to target. And and we also do a annual conference where we invite women, firefighters from all over the region to attend and discuss and be a part of the solution of a regional effort. And I would expect that in the future that Long Beach Fire Department will make a commitment to participating in that conference. It's an annual conference. It's called Arise, and it's been well-received by the participants. The reviews have been remarkable and inspiring. And so I hope that we can get on to the the the global effort regionally. And finally in closing, I will I'll take another quote from our chief. Some of the tests that we do to become, whether it's police or firefighters, are that of history. There's a lot of history behind those tests, but not a lot of data to support that. That kind of test proves the type of capabilities that are necessary to actually execute the job. He knew a lot of fire terminology in his speech at the time that I'm not as familiar with, but I'll make the analogy for the sheriff's department as I am more familiar. L.A. County Sheriff's Department used to mandate that you used a particular kind of revolver in your shooting test, but once you became a deputy, you would not be required to use that same firearm. And so that firearm, because of the width of its base and because of the the pounds of pressure necessary to pull the trigger, had an extremely high failure rate among people of a certain hand size and smaller. Typically, women and people of certain ethnicities had smaller hands than other individuals, and so they had a significant disadvantage in the process. Once they opened up the door to using other equipment which you're allowed to use on the job, the graduation rates skyrocketed and the failure in that particular category of the academy dropped. And so similarly, the chief had mentioned that you have to throw a particular apparatus in the L.A. County Fire Training Academy, but never on the job do you have to to throw that apparatus anymore because of newer systems and technology and different materials that those apparatus are made of. And so I would ask us to also look at any barriers in the process that are causing those challenges and to ensure, through subject matter experts, that the tests that we are utilizing are most aligned with the success of an individual being on the job, successfully executing the responsibilities and not being injured during the life of their career because safety, once they're on the job, is also of the utmost. Importance. So thank you for that. And I also think that there are a lot of challenges that go along with nursing moms that are firefighters. It's nearly impossible to be a first responder and be a pumping mom. It it's nearly impossible the way that calls are both on both sides of public safety. So I don't know what opportunities we have to be more inclusive of that side of it as well. But I'm always open to suggestions and support. Congratulations on the great work you've done, and thank you for accommodating my my comments at the end of this. Thank you very much. There's a motion and a second. Please cast your votes. That. Yeah, we are. We are frozen. It is. There's air pumps underneath these. Motion cars that. Are just pumping very cold air. Thank you very much. That passes. And then moving on to item 35.