Public Hearing to Consider Introduction of Ordinance Amending Alameda Municipal Code Chapter XII (Designated Parking) to Improve Procedures for Management of Public Parking on City Streets and in City Lots; and Recommendation to Approve a Policy for the Use of License Plate Recognition Technology for the Purpose of Parking Enforcement. (Planning, Building and Transportation 4227287) [Not heard on March 17, 2020]
Thank you. And I was going to say and Mike Magic Andrew Thomas, uh, planning transportation and building directory if I got that in the correct order changes. And good evening, Mr. Thomas. I think he's here. I see his name. Mr. Thomas. What have you done with Mr. Thomas? Um. There he is. Okay. There you are. Okay. I. You look like you're unmuted and everything. Are you ready to go? Uh, he, um. Let's see. Can we hear in Mr. Thomas? We can't hear anything here. Oh. It seems like his audio is not connected. It. Um. Let's see it. Connecting. It's connecting now. I can see it. Try now. Oh, now you have to unmute yourself. Can you hear me? Yes. For a moment I could. Let me try something that works. I see this. So am I hooked up? Am I ready to go? I think you are. Fired up. Ready to go. Sorry for the confusion there. Super getting used to it around here. Getting good at it. Let me just. I'm sorry. Now I'm getting double voices going on. Oh, um. Let me try this. Can you hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you. All right. That's much better. Okay. Andrew Thomas, planning building and transportation director. As the city clerk said, this is there's two items we're covering. Two items in this agenda piece with. This is one is the introduction of an ordinance amending our parking regulations within the Almeida Municipal Code and really to try to modernize those those provisions. And I will just briefly summarize some of those amendments for you tonight. And then the second piece is adoption of a policy for the use of automated license plate recognition readers for the purposes of parking management and enforcement. And I'll talk a little bit about that piece as well. The two, though, are we're bringing them together in this one staff report because they're both, we believe, instrumental to improving and modernizing our ability as a city to manage public parking here in Alameda. They're both of these actions, we believe, are consistent with your general plan policies that talk about the need to manage parking as a as a tool in managing our transportation network. And there is no bigger issue in Alameda, or at least there hasn't been historically than transportation in our ability to manage traffic and transportation and parking is a piece of that. And the general plan recognizes that the 2014 Alameda Point Transportation Demand Management Plan adopted by the City Council, the 2018 Transportation Choices Plan and your 2019 Climate Action Plan all talk about how important it is that we effectively manage parking, not just to make sure that everyone can get access to public parking when they need it at a price that they can afford. But it's also instrumental in our ability to support the business community, reduce congestion around the city, reduce greenhouse gases, and just ensure the health of our business community and our environment, everything from our ability to to do street cleaning, which is a way of keeping San Francisco Bay clean, to dealing with the larger issues of climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gases. We're not going to be able to effectively do any of those things that we can't effectively manage our parking supply and the space for parking. The other goals of these of these two companion pieces, as we to manage parking effectively, we think it also has to be convenient and flexible for the for the public and the users. It has to be flexible so that you the city council, when making policy decisions about how to manage public parking, that you can quickly and easily flex your policies and your and your tools to better enforce these two proposals are also really just trying to make our parking program more efficient and more frankly, cost effective. And then lastly, and this is certainly not something we talked about when we originally wrote this staff report two months ago. But even with the COVID 19, we are starting to think about parking in a different way and the needs for parking and the needs for people to be able to pick up and drop off food and retail and all sorts of things. So we don't quite know how that's going to play out, but I think it's pretty clear to us that the need to manage our parking spaces and manage parking and manage the use of the public right of ways is not going to be an issue that's going to go away. And anything we can do to make that system work better, make it more flexible and easier to adjust, is going to serve us well. So two months ago when we wrote this, we are also very much focused on being able to start charging for parking at the ferry terminals. I wanted to and we were pushing, pushing hard to get those parking charges in place by August, obviously, with the. But COVID 19 and the health emergency and the complete sort of drop off in ferry ridership, we don't believe this is the time to start charging for parking for the ferry terminals, but we do think it is the time to start getting set up so that we will be able to do it when life starts to return to normal and ferry ridership returns. So let me just quickly summarize these two different actions. The first is the draft amendments to the parking codes. These are really quite straightforward because the parking code is so old, for example, that I'll just hit on the four main changes to the Muni code that we're recommending. The first is about forms of payment. The currently the Alameda Mosby code does not include provisions allowing for modern forms of payment, such as mobile payment or digital permits . That is that is going to be something we want to be able to implement in the future. And it's important that our municipal code allows it. This will allow these amounts, allow for flexibility and convenience of paying with cell phones, customized parking rates, all those kinds of adjustments and modernization that a modern parking program is going to need. The amendments allow for the different being able to charge for parking in different kinds of spaces. Currently, the AMC doesn't include any provisions to allow for pay by play or multi spaced meter. Nancy currently assumes that every space is always going to be numbered or equipped with an individual meter. Well, when looking into the future, looking at things like large parking areas, neighborhood parking permit areas, we want to be able to manage parking even if every space isn't numbered or individually metered. And there are ways to do that. Thirdly, rate adjustments. The current municipal code and these provisions which were adopted originally, many years ago, assumed that parking rates just weren't going to change very often. You know, just a parking meter was going to cost essentially the same for four years on end. These adjustments make it easier for adjustments to be made by the council and or the city manager and public works director. As necessary, it may be everything from changing the hourly rates at Park Street and Webster Street to establishing a special rate for a special event at Alameda Point. You want to have that flexibility to adjust rates and do it flexibly and quickly. And then finally, the other main big issue we wanted to address in these code amendments is currently the ordinance talks about any revenue generated from parking revenue must go straight back into parking, maintenance and parking enforcement. That all makes great sense. That's still where most of the money will probably always need to go. But these amendments broaden those potential uses so that if the council felt that you had additional revenue from parking, you could start to, let's say, use it for other transportation programs like funding a shuttle or supplemental bus service to the ferry terminal to reduce the need for parking and ferry terminals, using parking revenues for projects, transportation demand management kinds of programs, bicycle and pedestrian improvements could also be something that the council might in the future choose to use parking revenues for all. The Vision Zero work that you're doing is basically trying to make other transportation modes more effective to reduce the demand on the public parking supply. So those that's a general overview unavailable to answer your questions on the code amendments. Now, let me just move quickly to the second half of this, which is sort of the other piece of this equation. We also want to put the city in the position to be able to use the most modern tools for parking enforcement. And one of those tools that we are recommending is license plate recognition technology to expedite and make the process of enforcing these permit programs more effective. We also think it's going to make it more convenient and user friendly for the customer. It's going to help support that flexibility we talked about. And as I said earlier, it's just a very cost effective way of. Doing parking enforcement. For those of you who show the council is all very much aware, but for the benefit of the public. License plate technology essentially replaces the old fashioned manual approach for parking technicians to check to see if somebody has paid for the parking space on the public street or lost it there that they have or that they're using to store their vehicle. In this case, it's a camera mounted on a vehicle that automatically processes the license plate number on a car and that can then can then verify whether that car has paid for the parking. If not, they can immediately in real time send that data to a handheld and the parking technician can write a ticket. So there's no more of the checking for green lights on meters. There's no more of make checking for little white slips on parking that vehicle dashboards. No more chalking of tires, none of that. With this new technology, you are able to move much more quickly, much more cost effectively. And I don't know, I've already mentioned this, but we're just following the lead of our other cities here in the Bay Area, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Leandro, Emeryville. Pretty much any city that's really modernizing their parking program is using this technology. It's very cost effective. It's very flexible, and it's great for also understanding use. You know, how many cars are parking every day in certain lots, but there is a there are issues to be considered. And the first and foremost is the privacy issues around this kind of technology. What this technology does and the privacy issue that we talk about in the staff report is you're collecting huge amounts of data, huge amounts of data at once. And when, in fact, we only need one while we're really looking just for one thing, has that vehicle paid for the parking for the space it's using that day? However, by collecting this amount of data, and if misused or not secure, it can be used by individuals or organizations to track people. It can be misused if it's in the wrong hands and that or is transferred to some other group or organization that wants to use it for a different purpose. Obviously, from our perspective, we're only interested in the technology for one reason, and that is to help us manage our parking supply. We are not interested in it for tracking people or for any other purpose. So what you have attached to your staff report in the package today are two important documents. One is the policy. And so this would be the city's policy for how this technology will be used and how will be used in a way that they were careful about making sure that that information and that data does not end up being misused by others or by ourselves, and that we try to minimize the potential privacy impacts of the use of this data that may occur if we are who are using it for parking management. So essentially the exhibit to the impact analysis essentially acknowledges the risks and identifies mitigations and essentially strategies and requirements that we can impose on ourselves to really minimize those potential risk and safeguard personal privacy and meaningful and minimize the potential impacts. I won't summarize both those documents, but I think the three main criteria that you will see is that we take essentially three approaches. Number one, the control of the information, the way we're proposing to proceed here is that like every other city, we would be bringing on a separate vendor to provide this technology and to store that data for us. This data would be owned by the city of Alameda. So with our information, we are going to be responsible for it and we're not going to share it. Now, of course, you minimize all the you minimize the risks around that whole issue of not sharing if you don't store it for very long. So the second important concept here is as that parking technician with their vehicle is driving down the street and recording every single parking, every single license plate and getting hits or no hits, you know, hit is in this terminology, meaning that car did not. Hey, for the parking or that car is stolen or is is wanted for some reason there's a violation in that only in those cases the data would be kept for violations or hits for other existing problems with that vehicle, stolen vehicle or something like that. That data then would be stored for a maximum of two years. Every other license plate, all the other data. If you paid your parking ticket, your car is clean. That data is erased that day. We don't need that data for our purposes. We don't want to have to store it. We the the proposal here is just to eliminate that data. So the vast majority of the data that's collected each day around the individual vehicles is going to be deleted. We only keep the people who have not paid for their parking or there's some other violation there. The vehicle is stolen or there's an issue, this active crime situation around that vehicle. So there is a tradeoff. Of course, that means we're not keeping information. That information could be valuable to the police department if they were investigating some sort of crime that occurred after the fact. We felt that on the whole, this was an appropriate trade off. We we recognize there are privacy issues and there is a tradeoff with police trying to balance that with personal privacy. But in this case, we felt like we had about the right balance. And it has sort of been, in our view, the balance we struck here is a a policy that recognizes the privacy protections are necessary, allows us to proceed as a city with cost effective parking enforcement and modernize our planning and management of the parking, as well as our climate change and customer convenience and flexibility sort of goals . So we think we've struck the appropriate balance. We hope you agree. If you do, then the recommendation would be to introduce the first reading of the ordinance amendments tonight and approve the policy for the use of automated license plate readers for the purpose of parking enforcement. If you do approve the policy, then our next step would be to start soliciting a vendor who is comfortable with our own restrictions and requirements. And of course, that vendor would come back to council for before we could sign a contract. So that's sort of the initial steps. I'm available to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Thomas. Good report. Um, Counsel, do we have any clarifying questions before we go to public comment? I guess I should ask the city clerk, do we have public comment on this item? We do. Okay. So, Counsel, let's just ask any clarifying questions of Mr. Thomas. Now we'll hear public comment and we'll come back for a discussion. Vice Mayor Knox Wait. I have a quick question. I think it might be for the city manager, but whoever is the appropriate place and I apologize for not asking this earlier, it didn't come up until I was listening to the presentation. I'm curious in in how the decision was made that the public works director is the one who sets our parking policy price. Given that the transportation this is kind of moving us further into a transportation policy arena, which is where I think park pricing and parking should be. And why that wouldn't be either the city manager or the the transportation director or planning body and transportation director who's. So I'm not sure who I could. Eric, unless you want to respond, I can certainly give some background on that. Go ahead, Mr. Thomas. Um, I look, I think for tonight's purposes, it certainly would be fine to make it the city manager instead of the public works director. Our thinking around that specific language, though, was not that we were trying to take the power away from the city manager or the city council, for that matter. It was the thought was that council would set policy directions. For example, Perkins Webster Street Youth Council in past years have adopted a policy that the city should maintain the park. The parking meter pricing at a rate that would ensure 85% occupancy. The concept being, if it's all empty, it means the price is too high, if it's all full and its price is too low. So 85% occupancy sort of means you're driving down the street every block. There's one or two spaces available that would be sort of. And the thought was, once the council set the policy, then the public works director and the management of the parking meters and the parking lot are really under the purview of the public works department in the city of Alameda. So it wasn't really trying to set the public works director off as the policy maker as much as the person implementing, you know, changing the actual rates to implement a policy that was adopted by by council. That was the thinking. I think changing it from public works director to city manager or his designee also would be a fair. Adjustment if that was something the council wanted to do. Thanks. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. Okay. And Mr. Chen, city attorney. Mr. Chen. Yeah. I just want to also add that looking at the ordinance, there is existing language and previous ordinance language that designates the public works director as the person who is essentially managing the various parking endeavors. So if the council wishes to make changes, will want to be really clear in the ordinance. And what places is the Council looking to make changes from public works director to something else, it appears. And maybe a dozen or more places in the ordinance. Thank you for that. And Mr. Leavitt, did you want to add anything? No. I can hear you. I could see you shaking your head. Okay, that's a no. Um. Any other clarifying questions? Mr. Desai? Yes. Thank you. Um, what thought? Well, frankly, I'd love to see Cesar Chavez Day be celebrated March 31st. I think it's a state holiday. Um, it's. It's not included there in section nine, so that I would certainly encourage that. And frankly, I think generally not just in this one, but generally I think the city of Alameda ought to celebrate that day. Um, so we might look forward its future and how we might change the city holidays. So, yeah. Thank you. That was your clarifying question. Thank you. Um, I've got one. If no one else has a clarifying question. Um, Mr. Thomas, I just wanted to ask a question in the I'm in the draft policy, which is exhibit one and. I'm sorry. I have the temperamental iPad today. Okay, I got it. And my question is on page two of the draft policy. It talks about storage of data and parking enforcement. El Paso automated license plate reader data is stored based on the following schedule. License plates collected but not cited. So what you were talking about there? Collected. But they pay. There's no problem with that car. That data is not retained. But the second bullet is license plates for issued parking citations retained for two years. Now I don't see our police chief popolare here, but if I recall correctly, the policy that governs our LPR data for the patrol vehicle mounted pass the one year retention policy. And assuming I'm correct in that, why would we make this data storage period longer? And I see city attorney been shown with his hand at that. So. Mr. Shen And so we actually inquired with the police chief and the fact that the policy here in front of you actually stores data for less time and all the cards. So what Mr. Thomas is proposing is 24 hours of storage of no heads and two years experience ahead with the police department's policy. It's more I believe it's in the more in the range of six months of storage when there's no heads and and potentially unlimited length of storage when there isn't. So the policy in front of you tonight stores far less data than the existing APD policy that's in existence, that the inquiry that we made earlier today with the police department in anticipation of this question. So my question would be, cause I was on the council that set that policy. And I know the police chief wanted a longer period of time and he didn't get it. So do you have that language to share with us? Because I'm trying to remember when we might have lengthened that retention period. Unfortunately, I don't. My office reached out to the police department in my understanding and said it's generally six months, but if there is a head and the head is different because for the police departments they might be engaged in, for example, with the district attorney's office for a multi-year investigation that the district attorney would request. And there will be necessity to keep that data essentially until the case is well over. And that could be many, many, many years because it could be the prosecution, the appeal and any collateral appeals. And that's why the data, I believe, is stored longer with the police department. And I unfortunately don't have the exact data. But we did inquire into the patient on this question. And my understanding is that it's six months and much longer to the extent necessary for any particular case for the police department. Well, you know, I always like to follow the advice of our city attorney, but I was there at that vote, and that is not my recollection. I'm willing to say maybe my recollection is, but I, I well, this is what I would say and this is what I wrote in the notes that I don't see any reason that we would retain license plate data from. It's you know that's that's related to that has has turned out been a stolen car. And again once the a case is is ongoing. So there is a stolen car. So it's pursued. Of course, we're not going to destroy that data. In fact, I think there's even something in the policy that it then becomes it goes into an evidentiary file. That's something else. But for all others that are being looked into, I would want to make sure it was the same retention period as we use for police department powers and and not any longer. And I just looking at the council, I don't think any of you all were on that council with me. But anyway, Councilmember Vela, did you have your hand up or is that just your hand? Okay. Councilman Rivera and new speaker. Well, I, I, I recall this conversation did come up when we were considering six Alpers. And I believe that your statement about it being only written for a year is correct, because I thought that was part of the discussion when we were talking about Six Alpers, which was an issue that came before the council, not this council, but the previous council was when I thought that conversation occurred, I did I did have also a question about the type of photographing technology that would be used, because, again, this was something that came up before with the six Alpers, which was what exactly getting photographed. So is it just life and is there a way to crop it out for it or to small make it so that it's just limited to the license plate and even perhaps just the back of the vehicle? And that wouldn't necessarily include faces, that sort of thing. I think Mr. Thomas has an answer for you, Mr. Thompson. And you'll see that in our privacy impact analysis, this idea of making sure that the camera that's mounted on the vehicle, the parking technician vehicle, is directed down and focusing just on the license plate. You know, we don't care about somebody who might be sitting in the vehicle. That's not our issue. The issue is literally just reading the license plate. And so one of the mitigations is the direction, how the camera should be directed when it's mounted on the vehicle. But I guess my question is, if there's something, would there be an instance where something else would get captured? And if something other than the license plate gets captured, are we going to be cropping the image? Well, I mean, in terms for the purposes of the parking management program, so there's two different LPR policies, the one that the mayor was talking about for the fixed, which is for fighting purposes. And then this LPR policy, which is for parking management, you know, for the, the, the, the mitigations that we were contemplating where first of all, if your car is clean and you paid your parking, then we're not keeping any data at all. No, no photographs of any kind. They're being they're being deleted immediately. That day just erased. If your you have not paid your parking ticket and I do remember a process by which, you know, if we start seeing photographs coming up, which are just too broad, they they can be cropped. Now, once again, we would only be cropping photographs that we're keeping and those would be somebody who got a parking ticket or they came up with a stolen vehicle or something like that. Right. I mean, I'm just I'm just thinking of a scenario where it's like in one of these lives, somebody walking with a small child who happens to be shorter and all of a sudden we start capturing other things. Is there going to be some sort of review mechanism to make sure that we're limiting what we're actually capturing? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's. Well well, while you're taking public testimony, I'm going to go back and read through the impact mitigation just to verify that my recollection is correct. Once the third important and last piece of this I think is important in this policy is and the mitigation is this annual review. Like, we do need to be checking on ourselves. We do need to make sure and I think that's one of those kinds of things that as part of the annual review and that's the reason I mentioned the vendor coming back to council, I think this is an evolving conversation really getting down to these kinds of specifics. I think it would make great sense to have that sort of annual review, include a review of, okay, let's see some of the photographs you've been keeping for a year. I mean, if we start seeing that it's getting sloppy, that we're catching all sorts of people and not. Just license plates. It means we need to sort of, you know, clean up our program and do better training, frankly. Okay. Or work with our or work with our contract vendor and say, hey, you need to clean up your program if you want to keep our contract. Okay. And Mr. Shin. So. Mr. Chan, we can't hear you. I've been able to obtain the APD LPR policy number for for 62. So I'm going to read the language to the council. Thank you. Requested the specific language. The language for the APD policy is that all LPR data downloaded to the server will be stored for a period of six months and thereafter shall be purged unless it has become or it is reasonable to believe, to become evidence in a criminal or civil action, or is subject to a lawful action to produce records. In such instances, the applicable data shall be downloaded from the server onto portable media and stored into evidence. And so that that was the, the information I was attempting to convey, which is that it's six months unless there is a case pending, at which point it becomes evidence and it stays much longer. So it doesn't say two years anywhere. It does not say two years, two years as the what the proposed in front of you. I think that the parallel is that what Mr. Thomas proposes for the 24 hours is close. The parallel there are six months. The two years. Here is the parallel to the somewhat less definite timeframe in the APD policy. Um. Yeah, I. Well, it would be great if. If you could maybe while we're hearing public testimony, if you could just email that over, cause I just, like I said, I, um, I do remember there are not a lot of times that I disagree with our police chief, quite frankly, but I really felt and it was one of those cases where we worked with the ACLU and the Oakland Privacy Project and, you know, trying to establish that balance between police needs, you know, crime fighting, crime solving needs and protection of civil liberties. And I just remember there was a one year limitation that didn't make the chief very happy, but, uh, and I just don't remember it coming back for modification since then. Um, but anyway, um, if there are no further. Mr. Thomas has his hand up. I just very quickly. Yes, Councilmember Bell on that provision that everything will be cropped out of the photograph is actually already in the, in the impact thing. So any photograph will be kept for that, not a limit if it's not purged immediately that day, it is being kept because of a ahead or or not paying. Then even still it's cropped if there's I. Guess my question is the sentence that comes after it that says personal identity information, call it connected. That cannot be technically. Obfuscated will be used solely for the purpose. What would that be? Cheese. I have no idea if that's. Why don't you take public testimony? Let me. Let me read out. Okay. It's just the final sentence. Point number three. Yeah, that's a funny phrase when you think about that. Um, okay. So should we go to our public comments, counselor, or any other clarifying questions? Okay. Ms. ways here. Let's hear public comment, please. Okay. We have two. The first one is from Karen Bay, Mayor Marilyn Ashcraft, City Councilmember, City Manager Eric Leavitt and city staff for Alameda paid parking and our ferry terminals and city lots will be a new source of revenue. And we have before us an exciting opportunity to use these revenues to fund high priority transportation projects. Parking revenue is something one of the highest sources of revenue for some cities. In my opinion. It's important that we separate the permit parking revenue from the daily parking revenue and manage these revenues differently. Permit parking is a more stable source of revenue, which could be used to fund some of the high priority transportation projects listed in the Transportation Choices Plan that currently have no funding sources. There are two projects that I list below for your consideration. One, as we move towards finalizing and implementing our public parking management plan and using public parking permit revenues to fund a smart city parking management system could be prioritized. Is state of the art automated parking management system can assist us with controlling operating costs, collecting pertinent data that will help us improve the management of public parking long and long term transportation planning. The second project is the Alameda shuttle funding. The Alameda back shuttle could provide shuttle services to our three ferry terminals and would be an important tool in getting more people out of their cars and getting more people to use public transportation. We can expand the Alameda shuttle to provide citywide services as more funding becomes available. Finally, we could use the Oakland Broadway shuttle model, which is a partnership between the city and AC Transit. And ah, we could explore other models to determine which model works best for Alameda, but this is a great opportunity to fund this high priority project. Thanks for your consideration. Oh. And the next speaker is Jim Strelow. Lifelong resident of Alameda. Madame Mayor. Council Member Staff There is a major hole in the logic of your license plate recognition policy at Alameda Point. Your intent is to limit and manage how long people park at city run parking spots. The major overlooked flaw is with management of non city run parking spots. Look at Williams-Sonoma was warehouse at Viking Street and West Orange Ski Avenue. Businesses at Alameda Point have parking for their own business needs. Those businesses currently have no need whatsoever to watch who parks in their parking spots. There is no current demand for parking in front of those businesses for not doing business with them. But once the city opens up, Seaplane Lagoon and the new ferry location, vehicles will soon realize they can park for free in non city parking spots nearby. There will be no license plate recognition at those free parking spaces. Those businesses will thereafter have to pay an employee to spend time to monitor their own business parking spots for scofflaws who are not doing business at their location. Their own business parking spots will become an attractive new nuisance to people who will want to avoid paying at the LPR parking spaces. A solution might be for the city to authorize these security monitoring service that currently patrols the area to report potential violators to a business contact. That service can then determine if there is a potential violation. And phone a tow truck service. But even at that, the city's license plate program will be a daily nuisance for businesses to mitigate. Your policy will spend lots of money for LPR equipment to monitor empty parking spaces. If people can park for free nearby, please fix your policy to plug that loophole. And that's the loudspeaker. That's the extent of our public speaker Public comment. So I will close public comment and we will return to council discussion. And I want to thank City Attorney Evenson for sending me that data retention policy for the purpose for the police department. I can see that we were even stingier than I thought we were with data retention. And so what I'm saying is, and I don't know if Mr. Thomas has a copy of this, too, but I do data retention, which is just one paragraph long. It says, in pertinent part, that all our data downloaded to the server will be stored for a period of six months and thereafter shall be purged. Unless it has become or it is reasonable to believe it will become evidence in a criminal or civil action, or is subject to a lawful action to produce records. In those circumstances, the applicable data should be downloaded from the server onto portable media and broken into evidence, which I think is in your policy. But I would argue would I do want to argue, but I would suggest that if the police department is retaining data for six months, unless that that license plate is found to have been involved in a crime or a civil action, and then, you know that that takes it into the realm of evidence. I would think that it is reasonable to have to have the policy for the parking lot data also be retained for six months unless these other circumstances apply. Unless. I mean, Mr. Thomas, if you think there's a reason to retain parking. Right, Dad, want to make sure we're. We're saying the same thing here. So under the police department's current program, all data is kept for six months? Yes. Well. Everything is kept for six months, and then it's deleted unless there is some reason to keep it for a for an actual crime or as part of evidence, what we're proposing to do is, unless this person has a ticket or is part of a crime with a stolen vehicle. That data are data will be eliminated in 24 hours. So if you're saying no, if you're saying you want us to keep it for six months to reflect the police department's policies, then that would be that would be extending our how long we would be holding data. We're maybe saying two different things. I'd say right now, your policy says license plates collected but not cited are not retained at all, and that that is different from the police department. But remember what this policy is governing and what this council I think is likely to approve, but I won't speak for my colleagues is a parking management program. The, um, the police department, they, they do keep data for six months unless it is a notice to be in a crime. So I. And the second bullet of yours is license plates for issued parking citations. I kept for two years, I. Don't understand why you would need two years to pursue someone who has a parking ticket. If I you know, if you again, if it's one of these vehicles, but then you're going to share that information. If you have gotten hits on vehicles that are stolen or vehicles that I love the term, but scofflaws involved in some crime, you're going to you're going to turn that over to the police anyway. So could you help me understand why you think parking citation replace expired parking citations need to be kept two years? Well, our thinking was you need you have to give people time to appeal. Parking tickets. So there's it might draw out. I mean, we look at San Francisco. I think they have if there's a if somebody's dealing with a parking ticket, they keep that information until it's. I mean, I guess one clarification we could make clear is it's until resolved or two years, whichever is whichever comes first. I mean, if somebody comes in and pays their parking ticket the next day, we don't need to have that information for two years. The thought was after, if if it's still not resolved in two years, we're going to get rid of the information. I'm I don't know why. If you wanted to shorten it we couldn't to one year but I just want to make I mean those are that's the that's the information we're keeping for somebody who hasn't paid a parking ticket yet or had some problems. So we can shorten that if you'd like. I'm just don't know what top of my head right now, what would be too short? I mean, like I said, we're not interested in keeping information if we don't need it. Um. Okay, well, I. I said those are, those are my views. I think that retention, um, is, you know, should be a reasonable length and reasonable minds could differ over what that is. But I don't want to take up all the time. Councilman Brody, I think I set your hand up. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thanks, Andrew, for the presentation. That's typical of Andrew presentations. Very forward thinking, so I appreciate that. Um. I had the same recollection of the mayor that it was one year, but it was six, six months. So I wanted to question but then, you know, maybe a solution of that is, you know, we do they collected, not cited, not retained. And then we do a second category. If it being for some other reason, like it was stolen or involved in a crime, then it would go off into that other category like like we have for our, our, our mobile readers and then maybe for, you know, issued. And I don't know how the technology works. I mean, two years does seem like a long time, but, you know, maybe six months after it's cleared or maybe after it's cleared or if it's not cleared, it stays till it's cleared. I don't know, something like that. But I get the analogy between the, you know, six months equating to the not retained and the two years equating to the, you know, as long as it's needed for evidence. Well, I guess what I'm trying to struggle with, you know, not so much this policy, but I'm trying to figure out , like the use case how it would work. I mean, so are we like proposing getting rid of meters and getting rid of slips and or are we going to have both or do we just not know? Or because it's a. Tiny like. Picture how this would work in real life? Right. I mean, Thomas is going to look into the future for us. We well, I speak first of all, it's this I have, but I have the benefit of working with a very talented group of other staff members. This has been an effort that's public work staff, police department staff have been working with us on this all along. So it's a good collaboration. You do have a very talented group of staff people working on this. What we but this is how we've been thinking about it. We want to introduce this license plate readers first that allow me to point and the reason we were thinking Alameda point was to very first of all the two ferry terminals operating. We were originally thinking at full steam with COVID 19. Our timing might be a little off, but the idea was and here we have these large areas around Main Street, which is completely unmarked, unmetered. This technology would be perfect for that. Then we have a situation at the Seaplane Lagoon, which is also very comparable, and this also addresses the speaker that spoke about the problems. We actually thought about that our the way we were going to use it at Alimi Point Seaplane Lagoon, obviously the the vehicle goes into the parking lot with 400 vehicles to check their license plates to make sure they're paid. What is nice about this technology for ferry riders in particular is you can walk to the booth and type in the license plate and say, I'm going to leave my car here all day. Here's how you go and pay. Or you can literally do it on your phone, do it literally, park your car, jump on the ferry, and then pay for your parking space on the ferry. Ultimately, we see this expanding and using this citywide. So you could start introducing it with street sweeping, I think Park Street, Webster Street, you know, Park Street garage or the municipal garage, the municipal lots, you might start integrating it in there because ultimately what you would be doing is you would be pulling out the old meters and instead putting in a pay by plate, sort of multi space booth. Or if somebody has already got the application on their phone and they're paying for their cars, they go to the ferry terminal a few days a week. And now there, if we start expanding the technology and this is I mean, which is a multi-year effort, this is not something we're thinking. We just overhaul the entire city. One in one summer, it was we were sort of thinking we would be rolling it out. The ferry terminals, Harbor Bay Ferry Terminal was another one where we felt like it would be very easy to implement it and use the technology there. So we'd be sort of but still have the meters on Park Street until further notice. That was sort of how we were thinking about it. The other thing just real quickly. Does that answer your question? Mr. Rodi Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, I was picturing robots and, you know, like the Hayward, I think has a robot in their garage. And I know that the airports have like the license plate that charges to your fast track and things like that. So anyway, whether it's you or a group of people are very forward thinking. So I appreciate this and you know, I, I am open and probably would prefer not keeping a clear citations for. Two years or so, I'm open to hearing what my colleagues think would be a better a better retention for those. Thank you. I think the city vice mayor. Stand up or. No, no. Okay. Anyone else have any comments? Okay. I that is the vice mayor said sorry. I my mike wasn't on, but I was saying I'd be happy to. Oh, yeah. My lip reading skills are not. They're not up to par. That's all good. Just. It's just a couple. I really want to just say how thankful I am to have this here. I think city staff across the board has done a fabulous job. I really appreciated our staff working very directly with Secure Justice to get input from the privacy community who are not here supporting or not supporting this, but who gave a lot of input and really helped make sure that what we ended up with was a report that even though we have yet to adopt a, a, um, a surveillance policy. Yet back in January we gave direction to use San Francisco intel. We have. And so this, uh, this is the first one that's come forward with a report that actually says when we're going to do surveillance stuff, this is the type of information we have so that we're having a mindful conversation about it. And I know it took a little bit of learning, but I just wanted to give Andrew and his team and everybody big props for that. Thank you very much. I think this is fabulous. I do think and I had looked through here for public works director in the current language Public Works Director as mentioned from Public Works stuff, whether it's paint, etc.. I do know the one place I would in having nothing to do with our current public works director who actually gets this and has let our parking conversations in the past. But as as rules have changed in the city over over time, I would consider at least putting the city manager in there right now. We're moving it from the council. I would say the city manager or designee would be the person. I just think it makes it cleaner. And it's an odd place for the pricing parking pricing policy or sorry, parking pricing policy to live at the public works director, because the pricing itself is not based on any sort of public infrastructure decision making. So but that's not the direction of the council. That's fine. I'd look for to support this either way. Thank you. Over and I have a quick question before I call on Mr. de SAC and Mr. Thomas and the data retention policy is that the length of time is that that length of time taken from other cities policies? Where did that come from? We looked at I don't remember exactly where the two came from the two years, but we do have also a very good parking consultant has been helping us with this. I did some of the excellent staff that's been working on this. They've been furiously texting me during this conversation. What did we do before? Text messages? I just got a text saying, you know, we could probably make one year work, but bureaucracy takes time. Well, that I mean, what I was going to say is I don't want to get hung up over something like that. And I, you know, I, um, if I get parking citations, I pay them. So, I mean, maybe, maybe they really do take two years. I assume you didn't just call that. You remember that. If the council wants to shorten it to two years, we can wait. It is two years. Yeah. I mean, I mean 2 to 1 year. Sorry. You want to do it to turn it to one year. We can work with that. And then another thing is we're going to have to then start working with selecting a vendor, bringing that vendor back. Right. We've got that whole. Conversation probably again when the vendor. Right, Anderson, let's hear. I'm mindful of the fact that it's 930 and we were just an item six. But and I know Mr. de SAC has had his hand up, so. Mr. Desai Well, thank you. Two points. One is, um, I really like the ordinance. I think, um, citizen Karen Bay summarized it best, but I especially like the ordinance and how it improves the way residents pay their parking fees or whatever else. Um, I also like the ordinance. Um, just because the way that, that we will going forward fund certain transportation projects, I certainly welcome the ordinance. And second, that the second point, though, is, you know, I'm not a fan of the license plate reading policy, quite frankly. And frankly, it doesn't really have to do with the privacy issues that people have spoken about tonight as well as in the past and in the in the far past. Um, quite frankly, I don't, you know, as one of five council members, I prefer the old way of identifying people who haven't paid their, their parking fees and the old way of assessing parking tickets. Granted, it's less efficient, it's less revenue generating, but, uh, you know, doing license plate reading. To do. For parking tickets and violations. I really think we we run the risk of having a parking ticket regime that's just completely on steroids. So I prefer the old way of doing things. I would hope that we separate the policy from the authorities, because I think this audit, for the most part, is silent on on on the on the license plate reading aspect of the. Nice discussion. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So I think we've all been heard from and I do see that our colleague, Councilmember Vela, has slipped out of view, but she might be putting a baby to bed and she's back in the nick of time. Councilmember Vela, um, are you ready to. Did you want to say anything more silly? But should we do? I was ready to support. And I'm ready to support approval of this ceremony. Yes, taking into account. But I would like to only retain the information for. One year instead of. Two years. So we were talking about a little bit and she filed the whole thing. And apparently Mr. Thomas, his staff has been furiously texting to him and they just let him know that while they could shorten it to a year. Bureaucracy takes time to get through the citations. Uh, I. But we're, we're retaining. We're retaining any evidence that there's an evidentiary need. So somebody is contesting it. They're still going to. They're still going to be able to to hold it. I just don't see how a bureaucracy would allow. That would. Require us to send out a ticket two years after the fact or something like that. I think it might be the court case pursuing it if indeed, but then it would be in an evidentiary file. I've seen our city attorney not. Are you now, Mr. Shad? Actually, I was in a band and Councilmember. I think Councilmember. Vela is right. If there is a judicial proceeding, the. Existing policy would allow staff to download it into an evidentiary file and keep it for the duration of the judicial proceeding, which will probably go beyond two years. Right. But it would be initiated inside of two years and hopefully inside of one year. Correct. So that. Yes. Yes, it certainly would. Okay. Okay. In fact, the statute of limitation requires that. Okay. So all right. So then if I understand, I think you just stated it that you you are moving approval of the amendment to the municipal code and approving the policy for the use of the appears with the modification that the retention period be limited to one year in the case of parking citation. Yes. Yes. Mayor. Yes. Which who is that so councilor. Okay, so. I like to separate out the ordinance itself from the other items and have a separate vote on on that. I'll ask the maker of the motion. Actually, I think that's mandatory. If he asks for it, though. Tip I forgave. Laura. About second whichever motion. Okay. Um. Well, I don't mind. Is it? I mean, whatever. We need to move things along to move forward, whatever. Whatever we need to do. I don't. I don't. I'm fine bifurcating. Okay, that moves it along. Yeah, let's do that. You can. You can be the maker of both if you like. That's fine. Okay. So we've got a motion that's on the ordinance. Okay. All right. So the ordinance amending the municipal code corrects. Second. And 72nd. That was you council every day. So I forget. Roll call, vote, please. Councilmember De Sang. Yes. Thank you, Knox. Wait. Hi. Odie. Just Bella. I may or as he Ashcraft I that carries by five eyes. Thank you. Second motion on the policy for the use of automated license plate readers. Motion. I'll move approval and if somebody wants to. Okay. It's been approved. And live by vice mayor, seconded by Councilmember Bellamy. We have a real cover, please. Councilmember Desai. No. Not quite. High. Odie Yes, that's was the amendment that Melissa talked about earlier. By the. Correct. By. Mayor as he Ashcraft High that carries 4 to 1 with Councilmember Dysart voting no. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Thomas. Good report. Good work to all of the staff who worked with you. Thank you. All right. With that, we close out item six A and we move on to item six B, but I bet Mr. Thomas is staying public here. And can I just say at the outset that it is 930, we've got a few more items to to cover. So let's be as expeditiously as possible and getting through this next. Public hearing to consider accepting an interim report on the status of the general plan and housing element, an annual report on the status of the Transportation Choices Plan and Associated Work Program Priorities. And an annual report on the West Alameda Transportation Management Association. And. Are you ready for me? I. I missed my sitter. I don't think we have to read the sequel language. I think we was. You okay? You're fine. Yeah, I. We just lost you for a minute there. Okay. No, it's all good. Okay, Mr. Thomas. All right, Mayor Ashcraft. Welcome. So I am good. Thank you for having me back. Um, I'm going to be. I'm going to do this very quickly and just make myself available to answer questions. This is an annual report on the general plan, the and the housing element and our transportation planning efforts.