Recommendation to request the Mayor, City Manager, City Clerk, and City Attorney to review best practices for streamlining City Council Meetings and report back on their findings within 90 days.
I want to acknowledge all the representatives from the Port of Long Beach. We have the H.R. director and finance director and another director. Thank you for being here this evening. Moving on to the next item, I'd like to take item number 28. Yeah. Item 28 is a communication from council members who panel recommendation to request the mayor, city manager, city clerk and city attorney to review best practices for streamlining city council meetings to report back on their findings within 90 days. Okay. There's a motion on the floor. Mr.. Council Member Supernova. Thank you. Keeping in the spirit of this agenda item, my comments will be brief, concise and streamlined. I'll just read part of the discussion for those of you who can't see it. And that is in over the past year, one third of our council meetings lasted six and a half hours or more, concluding at 11:30 p.m. or later. Discussion of important public business in the late hours of long meetings diminishes public participation. So what this item does is it? Asks the mayor, the city manager, city clerk and city attorney to examine best practices for streamlining meetings by concerning what other municipalities or government entities have implemented. This may include, but is not limited to setting a meeting curfew, tracking time and setting time limits for council members. Comments adding structure to the public comment process, receiving staff reports prior to the meeting and closer adherence to parliamentary procedures. And we also have a guideline. It's part of our city charter for how these meetings are conducted. And in fact, that is number 2.03.0440. The order of business and item be their list at the rules of parliamentary practice contained in Robert's Rules of Order shall govern the Council. Also, just so you know that the things we do the Council meeting, for instance, I'll just take an example of the moment of silence that's dictated by this document. So in order to remove that, not that it saves a lot of time, I think that would save 10 seconds per council meeting. Symbolically, it might be great to remove, but it is required by by the order of business. So with that, I would encourage my colleagues to support this. And thank you. Councilmember Michael. I look forward to the opportunity to hear the stuff, recommendations and the community's input on opportunities. I know that many of my constituents feel frustrated when they come to council meetings, and the item that they're looking to speak on isn't heard until 1130 at night. They oftentimes go home and we often have agenda items that impact young people, and those agenda items aren't heard until we pass their bedtime. And I think that there are opportunities for us to be more transparent and to ensure that when the community wants to engage, that it's done in a meaningful way at an hour that is reasonable for the community. So I look forward to hearing the options. Thank you, Councilmember Pearce. I yes, thank you. And I think Councilmember Super and offer this item. I agree that our council meetings are very long. I think a couple of things that I would like to to highlight as one definitely understanding, you know, the process with Robert roles that all of us on this council, including city clerk and city attorney, that we're all under the same understandings and process and making sure that we try to keep our agendas in the same format as they're presented publicly. I also really like the point that was noted around making sure that we have reports earlier. I know that that might be a little difficult for some of us, but being able to have those reports early where we're able to digest them, ask questions on Monday and Tuesday, instead of actually being presented at council with a report, it's difficult sometimes to digest them while also engaging in a debate about it and then being required to vote on it that same time. I, you know, like today we had some hearings, I think, exploring options. For us to have hearings moved up earlier than 5:00 would be a great option. I know that some conversations have been held behind the dais around supporting the committee process. If we do have that conversation around supporting more items going to committee, I would ask that staff also provide us with a report on each committee and how the city has been represented on those committees. For example, bossy. How many people from the seventh District have served as chair on the bossy for how many years? And making sure that we're able to, if we implement a committee process, that we're making sure that it's equitable across the entire city. But I think that this is a great option for us to recognize that we are a big city of half a million people and we take on big items. And it's time for us to really address how we run our meetings and how we make sure that they're accessible to everybody. And I realize that that is a difficult conversation to have after what we just went through, but I think it is an important conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Councilmember Richardson. Thank you, Councilman Austin. So. So, first of all, Councilman Super I think you're right on that. We need to have this conversation. And, you know, having participated in council meetings have been someone who's somewhat been a little long winded at times. I'll say I think there is more that we can do, but I think we do need to acknowledge that the count, the purpose of the council meetings and the structure that we have them, the purpose is for the public and it's the public's opportunity to see us at work and and for them to engage in this process . And so we need to always keep in mind the community that we have and the fact that we, you know, that the great majority of our community is working families and they work and they don't get home a lot of time. A lot of times we don't work in Los Angeles and we have traffic in Los Angeles. A lot of people do not get home until, you know, 7:00. My wife, she works in L.A. and she gets home every day around 630. People pick up kids and all those things. And so I think we need to make sure that we keep keep our families, our working families in mind as we talk about as we have this conversation. Then if I think about was your statistics 7 hours, seven a half hour or something like that per meeting was seven a half. Councilmember. Well, no, I'm violating Robert's rules if I answer that question directly so that the whole point here is we have a structure to these meetings. Yeah. The time it took you to. Say so, my point about adhering to Robert Robert's rules is that these the it gets conversational. That takes up time. The time is written in the document. I see. I think sometimes the best public policy takes place when people have an exchange. And I don't want to sacrifice quality policy with with. But it's fine if you don't want to answer the question. But I thought I heard was seven one half hours. If we have if we can't if we have the last meeting of the month cancel and we have three meetings. So that's 22 and a half hours that we typically use on average to get through the amount of work that it takes to get to get through them out the body of work in one month. 22 and a half hours on average. So if it's 22 and a half hours, one way that we can you know, one strategy is to spread out the work a little bit. Right. There's nothing that precludes us from having the fourth that fourth Tuesday of the month or having that last Tuesday, the month having a council meeting there. So I want to make sure that we as we have this conversation, we keep that on the table as well. Do I want to sacrifice another Tuesday? No. I know that we have a lot to do. I know that, you know, this is this is, you know, a working council. I understand that. But the reality is there's only so many so much in terms of pie. So either we grow the pie or we slice of the pie and give people less. And what I don't want to do is give less to the public unless it's a way that's vetted out and they have a part and a part in that process. The other thing I would say, the consideration I would just give the staff is I know the motion says to include city attorney, city clerk and city manager and the mayor. I think we should include the public in some way in this conversation. So the motion as it is, doesn't preclude us from doing additional outreach. But I think we should figure out a method to engage the public in this conversation if we want to buy in. And then in times in terms of sort of timing, I think it makes sense. And, you know, I've had this conversation with the mayor. I think it makes sense to go ahead and try to have this process wrapped up, wrapped up by the time we move into the new city hall, because that's a good opportunity for first, you know, have a hit the reset button and start fresh and just have one standard as move into the new city hall. So those are some my thoughts and a thank you. Thank you. I'll just take this opportunity to just be brief. Understanding the spirit of this item and what it would council member supervisor seeking to accomplish. I certainly support it. I think, you know, we need to be looking to become more efficient with the public's business before as we we do the public business here. During the city council meetings, our meetings do run long on. And there's probably many reasons why that that that is happening. But there's one great thing about this city, I think, that distinguishes us from many other cities, and that is our robust public participation process. And I don't want to do anything to damage that. I think we have more civic participation, more. I mean, our council meetings are packed week after week after week. And so. But I do like the idea of looking at other public agencies and how meetings are run. For example, in L.A. County, I know for the county it's run much differently. The city of L.A., other, larger, larger public agencies that don't have as much public participation, but still are managed and or comparable amount of public participation, but they manage to still run meetings efficiently. And so I'm completely in favor of this. And I think the larger conversation, the conversation that we will have in terms of getting it to the meeting, this is when this item comes back from staff with recommendations. So I'm happy to support. Councilmember Pearce. Thank you. I forgot to mention, I'm not sure if everybody has this letter yet or not, but there was a letter that I received today in support of this item, just asking for a couple of recommendations. I believe this is a small group of local organizations Cal State, Long Beach, Legal Aid Lane, Long Beach, Forward and Walk , Long Beach. That all want to be a part of the process as well in exploring how we can make our council meetings more streamlined, but also ensuring that there's maintaining community engagement in the process. So I just wanted to mention that and say that I hope that that report, when you bring it back, has included conversations with these organizations. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Super Supernova. Okay. Just a point of clarification. The agenda item asked city staff to look at this. Any member of the public can submit anything anytime over the next 90 days. If anyone would like to Google streamlining council meetings, there's a good starting point. You can look at what other municipalities have done. It was mentioned moving into the new facility. I think Palo Alto. One municipality was considering a timer clock for council comment. So that would be a piece of hardware that would be mounted on the wall. I assume, you know, like an NBA 24/2 clock as the councilmember speaks. So those types of things we'd like city staff to explore, but I don't want to. The item doesn't preclude anyone from the public sending a memo to my office or anywhere else or to any of these entities here. The one point about it was mentioned, the letter we received today, I think it was at 2:05 p.m., so it was kind of late. We started with a closed session today at four that mentioned additional council meetings or as I mentioned here on the dais was we have so many hours of work to do, so let's look at other meetings. I think that's counterintuitive. If you if you look at the option of adding meetings, you're not going to work on efficiency of existing meetings. And that's the focus of this item, is to look how we can streamline the existing meeting structure and not we're look at best practices, but the item does not include adding additional meetings. And thank you. Next up, we have Councilmember Urunga, then Mongo, then Gonzalez, and then we'll go to public comment. Thank you. Got to remember us, too. This is sort of deja vu all over again because many years ago, the reason we have the meetings where we have them now and the structure we have right now is because of the concerns raised by the community in terms of the city council not being accessible about transparency. Meetings were held during the day starting at 2:00 in the afternoon with hearings and committee meetings and and then starting the council meeting that at four, I think it was two or three in the afternoon. So we are here because of the review that was done before and this this this meeting that we have now a result of that. However, I am supportive of the fact that we should revisit where we're at. I mean, I can see time now to look at our efficiencies as we are currently so that we can make even more refinements. But I think that anything that pushes meetings out or adds meetings or makes them even earlier to where the public is not going to have access to these meetings, I think would be, as you said, counter-intuitive. So let's keep that in mind as we move forward with this and looking forward to what the what results. Councilmember Gonzalez. Yes, thanks for bringing this forward. Council Member Super. And I think it's a great item. Anything we can do to be more efficient. So a couple things that have not been mentioned is I'd like us to just think about in this research the the preplanning of holidays and days that we remove off of the the council calendar just because, you know, there's a lot that we're like, for instance, after the budget, we usually have a day off Thanksgiving, Christmas, so perhaps we could be a little bit more strategic and in how we're removing those off the council calendar. Of course, we don't want to be here during Christmas or Thanksgiving, but the days surrounding that would be something to think about. And the only reason I think that the the group had put together an extra day like Dark Tuesday and I had to explain this to council member super not is because we have additional duties. So many of us are on committees, state, federal legislative housing committees, etc. study sessions that we have, charter amendments that we're going to do, a study session, etc., etc., etc.. And so that may be a good opportunity for us to use the Dark Tuesday for those specific meetings. So that's one thing I'll mention. Other than that, I think this is great and I look forward to it coming back. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Longo. Thank you. So just to kind of align with Councilmember Austin, I'm sorry, Councilmember Richardson's comments on the previous agenda item, there's always a lot of input from council members and that's great. But unless it's a component of the friendly amendment of what's being considered, I, I just wanted to kind of throw that in there. And so while I appreciate the idea of a stop clock, I always appreciate staff's responses. But I know that kind of a component of a stop clock is also if I ask a question, how long does it take staff to respond? And that can be a part of the whole dialog. And so one of the other components could be perhaps a number of questions before reviewing. And I really appreciate the Dark Tuesday because when big items are coming, it's a way for community meetings to happen and for us to talk with the community. And it's often difficult to get these chambers, as Councilman Gonzales said, for our committee meetings and our structures where we have the public coming in. And so I know that in looking to offer opportunities, it's great that anyone can come and speak for 3 minutes at the dais, but to have a real dialog with the community, there have to be dates for that. And one of the other dates that I would comment on is I know Councilmember Durango and I consistently want to be able to be able to be out in the community for neighborhood night out. Our communities consistently ask us to be there. It's a time when they have the ability to ask questions that are already gathering. It's a national day, but yet every single year we have to struggle to either get it on an agenda and by then it's too late, or when we want to ask for it, we're not sure what the agenda might be and if there would be something time sensitive. And so I really appreciate this agenda item. And I think Councilmember Suber not for his step forward on this. Councilmember Richardson. Thank you. So just a few more thoughts. So one, I think another way. So if we say there's only so much PI, if it's 22 hours on average, we spend on and through three meetings we do have. And thank you for bringing it up. The committees. The committees. I mean, we should take a real review at the committees. Which committees are not like how much work is on the docket in committees, how much stuff, how many people don't call or utilizar committees when they should? Right. And if people utilize those committees, maybe they've set out some of their ideas. Or if we created the process that if there's a fiscal impact, it has a committee review first. It could it could potentially vet out some of the some of this work. So the council meetings are more are are less of a proving ground for new ideas, but rather we use it to to improve things. So that's something we could we could think about. Additionally, I'd like to just have a little more specificity on how we how we plan to engage the community. So and I'm going to pose this the city staff since apparently. Well, first, let me ask, is there is it against Robert's rules or order any any process to for us to speak to the maker of the motion or ask for clarity or anything, and. You're supposed to go through the chair. So you're not under rubber rules. You're supposed to ask the chair, and then it goes to the member of the committee. If you're not if the chair doesn't do that. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to ask city staff. So how would we I just want to and I don't want to belabor this, but I do want some clarity before I cast the vote today. How would we plan on actually getting input from the public on this before we make a decision? Well, as the motion stands right now, we would do what staff would normally do, which is do some research. We would bring back a report and then that community input would really happen at the council stage. So we would certainly take community input. We would be providing a menu of options and some recommendations. If you wanted to amend the motion to actually include a robust public outreach method, it could be anything from, you know, just having it will collect input from anybody or we'll have a survey or we could go out and do full blown meetings. So I think the more work you do, the longer the item would take. Sure. And and I think moving into the new building give us gives us roughly a year or a bit less. I would offer a friendly than that. We and I don't want to belabor it, but I want to actually have a meeting. I would like a meeting. And you should be inclusive of those those individuals who submitted the letter, as well as common cause because they've consulted our city before on good governance measures just to see if there's any ideas that the when the first time the council sees it, any good ideas that are out there. I like the conversations about I like one idea, for example, that when you submit an agenda item. Excuse me, Councilmember. I just want to be able to speak clearly, make sure my ideas were recorded. So, you know, like, one idea I think is good is when an agenda item is placed on the agenda, there's a time request on how much time you're requesting for, for debate. I've seen other agendas do that, and it actually allows you to sort of predict how much time you're going to spend on it. Then the council gets to make a choice whether you want to spend, extend the debate or continue with what's approved sort of proposing the meeting. So that's just a suggestion. So that's my friendly to the maker of the motion. Can we have as they conduct outreach, can they also meet with some of the community stakeholders in common cause? I think what I said previously, it was wide open for anyone to submit anything to city staff. Mr. Parkin, is there anything in my motion, this, my agenda item that would preclude the public from contacting you on this? There is in the motion, as I understand it. No, there is nothing that precludes the public from sending their comments or suggestions to city staff or to any of the council members or the mayor. So that's a no. Then it's a no. Okay. Subs to motion the motion as written. That includes community part one meeting for community part partners, including Common Cause I myself through motion. It's been moved and seconded. Councilmember Mungo. Did you call? Yes. I'm sorry. I appreciate the comments in my support of this item. One of the things that I think is really important is that there's an equal footing for anyone to have input. And one of the things that I would potentially encourage would be that perhaps the city clerk has a specific designation on emails that all come in related to it. I know that one of the challenges sometimes is we'll know what items coming two months out and people want to provide comment. However, until the items agenda is the e-com, it can't be there. And so even with Councilmember Supernova's original motion, if people wanted to make that comment for it to really be filed into the record in the most efficient way, for us to aggregate that and give access to us as a council of what those comments are, because they feel like it's really important that we are able to read those when considering this item as it comes back in case staff does not fold that in. So what I'll do is I'll make a substitute substitute motion that we reach out to the community through insight will be Twitter and Facebook posts that let them know that the council is looking to better include the community in the dialogs related to council agenda items and provide an email address where all public comment could be gathered so that we as a council can have that as an aggregate provided digitally when the report comes back. That work. Great. I'm sorry that this second or. There goes the vice mayor. Not present. I second. That. That's crazy. So the second will be by Councilmember Richardson. Thank you. Perfect. Trying to bring everyone together on one thing. So this is something the city clerk has done for us in the past when we know an agenda items coming, but we don't have the AECOM an option. And so I guess we would maybe say anyone who emails the city clerk with the subject line streamlining council meetings, all of that would be aggregated so that we would all have that available to us. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. So we still have three councilmembers cued up in the interest of efficiency. We still have public comment on this item. Councilmember Arango. Well, very briefly, I actually and this is part of the discussion that we're talking about at the super and I want Councilmember Super in Dialogs Alliance and that's good. However, I think that in addition to this, this built in efficiencies using Robert's rules for parliamentary procedure. And I think that one of the things that we should be including in this is also a training, if you will, by my parliament, by certified parliamentarian and Robert's Rules of Orders and how you can use those to make a meeting much more efficient. And I think that none of us what I have, but many of us have not been officially trained or no Robert's Rules of Order. I mean, we I think a lot of us have been sort of learning parliamentary procedure as we go along, and people in the audience have been learning about Robert's Rules water. And as we go along there and but nobody has actually received a training. Let me rephrase that again. I've taken it. But we need a parliamentarian to come in here and let us and actually show us through the ropes of using Robert's Rules of Order to make the meetings more efficient. I can train you, sir. Just kidding. Councilmember Pearce. You're doing a great job chairing the meeting. Councilmember Austin, by the way, I take training from you any day. I just want to concur with that. Is that the the process of us always asking the city attorney for tips on Robert's rules, I think is stalls us a lot of times. And I come from consensus building and grassroots organizing. We don't use Robert's rules. You know, I never chaired on a Democratic club or anything like that. I just I cued up not to make that comment. I queued up to say that the reason why I think it's important to highlight organizations that we want the staff to work with is not because not anybody can email the staff and ask to speak. It's because history shows that not everybody has been invited to be a seat at the table. As somebody that was working in nonprofits for ten years before being on this council, I know many times and we had asked to have a seat at the table and we didn't. And so that is why we ask for it. It's not because it's not accessible for somebody to send an email, but we there are people out there that work on this stuff that are experts and that engage with this council often. And I think that it's important that we include them. So I hope. Councilmember Super. Now that you will accept out that substitute motion. Thank you. Great Council member supernova. Thank you. I just want to direct everyone's attention to an item I placed on this item. That is the fiscal impact. We did the legwork on this. We went to city manager, city clerk and city attorney and asked about staff time. This is something had been brought up in previous council meetings. So if we expand this item, I have to go back and ask staff if there is an impact on staff time. Otherwise, it's not the same item that the focus here. I hate to call it narrow because it was wide open. Look at best practices anywhere, but it was did and did not include reaching out to the public. Okay. So I was saying that anyone can do this. But my question is basically going back to I was speaking to the substitute substitute. Is there an impact on staff time or a fiscal impact to add this item? So for the substitute substitute motion, adding a inside Long Beach and doing some Facebook and social media that's, you know, can be done, you know, fairly easily. We've done that. In the past. You put it out, that would be pretty low impact on staff. To put that question out, we would aggregate the responses and bring those back and those would help inform staff recommendations. Going beyond that to do meetings and others, that obviously is a little is a higher level of of work. So we believe from the substituted service to motion, we could accomplish that fairly easily. Okay. So if the maker of the motion agrees to that, that I would support that, that there is no additional fiscal impact. I really appreciate the comment because I'm very. I would want to send it to committee if it had an extended fiscal impact. And one of the reasons why I specifically talked about setting up the email address was I know that in prior times we can just click those select all turn into a PDF and you're talking about minimal stuff, time variance. And so I think that the fiscal impact would be as close as it could be to the original motion, and that was my intent. Thank you. Public comment, please. Very good. You click as the address. I support this 100%. The same way I support Councilperson Price and her positions on things. We do need efficiency and all we have to do is look back at what happened. A few dealing with the the hotel issue and the panic button. Some of the people, particularly the one that doesn't know enough that you shouldn't fish off the company pier or the two council people from the eighth ninth district that the D that support the deviant. Snoop Dogg. All right. Clearly. Didn't don't do their jobs correctly. That whole debate we had on the discussion, the hours it took relative to the panic button at the council, people done their job. There would be no need for that lengthy discussion. You've got a staff. You've got a telephone. All of that should have been worked out. Worked out publicly with your people. Then you bring it here. The public doesn't need, although it was very instructive to show how incompetent. The Councilperson for the second district and the two counsel to the council, Austin and Harrison. Are and should really be. Removed. If we want efficiency, you can set up all the rules. But when you have clowns like that, you're not going to get the efficiency. So I have clear confidence, as I said in the Council on Supernova and Super and Councilwoman Pryce as. And I've got great confidence in our vice mayor. I only wish. I only wish he would. If our mayor had the decency to recognize that his career is over and that by late spring he will be in prison, he should be resign now and let our good vice mayor take over for the balance of the year. But it goes back to again the council. People have to do their own job. When you come here, you should have done all your homework. And you're not doing it. What you're doing. I do not. Well, I do know what you're doing. So thank you again. It's a commendable idea and it should be implemented. Thank you. I just feel. Thank you, Mr. Good here. You had 20 seconds to spare. Thank goodness. I'm Karen Reside, president of District one. I come frequently to the council on meetings. Thank you very much. Council member super north. This is long needed this discussion. One of the things that I really would like to recommend and. The previous speaker. I think it's an example of this. We limit the number of times that people can come up and speak and waste our time. That's really a critical issue for me. I, I believe that all the city employees and all the council members work really hard and they do the best that they can with the tools that they have to work. I don't know if full time council can be on the table at this point in time, but I think that's something that our city is growing to the point where we really have to seriously look at. And I believe education. Lots of people come to the council meetings and they don't know what to expect. There are some very limited instructions on the agenda. It doesn't help people understand what it is that they need to do in the process. And they get frustrated and upset because the council members or city staff can't answer their questions. They don't understand that's not allowed as part of the process. So people need to understand the process better. And really, I think there are better ways to put the lovely PowerPoint presentations that parking districts CVB. All those presentations that take a large amount of time and have a large amount of staff in the audience, and I don't know if they're on the clock. I believe that those would be better if they were put on the website where people could view them at their leisure and it through their choice. So I see a number of efficiencies. We look forward to the opportunities to submit comments and we'll have a have a discussion of it at the Gray Panther meeting. Thank you. Thank you. Finally, these people. It's way more so again, why she's sitting there talking about limiting the times people could come up here. I don't understand why why we sit there listening to say the same thing over and over again. I feel like Yasha have a timer. We have a timer where we only get 3 minutes and some people don't even use theirs, which always sit there and linger over for 15 or 20 minutes, going ping pong back and forth and all this stuff. And it's okay. Yea, the ones that waste the majority of our time which are comments or notions or do we do this? Can we do this? I don't know. That's your position. That's your chair. I just come here because I'm part of the community and I just want to know what's going on or different resources that pose to be out here to help me where I don't have to come cry to y'all about the issues I'm having are not in place. So if it was more structured and y'all will really manage them more and make sure that everybody is on top of their job, doing their job. But y'all could do your job. It'd be better. But just like y'all drag your feet, they get to drag their feet. They get to slip people underneath the rug. They get to push it to the side. In a way, y'all cancel city council meetings and then way then don't have one. So is a lot of things that can be changed or, you know, done differently. But it got to be some give and take. And Jackie bringing up all the new building. A new building. Yeah. And all of that sort of new building. But I don't hear anything about the new park. I don't hear anything about how you guys are going to help all the thousands of homeless people. They used to at least get help at that part. I haven't heard one time y'all say anything about that part, but I heard John say building at their building. At the building. At the building. That's it. It's not about the people. It's not about the community. It's just. Let's see how we going for Dangote is money. Let's go sell this property to this owner where they do a you know what, a gated community. At the end, they had to pay $3 million to upgrade the park because you guys didn't have the funding. Their job was that every they wondered about the riverbed. Come on now. I do do my research and I do read and I'm very educated budget and saw a lot of people there is not even trying to know all this. I don't care about which I do. I'm a mother. I'm trying to be a mother. I'm not a politician. I have a good. Thank you very much. And I appreciate the robust conversation around this and look forward to it coming back in 90 days. Please cast your votes. Misses the vote on the substitute substitute. On the substitute substitute, yes. Motion carries. Okay. Thank you very much. So next, we're going to take item number 30 and then we will go to public comment and then the rest of the agenda.