Recommendation to conduct a study session to receive and file a presentation on efforts related to the Clean Long Beach Initiative.
Okay. Thank you. We're going to go back to our our study session then, and which we have scheduled today, which is a big staff presentation. I want to I'm going to open it up and let me know, Mr. Modica, when you guys are set up and ready. We're ready. Okay, great. We have actually let me go in first. Do you want to read the city section into the record, please? Recommendation to conduct a study session to receive and file a presentation on efforts related to the Clean Language Initiative. Thank you. And I am thankful I've been talking to staff about bringing this study session forward. And it's something that I know is not just important to me, but it's important to everybody on this dais. And we've been talking about this for as long as we've all been, I think, together as part of this body, the cleanliness of the city and ensuring that neighborhoods, regardless of where they're located across across the city, are clean and well maintained is incredibly important. I also want to make sure that I think we're all aware that during the pandemic, the the impact of the pandemic had on cleanliness was was serious. And we have gone through a health recovery. We're going through an economic recovery and making sure that we also recover so that neighborhoods have the streets sweeping on time, that trash is being picked appropriately, that dumped items are being are being picked up when they need to be. The corridors are being cleaned up is also really important when you think about a year and a half now where you had much of your staff or many staff members, whether they were sick or they weren't able to go do certain certain functions of their job. It did impact cleanliness when you had more homes producing more waste. That also impacts cleanliness. And when you have different patterns of travel, that also impacts cleanliness. When folks from your from from certain departments are unable to do certain work because they're out working at getting folks healthy or vaccinated or tested, that also impacts the work that we can do as a city around cleanliness. So we have had a difficult year and a half, but I'm really proud of the staff, is doing a great job of bringing this back and I look forward to hearing the presentation. We want to make sure that Long Beach is is a clean community for everyone that is here. And I know there's going to be a lot of questions. I have some as well that I'll I'll ask of you guys as soon as the presentation is over. I want to thank you guys for the work that you that you did with this and the memo that you sent to council earlier today. And I view this as a very important initiative for the team and for the staff as we move forward across this next year. So, Mr. Modica. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. That was a very good overview. We are going to have a presentation that kind of has three parts today. We're going to talk about a lot of the investment that this Mayor and council have made over the past four or five years. It's been impressive considering where we started. We didn't really have this kind of clean language program. We created it and just about every year we added to it. Every year, though, we kept getting more and more requests. So the better we did, the more requests we got for our service. And you'll see that today. Do you asked us to do probably 20 to 5 different initiatives as part of that over the years. We're going to report on those today. Almost all of those are complete or we're going to be getting to a lot of those or a couple of more of those as we do the Recovery Act. We're also going to go through some of the data of what it's looked like over the last year. That was one of the strangest years we've had from a from a refuge perspective. And the mayor mentioned a, well, just patterns changed and demand changed and the team really had to adapt to keep up with it. And then we're going to talk about what's next. We have for at least two years, we have some dedicated resources to really invest and do things we've never been able to do before. So I will turn it over to Eric Lopez, to Nico Mokonyane and to Chris Coons, who I'm sorry, Chris Hubert, who will go through the presentation. Thank you, Tom. I want to reiterate that maintaining a clean city is one of our department's highest priorities. We have heard loud and clear that this is a priority for the mayor and the city council, and it's a priority for us as well. So we've throughout the years, we have built a strong, clean team that continues to improve and evolve. And the present presentation today, I think, is going to demonstrate some of that evolution and some of the improvements that that we continue to make. So with that, wanted to turn it over to Decode McClennan, our deputy director. Go. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for having us here tonight to give this presentation. We're eager to. Share with you some of the challenges we face and some of the some of the successes we have had and anticipate. So with that, I'll start it off. The Clean Team was developed in fiscal year 16 2016. We were directed to develop and implement a clean team operation with an emphasis on improving the quality of life and esthetics in our neighborhoods. That included collecting illegally dumped items, dealing with cleanups of people experiencing homelessness, encampments and bulky item collections, litter abatement, some public education as well . In fiscal year 17, the mayor announced the Clean Language Initiative, and I'll be reviewing some of the items that were part of that initiative in a few moments. In fiscal year 19, the clean team took over cleanups for people experiencing homelessness in the park sites. And in fiscal year 20, the operation observed graffiti abatement as well. Initially there was a request for an illegal dumping action plan, which I believe, Councilmember, your anger had brought to the table at the same time that the mayor was also asking for the similar questions. What we did was we we evaluated what we were doing and looked at the the requests from the plan, and we enhanced our staffing as a result of that. We started promoting our no dumping signs that are available to residents for posting. We worked with L.A. County and the L.A. County sanitation districts to increase opportunities for household hazardous waste drop offs going from once a month to twice a month at a facility on California. We increased our. We promoted our bulky item collection program a little more heavily. And we increased opportunities at that time from two free annual pick ups to four free annual pick ups. And subsequently, we have increased that to 12 annual pick ups. We developed a mapping system where we can track our hotspots of where dumped items were being found so that we can proactively address those areas. We evaluated enforcement options. Some of you may recall we did a project with the graduate students from the Kennedy School of Management at Harvard University who did a lot of data gathering for us and provided us with some information that we helped use to target enforcement and target services in certain areas. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention our mattress and box spring collections, which that data in and of itself has become an item. When I remember when we were at about 15,000 mattresses a year, I remember the first time staff came to me and said, we did some analysis and we found it's 300 mattresses a week. And I basically looked at and said, Go back and redo your work because that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. And she came back and showed me it was 15,600 mattresses a year. So now we're over 25,000 mattresses and box springs a year. It's a remarkable number. We do track this separately because we do get some reimbursement from the Mattress Recycling Council, which when I learned that there was a mattress recycling council, I learned that every industry has its has its representatives out there championing your efforts. And I want to just kind of highlight that. I just think it's such an important number that we haven't talked about with the public in a long time. But the fact that we are that we illegally dump or pick up 25,000 mattresses a year in the city of Long Beach is is startling. And that goes to show that the amount of work and that is just one type of dumped item 25,000 mattresses a year. And so thank you for for that. Sure. And to be clear, it's both dumped item and and schedule collection combination, but 25,000 is a huge, huge number. Agreed. So in the Mayor's Clean Long Beach initiative, there are about 18 different action items that we will summarize over the next few slides and provide some updates or review. The city's current cleaning efforts was obviously the baseline that was was established. And based on that, we made some staffing increases by reviewing our resources and our current efforts. At that time, we looked at where our public litter containers were. I apologize if you got to advance the slide. Thank you, Eric. We looked at where our public container litter container locations were and have added about 200 locations since then and that's ongoing. It's evaluated regularly and we do add where we find appropriate when we do get requests for some of your offices to make additions as well . And thank you for being our eyes and ears on those. And we review the graffiti contract and resources and I'm really proud to say that 99% of graffiti is abated within 48 hours. And another statistic that I I'm really proud of is that almost 98% is removed in 24 hours and really proud of that work that's done . Thank you. We have community partners. We partner with Long Beach Transit and Long Beach Transit works with US Weekly to do deep cleanings, which I'll talk about a little later. We work with the bids citywide who have been very supportive and helpful. We were asked to consider a revolving volunteer corps based under the circumstances of the pandemic. That's been delayed a little bit, but we did use community service workers as support for a while. We have not continued to do that again due to the pandemic, and we'll talk about that a little later as well. We created a litter free Long Beach campaign and that included schools. And we'll talk about how that's coming back. We're going to be renewing that program. And we. We explore information marketing campaign and more neighborhood cleanups. So what we did with these marketing campaigns is we identified what are the big items in our litter stream. We found that that cigaret butts were somewhere close to 16% of what was in our litter stream. So we did a targeted campaign on on reducing cigaret butts out there. This council approved an expanded polystyrene ban, which is also a large item of litter out there. And we've been implementing that. Neighborhood cleanups were put on hold during the pandemic, but they're back and roaring. And we will talk a little bit about that to. Improving free on and off ramp cleanliness. We are in discussion with Caltrans to establish an MRU that will allow for City of Longreach to go in and do some cleanups on 22 targeted on and off ramps throughout the city. We hope that this will allow for us to have a quicker response to requests. We ask to look at a locked dumpster policy. We ran a pilot program on that in the East Village area. We are planning another pilot program. The results of that program were somewhat mixed. Some people really like them. Some people did not like them. Some people found that it did reduce litter in their area. Some people found that people were unwilling to unlocking and created more bags. So it's a it's a great idea, but it has its pluses and minuses. And then we were asked to explore an empty private lot ordinance which development services and code enforcement did that. And the City Council passed an ordinance a few years back regarding empty lots. We were asked to modernize to go Long Beach app and we have done so. If we use the Salesforce platform now, which is known worldwide and this system integrates with our existing systems and on the back end of it has really streamlined our ability to create field assignments and and issue them out to the field in a much more expeditious manner than the previous system allowed us to do and provide a customer relationship management implementation system. And the Salesforce application allows us to do that. And there are many tools currently available to utilize in that manner. Review shopping cart theft technology. We reviewed what we were doing. We had a contract with the shopping cart retrieval company. And frankly, what we determined was it was not being effective. So we eliminated the contract and the clean team crews are now responding to that. And I will tell you, we get a fraction of the requests for for shopping in shopping carts, though, than we used to do. Proactive code enforcement are code enforcement partners with the clean team. On our deep cleaning days, their staffing was impacted and during the pandemic, a lot of that staff was reallocated to do the enforcement for the health orders and at the parklets and whatnot. So while they are continuing now to get their staffing back up, we will hopefully see some more proactive code enforcement coming in the future. And Police Department issued over 120 letter citations in fiscal year 20. We continue to work with them to see how we can enhance those options. So now I'd like to talk about our current clean team activities. As you can see on this slide, we started in fiscal year 16 with about ten, ten and a half employees. That includes management oversight. Since then, fiscal year 20, we've increased the full time equivalent to 31 and a half. And based on our American recovery plan funding that we're going to get over the next two years, we are we've been approved to add 20 full time equivalent non-career positions to support that. We are already in the process of hiring those nine careers and we have brought about 11 of them on board so far already. This is not to reflect that what the actual current staffing is. We do not have 51 people out there working. I want to make sure that's clear. The goal is to get 51 people out there working. The responsibilities of the clean team remain largely the same as when they were originally planned. Illegally Dumped Item Collection. Mattress Collection. Bulky Item Collection. Homeless Encampment Cleanups. E-waste White goods, which are appliances and tire collections. And the reason some of these items are listed separately is to make clear that we have to use different equipment to collect these materials. We can't throw a TV in the back of a trash truck. We have to send a different vehicle to do that. Mattresses have to be kept separate altogether so that we can get reimbursement from the Mattress Recycling Council. So sometimes when you have a pile of stuff and only a portion of it, a portion of it disappears and then some of it remains. It's because we have to bring a separate truck in to collect those items. Deep cleanings, which we'll talk about in a moment. And graffiti abatement and litter abatement. We wanted to provide a little bit of some statistics and some graphs because my mom always told me she likes pretty pictures and colorful stuff. So that's what we did. And what we have here is we see the orange bars are special, bulky item collections, which are scheduled and requested by residents. Blue is illegally dumped items. So we can see that while there's an increase of both, we see a greater increase in special collections. And I believe that has a lot to do with us changing our methodologies. A few years ago, part of what we determined when we were working with the graduate students from from Harvard was that we got so caught up in responding to illegally dumped items, we were collecting them sooner than we were collecting items for people who were doing it properly and scheduling it. And we also learned that when we would tell people, We'll come pick up your couch in three or four weeks, they'd say, Never mind, and just take a picture of it and send it in as a dumped item in a go along recap. So we had some challenges as we changed our methodology, but I'm proud to say that now we get your special collections collected by the next week. Sometimes, at worst, we may have to schedule a Saturday clinical crew to do anything that we missed, but they're done by that next week. That does increase a slight delay on our dumped items, but our dumped items are still being responded to within five working days. Next map shows some of our efforts in areas where we do cleanups for people experiencing homelessness and also cleanups where we have our hotspots which aren't necessarily the same hotspots could be litter hotspots or dumped item hotspots as well. You can see there's been an increase in both. To be honest with you, as some of this, I don't believe this is the best metric in explaining how we deal with people experiencing homelessness and the and the litter and debris that remains as a result of that, because a cleanup could be two items . Cleanup could be massive. And so we're going to try and find a way to provide a better metric for you guys so you can get a better picture of what's going on out in the field. We talked about mattress collection. You can see the increase over the last few years here. Next slide, please. And now we'll talk about moving through the pandemic and the COVID 19 challenges we experienced over the last six months. First of all, staffing was obviously impacted by quarantine and isolation protocols when people experienced exposures. You'll see towards the bottom of the slide our sick leave usage in calendar year 2020 compared to 19 was a 90% increase and. You'll see the increase in calls for service that we're going to talk about in a moment while we have the experiencing this 90% increase in sick leave usage. We also utilize clean team members when our refuge operation is in shorthanded. Our primary core service is to make sure that the the trash you pay for to get collected on a weekly basis is done. So. So we do sometimes tap into our resources over the clean team to support our refugees collection. And during the pandemic that happens quite often. We are also utilize community service workers before the pandemic and to get this in perspective, in our fiscal year 19, when we had a full year of community service workers, we used we have 20600 hours of community service workers. That equates to about 400 Labor hours a week that we lost in March of 2020 because of the pandemic. And that all went to support the clean team. We are working with the city's safety officer now to develop protocols so we can reinstate that program. Also, we have daily sanitation sanitization protocols at each employee had to do that impacts the time. If it takes 15 minutes to get your additional safety gear, wipe down your truck, the interior, the exterior, 15 minutes over 50 trucks a day. That's that's a lot of hours. Again, that takes labor hours to get that work done. And we had about a 30% increase in calls for service between 15 as fiscal year 19 to fiscal year 20, which again were being addressed with a 90% increase in sick leave usage. I'd also like to add to that slide that during that time between March and May, we suspended street sweeping operations which. Street sweeping collects about 900 to 1000 tons of debris a month. So you can imagine for two months we didn't sweep sweep any streets at all. And then when we did return, street sweeping, we have been short staffed. Good news is that we have a civil service list now and we conducted interviews today to hire some people on board. So that's great news. But when we did return to sleeping, we were also had a parking citation forgiveness. And so we were issuing a lot more parking citations than we typically did and dismissing a lot more citations. I believe we just missed somewhere in the vicinity of 25,000 citations. So imagine for each one of those citations that was dismissed, there was a vehicle impeding our ability to provide a quality sweep. Additional challenges, 49% increase in calls for service in our hotline we had. We'll show you that statistic, that graph in a minute. It was somewhere around 150,000 calls for service this past year, 32% increase in go along beach requests, 22% increase in illegally dumped item reports, 21% increase in special bulky item collection requests, 9% increase in residential refuse collected. And I'd like to really talk about that for a second. When we discussed this briefly back in September last year, we were experiencing a 13% increase of level down over the year to be about a 9% increase. That's still about between 18 and 19,000 additional tons of trash that's collected at residential harms. That's the addition of the equivalent of five and a half routes added per day, which we didn't add we had to absorb with our existing team, which again was being impacted by the higher use of sick leave and furloughs for a portion of that time. So it was really a. Commendable that that refugee operation was able to do what they did do during that time. With the additional challenges, they experienced a slight increase in graffiti, square footage and a slight increase in. Our. Number of encampments that we had to work on. This is a monthly chart and it starts in January 2020 pre-pandemic. And you can see our base in March is lower than where our our start was before the pandemic. The good news is you can see what you can see where we spiked in July and the blue item is the blue line as illegally dumped items and the orange line is our special collections. And so while the special collections are fairly consistently even, we did see a huge spike in weekly dumped items from May to July . Some of that balanced out. And now, as you can see, we're lower than where we started in January in both illegally dumped items and go Long Beach requests and our requests for scheduled special collections continues to go up, which is a really good sign for us. Also, this is our hotline request. You can see where we had the spike in the summertime, but an additional spike in September, October. That spike in October reflects a time when we were really impacted with quarantines and isolation. At one point in October, our clean team was one person and everybody else was in quarantine or operation. And even as recently as two weeks ago, we had six people in quarantine or or isolation in our in our clean team. So that increasing calls, there is a reflection of complaints that were driven because of our inability to provide service. Next slide, please. Thank you. So deep cleaning events. We provide deep cleaning events weekly. They were they were impacted by the pandemic. Like I said, when we had people out in quarantine where our deep cleaning was impacted, too. Code enforcement had reallocated their resources to the to the work on the pandemic response so they weren't as available to support other outside agencies like Long Beach. Transit had their own impacts, and there were times where they were unable to support. So it was challenging. I'm glad to say things are back to normal, so we're glad to see the deep cleanings continuing. They include debris removal, bulky item collection, litter abatement, graffiti abatement, language transit comes in as bus shelter maintenance when possible. We have read abatement included and code enforcement comes along and notes any code violations to property owners. We've also partnered with some outside agencies I mentioned, along with transit, but also the Conservation Corps and the Cerritos wetland stewards, where we'll identify locations that they can provide support us, they can provide support for us to address. This is this is what we call a heat map. This was revised in December 2020. This reflects the calendar year, 2020. The yellow areas are the highest hit areas. You can see that. The highest addressed areas correspond a lot with multi-family living areas as well and concentrated a large part in the downtown area, although you do see areas west and north and a touch of other parts of the cities city. So next steps, the American Rescue Plan Act. $4 million. We had initially requested $5 million. Due to other issues, we didn't the city did not receive all of the funding we had anticipated it for. But we do anticipate making up that additional million dollars with other opportunities that are out there or providing some additional staffing for two years, including clerical support. And 20, as I mentioned earlier, non-career refugees, operators and maintenance assistance full time equivalent. So we'll probably have more than 20 bodies, which is good. We're getting some equipment that's going to allow us access to areas that we didn't have before. So we have six yard rear loader trucks that allow us access in smaller, narrower alleys that we weren't able to service and other equipment that we can use to provide different services that will either be provided as part of our deep cleaning efforts or as needed around by request. We are also getting pressure washers. I do want to caution that doesn't mean we'll be able to walk up and down all the different streets and just pressure wash the whole way. This is really for spot use. It'll be oftentimes associated with areas where we have people experiencing homelessness and we need an extra layer of cleaning and abatement in those areas. Commercial residential corridor improvements. We're going to be adding illegally dumped item crews. We have new equipment, as I mentioned, that will make areas marks accessible and we're going to expand the use of our community partners. We're adding additional support for neighborhood cleanups, for litter abatement. We've already began begun that we at one point we were only at one point we weren't providing any support. And then we would go and have neighborhood associations, have drop off locations for bags, and our teams would go and grab the bags to minimize contact. And now we're actively out there providing assistance during cleanups again. Deep cleaning. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. I know there's interest in that. We're increasing the frequency of deep cleaning events and we're expanding locations for deep cleaning events. And we're going to be promoting public awareness not just to the general public, but also working with our schools. Encampments for cleanup, for encampments of people experiencing homelessness. We will be adding staff to assist with that. We're again adding equipment and pressure watchers, as I mentioned, where there are many occasions where we cannot handle the debris and the material that make up these cleanups. In those cases, we contact Ocean Blue for hazmat collection, and we also have some trained assistance from Conservation Corps and illustrators wetlands stores. We've also tried a community dumpster program, which which is helpful, where we place select community areas, dumpsters to contain waste rather than let people spread it publicly in the area. I want to make sure we clear on that. You know, the clean team does not do enforcement on encampments. We post we ask people to leave. If they do not leave, we do not displace them. So I just want to be clear about that. We're there to clean the trash and debris. That's that's their street. And right away, improvements. We are looking at removing impediments for pedestrian and bicycle travel, uneven sidewalks, trip hazards, encroaching trees and bushes and replacing faded curbs and signs. Or repainting. Faded curbs and replacing signs. We want to do a comprehensive public education and outreach program, continue to promote our bulky item collection. We like to see that number go up, that graph go up on the free pickups. We're going to be working with Long Beach Unified School District to re incorporate our school cleanups. In fact, we we did have an event where we gave 50 cleanup. We have a program called Cleanup in a Box and we distributed 50 clean up here in a box are programs for schools to start doing their own cleanups on campus in the surrounding neighborhoods. We're going to do an education campaign on refugees recycling and composting, similar to what we've had in the past, but more up to date. And we're going to do programs to help address illegal dumping and help ensure people are properly managing their household hazardous waste. We also are going to continue our public education and outreach program. We do have an adopt a Street program where just similar to adopt a highway, it's actually managed by the same people. Public Works has adopted 12 stretches and we're going to work with our public information team to really promote this opportunity to businesses so that they can adopt streets in their areas and help with the litter abatement. We have a no litter zone program or we partner with businesses that commit to keeping their storefront clean. We have over 500 partners in our no litter zone program. And then we're going to basically do some education on how people can help, how can they participate in volunteering in a cleanup or coordinator, organize their own? We're working with outside agencies I mentioned earlier. We're working with Caltrans to develop a memorandum of understanding that will allow us to maintain 22 freeway off ramps. This maintenance will be specifically to provide outreach to homeless people, people experiencing homelessness that may need outreach and understand what services are available to them. And it will focus on illegal dump collection and litter abatement. We are also in discussion with L.A. County to address encampments for people experiencing homelessness along the L.A. River, San Gabriel River and Coyote Creek. We we do really need to get those agreements in place to access those locations appropriately. So here there are 22 different locations you can see spotted with red dots that identify the proposed locations we will be addressing with Caltrans. They are all around the city. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about deep cleanings back to the colors I mentioned. If you look at your your your map on the board and we'll identify the locations in the next slide. The red lines are where we're currently providing deep cleaning services. The yellow lines are where we are, which overlays. Some of the red lines are where we intend to increase deep cleaning frequency. Green lines are where we're taking an existing location, expanding that deep cleaning boundary. And the blue lines are new proposed additional deep cleaning locations. The expansion and the proposed locations are based on where we tend to receive a concentration of calls for service. So that's why we you'll see that we expanded some and not others and where we added some of the locations which we we proposed to add. So these are the locations. There's a lot I'm not going to read them all to you. But you can see the majority of locations have been current locations have been expanded to a larger boundary. Next slide, please. And these are the proposed new proposed deep cleaning locations that we are we propose adding to the existing ones. So the question is going to come up with what is the frequency of these of these cleanups? Currently, they're done quarterly. The goal is to get the current locations to at least monthly as we expand our staff. The proposed new locations which don't tend to be as. As heavily needed locations will begin quarterly and we will increase those and monitor those to see what frequency we find. It becomes more effective if it's increasing it. Are we spending too much time there and all locations will be assessed on a regular basis? So $4 million for citywide cleanup over two years. What are we going to do with this money to accomplish all these things we talked about? We're adding staff and equipment. We are going to address a public litter abatement campaign. We are going to be more proactive in and addressing issues for people experiencing homelessness, including working with the outreach team to provide services prior to a cleanup and ensure that we're not displacing people. Expanding the frequency and the locations of our deep cleaning. Doing a comprehensive public education campaign and improving our efficiencies. I'd like to thank you for this opportunity and the time you gave us to present, and we're here to answer any questions. Thank you very much. A very thorough presentation and we appreciate that. I do have some some comments and then a couple of questions. And then I'm going to turn this over to the folks that have queued up to speak. Let me let me just first start and I think I want to make sure that we say this also for the council and for the public. The cleanliness of the city. And I think and I've said this before to the team, we have the potential to be the biggest clean city in California, and that should be the goal. And we should strive for nothing less than that as as as our target. And I think that one one thing that that a lot of folks don't don't know is that we have a lot of work to do, I think still to achieve what we find is acceptable for every neighborhood. But the amount of innovation and hard work that has happened behind the scenes on this initiative has been incredible. I will tell you, like and you know that I'm so proud of all the work that the staff has put in over years on this initiative, even long before we brought the Clean Language Initiative forward. And there were 18 points in that initiative you covered, I think all 18 of them. I mean, the city council passed that policy. We are working. We brought the we brought the Bloomberg Innovation Team to do mapping, to do data. We brought in Harvard to do a study on how we can best approach our collections. We, I mean, every or every suggestion that council members that the staff brought forward as it relates to how we track a trash launching the Golden Beach app, putting the CRM system in place, are changing the way the expanding the collection items , the pilot programs. We tested just the amount of innovation that went into producing what is a very basic city function, which is making sure the streets are clean and picking up trash has been to me very impressive. So I just first want to commend just the entire organization for what I feel has been an. Absolute success of where we are today. That doesn't mean we should be satisfied with what we have today because we have a lot of work to do. But you guys have done a phenomenal job. Number one. The second thing I want to say is if you can go to Slide nine, first of all, and I and I definitely want to make sure we get and maybe you have where you have. Mr. Modica but can we get Councilwoman Allen and Councilwoman Zoro the initial clean team kind of agenda item and the kind of 18 point plan that we put in place that you covered. But it'd be great for them to see the narrative as well. Sure. And and that was that was I mean, we think we did that in 2017 or when we passed that. The Clean Initiative, I believe, was 2017. So and I'm looking at it obviously here in front in front of me here. And one of the things I want to bring up, if you can, you go to Slide nine, please. Okay. So to me, this is also really impressive. And you know, right around, of course, when we were we made a commitment this council created the Clean Time Program through our budget process, where we literally shifted to a proactive clean prior to the clean team process, where we actually put up employees on clean team trucks, branded them. We sent them out to the community. We didn't have proactive cleaning on streets. It was all by request. And so the proactive this has got us to a much cleaner community than we were ten years ago. There's just no question. And and then I look at where we are from the amount of employees we had in FAA 16. To where we are today. Which is triple, I think where we were to where we're going to be next year, we're going to be five times. The strength of folks working to clean the city from from from from back in in 2016. And that to me is is very impressive and I think shows a commitment to us taking this. Did I get that right? Does take taking the sun? Yes. And and I think what what's really impressive to me is we are in the process right now of almost doubling the amount of clean time resources we have today to work we're going to be in the next year or two, is that correct? That is correct. So I just want the council to think about the impact that this that we are making and why it was so important for us to set aside those millions of dollars in the American rescue plan for cleaning our city. And I think to me and I think to other people in this body, this is a core function of the city. This is what we should be doing right and what we should be doing and putting our our resources into ensuring that we provide this level of kind of basic service for for the for the community. I also want if you could go to Slide 11. I also just want to commend you like just, you know, decode Eric the team. When I look at this orange book collection request number. That increase is nothing but a massive success because you guys were working for years to try to figure out how to dramatically increase that number. When we were first talking about this like 2015, 2016. We wanted more people to report. Of bulky items at their home. And you guys have done a nice job of increasing that number and of using I mean, we've you know, we've been doing direct mailing, we've worked with apartment owners, we've put messages online, we've increased the amount of request. We made it easier to request pickups. So all of that has led to the success. So I just want to just share that. I really appreciate I appreciate that work that you guys are doing. And then we can go to Slide 20, please. Again, the what I love about what you guys have done here in the plan you presented is you're not just bringing in staff, but you're bringing the type of equipment that we need to ensure that we that our team has the resource, the modern equipment that that we need. I appreciate that. And then I want to go to if you want to go to slide 30, as we as we conclude. But because I'm not sure that the entire council is aware what a deep, clean actually is. And so obviously, all streets in Long Beach get cleaned. And and there's street sweeping and crews go out and do pickups. What these deep cleanings are is they go by foot. The teams most of the most of the time, and they walk the street. And what they're doing is they're picking up all of the small hardware, all that trash and and and cigaret butts and stuff that gets stuck in between businesses and on sidewalks and in gutters. And you're doing weeding. You are ensuring that that the streets and I know why you the streets that are selected are obviously the ones that get the most impacted by trash at these corridors do. So that deep cleaning that is happening right now a few times a year and we're thinking about increasing those to a month is so important in the quality and cleanliness of those streets has dramatically improved over the years, but dramatically improved. And I just think about just neighborhoods that you've highlighted as being the most impacted by trash and illegal dumping have changed dramatically. Now, we had a setback this year. There's no question, because of the pandemic. And so, you know, I have, you know, been we have been less for I'm still frustrated, but, you know, understanding why we are where we've been. And so I'm just really excited about kind of doubling down on this and making sure that we continue to clean the city as much as possible. And the last thing the last thing I'll just say is I want to make sure that the council stays updated regularly on our efforts on this, because you guys are doing such a great job with the innovation. Don't stop with the innovation. Let's continue bringing in some of these teams and continue analyzing what we're doing and looking at the data, how we can how we can improve things. And then I had mentioned to to Tom also that I wanted to just conclude my remarks about just tap at the Golden Beach app. And we had a prior Golden Beach system that maybe in some ways was easier to use, but it wasn't connected to a back end. So it was very hard. It was people didn't realize it was manual like a go. A Long Beach request would come in and somebody was manually taking the request and getting it off to someone versus now there's like an integrated backend. So to go along with your quest, go to the right person. What how many unique users do we have today on the go lobby, John? Someone asked, bring a body to come up and talk a little bit about that. That is a little bit of a complicated question because we couldn't track from before to today. But we have some of that stats while he's coming up. I do want to highlight the changes in the app. We've heard that too is that it's the other one was kind of point and click and again all it was was just enough to get to a person who then would enter it into all of our complex systems. And when we had 10,000 requests, we were keeping up. Now that we have 30,000, 40,000, it needs to be an automated system. It's provided a lot of functionality. We have it in four languages now, which we never had go Long Beach in. We have resource sections that you can actually look things up and really need. Function is the mapping function. You can actually see who else has actually reported that already and what the status is. And then if you want, you can follow it and you can get notified when that gets closed out. So it is a little bit of an adjustment. We had some technical issues in the beginning, as you do with any major new system. A lot of those have been fixed and worked out and we're still working on some improvements. So we'll turn over to Bahrain to talk about the number of users. Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Members of the Council. My name is Bowring, a body bureau manager with Technology and Innovation is city manager. Modica said. It is a nuanced question. Our old system did not have the notion of a user. A user was anyone who submitted their email address along with a request. Our new system can also align with that methodology. So a sort of apples to apples comparison would be the same time period from 2019 to 2020. So I'll give you the dates. October one, 2019 to July one, 2020. The old system had 3225 cases with associated emails, and those are unique to duplicated email addresses for the same time period. October one, 2020 to July one, 2021. The new app has 5899 unique email addresses. The new system, though it does have a well-defined mechanism for what constitutes a user. So a user would be someone like myself or many of you actually in your accounts that take the time to go in there. You create an account and then you validate your account. So it's not enough to say, I want to sign up. You actually have to go in there and log into your email and verify that you are who you said you were. So we have 1000. I'm sorry. No, no, I think that's 89 users. Okay. So would you would you say that we have been more likely have more users on the new system than we had before? We certainly have more unique email addresses. And so. That's good. And I think so. I think that's that's a positive thing. What I would my one request is going to be on go lobby chat because I think given some of my suggestions to Tom, but personally as far as changes, but I would like you to work on putting together just a neighborhood user group of. Residents from across the city. That can just be a group within your department that can just test the app with you and use it. Because I actually think there are some basic functional changes to be made that the person just making a request can just tell you versus, you know, the tech team making that change. There is just some very practical changes that can be made to make it easier and more user friendly to to to any neighbor across the city. So if you'd be willing to put together a group of residents, I'm sure that colleagues appear to be happy to recommend a few a few folks to test the app with you . And they can go through an app and give some suggestions for upgrades. I would appreciate that. Can I get that commitment? We're going to do that. Yeah, we can look at that. That could be never ending. I would like it to be a defined group, and we could be. Let's get. Together. It could be one of it could be one from every district. But I would I would like there to be a defined group that it's a user group that will test the app. We can do that. Okay. Thank you. And so I appreciate I appreciate all the work you guys are put into this. And I'm going to turn this over to the the council maker of the motion of Vice me, Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, first of all, I just want to thank the all the entire public works team and the rank and file who are out there cleaning stuff up. We were out a few months ago on Artesia Boulevard and they told me a little bit about the struggles over the course of the past year. So I'm really proud to see that you maintain your momentum and you're picking up speed, picking up steam. And and I just want to thank you for your efforts and thank your entire rank and file team for all that they do to help over the course of a very difficult year. Few things on go Long Beach. What we've done in the past. We'll do ninth districts blink spring cleaning where we'll put out a contest to the neighbors and say, hey, you know, we'll report, you know, the individuals who reported the most items over a certain period of time and schedule cleanups and do all these different activities, and we'll give awards and recognition to try to get more people involved. I would love to see if there are some citywide opportunities with the new platform to gamify the system and encourage more engagement there. The second thing I would say is I, I know this is one clean team, but a lot of us have business improvement districts with clean teams. I would personally love to see us through this recovery effort and I know that there is some direct funding of bids and things like that. I would like to see some coordination in incentivize and coordination across like we use Conservation Corps at Uptown Business District. I would love to see some some strings or some some way to incentivize them to work and coordinate with our clean team. An example would be if I know that our clean team I saw two corridors in the Uptown Business District area on your map, Artesia and Atlantic. If we were to have their schedule and then overlay that with what the Uptown Business District schedule is, then we can work with the local neighborhood associations to help fill the gaps and have one published maintenance schedule for the business district. I think something like that in the council office can help coordinate that, but I think it would go a long way for people to see exactly where our gaps are so we can keep up with it. The next thing I would say is I know that there was a period where we actually couldn't do neighborhood cleanups during the pandemic. I'm glad to see that they're there back, that the neighbor neighbors are getting the dumpsters and clean it up. At some point. I'd love to see from prior to the pandemic to now, are people requesting less cleanups or more? And do we need to do work to encourage more people to get out? The neighborhood associations get out and do more. So that's something I'm curious about. Next. I know that graffiti has also been up during the pandemic, particularly on our murals in North because we went through effort and we painted murals on most of our high graffiti walls and it's significantly reduced graffiti in these areas. But now a lot of them have been tagged over time. And Mr. City Manager, I know we spoke about spoke about utilizing some of the recovered resources to actually get a team of artists to go touch the murals back up. I don't need this and I don't need a big response here. But is is that going to be included in this clean up effort or do you have some other way to address that? That's currently not in this effort. That is something that we'd like to do, is to get more murals out there. So the original plan was that we we couldn't find a way to fund that as part of the Recovery Act. I think as we have found ways to use the Recovery Act in certain ways, we can look at that. But I don't have that funding yet. But that's still something that we want to do. Okay. What I'm interested in isn't necessarily more murals, but the ones that we do have, we need to go out and we need to tighten them up. And I think that when we think about a clean neighborhood, I think the availability of murals, people, people see graffiti on a mural, they'll see weeds, they'll see trash and all . It's all connected. And that is one of the priority uses of our percent for the arts as well that the Arts Council has suggested is being able to maintain the assets that we have and be able to clean them and fix them. Okay. We have we have some that need some immediate, immediate help now. Next, the train tracks in Artesia, I think I didn't see it as a node or specifically called out it's not our property. And then we talk a lot about Caltrans property, but this is the railroad property. And Tom, I've shown it to you. We've gone out, we've cleaned it up, but it is a problem. Hot spot. Just the train tracks just north of Artesia. What is that? I think west of Paramount, I believe. And then finally, I want to make sure that we we address weed abatement, particularly at the pump station, Artesia, or any city property, any city facility. We need to put a lens on how often we're we're abating the weeds there. This particular site, I think it's one of those I'm talking about the the mural is tagged, the weeds are grown and this is city property. So if we we need to maintain our own property to be an example for others. Thank you. Thank you. Vice Mayor, Councilwoman Sarno. Thank you, Mayor. I just I also want to add my thanks to Eric Decker and all of the other environmental services team for this really long, hard and dirty road that we've been on towards cleanliness. So and it's just an image and just an incredible amount of trash that's been picked up over the years. I mean, so just thank you so much for all the hard work that and it's been a work in progress and I believe that that's going to continue to be the case. You know, I've been having since I've been on council, you know, maybe mid-December, we've been having district dialogs among neighborhood and hands down. It didn't matter what neighborhood in midtown or central limit, cleanliness was the number one issue that everybody wanted to address. Right. And so I just want to make sure that our residents and as well as other Lomita residents know that based on this presentation, help is on the way and investments are being made to ensure that we're doubling down or tripling down the efforts. You know, and I also want to just share, too, during the time when we couldn't do neighborhood cleanup, that was really a challenging period because, you know, many people are home because of the pandemic and, you know, the trash is just visible everywhere. And so it's definitely impacted people's kind of, I think, attitudes, I think sometimes towards the neighborhood. So that's one of the things that I want to to circle back on is just how do we ensure that we're inspiring people to clean up? And I really like that idea earlier that about clean up in a box that was done with the school. I'm actually interested in thinking about how do we incentivize people to just clean up within their front door and front steps, not just businesses, but individuals? And how can we give, you know, people like a care? So that encourages them to clean with a pick up tool to put, you know, other gloves and trash bags and, you know, any other educational materials. And I'm actually thinking about how we can put that together as we, you know, go into this public education and outreach phase where I'm thinking about fix the six kit, fix the six kit in a bag or a box or whatever it is that makes it easy so that they just have it then and there and it's everywhere. And I think making it as easy as possible for people to clean, I think helps a lot, just as I think the mayor talked about making the app as easy as possible to use. And the other thing I want to say, too, is I want to thank our neighborhood association that's just really resumed their cleaning. And I want to think about ways we can offer support to them as well as seeing them kind of our, you know , neighborhood cleanliness ambassadors and where they're really encouraging people to use these Golden Beach app, even educating them how to use it in other languages to bathe and just making sure that people know they don't need to. Just posted on Facebook or other social media, they could actually use an app to report that. Right. So I think constant communication and education. An educational ways that we can encourage people is really helpful. So otherwise, you know, I'm just so thrilled that, you know, we're going to have so much more, you know, efforts and investment and tools to be able to really clean up and really get into it. So thank you so much. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilwoman Price. Before we go. Thank you. So thank you for the presentation. And I know that my office is probably one of the offices that contacts you a lot on these issues, and I appreciate the work that you do. There's a couple of questions that I have that I think obviously I talk with Tom regularly about district specific issues that we have. So I'm not going to use that time to do that tonight. But citywide, do our cleanups ever involve pressure washing sidewalks? Not often. Like I said, what we're we are going to be buying a couple of pressure washers through these funds so that we can make them available. Pressure washing on a large scale is is difficult, but we are going to do what we can to incorporate some of those efforts into our cleanings. I think maybe focusing on the business corridors and augmenting what the business corridors are already trying to do with their assessment funds could be a really good area, good use of that. And some of our major corridors, I think would be a really good use of the pressure washers if we could incorporate that, maybe a quarterly pressure wash on on some specific corridors. The other thing I want to talk about is community cleanups. We used to do those a lot where we would partner with community neighborhoods and then kind of stop doing that during COVID. What is the status of that now? Community cleanups have resumed. As I mentioned, initially, when we started supporting them, it was simply the neighborhood association would tell us they're doing a cleanup. We'd identify a couple of locations in their cleanup area to drop off their bags and we'd have a truck go by, pick up whatever's there. Now we're beginning to actively assist in those cleanups, and we're interacting with the actual volunteers. So I believe I believe in 2021, we've done already 98, 91 clean ups. So we're back on track there. People people are eager to get out there. And I know you touched on it, but is there anything specific they need to do to coordinate? Should they go through the council offices or go through? Either way, we have a staff person that helps coordinate those cleanups, and many of the council staff actually call her directly for assistance as well. So either way, we can do it. We do like to hear ahead of time. We do have occasions. We recently had one, for example, where some people take it upon themselves to do something and then kind of leave stuff behind for us and we don't know what's going on. We went today, in fact, and collected over 200 bags of debris that that someone had left behind. And again, while we appreciate the efforts to clean the city, we we it's very shotgun. If we don't have some sort of coordinated understanding of what's happening, where. Know what that is. In some of these cleanups we could really use the council offices help. And some of you are already doing this. Cleanups are more complicated than just putting stuff in a dumpster. A lot of things can't be accepted in the dumpster. It has to be sorted there. It won't be accepted if we put an e-waste in. So we're looking going forward to really partner with the council offices to kind of help take that responsibility to organized neighborhoods and designate someone who's in charge of appropriate disposal. And that'll make us be able to go a lot further and do a lot more of these as we work in partnership. Okay. Let me add something to that, too, Councilwoman, because I think I don't know, I hadn't mentioned it, but it was possibly going to be, I think, announced in the next few days. But I think it's pretty close to being set. We are going to launch a citywide cleanup, Long Beach Day. I think it's going to be August the 14th. And on that date, it's going to kind of kick off kind of like our post-pandemic, like cleaning the city. I think we're going to ask and host events in every district in the city and try to have an event hosted by every council office across the city to have cleanups happening everywhere. And Mr. Modica smiling because he knows it's going to be a lot of work. But he's very excited to, I know, to lead this effort. And and so and I think all of us are are looking forward to that, too. So I think that's going to be Saturday, August 14th, and that'll be our cleanup. Long Beach kind of community kick off and we'll have a lot of resources for all of our neighborhood groups to continue doing that work also. And by the way, a lot of council members, you've already been hosting a lot of clean ups, I think customers and daycares. I just saw one I think that you just did, I think this weekend. And so we'll well, I'm encouraged just all the efforts into the 14th and there'll be information on that in the in the days ahead. And if we can work on confirming that data, we still that's a huge effort to do all nine all at once. We normally move them around so we think we can do it. We got to work on the actual date and make sure we can get all the resources there to support all your efforts. But we will get a date and I'm hoping it'll be the 14. Okay. Right. Because that's the one that you mentioned to me today. Just. Councilwoman. Councilman Mongo. Thank you. First, I want to thank the team. I'm I'm very fond of all of you. But, Diego, you've done just an amazing job. I can't tell you enough how great of a partner you've been over these last six, seven years, from street sweepers to alleys to you name it. Your Let's Find a way attitude is really a really important thing for people to learn from. I can't tell you enough that you're ready to take on anything in the city, and I totally believe in you because of all that you've done for us when it comes to the clean team and everyone on the team is great and thank you for all of the work that you do. Mattresses. So tires. When you get new tires, you have a tire disposal fee. Mattresses have been like the new rage. I don't know if I'm like targeted. I do streaming television, but I get a new mattress advertisement at least four times a day. Are there mattress recycle fees because people are now getting mattresses delivered directly to their door from all over the country? What does that equate to in terms of is there a fee structure for that? Yes, there is. There's similar to what you do with TVs or tires. There's and that's that those dollars go to the mattress recycling council, which in turn we file a report to them annually and then they pay. Avitus reimbursement doesn't cover all the costs, but. But it covers a portion of the cost. That's why we collect them separately and track them separately as well. Good. That's good to know. Graffiti. You guys are doing a great job. I can't tell you enough. I want to thank both your team and then also my council office staff. We have a lot of on ramps and off ramps, so we have to work with Caltrans on and my team is on it and I appreciate the community for helping us report that stuff because the sooner you report at the scene, you can get rid of it. You talked a little bit, about 16% of litter is cigaret butts. I'm imagining that that's a citywide number. I'm going to feel terrible. I can't remember her name right now, but I was out and about walking in one of our neighbors of 60 years just named Lloyd, and his daughter asked me about the current trash problem we have with advertisements and specifically some of the non subscription papers that have kind of really taken off in terms of their ability to throw these things into our driveway and. A lot of them just end up in the gutter. What percentage of the percentage of the city that receives these throwaway advertisements? What are we talking about in terms of cost? And I wish I could tell you that I don't know. The 16% number on cigaret butts was from a statewide report. I do know that there are some freedom of speech issues. It doesn't mean you're allowed to litter, but there are some speech issues involved in printing and distributing. Well, there are people who leave them on your curb, like at your door. And there are people who just throw them into your gutter. And we should have some kind of structure for organizations that hire lazy distributors, that just leave stuff at the sidewalk to the street and figuring out how to ensure that those that are making money by advertising to our residents but are not spending that money for a proper distribution system, should then. Be charging or paying for that cleanup. They also cause blockages of water movement until the next street sweeping day, which then causes buildup of water and mosquitoes and all sorts of problems go along the job. I just want to thank the entire team, both in the city manager's office, the rest of news division and in the IT department. A lot of you know, I was a big driver of fixing the Long Beach up. I would guess that of your initial 30,000 people on the app, a thousand of them were probably fifth District residents, were high users, individuals who were in the park all the time, fixing our water fountains, all of those things. So I would love to have a presentation in the next few months related to our next steps on the Long Beach app. I appreciate the idea of the team. I'd love a senior citizen on that team because I think that a lot of our retired senior citizens are the ones that are really helping us out by taking responsibility and ownership of certain areas. They walk regularly to use the app. I'd love to find out more. We're hiring all these non carriers but we also have a lot of retirements coming. I'd love to make sure that there's a pathway for our non-career hires to work towards a career position and how we work on that as a city. Slide 11. We were talking about illegal. Dumping something and we see what we were on. If you could turn back to Slide 11. And then when you renew your animal license annually, you have the opportunity to donate. I think there are a lot of people who, when they do their refuse cleanup, if some kind of solicitation could be provided in their next water bill, I think there is a lot of people who would be willing to pay and donate to the clean team. I don't know if we can set up a nonprofit account similar to what Animal Control has, but I. I appreciate the 12 free pick ups. I don't think that people always expect it to be free. And so I'd love to get to a point in our city where we talk about what the true cost of collection is . And then those people that make an income of less than $60,000 a year, it's free and then like a graduated pay structure for those that can afford it. Because I think that we continue to have this where we're sub venting costs for people who are asking to be supported. And I think that those dollars could go much further. And in the meantime, if we could just give them the opportunity to donate you back to a program, because if they wanted to have a pickup done, you're talking $250, people are happy to do it. Thank you. That's a super. Thank you. Great presentation. My favorite slide was 19, the heat map. And since we were talking about neighborhood cleanups, I have to give a shout out to West CA. That's a West Eastside Neighborhood Association. I think that might be the longest running monthly cleanup in the city currently organized by K.C. Carver, and that it cleans up illegally dumped items bordered by PCH, 10th Redondo and Cherry. So it's a huge area. And I noticed they're not on the heat map or they're just beside the heat map. And I'm wondering if they didn't pick up that 6 to 7 tons of dumped items a month, they might be in that heat map. So that's a very interesting graphic. But on that topic, this is a monthly cleanup. It's the the fourth Saturday of every month been going on for, I guess, decades now. 8 a.m. to noon. And they could really use volunteers and especially volunteers with pickup trucks. And I notice that these kind of third party contractors were mentioned in your presentation, Conservation Corps. It should be nice if we could recruit them. I've never been able to do that, but it's a very consistent day of the month and time, so we could really use some help there. Also on the on the corridor, kind of clean ups or quarterly corridor cleanups, it would be nice if we could give you some very specific areas. And I'll just mention the Anaheim corridor in the fourth District. We have a no man's land between business improvement district. So where Zephaniah ends, there's a couple of block stretch before the Midtown bid starts. And so that's an area we could really target. And if there's a vacant business and whatnot, we have really no way to addressing that. So I'd like to give you a more focused area and then more than a quarterly cleanup in that area. That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor MacGregor. Thank you. You know what things I found interesting in that chart right there, 11 is that one of the reasons why I brought forward the illegal dumping ordinance was to. Lower illegal dumping. And instead, you know, we've had a steady increase over illegal dumping as the years go by. And that's an interesting phenomenon to look at right now. We are looking at the fact that you have more you have an increase in requests. Or pickup special pickups. Yet illegal dumping hasn't gone down at all. It's gone up. Which is interesting to note. Has there been an effort to. I know these people to to find them to cite them for illegal dumping. I mean, I know it's hard because, you know, they do you know, you do an illegal dumping at two or three or four in the morning and nobody's around. But I think that we need to start looking at how we can cite these people for all the illegal dumping. And you've talked about. There's hotspots that you know where it takes place, but maybe we could have some kind of a camera or some kind of a patrol or roaming team out there in those wee hours of the morning when illegal dumping is taking place to catch these people. And that's what keeps our our city our city dirty is illegal dumping. I mean, it doesn't matter where I drive. I could drive in my district, see an illegal dumping, a mattress or a bunch of waste. And I could go to the next district, whether it's eight or six or or drive down PCH to. District four. And and see some items out there that I just strewn in the middle of the street or in front of a yard? No. Are there any ideas that you have how we can lower that blue bar right there to down to near, like, 20% 2016? Uh. We have tried a few different things in the past. We did have a camera program a while back. Yeah. What we found oftentimes was. Once people figure out there's a camera there, then then they move the hotspot a block over or something like that. So it kind of shifted people around. We did have one prosecution that occurred with that several servers. This is many years ago with that program. What we do is we're again, we're trying to encourage people to schedule the bulky items. And and it is an odd phenomenon. I wonder about this often. Councilmember It is. Why does dump illegal dumping continue to increase when people are obviously learning that they have legal options to to remove their waste? But, you know, sometimes I think maybe it's I still I think that we still have a certain percentage of people that take advantage of that misuse, that go along which app. And rather than call and schedule a cleanup, they just take a picture of it and send it in. We do go out and if we can identify the location from where the dumping occurred. Then we will. We don't have citation authority on this, but we can charge them for the service. And so I recall I'm not going to it wasn't this like this. I think it was last year we had gone from about $14,500 a year in added charges to over $65,000 a year and added charges. So our field investigators and supervisors really started becoming more active in trying to identify where the dumping occurred from. So so we do try and charge back. And I think some of your officers will know. And when you get a report, I will often respond saying we're going to try and find out who did this and charge them for the service. And everyone's been very supportive of that. And, you know, against members who really need to look at behavior change. So that is part of what we looked at with our Harvard students is we can continue to pick up the trash, which we should do, and we're doing bit more every single year. But that's where education, that's we're starting with youth and getting people to really look at why is dumping occurring and how do we provide other options so that this doesn't happen. If we continue to double like this, that's going to be a tremendous, you know, impact on our operations of resources. So we are still looking long term about how to just get to be a society that doesn't dump as much. You know what? I think communication's very important. Obviously, the education program that we have in place for keeping our city clean is very important. And obviously, I think we need a stronger emphasis on illegal dumping, that the illegal dumping is illegal, plus the fact that it keeps our city dirty and unwelcoming. And I think that we need to push that. That's part of the behavioral change that you're talking about. One last thing. And the the freeway on ramps and on ramps, the cleanups that you're working with, Caltrans and I'm thinking also with the county of L.A., how is that negotiation going? Because, I mean, we still have it's still a bit of an issue. I see a lot of material dumped right there on the island ramps and off ramps. Sometimes it takes weeks to clean those up. So how are we doing with that negotiation and what's going on? How are we going to be able to get a faster response when we have items dumped right there, I know, on the freeways and the freeway on off ramps. We are further along in negotiations with Caltrans than we are with L.A. County. I think one of the challenges we're going to we're trying to overcome is how is it going to get paid for? So the to make it more expeditious, city staff will be responding rather than waiting for Caltrans to respond. We're trying to develop a model that will allow for their support to do those cleanups. So the dollars that were presented tonight will allow us to start doing that. So we were doing the final negotiations. We believe we're having the the only type of agreement like this in the state where we're doing both maintaining some areas, but also working on people experiencing homelessness. So we would obviously like some of the state dollars that are coming down. We're not waiting for the others, though. Once we get through them a few, we're going to go ahead and and start doing more of that work. But we do think if there's new state resources, that they should help compensate us for those costs. That's all I have here. Thank you. Thank you. Come on, Mango. Thank you. My theory on the illegal dumping is that the costs that you charge to come pick up an illegal dumping is worth it. And I think that part of that is because people don't recognize you talk about the terrain change and don't plan ahead for I'm going to clean out my garage this weekend, so I need to call in a request now for next week. And the individuals would rather pay the illegal dumping fee and fine and get it picked up right now because that costs is still two parts. One, less than it would cost them to hire someone off of Yelp or rabbit, whatever people use to task people to do things. It's still cheaper than those two options. I mean, a same day, pick up minimum. I can't think that it's going to be under $225 and that would be for a small amount of stuff. And I think our fines are less than that. I think I saw one in my district that we worked on together that was 115. And so if the fee structure is incentivizing them to be an illegal dumper, it is worth that cost to them for a same day pickup. So my call to action to you would be to find a way to come up with a fee for a same day pickup that was closer to market rate because we are the legitimate option and senior citizens are more comfortable calling us and knowing that we're going to reliably be there. There are a lot of these individuals who, when you call them and you schedule them, they come out, they start the pickup, and then they raise their fees on the individuals. And so those are the kinds of situations that I've encountered that I think are contributing to the number of illegal pickups. We talk about Long Beach Volunteer Day. I know I've done a lot of those. I would love to see us expand to Long Beach Volunteer Month. Just a friendly reminder. We have a citywide calendar and all of these things should be on there. I think that every cleanup should be on the citywide calendar, even when the clean team is coming. I think it's something for people to look forward to. Obviously, we do want to incentivize illegal dumping in the quarter that's getting clean. But I think that it's it's important transparency for us. I also just want to kind of give a shout out to our city manager. We talked a lot about the Go Long Beach app when you became the city manager and whether or not even every department had had to go Long Beach app and whether or not they were ambassadors for the city in the way that we felt that it was important. I don't know what that progress is. I'd be interested to know who the the city staff member is that does the most reporting. Same with the council offices. I imagine some of us do more than others, and I think that that's a fun incentive based activity. When you go into Yelp, you can become the mayor of a restaurant because you're the one that goes there the most. We need to find ways to make the go. Long Beach app fun. When kids are standing at Eldorado Park playing some Pokémon game on their phone. I'd rather than be playing some go Long Beach app, right? You did you play the Pokémon game? And then lastly, we talk about on slide 23 the sidewalk issues and things that you're addressing. But even some of the streets in the city that are in very good condition have poorly graded streets. So we're still having the collection of debris and water and trash that the street sweepers can't get to. So I don't know what our long term solution to that is, because those streets, instead of being fully reconstructed, were slurry sealed. So now theoretically, we're not going to touch them for ten years. We need to have a plan to address those grading issues that are causing debris collection, especially on our corners adjacent to our parks and things like that. So thank you very much. Thank you. Councilman in the house. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to give a huge thank you to both Echo and Eric and the whole team for all the incredible job that you've been doing this past year and a half. It's just been a very trying year. But you guys have managed. So thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for all your support for our cleanup in the First District this past Saturday. It was such a successful event. We collected so much, so much, so much trash, which makes me happy that we collected it, but sad that it was there to be collected. But the community really enjoyed being able to participate, so I look forward to many of those moving forward. I know that the Golden Beach app has been an incredible tool for my constituents and for my staff as well. And I know that you guys in this plan had a portion for education. Are we planning on doing maybe like. The workshops for gold, Long Beach aptitude for our residents to get more familiar with them. I know I had a presentation done for my check ins for my residents and they really enjoyed it. But maybe we can create and I know we have like a short video that that we have, if you guys could correct me and that I think we do have a short video, but are we planning on doing more outreach on and education around the Golden Beach app? I'm getting a nod of yes from Leah Erickson, our director of technology and Innovation. So I'll address that. So with any new system, we kind of did a software rollout. We you know, this was a massive system. It's not just an app, but it is a customer resource management system that interacts with all of our work order systems. And so there were some bugs to figure out. We had one of the premiere firms, Salesforce, to do this for us. But in the in the kind of months after the launch, we were still working things out. So we've never really done the big full promotion of It's ready, it's here. So that's still coming. We're going to be doing more and more of that and more of explaining to people how to how to use it. So we've gone to a number of community meetings, and just when we talk about it for 5 minutes, people just really get excited that there's these new tools that they have available to them. Yes. What you more. Thank you. Thank you very much. I also was wondering, I know part of the strategy. Strategy is. To, you know. Clean our streets and be be able to have a cleaner environment. Right. One of the things that I wanted to ask is what is the feasibility of maybe adding like a tree watering program to this? I know that, as we all know here, that, ah, trees have really, really been dying. And I know that something like that would be really, really important. Is there any plans for something like that through this program? Or maybe if you can recommend something else, another program? Not currently, but we can certainly investigate that and see what options are available. Thank you. And I appreciate that a lot. Also. I know that it's been touched on before, but I really like the idea of coming together and having like a clean kit to clean, you know, the neighborhoods. And it also would be really need to be able to collaborate with our schools and our students. I think that that would be very essential. Is there anything in mind in this strategy to cooperate and collaborate, I should say, with our local schools? Yes, absolutely. We're like I said, we've we distributed 50 clean up in a box opportunities to the schools. And as they as students return to in-person learning, we will continue to expand that. We've we've had other programs in the past that we're looking at potentially reinvigorating or seeing if there are new opportunities for litter awareness and education . Wonderful, as you know, because my office and is always in constant contact with your office in regards to this. But one of the most frequent calls that we get is about street sweepers and how maybe we don't have enough. Maybe you can say a little bit about that and what's what the plan is. Certainly I think we have enough street sweepers. If the challenge is that we currently are short staffed in street sweeping. Like I said earlier, civil service has established a certified list for us to hire from, and we started interviews internally today and tomorrow. So we hope to be getting some sweeper operators on board. Again, one of the challenges we face this year in particular is that in our in our zeal to assist people that were experiencing COVID hardships, we were dismissing a lot of street sweeping citations. And as I said, there were about 25,000 citations dismissed. And each one of those was an obstacle along the path of the street sweeper to provide a quality street sweep. Now, that's not to say that that's the only reason we are going out pretty much every day with at least one route, our time zone open and what we try and use is move those around so we don't miss any one particular route two weeks in a row. But recently, for example, we did experience that where a sweeper actually broke down on a route that had been skipped the week before. So once we get these people on board, we will have full staffing and we will be sweeping every route every week. Amazing. Thank you for that. Thank you, Councilman Allen. Thank you, Mayor. And just great job. Really just good work. I love these clean ups. This has been really important, supporting our economic recovery, supporting our residents, supporting our businesses and tourism. I'm just I'm so proud of CD2. A big shout out to a lot of my houses that are constantly doing cleanups. I keep all the equipment in the back of my car because I know there's going to be one happening every week. So I'm really proud of all the work that's being done and the community. I had a question for you with regards to the trash bins. I know we've had some clean ups. Are those available through this this project? If we have neighborhood cleanups, then we're going to need that. I believe Development Services and Neighborhood Services Bureau can provide you beans for if you just want to be there at the location for cleanup. Perfect. Great. And then also, I love the LO the Golden Beach app. It's it's incredible. I do. I have met with all of the scooter companies online, at least all of them about one. And no scooters being left, and especially in the downtown area is problematic. Is there any way that we could incorporate a function in the Golden Beach app that would could work with the vendors of the scooter so that those are picked up? Because I know it's really problematic, especially like I said in downtown. I'm getting a positive head nod from T.I.. So, yeah, that's something that is now on their radar. That is awesome. That is going to make my constituents so happy. And then also, I did not realize that there was a training video. I know when I'm out talking to a lot of my neighborhood associations. There's a lot of folks that are interested in using the Go on Beach app. I'm always excited to tell people about it. So if there is a video, I'm not aware of that. So I would definitely want one to get that information and then I'd be able to share that. So thank you very much and great job, everyone. Thank you, Councilman Zoro. Yeah. So I wanted to ask a question. I was wondering if you can pull up that map with the hot spot, because you mentioned earlier that it's generally where it has the most trash is where there's families living and I take that maybe or multi-unit and. Yet. I don't think that's the that's the map with the hotspot spot map. I forgot what Slide 19 was in 19. Is it stuck on this young? Fortunately, our remote control is no longer functioning. Okay. All right. Oh, that's good to know. I just wanted to. My question is really, what are. Because, you know, I live. Okay, great. So I live, you know, nearby a multi-unit. And I always know when somebody is moving out because all of their furniture is like on the sidewalk. So I'm just wondering, what are that some ideas and approaches has come up to address this. Is it does it range from, you know, charging these apartment owners the fee for removing them? Because I'm always using the app every week or two. Really, it seems like there's furniture's out. So I'm just curious, what are some approaches we can take because that's really kind of been the reoccurrence that's happening on a cycle with these large, bulky items. That we can often tell the difference between a move out and just a dumped item based on the the composition of the material that's out there. And frankly, we you know, I'm a very firm believer in charging property owners back for that service because it is a business that they're running when they're when they're have rental units and clearing out your tenants spaces is a cost of doing business. And it shouldn't be a cost to the ratepayers. It should be a cost to the person who's running the business. So we do make every effort to if we can identify how and when and where that debris came from, that we charge them back. At this point, we don't have the ability to site. What we do is we charge for the cost of the service to collect those items. So there's no way to do that on the go along beach. APT Right. As far as you know that you see something illegally dumped by a site kind of like what we have I think when we're we're doing those fireworks, right? We have this app that you can download where the pictures of it, people are literally moving things from the building into the sidewalk and then reporting that. Is there a function that does that? You can you can add a picture in the Go Along Beach app. You know, and we've you know, there's so many options out there now. People have closed circuit cameras, they have the Ring app and they have all these different apps. And people send us videos of all sorts of stuff anymore. And more and more and more. And I have to remind our team is like, you got to you got to work as if you're on camera all the time because that does happen. So people do provide that. With regard to the Go Long Beach app, you can and you are encouraged to add photos in your report and you can add comments. So if someone is aware that and we do get this sometimes this came out of my neighbors place it's the address is this but oftentimes people are also a little. Reticent to kind of put their name out there and say they're reporting their neighborhood because they don't want to create a neighborhood problems either. All right. Thank you. Thank you. And councilman's in the house. Thank you, Mayor. Another quick question. As we see that illegal dumping continues to rise. I'm curious to know if you think it's because it's in locations where perhaps there's a lot of renters. And my question is, can renters call in for illegal I'm sorry, for specialized a pickup. So yes, there is a correlation between multi-family units, population density and illegal dumping. So for the first question, yes, there's a there's a nexus there. Secondly, it really is a it's a it's a challenging situation in Long Beach because we have certain accounts that are master metered, which means there's one meter for a multi-unit building and there could be say, let's just say ten units at that building. But we know that there's one meter, so it's one account. Whereas other buildings maybe multi metered. So you have ten units. Each unit has its own meter, and so there's ten accounts. So it's challenging for us to say that every renter has the opportunity for 12. Every renter does have the opportunity. But it's hard. We don't have the ability at this point to kind of track when it's a master meter to account, to say, how many did this unit get versus that unit get versus that unit get? Thank you. Thank you. That makes sense. And that's something I think that teams in working on for for a couple of years because that's absolutely been an issue so. Councilman Mongo and then we're going to go and received another report. Thank you. Since we have so much data, do we see that illegal dumping is most popular on certain days of the week or certain dates like the 15th and the 30th of the month when people might be moving out or getting a pay day and then going and buying a new couch? And or are we thinking that it's related to move outs and move ins? In many cases it's related to move out and move ins. And anecdotally, we've we've noticed at the very beginning or end of the month, this seems to be a little bit of an uptick. So do we schedule additional crews at that time or do we have the ability to know? We might we might allocate our crews accordingly, but we don't have additional crews available to schedule. I'd be interested in I mean, I'll touch back with Councilman Van de Hoss and Councilman Ciro, who have also talked a little bit about the the move and move out date. I mean, I'd really strongly recommend that we provide a 30th of the month available for purchase $200 pickup because again, that's below what it could be cost . The landlord could very well burden the price. The landlord is the one who wants those items out of there for the new tenant to move in. And then I really think and I talked about this last week, we need to do a better job informing the landlords of these opportunities. The landlords don't want Tenant A to move out and leave all their stuff on the curb and then tenant B and C be upset. We aren't really informing those landlords. A lot of them are senior citizens. We really need to do a better job. We need to pull the situs addresses of the properties from the assessor's office, and then we need to do a notification based on landlord of what programs are available, how we can support them better, supporting their tenants and the penalties if they don't. So I would I would love to see us work something out if either of you wanna work on the agenda item together. As you can tell by my number of cues, trash is really important to me and keeping the city clean. I really appreciate Mayor Garcia and all the work through the years. One of the biggest things we've done through the budget process is these clean teams, and I cannot tell you enough. When I used to drive from the east side of town all the way down to city hall meetings, it was brutal. And now it's just so rewarding to see how clean it is. And the streets are clean. I know we could get a little bit better coverage on the weeds in the winter right after that first rain. We just have a huge pop up of weeds and all of the sidewalks and gutters across our big corridors. But other than that excellent job, I drive all over L.A. County for my county job and you guys are just doing such an excellent job. I just want to thank you so much. I'm excited for the improvements that you're still striving for, and I want to keep you striving, but you're doing excellent work. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes council comments. I don't believe there's public comment in the study session. Correct. Okay. Thank you guys for the report. I know it's been a long 2 hours, but a very I think an important one. So I just want to thank guys for the study session on this item. So with that members, please go ahead and cast your votes to receive and file. Motion carries. Thank you. Just as a reminder, we have three hearings before the regular agenda starts still. So those are going to go next. I think I have one member of the public who had a public comment that's on a agenda item. Is that right? Okay. Why don't we go ahead and.