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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2015-06-09 Policy & Services Committee Summary Minutes Policy and Services Committee TRANSCRIPT Page 1 of 61 Regular Meeting Tuesday, June 9, 2015 Chairperson Burt called the meeting to order at 7:01 P.M. in the Council Chambers at 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, California. Present: Berman, Burt (Chair) DuBois, Wolbach Absent: Oral Communications Rachel Kellerman: My name is Rachel Kellerman. I live on Emerson Street and work as a teacher librarian at Paly. Like many Palo Altans, I believe that increasing airplane noise due to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA's) new metroplex routing system is impacting our health and quality of life. Now that I'm on summer break, I have started to research this noise pollution issue. Today I spoke in length to Bert Ganoung, the Manager of Noise Abatement at San Francisco International Airport. I wanted to know by what process the FAA was allowed to essentially build three jet superhighways above Palo Alto without our citizens and our government resisting this action. I learned that unfortunately Palo Alto did not raise its voice forcefully enough to convince the FAA to modify their plan, thus three jet arrival routes now converge well under 5,000 feet roughly above Embarcadero Road and Highway 101. Also unfortunately Palo Alto is currently not a formal part of the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) Community Roundtable, an organization of cities in San Mateo County that consult with the airport about noise-related issues. The good news is Mr. Ganoung said he would endorse a noise study in Palo Alto near the point of route convergence using SFO's mobile noise monitors. I contacted the Palo Alto Airport Manager, Mr. Swanson, today and he indicated that he will follow up with Mr. Ganoung about gathering noise data. I urge your Committee and the City Council as a whole and City management to make conducting a comprehensive jet airline noise study a priority. Our City needs to work with the FAA to adjust these landing routes so that they are better dispersed throughout the area. We all deserve quieter skies. Thank you very much for your attention. Sheri Furman: At a recent Palo Alto Neighborhood (PAN) meeting it came to our attention that a member of the Architectural Review Board is representing an applicant before the Board. While this person obviously will not participate in the discussion of the application, many of us feel the fact TRANSCRIPT Page 2 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 that the person is a Board Member will have an undue even if unintentional effect on the other Members. While I know you have a busy schedule, I ask that at a not too far distant date you discuss the appropriateness of having active Board and Commission Members represent applicants before the Board on which they serve. While this issue came up at a PAN meeting, this is strictly my own request. I apologize if this is already in your police and services manual, and I have not managed to read the whole thing. Thank you. Agenda Items 1. Project Safety Net Community Collaborative Update and Recommendation for Next Steps. James Keene, City Manager: May I make a statement? Chair Burt: Sure. Mr. Keene: I just wanted to clarify to the Committee that we formally have assigned Ed to be lead Staff to Policy and Services and Suzanne from the City Manager's Office to Finance. We look to Ed as lead, and I'm here as Staff on at least the first item. Thanks. Rob de Geus, Director of Community Services: Good evening, Council Members. Rob de Geus, Director of Community Services. I've been involved with Project Safety Net and supporting youth well-being and suicide prevention for some years now. It's a collaborative. The City is one partner of many partners, that's why you see a few more people at the table than just City Staff. The first thing we're going to do is introduce the folks that are here with Minka and City Staff. She is the Manager of Office of Human Services and co-chair of Project Safety Net. Minka van der Zwaag, Manager of Human Services: As you all know, Minka van der Zwaag, Human Services and co-chair with my partner from the school district of Project Safety Net. I'll let you introduce yourselves. Brenda Carrillo: Thank you. My name is Brenda Carrillo, and I'm the Student Services Coordinator with Palo Alto Unified School District and also the co-chair of Project Safety Net. Sue Eldridge: Hi, I'm Sue Eldridge and I'm interested in Project Safety Net, community member. Leif Erickson: Leif Erickson, Executive Director of Youth Community Service, one part of the founding partners of Project Safety Net. TRANSCRIPT Page 3 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Shashank Joshi: Shashank Joshi, also a founding member of Project Safety Net, also representing Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and HEARD Alliance and child psychiatrist, pediatrician and little league coach. Pamela Garfield: I am Pamela Garfield. I'm a licensed clinical social worker. I've been the site director of Adolescent Counseling Services at Gunn High School this year. I've been on the front lines this whole year and support Project Safety Net. I'm on the Leadership Committee with these folks. Mr. de Geus: We have a few people participating with the presentation. We do have a PowerPoint. It's a little difficult to see. Minka is going to kick us off. Ms. van der Zwaag: We're very happy to be here this evening to share the work that the Project Safety Net Collaborative has been doing over the last several months to be able to bring this presentation to you and the work of Collective Impact and that concept for your review. I'd like to do a quick review of the presentation for you this evening. We'll be speaking about what brings us here tonight, and that was the referral last fall from the Project Safety Net presentation to the Policy and Services Committee. We'd like to give you some key touch points of PSN's work this school year. We'd like to do some sharing of a meeting we had with experts in suicide prevention that we had this spring. We'd like to give you the information about the Collective Impact approach that Project Safety Net (PSN) has identified as a workable model for staffing and structure and talk about some next steps that we have for next year. The Policy and Services Committee what happened October of last year, at that meeting the Project Safety Net Leadership Committee was there along with Rob and I as Staff with a purpose of providing an update on the work of Project Safety Net. We discussed the difficulty that we had in retaining staff with our current staffing model. We had had two directors in 18 months. We shared with the Committee a conceptual idea that the Project Safety Net Leadership Team had discussed regarding using the remaining City Project Safety Net funding to provide grants to partner agencies in the community that work on suicide prevention and youth well-being. The outcome of that meeting was that the Policy and Services Committee was not supportive of the concept that the City would solely become a funding agency for Project Safety Net efforts. They saw and expressed to us a real value in Project Safety Net was that gathering together of the collaborative members and that cross-functional and cross-agency work. They directed us to go back to look at alternative staffing and structure models for Project Safety Net and come back to you. I'd like to have my co-lead, Brenda, talk a little bit about the work of Project Safety Net this last fall and spring. TRANSCRIPT Page 4 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Ms. Carrillo: As all of you can probably imagine, there's been quite a bit of attention on mental health and suicide prevention and intervention and unfortunately postvention across our community given that we've had a number of teen deaths since October 2014. It's not only been difficult for community members including our school staff to deal with the crises in front of them, but being triggered by the past cluster that we've had many of the people who are in our schools were there when we had our first cluster of suicides. It's been a very intense year, a very difficult year for the schools, and I imagine for all of us. Despite that, we have continued to move the Project Safety Net agenda forward to focus on what more we could be doing to support our students, our families, our communities. I will highlight a few of the bullets that you see here. We did have quite a bit of crisis response on our school campus. We're very lucky to be in a community that cares so much about children. We owe a lot of that cohesion and sense of collaboration to Project Safety Net's work. When we had the crises on our school campuses, we were able to call on our agencies to come and provide support. At one point we had 14 agencies represented on our school campuses to come together and respond. There’s means, restrictions, efforts that are happening across the City. I'm sure you're well aware of those, so I won't spend too much time on that particular bullet. We had an Opinion Leaders Conference which Shashank will be talking about in a little while. One of the items that I would like to highlight that is up here is that we've done quite a bit of outreach in the last several months to the CDC, Centers for Disease Control. We have a strong interest in having the Centers for Disease Control provide us with some support. We want to understand what it is that's going on in our community that has brought us to this point of having lost additional students. We feel that the best organization to help us to understand what some unique factors might be in our community is the CDC. There's quite a process to access their support. You have to go through local channels and then State. Finally, you move yourself up. We've had a couple of meetings with the Public Health Department already to talk about what could be offered at the local level. We have also been consulting with Dalene Dutton with Communities That Care to help us understand what kind of help we should be requesting. Based on our conversations with her, we're very hopeful that the CDC will be able to help us in a couple of very specific ways. One of the ways in which CDC supported Dalene's community, because they also had a cluster of suicides, was that they came out. They were there, she said, for a week's time. They literally come in and they're here for an intense amount of time. They focused on their work, and they were able to access databases and systems and organizations in a way that we're not able to do. They looked at ambulance rosters. They looked at 5150 information for hospitals. They were able to go in and pull information out to help the community understand the scope of the problem and the depth of the problem in a way TRANSCRIPT Page 5 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 that I don't know that we've quite gotten to. The CDC was able to come in and do focus groups. They had over 400 participants in these different focus groups to understand what are the community norms, values and expectations around suicide prevention and mental health. At the end of this short amount of time, again they were there for a week, they produced a report that the community was able to use to guide their effort. We're very interested in having their support here in our community. We feel like that would be a great advantage to us in terms of our work with Project Safety Net. There's been various workshops that have been provided, parent workshops. We did some work around the role of sleep. We're adding sleep questions to our California Healthy Kid survey. It's a statewide survey that's administered to grades 5, 7, 9 and 11. We're trying to understand how sleep may be impacting our students in a way that we've not understood before. We've consulted with Stanford, with Dr. Joshi as well as other professionals over at Stanford, to help us understand what kinds of questions we should be adding to our survey. What else do I want to say here? We have been also doing a lot of work in reaching out to parents in a culturally responsive way, increasing our outreach to Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking families who have been very much impacted by the deaths that have happened. We also have Spanish-speaking families, and making sure that they're receiving the kind of support that they need as they move forward. In addition to that, we've been doing a lot of parent education overall, but focusing in on subgroups within our parent community. We continued to do school-based Question, Persuade and Refer (QPR) training. I know that the City also has QPR training they're administering through their different means. We are wanting to get more and more people trained on Question, Persuade and Refer and to the gatekeeper training, so that they can respond. Another highlight that we wanted to share is that we have also been doing a lot of work to promote this idea of youth voices. We had two youth forums in this last school year. The idea was to get students involved and to have their voice and what they think they need and how we can best support them. There were several events that were held. One was by the community, and the other was sponsored by a diverse group of community partners. The idea was to collect information from teens about their experience and what they needed moving forward. The Palo Alto Youth Council did a joint Study Session with the City Council. That was very helpful in terms of gaining information on youth voice. Every year the district partners with the City and others to support Youth Speaks Out, which is an art show. It's a way of helping students who may not want to articulate or voice their feelings, to do that through art. It's a very powerful partnership that we have in promoting artistic expression of mental health. Most of you probably know we also have a program at Gunn; it's called Sources of Strength. It's a peer support program. That program will be expanding to Paly next school year in TRANSCRIPT Page 6 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 addition to Challenge Success which comes out of Stanford, another program that both of our high schools will be implementing. We're very happy with the fact that our two new high school principals are doing a lot of work to make sure that the programs that exist at both of our campuses are similar and are in line. Minka's going to have an intern, and the School District is also going to have an intern working over this summer. We were having a good conversation about how we might have our interns work together to promote this idea of whether it be stigma reduction or providing more resources and support to our community. We haven't decided yet what that's going to look like, but there's lots of partnerships that we're continuing to explore. Ms. van der Zwaag: Part of that was continuing to value and hear from youth. Both of these youths are transitional-age youth, so they are youth that have been through our schools in Palo Alto and have an interesting perspective to share with us. The next part of the presentation is an interesting Opinion Leaders Forum that Dr. Joshi pulled together in March of this year. A key and core value of the collaborative is continuing to learn together. This is ever more important in the midst of our current period of suicide contagion. Dr. Joshi called together an Opinion Leaders Forum in March. They shared a lot of best practices for suicide prevention. We've asked Dr. Joshi to give an overview of that event. Chair Burt was at that event, and that was wonderful to have you there and interested in the work of Project Safety Net. Dr. Joshi will let the others of you who weren't there, to give some highlights of what happened. Dr. Joshi: Thank you, Minka. Thanks for inviting us to be here. One of the five conditions for Collective Impact success is known as continuous communication. One of the aspects of our community collaborative, one of the leaders there, you see their names up on the screen, Mort Silverman who is the senior science adviser for the Suicide Prevention Resource Center which is one of the most important suicide prevention organizations in the world. He's been doing this for 35 years. He's best known for some of the work he's done with the Jed Foundation which concerns itself with transition- age youth. He's also done a number of projects with the big parent groups that look at suicide risk factors. One of the first things he said to us that day, after hearing brief presentations from our community leaders, was that in his more than 35 years he hasn't seen anything quite like this. We're unique in our risk factors because of the easy access to means. We're also unique in our strengths as a community in terms of how we've come together. He also noted the success of the last four years in terms of what the community has done to try and mitigate the issue of teen distress and completed suicide, particularly with regard to suicide cluster. They mentioned some of the best practices that we have already been engaged TRANSCRIPT Page 7 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 with, such as gatekeeper training not only for adults but in our community. Uniquely we've made it mandatory for all teenagers in our public schools to get trained as gatekeepers through QPR and now through Sources of Strength, which is another best practices program that our group is actually doing research on, not only in our community but in other communities in the Bay Area. Peter Wyman, whose name is up on the board, from the University of Rochester has done a lot of the research in that area. We are one of the sites in that big study. He also talked a lot about both upstream universal suicide prevention and mental health support a little further downstream and then farthest downstream, the efforts of the City to engage Caltrain into best practices means restrictions, because we know that means matter. We did not have one of our most recent, Lauren Barley Schlemmer who's been quite an advocate for downstream prevention. Mort Silverman and a couple of others who have had experience with train suicides and youth suicide in general pointed to that as a very important next area to focus on. There was also a focus on things like prevention. Again, with our unique Board policy and administrative regulations that the School District passed in 2010 which allows best practices to come into the classroom to take instructional time, to be able to teach these very important skills to peers, to not only look for distress in their friends and how to get help, but how to recognize when they themselves are under too much stress, turning to distress way before it gets to desperation. Other highlights included the role of sleep in prevention and the role of sleep deprivation or sleep problems as a unique suicidal risk factor across the lifespan. That's been shown worldwide in data over the last five years. Rebecca Bernert, who heads our suicide prevention laboratory, highlighted some of her national and international work looking at sleep issues across the lifespan. That discussion resulted in a lot of very important talks at the School Board level around school start times, again bringing in the experience of people nationally who have had experience with other communities like ours. Brenda and Minka mentioned Dalene Dutton from the Communities That Care initiative that's going on in Maine, in a community, Camden, that is very similar to Palo Alto in terms of demographic makeup and what they struggled with and what they've done. That model lends itself very nicely to Collective Impact as well. Finally, best practices in media coverage was a theme. We had Doreen Marshall from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention give us examples of what are appropriate ways to cover suicide and to cover, say, the back story if that is to be done and how to do it and some examples of how not to do it. That, again, is an ongoing conversation. There was just another media roundtable today that I participated in that was fruitful and is something we're going to need to continue to do. Finally, Brenda mentioned our ever increasing diversity in the community now, with about 40 percent of our student population being Asian-American. A large number of those kids being children of immigrant parents and how do you TRANSCRIPT Page 8 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 culturally adapt and attune all of your intervention and prevention kinds of initiatives so that those for whom you may not have intended the message was not received, how can you conduct culturally syntonic community forums as the District has sponsored five along with the hospital and the Department of Psychiatry partnering with community agencies like ACS and PACYS and other places to try and reach our growing diverse community. Those will also continue. That comes back to where I started, which was the idea of continuous communication, making sure that everything actually goes through Project Safety Net. All of these specific examples I've mentioned, they have acted as a clearinghouse to make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. That brings us back to why we have chosen Collective Impact. We have all of these ideas. We had a flight into health, if you will, for the last four years, relative health. From where Pam Garfield and I sit, we do still see these kids who come in with distress. The community is better equipped now from a capacity point of view, not only to handle those in distress, but also to know what best practices are when we're in that period where we're not losing kids and adults regularly. We still have a lot of work to do. This model provides a nice roadmap for us given that it's been demonstrated in other cities like ours to make a big difference. Ms. van der Zwaag: Thank you, Dr. Joshi. Before going any further, I'd like to introduce Cathleen Blanchard, who is an original member from Project Safety Net from the beginning and is a member of our Leadership Team. We are here today to talk about the Collective Impact model. I wanted to very briefly talk about the process which we went through to bring this model to you today. We comprised a subcommittee, and that was members of our Leadership Team current and past leaders of Project Safety Net. We felt like we needed the perspective of leaders which had been with us since the beginning as Leif introduced himself as being one of them. There's a full list in your Staff packet. They gathered and they reviewed several models for staffing and structure. The approach that they came away with, which was subsequently reviewed by the School District executive staff, by Jim Keene, by the full Leadership Team, was that of Collective Impact. We're grateful for this very intense work that the subcommittee did in this regard. Rob will spend some time explaining Collective Impact to you. Mr. de Geus: I'm going to move through it pretty quickly, because we want to get to the discussion. You've seen the Staff Report, and so we talk about Collective Impact. It's defined up here. It's when organizations from different sectors agree to try and solve a social problem and align their efforts around a common agenda. In reality, Project Safety Net is doing that already. That's what we've been trying to do for the last several years. Collective Impact is the latest, cutting-edge thinking around how a TRANSCRIPT Page 9 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 community does this type of work. There's lots of different models that one can use. The Communities That Care, you heard about that. There's Positive Community Norms. There's Healthy Communities; another collaborative-type model. Collective Impact was one that we landed on because it fit well with the work that we're doing here in Palo Alto. We also had some leaders that are part of Project Safety Net that are in a Collective Impact framework already. Leif Erickson in East Palo Alto is working within a model like that. Terry Godfrey on the School Board is as well. Sue Eldridge—where is she? She's back here—was Executive Director of an innovative Collective Impact model in San Francisco. They did some great work. We have some deep knowledge internally. We landed on this and thought this was a good framework for Palo Alto and for what we're trying to do. The best way to think about Collective Impact success is these five conditions. They're called the Five Conditions of Success for Collective Impact. I'll just go over them really quickly. A common agenda is the first one. We largely have a common agenda. We have a 22-point plan that maybe new Council Members haven't seen, but when we had the first cluster of suicides we developed this very robust plan that had intervention, education and prevention strategies. This is still relevant and a guiding plan for us. Then we have a more succinct one-page plan that also supports a common agenda. We still need to tighten it up even further, and that's some work we need to do. A common agenda is the first Condition for Success. The second is shared measurement. The idea here is that we have a clear agenda of what we're trying to accomplish, but we're sharing how we're doing across sectors. The City's doing certain work. We're working with teens and youth. This summer, in fact, we have several thousand kids in our program, but we also hire 200 teens to help us do that. That's a program where we support them and mentor them. We have a Teen Center that we run every day. We're measuring our work, but is our measurement of that work aligned with how the District is measuring their work and is it aligned to Youth Community Service (YCS) and some of the other organizations? The idea is to have a clear, common agenda and we're sharing our measurement and adapting to that feedback that we're getting continuously. The third thing is mutually reinforcing activities. The best way to think about this is with an example. We talked about gatekeeper training where we train non-medical staff on the basic tenets of what one needs to know if someone is in distress and how to help them and how to have that conversation and get them the professional help that they need. We're doing that training for all City Staff, Library Staff, Human Resources Staff in the City. The School District is teaching all of their secondary teachers and coaches and YCS, the Young Men’s Club of America (YMCA), all teaching their folks that are working with kids this basic level of training. Developmental assets is another example. We've adopted developmental assets as a framework for how to think about youth developments. YCS has TRANSCRIPT Page 10 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 adopted that. The District is doing a variety of things related to developmental assets at each school, the YMCA, the City. Mutually reinforcing activities. Continuous communication is the other investment that a Collective Impact organization or group needs to work on. It relates to trust and respect and building relationships. Largely that's what Project Safety Net is. It's bringing organizations that impact youth in some way or people, individuals that care about this topic, and bringing them together and building authentic, genuine relationships among them. Then true collaborative initiatives can seed from that. The last is a backbone organization. This is an interesting one. Collective Impact, the model, the framework, suggests that there is a separate backbone agency that is not one of the partner organizations that is embedded in the work of supporting youth and young people. In fact, it's an organization that their only job is to support the collaborative. It doesn't have to be big; the idea is that it's a handful of people. That's what they do: they bring people together; they support the continual communication and the shared measurement across the different sectors. There's the five tenets of Collective Impact. We think that this model will create greater accountability, will strengthen the alignment of activities across the sectors and the 30-some organizations that are part of this collaborative, and will sharpen our communication and understanding. The last page on this, Minka, if I'm right? Ms. van der Zwaag: Yes. Mr. de Geus: Developing a clear roadmap for what we're trying to accomplishment, others can speak more eloquently than I can about this. The idea is having a clear roadmap that we can share with the public and with students, so it's clear what we're trying to accomplish and define it. The roadmap needs to be meaningful, that it gets us to where we want to go and that is to save lives and to create an environment where youth thrive in Palo Alto. We're making bets on these things. We're investing in certain activities. We're making the bet that if we focus on this activity, it will in fact impact our end goal, our outcome. It has to be plausible, and it has to be testable. What we're doing, what we're testing is some type of scoreboard that we have that can say, "Yes, we are actually getting closer to reaching the objective." It has to be doable. That means we have to have the resources available, and we have to have partners that are truly engaged and fully engaged, particularly those that work very closely with young people. The roadmap and Collective Impact, we're doing a lot of this already. There are areas where there are significant gaps, that we don't have and that we need to have to be truly effective. That's what we'll work on next, if we get the support of funding. Ms. van der Zwaag: With the grounding that you've just received, that's the same type of grounding that our collaborative worked on at our recent TRANSCRIPT Page 11 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 meeting, to understand the concepts of Collective Impact and how it can make a difference. From that point, we felt it would be important to take a next step before we came to you today. That next step was to call in two experts on Collective Impact. One was Dalene Dutton, who has been introduced to you by a couple of my colleagues at the table, who runs a Collective Impact collaborative in Maine and a community that's very similar to ours. The other is Dr. Jim Connell who was brought to our attention by Sue Eldridge, who is the Executive Director of the Institute for Research and Reform in Education. In that role, he has been vital to many organizations that have worked to institute the Collective Impact model and worked with them to set up this roadmap. What do you need to do? What does it look like? How will you know you're being successful? Those two leaders came to us on May 7th to lead a workshop. The real purpose is to look at what matters in the lives of our youth and which efforts do we do and which efforts should we do that make an influence and a difference in the youth that we're trying to reach. The key work that we did that day was to do a mapping exercise, to look at what we'd already done in Project Safety Net against a data framework under prevention, intervention and postvention and the types of youth that those efforts had reached. From that work, it was very interesting to see the gaps, to see the youth we were actually reaching, and were those the youth that we're trying to reach to make maximum impact on suicide prevention. We had a whole group of individuals there. It's on two slides, and it's an eye exercise. We included it for the very reason that you could see the wide-ranging attendance that we had and the wide-ranging support we had with our partners in the community who are standing with us to make these next steps towards a Collective Impact approach. There were parents there, faith community representatives, School District had many representatives, nonprofits, mental health professionals. It was a good time to come together, just so we could feel a lot more well versed in the concepts of Collective Impact and to step back and say that we wanted to affirm and strengthen our commitment to this approach to move forward and to get an idea of the type of resources. We're not the only community that would be working on a Collective Impact model. This is a very strong way of working together that many collaboratives are now doing. There's a whole body of research that we can lean in on to gain some information that will help us. Doing a collaborative is not easy. Running a collaborative, being a member of a collaborative is one of the hardest things you can do, working towards that common mission. We feel like using the Collective Impact approach and the knowledge resources it brings to Palo Alto will be incredibly useful. I'd like to end by talking a little bit about the recommendations. The two consultants met with us that day and they had a chance to also meet with City Manager Keene. The Superintendent was also able to get briefed on the work that day; he was in attendance that day as well. Brenda spent some TRANSCRIPT Page 12 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 good time with him briefing him on the results of that meeting. They sent us some recommendations. You'll see those on Pages 7 and 8 of your Staff Packet. I won't go over them individually. We feel like our transition to a Collective Impact model will be a journey. The Project Safety Net Collaborative members will work on that. We admit we don't have all the steps in place. We would like to share with you tonight what we think are some reasonable Year One goals. I'd like to quickly go over those and spend the rest of the time hearing your questions and comments and being able to give that time back to you. The first step and the first recommendation for next year is to contract for an interim or transitional Project Safety Net leader. For PSN to be successful, what we heard over and over and over again is we needed someone who's full-time job it was every day to come to work to work on collaborative issues. As you know, that's something we haven't had in the last couple of years. It has been a real gap. The second thing we feel is a workable Year One goal is to complete a Project Safety Net Collective Impact roadmap. Rob quickly laid out what a roadmap is, but we need to establish the roadmap for Palo Alto. We feel like that's a reasonable Year One goal, to create one that is plausible, testable and doable. The third one is to establish an Executive Board made up of key institutional leaders. This was a recommendation from the two consultants, feeling like this Executive Board with its two founding members, which would be Jim Keene and Dr. Max McGee at the School District, would be able to call together other strategic leaders in the community, leaders of key institutions, and bring them together to talk about marshalling sources for Project Safety Net. The fourth thing that we feel like is a Year One reasonable goal is to resource some teams. These are the key three areas that any Collective Impact approach and collaborative needs to be successful: to have strong skills and strong resources in data collection, capacity building, and facilitation. We feel like resourcing teams in each of these areas will be key for our Year One. Lastly and certainly not lastly in importance is to elevate youth voice. We need to establish an ongoing avenue for authentic youth voice. We have had youth involved in Project Safety Net at meetings. We have had youth involved in subcommittees. It proves difficult. It proves difficult for time of day. It proves difficult just to set the youth up for success in those meetings and hearing their voice as far as what would be successful strategies for their involvement and successful strategies for affecting youth in our community. That is what we'd like to do for next year. If you look back at the youth events that we've had in the last six months, we're at a good start there. Lastly is the Project Safety Net budget. This slide represents the City's budget as it relates to Project Safety Net. We are showing a couple of things. We're showing the adopted budget for this year, the amended budget. As you know, we came back to Council for additional funding for the Track Watch Program and the proposed budget for next year, which Rob will speak to just a little bit. I just wanted to emphasize that TRANSCRIPT Page 13 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Project Safety Net is a collaborative with over 20 agencies participating. The budget that you see here is the City's budget for Project Safety Net. It does not represent the time or the money or the commitment that all of our partner agencies contribute, many of them quite substantially in their efforts to work on Project Safety Net goals and outcomes. I just wanted to share that with you. Rob will go over a little bit more about the budget. Mr. de Geus: This is the Project Safety Net budget that is drawing on the Stanford Development funds for Project Safety Net. We as a City do a lot more than this. Four teens and four youth also relate to Project Safety Net work as a partner organization. I did want to call out the track security number. It was overstated by about $170,000 in a slide yesterday. That's not to say this isn't significant; it is a significant commitment to rail security if we were to fund at that level. Ms. van der Zwaag: If we went down the different partners that are here, represented today, each of them could talk about the substantial commitments that their agencies are invested in currently and for next fiscal year as far as their commitment to Project Safety Net as well. With that, we thank you for your attention to our Staff Report. Mr. de Geus: It was long; sorry. Ms. van der Zwaag: It was long; we're sorry. We invite any questions. Chair Burt: First, I wouldn't apologize for it. It was a very informative report and helpful. Thank you. Council Member Berman: Thank you guys very much. Thank you for the Staff Report, the presentation, the work that you guys, hours and hours of work that you guys put into this and have been for years. This is an issue that's been confounding our community for a long time. We're lucky to have all of you guys who are working on it. A couple of questions that I had were—the Collective Impact model seems to be the right model for the various organizations that we have involved and the expertise that each one brings to specialized areas of the issue of teen mental health and youth well- being. I'll get to that question in a second. Maybe I missed it in the Staff Report, and I didn't dig too deep into the attachments. If you had to summarize in 50 words, what's the biggest difference between what we've been trying to do and the Collective Impact model? Ms. van der Zwaag: Maybe you can add what you would say. Mr. de Geus: There are several. A lot of what we're doing is Collective Impact, even the word. That's what we're doing; we're bringing people TRANSCRIPT Page 14 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 together to try and have collective impact in Palo Alto to support youth. A couple of real differences is the shared measurement. That's the big one. We don't do that. We measure in a variety of ways. The School District does probably the most measurement. We're not sharing that across sectors in a way that informs what we do and where to invest more or less. That's not happening. That's a big difference. The second one that I would mention is the backbone support. It's been the City of Palo Alto. On the whole, that was good to get us started, but I don't think it will work for the future. The Collective Impact approach suggests that it is an independent organization. Ms. van der Zwaag: That's what I was going to say. I just wanted to give the visual back. Council Member Berman: The visual is very helpful. I was trying to get the contrasting between the path forward and where we've been. Speaking of the backbone support, I work in my day job at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. We're an education nonprofit down in San Jose. One of our big initiatives is the East Side Alliance, which is a collaboration, we call it, between the East Side Union High School District, the seven feeder districts, K-8 districts, the high school district, the community college district and San Jose State. We also bring together outside organizations. Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF), we're that backbone support, and we have our Vice President (VP) of programs and advocacy, Manny Barbara, run the initiative. I raise money for the initiative. It seems to be a pretty good model. We've got support staff within SVEF that can help Manny. What organization do you see playing that role here? We're vetoing a whole bunch of them, because we're saying, "If you're involved at all already, then you shouldn't be the backbone support." Mr. de Geus: Not necessarily. That's what this says, but we do need to, as a collaborative, think that through. One thing we have in Palo Alto is a lot of nonprofit partners, more than most. Is it another nonprofit partner? Even within the collaborative, there's been concern about that. Should we maybe have a fiscal agent? Should it be one of our large medical institutions that has the ability to take on some piece of this, like shared measurement, like Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Sutter Health potentially? That's something we need to think through. We don't have the answer to it yet. Ms. van der Zwaag: Working with the two consultants, looking at the models that they have used and overlaying that to Palo Alto to see if that would work. I've initialized some conversations with the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits. I'm going to have a conversation this week with their Executive Director to get some ideas from her of what's worked for other collaborative efforts, what hasn't worked. I also had an initial conversation TRANSCRIPT Page 15 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 with someone with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation yesterday. He'll be putting me through to his supervisor as well. We're going to look at different models. We haven't landed on a specific one. Council Member Berman: I'll guess I'll stick with that and maybe see if I have other questions towards the end. Thank you. Council Member Wolbach: My only question is to follow up on that. My initial understanding was the idea here was to move in the direction of establishing PSN as its own independent backbone organization. Perhaps I misunderstood that. I thought the idea was that you set up the Executive Board, hire a Director. I thought the idea was to move PSN in the direction of being its own backbone, rather than finding some other. Perhaps I misunderstood remarks, the responses. I confused them when I came in. Mr. de Geus: That is the typical Collective Impact approach. As other organizations set these up, there is different varieties. Maybe Leif can speak a little bit to the one that's in East Palo Alto. They use one of the smallest, if this right, one of the smaller. Ms. van der Zwaag: That's Terry's. Mr. de Geus: Was that Terry's? Ms. van der Zwaag: That's Terry's. Mr. de Geus: They use one of the smallest partners as the backbone and can provide that particular service. It's something that we need to think through. Creating a nonprofit is certainly one of the leading thoughts on this. I have to say it's not where everybody's at. Not everybody in the collaborative thinks that that's what we should do. We should take our time and think that through. Council Member Wolbach: If we this evening, for instance, approve the Staff recommendation and the full Council, assuming hypothetically, goes along with that as well, then what's our roadmap and timeline for deciding on what the backbone organization would be? Mr. de Geus: It's this first year. It's part of that first year work plan, hiring that Director and working through what are the options for a backbone agency, does a nonprofit make sense. Also the discussion with the senior leaders of the institutions that are here in Palo Alto, such as Jim and Max and some of these higher level folks, to think through what their interest is. They may step forward and say they want to do that. Stanford University has been interested in this work and are following it closely. They may say as a teaching hospital, "We will be the backbone for you. We have TRANSCRIPT Page 16 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 researchers on staff. We can do that." That's why we're not 100 percent saying it's going to be a new nonprofit partner. Council Member Wolbach: Again, if we were to go with the Staff recommendation both as a Committee and as a full Council, would then the Interim Director, would one of their roles be facilitating the decision making about the future structure of the organization? Mr. de Geus: Yes. Council Member Wolbach: And the future selection and solidification of a backbone agency? Mr. de Geus: Not on their own, with the collaborative. Council Member Wolbach: They would be facilitating that conversation. Mr. Keene: Working with the Board. Mr. de Geus: With the City funding it, there will need to be a check-in with this Committee or the full Council, probably both, before the decision is made. Council Member Wolbach: I would certainly not expect them to make the decision. One of their goals or responsibilities would be that selection. Mr. de Geus: One of the priorities. Council Member Wolbach: Helping again facilitate the decision making so that we can have some closure on that question and move on with getting the work done. Mr. de Geus: It's interesting. We talked about the five cities, Dalene Dutton from the East Coast, and they had a large community crisis and suicide cluster there. They developed a Communities That Care model, is what they used. It began in the school district, and that was the backbone agency. At one point it was with the Y, and eventually they developed their own nonprofit, because they grew and it became what was needed for them. It's not uncommon that it evolves. Council Member Wolbach: That's it for my questions. I have comments, but I'll save them until after. Chair Burt: Let me follow onto Cory's before turning it over to Tom. I have some others after that. On this particular subject. Is it correct that we have two aspects to this Collective Impact discussion? One is the model for the TRANSCRIPT Page 17 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 organization. The second is who serves as the backbone. We're talking about proceeding with a model for the organization at this time and giving ourselves some breathing room to determine the second backbone issue as we go forward over the next year or so. Mr. de Geus: That's a great way of focusing it. Mr. Keene: Could I just neaten that a little bit. That's exactly right. It's a little more though like we're—I apologize for the sports analogy, but the Chair is a football player, etc.—running the wish. Chair Burt: Not anymore, Jim. Mr. Keene: Was. Your dad was a coach, of course. We're running a wishbone-type offense here, in the sense that settle on the structure, then deploy the structure with the concept of, one, taking our time but maybe testing it out even with an Interim Director. There's always the potential the Interim Director could morph into the permanent, for example. Obviously we have enough pressure on us to get things moving and take us to the next level that this is an acknowledged evolutionary model that will require a rigorous assessment of how things are unfolding as we go ahead to make sure we make the right choices, so we don't get soft-headed about whether we're on the right track as we're testing this or not. The other thing that I wanted to add about what's different about this is that it's more like we're reenergizing, giving a boost, to the existing Project Safety Net. The Executive Board, for example, is going to have to be invested also, because there are some real decisions and considerations that are going to have to be made as the year goes ahead. We can't say, "Oh, good, we've got a Director on board. We'll see what they say." Council Member DuBois: I haven't been deeply involved in Project Safety Net, so I may have some basic questions, if you guys could fill me in a little bit. In terms of the model, what other models were considered or was this the primary model you looked at? Mr. de Geus: The list of models. Ms. van der Zwaag: I'm looking for that. The four models that we brought to the subcommittee were looking at having no Project Safety Net staff. It would be volunteer led, and there would be shared leadership among the partners. That was one thing that the subcommittee talked about. We talked about leaving it as the current model, that the City of Palo Alto would hire and manage the staff. We talked about another Project Safety Net partner, not the City, becoming the sponsor partner that hires the staff with financial support from other partners. We talked about enlisting a separate TRANSCRIPT Page 18 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 organization specifically designed and purposed to provide resources and infrastructure for the collaborative. Those were the four concepts that were discussed. We all came to the deep realization, we were talking about a backbone agency. This work of Collective Impact, of the shared model, that was exciting to everybody, but the work that called us together was to look for the best concept of a backbone agency that could push PSN forward. Leif, did you want to add something? You were at those meetings as well. Mr. Erickson: The process was a very practical one of understanding what had worked and hadn't worked in the past and what were the potential ways to fix that, fix those problems. We had good people around the table, but there were structural issues why we were not being successful moving forward. Council Member DuBois: I was looking, but I didn't see what are the organizations that are part of Project Safety Net. Is there any criteria to be a member? Ms. van der Zwaag: A willingness to work together towards very important work. Council Member DuBois: You can just tell me where to find the list. Ms. van der Zwaag: It would be on the Project Safety Net website. If you go back and look at the people that were at the workshop on May 7th, that's our partners. Working with staff at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, the School District, the Board of Ed. It's really the Y, ACS, YCS, independent mental health professionals. The County of Santa Clara suicide prevention staff has been great a great asset to us. Council Member DuBois: Is the JCC and any other religious organizations part of this? Ms. van der Zwaag: Yes. Mr. de Geus: There's several faith community members that come. The JCC was involved early on, but have not been attending recently to the meetings. To your point, Council Member DuBois, it's a good one. In our thinking, it was definitely my thinking and the Leadership Team that everyone in the community that cares about young people is part of the safety net. Council Member DuBois: If you show up, you're in. Mr. de Geus: Yeah. What we've. TRANSCRIPT Page 19 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Ms. van der Zwaag: Rob says if you live and breathe, you have a role to play. Mr. de Geus: It's true. Everyone has an impact on a young person, whether they're living on your street or you're a teacher or you're whatever. Council Member DuBois: When you start to talk about shared measurement and accountability, what is that going to look like for member organizations if you show up and you're in? How accountable do you have to be? Ms. van der Zwaag: Leif, do you want to speak to that a little bit, how your coalition does that? There's sometimes different levels of expectation and involvement as a key organization or a member organization or a participating organization. Mr. Erickson: In our Collective Impact experience in the East Palo Alto community, East Palo Alto and Belle Haven, the Collective Impact organization is called YES, Youth and Government Strategies for Success. The backbone organization is the One East Palo Alto organization, neighborhood improvement initiative. That was originally a convening organization. It's independent, neutral. Those of us who are involved in direct service with young people rely on them as a support. That organization is held together by Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreements. Our shared measurement is done by the Stanford's John Gardner Center. This is Sequoia School District, the Ravenswood School District and 44 nonprofit organizations. Council Member DuBois: If I could interrupt? Mr. Erickson: Yeah. Council Member DuBois: In an MOU, they would commit to certain resources or certain participation? Mr. Erickson: The key one is that we provide data on the students, the names and the attendance of students participating in the after-school organizations. That's then securely compared with the data that school districts provide, so they can identify if someone is involved in two after- school programs, does that increase their likelihood of graduating or of grades going up. They also can identify gaps. This is where the rubber hits the road in terms of knowing if we're being effective or not, what sectors of the youth community are we leaving out, are we not serving Pacific Islander kids in the way that we should. We would never have a way of finding those things out without the Stanford John Gardner Center with the MOU agreements. We can't join the organization as a member, community TRANSCRIPT Page 20 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 nonprofits, unless we agree to submit our data. With the assurance that it's protected, it's confidential and it's aggregate reports that come out. That's the way we work on the East Palo Alto side. Council Member DuBois: That's another prime role of this backbone organization, data integrity and security. Mr. Erickson: Absolutely. Council Member DuBois: Quick question on the gatekeeper training. Does that only occur in high school or are we doing anything in the middle schools? Ms. Carrillo: Just this year we started piloting the QPR in the middle schools. That's something that has gone really well. We want to continue to offer that to our middle school students. Mr. de Geus: Did you do the staff at the middle schools as well? Ms. Carrillo: Staff at middle and high school have been trained ongoing. Mr. Joshi: We don't have the middle school part worked out yet. That's not been done on a national level. The QPR folks look to us in some ways to try and develop what is the practice for reaching younger kids. I'll be totally honest. We have struggled a little bit with QPR as the main gatekeeper training for teens, because of the infrastructure needed to do that properly, to connect with teens. We have a number of people from Santa Clara County who are well meaning and trained, but they've not been in the classroom with teenagers. We have looked at some other models for gatekeeping. We're going to continue to do this for adults. QPR gatekeeper for adults is going to continue. Unless we continue to train teens to support one another and to go to trusted adults, the big data nationally show that just doing gatekeeper training for adults does not lead to the youth help- seeking behaviors changing to go to adults. You have to empower the youth in a very direct way, either through QPR or another program. Sources of Strength is one example, but it doesn't capture all of our secondary school kids because we have the two high schools and then we don't have the middle schools; we don't have Castilleja and some of the others covered. It's something that is an ongoing conversation around what is the best practice, what are the data points that show is this effective or not. We know that QPR is an effective, proven program of gatekeeping for adults, but it's not enough. You have to make sure you're getting to your other constituency which is the youth themselves. TRANSCRIPT Page 21 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Council Member DuBois: I saw the mission as promoting youth well-being and suicide prevention. How much of the focus continues to be on the youth well-being part? You're talking about Stanford Medical; that seems very heavy on the suicide prevention side, if I'm reading that right. Do you guys have comments on that? Mr. de Geus: It's an interesting question. A good one, because it's been a little bit of a challenge for the collaborative. We've worked hard to keep both in focus. Suicide prevention very much downstream, the gatekeeper work, working with medical professionals. There's definitely lots of work happening there. Also the youth well-being, there's lots of people in the collaborative like YCS and the YMCA, the JCC would fall into this. The City programs, our programs are very much upstream youth well-being. We've kept them altogether. Where is the emphasis? It probably changes from time to time. Right now with the most recent incidents and deaths we've had, very tragic, so maybe more emphasis on the mental health piece. We've kept both at the table and intentionally so. This has been a discussion the collaborative has had, the Leadership Team. Should we be more focused on one versus the other? We've always ended up with no, we need to focus on both. Ms. van der Zwaag: We found our real strength from having all those voices in the room together. Council Member DuBois: It seems like that's a good thing. Again, that would be a big factor in choosing that backbone organization, because you could potentially slant it one way or the other. Again, not to overemphasize this, but thinking about teens. I wonder if there is a bigger role for youth group organizations generally. If they did sign those MOUs, it might be another interesting data point of kids who participate in a youth group. It's an organization outside the school. So much of this seems to be focused around the school. Ms. van der Zwaag: Right. There's so many other avenues where youth come together, whether it's a faith community, it's a sports community. We know that we have extra work to do in that regards to hear all youth voices. Council Member DuBois: It just seems like a good one where you have an adult leader and its separate from the school. Ms. van der Zwaag: Exactly. Council Member DuBois: I'm going to channel the ghost of Larry Klein a little bit and switch to a discussion on the funding side. Looking at the minutes from last October, it seemed like, if I'm reading it right, there was a TRANSCRIPT Page 22 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 big shift in funding. They were talking about 75K, 100K, basically running on the interest from the $2 million and talking about those funds lasting for 20 years. The actual stated budget for last year was 214K. Were there monies in there coming from other sources or when did it shift from October until now? Mr. de Geus: Jim may want to talk about this. Project Safety Net is one thing in holding the collaborative together and making sure we're aligned and those things. Then there's track security and Track Watch, which is related to Project Safety Net. It's a unique effort, and that's what has pushed the funding up. We have right now track guards around the clock at four locations plus a floating guard to support breaks. That's what has pushed it. Mr. Keene: You're speaking at the micro level about what we have. Going back to October, one, we were on the other side of the reemergence of the cluster for the most part. We were also having a larger conversation that wasn't just about Project Safety Net, but it was about the use of the Stanford funds, the $4 million Health and Safety funds, of which $2 million have been allocated to Project Safety Net. We had a whole series of other folks coming to the Policy and Services meetings, who were making a case for how the remaining $2 million might be used. There were a lot of different ideas out there. The Committee's concern, as I recall it, for example Council Member Klein and others, was the constraints on the funding we have. If it's $2 million or $4 million, we still don't have a lot of money to start making decisions. They almost shifted to an idea that we had proposed early on that the Council hadn't seized on, which was do we try to start to look at these limited Stanford funds as an endowment and try to keep it and use the earnings to fund things. That was what was informing a $75,000 piece. Council Member DuBois: That's what I thought. The question is what happened between that discussion and spending $214K last year. It looks like that idea has been totally lost. I wonder if that has been discussed. Mr. Keene: No, it hasn't as far as where we were. Let me just set the stage again for where we were back in October. In addition to the discussion about what funds we have for health and safety in the community of which the Project Safety Net initiative with its two components, youth well-being and suicide prevention, was one stream, so to speak. We were pretty disorganized in October about where we might be going with Project Safety Net. It was very difficult for the Committee and others to understand what the choices would be. There was a hesitancy to make any decisions about what we're doing. We had the directive to come back and do the work that has been done here. Since I’m speaking, I would say there's been an TRANSCRIPT Page 23 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 incredible advance from where we were, which is cloudy and confusing, to a lot of clarity about a path and a viable structure. A lot of the issues that we had at the very beginning of the first forming of Project Safety Net are still here with us. We have a crisis; we put together a collaborative; it defaults to the City as a hub because nobody else could be the hub. We were providing the main funding sources. All along in the background there's been how do we make this sustainable. How do we shift the roles? Even on the City's side and everybody else's, there's been a concern about what's it going to cost, who's going to do what. That had moderated a little bit and we were having this discussion where it was easier to say, "Let's just put $75,000 in." Not only have we lost the staffing of Project Safety Net, but we've got the cluster emergent again. We're almost back in triage in crisis, which is why we're suddenly spending so much money. We still all have to acknowledge that while we've got to be in triage, we've got to move to health simultaneously with that, not just in the community but in the way we're working these things. I don't know what the numbers are, but with $700,000 this year and $400,000 and whatever we've spent, we're at least $1.5 plus million out of the existing $2 million. Council Member DuBois: We have two years. Mr. Keene: We've got to confront this issue head on about where we are. That's why we've got to have a more potent collaborative. It can't just be on the Executive Director to carry all this. That person has got to be skillful enough to not only engage stakeholders but whatever this Executive Board is to say we've got to invest, we have to make difficult choices and we've got to do it in a timely way. We've never really had that. We've been a confederacy of sorts. Council Member DuBois: I don't know the right numbers. I'll just throw out there that I am a little concerned about the $738K figure. It's not a lot of runway. If you bring in the Director, are they supposed to shift to fundraising immediately? Are there grants and things we can go after? Even that, it doesn't seem like a lot of time. What's the sustainable model? It doesn't seem like there is one right now. Mr. Keene: We've always said what we're doing and what we're funding is seed money that's more than a Kickstarter Program. We've got to move to a sustainable model. Max and I have talked about, for example, the fact that from my point of view the School District has to find a way to fund this in an ongoing way also. There may be other community decisions we have to make about how we fund it in an ongoing way. TRANSCRIPT Page 24 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Council Member DuBois: If you look at the Track Watch dollars, you could in a sense take them out. They're just allocated to Track Watch, and they're here because that's where the funding is. Mr. Keene: Very good point. Mr. de Geus: Sometimes you have to build it before the money shows up in some ways. To have the map and have that person hired and have a compelling story, and then funding will become available. I believe it will around a topic like this. Council Member DuBois: It's just if you start with a tight cash flow, you'd start to go down and so you're locked in. I'll stop there. Thank you, guys. Chair Burt: I'd like to follow on Tom's comments. To a good degree, Tom and Marc were trying to draw out the distinctions between the program that we had started with, which was a collaborative of sorts, and this more focused Collective Impact and what's similar and what's different. Let me go to this last topic that Tom touched on at the end. We have Track Watch described as being part of Project Safety Net. Are you envisioning that the Executive Director would oversee Track Watch? Mr. de Geus: No. That's being shifted to our Public Safety Staff, and that's where it belongs. How it gets funded is a question that's being drawn from the Project Safety Net $2 million. That could change, but it has to come from somewhere. Chair Burt: That seems logical. Where are we in transferring oversight of Track Watch to the Public Safety Department? Mr. de Geus: We're a month in with that. Chair Burt: I understand at the beginning we had a volunteer program of Track Watch, and that was supplemented by our own police officers out there working with the volunteers. Then we hired a private entity. Somehow it seems that—because at the beginning it was volunteer and it was somewhat orphaned; it was spontaneous and orphaned—it got overseen by Project Safety Net. Rob, you're saying now, already it's essentially not a part of Project Safety Net. It's a public safety endeavor overseen by our Public Safety Department with an involvement of those entities that are focused on youth well-being and the objectives of Project Safety Net. It might be more clear that the sooner the better we segregate those two things and that the funding is recognized as a public safety expenditure and it's not a mental health function. It's not youth well-being in that broader upstream; it's about public safety and security at tracks. We're confusing TRANSCRIPT Page 25 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 this whole thing of the Project Safety Net budget is blown up. No, look at where the dollars are. We have a much smaller, more focused discussion around the true purposes of Project Safety Net. The Track Watch didn't have, until just now, an assigned and properly assigned overseer. It was taking up slack by people who stepped forward and said, "We need somebody to take up the slack." It was done. That's something that maybe we should discuss when we come back to discussion. Mr. de Geus: Chair Burt, the only thing I would add to that is that the track security is in the Project Safety Net plan. It's called means restriction. Shashank can talk about this more. It is part of a suicide prevention plan, not always related to tracks but for us it is very much related to track security. It is part of the Project Safety Net. Chair Burt: I appreciate that. That's what I was trying to allude to in that last part, that there would be an involvement just as we do capital investments on our track. Is that a Project Safety Net responsibility and oversight or is that something that is led by Public Works with a collaboration by our Public Safety Department and by our Community Services and Project Safety Net? I don't see the Executive Director of Project Safety Net getting involved in the engineering design of how to obtain track security. We've drifted into something that we should take a step back and say, "There are certain other functions where clearly we're not siloing this." We're not saying it's only Police Department or when we do the physical measures, it's only Public Works by any means. Where should it be overseen and assigned and, for that matter, where should we put it in the budget? It becomes confusing when we were first looking at the Stanford funds. We weren't talking about paying for ongoing Track Watch out of the Stanford funds. That's two-thirds or more of this whole budget. We've allowed a drift to occur. By everybody saying we just have to do it, that's entirely correct. As we've talked about the enormous cost of the Track Watch, a question that we have to ask ourselves, despite its enormous cost, is what price are we willing to place on the life of a single child. That becomes, as expensive as that is, an easier question to answer as to whether we must do it. If that's the way that we have the most effective prevention measure right now, it doesn't become much of a choice. I don't see the ability to make an argument that we should not spend those dollars and in exchange lose the life of one or more children. That doesn't mean it should necessarily be the lead responsibility and the management responsibility of Project Safety Net. Those are two different issues. Mr. Keene: If I might add to that. To invert that, Project Safety Net being both suicide prevention and youth well-being, we have millions and millions of dollars that are being spent by public agencies and in service provision in hospitals outside of Project Safety Net. We're not bundling all of that into it TRANSCRIPT Page 26 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 and saying, "This is Project Safety Net," as far as the budget and that sort of thing. Mr. Joshi: Based on this conversation we had today—is Claudia here? Mr. Keene: Yes. Dr. Joshi: Was it you who talked about public health today? Mr. de Geus: You might want to mention what you're talking about. Dr. Joshi: Pat ... Chair Burt: Pat wasn't introduced yet. Dr. Joshi: Can I invite Patricia Lau to speak again as eloquently as she did today at the media roundtable; that unfortunately none of our local media attended? This will be the first of two media roundtables. There will be another one in September. On the bright side, we did have some agencies that did need a refresher. One of the agencies was one of the panelists. We had a little bit of a healthy debate about the merits or not of running a story about a community meeting that we might have in Palo Alto and how could they not run a cover with a picture of the train if that's what it's about. We had a spirited, I would say, discussion where I tried to highlight the research on why that's a really bad idea. Not because I say so, but because here's a well done study by the leading suicide epidemiologist in the world that says that's an example of something you don't cover. I thought it was a very good discussion. I liked, Patricia, how you couched a lot of this work in terms of public safety. Maybe that's what Council Members Burt and DuBois, maybe Pat in particular, were referring to about the public safety piece. Patricia Lau: Good evening, my name is Patricia Lau. I've lived in Palo Alto since 2009. My husband is a surgeon at Stanford. Throughout his medical education, we've lived in five different states. Previously I worked in Indiana for the Indiana University School of Medicine on a project that looked at data collection regarding firearm injuries and fatalities. It's called the National Violent Death Reporting System, and it's used now as a national database. When I came here, I saw the different issues related to the trains and suicides. I stepped forward in October, and I met with Minka. I reached out and said I would like to help. What I said today, and I'm a consultant now with the City. My focus areas are data collections, means restriction and some other special projects. What I like to say is that this is a public health project. This is something we need to approach from the individual family and the community. In terms of Caltrain and the media roundtable, there TRANSCRIPT Page 27 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 are people coming together with different missions. What we need to focus on is the health and safety of our community. Even though Caltrain has its mission of focusing on transporting people safely, it's important for all of us to understand that that train comes through our community. Therefore, it is a mechanism of suicides for some of our citizens, not just young people but also elderly people have been affected. In going into this, I've looked at a lot of different collaborative efforts. They're very successful in terms of the backbone agencies. The directorship has to be someone who can understand a lot about the different areas that we're talking about here and funding. That's really important. Going forward, I would like to emphasize the need to focus on public health and data collection efforts, uniform data collection efforts, whether it be from the hospital, the coroner, the police. Everyone should be able to term whatever they're talking about in similar terms. That was, I think, one of the gaps; we were not talking in the same language and we weren't writing reports in the same language, so we couldn't evaluate. Another piece of this is evaluation. The last thing I would like to say is seed money. That's important, to have the seed money. You want this to be long term. This is going to be an issue that's going to be with us for a while. We don't want to look at these clusters and be reactionary, but rather be preventative in the future. Chair Burt: There was a question that Tom had about the criteria for membership in PSN. That was an important question. He would benefit from a little more understanding of the original commitment. What we had was some drifting away from that commitment. We had MOUs, correct? Mr. de Geus: We did. Chair Burt: The original partner agencies and entities all had MOUs. The City acted as a convening organization. We were a hybrid, I guess, between a collaborative and a City Staff doing certain functions. That starts making some of the distinctions between the model of the Collective Impact where Staff is proposing where we're heading and where we were. We were somewhat, if I understand it right, a hybrid. We had many elements of a collaborative, which is this Collective Impact I would describe as a deeper collaborative. We not only drifted away from some of those things that we did in those first maybe two years. It's a deeper commitment to the form and a different leadership. Do we have that slide that had the five components of Collective Impact? Mr. de Geus: Yeah. Chair Burt: You went through them, but it's dwelling on those that is what people are struggling to try and understand that distinction. You talked about the first one being a common agenda. We did have, to a good TRANSCRIPT Page 28 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 degree, a common agenda from the outset. Rob showed the original Project Safety Net plan. It's a long plan, but I encourage everybody here to take the time to read it. If you look at it today, it is a very thoroughly designed plan with a lot of still extremely relevant components to it. There was a temptation to, in the last year as we lost focus on some of where we were in the first year or two, to think that we didn't have the right plan. If you read the plan, you go, "What's not right about this?" There are certainly some things that we would update, but it's a very strong plan. It was well researched from the outset. I have no doubt that we will improve that even more as we go forward in Collective Impact. That plan created that common agenda. The second one is about this shared measurement. That's one of the biggest distinctions between where we were. We had a plan, but it was less strong on shared measurement than we intend to have if we go with the Collective Impact. These mutually reinforcing activities, I recall there were a lot of them, but once again the Collective Impact model is a deeper commitment to all of those entities coming together and making sure that their efforts are well aligned, which would then show up in those measurements of success. They don't just happen; they happen because of that common agenda and those mutually reinforcing activities. To make that happen was this element of continuous communication. We had had strong communication in those first couple of years. That is one of the things that seemed to have drifted away and would be stronger. Finally this backbone part, that's where we're looking at something that is a slightly different focus. I do think we need to understand the difference between what entity or entities are funding versus where the backbone lies. We could have a shared funding and we could place it under the City or the School District or a third entity. Those are two different issues. They're not one and the same. The funding doesn't necessarily flow to where the backbone resides. I want to make sure we're not lumping the two together. I apologize for drifting into some comments. Because of the questions raised, some important things were brought up. The leadership that we're looking at now under the Staff proposal is one where it's, as Rob described it, having those Collective Impact skills and experience and a full commitment to the collaborative approach and style. You had down facilitation too; that's a skill set but I wouldn't say it's limited to a facilitation. It's understanding how do you bring together 20 different partners and pull them together rowing in the same direction. Even while each has distinctive functions or in some areas more common than others, they come together in certain elements of a plan. Other groups come together in others. That leadership is not what we have in a hierarchical structure. It's a different approach, but it has to be a strong leadership and a non-hierarchical leadership at the same time. That's tough. TRANSCRIPT Page 29 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Ms. Eldridge: They have to be able to address a unique community, a highly intellectual community who likes to advocate, but also those folks who are underrepresented. It's going to take a very special person to address all those different populations in a very sensitive way, but an effective way. Chair Burt: That final part is this roadmap, which is how do we take those five elements and put them together in a plan that is not a document but a working, active plan that guides us to achievement. Mr. Keene: Thank you for that. That's spot on. Where we are right now with the Collective Impact model, we have a viable model and structure to use. That said, structure is just a beginning point. This is like we are reforming, I'm using this word specifically, reforming Project Safety Net. Then we've got to do the same old forming, norming, performing. All of this work about making sure we have the right people in place, not just the Executive Director, but we have the norms of expectation; the need for explicit commitments and formal agreements; the norms of identifying the measurements that are going to be used, the common measurements. Something that's not up there that I heard Pat starting to touch on when Pat was talking about this public health thing, we consciously need to develop the accurate but accessible narrative about what this is all about in a compelling way, so that it's a story about what's happening in the community, so that you don't have to be an expert on this to start to understand how to access what's happening. We're not going to get fundraisers and people engaged if the narrative about what we're trying to do and why we need to keep it going isn't important. The goal will be to put the crisis in the rearview mirror again. Sustaining the well-being piece gets to be a challenge. Chekhov once said anybody can face a crisis; it's the day- to-day living that wears you out. This is the thing: how do you sustain this commitment year after year in a meaningful way. Chair Burt: Jim touched on that the more we have this strong program, the more we'll be able to draw in even more of the community as human resources and funding resources to fulfill it. It's a virtual cycle that can occur. Ms. Carrillo: I wanted to add to what you said. It points to other comments that have been made as well around who can join Project Safety Net. Right now we have many different individuals who walk in that are parents, individuals who are part of an organization but they don't represent that organization at a level where they can make commitments and decisions. They're there because they care and they might be doing the work. The idea of having the Executive Board that we talked about initially is important, because we need the decision makers also at the table making critical decisions about resources and support and outreach. Moving those TRANSCRIPT Page 30 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 conversations away from just being a City, right now it's perceived as a City/School problem and not a public health issue, will be helpful for us in many ways moving forward. Chair Burt: I alluded to the human resources. Part of what we need to build is the capacity to take advantage of these people who are basically calling out, saying "I want to help" and much needs to be done. We haven't had the systematic way to pull them in. Many of them have gotten involved; many of them are already involved in different organizations. It needs to be systematic. You spoke about the initiative in Camden, Maine. Probably the greatest take-away that I got from when Dalene spoke is how much their entire community rallied around, fully participating in the issue. We have public speakers; although, some of them are amongst our guests here. Ken Horowitz: Thank you very much. I'm Ken Horowitz. I live in Palo Alto. I'm here to support the project that's being proposed tonight. I want to make a couple of comments. I'm on the Health Advisory Commission for the County as well. This issue here is not unique to Palo Alto. It's all over the county. We have a unique situation, because we've got a train running through. Kids are trying to commit suicide all throughout the county. I was talking to Hillary Friedman the other day. Hillary used to be on the Council; she teaches in Saratoga. She has kids in her classroom that are literally cutting themselves, because of the stress of schools. I wanted to applaud the group for all the work they've been doing. I also teach health education, and I'd like to see more health education going on in the schools. We have just in Palo Alto High School a five-unit class in living skills. A lot of the kids take it in their senior year and when they're ready to graduate. This is something that should be throughout the curriculum, in the elementary schools, in the middle schools as well as in the high schools. Just one class in living skills is not doing enough. As I said, I teach health education. You'd be shocked to see how little kids know about health today, particularly how to deal with stress. Thank you for your time. Ms. Garfield: I wanted to say how much I support this effort. I've been on the frontlines at Gunn High School for the last two years. Being a part of this collaborative has been invaluable, both in a concrete way to be able to connect resources and physically bring a kid to Dr. Joshi and say, "This kid's suicidal. Get him in now." Very specific, concrete things have happened in addition to the camaraderie that we've had this year. That's an intangible that's not in the plan, but has made a difference through all of the stress and through all this effort. I hope we can keep this going. Ms. Eldridge: Hi, I'm Sue Eldridge. I'm a parent of a recently graduated sixth grader. I have been watching Project Safety Net unfold for the past years. I'm here to say that the direction that Project Safety Net is proposing TRANSCRIPT Page 31 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 is very helpful and can lift and elevate the work that's been done. This has been said before, but embracing Collective Impact, one of the most important elements is that this is a movement. It's a naming of work that's been going on for years and years. It's a movement, an international movement. There are learnings, there are bodies collecting learnings and pushing the envelope in terms of everybody's understanding of who is to do this very complicated work. Aligning with Collective Impact can inform what we're doing here in Palo Alto in a lot of important ways. I got involved most recently pushing for this notion of a roadmap as essential to guide a complex effort like this. Jim Connell is a past colleague of mine who I introduced to Rob and Minka with the intention that, in a very brief series of meetings, he might help everybody understand how a roadmap linked to data could elevate the work here. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to help pull together the May meeting. What that did was give me a much deeper understanding of the work that Project Safety Net has been doing and the people involved. I have to say the biggest asset Project Safety Net has are the people who are at the table. I can't say enough about how each and every person I met and worked with, the care, the commitment and the return to sit at the table through what's been a devastating period and frustrations and missteps and all the rest of it, just incredible commitment. That's the biggest asset, I hope, moving forward beyond all the other pieces that are being proposed. I want to reiterate the importance of a roadmap. Jim, you were talking about a narrative. A good roadmap isn't a voluminous document. It's a visual roadmap that can communicate to everybody clearly and simply where you're headed, but most importantly what things you want to change, what are those outcomes that you want to move. It's as important as the 41 assets are. It's not going to be 41 assets. It probably won't be a document with 22 strategies. However, it will build on all of that in a very communicable presentation. I worked for 20 years primarily in low-income communities, working with institutional leaders and community stakeholders to create a collective agenda to promote youth well-being in roles very similar to Project Safety Net. In every instance of where we got traction, it was a roadmap that was central to our being able to do our work. You're going to bring a leader in and you're going to have an Executive Board, but it's a collaborative. It's that roadmap that sits in the center of everything you're doing; that gives the leadership authority and authority to negotiate when things are slipping, authority to bring people to the table and try to help support a focus of attention. The major piece here is that it's going to bring data into the picture sharply. You learn using that data. Roadmap is dynamic. The leadership that's being proposed, a Director that has experience is important combined with this Executive Board. I probably don't have to say too much more. It's that institutional leaders group that's going to be able to cut through some of the roadblocks, to go out and effectively fundraise and provide the ongoing constant backup you need. TRANSCRIPT Page 32 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 The last thing I want to speak to is data and youth voice. PSN has been collecting data, but I don't think effectively using it. The collection of the data is the starting point. Then it's what you do with it. It's the conversations. Most of the data, a lot of the data you've been collecting, a big piece of that, not all of it, is youth voice. You talk about engaging youth. In my experience the leadership roles are important, but the most effective way to engage youth day-in and day-out is to hear from them about what their experiences are, bring that back into the room with the adults that work with them, and then open up a conversation about why and what can be done and enlist youth actively in helping move everything forward. I can't say enough about how important the data piece is. I have some concern that you've got a budget for a year. There isn't much resource built-in for the data component. I don't believe and in my experience you can wait an entire year to start moving that forward. The notion of a data group and a data plan being put in place so that you know where you're headed is an important first step. I don't think that's something that needs to take an entire year. Thanks. Thank you all for your efforts. Cathleen Blanchard: Thank you so much for letting me jump in here. I apologize. I'll be quick because I have to get my daughter from Cubberley at ballet. My name is Cathleen Blanchard. I'm a mother of children who have attended the School District here. We've lived here since 2003. My daughter Isabel is entering her senior year at Gunn. She'll be Student Body President and very excited to be a part of that community. It's been a good experience. I'm very glad that she made the choice to go there. My daughter Chloe is about to graduate after next year. She's in her final year at Columbia in New York. I'm grateful for the experience that she also had at Gunn. As many of you know, my son JP was at Gunn, and he passed away in 2009 in his junior year. You asked what's the price of a life of a child. It's priceless, and we know that. What I wanted to take this few minutes to say is what I find remarkable is how the community came together. I've been pretty open about what happened to my son. I do that because if we can't talk about a problem, we can't begin to solve it. I have been very struck by the number of people whose lives have been touched by suicide. You would never know it, because they have been unable to speak about it. It's been very tragic to me, because they carry the sorrow of the loss and the deep tragedy of the inability to speak about it. As a community, we not only embrace youth well-being which is a relatively easy thing to embrace. It's apple pie and all that. To also embrace suicide prevention is distinct and remarkable. To carry forth for as many years as we have with the level of energy and commitment, again remarkable. Now we're talking about taking this to the next phase, amazing. We are very, very lucky to be living here amongst such good people, such intelligent people, so very willing to tackle an incredibly hard problem. I have been TRANSCRIPT Page 33 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 asked by people from outside the community who wonder why we haven't somehow solved this issue. I thought, "If we could somehow solve this issue, we'd own the world. Wouldn't we?" We're trying our best and we're willing to continue to try our very best. I have to applaud all the good people around the table and around this community. Rob says, and I absolutely agree with him, we are all a part of Project Safety Net. You ask; who can join; you're already a member. Again, I thank you all, and I thank the commitment of the School District and the commitment of the City and all the institutions around us for this commitment. We have saved many lives, and we will continue to save many lives. Again, what a fantastic place we live. Thank you. Council Member DuBois: On that great note, I'd like to move the Staff recommendation. Council Member Wolbach: Second. MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to recommend the City Council support the transition to the Collective Impact Model (CIM) of collaboration to ensure the ongoing success of the Project Safety Net (PSN) Collaborative by supporting the following actions: A. Solicit for contract services to act as an interim PSN Director; and B. Complete PSN Collective Impact roadmap for youth well-being and prevention of teen suicide; and C. Establish a PSN “Executive Board” made up of key institutional leaders; and D. Resource a team for data collection, capacity building and facilitation; and E. Elevate Youth Voice within the PSN Collaborative leadership. Council Member DuBois: I don't think I can top what Cathleen just said. We've covered it, and it seems like a great recommendation. I support it. Council Member Wolbach: We've spent a good two hours on this topic tonight. I concur with what Tom said. There's much I can say, but no point. Council Member Berman: I agree. It's been a great, substantive conversation, helpful. I'm going to support the Motion. The one thing that I'd encourage you guys to do is keep an open mind as to what type of entity ends up hosting the backbone organization. I was thinking about it as we TRANSCRIPT Page 34 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 were talking. A lot of folks around the table know running a nonprofit is hard. I'm lucky enough that I don't run one. You've got HR, finance, development, IT, communications, administrative support, facilities, graphic design. In terms of getting the biggest bang for our buck, if there's another entity out there that is willing to host us and host this effort, that's something that could be a great fit, if one exists. The Community Foundation is a great place to start. If they're not interested, they know every nonprofit or foundation on the Peninsula. Hopefully they'll get ideas if they're not interested. Chair Burt: I have one follow-up question. Within our budget and the dollars that we increased on a budgetary standpoint tentatively last night, do we have dollars that are dedicated for the purpose of being able to do the sort of data analysis that is perhaps something we need to strengthen in this entire endeavor? Mr. Keene: If you've got some money squirreled away let us know. Mr. de Geus: I was just going to say since it was overstated yesterday in the budget, yes, there is a fund of course that was related to track security. There is not funding set aside for resourcing a data team. That's true. Mr. Keene: Yes, exactly that. That being said, we'll know next week where we end up when we run those numbers. While there's some significant data work, I don't think what we would have to staff or support would be out of our reach financially. Chair Burt: Maybe when this does come back to the Council in the overall City budget, we upped our funding for our resources that were more directly Project Safety Net. If you can refine those thoughts on what is anticipated as the placeholder for the cost of the Executive Director; what dollars we need to build in for this other function on enriching what we do with the data that we're already collecting; and perhaps within that what other gaps may exist in data. I know that we have a lot of good data. The point was made that what we want to do is be able to utilize that data more effectively. Council Member Berman: That's a great point. One suggestion on that, that I'm sure you're all thinking about, is what third-party organizations we can leverage who might volunteer their expertise. Palantir comes to mind when it comes to data accumulation and analysis. They have a big philanthropic arm. Council Member DuBois: And security. Ms. van der Zwaag: We don't even know what they collect. TRANSCRIPT Page 35 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: I'd be hesitant to trust them, because they're data experts, necessarily into interpreting this kind of data. They're in a different ballgame. Council Member Berman: Different pieces. Chair Burt: But the second part of the notion of what other resources, either financial or through other skills, outside of the normal group that we might think are already engaged in this kind of issue, what we might tap into is an interesting one. Mr. Keene: Could I say one final thing on this? Obviously the Council Members are speaking directly again about the City's piece of this funding, because that's what you have direct control over. We've talked about it a bunch tonight, but we do have to get to work on how we engage and talk about getting sustainable funding from other partners and other sources pretty quickly this year too. Chair Burt: I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that we've always had within this plan a major portion that was dealing with the school climate. The schools have the children for more awake hours than the community and the parents often do combined. In the last nine months or so, with new leadership we have had some really positive changes in adopting programs that are, whether they are precisely or simply aligned with the same mindsets, moving forward with implementation of the homework policy and the counseling model and start times and recently mental health resources and the Challenge Success. At one of the teen forums, the biggest take- away to me was the students glomming onto wanting to have a different definition of success for themselves. Those and other initiatives that have been going on are positive, and they very much complement the efforts here and have been extremely important. I just wanted to acknowledge that. Ms. Lau: I'd like to say one final thing about funding. There are State funding sources as well as Federal funding sources that might be explored, particularly in terms of the means piece. I spoke with Scott from the Federal Railroad Administration. We talked about the potential for grant funding at the Federal level. Also there's regional, again we're in Region 7 for the FRA. Then there's County funding, Santa Clara County, mental health grants, education in training grants. There's a number of grant opportunities that need to be explored, and they should be explored immediately, because of that bottom line. If you can do that now, you can get it jump started, at least know what the potential funders are and include private individuals as well as businesses. This is Silicon Valley. TRANSCRIPT Page 36 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: We should acknowledge too that Supervisor Simitian had been reaching out on what role the County might play. What's happened and was announced in the last week or so is a proposal before the County Board of Supervisors to provide psychiatric teen beds within the county which, as he said, it's a void that those outside of this field as professionals are shocked to understand that we had none in our entire county. That appears to be something that's on a very positive track. It shows all these complementary efforts and the different partners—the County has been one of our partners as well—will perform different roles. I thought more about this notion that is the Collective Impact, the metaphor about we've had a bunch of rowers and we're looking at how to move them as a team and move forward most effectively. Council Member Wolbach: I'm sorry. I do want us to move on with a business agenda this evening and let everybody go and watch their tapes of the game. There are a couple of things I want on record, before this goes to the full Council. One, picking up with another analogy that City Manager Keene alluded to when he used the word confederacy earlier. We're in a moment for Project Safety Net similar, forgive me as a politics guy, similar to the United States when we realized that the Articles of Confederation were not a strong enough plan, were not a strong enough body. Rather than throwing in the towel, double down on the commitment, the vision and the values and said, "We've got to come up with a better structure, because the vision and the values are so important." Thus, we had the Constitutional Convention and now a very stable structure for governance. I cannot predict but I can certainly hope and support the effort of Project Safety Net in similarly being so successful. I want to be on the record, especially in the minutes, for other Council Members who have not been here for this whole discussion and may or may not feel similarly as we do here. First, thank you very much to the City Staff and everyone involved in Project Safety Net. As a Member of the Council, I particularly wanted to say thank you to members of our Staff, to Minka, to Rob, for an extraordinary amount of work from the City side for so long on this. To Jim, thank you for your work and leadership and willingness to become even more of a direct leader on the Executive Committee. To Ed, even though you've not been here long, I hear great things about what you're doing to support the teams that are working under you. Thank you very much. This is a very important project and we've got to find the support. Mr. Keene: I would also extend them to Pat who's doing work for us. A reminder that at 9:30 tomorrow morning we'll have our weekly Caltrain Station meeting. TRANSCRIPT Page 37 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: Before the vote, I will add the emphasis on the incredible community partners. Ready for a vote? All in favor. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 4-0 Chair Burt: There's a question on, given the important time that we just spent on the last item, we had Item Number 3 that was referred to this evening as a placeholder, should we be able to get to it. It doesn't look likely that we'll be able to get to it. Agenda Item Number 3- Continued Discussion Regarding City Council Procedural Matters… continued to a date uncertain. 2. Referral of Colleagues Memo Regarding Strengthening City Engagement with Neighborhoods. Khashayar Alaee, Senior Management Analyst: Good evening, Chair Burt and Policy and Services Committee Members. Khash Alaee, Senior Management Analyst with the City Manager's Office. This Colleague's Memo was brought to the Council originally on March 13th and then forwarded to the April 20th meeting, which at that meeting it was then referred to the Policy and Services Committee. We've brought it forward today. The Memorandum seeks to build on existing engagement platforms and add more face-to-face contact with the neighborhood organizations. If I could have you turn to packet Page 72. The memo outlines seven major points. What Staff has done is put those bullet points in the Staff Report and commented on each of the points. For the sake of time, I was not going to go through the points and highlight Staff's comments. We can, if you'd like us to. I wanted to quickly set the context and turn it over to the Committee for discussion. I don't know if Assistant City Manager Ed had some other comments. Ed Shikada, Assistant City Manager: We also wanted to note for the Committee that we've forwarded a set of community comments that had been received in response to the initial item being brought forward to the Council. I'm not sure how to refer to this. Mr. Alaee: It's an at-places memorandum with the Number 2 on it. We received letters from Sheri Furman, who I believe is here—I don't know if she submitted a card to speak—Brent Barker, Annette Glanckopf and Fred Balin. They have in their letters commented on the seven points as well. There are some themes that have come out of those letters that Staff could summarize for you, if that helps the discussion. TRANSCRIPT Page 38 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: Why don't you go ahead and address those themes. Mr. Alaee: From the community members' responses or for the Staff responses? Chair Burt: It would be useful for you to go through and give the thrust of the Staff responses to the elements of the Colleague's Memo. Mr. Alaee: Let's turn to packet Page 72. The first bullet point, just to summarize, is about the City of Palo Alto website and what information it has. It does talk about a process for formally recognizing what it means to be a neighborhood and the governance. Staff's response is that the website does need a little bit more work. There is some basic information on there. Certainly we can always do more. One example is that we have a map of the neighborhoods on the existing website. That shows 30 neighborhoods; whereas, the Memo refers to 37 neighborhoods. There is that little bit of "we've got to figure out what do we mean and what is the boundaries." With regards to the definition, recognition, there's multiple different approaches for this. There's pros and cons. We'd like to have that conversation with Council. The community response that we saw in the letters was to not get involved in that. Sherry and others can speak to that. It seemed for us as a City not to dive into that much. Chair Burt: I'm sorry. Can you explain what you're meaning there? You're talking on the facilities, Number 2? Mr. Alaee: No, I'm talking about Number 1. It says the City should review the process for recognition in consultation with neighborhoods and explore agreement on basic standards and requirements regarding governance, association responsibilities for outreach and inclusion as a recognized neighborhood association. That trickles down into how are we defining a neighborhood association. Do we want them to have bylaws? Do we not want them to have bylaws? Do we want them to have a board and not a board? Do we want them to have insurance? Do we not want them to have insurance? Are they a registered 501(c)(3)? Are they not? All that opens up a whole set of discussion and pros and cons. We can have a conversation about that and determine what the Council would like to do and what the best foundation is. It seemed to me from reading Sheri's note and Brent's and Annette's and Fred's, that their recommendation was to not prescribe what that should be and let the neighborhoods form that on their own. Chair Burt: I see in the Staff Report that you'd yet like to do research on what other municipalities have done. Mr. Alaee: Correct. TRANSCRIPT Page 39 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: Were you going to do the research first or draw the conclusion before doing the research? Mr. Alaee: If we go through the other points, a couple of times we bring up the point of doing a survey. That survey could touch upon a lot of the different points that was in the Colleague's Memo. It's a combination of both. Council Member Wolbach: Are you talking about a survey of existing neighborhood associations in Palo Alto, a survey of neighboring or similar municipalities or both? Mr. Alaee: The existing neighborhood associations. I can jump into, for example, Number 2. The recommendation was for recognized neighborhood associations and the City should explore guidelines and costs for providing periodic free use of available public facilities for public meetings in advance as well as insurance coverage under the City's policy. That's where we'd like a little bit more information from our existing neighborhoods. Does that mean how many times per year were they wanting it, the duration, what types of events, are they fee events, are they non-fee events, do they want alcohol at the events? There's a lot of different nuances to what that use means. Mr. Shikada: If I might also add perhaps back on the reference to research and the areas that might be researched. In our Staff Report, we wanted to phrase it in terms of if the Council, for example, wanted to establish those basic criteria or standards for the components or elements of a neighborhood association. That's certainly an area that we'd want to research further. The feedback that we did see from the neighborhood associations reflected some concern about going down that path. From a Staff perspective, it'd be fair to say that we wouldn't necessarily need to do the research in terms of the Council priorities if that were not an area that we wanted to pursue at this time. That would be one. Perhaps more broadly, this issue of the survey and research and the like, something of the elements of simply trying to get some feedback from the existing neighborhoods and the methods by which the follow-up work that Staff were to do would reflect the interests and the priorities for the Council and for the neighborhoods themselves. Mr. Alaee: To follow-up on Number 2, we have included some of the fee schedules in the Staff Report, if we want to dive in and look at the fees. As the Committee knows, there is a pending item on the Committee's schedule to come back about the facility rental fees. This could also tie into that. The third item was one-time start-up grants for the neighborhood associations to be used to attend the United Neighborhoods of Santa Clara County's annual TRANSCRIPT Page 40 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 conference, towards the neighborhood association initiation activities. We do think that some sort of start-up or governance training funds for neighborhood associations would be a good investment. Again, we'd want to check-in with the neighborhood groups to see what those training funds would be for. Neighborhood associations, all are at different evolutionary points. The needs of one may be different than the needs of another. We wouldn't want to limit the use of those funds just to this conference or this organization. We haven't heard back from that specific organization's Executive Director. In speaking with community members, some have already attended that. The jury's out on whether that specific organization is the best one to align with or not. That's the update on Number 3. Jumping to packet Page 74. Number 4 is to support the neighborhood associations in distributing relevant information to members including information about upcoming community meetings or events, notifications of proposed projects in their neighborhood, City initiatives, emergency preparedness events, County proposals, Public Works or Utilities projects, Caltrain, VTA or neighboring community plans. We're just a little bit unclear on the direction here. We do have many avenues for residents to be engaged. Over the last year, we have ramped up the number of department emails. Let's say at least half of our departments have email notifications. We have the Mayor's newsletter. We're heavily on social media. We've placed the links here for neighborhoods to sign up. From the community feedback we got, the community does feel that there are good avenues to take that information and pass it on. In regards to Number 5, each neighborhood association would be encouraged to identify a designated communication officer as an information liaison. This would be great. They could take our information and pass it on. Again, a little bit more direction here would be good. Number 6 is to hold an annual town hall-style meeting with City Council representatives and appropriate City Staff focused on different regions of Palo Alto. The meeting shall encourage both individual and neighborhood association participation. We'd like to have a conversation about this. The number of regions, would these be full City Council meetings compliant with the Brown Act or not, would the meetings occur at community centers, are you envisioning them at homes, school sites, parks, churches? Just a little bit of conversation about the thought that the Council Members had, to be clear on how we want to make these different than the Our Palo Alto events. We've hosted coffees at coffee shops, slices of pizza with Staff. We had the Summit recently. We don't want to duplicate. The final element was evaluate the creation of an ombudsman program with neighborhoods to follow-up on neighborhood or resident issues and facilitate conflict resolution. Again, further direction. To remind everyone, we do have the Palo Alto 311 app. This can real time take pictures and send notifications to the City of any maintenance issues 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As far as conflict resolution goes, we're a TRANSCRIPT Page 41 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 little unclear on this. The City does support the Palo Alto Mediation Program, $65,000 annually. It's a wonderful program. The organization provides services for neighbors, tenants, landlords, employers, coworkers, local businesses, or other persons and organizations in the community. That's their mission. That's a pretty broad mission. That's it. Ed, do you have anything you want to add? Mr. Shikada: Perhaps simply to roll them into a few finite themes as we started the conversation. It appears in the course of discussion, let me try and identify four. One would be to recognize existing resources and applications and how those are currently being deployed with the intent of minimizing duplication, certainly building on these existing channels where they exist. Second would be recognize the variety of situations, variety of circumstances in which we'd want to approach additional engagement. That applies both to associations and their circumstances as well as the differing roles that might occur between the City's and both associations and individual residents. Recognizing the variety of different circumstances there. Third would be the importance of getting feedback and delving further into communication of what the priorities might be among the array of opportunities we've talked about here. Finally, the last category I'll classify as infrastructure. Clearly in the comments that were received, great interest in infrastructure and simply a place to meet as one of the most basic areas of great interest, but also in terms of infrastructure for communications whether it be the ombudsperson concept or some variant on the theme ways in which we could build on channels for effective communications, but don't duplicate, don't get in the way. Our means of streamlining connecting residents and associations with the information and the key resources they need with the City. Chair Burt: If I might say at the outset, before we go into more substantive questions and discussions, as one of the lead co-authors of the Memo, the Staff has misunderstood some of the intent. We're going to want to start with a discussion around the recalibration of what the intent was so that we can have discussions around that intent. Council Member Wolbach: I'd actually ... Council Member DuBois: Could we hear from the public? Chair Burt: We can we do that first. Sheri Furman: I believe you all know me. Chair Burt: Introduce yourself anyway. TRANSCRIPT Page 42 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Ms. Furman: I am Sheri Furman. I am the Chair of Palo Alto Neighborhoods, and I'm speaking on behalf of that association tonight. First, we want to thank you for your recognition of our neighborhood associations as a vital part of our community. We greatly appreciate your efforts to improve communications. Second, we'd like to keep the process as simple as possible to ensure we don't place an undue burden on Staff, nor create an unnecessary bureaucracy. We believe the best way to accomplish your goals is to set up a joint meeting between PAN representatives and City Staff. Please ask us what we want and need and what problems are we all trying to solve. I want to make just a few points here. PAN has been listed as a community partner on the City's website since the site's reorganization a few years ago. PAN's webpage lists each neighborhood, its boundaries and its primary contact person, which is usually the association president. What I'm saying is this information about the neighborhood, who's in charge and where they are, already exists on the PAN site, which in turn is a community partner. From its inception, PAN has been a networking organization, including mentoring new associations. I personally have worked with many of them including Loma Verde and Ventura most recently. In effect, we provide a function similar to United Neighborhoods of Santa Clara County. We hold monthly meetings with the neighborhood leaders and distribute information to all of them to then pass on to their residents. We have sponsored, as you all know, Council candidate forums as well as meetings on retail and growth issues which, by the way, many of these meetings the City graciously waived fees for the rooms we used. The PAN Chair, that's me, has always acted as the City's primary contact point for passing along information to the neighborhood associations. Identifying a communications officer for each neighborhood would simply be a duplication of effort, because I send all of that information to each neighborhood leader and anybody else who is signed up in the association to be notified. Our greatest need is for places for neighborhood associations to hold community meetings without costly fees. For each neighborhood, these are typically just a few times a year, sometimes one or two, sometimes quarterly. From 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. is typically when they happen, and they do not involve alcohol. These are generally information meetings. They are not block parties or anything like that. Few neighborhood associations have treasuries, and finding adequate space for general meetings to hold, say, 50 people is often difficult. We generally hold our steering committee meetings in the president's home or something, where you can accommodate eight or ten people. Our larger general meetings are a little difficult. Regarding town hall-style meetings, can you clarify the intent of such meetings? We have always found Council and Staff quite responsive to our requests for their attendance at our community meetings to discuss issues of interest such as the recent drought guidelines that Staff came to at Midtown. There are a couple of areas we think require discussion between Staff and PAN to clarify TRANSCRIPT Page 43 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 and define. One, we are unclear how an ombudsman program would work or what need it would meet. Two, what defines a neighborhood association? PAN believes each neighborhood should determine its organizational structure, be it formal or informal. This has served us well since our founding 17 years ago. In addition, criteria should be discussed with the neighborhoods themselves. We want to ensure that any requirements do not discourage people from participating in their neighborhood activities. Again, we thank you for initiating this discussion and look forward to working with you. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have on the points you're discussing if you need further clarification. Council Member DuBois: I have one, quick question. Chair Burt: Go ahead. Council Member DuBois: I don't know if it's in your letter. It's in Annette's letter. One of the suggestions for a criteria is that it's listed on the PAN website under who we are. The question is what is your criteria for listing a neighborhood association. Ms. Furman: The neighborhoods we use are either longstanding neighborhoods or we are using emergency preparedness. Usually each neighborhood has somebody, either somebody has volunteered to be the spokesperson or chair or head of the neighborhood association or in some instances they are the neighborhood preparedness coordinator, that will also send out information to neighborhoods. Council Member DuBois: It's a pretty wide range. Some neighborhoods could just be a person who put up their hand. Ms. Furman: Yeah. I know you spoke about 501(c)(3). Most neighborhoods are not that, because of the filing requirements, the costs. Almost all associations, membership is if you live in the neighborhood, you're a member. Dues are voluntary. We rely on them to do our, for Midtown, it's for our ice cream social, for mailing out a newsletter. If people want to give us money, that helps. Otherwise, a lot of the money frankly comes out of the volunteers' pockets for things. Chair Burt: Anybody else? Council Member Wolbach: Just a few thoughts to start out. It was several months ago. I might have been the first person to start reaching out to Colleagues about this Colleague's Memo. This will maybe be a start to the conversation about intent and what we're hoping to get out of this. In the Colleague's Memo, there's something on Page 2, Page 78 of the packet, TRANSCRIPT Page 44 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 under Discussion that I'd like to highlight to start, which is the intention of severability among these items. There are some items that perhaps we could move more quickly on. Others might require a great deal more consideration prior to implementation. Geographically focused neighborhood meetings are specifically called out in the Colleague's Memo as something that we were hoping to move more quickly on. That was the first item that I was highlighting in the discussions with Colleagues as we started to draft the Memo. Other items were added because we figured there was a nexus here in focusing on strengthening the City's relationship with the community. A couple of thoughts about geographically based meetings. Some of my thoughts about why I think they would be important and what those would look like. It's important to get the City government outside of City Hall. That's good for Council Members and good for City Staff and Board and Commission Members. It's also good for the community. The idea of having a meeting in a particular neighborhood or sub-region of the City that brings together a couple of adjacent neighborhoods can help provide a setting and a time and space where the focus is on the interaction of the City with that part of the community, the interaction of the City government with that part of the community. That'd be a good time to talk about events going on in the City, upcoming development projects, redevelopment projects. Particularly as we're working on the Comp Plan, it would be a good opportunity to have a discussion about how the Comp Plan process is going. At least my own vision for this is that this would be an ongoing process, whether an annual or biannual cycle of meetings at a number of locations around the City. Our neighbor to the south, Mountain View, I believe they have a two-year cycle and seven locations. Over the course of two years, they have seven meetings in different neighborhoods of the city at which they have three members of their City Council, every department head or a representative of the department if the department head is unable to make it. They also have a neighborhood services manager, which might be comparable to this idea of an ombudsperson, if we do get into the idea of having a Staff person who's dedicated to being a liaison from the City side to the neighborhoods. That might be the person called an ombudsperson or a neighborhood services manager, which is the name used in Mountain View. That could be the person from the City side. I'm not saying that we should follow the Mountain View model. I would prefer an annual cycle rather than a biannual cycle. What they do is have a neighborhood committee composed of three Council Members that attend the meetings. I'm open to discussion, but I would personally rather see the Council attendees be randomized and rotating which would provide an opportunity for Council Members to maybe go to neighborhoods where they maybe don't have as many personal connections and be exposed, which is good again both for the community to get to know more of the Council Members and for Council Members to get to know their community even better. Those are some of TRANSCRIPT Page 45 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 my thoughts. Again, the idea of having meetings like this is to focus on what are the issues going on in the City that relate to this part of town and what are the issues that people in that part of town are facing that they'd like to have the City think about. I'm glad to hear and am aware that members of the City have been open to invitations and responsive to invitations from neighborhood organizations and from Palo Alto Neighborhoods in the past. The point here is that the City should take the initiative sometimes, that we should take the lead. The question of how this intersects with Our Palo Alto is a good one. My thinking here is that this would be a regular process that we would continue on. There's certainly a relevance right now in tying it to the Comp Plan, continuing to get people involved in thinking about the future of our City with the focus on neighborhoods. One thing you might talk about in a neighborhood meeting is how are things going with, say, a single-story overlay or other design requirements in your particular neighborhood. Is that something you're looking for? Do you have something that you've had on the books for a while that you would like to get rid of? Those geographic meetings might be a good opportunity to have discussions about geographically based issues. As far as how many meetings we might have, how many geographic sub- regions of the City we might have, you could probably break the City down into, you could do it in 30 or 37 or maybe a more manageable six to nine, somewhere in that region, sub-regions. Prior to this meeting, I was starting to sketch out one way of doing it that would include nine. Just putting this out there for conversation, maybe Area 1 would be Downtown North, University South and Professorville. Area 2 would be Crescent Park, Community Center, Duveneck/St. Francis. Area 3, Old Palo Alto, Leland Manor, Embarcadero Oaks, Garland Drive, Triple El. Area 4, Southgate, Evergreen Park, College Terrace. Area 5, Palo Alto Hills, Esther Clark Park, Greater Miranda. Area 6, Barron Park and Green Acres I and II and Palo Alto Orchards. Seven, Ventura, Charleston Meadows, Monroe Park. Eight, Midtown, Palo Verde, St. Clair Vernon, south of Midtown. Nine, Adobe Meadows, Meadow Park, Fairmeadow, Greenmeadow, Charleston Gardens and the Greenhouse. Again, there are a lot of ways we could break this down. Just putting that out there for food for thought. I have thoughts about some of the areas discussed in the Memo but, as the Memo said, the neighborhood meetings are probably the highest priority, so I wanted to focus on that for now. I'll pass onto Colleagues and it can come back to me and we'll talk about the other issues. Council Member DuBois: You said you wanted to redefine it. I wanted to hear ... Council Member Berman: I agree. TRANSCRIPT Page 46 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: There were a few areas where the Staff's interpretation of the Colleague's Memo needed to be addressed. First, I touched on this one about a formal recognition of neighborhood associations. First, this is in the category along the lines of what Cory alluded to. There are some things that are low-hanging fruit, and some things that will be more complex and require more time. This one's more complex and will require more time and engagement. It doesn't mean it's not important. It just means that it's not something that's a simple, clear solution. That means that we're at a starting point. Basically, the Council gave a direction. Staff has come back with, based on some feedback from some neighborhood groups without dialog, a recommendation to essentially reject this proposal. That's premature. What should happen is we should figure out how do we begin to have dialog. Out of that, we might come to this conclusion. We might come to some modification of it. Who knows what? This is what we would have a result of, one, understanding points of reference. How do other cities do this? It doesn't mean we'll necessarily want to copy those. We certainly would want that as one of the points of reference including looking simply within our City at the full range of what we might think of as two tiers of neighborhood groups. We have those that have full-on organizational structures and have for a long while, are very active organizations with committees and great communication structures and some formality, varying degrees of formality, to how they run themselves. Others that Sheri described and it's consistent with my experience, some are someone who has volunteered to be a Chair or a spokesperson. I don't think it's necessarily appropriate nor most effective to place those two types of neighborhood groups as being on par with one another. What a lot of the intent of this was to respond to what has been for a long while a request from neighborhood groups for the City to have greater acknowledgement of neighborhood groups, greater acknowledgement of the importance of them and help enable them. Part of the apprehension that we've seen from some of the neighborhood groups has been a misconception that that would somehow mean the City would be co-opting neighborhood groups. That's far from the intent here. That's a fundamental misunderstanding that has occurred. I saw College Terrace talk about rejecting a set of top-down standards. I couldn't find that in the Memo; it's not there. That is clearly what some chose to construe, but it wasn't the intent and it's not the wording. It might mean we move toward guidelines. It might mean that we move toward minimum standards but not prescriptive standards. There were some suggestions of minimum standards. How do they recognize that there is such a neighborhood group? What if I want to create a neighborhood group that's around my block? How do we get these things? That may sound a bit extreme, but that kind of thing we've had historically. I'm going back to when I helped co-found University South, at a time when University South had monthly meetings with 50-100-plus attendees every TRANSCRIPT Page 47 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 month, a very active neighborhood group versus one that today represents a large portion of City population and is not a very active neighborhood group. Those differences are pretty significant. We want to make sure that we have a situation where a resident in one neighborhood has a somewhat similar sense of representation through neighborhood leaders that we do in College Terrace and Midtown and Barron Park and some of those neighborhoods where those residents understand how things are structured. It's a valid point, and it was made that we're not going to have all of those neighborhood groups come up to that standard, so that's part of the discussion that we would have. A second point was about the notification about projects. Cory touched on this. There are things that go on in the City that are more geographically based. We have certain formal rules that says within 500 feet of a project, you get a postcard in the mail and we put a minimum signage out front that may not be adequate to inform the residents about what's going on and how they could engage on a project, engage with their concerns. The Memo wasn't an attempt to be the answer to that, but the issues are around what kind of things are geographically based. The Foothills does not need to have the same engagement about creek flooding down in the flatlands or tidal flooding or railroad track issues or various things that are geographically based throughout the City. The intent was to have Staff start thinking that way of "we have different things coming up. Some things are Citywide in their interest and dimension. Some things are more geographically based." We have these rigid formulas. If it's geographically based and you're within 500 feet of a project, you get the postcard. Check mark. It's done. We want to question whether there are more and better ways to communicate with the different areas of the City. Some are specific to neighborhoods. Some are subsets of neighborhoods. Some are several neighborhoods that might be. It's not rigid, but it's a different mindset about how do we communicate better with our residents and our neighborhoods. On the town hall meetings, whether it's nine or— the Mayor had talked about four. There are good, logical ways to break those things up. Monday night, there was a reference to when we had our real budget crisis and the Recession. We had a series of meetings throughout town. To a good extent they took advantage of those well- established neighborhoods and utilized those meetings to have meaningful dialog with the community. What does that mean about these other neighborhoods that don't have comparable neighborhood organizations? They were left out of that kind of communication. The question is how do we have more proactive—we aren't doing those kinds of engagements unless there's a specific invitation, say to the City Manager or the Mayor or whatever. Should we be more proactive in this? Second, how do we help facilitate it so that residents in all neighborhoods get some of the benefits of neighborhood groups that we get from our strongest neighborhood groups? This isn't intended to undermine neighborhood groups. It's intended to help TRANSCRIPT Page 48 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 strengthen neighborhood groups. The final one was on the conflict resolution. We weren't talking about what we have. I don't think the intent here was what we have of neighbor-to-neighbor conflicts principally. It's about neighbor and neighborhood conflicts with City initiatives. How do we create a more either collaborative or facilitated dialog when we have those conflicts between concerns the neighborhood may have or subsets of neighborhood may have over what's going on in a development project or whatever? We've had a lot of discussion at Council and a lot of examples where it seems to be that the City is acting more in a rule-based environment. What we want is to have, under appropriate circumstances or explore what appropriate circumstances we might have, more of a facilitated dialog with the neighborhoods over issues that are not simply "you don't like it, file an appeal." We want to move beyond that kind of setting. I don't mean to oversimplify it, because that's not the only way the City functions. The intent is to look for ways to have more effective dialog and listening to the neighborhoods on issues that they are concerned about and how do we create that. Once again, the intent was not to, at this kind of meeting, say, "Okay, we'll make those decisions here and now." These are nuanced, complicated issues. Some of the things we have in here will be low-hanging fruit, and not fruit we're going to squabble over very much. Other things are going to need thought and discussions. I remain convinced that they are worth exploring, and that people shouldn't rush to a conclusion. Because they haven't figured out the right solution, they say, "This should be a non- issue." They haven't had the dialog and come up with the right solution; therefore, let's reject the topic. Actually these are all topics that have gone around in the City for a long period of time, including in different forms. These are reflecting concerns that have been voiced by the neighborhoods. There was a misconception and an apprehension that somehow this was a threat to them or a co-opting, and that's far from the intent. What is clear is that this should be a starting point for discussion around these issues, not leaping to conclusions. That's my best shot at it. Council Member DuBois: That's helpful. Overall, I support our neighborhood associations. I support the idea here. I do think we can accomplish a lot of this with a pretty light touch and not a lot of Staff time. I would like to see us do that. Again, a lot of those concerns we're hearing was this idea of a bit of heavy-handedness. We can accomplish a lot of this without doing that. Looking at Number 1, we have our partners page on our website. We have a bunch of categories there already. We have official Friends of Palo Alto organizations. We have foundations, environmental groups, nonprofits, youth, business and service organizations like Kiwanis and Rotary. Adding a category of neighborhood associations and listing those makes sense to me. TRANSCRIPT Page 49 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Claudia Keith, Communications Manager: It is there. Sheri's made that point. It's under PAN. Council Member DuBois: Yeah, but then you go to the PAN website. It makes sense to list the associations on our website. We should add a second category which would be Citywide advocacy groups. We should list Sky Posse and Palo Alto Sensible Zoning and Palo Alto Forward and provide links. I wasn't aware of Palo Alto Mediation. Even though we weren't talking about neighbor-to-neighbor stuff, listing them there with a little description would be useful as well. That's Number 1. If we do have an ombudsman, they would also be listed right there with contact information. For Number 2, the criteria—getting back to Number 1, who is listed as a neighborhood association. I would advocate for a laissez faire approach. What PAN does, you look at some of these associations, they're literally one person. Maybe it's the emergency prep person. I would adopt that role. We would have to give a little bit of thought to what happens if two people say they're the head of the association and how do you validate that. I don't think we should spend a lot of time on that. We should be thinking about it, maybe have a process, maybe have a way to deal with it when it happens. Chair Burt: We have a history of some of those things coming up. I'll give you an example. When we had the street closures in Downtown North, we very quickly had two neighborhood groups battling each other. There was no way to recognize what was legitimate and what was not. Council Member DuBois: I'm not sure the City should. We could have Downtown North I and Downtown North II and list them both, until one of them fades away. One of the biggest things here is this idea of providing meeting space. The Downtown South, 50 people every month. We probably need to qualify it. A lot of the association meetings are small and then they have a larger general meeting once every couple of months. If we quantified a number of no-fee meetings for a group, it'd have to be limited. The biggest question I have there is what do we need to know to not have an insurance policy. Can the City have an umbrella insurance policy for these groups in some way? Under Number 3, I thought the Staff response was to use the Know Your Neighbors money and allow an association that wants to go to one of these things, for that to be a valid use. If somebody applies for a grant to go to one of the neighborhood association conferences, we would accept that as a valid use of that money, and see who wants to use it. Again, part of what we're getting in the letters, there's a feeling that maybe that's not terribly useful. If people don't apply for it, they don't use it. On Number 4, the response was "people can go sign up on the City email list." The idea would be if an organization is listed on our partner page, we would have an actively managed mailing list. Maybe the PR office would have a list for the association leads and a way to practically email them or TRANSCRIPT Page 50 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 include them on electronic notices, rather than expect people to be active and go register. Again, I don't think that needs to take a lot of time. Number 6, the town hall meetings. When I read that, I was taking that as more of a Q&A session with the opportunity for neighborhoods to talk to Council Members, not to meet with Staff over pizza. Our Palo Alto is very structured meetings with a lot of planning. I don't think that's what we're talking about. I think they could be pretty informal. It could even be a lightweight process that people could request a Council Member come to a meeting through the City Clerk's Office. Redwood City only has like two town meetings a year. The number is important, but we could try it with a little bit less structure. I like the idea of getting out in the neighborhoods. Maybe we have to have a topic that will have people turn up, but just the idea that this is a time to talk to your Council Member about issues in your neighborhood. Just doing that a couple of times a year. The ombudsman, I'm wondering if the new Code Enforcement Officer might be the right person for that. It's just the idea of providing some known level of response, a service level agreement if you will. Maybe recognizing when they're being contacted by a neighborhood association leader, the City would know who those people are. Not that you want to respond to anybody reaching out to this person, but when that person reaches out, you know they represent a larger group of people, so they would maybe get a response a little more quickly. That's my take on those points. Council Member Berman: I probably agree with practically everything Tom said. I thought it was interesting that there was concern from our currently organized neighborhood organization leadership. Hopefully that was a misunderstanding on a bunch of different sides and misinterpretation of what the Colleague's Memo was about. There are some things that are quite easy fixes that there have been expressed concerns about, including the waiving of the fees for meeting rooms. That should be at the top of our priority list in terms of trying to address concerns that we've heard from our residents. For things like creating minimum qualifications for neighborhood associations, I agree with Tom that we're not going to have robust neighborhood associations for each of our neighborhoods. That's probably okay. As things pop up in different neighborhoods that attract attention, then they'll strengthen. Hopefully that doesn't happen that often, and our residents are content with the way things are going. I want to make sure that any structure that we created wouldn't eliminate organizations from existing. I agree it can be complicated when there are numerous organizations that are created in one neighborhood. That's something that merits discussion, but I wouldn't want to add on too many other requirements. Maybe I still need to understand a little more the purpose of the ombudsman or if that can be something that's folded under somebody that is already on Staff or the new Code Enforcement Officer. I don't think TRANSCRIPT Page 51 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 we want to hire somebody specifically to play that role. I don't know if that was the intention or not; I'm not claiming it was. I don't think that's something I would support. Let's make sure we have robust interaction with PAN and our residents who are concerned as we go through this process, so that everybody gets to provide feedback. Council Member Wolbach: I've got some more comments in follow-up. Chair Burt: Go ahead, Cory. Council Member Wolbach: I appreciate the other comments I've heard from colleagues. Regarding some of these other things and looping back first on the geographic meetings, the town hall meetings. My inclination would be to have it be formal in the sense that it's well noticed, it's regular, on the calendar months in advance so that people can plan to be there, so we can do robust outreach to the neighborhood or sub-region of the City to ensure that anybody who wants to come can arrange it on their schedule. Something I'd forgotten to mention earlier that Tom did mention and is really important is the opportunity for dialog. Some communities when they do this—I don't know when it comes to direction to Staff or whatever if we're going to call for a more robust study of other communities. I like the idea of having some Staff presentations. Maybe go through and introduce whatever department heads or Council Members are there, talk about what's going on in the City, here's some of the stuff that's come down the pike in your neighborhood, here's some questions we have for you about what you'd like to see in the future of your neighborhood. Do you want some kind of architectural overlay? Do you want a shuttle route that comes to your neighborhood? Those kinds of questions that will change from year to year. Things we're looking at over the next couple of years. Here's something where we need this neighborhood's input. Definitely dedicate a significant chunk if not the bulk of the meeting to Q&A, as Tom pointed out a good chance for people in the community to say, "Thank you for coming to our part of town. Here are our gripes. Here are our questions. Here are our concerns." That's a really key focus. Others might have different thoughts. The real key behind the ombudsperson or something like that is constituent services. It's a point person to handle complaints and questions. A point person who can facilitate responding to issues. Thank you to Staff for pointing out the Palo Alto 311 which is a great thing. I even have used it myself. Sometimes having the personal touch of somebody you can call is great. On the issue of how we recognize neighborhood associations, the term that Tom used was one I had a couple of times in my own notes as I was thinking about this before this meeting, which is laissez faire. As others have mentioned, if we do for a time have two neighborhood associations within an overlapping area, I would be okay with listing them both, listing links to both on the City website. The point is to provide a facilitation of Palo TRANSCRIPT Page 52 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Altans connecting with other Palo Altans, particularly in their part of town. If we can start exploring free space and not having to go through the hassle and cost of paying for insurance for finding a facility, whether that's a City facility or partnering with other organizations in town who might be eager to open their doors and provide space for the neighborhood, whether that's the School District or a nonprofit or even a business that's interested in partnering with the neighborhood. They get some good PR out of it too. That would be great. Those are my key thoughts for now. Chair Burt: I had a few follow-up thoughts. One is how do we break up these items into things that we can give guidance on right now and which ones get carried over with what guidance goes with that. Under Point Number 1 of the Colleague's Memo, we have two paragraphs. One that's much more simple which is to have richer content about the neighborhood groups on the City website. It's very valuable to have PAN there and then also the neighborhood groups, not one or the other. It'd be great to have good interactive maps so that somebody can go there and see, "I live here. It must be this neighborhood group, and here's who I contact." The second part is one that we want to give some guidance for how we would proceed in that discussion. One thing that we may want to be thinking about is whether we should support the Mayor appointing a couple of Council Members to work with an ad hoc group of neighborhood leaders to talk through these different other sub-issues and come back with some recommendations. One thought that occurs to me and I've seen it at some of the arguments against as well, we can't force some neighborhood that doesn't have a formal group and just has somebody who volunteered to be a spokesperson have the same organizational structure as some of our full- flushed and strong neighborhood groups. It wouldn't be the intent to do that. It would be valuable for the City to help facilitate neighborhood groups being as strong as they wish to be. A lot of people don't know the history. There have been strong neighborhood groups in the City for a long while preceding 20 years ago when I got involved. When we created University South, we had some folks who borrowed off of neighborhood group models that were from outside of Palo Alto and brought them as recommendations. We went through the typical process of a bunch of months of figuring out what our protocols and bylaws ought to be. That's a formality that not every neighborhood group is going to want to go through. In the end, the neighborhood in that period of time got recognized as being very effective and a model that other, not only in the City, said, "This works well. This neighborhood is influential and constructive at the same time." Other neighborhood groups came and said, "We want to talk to you about your template." We said, "By all means. We don't own it. We'd love it." We passed along the template and other neighborhood groups borrowed portions of that. That helped strengthen them. At that time there was TRANSCRIPT Page 53 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 discussion about why doesn't the City do this, why does every neighborhood group have to talk to each other, why doesn't the City say, "Here's a good template. It's not a requirement, but let us help you. If you want to create a strong neighborhood group, here's a model or a couple of different models that you can choose from and cut and paste and do what you want. You don't have to reinvent the wheel yourself or do all your own research if you want to strengthen your neighborhood group." On the other hand, if you don't want a full-fledged one, what's that second tier neighborhood group? Should it be the one guy who is most passionate on the hot issue in the neighborhood becomes the de facto representative for 1,000 people who live there? I don't think that's ideal. Maybe we create a second simplified tier that says, "Here's Tier 2." We have the full-fledged neighborhood groups that have certain minimum requirements. The others are still recognized as neighborhoods, and there's some designated person, however that might get set up. This would be one of the things that would get discussed through this ad hoc committee. I would recommend that the ad hoc committee include one or more neighborhood representatives from that second tier that isn't the strong, fully flushed out neighborhood group. Council Member DuBois: To me, that gets really tricky. There's not this clear separation in my mind. We just had Palo Alto Common Association, which is a building, is that Tier 1 or Tier 2? Would that even be recognized? Council Member Berman: We had some represent that they were representing that organization, but they weren't by the way. Chair Burt: My answer to that would be we don't resolve that tonight. That's a part of what would go into that discussion. I will say that going back a long while, when we started University South, I was given a list of all the neighborhood groups that the City had a list of and that went back the previous 10-20 years. I went through it, and half of them I don't know these guys; they don't seem to exist anymore. A number of them were neighborhood groups and a number of them were essentially homeowner associations for condos and things like that. We didn't have something that resolved that issue. I would say that's a topic for this group to explore and come back with recommendations as opposed to us having the answers tonight. Council Member DuBois: What I was advocating was we don't spend Staff time on that. We adopt more of a laissez faire attitude. The question is how much effort do we really need to ... Chair Burt: I wasn't saying that this would necessarily be Staff driven. This would be a couple of representatives of the Council and representatives of different neighborhoods to go and have an ad hoc group to flesh out issues. TRANSCRIPT Page 54 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 I don't think we're prepared to say it ought to be this and that. I don't think we're prepared, in my mind, to say it ought to be laissez faire either right here and now. I'm not advocating that we come and conclude one thing. This is the sort of thing we should have more dialog on. We may come up with the agreement of your laissez faire proposal. Council Member DuBois: I was just assuming even if it was a Council subcommittee, that there would be Staff dedicated to organizing those meetings. Chair Burt: They could help facilitate it, but there's a difference between Staff driven and Staff present. Ms. Keith: Could I just add one element of that in your discussion is Nextdoor. There's some neighborhoods, and I'm not sure if they're exactly aligned with how PAN has defined their neighborhoods. There is that part, and that may not matter. There are maybe different designated leaders of that neighborhood group. We have about 10,000 residents who are on Nextdoor, so that's a good chunk. In some neighborhoods, it's up to about 40 percent of the neighborhood on Nextdoor. In your thinking about who to invite or how to organize that, it should be at least part of the discussion and dialog. It may be a lot of the same and it may be some different folks who have not been typically part of the neighborhood association. Chair Burt: That brings up an interesting concept. Nextdoor is not currently organized according to our neighborhood groups, but they might be willing to be. They might be willing to break up themselves according to what our neighborhood groups are already organized by. People want to be able to talk to people in their neighborhood. What was the—I've lost ... Ms. Keith: The other point was that there are some who, for example, started their Nextdoor social media network that could be leaders that may or may not be part of the Palo Alto neighborhoods. Chair Burt: It's a good point. Where we lack formal neighborhood groups, we may be starting through Nextdoor to have grassroots occurring. The one that's been strongest in recent years on that is what Sheri alluded to on several of them, which is the emergency preparedness. That's created a whole group of people who have become active in their neighborhoods because of the block preparedness coordinators and CERT initiatives. That has been, probably in the last decade or maybe a little less than a decade, the strongest change that's happened in our neighborhoods, that additional layer on top of the government affairs and the social stuff that existed before. Now we have that dimension, and it's valuable. It's valuable to the City. It's created in many cases either stronger neighborhood groups where TRANSCRIPT Page 55 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 they existed or de facto neighborhood groups where they didn't exist before, but they're now organized to some extent around the presence of that initiative. These are all good things to talk about. I don't think we're prepared to draw a conclusion tonight on ... Council Member DuBois: Yeah. I'm looking at the clock; it's 10:20. Where do we want to end up? Chair Burt: I would recommend that we call out the things that we can make recommendations on tonight that would go to Council and others that would be carried over. If we can't even get to that point, we may have to carry over the balance of the item. It is pretty late for a P&S meeting. Council Member Wolbach: As I mentioned before, the one thing that's called out specifically in the Colleague's Memo as an initiative that we'd like to launch—it said early this year; although, it's already half way through the year, so that's not going to happen—earlier than others is setting up meetings that are initiated by the City establishment in different communities within the City. We've offered some various ideas about that. Might it be good to at this point direct Staff to put together some more clear proposals and bring that either back to Policy and Services following the break or directly back to Council following the break? What are your thoughts? Chair Burt: It does need to be vetted by P&S before going to the Council. We can give that guidance. I would suggest on that, if we're going to do that, say that we'd like Staff to come back with draft recommendations on number and form of town hall meetings—I'll make this in the form of a motion—and that where possible those town hall meetings would be coordinated with one or more neighborhood groups. Council Member DuBois: I have a question for Staff. Chair Burt: Let me see if there's a second, and then we can have a discussion. Council Member DuBois: I wanted to see if we could generalize your proposal. Council Member Wolbach: I'll second it but open to amendments and questions. MOTION: Chair Burt moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to direct Staff to return to the Committee with draft recommendations on the number and form of town hall meetings and where possible town hall meetings could be coordinated with one or more neighborhood groups. TRANSCRIPT Page 56 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Chair Burt: I'll pass on other discussion. Do you want to speak to your second? Council Member Wolbach: I spoke at length earlier about this topic. Council Member DuBois: I wonder if we could generalize your idea. If you guys got enough feedback from us, we could almost treat this as a Study Session and move more generally that you come back with an update to all the elements with more specifics on Numbers 1-7 including the town hall item. Council Member Wolbach: I would suggest that we also do that as a separate motion, again focusing on the severability that was highlighted in the memo, so that we can move on the one. That one, hopefully Staff can start working on that with specific proposals. Whereas, with the other, Staff might bring back more information. Council Member DuBois: Yeah, that's fine. Chair Burt: I would agree. Any that we can carve out with clear direction. As to clear direction, let's not get hung up until 11:00. If we find that we're struggling to agree on clear direction, then let's agree that we'll table that and let them come back based on what Tom described as the informal input. Felicia Gross, Assistant City Attorney: Can I take a moment to interject a legal aspect? Chair Burt: Yeah. Ms. Gross: Felicia Gross from the City Attorney's Office. Clearly for the town hall and the Q&A sessions, the Brown Act would apply. There's a strict interpretation of the Brown which would suggest that no more than two Members of one Committee, for example the Policy and Services Committee, could appear if there are questions that are likely to be asked or discussions are likely to be had that may return to Policy and Services. Something to be cognizant of. Chair Burt: I'm sorry. Isn't that only if they participate in those discussions? Ms. Gross: Sorry. When you say "those," meaning? Chair Burt: Those two Members of, say, Policy and Services, more than two Members of Policy and Services. We can be there as observers, correct? It's only if we're participants does it apply. TRANSCRIPT Page 57 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Ms. Gross: I think that's correct. If it's a Q&A-type situation, to decline questions. It's something you'd have to be cognizant of. Council Member Wolbach: Or defer them to Staff. Chair Burt: I'll give you an example. When we had the town hall meetings that the City Manager led during our budget cuts, there were Council Members there, but to my recollection the Council Members didn't participate in the Q&A. I appreciate the warning, but I wanted to make sure it's understood that there's a difference between attendance and participation. You start getting nervous if we're attending and we might slip into participating; I appreciate that. Council Member Wolbach: For Staff, as you bring back draft proposals to keep this in mind. I had suggested tentatively three Council Members per meeting. This might mean that we're careful about how we divide which Council Members go to which meetings. Ms. Gross: Exactly. Council Member Wolbach: So that's just something to consider. Council Member DuBois: The whole intent is to participate, not to go and not say anything. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you for mentioning that. Something I forgot to mention earlier. I'm open to colleagues' thoughts on this. In addition to Staff and Council Members, another group to draw on as appropriate for this type of meeting, I would suggest, would be Board and Commission Members especially over the next year or so as we're working on Comp Plan stuff. I would say Planning and Transportation Commission as well as Architectural Review Board, representation from those bodies would be particularly advisable, but other Boards and Commissions as well. Chair Burt: I'll just briefly say there's a good example of where these geographic-based town hall meetings might matter. If we have as part of our Comp Plan discussion a discussion around south El Camino specific plan, we've got neighborhoods of Ventura and Barron Park and the Green Acres and Orchards, they'd all have an interest. The rest of the City generally wouldn't so much. That's an example. We have this one motion before us. Does it need to be repeated? Mr. Alaee: Chair Burt, may I make a suggestion? I certainly don't want to get ahead of the Committee. Just to follow-up on Council Member DuBois' comments. It seems, from my perspective, that there are about three or four recommendations that would make sense to bring back to you. One TRANSCRIPT Page 58 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 would be about the town hall meetings. That would include an analysis of resources needed to do that. The second one would be about the fees and the insurance. Again, there's some resource implications and costs to that. The third recommendation would be about—I don't know if it would be a recommendation, because we got the gist—enhancing the website. We can start working on that. Again, I don't think we need a formal recommendation, but we could have one there. The fourth recommendation would be about this ad hoc committee that you had mentioned. That would tie into these other issues, which is the definition, communication and how that's syncing, as well as the ombudsman program. I don't know if that helps your organization. Chair Burt: You've convinced me that Tom's recommendation would cover what ... Council Member DuBois: The easy one would be this idea of City funds to attend association conferences. Could we roll that into the block grant program? Mr. Alaee: We'd want to bring something back to you on that. Right now the Know Your Neighbor grant program has clear purpose and principles and definitions. This fits into it. It's becoming a very popular program. We have over 40 applications this year and only $25,000. We could make a recommendation to increase funding and re-massage the purpose. Council Member Burt: That's a good idea. I was going to comment that within that re-massaging, it's not just attend conferences. I know neighborhood groups especially when things were, trying to print flyers. If you don't have an email list, you still have to go door-to-door to first start forming a neighborhood group, because you don't have that email list. If somebody's trying to form a neighborhood group, it was always "I've got to pay $300 out of my own pocket and the sweat labor." Making some of those funds available to neighborhood groups for some of their minimal purposes would be something to consider. Council Member Wolbach: Procedurally for this evening, so we can all wrap up in a timely fashion, should we amend the motion on the table or should we just pass it (crosstalk) and then move to the others? Chair Burt: No. I am comfortable with accepting what Khash described as their intention and am withdrawing the motion. MOTION WITHDRAWN BY THE MAKER TRANSCRIPT Page 59 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Mr. Alaee: Then we would return back to the Committee as soon as possible, I would think, with a return in August or September. Council Member Wolbach: The motion is not necessary for that. That's okay with me. Council Member Burt: Does anybody else have anything more on the item? Great. NO ACTION TAKEN 3. Continued Discussion Regarding City Council Procedural Matters, Including Updates to Municipal Code Sections for Appeals, Post Government Employment Regulations, Date/Time of Policy and Services Committee and Other Referral Items from City Council Retreat (Continued from May 21, 2015) Future Meetings and Agendas Khashayar Alaee, Senior Management Analyst: The first three items in orange are what occurred tonight. We'll obviously push the City Council procedural matters to August. I do apologize; I didn't include August in here. In August we also had the item for the handbook, which is going to come to the Committee. Chair Burt: What's our August date, because we don't have one here? Mr. Alaee: Yeah. I need to circle back with Council Member DuBois. It was either the 16th or 25th. We had picked two dates, and I was supposed to check back with him, but I haven't yet. I don't know if we can formalize that tonight. Council Member DuBois: 18th or 25th? Council Member Berman: It was the 18th. Mr. Alaee: Was it the 18th or 25th? Council Member Berman: I could be wrong, but (inaudible). Council Member DuBois: I believe the 25th would work well for me. Mr. Alaee: Okay. Does that work for other Council Members? I believe it did. Council Member Wolbach: I'm sorry. Could you repeat the date again? TRANSCRIPT Page 60 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 Mr. Alaee: August 25th. Council Member Berman: It's fine for me. Chair Burt: Looks good. Council Member Wolbach: Yes, that's fine. Mr. Alaee: At the August 25th meeting, we'll bring back the procedural matters which is on the agenda tonight. From our previous meeting, we had said that we would bring the handbook back. Those would be the two items there. If we can turn the Staff Report around and the recommendation analysis, we'll bring it back there, at least get it on the agenda. For September, it does look like we've got a pretty full plate; the approval of the Junior Museum and Zoo collection policy, the two auditor reports, and then the records retention policy from the City Clerk. We've got some tentative placeholders for October and November for the Public Art Ordinance and the human resources allocation process budget. We do have these pending items that we're still working through to bring back. It does look like we're having a very successful year so far. Council Member DuBois: The one that's in the parking lot here, the health and safety funds, Project Safety Net, how different would that be from the budget process? Mr. Alaee: Chair Burt can correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understood was that, as Jim mentioned this evening, when we had this item in October, there was the discussion about the $4 million total. $2 million have been allocated to Project Safety Net. That's what I think you're talking about now. That other $2 million is still hanging out there and what do we do with that money is what that conversation's about. That's where there was this larger conversation about the guiding principles of how to use those funds. Council Member DuBois: Do you think, when we're talking about the meeting rooms, you might be able to roll in the Alma Plaza meeting room discussion? Mr. Alaee: Yes. We should be able to. I need to circle back with Walter, our Budget Director, because the user fee cost recovery policy has already come to Council. We need to wrap all this together. Chair Burt: I have a related question. In addition to neighborhood groups, there are other nonprofits in the community that we may want to enable to use—these may be informal or unincorporated nonprofits. We might find it is a community benefit, whatever they're providing. I'd be interested in including in that discussion what are the parameters. If we chose to do so, TRANSCRIPT Page 61 of 61 Policy and Services Committee Regular Meeting Transcript 6/9/2015 how might we or Staff identify a process for organizations to apply for exempt status from fees for community facilities? Claudia Keith, Communications Manager: That might help also define. We get a lot of requests to be put on our website, linked to our website. We don't have criteria. There's lots of good nonprofits. That might be a good way to have some criteria. I know we want to be loose and open but not chaotic, so that might help for us to be able to say ... Chair Burt: The Goldilocks version. Ms. Keith: A lot of people do want to be linked to our website. Council Member DuBois: You almost need a chamber of commerce for the nonprofits, like an organization. Ms. Keith: It's just a thought. Chair Burt: Does that cover it? Great. Meeting's adjourned. Adjournment: Meeting was adjourned at 10:34 P.M.