Madam City Clerk, can we get a roll call?

Yes.

Commissioners Harris.

Bowling.

Present.

T.

Chair Miley.

Present.

Uh, for present, and hopefully, um, Commissioner Schwartz will be able, he's joining remotely and hopefully he'll get on momentarily, and we'll be able to add him when he's ready.

All right, thank you.

Um, see you here, so that's item one.

Item two on our agenda is non-agenda public comment.

So if there's any members of the public who would like to speak in person or online, uh, I believe they either need to raise their hand or fill out a speaker slide.

Yes.

Uh, the first one is in person, Rita Lark.

Good evening.

My name is Rita Lark.

And the reason that I'm here tonight, I came to tell you a story.

My story starts with I came to Alameda four months ago, and I was living in uh Village of Love shelter.

Okay, I was lucky to get an apartment at the uh Esperanza.

Since I've been there, keys have been stolen out of the keybox from the uh maintenance supervisor and the co-worker.

And the drugs they keep escalating, and we have sex traffic and marine that keeps coming up in there.

All these terrible things have been documented with the police department here.

And my question is: why should a person like me that came out of homelessness?

I'm 66 years old.

I have a service animal.

Every time I come home, I find more damages in my house, like it's been pissed out from my couch to my love seat in my bedroom use where the maintenance supervisor, he likes to have sex with underage children.

Both of these men have been locked up and they released them and they let them come back to work.

I have talked with the management there, and nobody wants to control it.

Then I went through the latter.

I went from the unbudsman to the um manager, supposed to be the manager over this, and then uh I went to the even the director of Alameda Housing.

And I'm not getting through to what's really going on.

And so I went to a church yesterday and I spoke with this lady that donates clothes, and so she told me that she knows a lawyer that does free work, but I just wanted to let the city know that these are beautiful apartments, and it shouldn't be going like it is.

People are moving in and out of this place, and it should be a safe place for everyone.

Thank you.

Ms.

Lark, thank you for sharing.

Thank you.

But uh I appreciate you sharing and uh, you know, wish you the best in getting the support you need through the city or other service providers.

Have a good evening.

Thank you.

And we have one remote, uh Jake R.

Finkel.

Good evening.

Uh I assume you can hear me?

Yes.

Yes.

Yep.

Yeah, oh good, okay.

Um what I want to discuss tonight is um what the OGC's um uh tasks is, what you're supposed to be doing.

You know, the Brown Act was passed in the 1950s, give or take, and then um to make meetings open to the public.

It also uh addressed making uh uh public records available in around 2014, City of Alameda uh codified some of this for uh locally with the Sunshine Ordinance and the Open Government Commission.

Around nothing much was going on, and then around 2017, 2018, a citizen filed a complaint, the commission upheld it, went back to the council, and the council had to do a redo on some issue.

Uh since that time, the council has steadily chipped away at the commission's authority to a point where it appears now that you can't really do anything about anything.

Um so what I would like, yeah.

I mean, you do an annual report, and that's wonderful, but the the public records portion of the job is being done uh by computer.

The um commission no longer really has to uh evaluate complaints because there's a hired attorney who decides everything.

Uh and what I'm asking you to do is do something to help improve the transparency, uh, so that citizens can know what's going on.

Uh, you know, the mayor decided that uh people should not be able to address the council and non-agenda items.

Totally her doing, and it uh in view of our not having a newspaper locally, I think the ability to address the city council with non-agenda items, I think is very important.