The County Board of Supervisors Transportation Slash Planning Committee meetings order.

Will the clerk please call the roll to establish our forum?

Supervisor can I like here?

Supervisor Halbert present.

Member quorum.

Thank you all.

I appreciate members of the public participating, either in person or online.

Apologies for the room technical issues require that we be in this room today.

It's a little bit tight inside, but everyone will have a chance to participate, including public comment.

And if those people who are online wish to participate, there's a procedure for doing that, and I will ask the clerk to please describe that for anyone online.

If you'd like to participate remotely, you can follow the teleconferencing guidelines posted at WWEW.

And use the raise your hand function.

We have many online.

Yes, we have uh 26 people on the okay, very good.

We have one, two, three, four, five, six items plus public comment today.

The first item is an informational item discussion of discussion of floor area ratio as it pertains.

Partially covered roof over a gravel walkway.

Is there a presentation from planning department?

Yeah, I'll take that one.

Uh Albert Lopez Plan Director.

Uh this item, it's it um there's a couple of terms that are used in the East County area plan, which I believe this is referencing um related to floor area and the definition of building.

Um floor area ratio is uh it's a ratio between the size of buildings and the and the lot and the in the east county area plan, the floor area ratio generally it's 0.01, except for agriculture.

Yeah, additional uh floor area bump.

Um, but as it pertains to uh this particular item, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the definition of a building, which is in our code, and that's how we uh determine whether or not something should be counted as floor area.

Um generally speaking, the if it requires a building permit and has been um engineered to uh as a supporting structure for the uh um I'll read the actual definition of the building, it's uh any structure erected for the support shelter or enclosures of persons, animals, property, um, and so if it requires a building permit and sort of meets those characteristics, we generally consider it to be a good uh if it is a building, then it does count towards the floor area ratio.

Um and again with that point oh one generally speaking of the buildings in the um in the East County area plan, specifically, I think you have to talk to Ag Zone in this particular case, and so if there is um, we did have one case, I believe it was a couple of years ago.

You might remember a cemetery that we approved.

Um, and there were there were mausoleums um as part of that, and at one point we weren't going to count those as buildings, but we later on did count them, which we did.

We had to reduce the size of the cemetery, or I think I think we actually ended up eliminating the mausoleums because of that because we did determine them to be buildings and they butted up against the floor air ratio maximums, and so um without a ton of context on this item.

I would say that if it is a building, requires a building permit is uh engineered structurally to support um an enclosure of some of some kind for humans to use, then we would consider that to be a building and subject to the floor air ratio.

So um do we need to um make a change to the definition of that or do we need to make a um voter initiated and voter-approved um uh amendment to measure D to and I think the um comments that I've heard is um that if it is open air that if it's a flooring that is semi-permeable, that it is unattached, that um similar to solar panels, which also cover the ground below them but are not considered part of FAR, i.e.

the intersect power, that there is a way to have the meetings not counted as floor area ratio, and that a definition could perhaps alleviate that, like the definition of a pool, which used to be considered FAR and now is not considered.

So I guess could staff work on the what we're trying to accomplish and figure out the how we can accomplish that.

Yes.

Well, so certainly we can come up with a definition of a building that meets the walkway.

Yes, the criteria that you talked about on the arcade or something like that that is open air, permeable floor, unattached to another building, I guess, as opposed to attached to the ground.

Um, you know, there is always the word structural to me.

I I assume that that meant that if it's holding up the building, so helping the building to stand erect, then that counts.

But if it's completely unattached, it has no structural bearing.

Yeah, so and and could you remind us where exactly the page and the paragraph you're referencing when you did that?

So the building uh definition is in the zoning code and zone mission section.

Um that's uh 17.04 of the of the uh county code.

Um, there is always a caveat about measure D, of course, because measure D does in the large parcel ag it doesn't talk about structures, it only talks about buildings, and then going back to that definition of buildings.

You know, there could be a conflict there.

Any zoning code, any ordinance, policy that the county adopts has to be consistent with measure D.

Um, so to the extent that any definition change doesn't do that, then I think we'll be okay.

But there's always some interpretation, as you know, when it comes to measure.

Um, been on both sides of that that argument over the years, so that's the caveat.

Yeah, supervisor Miley, do you have any questions about this?

Yeah, and we um it's not requiring a motion, but um, can we provide direction to staff to work on as Albert mentioned, we can find a way to further define this?

Sure.

Sounds good to me.

Yeah, I I think uh public comment would be good now.

Um I've said what I think I I would like to say.

Is there anybody either in the room first and then online rotating everybody who would like to speak now?

If you're in the room, please fill out a speaker slip.

If you're online for item number one, wishing to speak, now would be the time to reach Larry Gosslin.

Thank you for allowing me to speak.

My name's Larry Gosling, I'm rancher in eastern Alameda County.

Uh the zoning ordinance actually does address um floor area ratio, uh, but measure D does not define it.

It uses the term, but there's no definition for floor area ratio.

That being said, at the state level and in Alamini County, the term floor area ratio is used to um define uses in the residential areas in Alameda County, it's specific to the R1 district, and that's the only time it's used in the ordinance.

Uh the term floor area uh is defined in section 1752 900, and it states that floor area now shall mean the floor area space, and I'm sorry for uh the reading.

This is very tiny.

Floor area shall mean the floor area of space used for service to the public as customers, patrons or clients, and so it's a very restrictive definition, and it may be valuable to staff in the future.

Certainly, uh again, the measure D issue that uh has been uh addressed by the planning director still applies.

There's ambiguity regarding that, and so if we need clarification of measure D, I think outreach to the A Advisory Committee is syndicated.

Thank you.

Nick Schneider.

Morning, supervisors.

I wasn't prepared to talk about this issue, but because Measure D was brought up, I wanted to make an observation, particularly for staff.

There are a few typos and an important omission in the printed version, the online version of the East County area plan.

Measure D has a definition, adopted a definition of development that includes a definition of structure, but that is omitted from the online and the uh printed version of the county area plan.

So I urge staff to make that correction, and I don't have it in my head to be able to say what it is right now, but the and I will provide staff the other typos that are in.

So it's going to be great.

Thank you.

Is there any uh any other public comment on this item?

Yeah.

You're on the line.

You have two minutes.

We're on item one.

It'd be admitted.

Thank you.

Um this uh item um uh uh again has been said several times uh measure D is an overlay.

So it goes on top of some uh in addition to uh and alongside uh all of these uh county zoning ordinances um and in this idea that uh Mr.

Lopez just described, you know, um out in the East County area plan, um he has uh uh had buildings built with patios, full-size patios, two thousand square feet of patio attached to the main building, um, and that's a second story, and then with uh with uh trellises and eaves and um, you know, uh uh lawn chairs and everything out on the patio, um, and then on the second floor, and then on the first floor, um, you know, pavement, full pavement, uh, not semi-permeable, uh, and um, you know, uh full concrete, full uh limestone, marble, whatever they use, and uh that's covered space, 2,000 square feet.

And Mr.

Lopez somehow never figured out that um his uh code enforcement, his building inspectors.

Actually, it's not his, that's under the uh public works agency.

Um they couldn't figure out that that was uh floor area.

They don't think that's a building, they don't think that's a floor area.

But uh, you know, I'd like to know who is asking for this.

Where uh why do we jump to how can we get this changed?

Where uh where is this uh building?

What does it look like?

Why don't you bring in pictures?

And why is this an action item?

I thought this is an informational item.

How can you be making a direction to staff, giving direction to staff?

Isn't that an action?

Wouldn't that be non-permissible under the Brown Act because this is an informational item only for discussion?

What are you doing giving direction to staff on this?

And uh let's get these things covered.

Uh floor area.

Thank you.

Yep.

Good morning, supervisors and everyone.

Yeah, uh, am I audible?

Yes, okay, perfect.

No, thank you.

Uh good morning, everyone.

Thanks for giving me this chance.

My name is Harish, and I've been a resident of Lemony County for many years.

Um, so the reason why I'm here is I kind of um heard and read through the topic here and item, and I actually support the proposed clarification regarding the floor area ratio.

The county has already determined that solar panel structures are not counted as uh floor area ratios, and neither are certain semi-permeable surfaces and similar site features.

Again, there are some examples that were taken earlier.

So, and an open air walkway is kind of consistent with these existing interpretations, and I feel that's that's very reasonable clarification that provides certainly while remaining consistent with the established uh county policies.

So uh in a nutshell, I kind of strongly encourage the committee to support this uh clarification uh that was discussed here.

Thank you.

Andrew Turnbull.

Sorry, I can't define the the unmute button.

You hear me okay?

Yes, thank you.

Well, first of all, um I would I want to support Dr.

Larry Goslin's recommendation to the committee that you get some guidance from your um Alameda County Ag Advisory Ummittee.

Um, very strong group of people over there that are working very hard.

I'm I'm attending those meetings as a um as a member of the public, and I think that's a great place to take um take your guidance to the other thing is I know um as a constituent in um district one and in um uh president David Hobart's uh group.

Um I know David is looking for ways to increase and support agribusiness in Alameda County, and though um I'm not sure exactly what the case that's brought this to the board, um, I do want to join David in as a citizen, uh looking for all the possible ways that we can support agribusiness in Alameda County, and uh so in summary, um, yes, uh please please if this supports agribusinesses, find a way to make the change and also rely on your excellent Alameda County Ag Advisory Council for guidance.

Thank you for your respect and attention.

Do you want to speak on item one?

Unmute your microphone, I have no additional speakers for this item.

Okay, um, thank you.

With that, we'll move to the next item.

Nothing would be set on item one.

An item two, an informational item discussion on allowable uses under the Alameda County zoning ordinance, section 17.06 and 17.52.

Yes, I'll take that one as well.

In the point of fantastic, I guess, general planning question.

Um, the code sections that are being uh currently cited are one of 17.06 is our ag zone.

Um, and in our ag zone, we do have a number of uh permitted uses as well as conditionally permitted uses.

And depending on the use, that conditional use permit could go to the planning commission or to the East VCA.

Uh, for example, a cemetery goes to the Planning commission, where a uh mobile cell site goes to the East PCA.

Um, same thing for wind farms and solar farms, those go to the EPCA.

Um there is a note here about machinery and such.

So I'm I'm also making the assumption that this is does relate to storage of vehicles.

For example, some of the lists some of the uses that are prohibited in the A zone would include things like outdoor storage or contractor storage yards.

And when it comes to outdoor storage, I think we've had a lot of challenges in the ag zone in our rural areas because people do store a lot of material outside.

They have large properties, it could include abandoned vehicles or inoperative vehicles, building materials, and so uh the case is that code enforcement usually uh handles they have to get into the specifics and details with the landowners about what they're using those materials for um before they they pursue any kind of code enforcement action.

Um there have been uh there's been one very stubborn case in these county related to outdoors of inoperative vehicles, which we have been pursuing for um I would say years now.

Um that particular owner has 50 to 100 cars are all very nice classic cars, but they don't work, and you know, some we get complaints about those.

Um same thing with with contractor yards in terms of people storing building materials and and using their property as a lay down yard for uh construction sites and such.

That is something that's also prohibited that we uh we get complaints about that from time to time.

There's been one um one case that I can recall about somebody wanting to store historic looking uh agricultural uh machinery and vehicles, old tractors and um old um bailers and things like that on their property for historic reasons, and um we have given that a little bit of leeway in the past, but it does come up from time to time because there does seem to be some interest and uh support for doing that in unlimited cases.

If there's like one tractor like out in front of the winery or something like that, you know, we usually have um have uh not pursued that as code enforcement, but if you have you know 10 or 20 of them and they're all kind of junk, that's a different case.

Um, and um there's a little bit of gray area there that we have to um that we have to utilize our sort of you know our field work and just common sense and and regulating those those uses and and those violations when we see them.

Um, so that's all I really had to say about that.

I mean, again, there is a list of permitted uses, and and I could share that on screen if you'd like to.

Um, but it is a very finite list in terms of uses and go again going back to measure D, because most of our ag area is in measure D.

I would say 100% of it is in measure D territory.

Um, we can't necessarily add to that list of permitted uses without going through a ballot measure.

Um, and I mean that's you know, we've talked about that before.

Um, um just you know, for example, like there is there are certain uses that we could just add to the list in the ag zone if they if they are there's a conflict with measure D and the limited types of uses that are allowed um in the A zones.

What about landscaping businesses?

I think that that part of this is related to landscaping, and in particular if landscapers utilize park or other coverings, mulch or whatever, and you know, or rask cutters, lawnmowers, or the ones that they can drive around or um or the trucks that drive them around.

Is landscaping allowed?

Yes, gaping businesses.

So uh there's a couple of things to say there.

I mean, we do have businesses that are that are landscape-related, ag related that do mulching um and chipping, things like that haven't allowed because it is agricultural.

Once you get into storage of like trucks and vehicles for the purposes of a landscaping contractor, then I think that falls into the category, and that's something that we would likely code enforce.

Contractor yards are not a permitted or conditionally permitted use.

Contractor yards in I'm what trying to define that.

If a contractor is building homes or a contractor is um got um the uh the yellow metal machineries that are building freeways, um contractors.

If I'm a landscaper, I'm not a contractor, I'm a landscaper, but if I need trucks to drive my lawnmowers around, we're saying that a land I guess what I'm getting at is how can a landscape business exist if it doesn't have machinery, so if a landscaping business is allowed to exist, you need to allow its machinery, otherwise it truly can't exist.

Or how do we how do we define that?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it sounds like a landscape contractor um that would have all that kind of um irrigation supplies, all that.

You know, we consider that to be like a lay-down yard yard where they put all their stuff and all the building materials, um, um, and so yeah, I mean that is that has been a challenge in other parts of the uh East County, sure.

Um how can we provide further definition to that?

Can it be in our policy making realm of what the board makes policy on?

Or does it have to go to a vote of the people to say that a landscaper can have his trucks to operate his business?

Where what I'm trying to get at what is the what are the required pathways to get there?

Sure, sure.

Well, um the uh you know the list of what measure D did when it was passed is that it really it kind of sealed off our ability to add uses to our list of permitted or conditioning permitted uses.

You want to put that list up then you said you could do that?

Uh yeah, I I could do that.

Um, it's not too much problem.

So, um, so here is a list of that bigger.

Um make that bigger, Katisha, or do I have to do that in my hand?

You'd have to do that.

What was those can be found in 17.06 or 17.5210.

Uh, yeah, this is all 17 uh oh six.

Okay, yeah.

Um, going to the um the list of permitted uses in the A zone.

Oh three.

And this list, as I said, is I mean what measure D it essentially tied our hands to add things to this without a ballot measure.

If there was some clarification and some nuance or gray area, I think that we probably would be able to do something like that.

But once you add in like a landscape contractor yard or contractor storage yard, I think that probably would be a violative of the measure D, just because there's no other place in measure D that says you could do something like that.

Um, so you know, again, you can have a single-family home, you could have crops, vine, uh tree farm, truck garden, which I'm not even sure what a truck garden here.

I think I think Larry Goston probably knows what a truck garden is.

I don't know if anybody else that does know the truck garden is um a plant nursery.

So you could have a nursery where all you did was grow plants, right?

And we have a couple of those out here, Colivares.

Um greenhouses, apiary, um, so there's something that's getting close, but not quite contractor storage at that point.

Yeah.

Um you could do uh raising of poultry, grazing and breeding and horses or cattle, of course, winery, microbreweries, and olive oil mills.

So raising cattle.

If you need to drive the cattle around in truck, where do you put your truck?

Well, I think that would be permitted.

Okay, you'd have all right.

Trucks related to that one.

All right.

Um, of course, all the winery and olive oil mill stuff is permitted.

Uh, how that works.

Fitch fish hatcheries, public riding and hiking trails, secondary unit.

Agricultural caretaker units.

Caretaker and I thought I saw it farm worker.

Oh that's coming up.

That's coming up boarding stables and writing academies, as you know we have a number of those um stables there's a whole bunch of um additional agricultural housing consisting of not more than 36 beds.

Agricultural employee housing not more than 36 beds in a group quarters okay like a and I don't I don't believe that we have anything that meets this definition in Alameda County.

Not yet.

But it's allowable it is it is a permitted use any questions?

So we'll get the public comment in my second we'll get that I've gotten several texts from people who are trying to log in and saying getting a message the meeting hasn't started.

Yeah we're working on adding that at the link on the broadcast page to go to a different link.

To go to this link yes so they're not able to see anything or hear anything but then some people have been to the so there's a way to do it we're just trying to better advise people on how to do that.

Okay.

It's the one in the agenda the one in the agenda is the right one and the one on the broadcast is the wrong one if anybody knows somebody trying to get in you might direct them to the teams link that's in the agenda.

Teams link in agenda which is posted online and not to go anywhere else anywhere else.

Anywhere else and again in light of that we'll take a say that again what was that construction?

It's the correct one.

It's the correct one the online agenda but until they're able to uh do that I think uh county council's right it's best to allow jump on so we'll take a five minute recession How do we give us a hug Okay.

Is we're going to be in our meeting on the support called the role.

Supervisor Miley.

Supervisor Howard.

All right.

We were going through the allowable.

Yes, we were.

Make that a little bigger this time.

So we were at committed uses.

I think we went through that.

We're just getting to the talking about agricultural housing, I believe, or ag employee housing.

Yep.

But they don't exist.

You do ADUs.

And then we get into the conditional uses planning commission, there's only four of them.

Sanitary lands.

Okay.

Sanitary.

Those are all listed in Measure D.

Um not by reference.

Um, but some of them are, I believe.

So a composting facility.

But trucks to drive around the compost, load it up, kick it up, move it.

No, that would be part of the use.

Okay.

I I feel like there's a fine line that has to be clarified between having a contracting business, irrigation, pipes, um, plumbing, fittings, uh, or you know, versus a place to park trucks that drive around mowers, or places to store and move mulch or composting.

You know, so it all gets into the definition of landscape, non-contractor landscape business versus a contractor landscape business.

And I I understand a lot of what our job entails is interpreting and figuring out if there's a code enforcement issue, or we're just defining how to allow it to happen, we're define the conditions for that to happen.

So if we wanted to better define a non-contractor landscaping business, and better define a law as allowable, and better to define a contractor defined landscape business as not allowable.

Would that have to go to a measure D vote of the people, or would that be something we could define within our policy making funds?

I think it would depend on the definition itself.

Um because there is a there is a separate contracting license for con for landscapers, right?

Landscaper landscaping contractor, and those are the folks that would usually have all the irrigation materials, papers, you know, piles of sand and soil and mulch and all that kind of stuff.

Um which is currently not permitted in the A zone.

There is a definition of that.

No, I'm just oh that that's that would be the association between a landscape contractors, usually those items and including all the trucks to move all that material currently is not permitted in um in the A zone.

If there was another definition that you wanted to work on that didn't have any of that stuff, then potentially that could be found compliant with Measure D.

It does sound similar to maybe you know composting in a nursery or a tree, a tree farm, whatever that term was.

Um so if it's in that gray area, then yeah, potentially, I guess it depends if we got challenge on it.

Yeah, okay.

That's very helpful.

So, I smiley, any questions on this public comment in person first?

Thank you for hearing me.

I am still a rancher in eastern Alameda County.

I also serve on the Ag Advisory Committee.

Um Measure D has within it land use descriptions that are you know paragraph long, they're very broad descriptions.

Uh they do require interpretation.

And uh to that effect, uh, there are actually two measure D's.

One that was passed in uh the year 2000 that's created a lot of consternation and problems.

And then there is a clarification in 2022.

The 2022 Measure D actually calls for broad construction or to broadly construe uh the meaning of the ordinance going back to 2000 uh to enhance agriculture and agricultural land use.

So according to Measure D 2022, as long as findings are in place and it meets the common sense sort of interpretation, uh, we do have a lot of leeway, I believe, in the document.

Now, something I mentioned before, which is also still the case, is that uh Measure D has never had a legislative review, and that is a standard that's typically followed when a uh legislative action is taken by the public.

So it's just never been done in Alameda County.

Uh staff has done their best to respond to people's the public's interpretation.

I think it's time for legislative review D, and I think that should be tasked to the advisory committee.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Kelly, we're on item two.

You have two minutes.

Yes, thank you.

Um some highly misleading things being discussed here, like this idea that measure D has never had a legislative review.

I don't know if there is such a thing as a legislative review um uh by uh legislatures.

That's not what they do.

They don't go back and review their laws, they make the laws.

You know who does legislative review?

That's called the courts.

And uh your um, and there was uh your county defended Measure D around 2005 or whenever and um it was upheld.

Um the measure D was was uh the the uh county council had to go out and defend Measure D because uh that's your job is to defend the ordinances that are voter approved uh by the people, and measure D was upheld against the uh the opposition.

Um now going back to this um uh what we just heard, very highly misleading from the planning director, where he said something about the um the uh uh the the uh um uh the the permitted uses, and in in uh in the agricultural district.

Well, well there's no such thing as an agricultural uh district anymore.

There's uh you know, three different agricultural districts.

There's large partial agriculture, there's um you know, resource management, and there's water uh water management.

So um this idea that there is an agricultural district, that's um it's been overlaid, it's been divided up in several ways by Measure D.

Um, and so uh specifically this idea that permitted uses include winery, uh microbrewery olive oil mill, visitor visitor centers, tasting rooms, retail sales, display of historical or educational items.

Well, that's true in some areas, like uh in large partial agriculture, but it's not true in uh resource management and in uh water management.

So um your your uh discussion here is very misleading, very, very uh incomplete and uh legally and factually wrong.

And I'd like to I I'd suggest you go back and rewrite your zoning ordinance, you know, the the uh 17.06, rewrite it and make it so that it complies with measure D and it's it uh reflects Measure D.

Because you never did that, never went back and revoted.

Thanks, Speaker.

Nick Schneider.

Thank you.

Kelly did make an important point.

The zoning ordinance has never been updated to reflect the changes to the general plan made by Measure D in 2000.

Um, and state law requires that when a general plan is changed, that zoning must be um required to be compliant with those general plan changes within a reasonable amount of time, and uh 25 years is not a reasonable amount of time.

So I think the Board of Supervisors should direct staff to undertake that uh tedious but necessary and legally required action.

All right, thank you.

Any other uh, thank you.

Andrew Turnbull, yeah.

Thank you for recognizing me.

Um first of all, my right when I voted for Measure D, my understanding was that it was going to promote the um open space, and it was also gonna promote agriculture.

And I think we've done pretty good job in open space.

I like driving around, but you know, the more and more that I'm being involved in a lot of the agricultural discussions, the more I feel like it's a lot of handcuffs on agriculture, and I don't think that's not what I voted for.

And so when you have some ambiguity like you do here, and I can tell and I appreciate my elected official David Halbert for looking for every possible way to help agribusiness, and that would be consistent with Measure D.

Um, I suggest you make a delegation to the ag advisory uh committee, Jack Norton's a great guy, he's running that out uh group and you have a very powerful group of people to refer to, but you also ought to listen to them, you also ought to take their advice and act on it.

And finally, I I don't know the answer because between what Dr.

Larry said and what I heard um um Kelly Abrace said, I'm a little confused about um, you know, from back to the implementation, but geez, why don't we get this to where it does the original goal, and that's to make sure that agriculture and agribusiness is supported by measure D, just like we do open space.

Uh I trust uh the two supervisors that run T and P to do exactly that.

I hope that staff will support them.

Thank you for your respected attention.

I don't have any other speakers for item two.

Very good.

Um it's been pointed out to me that some members of the public weren't able to participate in public comment on item one, and so if anybody who has since been able to join, would like to provide public comment for item one, who has not been able to speak on item one in public comment.

And now I will allow additional comment, public comment on item number one.

So if a member of the public either in the room or online is not able to speak on item one and would like to, now would be the time to raise your hand if you want.

Andrew, I think he spoke on item one.

Yeah.

For anyone who has not been able to comment on item one and would like to, again, because we had a technical difficulty.

Now would be a good time to raise the time.

Raise your hand.

I have no speakers for item one.

Okay.

Well, it was out of an abundance of caution we would allow for that.

We'll move on then to item number three.

Oh, public comment.

No, supervisor, you get to talk anytime you want.

So we'll follow up on the uh the zoning measure D.

So where will we?

Well, we have been uh we have we know that we need to do that.

I think that we have been talking about amending measure D.

Um, the obstacles to finally getting the zoning consistent with it.

We um it's primarily a mapping exercise, um, but it is tedious and it will take time to do that.

Um it isn't we haven't budgeted this uh upcoming um fiscal year, but it is on our uh long range to do this.

Yeah, because I think I'm a little disturbed about that, because I'm sat in there for a while and you know when I was on the open city council, I supported measure D mainly to prefer open space and since being being here uh since 2000, uh you know, we know measure D, and you know, we didn't go down that road if you want you know ultimately everyone wanted us to um take it to the ballot.

We did took to the ballot, David was on the board at that point in time that we did uh you know, amended measure D to do, give a floor ratio when it comes to equestrian facilities.

So I think you know the controversy for me to D, I don't know if that'll ever end, but I I don't think we should be putting all zoning uh changes as necessary, or if or if measure D is gonna continue to be so controversial and there's issues associated with it.

Um maybe we should charge the committee, the um uh commission with uh taking this on and looking at it bringing back recommendation to the board in terms of uh a path forward relative to measure D and enhancing AC because I know Supervisor Halbert and I definitely support the community, and um I've often said I'll continue to say it, you know, measure D passed, I don't know Dick was one of the authors, but the other author I can't remember, I don't know, told them back when they uh were moving off with measure D that I felt if um who are restrict property owners' rights that they should be compensation associated with it, but that wasn't part of the measure at the time.

So anything we can do to support AG, we need to do that.

So I don't know where we want to go with this, but I'm just a little um disturbed that we keep holding up on what we need to do because of controversies with measure D, because it measure D could be controversial could be forever.

Um we address the controversies or we do the zoning, but we don't delay.

Just kind of throw that out.

No, I agree.

Here, I think uh the ag advisory committee should be consulted um uh on that.

Um we also can consider outsourcing, um, maybe to professional companies that do this.

Um I note that tomorrow we're gonna be talking about uh another item related to better understanding communities' thoughts on measure D.

So um better time than now to start with the ICU.

Let's ask them to put this on their agenda.

I agree with that.

All right, anything else on that um the only other thing i would say and i'm not saying um this is something i'm supporting but i know it's come up the the whole premise uh measure d to promote it open space and preserve that we need to consider the ag the open space but i also know that we're also coming up with with challenge around um uh development and house so i don't know if we can ever reconcile that because we don't want to have because i was one of the supported budget to begin with because we don't want to have east county just become totally developed um we wanted to have some you know regulations associated with that so i would hope the the the brains on the ag commission um we kind of ponder that as well yeah i separate them into residential discussions and ag discussions and measure d is meant to preserve open space and and agriculture so i i would say that as long as the ag committee stay somewhat you know really focused on ag items that would alleviate any fear of overdevelopment yeah but well a little prolonged but measure d says you can't it's gotta be a hundred acres what is it to the envelope development partial size is a hundred acres acres yeah because I was I mean I've heard people over the years say in terms of feedback maybe we should reduce that down to like 2000 acres or 5000 acres as opposed to 100 acres and once again I'm not advocating anything at the moment I think that should be in the mix maybe 100 acres is just too much yeah I think that would be um uh in my vernacular within the realm of preserving ag um and uh alleviating the fear of over development yeah um reducing parcel size as long as it's for agricultural uses would be now the the other discussion of um residential development I think that's a whole separate topic and I think we agree on that yeah okay I guess we were pretty loosely associated with item number two but now we'll move on to item three item three is an informational item it's a recommendation for an unincorporated communities coordination pilot this will be a presentation on findings and recommendations for addressing governance and coordination gaps basing aluminium counties unincorporated yeah thanks welcome thank you we have before us yes I have the slide deck and see if that knows the drill we have done this six times together now and I think you again uh my name is Brian Gala um and I'm here um on a contract with the board of supervisors supported by district four um to present my recommendations for those of you who I don't know I come with a 15 plus year background working in community development and public policy and more than a decade of that in Alameda County's unincorporated communities um and so today next slide um today I'll be walking through uh five sections kind of an overview of the project the findings the original proposal which was the one that went to all the Macs and the Sinnal community citizens advisory council and then my updated recommendations for discussion with the supervisors and with the community.

So just some con yeah just to go a little bit more over the project objectives.

So there were kind of three core objectives for this project.

The first was to research and evaluate the current gaps and challenges.

Alameda County governments unincorporated communities.

The second was to propose recommendations for improving this, how Alameda County coordinates, manages the services programs, investments.

And then third and uh an implementation strategy rooted in government efficiency and responsive to community voice.

So just some context setting and the this work really builds on like analysis and commitments that the board of supervisors has already made.

I think there are two important kind of points to make here.

First is the Baker Tilly report, which the board commissioned to examine the county's development services and permitting process.

And that really found kind of the one of the core, or like the first recommendation in the report was really that someone needs to be in charge.

It explicitly called for developing a dedicated county role to convene agencies and track commitments across departments.

The second is the EJ element, the environmental justice element, which the Board of Supervisors adopted in 2024.

That also had a priority action being that the county really needs to explore some internal organizational changes, including potentially establishing an Office of Unincorporated Services.

So really this project is a direct response to kind of both of those directions and commitments already made by the Board of Supervisors.

So now I'm just going to give a kind of a high-level overview of the research.

This was kind of how I pursue the research.

One was doing an organizational scan of a lot of the existing county plans and policies, right?

Everything from again the EJI element, the neighborhood and district specific plans, the visit vision 2036 framework, Baker Tilly, there was a lot.

I also interviewed over 40 staff and directors across various county agencies.

I'll show that list in a second.

Participated in a set of community meetings in the fall.

This these took place in Sinnel, Castor Valley, at all the different MAC and advisory council meetings, as well as there was a few open community workshops.

This was really a chance for community members to lay out their priorities around the budget, and kind of priorities that they wanted the county to hear about kind of things going on in the community.

And fourth was a comparative analysis with other counties across the state.

And I really looked again at peer counties that have a blend of urban and rural unincorporated areas like we have in Alameda County.

So I'm not going to walk through all of the different interviews, but just to show that I did interview the different departments within the community development agency, public works, the different district offices, our special districts like Hard or the Reach Ashley and Youth Center, and then again the other counties, fire sheriffs.

So it was a pretty comprehensive set of interviews that really laid the groundwork for this project and for my recommendations.

Just to give a bit of context, since I know a lot of people have asked, like, what's going on?

What are other people doing?

What are other counties doing across the state?

Here is a chart that shows kind of how Alameda compares to other communities.

We have 8% of our population living in the unincorporated communities.

That's, you know, we of course are a much bigger county than Marin, but you can see that in Marin, they have 16% of the population in the unincorporated areas.

And what they really done to address some of their coordination issues is to create two different positions within their executive office, one dedicated to the rural areas and one to their urban areas.

Again, playing this liaison role, trying to drive more coordination.

We see Sacramento kind of as the outlier with like a third of people living in their unincorporated areas.

So they've built a lot, a lot of structures over the decades.

And one of their strategies was to try to break down silos between all of these agencies by creating kind of more almost like a mega agency that oversees and coordinates and tries to drive alignment.

And then LA was quite similar to Marin.

You see them, they added a branch within their executive office, really focused on policy alignment.

It's called the policy implementation and alignment branch, with really a dedicated coordination function focused on the unincorporated communities.

If you go to the next slide, I can just talk about some of the themes from this.

So really, I think a couple key things.

The structures varied across, but there were, I think, one is that of course all these counties have taken some intentional steps to improve how they manage and oversee and invest in their unincorporated communities.

So that was kind of what the first big big takeaway.

But a lot of these people have been doing this for five, 10, and in Sacramento's case, like over 25 years, have been trying to iterate on this.

So the first theme was really interdepartmental coordination was kind of a core issue.

So in that sense, we were not alone in that being kind of a pain point.

And so uh just yeah.

Um the second one is that they've all changed their models over time.

So I think this idea of starting with something iterating and learning and trying to be flexible was really really critical, and they all emphasize that in their interviews.

And third is that leadership from the board of supervisors is really critical for this being successful.

Um, and every county that made real progress, the board really mandated the agency and department directors participate in these structures and really try to work together.

I think that signal from the top was really what made these efforts work well.

So, again, coming out of the lessons from those, and then all of those interviews, just a few few key findings.

There's of course a lot, the report is 40 plus pages, so it has many more findings, but the kind of three ones I want to like point out here really kind of point at the same root cause.

One is fragmented governance.

There's really um within Alameda County, there isn't a single entity that's responsible for setting vision, uh, coordinating departments or ensuring accountability across the unincorporated communities.

And often one of the common things raised is that the board of supervisors, like your district offices get pulled in to addressing issues that really should have been addressed earlier in the process.

So there's like this escalation of what I'm kind of calling like little mini emergencies that become these crises that then require everyone to just be reactive to and start responding to, and that that really isn't good government and good governance.

Um, the second is that there's these sets of complex issues.

So let's take the kind of bigger tilly development services and permitting review, a common one when I was out in SINOL was of course flooding or enforcing existing ordinances that the counties developed that might require code enforcement and the sheriff's office and public works, like all these different um agencies or departments working together.

Those kinds of issues were the biggest pain points.

They were where uh there was often not enough progress made that led to a lot of I think community emotions as well, where people feel like what happened?

We passed this policy, or this has been a big issue, and like why aren't we making progress?

And so it's in those um issues where you there's there needs to be somebody coordinating that kind of issues can just stall without a designated lead.

And the third is around communication.

Um, there's not a centralized communication system for residents living in the unincorporated communities.

Um, so residents often navigate kind of a patchwork of different department and agency outreach, or they get passed between agencies when trying to navigate the county, and the county is of course much bigger than just the municipal serving agencies that serve the unincorporated area.

The county has this much bigger structure that they have to navigate.

Um, so really, again, the findings point you can go to the next slide, kind of this same root cause around there needing to be more of these structures for coordination and someone trying to uh take charge of the whole picture.

Um, I've kind of gave some of these examples already, but here were some examples that came from around how great counts, like where some of these governance breakdowns were occurring.

Um, let's take the board adopted again the environmental justice element, it has 162 actions in it.

A lot of them require coordination across public health, social services, all the CDA departments, public works.

There's a whole host of people that need to be, you know, agencies that need to be at the table to make that successful.

And while planning helped to, you know, create that plan, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're in charge of coordinating it.

We talked a little bit about flooding, right?

Those kind of complex issues and again development and permitting review.

Um, another really common thing that came up that I just want to point to is that last one.

Often there are policies adopted in the unincorporated communities without clarity on budgeting and staffing needs, and often that leads to quite a lot of uh challenges because people and the community side are quite frustrated when they feel like ordinances don't get implemented that they've worked hard to advocate for or advance.

Um, so um, I want to point out something that I think came out coming up a lot in the research and also at the community level.

This was about cost.

Um, how much is this gonna cost the county?

Is this worth the investment?

And I also I want to point out that the current system um has a real cost.

Like the status quo isn't free, it feels free.

But of course, um, we know the issues that should have been addressed, just spiral into again these small emergencies or again deferred problems become more expensive problems, and that like reactive crisis management isn't um is a pretty expensive way to govern.

And so um I want to just get ahead of some of those comments and just address that like the budget and the cost um needs to be thought of in the way of like the status quo, is it free?

Um, and then I think there's this last point here, which is like unincorporated residents pay county taxes and they don't necessarily receive the same kind of um governance infrastructure that people in the cities, right?

It's pretty common for the cities to have uh a city manager or a function like this, um, and so I think some of this um points to issues around equity as well.

Thanks, okay.

Yeah, so central finding um residents, right?

Uh the challenges facing unincorporated residents are not caused by individual agency or departments.

There isn't like, I think people were wondering um if there was some single flaw, it's more caused again by this uh stem from these structural gaps, right?

The county was never really the county is supposed to be playing the municipal government for the unincorporated communities, and it was never designed to do so.

Um so the proposal that I originally came out with that's in the longer report.

Um, here is a summary of it.

I'll just go over it briefly.

Um, the first was to establish what we were calling that, or I was calling that an office of unincorporated communities as a three-year pilot.

Um it would have these five key functions, which would be representing the unincorporated communities, supporting fundraising efforts to bring in more resources from like state and federal and neurothropic um uh resources, um, driving coordination on these cross-agency initiatives, such as again development review and permitting reform, or on um ordinances that need additional support like uh sidewalk vending or on implementing the EJ element.

So, really, how do we drive this coordination?

Picking a few of those core projects and advancing them, launching a communications hub.

So, again, kind of a larger communications improvement strategy for how the uh county engages with the unincorporated communities, and then um supporting and taking over the coordination from the municipal advisory council of the advisory councils.

Um we currently have right the Castor Valley Mac, the Fairview Mac, uh the Eden MAC and the SINOL Advisory Council, Citizens Advisory Council.

They are spread like the district offices manage them in different ways, and so this would include um what the original proposal included managing those, and then supporting a community budget input process.

Um, the other recommendations were to integrate the office into the county administrators' office and to start with the three-person staff.

The um okay, um, well, actually, let's go ahead and if this comes up, we can talk about this.

I just want to just a note that we did consider placement in other agencies, one being the community development agency, um, the other being an independent office.

Um, so there were other considerations about whether it should be in the county administrators' office or um embedded elsewhere in the county bureaucracy.

Um, and if we want to talk about that in greater depth, we can talk about that, but for the sake of time, I'll just say that that original proposal.

So, again, this expanded scope of work, this three-person staff was brought to the advisory councils for input.

Here is how they voted.

It was an action item.

Uh, the Fairview MAC voted um in support with the following amendments.

They really want the office to be an independent, uh, it's an independent agency or an independent office with quarterly reports to the board of supervisors.

They wanted their own dedicated budget line item, and they wanted to prioritize hiring staff from the unincorporated communities.

The Eden MAC voted in support without amendments.

Um, the SNOL Citizens Advisory Council voted uh in support with the amendment that the pilot focus on the urban unincorporated communities.

Um, they were, I think, concerned about whether the pilot had the capacity to address uh the needs of the rural communities.

And Castor Valley voted not to support.

They're concerned, and I think there are folks here to speak on this, but centered on not wanting to lump all of the communities together in our office, and their input has really been taken into consideration in the updated recommendations.

So there were a few key themes.

People were really, I think there was no disagreement across the Macs about the findings, like people really agreed with the issues around governance, around structures, around needing more accountability, needing more coordination.

There was very little disagreement at from the community on those points.

The proposal was welcome for taking a structural.

So just let's go to community access here.

So there was a range of opinions about how community members would engage with the office.

I think for folks in the Eden area, there was a desire that this be an office where people could go to get support, like more of like service navigation or that it would take over like the district's constituent affairs work.

Whereas actually other Macs had the exact opposite feeling, like I think the Castor Valley Mac, the Sinnol Advisory Council really liked having their relationships with their district offices, they really prefer the constituent affairs work, stay local, or this with the offices.

There was also a lot of discussion about authority.

How could this office actually have the authority needed to drive this kind of change?

Should the office have more enforceable standing with department heads rather than just playing a coordinating role.

And then there were differences across the communities, as we can see by the votes, the votes were very different.

Synol's amendment and desire to not engage with the office and Castor Valley's no vote, I think really like reflect a real tension about whether the proposal can adequately serve all these different communities with different needs and different contexts.

And so I do want to, you know, acknowledge that.

So next slide, I took all of that, right?

It was hours up and Mac meeting, hours of public input.

Supervisor Miley knows we were at the committee the other day until past 10.

So it was a lot of input from different sides of the community, took all out of that, did a lot kind of more thinking and analysis about how to make this work.

And these were sort of three, I think, main factors I took into the net the updated recommendation.

Again, um strong agreement about the findings, but not very much alignment about uh the ways to solve these chronic problems.

Um knowing that we might we need to probably pilot something, we need to be in a space more learning and testing and then growing from there.

So that's one.

The second is that some of the advisory councils um really surfaced a need for hyper-local solutions that were tailored to each community.

Uh, and so I just want to acknowledge, right, that that's an I think an instinct that comes that's that's fair.

Uh there's these communities have very different social economic and historical contexts.

Um, but uh, but I think that the problems are really structural, and the structural problems need a structural fix.

So I think problems, a solution that's really focused just on one community that doesn't fix the underlying system, uh, just isn't gonna solve anything.

Um, and it won't really be scalable either.

And then the last one is that that as we all who have been sitting in budget meetings commit uh for the county budget know that the county is going to be facing an extremely tough fiscal year.

Um, and so my my updated recommendations take that into account.

So finally, see, there are the rapid editor recommendations.

Okay, launch as a pilot.

So I will I've dropped the name, the Office of Unincorporated Communities.

We're calling, I'm calling it now the unincorporated communities coordination pilot.

Again, focused on addressing these internal issues.

This is not going to be an external facing office, it's not gonna take over the board constituent affairs work, it's gonna be focused on trying to shore up some of these issues that need greater coordination and really again build this proof of concept, um, see how we can get this to work.

Um, if you go to the next slide.

To that end, uh, oh.

Okay, here, um, so in in that vein of scaling the scaling the work back, launching as a two-year pilot, not a three-year pilot, trying to be more sensitive to seeing what works, learning.

Here's the scale back scope of work one.

The pilot would focus, would serve as a liaison for the unincorporated communities at internal county meetings.

Now no one is really representing the unincorporated communities at these internal county discussions where there's discussions about more executive, you know, like budgeting and policy making things that require again someone to really speak on behalf of the unincorporated communities similar to how cities have that representation.

The second is around again just a more limited set of these cross-agency coordination efforts.

The two that I've identified are continuing to implement the Baker Chili recommendations.

But there's still a ways to go.

And then the other one is supporting the implementation of the environmental justice elements 162 actions.

So again adding capacity the third is around the budget alignment.

So supporting the community's interest and more transparency around the county budget into how resources flow from the county to the unincorporated communities and supporting that dialogue around how the county invests in the unincorporated communities.

The last um recommendation so still recommending that the this pilot live within the county administrator's office my suggestion is that right now there is a $3000 carve out within the measure W funds for um for a unincorporated administrator and so my proposal is that we utilize those funds to really hire a smaller set of staff maybe two my proposal is for two staff and that these two staff would use again these the measure W resources and start to get this pilot off the ground and start to scale.

So the big thing in response I think to the Castor Valley and Signole Max just want to acknowledge like the things that have changed the big one that's changed is that the management and coordination of the advisory councils is going to stay in the district offices it's not going to be a three year pilot.

It's not going to be this office it's going to be a two year two person team in the CAO's office.

So again a scaled back version a scaleback scope of work and utilizing measure W resources that have already been allocated that the board is set to approve at I believe tomorrow's board meeting.

So I know this is always a lot to get through we can move ahead sorry we can for the sake of time since I know there's okay well I guess in conclusion um this pilot you know if implemented right effectively should lead to again faster and more effective resolution of complex issues more consistent policy implementation and kind of a big issue raised and this and stronger representation for the unincorporated communities.

I think there's been this long history of trying to build more structures trying to build more advisory councils trying to improve how residents in the unincorporated communities engage with the county and so this is kind of the next step in that broader kind of history of again trying to build how the county and improve how the county engages with the unincorporated communities.

I was at the unincorporated services committee with Supervisor Miley Supervisor TAM last week and then we're here at transportation planning and if approved we would go to the full board for approval sometime later this year and then we could get started on hiring staff as like the top priority of the pilot period.

So I think two areas of discussion.

Again, one is to confirm the location of the pilot within the CIO's office.

This has been an issue that I think there's differing opinions on from the different community members as well as the different board members.

So I'd love to hear what you both have to say about that one.

And then also there again is this issue around kind of SINOL wanting to exclude the rural areas, but again, Sinnol is a part of geography in the broader realm of like the rural eastern east county areas.

So just wondering if they wanted to discuss that a little more as well.

And I think that wraps it.

Thank you for the presentation.

I'll ask Supervisor Miley too.

He is the king of unincorporated.

Can we say that?

I don't know.

That's not the right word.

That's not the right word.

The mayor of the unincorporated humble servant.

Humble servant of the unincorporated.

Yeah, I want to thank Brianne.

Uh, you know, she's under contract in my office to do this uh, you know, this this effort.

Uh but let me just back up a bit, because over the past 25 years, I've seen a lot of improvement in the unincorporated area.

I became the Canada supervisor.

People felt they were second-class citizens in the county didn't pay any attention to them.

Uh, plus uh a lot of decisions were made that were to the detriment of the unincorporated area, for example, allowing the city of Stanley Android to annex Bay Fair, which took two weeks, you know, vital sales tax, because um uh often uh the the more prosperous parts of that incorporate area were cherry picked to be annexed, for example.

Um so we've been on a quest, and even some county staff didn't understand the unincorporate area.

So we've been on a quest to ensure that the county served the unincorporated area just as a uh city would serve uh its constituents.

So that delivery of the municipal services.

Uh, as has been pointed out, that's not something that counties are used to doing because we provide safety net services, uh, but I think we've made a lot of progress.

You know, we've had the Eden Earth of the building initiative, phase one and phase two that came up with a shared vision for the unincorporated area, of which the whole notion of uh unincorporate area manager uh kind of germinated, and other things took place with that.

We've also done a LAFCO study to determine should the whole unincorporated area be incorporated, should portions of it be incorporated, should it be annexed into different cities?

Because my position always been since I've been here, I'm not going to allow annexation to take place unless the city decides and the outro to take the good and the bad, you're not just taking the good and leaving us with all the burden, not the sales tax to go along with that.

So whether there should be annexation, and then um my office early on, we supported the incorporate uh the study for the incorporation of Castro Valley back in the early 2000s that failed like three to one, four to one.

Um, but we've always been pursuing how we can help that incorporate area have more control, local control, uh, and have more input.

That's why we created the BCAs, board zoning adjusters.

Uh, that's why we created three Macs now.

We originally only had Cash Valley MAC.

Um that's why we have district offices.

Uh I've advocated that since I represent most of the urban incorporated area, most of the population in Ford Supervisor Halbert took over unincorporated Pleasanton, and Happy Valley, Little Happy Valley, Castlewood, and the Riemann Track, uh in the Pleasanton area.

You know, I just have the Rima Track, right?

And you've got the other.

Um, so I had the greater percentage of unincorporated uh uh residents, but I don't have any additional staff.

Um, and we also manage the MACs, the only Mac we don't manage the CNO.

So we manage Castor Valley, Fairview, and Eden, and that's five meetings a month.

Uh Eden is one meeting, uh, Fairview's one meeting, Castro Valley's three meetings, that's five.

Brown Active meetings with the clerk with staff uh for the unincorporated area.

That's a lot of work.

Um my staff, I don't have any more staff to supervise Albert or any other supervisor.

Um, you know, I'm on the Metropolitan Translation Commission, I'm on the uh association of the area of governments, I'm on MAFCO with the Supervisor Halford, I'm on the Joint Powers Authority for the Colcene area with supervisor, I've got this TC, yeah, uh the Transportation Commission for the County, I've got this board committee, I got the unincorporated committee, I've got uh procurement and contracting a good health committee.

Um I mean, so it's not like I've got more staff and we have less responsibilities.

No, we have all those responsibilities, plus trying to ensure that the citizen in that incorporate area, if it were a city, it'd be the fourth largest city in the county.

But do we have additional resources to do that?

No.

So this effort is just another iteration of trying to uh look at what have we done lately to try to help the unincorporate area achieve uh a comfort level, which I don't think they'll ever have a comfort level, because it's always like what are you what do you have done for me lately?

So, in this instance, um we've talked with Brianne, some of my staff and I, we've talked with Brienne, and we really think the the recommendations that she's making are right on point because the county is facing significant budget challenges now.

Um, you know, I'm gonna be in a meeting on Wednesday dealing with the Alameda Health Systems, trying to make sure they don't have to lay off uh a couple hundred staff, and they don't, and we're trying to address their hundred million dollar uh budget deficit, trying to do tomorrow.

Hopefully, we'll deal with uh the mental health providers and their concerns about funding for uh preventative uh mental health.

Um, you know, look at that, and then what we know is coming down the road with HR1 and Medi-Cal, this and the other.

So there are a lot of budgetary challenges, and these are not challenges that we're just gonna have this year.

These are challenges that we're gonna go forward into the future.

So we thought once we got through the pandemic, things would be better, but they aren't really better.

The only thing that's saving the county is the fact that we have voter approval measure C, voter approved measure A, voter approved measure W.

These are three voter-approved measures that give us additional resources to address some of these challenges.

So I don't want to see the county create an office.

No, do I want to see the county create another bureaucracy where we can actually deliver what we need to do with this new uh recommendation by having two staff, and it kind of mirrors what's in Marin, having two staff that are focused on the unincorporated area.

Uh, fortunately, if the water proves this tomorrow, we'll have 300,000.

Is it per year, Sandy?

300,000 per year of measure W money to go to a community manager, and that's why suggested degree on that we look at that as resources because that's not going to put additional burdens on the county.

That's why we're considering this a pilot.

That's why we're considering that the focus beyond, for instance, the banker teleach study, you know, one of the jurisdictions uh so that uh the counties represented there uh with the Congress, first of all, with hard with other jurisdictions around coordination as appropriate, that we look at the environmental justice element around coordination, uh, that we look at those things, uh, that we look at the budget justice piece.

So these staff are really targeted around what they're doing over the next two years, and they show that they can add value to what they're doing to the unincorporated area.

Uh, then maybe down the road, we might want to take another step because this is all energy.

It's not one and done.

It's not a spread, it's a marathon.

And like I said, what we know the more we do, the more that we're gonna have to do, and that's to be expected.

So I'm not complaining or lamenting that.

But I wanted to give that context because I think uh we want to bring this today to this committee so we can get your reaction, Supervisor Halbert as well as the public, because it's been out of corporate services committee at least once, maybe twice.

It's best, bring it, and it's been out of the community.

Before we bring something forward to the board, we wanted to make sure we were on track with this.

Um, but once again, I'm keeping in mind, county administrators' office is a lot of pressures.

I mean, what a credit office of immigrant services, put that there.

Well, you know, there are other things that uh we're trying to push the county administrator around.

So I think if we can come up with maybe having two staff that are focused on the other corporate area and not just the urban part, but the rural part as well.

If you're open to that, I think it can add it can add value, but it has to add value, it has to add within the context of where we find ourselves uh uh presently at this point in time.

Um, and the final thing is if we do this, I think it would satisfy the pushback that bringing up the castraling back.

It may be for Sunol, because we're not creating another bureaucracy or another structure.

We're actually having adding additional staff, oh, which I've always wanted, adding additional staff to the county administrative uh to try to do more focus efforts in the other corporate area around some of the other needs and concerns.

Because we've even talked about having um a community uh service district like they have in Kensington.

I know Graham's for the she lives in Kensington, um, and certain services could go through a community service district.

So there are a lot of different models we can pursue.

So I don't ever think this is overdone.

Um, and then then what do we do?

So this is all here.

So I've said enough, but I want to give that context.

Yeah, uh I appreciate that context.

And indeed, I I think it's undeniable that um we as a county uh organization have uh mandate from the state of California to provide all of the things that you describe across the entire county that affect incorporated cities and in fact affect unincorporated parts of our community, but we have plus in the unincorporated parts.

We have the municipal services that need to be provided that are provided by incorporated bodies within cities.

We have to do both our county main function and municipal services for the unincorporated areas, and um I think not having additional resources to do the municipal portion of our job is a clear disconnect.

We cannot provide the municipal services as well as cities can without additional resources.

Um I mean, that's what our teams are tasked to do.

They do the best job they can, they do a fine job, but I I can just see the difference in um how cities operate, a mayor, a city council, um, entire departments faced up against providing those services, and more are needed in urban unincorporated, they're more closely aligned with a city than say rural or oral area.

But they they still require services, and so um I'm all for uh providing an increased level of service to the unincorporated areas, and the devil's always been the details of how we do that, but um, relying on the same amount of resources in your district department as all of the other district part is not is not sufficient.

So with the mindset that this is meant to improve services, add resources and focus and attention, and um you know, seems seems like it's uh step in the right direction.

So uh I'm interested to hear how the public feels about it.

I'm interested to hear that if that some of these changes and clarifications will um be uh agreed to by Sunol and Castor Valley.

Um, but I'm uh I what I do know is they deserve to, or they're gonna have to incorporate uh if they want to have a stronger voice.

Um I liken this in some ways to what we saw happen in Dublin 35 years ago.

They incorporated.

I liken this to what we saw just a year ago, Mountain House Incorporated, and I know those things don't happen over time, but there is um a lot of precedent for urban and communities deciding to take on the responsibility of local control by incorporated, and this is one step towards that, I guess.

Let me just say too, um I didn't take a position on Castro Valley Incorporation.

I paid for the study, and I know there's a big effort.

Look at Cash Valley Incorporation.

Maybe it'll be a little 2028 ballot.

But the point is, we've got to be honest with folks in Cash Valley.

If they incorporate, they can't expect that their taxes are gonna remain the same.

I mean, if they incorporated in the past, they either were gone bankrupt or they would have had to increase their taxes.

Uh that's a factor.

Uh so but there's a trade-off.

Incorporate at more local control or stay in the county, and we do the best we can to try to deliver quality uh services to you.

And the thing is, if we do this, and it's in the county ministry's office with two staff, or the committee, one person working with uh community development and a person in process office.

Uh that institutionalizes it.

So whether I'm here, whether you're here, the point is it's institutionalized, and hopefully it'll it'll continue uh into the future, you know, regardless of what happens with the elected.

Uh, because quite frankly, I bring a different lens to how I do the work than how Mary King, she was a supervisor, did the work, you know, 25 years ago.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

I I would I would have to point out that all the cities in the county, the city of Dublin might have the strongest balance sheet.

But we heard largest reserves, we heard about increase in assessed valuation in the county.

Yeah, because we heard that yesterday.

Yeah.

They didn't go broke, I'll put it that way.

So um uh yeah, Danville.

Uh can I just add one thing about the community?

Because you'd asked about that community support.

I know we'll hear from folks online and in person.

Um, but at the unincorporated services meeting, I think part of why we were there till 10:30 is that there were 38 speakers on the item and uh 30 six of the support and two in opposition, and I do think I've tried in a short period of time from being at all those advisory councils to get ahead of some of the um, I think some of the big concerns, and one of them, and I think Dan here will probably speak on it, is I think folks do feel like both of you really represent them well and like really like having the relationships between your advisory councils and your offices.

And so I think this modified version allows for that relationship and like that connection to continue while again trying to improve more the operations, like improve the service delivery and let kind of the civic advisory council structure remain as is.

So I just wanted to say that last point.

Interesting.

Let's hear from the public.

Um, if you're online, please raise your hand.

I'll ask the talk to count the speaker slips and to count the hands raised.

We have five speakers, five speakers in person, and how many and online.

Total.

Yes.

All right.

Two minutes each.

And a Vini.

In person first and then online, rotating three and three.

Hi, I'm Dana Vinny.

I am a member of Castor Valley Mac.

Uh, but today I'm speaking in my personal capacity, uh, not as an emissary of the uh of the MAC.

Um Alameda County has chosen the advisory council model as a form of government uh at one way of government of unincorporated Alameda County.

And it works well.

It works really well.

It works perhaps better in some jurisdictions than in others, but the Castor Valley Mac was stood up 45 years ago.

And I think we've really grown into to our role.

We don't always get what we want.

You guys don't always support us.

The department heads don't always support us.

But we have access.

And we're able to directly work with department heads and give them our opinion.

Of course, they have subject matter jurisdiction, so we don't win all those battles.

And we have very good contact with our supervisor.

So I I personally, as a MAC member, don't want anybody else representing me in front of the department heads or in front of the supervisor.

So I think that this initiative has taken an appropriate turn in that the oversight of the MACs would not be through this new office.

It would remain with with uh the District 4 staff with the uh chief of staff uh that the community liaison would stay at the at the district level.

Um I still personally this this effort has really been driven very much by the Eden area by three organizations there, my aid and voice slam and and the Eden uh uh United uh church um and their needs are different than Cash Rally needs.

So I don't think we need this.

If it does get stood up, I really think it should remain in district four.

And the reason why I think uh Supervisor Miley talked about his need of additional staff, I think it should stay in district four because that's where the vast majority of the unincorporated residents live.

Um and I think Supervisor Miley and his chief of staff and his community liaison are well geared towards addressing countywide needs in the unincorporated areas.

So if if it does, in fact, get stood up, uh I think it should stay within district four.

It's also a pilot period.

So rather than set up an office and tear it back down, perhaps for the next two years, leave it in district four, then determine where the ultimate goal is.

Larry Goslin.

Hi, uh I'm Larry Gosland.

I'm from the East County, so uh, you know, my experiences reflect the experiences of uh Supervisor Howard and uh you know the rural and unincorporated residents.

So what I can say is I I think this has been a pretty darn good study in that you know the issues that are addressed are beasts that's needed to be grappled with for quite some time, and uh that being the case, as a person out there in the A community, I recognize that we're both a big and a small community, and that there's not many of us out there.

On the other hand, we control most of the landscape of Alamini County, and to the degree that we're much larger than East Bay Regional Park District, and that being the case, we're looking forward to the time where we'll be interviewed and be able to weigh in on this process.

Um that being said, the uh thing that I uh recognized is that Alameda County has been attracting numerous types of trusts, and uh that being said, those trusts are starting to make agreements with park districts and other agencies in a manner that doesn't show consistency and isn't always consistent with the purposes of our general plan.

So I think we might have the opportunity to start looking at uh the creation of a working landscape trust uh with a body that is responsible for implementation.

So I don't I don't think that's a major priority at this time, uh, but between the value of addressing the needs of the agricultural community and the needs to have consistency and trust applications, I think we may be able to carve out an edge for the next few months, certainly.

Thank you.

Anne Maris, we're on item three.

Anne Maris.

Andrew, Andrew Turnbull, we're on item three.

Yeah, greetings.

Can you hear me okay?

I'm not seeing the two.

Okay, perfect.

Um, first of all, uh, the reason that I wanted to get back in on that other item was that you're using a new tool, and it doesn't make it obvious to the user how to unmic, uh, I mean, how to unmute.

Whereas your old tool used to like blare it at you.

Here's how you unmike unmute.

So I just want to let you know that if you could make that clear to everybody on the line, using your new tool that where the unmute is, that would help.

Okay, to the to the item.

Um I want to give huge credit to um Brianne Galat, your consultant.

Um, and by the way, I live in Sennol, California, and I am not speaking for any body um other than my own uh household here.

Um, but I heard uh the whole uh discussion, and I was a public speaker in it, um, and I also understand that there's multiple issues here.

First of all, there's a huge compliment to David Halbert and Sean Wilson and the staff in that um we feel very supported by um district one, but the other problem is that there's if you try to get something done in Alameda County that requires a whole bunch of of um different uh groups, it's really hard to get that done.

Um I know I'm running out of time on this, I'll just say this simply.

Thank you to both um Big Kahuna, uh Nate Miley, who's the big kahuna of um of unincorporated, and a David for thinking about us.

But I think you got a good proposal.

I think Brianna's listened, and I think you ought to go with um with what Brianna said.

Uh thank you for Brianna for what you've done on this.

Uh, thank you for your respect and attention.

Kelly, we're on item three.

Sandra.

Sandra, we're on item three.

The unmute your mic function is at the top of the page, and Maris.

Hello.

I think I'm unmuted.

Oh, great, I'm unmuted.

Okay, so yeah, Dr.

Ann Maris here.

I'm a scientist, a biochemist, a teacher, community advocate.

Um, my family home since I was eleven was a state rental home from Caltrans in the 238 project at the 580 freeway.

I lived in unincorporated Ashland for 12 years as a tenant.

And finally, 10 years ago, after 38 years of renting from the state, tenants were able to purchase their rentals.

So I have a strong interest in tenant advocacy and for unincorporated residents and for uplifting our state of living.

Initially, I was for the unincorporated office idea because I thought it was a great idea, but I'm I'm not seeing that right now.

I I feel like it's um not listening to the residents, it's unclear how residents will participate with it.

Um you've invited someone from RCD housing, it's a uh rental corporation to conduct this study.

Uh you said only two speakers were in opposition at unincorporated.

I was one of them, and 38 from My Eden Voice, Slam and Eden Church.

I mean, these are Brianne's organizations.

My Eden Voice is not even an organization.

It's a project that gets money under multiple organizations from the county.

And you had the paid staff calling in on Wednesday.

So this is the bullying approach that these rental housing corporations have treated my neighborhood with.

And so I have a lot of problems when you're citing the environmental justice element.

This is the purpose of the environmental justice element is to increase our health, which does include healthy housing, but I'm not seeing that in this proposal.

I'm not seeing anything about the environment.

So don't cite the environmental justice element if you're if you're not not doing it.

So in my two minutes, I'm just saying I'm against this for many many reasons, and it doesn't help the general public.

Keith Barrows.

Can you hear me?

Yes, hi.

Um I wanted to um voice my support for this proposal uh for a couple of reasons.

Uh, number one, back during uh Eden Area Livability Initiative when the struggle was going on for governance, um, Supervisor Wilmachan uh strongly supported this the idea of an unincorporated manager.

Um, and at the time uh I was opposed to it because she was she was proposing it instead of uh an Eden municipal advisory council or uh or even fairway for that matter.

Um anyway, we ended up getting our our Mac so that we can all uh rise uh together.

I think a lot of why this office, this uh these people, these staff or this manager is uh is necessary is a lot of people in the corporate area, you know, perceive the uh the gaps as as getting the runaround when in fact it's just you know, it's just because it's just so complicated.

Um, I'm I I understand this uh Castro Valley Mac voted uh against it.

Um I I know that they have uh that they have access and that they have good connections, they've been established for a long time, and I congratulate them for that.

Uh however, I think what's more important than the established uh connections and uh and uh access that they have.

Um's not gonna be around here forever, and who knows we might get uh you know another like we had a former supervisor, and you won't and it won't be as it won't be as nice of a picnic uh as it is it is right now.

Uh having this having this uh as being a as being a pilot uh is a good idea.

I think uh Brianne has really listened, and I think it's uh it's much more uh doable and much more reasonable now, and I'm for it uh 100%.

Um I'm just not sure how this these people are going to be hired.

Thank you.

We're on item three.

All right, okay, thank you.

Um first thing that uh to represent the unincorporated areas.

Um the uh first idea would be to do more like Oakland does.

Oakland has three supervisors that uh Oakland is split.

Each supervisor for Oakland represents all roughly 140,000 people, or which is almost as much as the unincorporated area.

So they're getting uh county resources and county law enforcement, and uh that's what the unincorporated area needs.

Not have one supervisor who's overloaded.

Uh, the king of the unincorporated county, his district four office represents 78% of the unincorporated population.

And you know, for example the Riemann tract doesn't even have a municipal advisory county because you you you uh carve them out you didn't put them in the East County MAC.

The East County MAC doesn't even exist yet.

When you talk about uh un uh incorporating some cities why don't we just do some incorporation well that sounds good but you don't look if you look at the history there were seven his cities incorporated uh between 2000 and 2010 uh and then after 2010 Eastvale was incorporated in 2012 Haruper Valley was incorporated in 2011 and Mountain House was incorporated in 2024 there's a 13 year gap that shows you how how hard it is to unc on it to incorporate so um there's also the delivery of new sewers and services um which you you can barely you can't even do you look at this the lago arroyo um uh just east of Pleasanton you you you're you haven't even figured out how to give them sewers yet you you can't give them sewers you have to make a deal with incorporating in into Pleasanton um and uh finally the important another important distinction here is between unincorporated between rural and urban this uh this uh needs to focus uh more on unurbank as uh the Sunol council told you and uh let's leave the unincorporated the uh rural alone because they're already getting plenty of representation thank you Charles Pisano the unmute mic is at the top of the page Charles Pisano we're on item three no other speakers for item three just can't figure out how to unmute that's unfortunate uh is he unmuted now Charles Charles Pisano unmuted now muted can you unmute him hello is am I finally in yes thank you sorry about that I could not see the uh unmute button uh I I'll make this quick I am here in support of this um pilot concept I don't feel it's a personal issue I don't think uh there's bad intent here I do think that there's been a lot of research that shows county employees and um a lot of residents uh just don't feel like the system is working the way it is the supervisors don't have the time to micromanage every little project uh I like to think of um I like to think of an orchestra without a conductor I think what we're looking for here is a conductor who can communicate with people and who can guide projects so I personally am totally for it and I hope you support it thank you.

All right it is an information item uh supervisor do you have any other questions or comments to make after you're in from the uh yeah um so once again supervisor uh albert I uh I would uh suggest that uh the next step be this maybe go to the board uh board session so the rest of the board members can hear about this, and then uh as a result of that, then we can hopefully advance and board uh for uh shouldn't I do think uh obviously this affects uh the other corporate areas of which you and sort of Tam and myself uh represent, and we're just trying to ensure that they get the best uh governance that we can possibly provide at this point in time, and as I said, I've seen improvements over you know over the decades, but um we still have to continue our efforts in trying to bring about um as best uh governance that we can along with you know service delivery, etc.

Um I think Kelly, you know, last time I called somebody my good friend, I got chastised uh by for that, but I'll just once again say my good friend Kelly immediately just but um my good friend Kelly.

I just want to say the teachable moment around this is the fact that there hasn't been many incorporations because the state legislature took away the funding source that you know could have been used to help uh with incorporations.

Um so that I think that's been kind of an impediment to incorporating.

I don't know.

I'm sure Kelly knows this because he's a very wise uh uh person who uh uh tracks and uh makes sure that we're held accountable.

Uh, represents the the needs of the public to the best of his ability.

We don't always agree, but I know he's always uh very outspoken.

Um and then I'm gonna continue.

We're gonna extend Brianne's contract.

My office is going to continue to uh pay for her services so that we can hopefully get this pilot uh operational, you know, get it approved by the board.

Um should uh uh your office and supervised Stan's office want to contribute to her contract.

Uh my chief of staff approach you about that as well, uh, so we can because we don't want to drop this, we're gonna keep the momentum going and then hopefully get the board uh to approve moving forward and put a little bit more um uh meat on the bones in terms of how this would play out if indeed the board does uh approve of the you know um staff working on this, of course.

The funding should be available to do that.

Um it'd be very modest.

And then the final thing is uh I just want to quote uh the Rolling Stones.

Um that great song by the Rolling Stones.

You can't always get what you want.

But if you try sometime, you can get what you need.

I'm done.

Uh drop mic moment.

Um, public comments been very helpful and as I process this uh document, you know, I'm sure things will continue to come out.

Um, if you can work with my chief of staff, maybe we could have um some separate time.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Questions I have at this moment though.

What about the departments themselves?

Have you interviewed our department heads?

I've interviewed.

And do any of them have strong feelings one way or the other?

Um, would you like the uh I would say that there is pretty I mean I interviewed staff on the more operational level as all right?

Field trip day at the county board.

Is it there's a fire emergency in the building?

You want to leave the building by the nearest exit or the stairway.

Okay, okay.

There is a stairwell at the end just to the other side of the elevators.

We shall orderly and whatever efficiently, we just come in when the idea do we give us a h do we give us a h do we give us a h do we give us a h do we give us a hug Are we moving on from my items?

Do I need to sit here?

I think we didn't finish.

Sure, we're still in the middle of it.

We're at the end of it.

It's called forum.

Supervisor Miley?

Here.

We have a quorum.

Well, before the fun drill that we had, I was asking a couple of clarifying questions.

I was really hoping to just summarize and wrap up.

It seems to me that there are several different types of themes that we're talking about as it relates to unincorporated communities in this coordination pilot.

One of them seems to be sort of policy related.

Cities have ordinances, counties have ordinances.

Are we getting enough attention on the ordinances that we have?

Do we provide as much resources towards developing ordinances?

Again, if we were the fourth large, if unincorporated were the fourth largest city.

So are we providing the other uh another one seems to be around you know physical services, you know, police policing, potholes getting filled, parks getting trimmed, um, uh the grass trimmed and uh alike, physical services provided, and um, I guess another one just sort of being governance, um, cities have um city managers and they have uh city councils that meet every week sometimes.

They have staff that staffs those city councils.

So are we providing um whereas we as a county have a whole lot of other things to do, the safety net functions that counties have to do, and that's where our focus is.

That's where our CAO would might be focused.

How do we provide all those other things that I mentioned?

Ordinances and policy regulation development, physical services development, governance coordination.

Do we do that within a CAO's office within a district office completely separately?

How does that work?

So this is becoming more clear in my mind.

Is there anything that I'm missing as I think about this?

And that's just a summary for a minute.

Yeah, no, that was a good summary.

I think this project aims to shore up gaps in the governance coordination structure, like not having a city manager that ensures coordination and accountability as a way to say downstream that should improve things like how well our ordinances are implemented or how well our programs are successfully completed, like the outcomes should improve on those bases by way of starting to improve governance.

That's one thing I would add, but I would agree that's a good summary.

Um, talking about that at a work study session, I guess.

That's what you're asking for, Supervisor Milan.

Yeah, thank you.

Okay, um, I agree the next step is a work study session, possibly then a full board regular meeting, glad your contract has been extended.

So timing sometime in 26, 27, 28.

Hopefully, sooner than that.

But yeah, we should yeah.

What's your uh uh thought on timing and expectations?

Hopefully, before we recess, but clearly before the end of the year.

Very good.

Yeah, because I know the work sessions are getting back, I think.

All right, thank you again.

Thank you.

That we'll close item three.

We'll move to item four.

Noting that item five, we can continue, it's not time sensitive.

And then um, we will also get to item six, chair.

May I make one request?

That the people online are able to comment before the people.

President chair just given the delay.

I always respect the people that took the time to first.

Sorry, that's just I always don't.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

Um, Ali Averton's planning department.

Um, I'm here to introduce this item.

So California State Parks is currently undertaking an effort to integrate approximately 3,400 funds in certain Alameda County, which is known as the Alameda Tesla Park property into the California State Park system.

In November of 2025, the Alameda County Agricultural Advisory Committee submitted a letter to the Board of Supervisors requesting that your board uplift the concept of a multi-use east-west trail through that property as a priority to state parks during state parks planning process for this property.

Um so I'm here to introduce Jack Norton, chair of the agricultural advisory committee who needs to take the present the contents of uh the agricultural advisory committee's letter and to discuss the agent advisory committee's recommendations regarding trail and primary at the Alameda Tesla property.

Maybe you had a brother that wasn't.

I do have a brother.

His name's not Jack.

Thank you, Ellie, for that introduction.

And uh thank you, Chair Halbert and Supervisor Miley.

So I'm Jack, not Jeff Norton, chair of the Alameda County Agricultural Advisory Committee, and I appreciate this opportunity to present the AAC's recommendation on trails at the Alameda Tesla property.

As Ali had mentioned on September 18th, 2025, the AAC voted to send a letter to the Board of Supervisors requesting that the board communicate to state parks a simple message.

Identifying a route for a multi-use east-west trail through the Alameda Tesla property should be a high priority for Alameda County.

Today I'm here asking this committee to forward that recommendation to the full board for discussion and potential action.

So why does the AEC care about trails?

The AAC exists to enhance the economic viability of agriculture and protect open space in Alameda County.

Trails are directly tied to that mission.

A connected East-West Trail through the Tesla property would increase East County's potential for agro tourism, linking the South Livermore wine country with the broader regional trail network.

Members of the AAC with trail expertise have identified this connection as one of their top priorities precisely because of the economic benefit to the agricultural community along Tesla Road.

The county's own 2019 bicycle and pedestrian master plan for unincorporated areas acknowledges that East County has the least developed pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure in all of Alameda County.

Residents in East County and Sonola are often forced to walk on road shoulders and high-speed roads with long distances making cycling environments.

Yet despite decades of regional planning by Livermore Area Recreation and Parks District, the City of Livermore and East Bay Regional Parks, there's still no continuous East-West Trail across East County.

Filling that gap would serve East County residents and it would benefit visitors from across Alameda County and beyond who come to experience the wine country open space and natural resources along Tesla Road.

So I'd like to be clear about the scope of what our recommendation is.

We are asking that a multi-use east-west trail be identified as a priority during state parks planning process.

We are not making any recommendation as to the classification of the park.

We're not proposing any new road construction.

We're talking about using existing ranch roads across the 3400 acre property to provide a trail corridor.

This proposal fits with the regional vision.

This trail doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Livermore area recreation and park districts 2016 master plan identified the T10 South Livermore Valley Trail extending east along Tesla Road to connect with the Tesla property.

So this ask is simply asking state parks to follow through on that long held regional expectation.

In the agenda packet, you received a copy of the letter and uh also a letter that was sent by the by the board about a decade ago in reference to uh whether Tesla whether the Tesla property would become an OHB park or not, an extension of Carnegie.

So to address this, uh, off highway vehicle.

So that's a that's a dirt bike, an ATV, a Jeep used off off highway.

Um 2015, your board unanimously opposed the expansion of Carnegie or off-highway motorized vehicle recreation on this property.

And the AAC was right there in opposition as well.

That fight was won.

Synod Bill 155, which was signed in 2021, permanently bars OHV recreation on the Alameda Tesla property.

Now what we're recommending, multi-use trails for horses, pedestrians, and bicycles is non-motorized recreation.

It is entirely consistent with what the board and the AAC fought for.

I'd also like to point out uh that this ask is in alignment with Alameda County Vision 2036, which prioritizes safe mobility options, climate smart transportation, broader access to parks and open space, and equitable investment in underserved communities.

An East West Trail through the Alameda Tesla property checks every one of those boxes.

It gives residents a non-motorized alternative to dangerous high speed rural roads, opens thousands of acres to public land of public land to the public, and supports low carbon transportation and begins to address long-standing trail connectivity issues for the benefit of all county residents.

At our November meeting, some folks had suggested that it was premature to state trail priorities while state parks is still in the early stages of its planning process.

I'd respectfully disagree with that.

State parks actively seeking stakeholder input.

The planning process itself is expected to take five years, and now is exactly the time to communicate Alameda County's priorities, not after decisions have been made.

If Alameda County does not transmit this recommendation now, the county may lose its opportunity to influence state parks decisions.

Once the classification and general plan are adopted, they will govern the property for decades, and retroactive changes will be extremely difficult.

Silence at this stage risks allowing state parks to finalize a plan without an east-west trail connection, despite decades of regional planning and community expectation.

There's also been concerns raised that trails could damage sensitive biohabitat.

California State Parks maintains a roads and trails management plan that guides how trails are designed, maintained, and operated across park units.

Program is built around balancing public access with ecological protection.

State parks does not build trails that harm wildlife.

In fact, designated trails are a conservation tool.

They concentrate visitor traffic into managed corridors, direct people away from sensitive habitat, support biodiversity goals, and create opportunities for wildlife education and stewardship.

So that covers our ask for the letter.

And I also, in addition, I have uh really a process clarification clarification question for you all.

I'd like to ask the committee's guidance on the appropriate path for the AAC's letter writing process.

Our purposes, powers, and duties are stated, include, among other things, making recommendations to enhance the economic viability of agriculture and to minimize undesirable environmental impacts.

And providing and another one is to provide active participation and leadership in the development of open space preservation plans.

Now, given those authorities, there may be some opportunity if the board desires to establish protocols so that recommendations like this one we have before us today can be transmitted without requiring a full board hearing each time.

So we're open to the committee's guidance on the best path forward in this way as well.

Thank you all and happy to try and answer any questions you might have.

Good surprise, Mile.

Any questions?

The last part of the prairie is at the board.

Can you um explain that once again?

Yeah, well, for example, for example, yeah.

For well, for example, Supervisor, um, this letter, we we made our motion in November to recommend this recommendation.

That's seven months ago, and by the time we get to the to the board, it will be getting on towards a year perhaps.

So you made your recommendations, the let's go.

Yes, and now we're here today.

And so it seems like when analyzing our purposes, powers, and duties, it may be the case that we we could be uh the way we drafted this letter was to ask you all to to make this recommendation, uh, but it does seem like there's possibility that we could develop protocols uh if the board did desire so that we could actually make some recommendations similar to this one without requiring a full board approval every time.

Yeah, well, just to speak to that, I would think it's unfortunate I'm just getting here.

I mean, but we shouldn't I think it's at a month.

Uh, that I just that's unconscionable, and I don't understand that.

But because it's advisory, we can't have a commission, any commission.

Speaking for the county without the board having authorized, you know, whatever's being understood.

Yeah, because uh, if it's like the BZA or the planning commission, if they make a decision it's not a PL, then that's a decision that's sound.

We have a lot of advisory bodies, and we just can't have advisory bodies.

I mean, you can imagine if the advisory bodies start communicating the position of the county, it would be a total mess.

So I just think we need to get this stuff to us.

Perhaps working on strategies to make it, yeah, that's a staff responsibility.

Yeah, so you don't know why it takes so long.

Yeah, and then with the trail itself.

How do we reconcile the conflict between when you say bikes?

Are we talking about just normal bikes?

Are we talking about e-bikes?

So our recommendation did not did not contemplate that.

Um, I think that I think that the state parks has a whole uh method which with which they deal with that issue, but I believe if the board so wanted to make some decision there, they could amend what we were asking for in some way or another.

So I think e-bikes is a is a problem, and then even bikes and the conflict between bikes and horses is an issue.

So I'm away in here from the public, but I have got some reservations about, you know, just the whole category of non-uh motorized um, thank you.

Let's go to the public.

We'll rotate so that we get online speakers as soon as possible.

Three and three.

David first.

How many do we have, by the way?

Uh yeah, if you're online and you want to speak to this other 17.

And how many in person?

Five in person.

Total.

18 total, five in person.

Oh god, 18 total, five in person, 15 online.

Two minutes each.

Yeah, first of all, I'm David first.

First of all, I gave my comments to the uh clerk.

I'll give them to you now.

I'm just gonna hit the highlights because you've got more written information.

Uh again, my name is David First.

I'm a Livermore resident.

I'm a voting member of the Altamont Lanefield Open Space Committee.

I'm also an elected director of the Livermore area right now for your park district, and I was on the board in 2016 when we wrote this master plan.

Uh Mr.

North just gave a very comprehensive, very clear explanation.

However, the letter he refers to is has inaccurate statements, incorrect assertions, and vague language.

Specifically, the 2016 LARPD master plan does refer to trail T 10.

The master plan states, and I quote, a long-term proposal is to continue the proposed trail along Tesla Road to the east of Greenville to the Tesla area to the Tesla area.

That's all it says.

It does not say or imply that this proposal proposed trail will enter into the Tesla property.

Paragraph three states the letter states regional curl maps by the LERPD plan provide multi-use access to the Almeida Tesla property.

That is vague and incorrect.

Nothing in the sentence from the master plan I just quoted refers to any access to the Tesla property, much less a multi-use access.

Paragraph three again, it says the LARPD master plan explicitly identifies the T10 South Wordmark Trail, which connects with a property on the Tesla property.

That's not correct.

The proposed trail does not connect on the property.

If there's anything that's intention.

There was no intention at all bypasses the property on the OERPD to have a trail that goes through the Tesla property.

And repeatedly implying that the RIPD 2016 master plan encourages anything other than a trail along Tesla Road is inaccurate and disingenuous.

I would urge the committee now to not forward this to the full board.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Speaker.

Andrew Turnball.

We have a reason.

Yeah, can you hear me now?

I found the mic button.

Going forward.

Am I there?

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you for uh listening on this one.

I actually helped write that letter because David, I'm a supervisor Hubbard, President Albert.

You asked me to come in as an independent citizen to help out with these kind of things.

And I began to attend some trails discussions.

And I've been attending the transportation and planning.

Um I was amazed how much conflict there was over this particular issue because I drove up to the property and I took a video.

I could drive my truck right up the property where this proposed trail is.

But for some reason, there was somebody even shaking hands at uh members of the agriculture advisory committee on this.

So obviously there is uh conflict.

Um, however, um, I'm in support of this, but the other thing is I just want to make one point.

Jack Norton is doing a great job on this, and the other one is uh we have Ali Abbers on our team struggling with how does this board communicate and work effectively with a supervisor?

So several issues going on here.

Um, I know uh and I trust David Howard and I trust uh the uh the king of uh unincorporated that uh they'll find a better way to communicate with this excellent group of your top agricultural people and begin to have them influence policy and not take six or seven months for them to be heard.

Thank you for your respect and attention.

So, last Germany.

Thank you, and I have a couple of documents for you.

Thank you.

Um these documents were um a link to these documents were provided in the letter that was sent to you last week by Nancy Rodrigue on behalf of Friends of Tesla Park, the large alliance of organizations that are working to establish the Tesla Park land, the 3100 acres, as a state natural reserve.

That has been a long-standing objective that is supported by the Altamont Land for Alameda County resource conservation district, among others, and um it's important just from policy perspective that there not be exactly as supervisor mentioned conflicting positions presented within the county.

I want to um provide an overview.

I spoke at the November meeting with um this letter was approved and asked the committee not to approve and not to advance it for multiple reasons.

The committee had not reviewed the nearly 25 years of work that had been done to document Tesla's irreplaceable resources.

They hadn't studied the comprehensive and extent extensively sourced and peer reading biological assessment and science scientist consensus statement.

We provided you a copy of the executive summary of the 170-page biological assessment and the scientist consensus statement, which includes over 40 scientists, some of the most esteemed scientists in their specialty areas from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, other universities, academy of sciences, and so forth.

They did not research the 300-year historical record, including the potential for the Tesla Mining District to be listed as on the National Registry of Historic Places.

The trail they've identified goes right through it.

They did not consider the decades-long struggle by the indigenous leaders who are trying to preserve the entire tribal cultural landscape, not just an archaeological feature of a bedrock motor.

And they did not review the public resources code statutes that define how Tesla directly exceeds the requirements for natural resources for a natural reserve to be established as a natural reserve.

In addition, I live on a ranch that is next to the Tesla property, a cattle ranch.

I can tell you there is no nexus to agritourism or to promoting agriculture by having a multi-use trail through Tesla.

It simply doesn't exist.

That's different than what occurs down in the valley with the wineries, but in this area, it doesn't do anything other than potentially provide harm because of trespass, because of fire danger, and other impacts from having multi-use trails.

Finally, I want to address the point of, and I'll finish up here, the point of Supervisor Miley asking about e-bikes.

The reality is there will be e-bikes of all kinds within this property because state parks allows e-bikes if it is if this is classified as a park.

If it's classified as a reserve, there cannot be bikes unless they're on a paved road, and there would certainly not be e-bikes.

We are all aware of the controversy that exists regarding motorized electric recreation.

Just as one example, SB 155 prohibited OHVs.

Well, now OHVs have multi-have dual use.

You have an electric motorcycle that is both street legal and OHV and off-road.

A street legal vehicle can go in and use Tesla in the under the current um law, and if it were approved as a park.

So there are many issues here.

I ask that the that the board or this committee not approve this letter.

It should not go forward.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

Dick Schneider, I'm a member of the Alameda County Resource Conservation District Board of Directors.

Since 2022, the RCD has supported the Alameda Tesla property be classified as a state reserve.

The time since that 2022 recommendation was made, significantly more information has become available that reinforces the RCD's position.

In particular, a comprehensive study, commonly referred to as the Tesla Bioassessment, has been peer reviewed, published, and endorsed by over 40 scientific experts in the relevant subject areas.

The RCD now recommends that Tesla be classified as a state natural reserve.

The Tesla Bioassessment has an entire section on recreation impacts on natural resources, including an extensive literature review of the effects of trails on plants, wildlife, and ecosystem services.

Literature review covers impacts to soils, water, and hydrology.

Habitat fragmentation, impacts on vegetation and vegetation communities, impact on liparian and aquatic resources, invasive species, direct and indirect effects on wildlife, including behavioral changes leading to functional habitat loss, and population and community level changes specific to trail associated recreation.

And you have that Tesla bioassessment in the record.

To the best of my knowledge, the Ag Advisory Committee did not review this material, nor did it solicit testimony from subject matter subject matter experts in these areas.

It was therefore premature to make any recommendations to the Board of Supervisors about trails inside the Alameda Tesla property.

Moreover, there's adequate time to hear from specialists since the planning process for Tesla was expected to take several more years.

Multi-use trails within the Alameda Tesla property will neither enhance the economic viability of agriculture and ranching nor minimize environmental impacts.

Please do not move this letter forward to the full world supervisors.

Larry Gosselin.

Thank you for giving me the time to speak.

I everybody's using their titles, and so uh I'll let you know that I've spent uh 25 years engaged with planning in Alameda County, starting out at 14 years on the East County border zoning adjustments within that capacity of approved environmental projects as large as we have one.

Very familiar with SEQA, very familiar with the process of moving through and development projects.

That being said, it is state parks that define the stages of their analysis.

And the letter that was written by the Ag Advisory Committee is perfectly positioned within the requests made by state parks to review recreational opportunities on the property.

Question was whether or not those review that review should focus on consolidating uh recreation or dispersing it throughout the uh park in a bigger area.

That is what we responded to.

The uh fact that uh there was not a trail plan through that property isn't disputed.

The Ag Advisory Committee is asking for supervisors to advise that we would like to connect to the park once it's developed.

Uh that being said, it should be recognized that the area of Tesla Park, Carnegie Park, Corral Hollow is an area that's had intense usage from pre-European times.

Pre-European times, it was a place of food management, uh agricultural management with prescribed burns.

Uh there was food processing that occurred in the area that's still evidenced by the borders.

I think we found in large rocks.

Uh the uh span during the Spanish land grant era and the Mexican land grant area era, there was a uh focus on tallow production and uh primarily tallow and hide production.

Uh but that led to again high density of uses in the area.

Moving into the western expansion period of time, uh uses in the area have focused on uh production of natural resources to the extent that we were engaged in international travel and uh as a result or international trade, I should say, both with uh uh kiln products, bricks, and so forth and uh your time has expired.

Can you summarize?

Yeah, no, it's an area of high use, and part of within that high use that's existed from the mid-1700s, the species have survived and done well.

We have a hundred and forty-page study that shows the area is rife with habitat uh and bioresources that are surviving.

That being said, if weapons development at site 300 didn't impede uh bioresources in the area, there's no reason to think that a shrail could not be managed in a way that did manage the bioresources as well.

Thank you.

Marilyn Harvey.

Hi, my name is Marilyn Harvey.

I'm the CEO of the Alameda County Resource Conservation District and also a member of the Ag Advisory Committee.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the November Ag Advisory Committee meeting because of a conflicting work conference that I was attending.

Had I been in attendance at the meeting, I would have voted against sending the Ag Advisory Committee letter to the Board of Supervisors.

As the CEO of the Alameda County RCD, we provide leadership in the county and region to enhance natural resource conservation and to preserve habitats for native plants and wildlife.

The district has long supported the Alameda Tesla property being established as a state natural reserve because of its importance to the enhancing and preserving irreplaceable natural resources.

Tesla Park's outstanding and unique floral and habitat characteristics, geologic and landscape features, scenic qualities and historic and prehistoric sites, including its Native American sacred sites, has a need to be protected for the integrity of Tesla Park's natural landscape and biodiversity, especially during the current climate.

Please do not move this letter forward to the full board.

Thank you.

Will Bolton.

Good afternoon.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

I'm Will Bolton, president of the Livermore Heritage Guild.

I'm asking if the Alameda County Transportation and Planning Committee do not forward the Agricultural Advisory Committee letter on Tesla to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.

In addition to damaging manpacks to the rare biological resources and tribal cultural resources, the proposed multi-use trails in the memo run directly through the historic Tesla Mining and Townsite area, which could be designated as a cultural preserve and eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Given the important historic resources in this area, there should not be multi-use trails with bikes, motorized e-bikes, and vehicular traffic in Tesla, and certainly not in the cultural reserve area.

For these and many other reasons, as listed in the letters provided by the friends of Tesla Park, we urge the committee to not endorse or forward the agricultural committee letter to the Board of Supervisors.

I hope that this committee will stand with Livermore Heritage Guild and so many others in this community to fully protect Tesla's extraordinary historical, tribal, and natural resources to the maximum extent possible, which is as a state natural reserve.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide these comments.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Great.

My name is Haley Rose.

I'm with the Tri-Valley Conservancy in Livermore.

Tri-Valley Conservancy has been a longtime advocate for the permanent protection of the 3100-acre Tesla property, and the TBC board of directors has voted that it should be classified as a state natural reserve.

TVC has advocated for the protection of Tesla Park for its part in a critical linkage habitat corridor, and its remarkably markable biodiversity.

Diablo Range, which includes Tesla Park was identified among the top conservation priorities in the state in terms of protecting biodiversity.

Tesla's extensive natural and cultural resources include numerous special status species and habitats.

California Native American sacred and archaeological sites and other historic sites.

Given these biological, cultural, geologic, scenic, and other factors, the classification of Tesla must provide the highest level of resource protection and be classified as a state natural reserve.

Thank you for your time.

Good afternoon, supervisors and staff.

My name is Beth Wurzberg.

I'm a delegate for the East Bay chapter of the California Native Plant Society and a Alameda resident.

And I'm here to ask you not to forward the Ag Advisory Committee's letter supporting multi-use trails at Tesla to the full board.

The kindest description I can give of the letter is that it's premature and uninformed.

In fact, it may jeopardize decades of work by many people, organizations, and by Alameda County, all of whom have labored to save this rare place.

The letter endorses multi-use trails at Tesla without considering the abundance of rare and special status species that occur throughout Tesla, without considering the impact of high intensity trails on Tesla's wildlife, without considering the effect on the tribal cultural landscape, and without considering whether multi-use trails are even appropriate inside Tesla.

A connecting east-west trail doesn't have to go through Tesla.

Tesla is an extraordinary place worthy of the highest protections.

Both UC Berkeley and California Department of Fish and Wildlife Scientists separately determined that Tesla is a top biodiversity hotspot in California, which is itself a global biodiversity hotspot.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife considers the Tesla area to be a top conservation priority in the central California.

Its natural resources are statewide and even global significance.

The Ag Advisory Committee may have stepped outside its purview when it said multi-use trails in Tesla are a county priority.

The committee certainly jumped the gun by endorsing high-intensity trails before potential impacts to natural and cultural resources could be evaluated.

Tesla should become a state natural reserve.

All the data points that way.

Tesla could become the first state reserve in 40 years, the first in our part of California, the first that would protect the entire cultural landscape of tribes.

Alameda County has stood up for Tesla before and won.

Please don't stop now.

Please set this letter aside and help make Tesla a reserve, a reality here in Alameda County.

Thank you.

Marilyn Russell.

Unmute your microphone at the top of the screen.

Top of the screen, oh no.

Yes, we can hear you.

Oh, good.

Okay.

Good afternoon, supervisors and staff.

I am Marilyn Russell, a 50-year resident of Roos Road off of Tesla, and very close to the property we are discussing.

I'm a devoted advocate for agriculture and conservation and have served on the board of the Resource Conservation District in the past.

I'm an active member of the California Rangeland Trust for my cattle ranch in Mendocino County.

Therefore, I oppose this letter supporting the high-intensity use for the Tesla property for many reasons, not the least of which is that the purpose of the agricultural advisory committee is for agriculture and environmental protection, not trails for recreational use that may not support agriculture in our area at all.

As a lifetime equestrian and rancher with great respect and regard for land and trails, I am saddened to see the trail destruction that has occurred by off-road bicycle use in state parks with unruly mountain bikes and now worse, e-bikes.

A recent article in the Backcountry Horseman's newsletter to which I belong reported that of the 5,000 acre Anadale State Park in Santa Rosa, once a Mecca for trail riders, is now used by less than 5% of equestrians due to aggressive bike users and the dangers of encountering rapid moving bikes and the inability of rangers to control the situation.

Mount Tamil Pius has suffered a similar fate, and I am appalled by the renegade trails at Del Valle, Pleasanton Ridge, and the Arroyos of Livermore.

I do not want to see this happen at Tesla.

I am dedicated to ensuring that these 3100 acres be classified as a state reserve.

There is a huge potential for unplanned and unintended consequences.

Therefore, please do not send this ill-timed letter onward to the board.

Thank you very much for considering our point of view.

Hi, I hope you can hear me.

Recommending multi-use trails in Tesla is a mistake because it is inconsistent with its designation as a state natural reserve.

Tesla is a jewel that sits at the junction of Alameda and San Joaquin counties.

It is a jewel because of its pristine beauty.

It is a jewel because it is home to a number of special status species.

It is a jewel because of its historical artifacts and its ties to local Native American tribes.

It is a jewel because many animals use it to cross from one area to another, ensuring that they can access food, water, and breeding areas.

Why should Alameda County support the designation of Tesla as a natural reserve?

After all, we think it's logical to uh that people should be able to recreate in beautiful open spaces.

The reality is that people are hard on our pristine environments.

They don't stay on trails, they leave trash, and they can damage historical places and sensitive habitats, maybe unwittingly, but it happens.

We should not allow our jewel of a park to fall prey to these risks.

We don't indiscriminately give our fine jewelry to our children to handle.

They might lose it, get it dirty, or damage it.

Instead, we gladly bring it out to show them under supervision and maybe let them handle it gently.

In the case of Tesla, we are all Earth's children, and some places are too delicate for us to interact with.

That is what we are asking for Tesla.

The protections afforded by a reserve designation so that our jewel remains clean and safe from those who would not treat it with the necessary care.

A reserve designation is the wise choice.

The AAC recommendation is premature and misguided, and the board should not be promoting uses that will defeat this designation.

Please reject it.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, supervisors Halbert and Miley.

Karen Asbell here.

I live in Supervisor Miley's district.

And thanks to you, by the way, Nate Miley, for all you do for us.

You stand tall in my book.

I'm asking you not to forward the Ag Advisory Committee's letter to the full board of supervisors.

Their letters supporting multi-use trails at Tesla is way early at best.

Despite earlier comments today, the fact remains that state parks is still deciding whether Tesla will become a park, a cultural reserve, or a natural reserve.

Once Tesla is classified, then it will be a reasonable time to support activities there.

I'm sure you're aware that Tesla's outstanding natural resources have been studied for generations.

They are of statewide importance.

As mentioned earlier today, those natural and wildlife resources in Tesla may have survived since the 1800s, but let's recognize there were no e-bikes and ATVs until now.

More than 35 local, regional, and statewide organizations support reserve classification.

Local tribes support reserve classification because it offers the best protections for their cultural resources.

The ACRCD and the ALOSC both reserve support reserve classification.

And state parks has received public input that overwhelmingly supports making Tesla a reserve.

The Ag Advisory Committee is supposed to make recommendations on matters involving economic enhancement and environmental conservation on our agricultural lands in Alameda County.

And they're advocating multi-use trails at Tesla is to act against environmental conservation.

And it undercuts and conflicts with years of conservation advocacy, including by the county of Alameda.

I urge you to set the letter aside.

Do not forward it to the full board so we can all continue to respect and applaud your good judgment.

I can't imagine the Board of Supervisors would want to weigh in.

You're unmuted.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Oh boy.

Oh boy.

I'm getting echoes.

I'm sorry.

Are you hearing the echoes I those I am?

Yes.

I don't know how to deal with that.

I feel what I see.

There's two microphones on.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, it should as was noted before.

This has been a high intensity use area for uh two or three hundred or uh thousand years.

Um and the highest intensity use obviously in the in all senses of the word high intensity is that site 300 where they're working with explosives.

That's some pretty high intensity stuff there.

Um and um I think the county um has to look at the uh overall the overall needs of of uh the entire county and um having recreational trails is um a value for this county and um the what the and it needs to coordinate with the neighboring counties like San Joaquin County is built this Tracy Hills with thousands of new homes and uh parks right there, um, at uh just east of here, just east of this part of this area to the northeast, and uh if we can connect into there with uh recreational trails and and go all the way out to uh to uh you know Greenville and uh and South Livermore, this is a value for the county.

This is what uh will will allow people to uh to travel to uh go back and forth and uh on bicycles, on horses on uh uh on foot, and the the impacts of course there's impacts.

There's impacts of these trails.

Um we're asking people to uh to uh spend a lot of money on taxes and pay for all these parks and pay for all these historic areas and pay for all this uh land set aside for preservation everywhere, and uh these people are this are the taxpayers who want to be uh using these recreational trails.

You know, I think there's a balance here, and the two the trails are for the taxpayers, they're also for the businesses in South Livermore, um, and uh and they also connect us to Tracy Hills.

Thank you.

William Hopps.

I don't know speakers, I think.

Ten more speakers.

How many online?

Yeah, I got this.

No more.

We're done taking speakers, so let's leave it at that 10.

Okay, and William Hops, unmute your microphone at the top of the screen.

Carol Silva.

Excuse me, can you hear me?

Yes, okay, thank you.

Um I'm Carol Silva, I live in Livermore, and um I'm also an alternate on the Altamont Landfill Open Space Committee.

Um, the county's agricultural advisory committee's purpose is to make recommendations to enhance the economic viability of agriculture and ranching to product to protect open space and to minimize environmental impacts.

I don't understand why this committee has gone outside its main purpose to recommend putting multi-use trails anywhere, but especially in an area such as Tesla, in which numerous organizations and individuals are trying to protect its unique resources.

Altamont Landfill Open Space Committee has been paying for studies to review wildlife movements for possible locations to install wildlife crossings over our highways.

One of the locations strongly recommended is for a wildlife for a wildlife crossing to be in the vicinity of Livermore's Greenville Road.

So why in the future should taxpayers or other funds be spent on a wildlife crossing for wildlife and then for wildlife to be stopped by multi-use trail of high intensity uses besides organizations and numerous individuals fully supporting Tesla to be established as a natural reserve, there are county associated committees that have spent more time reviewing and evaluating Tesla's resources than the county's agricultural advisory committee has done.

Thank you.

Karen, hi.

Unmute your mic at the top of the screen.

Joanna Thompson.

Hello.

I'm John O'Thompson and a Livermore resident for 53 years.

I very much hope that the Tesla property will be designated as a state natural preserve to protect and preserve its well documented biological and cultural attributes.

Multi-use trails are incompatible with these goals.

I ask you not to advance this ill-advised letter to the Board of Supervisors.

Thank you.

This is Jean King.

I live in Livermore, California.

I asked the TNP committee not to approve or advance the AAC letter to the Board of Supervisors.

I live in Livermore and I have for many years walked the trails in Del Valle Park.

The bicycles are allowed on the trails there.

The fast moving vehicles are a hazard to hikers and they damage the trails by going fast and not staying on the trails but cutting across between trails.

Once you allow bikes, you will not be able to stop e-bikes, which are motorized vehicles and have been causing great problems.

I used to backpack and go hiking in the Sierras, but because of limited physical abilities now, those days are over.

If motorized vehicles are not allowed, I will not be able to enjoy the Tesla Park.

But preserving the natural and biological resources of this area is much more important than my individual visiting the area.

The overwhelming support at public meetings for years is for Tesla being established as a reserve.

This will provide public access to trails in the area to support a tourism and still minimize the environmental impacts.

We do not need multi-use trails.

I encourage you, I ask you not to approve or advance the AAC letter to the Board of Supervisors.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is Juan Pablo Galva Martinez, Senior Land Use Manager for Sayabam Diablo, and we ask that the committee not approve or advance the letter to the board for the reasons that many others have already shared.

Thank you.

That was an excellent exhibition of up to two minutes.

William Hobbs.

Mark Connolly.

Nancy Rodriguez.

Hi, I'm Nancy.

I'm a Livermore resident.

I'm a 20-year member of Friends of Tesla Park.

And I'm here to ask that the Transportation and Planning Committee not approve or advance the AAC letter to the board.

And even in the mountains.

And I don't know if you know this, but every single East Bay Regional Park allows bicycles and e-bugs.

I don't think there's a need for more of that.

It would be nice to have one area, like Jim King mentioned that is actually peaceful and quiet.

I think the uh the risk to bioresources, if if you don't understand that, I would like to invite you to go to Delville Regional Park.

Start parked at the top of the hill, you don't even enter the park, start walking, you will see what happens.

It's pretty much uncontrollable.

Bicycling is a great sport, whether it's motorized or not.

It's just a where do you do that?

Tesla Park is not the place to do that.

There will be plenty of recreation in Tesla Park.

And I'd like people to think, uh start thinking, use your imagination, think about something different for our for our people, for our citizens, our children, a quiet enjoyment of nature.

And e-biking is fun, but it's not that.

Um, I think there's we can offer a lot at Tesla besides recreation besides hiking, we can offer photography, uh there can be um studies, resort research, and other other things for people that doesn't have to be fast.

So I want to um if action is taken by the board of supervisors, it should be to fully fully support establishing Tesla as an actual reserve.

So um please do not forward this letter to the board.

Karen.

I can't get the rest of them to disable, so thank you for trying your best.

We'll close public comment, bring it back for deliberation discussion.

Supervisor, well, I actually have to clarify question.

So I'm I'm wanting to understand the so the advisory committee discussed this and voted to approve the letter back in November.

That's correct.

Is it a unanimous vote?

I think it was seven to three.

So I recalled it.

Okay.

And there's this uh feeling that this would speak for Alameda County, and we have a split sentiment here.

So and I also want to echo surprise my nothing should take seven months.

I have an open door policy, please use it.

And I know you've probably tried.

Um I'm gonna say it's my fault for not getting to you and your committee diligently.

I apologize, but um Thank you, Supervisor.

Yeah, yeah.

So we'll we'll just try harder next time.

Yeah, no, we'll we'll we'll get there, we'll get there.

It's it's my bad.

We're we also are going to be um yeah, so but when that happened, I'm hearing an overwhelming opposition.

At that time, was there overwhelming support for this?

Um three.

In my recollection, it was it was pretty well split.

It might there may have been more disinterested, I can't exactly remember.

Yes.

Is there a another group of people that are enthusiasts that will be coming and yelling at us if we say, don't do this letter because they really wanted it, which the opposite is occurring here now.

We have a group of people that are coming and yelling at us to do this because they I mean, are there competing factions out there?

I I believe that there are people who are interested in it, but I I cannot say whether they're going to invest the time to come, you know.

As as a member of the AEC, and invest my time to um do the work that is put before us, yeah, but um public's gonna do I I can't predict that.

Okay, I mean um I because I uh I have to echo our good friend Kelly, who said earlier there's perhaps balance here and um an opportunity to uh to do that.

Um I think it did seem like one of the sorry to interrupt you, but it did seem like one of the main contention contentious points is these e-bikes and and bikes as well.

I I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure.

Larry, you're popping your hand up there.

Yeah, so shortly after, or just a few weeks ago, there's a uh uh California Trails and Greenways symposium in San Ramon, and uh, you know, a lot of a lot of the uh presentations was made by state parks.

Uh specifically, it was asked at a working group, um, whether or not the fragmentation from composition of parks was recognized by state parks, and they said yes, they believed it was a problem that needed to be addressed and resolved.

They actually asked that uh leadership from Alameda County.

By that I mean the advisory committee participate in addressing those issues with the all right, very good.

So um there are pieces here that I would like to continue it to explore, such as um Supervisor Miley mentioned it, the interplay between bicycles and horses, bicycles and people, people and horses, and the wildlife um that were there to to protect that I would like to to understand better, and I think where um all of this in my mind is um while I I am supportive of this letter in some ways, I also can't in good conscience support forwarding it because we have opposition.

So I think um what I'd like to do if it's okay with Supervisor Miley at some point is for me and my team to maybe convene a town hall meeting or um participate through the ad uh agriculture committee to get a little bit more learning on this.

I don't want to take a lot of time because a lot of time's gone by, but yet there still seems to be time left.

Short of that, um I imagine there's public input that can happen to the state parks people.

So members of the public that are on the ad committee, members of the public who are on other committees can weigh in.

It just won't be Alameda County's um official viewpoint.

That's where I'm thinking it needs to be.

I I haven't studied this enough to have yet, but I'm not willing to support the letter as written.

I do support pieces of it, Supervisor Miley.

Sure, yeah.

First of all, my chief of staff spoke with me about this.

It was coming in this morning, so it's kind of the first impression hearing it today.

So it says in the uh board letter that the uh the state parks is actively seeking stakeholder input throughout the planning process, and the process is going to take five years, and it says throughout.

So once again, I don't see the necessity of submitting a letter just yet.

That's first thing.

Secondly, the board letter says speakers urge the agriculture advisory committee to postpone making recommendations to the board until the state park finalizes its comprehensive environmental review.

So why can't we wait until they finalize the environmental review because I think based on the information I see here, there's a lot of concern, and based on just my own gut instincts, and some speakers spoke to it.

There's not a dearth of parks in natural locations for people to ride the freaking bikes, and I don't understand why this needs to be opened up to that.

I have a lot of respect for that committee, it's generally a committee.

I think you're right on target, and I know you, Jack, and I know Larry and I know a few of the others for your right on target, but I think you might have missed the mark here.

I'm just being where I'm coming from, based on what I know about this, what I know about everybody and what I have a bias against.

I have a bike, I ride a bike, but I don't think there's an issue of not of a dearth of locations to ride bikes, and I think it would probably be more appropriate.

I'm just one of my cards on the table.

This continue to be or be designated a natural reserve, and period.

But I'm willing to hold hold off on the letter going to the board.

Uh Chair Halbert already said we don't want to send this letter to the board.

Um, his reasons I have mine.

But I'm just letting you know I'm gonna have to really, really be convinced that having uh a trail or non-V non-authorized use is in the best interest for us out there.

I don't think it is.

Um I think Kelly, like I said, my good friend Kelly, our good friend Kelly, I think he once again missed the mark on this one, quite frankly.

So that's kind of where I'm coming from.

I know you're gonna get your hands dirty.

I know Larry get this hands dirty.

So I think some kind of we I just kind of think you missed the mark on this one, but right now I'm not comfortable sitting in some of the people.

Thank you for your input.

All right, um, county council mentioned that some people are still trying to get in or have gotten in.

If there's anybody else that we can let speak, I'll give you another minute or two, Tisa.

If you can't, then we'll move it on.

I don't okay, fill it out.

Dick Quigley.

Still on mute.

Unmute your microphone at the top of the screen.

Karen, Karen Sweet.

Can you unmute?

Good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon.

Sorry.

Yeah, you know.

Pisa, you've done your best.

I appreciate you.

Thank you very much.

We're gonna move on to item six, which is an action item, which is a proposed resolution to establish a public private partnership in support of the development of an innovation transportation system capable of moving freight in the county of Alameda, but not to go through Tesla Park.

Thank you all.

I appreciate all those literal presidents calling in.

All right.

Well, we have uh this is information no action item, but it's not a CDA um item.

This is gonna be a presentation by a company, Dexter and Harvey.

It's uh a team, um, with several are listed there.

Okay.

And uh so I'm Dexter Visenoff, and I am the uh CEO and president of Cybertran International, and uh we are a manufacturer of innovative transit rail system uh capable of moving freight, and with me I have uh Chief Technology Officer Ari Lamba, who's gonna go through the uh PowerPoint.

I've asked all of our members to that.

Um quickly through their slides.

Uh and then we have from BC Berkeley Path, uh partners for advanced transportation uh technology, uh and uh which is Orion V, and then we have the CEO of Earth Grid, uh Earth Grid is the developer and manufacturer of an innovative uh boring boring technology that doesn't uh drill through rock but they melt through rock uh with uh plasma plasma uh laser uh technology.

And so uh just so you and then we have a couple of others who are like extensions of our team.

Uh Gregory Hunters will call you.

He's not going to speak unless there's a question that I want him to answer.

And then uh also Gene De Shinaga over here, has his own company that does uh control systems uh for transportation companies and ask the the control system that operates BART today was developed by so uh gone through a few upgrades instead of but anyway.

Uh so with that, I'm going to uh uh we are we are asking that you uh recommend a resolution uh to the full board for passes to establish a partnership on our efforts to move together to develop a project within Alameda County to move freight, um, for the county uh tunnels.

Uh that's what we can do.

Uh you see Berkeley is basically our project lead for the rail technology.

So, you want to get going?

Yes, um, so we are uh CyberTrain uh and ultra-light rail transit and freight um transportation system uh offright our freight option can provide ultra-light freight vehicles, five to ten tons.

Um they are designed to carry different kinds of freight uh from the port of Oakland uh packages, automobiles, bulk commodities, uh three tons every nine seconds, which means you'd have a vehicle traveling at say 30 to 60 miles per hour, and have vehicles at nine second intervals.

These would have ULD type containers, which are used on aircraft.

Um, these are automated vehicle operations.

Um this would eliminate a lot of diesel truck traffic.

We also have uh a transit option for future consideration, uh, which can move uh uh vehicles on uh demand, um, uh on direct to destination, and that is CyberTan.

We are based in Richmond.

We are eager to help you with innovative rail freight and transit solutions and um things that you dream about in rail transit.

Please um feel free to approach us.

And so that is Cybertrend.

And uh our next slide is from Othgrid and uh Pride, do you want to speak to that?

Yeah, we have to.

So Troy Helling, CEO of Earth Grid.

Uh, we actually started in West Oakland, uh Mandela and and Grand and uh moved to a big industrial facility.

World War II tank factory.

Um I'm an entrepreneur, eight companies, um four exits, including a company that's a DECA unicorn, 35 billion dollar division of an Al Green Powers, big wind farm and solar company.

Bayway, EarthGrid has lightsabers for lack of a better word.

They're like Star Wars lightsabers.

We vaporize or melt the rock.

Uh we're nine years in.

We've been testing for eight years.

Um technology is fully commercialized.

We can pour it anywhere from 200 meters a day through hard rock to up to our kilometer per day, which is anywhere from 12 to um a hundred times faster than conventional tunneling using just air, which is free, and electricity from the grid.

Uh so it's pretty cool tech, it's highly disruptive.

We're likely going to be going public uh next year.

Uh we have a number of customer projects, but uh we can borrow we've uh tested in hard granite here in California near uh Yosemite National Park.

Uh we can bore through anything.

Uh we can bore utility tunnels, we can bore train tunnels, car tunnels, any size, just a matter of how much electricity we use.

Um and normal tunnel lining, we would line it with concrete just like any other conventional tunneling technology.

Um we're just faster and cheaper.

So it's pretty cool, very excited.

Uh it's been a long journey, and uh it's got about to go cool nuts.

The last thing I'll mention is that EarthGrid has a bunch of capital backing us to build an underground super grid, an underground network of tunnels moving 100% renewable power, water, fiber, data over fiber, freight, and eventually people for our tunnels.

I'm guessing the group that just left, it's a good thing they left.

Perhaps I mean it's all underground, maybe the bike trails are all underground.

I'm not sure they were like that.

Anyway, that's it.

Interesting.

You can you do undergrounding of utilities?

I mean, just get rid of the cell phone poles, yeah, utility poles.

We're working with a number of utilities, including BGE, although they're hard to work with, but yes, we are we have a pilot project with BGE power lines, we could do it ourselves.

So the road in East Dublin, okay, great.

Anyway, off topic.

Thank you.

That's a very interesting stuff.

Okay.

What else?

Next.

Yeah, hi.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

Um, so I'm I work for PATH, which is a research program under the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley.

Um PATH has been at the forefront of transportation innovation.

We've worked with Caltrans, we've worked with transit agencies across the state.

Um, we have worked with the US Department of Transportation.

In fact, we recently received a 10 million dollar grant um focused on developing technologies to move freight with autonomous vehicles.

Um in 1997, Path put the very first driverless car on the road.

Um, and they've been doing research uh that has driven innovation and policy for the last 30 years.

They have the ability uh to turn ambitious ideas into proven working systems.

Um we have a vast network of connections and resources that we can leverage, including some of the best autonomous vehicle talent in the world.

Uh Path are experts in autonomous vehicles, which makes uh collaboration with CyberTran a natural fit.

All autonomous vehicles have the same core challenges, how to sense the environment, how to operate safely, how to connect to infrastructure.

Um and path researchers have been solving these questions for decades.

So yeah, Path is really excited about this collaboration and contributing our autonomous vehicles expertise to a rail project.

Next slide.

Yes, extra.

Yes.

Man, it's uh unfortunately you couldn't make it today.

Um so I used to work for the board of supervisors here at the county.

I worked off the halls of the board.

It was a consulting contract, but I was an extension of staff.

My job was a liaison between the board of supervisors and East Bay EDA as you know it today, which was EDAP at that time.

One of the initiatives while I was there was to establish a uh consulting center to coral manufacturing jobs in Alameda County, and we were successful.

Brown Bruce Kern was the executive director at that time.

We were successful getting grant, and we established Manics.

So I'm a founding father of Mannix, and Manics uh recently it was a it was a US Department of Commerce program, their manufacturing extension partnership under this, which is the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

I have a background of tech.

I started working at IBM right out of high school, so and I've worked for a number of tech companies, so I've got an extensive background in tech, but manufacturing as well.

And I knew we were gonna manufacture transit systems for global market, and manics can provide us with a turning key factor.

They can do everything for developing supply chain, plant layout planning, processing, quality systems, assurance with risk management and uh the program was recently cut by uh Donald Trump, uh, and they've gone private, and so everybody's working on projects right now.

They're still uh they're just gonna be a private company now, and they're still a partner with us.

Uh, they're part of our team, and also let me just say, as far as our team, we have a lot more partners than what you see why here.

This is just for the purpose of this presentation, but we could feel this whole room of people.

And there's no shortage of people that want to work on with us.

What is the MOM facility mean MOM?

Okay, manufacturing operations intervening.

Okay, yeah.

So, uh we're looking to uh in the event that we are able to put together a project and this resolution will support us in putting together an actual project it will consist of three facilities one would be uh one as close to the port and we're in discussions with the port which would be an intermodal facility logistics center which would handle freight forwarding crosstalk activity uh you know um and transloading uh and then we would also establish an inland port uh out in Tracy uh call uses our real estate uh firm that we're working with to identify land we would establish an inland port which would be an a logistics center so trucks wouldn't have to go all the way to Oakland from the central valley to get freight we can we can establish an inland port in Tracy as a first phase initially as a second phase an inland port in Stockton in the port of Stockton and also an inland port in the Central Valley and so it would you know really reduce truck traffic there's always going to be a need for trucks so we're not gonna eliminate trucks but it's going to greatly reduce trucks and the congestion that's caused uh by trucks and also let me talk about the customer the customer you talk about your Walmart Chicost your UPS your Amazon they want their goods as quickly and efficiently as possible and innovation is the way to get that done so this is really supporting the customer that wants to get and in the end we're the ones they're bringing the goods that we all use and that we all buy so we need more effective more efficient less costly uh ways of being able to move freight we can move nine tons I mean three tons every nine seconds because it's not just like it's it's like it's a vehicle like a almost like a bus on rail we have our own containers you can take containers break them down and at the intermodal facility uh heavy rail can come in if the containers still need to go out on heavy rail trucks can still come in and pick up containers and then what else can go out on our system can do this and we can do this through choice tunnels and the benefit that you get with the tunnels is not only reducing truck congestion and truck traffic and getting the goods faster you get a super grid that can accommodate the utilities of the future because you know as you know the causing fires uh winds you get power outages we need to update our grid and so what Earthgrid has developed here is a method uh a very cost-efficient way of being able to update our utility grid so we ask that you just support this team in its effort uh by passing this resolution recommending this resolution to the board uh to support our efforts in establishing uh a project uh for the purpose of all the above our next slide has some good information uh it's uh unselected solicited proposal to the port of oakland uh out of harbor terminal uh a public partner partnership with the port of oakland um and we would be proposing and innovative the kind of things extra talked about innovative goods transportation project uh we would move 20 foot equivalence free units uh we have the capacity to you move 1500 tons of freight in and out of the port.

Approximately 130 acres at ports 20 and 24 uh we are proposing cyber transit ultra-light freight and transit system uh and so this is an innovative ultralight technology along with plasma boarding technology for partial use of tunnels so that we don't have some of that infrastructure problems of moving freight.

Otherwise, you would have elevated track that would be moving the freight, be solar powered.

And mom, of course, is a manufacturing operations and maintenance facility that we established at the uh at the Alta Harbor tunnel.

And you would have Intermodel One, which is doing all of all of the logistics of ship to shore logistics centers, freight forwarding, transloting, cross-fire, and of course the manufacturing operation and maintenance center would be set up where we would be manufacturing both vehicles and track and any automated systems that Poth and Gene Nishinoga come up with for the control systems of controlling the vehicles going and so we'll generate about 2500 jobs in an 800 square foot facility and we are looking for the Port of Oakland an exclusive negotiating agreement with them.

These are some of the things that we are looking for.

The next one would just show you uh a particular uh place where innovative rail transit has been operating in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Those are tired vehicles, I mean with rubber tires, and um they operate in an automated fashion at the uh university in Morgan, West Virginia University at Morgantown.

They work very well.

We are proposing at this time to move freight, both in tunnels and on ground from the Port of Oakland to Tracy to begin with, and we are asking for your blessing and um so that this can move forward.

Um it will relieve an immense amount of congestion and uh upgrade.

The Port of Oakland has the ambition of becoming again a bigger port, and our goal would be to try to help them move, be able to move more freight in and out, and possibly even like he said, get to Fresno, have produce being finally sent out there and for Department of Defense, we could be having stuff going to the port of Oakland.

So a lot of possibilities exist here that and we look forward to your blessings for this project.

Okay, thank you, Harold.

Sorry.

So just to add on that.

Um the uh Morgantown West Virginia systems have been in service since 1975.

It basically is the same system.

It's the only one of its kind installed uh in the country.

Uh and it may be worth going there to see it or at least talking to the mayor and see how the system works.

But the features that it has that are similar to ours and the same as ours, is that it has direct to destination.

So it's not um, you know, a hub and spoke system where it has to stop here and stop here and stop here.

Every vehicle is an express.

So uh it operates directly destination.

It's uh rubber tire, we're rail.

Uh we can go up to speeds, SI is 150 miles an hour.

This was developed by the US Department of Energy.

Cyber Train gets the rights to the technology, and so we think we can commercialize the technology.

I was originally a consultant with the company uh 16 years ago, and now I'm the CEO, and you can blame uh Bruce Kern and Keith Carson for that because those were my mentors, and I have an extensive background in economic development.

I have an extensive background.

I went to work for Mannix after we got it started.

That's when I left here, and then I got a contract with directly with the US Department of Commerce for NIS, promoting that program nationally across the country for two years, learned everything A to Z for manufacturing.

So I'm well versed in manufacturing.

I'm also well versed in uh goods movement.

I've been very active for everything is a county, and I understand I've worked with companies out there, BCC logistics.

I have part ownership in a trucking company uh out there that has a development project out at the port.

I'm a member of the port community.

I know the port very well.

And let me also say this, doesn't necessarily have to be uh at the port to start in Oakland.

We can identify other lands someplace else that we can do this, but if the main point is getting from point A to point B and then to point C and then point D.

And so and with Troy having access to capital to fund a project like this, so open to any questions that you're asking for us to approve a resolution.

The resolution as I read it doesn't require us to provide any financial obligation.

Um I will say, and I'll just uh turn it over to Supervisor Miley in a second, but um, as you can tell, we at the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, whose main mission is public hospitals, food and security, solving homelessness, and trails, and we're not experts in transportation.

We sit on and chair Alameda County Transportation Commission, sit on and advise uh uh direct and govern MTC, um, meet with and collaborate with Caltrans.

Uh I want to and gently touch transportation, but don't get our fingers too deep into it.

I understand.

Would say that um those are more likely um collaborators that we can connect you to, but I will look for validation from them because I'm not an expert.

So I may, if I may, I may I like to excuse me.

Uh proposed action item is for you to forward this resolution for their consideration.

My office has not reviewed uh this resolution and is not able to approve it as to form, so please keep that in mind and also that um, what is being presented in day would likely be subject to our county's competitive procurement processes.

So I don't think we're gonna procure anything, but good.

We have to mention that.

Okay, so um anyway, with that said, I'll I'll stop and let Supervisor Miley talk because I have a two o'clock stop.

Yeah, okay.

And so, Supervisor Miley.

I think yeah, well, yeah, I wonder if the county council and you would.

Yeah, uh the the resolve uh be it resolved that the county of Alameda be involved and should be be involved in the collaborative efforts.

Yeah, so we insert the word in.

Oh, and okay.

All right.

And typo, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

I was wondering about that.

And then we the thing is this doesn't make this county to any financial issues.

Let's count the council reviews and make sure there's no legal issues associated with it.

Um I think it would be good to after that forward it to the the full board because everything there's merit and cybertrend trying to get uh goods from the port over to the central valley, and if we can reduce the amount of truck traffic on the freeway, I think that would be beneficial because they are trying to compete with Francit.

We're looking at this move, and we think that we supports this a resolution.

I I'd really like to see if the Transportation Commission, looking at County Transportation Commission, we have a goods movement component, the Transportation Commission to go to Albert Chairs the Transportation Commission for the county.

If if we could take this up in uh further review with you, the Transportation Commission as well.

Um but I think it's it's good.

I'm you know what what I'm I'm contemplating is with the technology.

How do you use the technology to get from the say the port to the Central Valley?

Um you have to put in new tracks to use existing tracks.

How does that work?

Oh, the this is our our system is uh it's a proprietary rail system, it has its own rail, so it's a whole new infrastructure in rail, but we're planning we've already our civil engineer has already looked at how we could how we could do that, what route we would be going, how we can go up under town.

Oh, we would go, we would only need to get underground near the port, and then we'd have 57 miles of tunnel direct to Tracy.

So it would not interfere with any surface.

Uh, you know, methods are quickly.

How do you get from the say from the port to the outlock?

Underground.

Under it's all underground.

All underground.

It's a tunnel.

So it's moving freight underground.

And it's basically what we're doing is providing freight with its own expressway.

All underground.

And it's importing and export.

Yeah, so it's a two-way operation.

So moving goods in, and so right now everything going to the central valley from the port is going out on trucks.

I know, I know.

Because heavy well doesn't go down there.

Now, now just to go to a point that you uh that you made uh supervisor, um, about the county and because I worked here, I was on staff.

I know your job.

You have a thankless job, you got a tough job.

I know every aspect of what it is that you do because I was working, I was part of Keith Carson staff.

But it was the county that led the goods movement study to try to deal with the traffic, and also to try to focus on the port.

It was the port, was the EDAP that was the that really brought the attention to this issue and was at the forefront of this issue because Alameda County in itself is innovative and tries to be at the forefront of innovation and innovative solutions.

So it's no monetary game.

We already have a resolution that was County Cybertrack does that was passed by the county that gave us the authority to go after funding for for uh projects in Alameda County.

So we already have a resolution, but we're just now asking, well, let's instead of just supporting Cyber Trade, support the team, support the partnership that we get, support the university.

UC Berkeley just got a grant, two million dollars uh to um to do uh research and development on for moving freight on uh autonomous vehicles.

So I mean the timing, the timing of this band is thank you, it's idea.

So um we do have one speaker who has filled out a speaker card that would like this.

We got eight minutes left.

So I was just saying I think it'd be good for county council to review it, you insert the word in uh in the uh resolve.

I do think this would be good for the because if we can support this, this uh is actualized, it'll be cut again.

Yeah, that's great.

I I totally agree.

Thank you.

Eugene Nishinaga?

Well, everybody's left, but I guess the most important people are still in the room.

So too many trails guys don't want to hear this.

That's okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

My name is Eugene Nishina.

I'm currently the president of a technology development company here in the period called Transit Control Solutions.

But prior to my tenure here, I worked for 25 years for BART, very rapid transit system, developing much of the control technology that's running BART today.

And prior to that, I worked for the boring aerospace company, which was the they have a division called ground transportation system.

But that's that organization also built controls for the Morgantown system that you saw pictures of.

And I worked on the team that developed the control technology for that.

So this is relevant because what I'm gonna tell you now is explain to you the significance of this project that is being proposed here and is in this resolution.

It is this between the combination of the um the lower cost of infrastructure because instead of long trains you're running small units.

Now the infrastructure cost goes way down.

And the frequency at which we can operate these cars because the new technologies that are being available now, because the American Society of Civil Engineering in 2020 changed the standards to allow a different kind of controls control approach.

We have now we now have, and there are others probably all also developing this, a technology that can run your cars much closer together than nine seconds that he that uh just mentioned.

And the end the end result here is that the cost of moving people and freight will drop by a factor of four.

And these systems are being proposed all over the world right now.

Easily over a hundred are being proposed in Asia and in Africa.

You hear very little about it here in the US, but these systems are gonna change the way we travel, both in terms of moving freight and moving people, and this is an opportunity to kind of be the trailblazers in all this.

So I'm very excited about the resolution that's being considered.

I just want to voice my support for it.

Perfectly timed for two minutes.

Outstanding.

Did I?

All right.

Um, thank you.

I think Supervisor Miley summarized very succinctly.

Tisa, questions, comments?

I don't have another caller online.

Kelly.

Okay.

Uh thank you.

Um, yeah, I'm gonna uh bring you back to history.

Um, and uh I've got all kinds of history lined up for you today.

Uh there's a 2018 resolution of uh in support, your board passed this already.

Um take a look September 18th, 2018, uh, in support of an ultra-light rail system in Alameda County and in support of companies, okay.

So take a look for your lawyers.

You can go and you already have a template, right?

Um then uh I'm sure the lawyers already uh reviewed that one because uh that was uh that was approved by your board.

And then five or ten years ago, uh that was five or ten, that was the Richmond company, it's the same company, and then uh Elon Musk, um, you know, he's got a great success right here in Fremont.

Um I'd like to remind you of that uh Tesla.

But um his boring company, you know, drilling through uh the the ground, drilling through the earth is uh a lot harder, and uh he's got a lot of uh you know uh pilot projects and toy projects all over the place.

But uh it costs millions of dollars per mile to build tunnels, uh even if you're Elon.

Um the Alameda County sponsored and supported five hundred million dollars.

I'm sure you're trying to forget this.

You've spent your your uh the government spent 500 million dollars for the Oakland Airport connector.

It looks just like that thing in uh West Virginia, except it was built by uh uh Switzerland company, and uh it only went three miles.

So that's what 170 million dollars a mile.

Uh that's pretty expensive for uh and those were trans uh passenger transportation.

Now, historically, um the way that these things work.

If you look at the US interstate rail system uh, no interstate uh freeway system, it's built for cars, but it you know, it basically carries the trucks for free.

So the cars, the passengers subsidize the cargo, and the same thing with the US mail in the 1800s, that's history for you.

First class mail was paying all the bills, and uh freight was getting subsidized at very low rates.

So freight is not a high high-paying item.

Thanks.

I have no additional speakers for the sign-up.

All right, so I supervisor my do you have something else to add?

Yeah, the resolution that the board passed in the formally supported transit.

This resolution is it's more comprehensive in terms of all the partners, but also it's directed at freight, and that is really important.

If we can as one point the speaker pointed out, I think it's come forward, if we can get on the cutting edge and make this work, it's gonna it's gonna produce so many uh benefits, um, so many benefits, not just talking jobs, air quality, climate, climate change, everything.

Uh, and that's why I think we should pass it.

Let's get after county council reviews and we should hopefully get this to the transportation commission ultimately, and my question would be if let's suppose everything were to go well.

What would be the time frame associated with actualizing this?

What would it take?

Two years, three years, because you're gonna pour underneath, you've got to get all that set up.

How long would it take for this to become otherwise?

Okay, so that's a two-part question.

I'm gonna speak to first the tone.

Yeah, the tunnel earthquake can bore up to a half a mile a day.

We can install our rail systems a quarter mile a day.

You're talking 57 miles on the ground.

So I say, then you have your permitting, your your your sequel, all those reviews and all of that.

But I would say from the time that it's a go, it would take uh three four years.

Okay, yeah, which is still a long time, but just being realistic.

Yeah, I'm right.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have a main Troy and I haven't meeting trends.

But if we could do this, I think that's you pointed out or somebody, this would propel the port of Oakland.

Yes, it would really propel the port of Oakland.

It's already economic engine, let's say for Oakland in the area.

But if we were to do this, this would really propel it um to astronomical, put us to the leadership, absolutely good.

We have our um next steps, county council review as to form, see how we do at the board.

Okay, do you guys vote on this as a committee?

Oh, yes, it's an action item.

Supervisor Miley made a motion, and I concurred.

So action taken.

Okay, I think want to miss that point.

There's it.

Thanks.

We have one last item to you guys can go.

Thank you.

We have one last item though.

It's available to you anytime.

Of course, it's called public comment on items not on the agenda.

Erin Goslin, we have a speaker, and if anybody online wants to raise their hand, thank you, guys.

Thank you.

A few months ago, the transportation committee asked that uh planning department work with uh people from the wine technical advisory committee of the ag advisory committee to start streamlining the permitting process for the equine industry.

Uh we started our work on that.

Um, seems like we made quite a bit of headway at the beginning.

Communications just stopped, and we have a planning department.

Okay, got yeah, haven't heard anything since then.

Send an update asking for you know, conversation to start again, hasn't started.

So this was a pattern that I saw 25 years ago when we initiated this process and it resulted in the 25 year hiatus on the issue.

Got it.

Uh so we need direction, you know, keep going.

Okay, so wouldn't we?

I I am quite capable of training the work, but on TMP.

Okay, all right bring it back to TMP in two months and let everybody know that they have a deadline of two months.

Okay, great.

And so uh we notify them, we're supervisors.

Sean Wilson.

Sure, okay.

Very good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's how you get things done, go through Sean Wilson.

Yeah.

Understood.

Gina for public comment.

Maybe back in the nick of time.

Uh, this will be a sub-two-minute one.

Uh, back in February, there was an agenda item that contemplated um an ordinance that would allow best uh battery operated storage systems on Williamson Acklean.

And uh I didn't see it on this agenda list, and I just wanted to uh come and voice my support and hoping to hoping to see see it on the next.

I don't know for sure, but I think they went through the see the California Energy Commission.

I'm not I'm not working on that project in my office, but I believe that there's the support being done.

They may be going through the process that allows them to get approval from the CEC.

Oh okay, so they don't need us anymore.

They could go direct to the state of California.

That seems like it might be.

Okay.

And um I believe that they now that that's what they went.

Okay, cool.

You know those people you can call them up.

I'll figure it out.

Okay, that's it.

Thank you.

Any other speakers?

Andrew, Andrew Turnbull for public comment.

Yes, can you hear me okay?

Yes, okay.

Um, first of all, um, I sent you guys uh several of you, um, a picture of what it's like to be a public member of this meeting, and I think there needs to be a get well plan on the on the mic and mute issue.

Um, but I sent you that at your service.

Um worked much better for that.

Second, David Hobbert's comments in the meeting that um Dr.

Larry Gosden just resolved were very simple and concise.

Find out what the minimum requirements are for horse ag and I'm so thankful that he gave that guidance, but it's pretty clear is and and I want to uh without taking much of your time because I know we're in overtime.

Um Larry's exactly right, we're we're working on, we're we want to get that done.

We want um Alameda County to implement horses as ag and I really appreciate that I now know that the point of contact is the amazing uh Sean Wilson, and we're planning to rely on Sean to help us make this happen.

I hope that the um infrastructure within Alameda County, namely uh the planning group uh and all the people involved will take Sean's guidance and that we will continue to have the support of this group to recognize that just like everywhere that the flag flies, horses are agg.

And I really appreciate that.

Um the leaders in this meeting support agribusiness, and may the horse be with you.

I have no additional speakers for public comment.

Very good.

With that said, all this is before us has been achieved.

We are adjourned.

Thank you.