Okay, good evening.

This is the City of Belmont City Council and Belmont Fire Protection District Board of Directors special meeting agenda.

It is Tuesday, 20 June 25th, 2024, and uh we are live in our council chambers, and this meeting is broadcast live to Belmont residents on Comcast Cable Channel 27.

It is also streamed live via the city's website at www.belmont.gov, and the public is welcome to attend the meeting in the chambers and address the council from the chambers.

The first item of business is roll call.

Can we please have the role taken?

Of course.

Councilmember McCune.

Present.

Vice Mayor Lauder Merlin?

Yeah.

Mayor Mates.

Here.

We have a quorum of three.

Pang Maganaris and Hurt absent.

Great, thank you.

Item two, items of business.

Persons wishing to orally address the council on the items of business listed below will be given an opportunity to do so before or during the council's consideration of the item.

Item three is special presentations.

We are receiving an update on the city's diversity, equity and inclusion initiative in FY 2024.

We have with us our Parks of Directors and President Director and DEI official Bridget Shearer with us.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

I wanted to give you an update on this year's DEI or diversity equity inclusion activities and uh and discuss what we're planning for the coming year.

So as I mentioned, we're gonna talk about the initiative update, um, the goals and outcomes that we prepared for the year.

Um we're gonna look ahead at our city calendar uh of cultural events, etc.

Um so just to remind you, uh I know this is familiar to you on the council, um, this is the the uh DEI statement that our DEI committee uh prepared last year, and um it has um it still fits and um and is still appropriate for the work that we do here in Belmont.

So confirming that the City of Belmont values and celebrates a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace environment and commits to providing everyone an equal opportunity to thrive.

And as I've mentioned um to you in other occasions, um if we were to just remove the word workplace, um this would be an appropriate um DEI statement for uh the way we um deliver our services to the city as well.

So just a recap of our initiatives to date.

So in 2017, the council started with a resolution protecting civil rights for the community.

I was appointed as DEI officer in 21.

And since then we have uh engaged our uh a DEI consultant, um Irma Zeph sitting behind me here today, um, for uh to get us started on this effort.

We put together a steering committee, um, uh conducted a survey, uh established a working committee, and um started to identify some goals uh to improve our uh operations and interactions with the city with um uh more of a diversity, equity, and inclusive focus.

Um this year we've also implemented implemented more initiatives and programs and services beyond what our working committee was working on.

And just in general, as you'll see from the presentation here, Belmont's been um doing DEI type things and um and incorporated that concept into our programs, projects, services, activities, events, etc.

for a long time.

Um but it's but it's good for us and for the community to see all those sort of gathered under the DAI umbrella more formally.

So who's involved?

Uh again, we have our uh leadership, city council, um, city managers, senior management team, um overseeing this and and supporting the activities of the steering committee, the working committee, and the um staff and stakeholders.

We're doing our work by uh by having the steering committee sort of guide the efforts.

The working committee meets monthly, comes up with goals, and then implements those goals to make some incremental DEI improvements.

And then we share all those findings and activities with our city staff and with the community.

So this year we're calling it DEI 2.0, it's sort of the second year that we've been doing this more formally.

We had uh trainings with city staff.

One of them is foundations of DEI because we have quite a few new employees that didn't necessarily have the opportunity to experience that training the year before.

We also just recently had a discussion session called Handling Difficult Conversations, and that was actually very well received by the participants.

We had a training with senior management team and then a training sort of discussion session with council just a little over a month ago.

There have also been a lot of training opportunities outside of Belmont for our staff.

They've participated in California Park and Rec Society activities and conference sessions.

We've been able to participate in Redwood City and City and San Mateo County trainings, and there are uh there are lots of toolkits available that have been developed by other communities or the group of DEI officers of San Mateo County collaborate regularly to sort of so we don't all have to invent our own wheels.

We like to lean on each other's uh findings and work.

So uh internally, our DEI working committee 2.0 had a couple of goals to uh confirm a calendar of cultural and community recognition, develop a format for DEI updates for staff, develop and conduct an interest survey and plan an activity to foster staff uh unity and inclusiveness, identify resources for translation services, and identify and clarify how the city would reach out to underrepresented groups.

So now I'll walk through each goal and tell you where we ended up.

So goal one was developing and confirming a calendar of events.

So after conferring with other cities and the county about how they do this, just so we had some consistency uh across agencies, uh, we came up with sort of this categorization of holidays and recognitions, cultural and historical recognitions and other types of awareness that we in the city of Belmont wanted to promote.

And I'll show you that uh list of uh of events in just a moment.

What's next for us is to kind of develop a process uh sort of simplify and streamline a process for community engagement and leadership.

Um rather than the city of Belmont developing and hosting a lot of these kinds of activities and celebrations, um, we're looking to the community to come to us and bring their ideas to us so that the city of Belmont can provide the space and the logistics for these kinds of event.

But that way we're really better reflecting what the city wants and how they want those things to happen.