Work session on Avenida Diaz Equitable Development Strategy.

Thanks to all of you who are here in attendance and to the staff who's going to brief us, welcome.

And I'll turn it over to Robbie Hannon.

Thank you, Mayor Pace.

Good evening, everyone.

A few months, I guess a couple of months ago at this point, we uh had a work session on the kind of first half of this.

And tonight we're excited to kind of share the outcome of uh the equitable uh development strategy for Avenue Didias.

I want to thank Justin and Edmund for all their work uh with our consultants and all the engagement that they've done.

And so um tonight it's kind of a high level summary of that report.

Um, if any council members have any kind of detailed questions, we'd be happy to kind of take those offline as well if you want to dig into anything specific uh throughout the report as well.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Justin.

And actually, speaking of the questions, Justin, you wanted to hold questions till certain sections, is that right?

Yes.

So I think a couple of real logical break points is uh we'll consider sort of the four main um buckets within the equitable development strategy.

Okay, maybe pause there, then do a little bit of a deeper dive for the police uh department block site, pause after that one too.

I think that those will be a couple of the the probably the most logical places to take a little breather and then we can field questions and then of course at the end.

Right, and at the end, and if there's any deep, deep questions, we can always email them as Robbie said.

Okay.

Take it away.

All right.

Well, for the record, uh Dustin DeMello, senior project manager for uh economic and community development, and I'd like to introduce Edma as well.

Good evening, uh Mayor and Council.

My name is Edna Castillo, and I'm a project manager in economic and community development.

As uh Robbie said, it's uh it's hard to believe that already two months has passed since we were last here for the Avenida Diaz uh work session.

Uh it feels like it was just a couple of weeks ago.

Um, but uh we we are back.

Uh this time, of course, uh uh we have the the document that was shared uh with you all, I think uh a week or two ago.

And uh as Robbie uh mentioned in his introduction, um, we're more than happy to dive deeper and take any sort of in-depth questions or or conversations that you may like to have or ask you know offline if we need to dig deeper.

But of course, tonight's a good forum for that as well.

So we'll do a still a relatively high overview this time, not of the entire Avenida Diaz program.

That was the work session back in June where we talked a lot about uh some of the uh uh diverse goals of the program.

We talked a little bit about the engagement that has taken place uh to date.

Tonight, really the focus is is much more focused on this document, the equitable development strategy document itself.

Uh, and uh the 20 actions that are contained, the the proposed uh and recommended actions that are contained in the document with an eye toward adoption uh later this fall.

So um the document is still very much a draft.

Um there are sections of it that in my own opinion still need a little bit of work.

So uh don't hesitate in in sharing please your your feedback.

We wanted to get a draft uh to you that was in an early enough state that you could uh really engage uh early with the draft, but also which was developed enough that it was worth your time to review.

So we've we've tried to hit that target, and I hope and I hope that we have.

So uh we'll do a quick slide here to the next one.

Yeah, so tonight uh the agenda really is to talk about the equitable development strategy itself, uh, how the various strategies were uh developed, a little bit about the organization of the document, and then a quick overview um of some of the some of the the strategies.

We won't go uh deep.

And then I hope to carve out a substantial amount of time at the end to talk a little bit more about um the early planning, and I want to reiterate that early uh in the process, but yet planning for uh future redevelopment of the uh city-owned property on the corner of 10th and in Washington.

That certainly is part of this document where we can go a little bit uh deeper.

And then uh we'll conclude uh tonight uh with uh a brief overview again of the next steps, uh process and policy steps toward uh adoption of the strategy later this later this fall.

And Justin, would you mind pulling the mic closer to you?

Not at all.

Yeah, thank you.

My apologies, Mayor.

I've been told uh every presentation I've ever given that I need to speak up.

And so I continue to try to work on that.

But in the meantime, I'll pull the mic closer as well.

So thank you for that, Mayor.

Uh as usual, we'd like to uh ground the presentation uh in existing policy.

I think this slide was seen from last time too, so I won't spend a lot of time on it.

But reiterating the main point that especially as it relates to downtown, a lot of the policy goals upon which these specific actions are based, uh, have been part of our planning framework for many, many years, especially in the downtown framework plan and the downtown urban uh renewal area plan.

And really the program purpose we covered in that presentation back in June, so I won't uh spend any further time on that either.

Uh I'll take our first break there uh in case anybody has questions on the outline of the agenda or anything else that you'd like to ask before we start diving in a little deeper.

Any questions?

All right, let's keep going.