Welcome to our special council meeting today, Wednesday, July twenty third, twenty twenty five.

Go ahead and call the meeting to order and pass it to Clementine for roll call and to share announcements at the public.

Councilmember Barber, present.

Councilmember Garcia.

Here.

Councilmember Rash here.

Councilmember Smith.

Present.

And Mayor Williamson.

Here.

And public comment and participation information is provided on our meetings agenda, which is online at monterey.gov/slash agendas.

In-person attendees, please keep your electronic devices and phones muted to prevent audio interference.

And thank you for participating in your city government.

Thank you, Clementine.

With that, I will pass it to Dr.

Barber to kick us off with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ready?

Yeah.

I have a question.

To the Republic.

It's just advanced.

Under God.

And indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

All right.

Thank you, Dr.

Barber.

With that, we'll go to our public appearance item number one on the agenda is to amend and resubmit to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the draft fiscal year 2529 consolidated plan and draft fiscal year 2526 annual action plan for the community development block grant program to comply with federal executive orders and authorize the city manager to make administrative changes requested by HUD.

With that, I'll pass it to Hans for staff presentation.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Again, uh you you uh read it absolutely correct.

We are under the gun to comply with federal executive orders, and that is uh the uh the intent of this agenda report and our uh housing manager um Anastasia Wyatt will present to you a brief staff report.

Good evening, mayor and council.

I'm here to present, thank you.

On May 6th, you uh approved our action plan, annual action plan and consolidated plan for HUD.

And uh we received notice back from HUD on Friday.

We have six days to uh make these amendments and provide them back to HUD by tomorrow.

So um HUD is requesting that we remove any uh DEI equity um statements from our plan, which includes data that we are taking out, and that is presented to you today, and we um this all of the changes in the plan meet.

We also needed to make assurance statements that meet the executive orders required by this administration, and we have also um within the plan not changed any of the important funding recommendations that were approved.

It's these administrative changes.

That concludes my report.

No questions.

We'll go ahead and open up for public comment.

So for those that are maybe unfamiliar, I'm just gonna share with you how public comment works.

We identify those that want to speak during public comment at the beginning of the public comment period.

We identify the folks that want to speak during public comment at the beginning of the public comment period.

Once those folks are identified, we close it off and only those folks get to speak.

So at this point, I'll check with folks on Zoom.

You can navigate your way over to the raise hand function.

Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item?

All right, seeing none, we'll go ahead and do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one.

And there's one on Zoom, so we'll go ahead and take that public commentary, give them their three minutes.

Go ahead.

Good afternoon.

Just a short point.

It's kind of ironic that we just made a big deal about acknowledging the indigenous um settlers and the you know, because of what was going on with the new um 100% affordable housing that we're building, and now we have to put up with this um basically steps back, uh, a century with this DEI thing because of the current administration.

Hopefully, um it will be reversed soon, but it is pretty embarrassing.

Thanks.

Okay, thank you, Esther.

With that, we'll go ahead and close public comment, bring it back to the council for motion and deliberation.