Good morning.

And welcome to the rules and legislation committee of Thursday.

January 15th.

Before I call roll, I will give speaker card instructions.

If you would like to speak on any item on this agenda, please fill out a speaker's card and give that card to a cleric representative before the item is called.

Or 10 minutes after the start of the meeting.

This meeting started at 10 31.

So your last opportunity to turn into speaker's crowd will be at 10 41 a.m.

Or before the item is called for discussion, whichever comes first.

Our role for this meeting are Council members Brown.

Present.

Councilmember Five.

Present.

Councilmember Ramachandron.

Excused.

And Chair Jenkins.

Do you have any announcements before we begin?

Yeah, happy founders say it's all my favorite AKAs.

That's it.

Now that we've sorted out everything that can be recycled or composted, let's cover what goes in the trash.

Soft and flimsy plastic, like food wrappers, used pens, sticker labels, label backings, loose plastic bags, and plastic food wrap.

Plastic utensils, straws, coffee cup lids, sauce packets, and styrofoam also go in the trash.

So should rubber and plastic gloves, hair nuts, disposable masks, and cleaning wipes.

Used batteries are collected separately, and these better receptacles.

When better receptacles get full, concept your custodial supervisor for proper disposal.

Office staff are expected to empty their own dust side receptacles into larger shared recycle compost and trash bins.

It feels good to compost and recycle and to put your trash where it belongs.

And it's so easy.

This website link, Oaklandrecycles.com, has all the information you need, including resources and more details about Oakland's compost and recycling program.

If you have any questions, you can always contact the recycling hotline at recycling at Oaklandca.gov.

Or 510-238 save.

And if you're not sure where something goes at home or at work, check out the resource website for disposal resources across Alameda County.

How can you make an impact and change the world?

One way to do that is through education and learning about issues that affect you.

At the Gralta Colleges, we have hundreds of classes to choose from.

Start by enrolling at one of our four Bay Area campuses, Berkeley City College, College of Alameda, Laney College, and Mary College.

Become part of the change in the world.

Classes are available online.

Enroll today at Peralta.edu.

Like your future at the Peralta Colleges.

Boys and girls, families and friends, the puppet show will begin in 15 minutes.

Just follow the yellow and ground past the Apple City stage to the storybook puppet theater on your right.

I am Randall Metz.

I'm the uh director for the Storybook Puppet Theater here in Children's Fairyland.

I think the big power in Fairyland and the big power in the puppet theater is imagination.

And as long as we have kids, we're gonna have imagination.

We have the wall.

Mainly here at Fairyland we do stuff from uh fairy tales, children's literature and things.

Lewis, he used to travel the world every year.

He went away to a different country, and he'd come back and he'd say, okay, we're gonna do something from Poland now.

Or one year he came back and went to Alaska.

Guess what?

We're gonna do an Alaskan Indian tale.

Uh but uh he traveled the world looking for fairy tales.

Well, I just knocked on the door of the puppet theater at 10 years old and said, I want to be a puppeteer.

And after he closed the door, I went away and then I came back and tried it a couple more times.

Finally he said, Well, if I could get rid of this guy, might as well train him.

So uh Lewis Mallman took me on as an apprentice, and I've worked with him for 45, 46 years.

Puppets though.

Very silly.

Yeah.

This is Frognouncer.

Rats all over the place.

So they're kind of fun.

Children's Fairyland is one of the first parks of its kind, opened in 1950.

It's based on children's literature, also, and it was designed at a time period when kids didn't have anything.

So Oakland put together Fairyland and gave families a place to come for children to explore uh storybook settings with all the houses and all the sets being their height.

So this is their world.

Adults have to step down and bend over to get into buildings and such.

And this is, of course, empowers a child because they like nothing better than see their parents crawling into a little area that they just run ahead of them in.

And part of the puppet theater is again miniature things coming to life.

That's exactly what we do here at Fairyland.

Giving your child a strong start against the moment they're born.

Talk with them, read with them.

Sing and count with them.

Talking, reading, singing, and counting to your child are simple ways you can bond with them, help strengthen their brains and bodies and protect their health.

Your voice, your hugs, your love, build resilience, and protect against the harmful effects of stress.

So as California's surgeon general, this is my prescription.

Go to First Life California.

Become a champion at the Peralta Community College District.

We have four convenient locations.

Berkeley City College, College of Alameda, Laney College, and Merritt College.

You can even study online.

Enroll today at Peralta.edu.

Build, learn, play, grow, and become a champion at the Pralta Community College District.

What you flush down the toilet has a major impact all the way to the bay.

Despite marketing claims, flushable wipes are not so flushable.

Unlike toilet paper, wipes do not break down in water.

They clump together in sewer systems and clog sewage treatment equipment.

I'm a wastewater treatment plant operator here at uh East Bay Muds treatment plant.

And I'm begging you, please do not flush your flushable wipes.

Uh throw them in the trash van.

Even when they do make it here to the plant, it clogs up our equipment.

And we end up spending a lot of uh time and energy cleaning this equipment.

We'd much rather spend treating Waveswater to the best of our abilities to protect San Francisco Bay.

Think before you flush.

If it's not one of the three Ps, toss it in the trash.

Hi, my name is Ethan Beery, and this is Battery Wynne, the director of Different Park Recreation Center, right here in West Oakland.

I'm the co-founder of Ethan Berry Inc.

Nonprofit, and we have a program here called Code Forward Academy.

With that program, we want to reach the students K through college and help the parents and guardians with helping the kids learn how to read, write, and do math and comprehend those things at a 12th grade level so they can prepare to go to college.

Hi, I'm Rondolyn McClintock, known as Ronnie, and I'm the founder and executive director of the scholarship club.

Well the program actually ties in very well to the mission of EBI in that we promote digital literacy.

We work with students to use their technology for things that are going to be helpful to them, not just entertaining.

I'm Marlani Williams.

I'm 14 years old.

I currently go to Oakland Technical High School.

I've been in this coding group for a little while now, I think since the last year, 2015.

We've been talking about like pixelation and binary code and um hexadecimal code.

That's what we've been talking about lately.

Educating the youth is obviously very important, and I feel that we are losing so many of our youth.

Part of what I try to do is to help them to look into themselves to think about who who am I and what do I want in this world?

What do I want to create?

What do I bring?

Science is a part of everything.

Um people used to just think, oh, science is mixing up some chemicals and voila, you have some experiment going on.

But science is it lives everywhere.

And so it's important to be able to negotiate, to communicate, to have all the soft skills, leadership skills, all these things are important for everyone in every industry, but more importantly, I believe is important for scientists.

We do skill set training, teach these kids how to play basketball.

Again, I came up with the mindset because everybody knows when you throw a basketball in your hand, you know how to dribble, you know how to pass, you know how to shoot, but do you know how to play?

So that playing thing also goes into life because sooner or later you're gonna have employees, you're gonna have teamwork, you're gonna have you know people who you have to work with.

So we have to really take the lead and show these kids by demonstrating to them that we care and that we love them, but at the same time, they have to put in the work, and hopefully, we can be of some support to their families as well.

I'm my lane Garcia, I'm the City of Oakland's online engagement manager, and I'm here with Darlene Flynn, uh, our director of race and equity.

So I'm gonna ask you a few questions about um life here in Oakland, but before after, and maybe some things that you see.

Great for forthcoming.

So I don't know.

How would you say that some of your friends and family would describe you?

They would describe me as outgoing, an extrovert, yeah.

Yeah, and I um someone that's passionate about the work that I do and uh has a real uh attention span for it and some longevity and resiliency around looking at hard issues of race and racism.

Where did you grow up?

Seattle, Washington.

Okay.

And can you talk a little bit about maybe was there any sort of moments or anything that um happened to you or inspired you to sort of come into the work that you're doing now?

Well, I think that it's possible that my racial identity has something to do with it.

And growing up in Seattle, Washington, which was a fairly progressive part of the country, but actually has all the same challenges with racial inequity that the rest of the country does.

So it has one persona and another outcome.

And I grew up there in a mixed-race family.

My mother was white, my father was African American.

So although we were a mixed family, I grew up in a time where the city was strongly segregated, and where everybody who was a person of color lived in one neighborhood of the city.

And because we were a mixed family, my father was black, that was the neighborhood I grew up in, very much immersed in the black community and close to my black family.

And uh yet in a city that was uh 70% white, uh, generally much more well off than the community that I grew up in, and yet saw itself as being progressive and above the need for a racial conversation.

You worked in labor previously, you did some work in the labor community.

Um you did some advocacy work and activism.

Yes.

Um, and then you decided to come into government, which I think for those of us that have worked in advocacy before is quite a switch.

Well, yes, it is, it doesn't happen that often, but it happens more often than you might think.

I think in my particular case, my advocacy work that I did in the community was really more community advocacy, neighborhood advocacy, uh, and school work work around equity in schools.

So my labor stuff came later when I actually was a public employee and became the president of my labor union in the city, in the government union that I was a member of in Seattle.

So my there is labor work in there, but it actually came later.

My original work was more local government activism, right, and particularly around land use and planning issues.

Okay.

And that caused me to go to to be offered a job working for a council member that was the chair of the land use committee.

And so he got to know me through my community work.

So that was my activism there, and he also had a strong interest in education, which pushed me more in that direction because I staffed his education issues as well.

So it was a great, it was a great fit because I had been interested in how government impacts land use and communities and neighborhoods when I was on the outside, and then I got to be on the inside working with the policymaker who was working on those issues.

Right.

Yeah.

And then fast forward to now, now you're in Oakland.

So what do you think you're bringing from that life to Oakland?

Well, following that beginning of my world in public service, I eventually ended up joining the Office for Civil Rights in the city of Seattle and helping to start their race and equity initiative about 12 years ago, 13 years ago now.

And they didn't have one, no one in that no city in the country had one.

And so I got to be part of the originating team that began to structure what this work was going to look like for the city of Seattle.

And I think that that there's a in between there was a lot of time that I worked in policy in different departments after I worked for the council member and got to understand how government and race and racism and racial inequity, how they worked together, how they worked not necessarily in a way that creates greater equity for communities that have for you know hundreds of years been marginalized.

So the deeper I got into doing public policy work, the more I came to understand what public policy work had to do with race and equity.

And so I got to bring that lifetime of experience and that overview of policy work for 15 years or so by then into that realm of thinking explicitly about how does policy impact people's lives in marginalized communities and what can we do about it.

And what do you think you're most excited about that's happening in Oakland now?

And what do you think is probably most challenging?

Most excited about.

There is so much happening in Oakland.

It's really hard to choose one thing.

This is very much a movement city, it's an activist city, and I think that that's exciting and has a lot of has a lot of opportunity in it for making a difference and challenging the structures here that are not dissimilar from the structures that I had encountered in Seattle.

Um but I think Oakland's history around civil rights and being a leader on the West Coast, um, it doesn't surprise me that now Seattle was the first city in in the country to have a race and equity initiative, but now Oakland is the first city in California.

So it's a huge opportunity once again for Oakland to lead in this really important way.

I think the challenge that we encounter is that government in general, not specifically Oakland government, but government in general has not actually been particularly aligned with or responsive to the profound level of activism that we experience here in Oakland.

So there's a disconnect between what the community can bring us, the richness of perspective and ideas and determination and sheer grit here in Oakland, I think.

It's a very spirited city.

There's a disconnect between that, what the community has, which is incredibly valuable, and what the government has, which is government power and a lot of government decision making.

So the challenge is to from the approach that we're using to change government to reorient government enough to be able to see the opportunity to create equity by working with community differently, by examining our own policies, practices, and procedures, and how they perpetuate or re-inscribe racial disparity and changing them.

So it's it's a more proactive stance, but it's a proactive stance that will move us toward community and into closer alignment with what the community is asking us for.

So that's incredibly exciting, also incredibly challenging because we're talking about steering city government around enough that those connections can be made.

And that doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen easily.

Change isn't easy even on the personal level.

So when you think about change at the institutional level, you know that it's going to take a fair amount of practice and learning new skills and knowledge that we don't currently have that we need to take in, new ways of doing things that make it easier for the city to get better outcomes.

And that's a process.

So we need a strategy, and that's that's what I that's what I brought because that's what I've been doing for a decade or more, is developing the strategies that can be used in cities to make a difference.

And we're notorious, governments are notorious for not having enough resources, that's communities, right?

Public service agencies, advocates, we're always looking for more resources.

So if you had unlimited resources, what what would you do?

Probably really I would just replicate uh the activity in my office a little bit more.

I would add a little bit of staff, I would add some more staff.

I don't think that ultimately that's the that's not the destination is to have a big staff of people leading racial equity work.

But I think we could move faster if there was more of our capacity to spread around the city.

So with there's just two of us in the department, yeah, and so we just run run from you know one thing to the next as fast as we can.

And I I know we're making a difference.

I can tell we're making a difference, but I also see the big gaps in places that we haven't been able to touch yet, or infrastructure and capacity building work that we haven't done yet, because there's only two of us.

So I really do think the first thing I do would be have just a little bit more capacity in the department to work with the other departments to build their capacity, at which point we would have more synergy and things would begin to move faster.

We'll get there anyway.

It will just take a little longer.

And uh faster would be better because this work is it's life-saving work, it is life and safety work.

We always talk about that in the city, like that's our highest priority.

But racism actually kills, uh, and it doesn't kill necessarily the way we think of it necessarily, quickly, fast, you know, uh, at the wrong end of a gun or something like that.

It actually also has a devastating effect on people's life expectancy, on uh the quality of life and their ability to contribute to society slowly, like a slow, oftentimes people refer to it as the thousand cuts, the thousand little cuts, you know, of uh racial disparity.

And so this work, however big or small we can do it, is actually about saving people's lives and changing people's lives.

So you're talking about a long range of success and work.

And then there's also the success that you're starting to feel now.

So, what are you seeing now that you know that you're making a difference, and what are the signs of things to come in the future?

Well, I think that what has ex what has been hopeful for me since the moment I got here is the willingness of people in city government to take this on, to do this work, to learn, to try new new skills, new tools, to uh think differently, to be willing to have their their uh assumptions uh shaken up so that we can think about it differently.

Incredibly welcoming, people are so ready for it, which is why I think having being able to reach more people faster would make a difference because people are asking for this support.

They would like to be more successful.

People who work in the city of Oakland really want to perform equitably and they want government to do the best it can do to uh help people in their lives, and so there's a great deal of willingness, and that makes me very hopeful because I'm not uh I'm not having to you know knock down doors to do this work.

I'm my problem is running from one door to the other as quickly as I can because people are really ready, and that's exciting.

Thanks, Darlene.

It was great having you, and we look forward to seeing what you do next.