Well, good afternoon, everybody.

I'd like to welcome you all to the September twenty-seventh, two thousand eighteen meeting of our economic development and intergovernmental relations committee.

We're very excited for today's unique joint meeting with the members of the City of Tijuana's Commission on Tourism, Commerce, and Sister Cities.

And that these members have come here to join us today.

So let the record reflect that Chair Yvette Cassius Rivera to my right, and members Mirna Gonzalez Medina, Elbia Rangel Garcia, and Monica Juliana Vega Aguirre, as well as our Vice Chair Kercy and Council members Alvarez and Bree are present.

Also in attendance today are Deputy City Attorney Daffy Scogan, Denise Garcia from the Mayor's Office.

Ms.

Garcia, thank you so much for your assistance to bring together today's meeting.

Angela Colton from the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst and Committee Consultant Lucas O'Connor.

And as one note of housekeeping, I'd like to let everybody know that we have active Spanish translation that is going to be a part of this meeting as well.

So this note is mostly to myself, but if we can slow down our cadence uh just a notch to make sure that all members that need that translation are able to receive it in a timely fashion.

And anybody that is going to be presenting either public comment or from the dais in Spanish will have double the time per our Brown Act because we will also be translating that back into English.

Before we begin today, I wanted to thank our counterparts from Tijuana for joining us.

It's been several years from since we've had a joint meeting like this, and it's more important than ever to given I think the state of the world today.

San Diego and Tijuana have been doing amazing work to bring us all closer together across the border at a time when many forces are trying to separate us instead.

We've seen great outreach from the Chamber of Commerce and the mayor's office here to help foster these connections.

And I think that we've seen the economic benefits and the social benefits from that work.

Today's meeting and conversations is another opportunity to bring us all together, work more closely together, and strengthen our resolve to invest in one dynamic region and community.

We will begin today with the approval of the minutes, and the committee record of actions from this committee from July 26, 2018, will be approved by unanimous consent unless pulled for discussion.

Seeing none, those are so approved.

Next we will move on to non-agenda public comment, where members of the public will have two minutes to address the committee on an agenda on an item not on the agenda.

Today we have one member that wishes to speak, and that is Rob Gordon.

Mr.

Gordon, if you'd like to approach the podium, you will have two minutes.

Hi, and thank you.

I'm a little bit out of my element here, so please bear with me.

Uh my name is Rob Gordon.

I'm an independent professional.

I live and work in Pacific Beach.

And I've done some um low-level uh organizing of self-employed professionals.

And over time I've started to realize that it's really a large and growing community.

I've done some back of the envelope calculations and it's huge.

Hundreds of thousands, at least, maybe it's close to half millions million or more.

I did one calculation that even had that higher.

But they've gotten close to zero attention from the political and business establishment.

I mean close to zero.

Um as a result of this, I started kind of keeping an eye on economic development and what's going on.

And I was really kind of shocked at the lack of responsiveness by the city and my representatives to the point where I now say publicly, we're not represented at all.

Um I've got big files of letters and and and they're not nutcase letters, they're polite.

Um that nobody's answered.

Excuse me.

That nobody's answered.

Uh most recently I've been you know writing paper letters to the mayor asking only for a point of contact, nothing else in the economic development um arena, and uh no response.

Completely the opposite with the county.

They've been wonderful, even though they don't have an economic development group.

They treat me with respect.

They've even instituted some policy changes that I've recommended.

So um, so that's good.

So, real quickly, the 30 seconds, one minute.

This is our timer.

Oh, 26 seconds, okay.

Um, real quickly here, one thing I was shocked at is the lack of statistics.

Nobody knows if the number of startups are going up or down, and nobody knows um, and this is really bad.

Nobody o knows if the work hours per working age adults is going up or down.

They measure everything in jobs.

Jobs mean nothing anymore.

It's just not a good measure, and I've got five seconds, so I guess I'm not gonna say all I wanted to say.

So I'll listen for a while, but thank you for listening to what I had to say thought so far.

Thank you, Mr.

Gordon.