I'm Kevin Wilk, Mayor of the City of Walnut Creek, and welcome to the regular meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council.

The City Council is conducting this meeting from the City Council chamber.

This meeting is being video streamed and can be viewed live or later on the city's website.

As some attendees may be participating in their first Walnut Creek City Council meeting, I wanted to welcome everyone and talk briefly about the public comment process.

For each agenda item, there will be an opportunity for public comment on the item.

Thus, if you desire to speak to an item on the agenda this evening, please hold your comments until the city council considers that item.

Additionally, we have a section on the agenda titled Public Communications, which is for public comments for items not on the agenda.

Any comments during public communication should not relate to an item that is on the agenda this evening.

Consistent with section 9.5 of the City Council Handbook, 30 minutes will be initially allocated for public communications for items not on the agenda.

Additional time for public communications for items not on the agenda will be provided at the end of the open session portion of the meeting if necessary.

If you desire to provide a public comment, please complete a speaker identification card and line up behind the lectern at the appropriate time.

Wait your turn, and then when you approach the lector, please state your name and city of residence for the record.

You will have two minutes to address the city council.

Please keep in mind that this is a city business meeting.

The City Council has adopted rules of decorum to ensure that meetings are conducted efficiently and effectively, and that all members of the public have a full, fair, and equal opportunity to be heard.

The city council handbook outlines decorum expected in the council chamber and can be found on our website.

All remarks should be addressed to the city council.

Please do not use threatening, profane, or abusive language, which disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of the council meeting.

Again, each speaker will have two minutes to make your remarks.

Written comments submitted and received up to two hours before the meeting have been posted to the city's website for public review and are included in the meeting record, but will not be separately read into the record.

I'm Kevin Wilk, Mayor of the City of Walnut Creek, and welcome to the Tuesday, June 16th regular meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council.

And if I could now ask if the British please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Whereas on June 1st, I'm sorry, January 1st, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation officially ending slavery, changing the status of more than three and a half million enslaved African Americans in the Confederate States of America.

However, over two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 to inform enslaved African Americans of General Order No.

3, the people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.

This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection between existing between then becomes that between employer and hired laborer.

And so Juneteenth, also known as Juneteenth Independence Day, emancipation day, emancipation Celebration, freedom day, is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.

It's a painful chapter in American history that also serves as an opportunity for us to recommit ourselves to combat all forms of modern day slavery, human trafficking, and racial injustice, as well as to continue to fight for freedom.

And whereas the city of Walnut Creek commemorates the anniversary of Juneteenth in recognition and celebration of the great contributions that African Americans have made to the United States, California, and the City of Walnut Creek, and therefore I, Kevin Wilk, mayor of the City of Walnut Creek, on behalf of the Walnut Creek City Council to hereby proclaim June 19th, 2026 as Juneteenth National Freedom Day, and encourage the community to honor and reflect on the significant role that African Americans have played in the history of the United States and how they have enriched society through their steadfast commitment to promoting unity and equality.

And well, I think that just deserves a round of applause right there.

So and Nicole, if you'd like to say a few words on behalf of uh yourself, the chamber, and what June 17th is.

Yes, absolutely.

Thank you, Mayor Wilk and City Council members.

Thank you very much for this pro proclamation.

I brought some supporters here.

I brought um my cousin Aaron Robertson, who does business in Walnut Creek.

So welcome, Aaron, and uh Wilson Stevens, who also is an entrepreneur in Walnut Creek and a new business owner in Walnut Creek, tell me your name.

And her your business.

Absolutely.

So they showed up here very happy for the proclamation, and we welcome all of them as chamber members, and we're just excited to be here to receive this.

Wonderful.

Well, thank you, and thank you for attending.

Well, why don't we take a picture to make sure that we get this word out?

You didn't know you guys are going to get remote.

Right, you go to oh, there's a mighty amount of that one.

I only call out all the media, don't worry.

I'm usually a little bit of a little bit of a yeah, right here.

Okay.

I think you're kind of lost.

Okay, one, two, and I got one.

All right.

Next on the agenda is the consent calendar.

Does any council member wish to pull an item for discussion?

Or any member of staff wish to pull an item for discussion.

2 F.

2 F.

I will pull to G.

Anybody else?

Okay.

Does any member of the public wish to comment on an item on the consent calendar?

As a reminder, each speaker will have two minutes to make their remarks.

Written comments submitted have been posted to the city's website for public review and are included in the meeting record, but will not be separately read into the record.

And I don't see any speakers.

So I'll ask the council if anyone would like to make a motion with regard to the consent calendar for those items that have not been pulled.

Move to approve items 2A through 2E.

Second.

We have a motion and a second.

Elena.

Councilmember DeVinny.

Hi.

Councilmember Darling.

Hi.

Councilmember Silva.

Hi.

Mayor Prothem Francois.

Hi.

And Mayor Wilk.

Hi.

All right.

So now we've uh so let's go to item two F.

Councilmember Davin.

Yeah, so I I said a quick question for Arts and Rec.

Um it looks like this, and it sounds like a um looks like Lifetime Tennis has done a great job managing these courts, you know, positive uh feedback and um positive report and the agenda report.

When I was reading about the financial agreement, just made me uh wonder uh if we're we there's a there's a 700 over 700,000 in profit we share five percent above that is that what that says that's correct so that it it reads as if there's quite a bit of profit made there and it makes me wonder if have we explored running that from an arts and rec standpoint if it's really that profitable or we've looked into it and it doesn't really make sense to do so.

Sure so a lot of expenses are absorbed by their company um overhead that isn't included in this bottom line so for example their marketing is shared across multiple locations and so those kinds of costs that we would be absorbing on our own would be far more expensive than their shared resources that they are um looking at so to be fair though we haven't looked at that for probably six to seven years so as we are preparing to launch into the RFQ RFP process that is an analysis that we could make at that time as well and so just to clarify for everyone the my question again it was to be we pay six um they pay us sixty seven thousand five hundred to have the courts correct and then they run them and then if they make over seven hundred thousand we share five percent of that profit over over seven hundred so it sounds like they've got a lot of operating expenses and a lot of other things that they're they're paying for that would be questionably profitable for us to take over okay well as long as we'll be exploring that in the future sure yep thanks yes thank you as long as you've answered a question I have a question on this in the same way what um employees and services do they provide they're not just opening and closing the courts correct what are you so they also provide instruction and then all of the US uh the national tournament structures so the city is not responsible for providing those opportunities for the residents so whether it's a class it's an instruction or it's a league play tournament play they are managing all of that as well and this is similar to the outside golf course expert that runs boundary oak for very similar okay great thank you I don't see any more questions uh councilmember Davin would you like to make a motion?

Yeah move to uh approve item uh two F uh as written in the agenda report second we have a motion to second Alan if you call the role please Councilmember Davin aye council member darling aye council member silva aye mayor pro tem Francois and Mayor Wilk aye motion carries right so next is item two G and I pulled this one uh not so much because I have an issue with it but uh this is regarding a thirty thousand dollar payment from Chick fil A for traffic calming measures uh in the traffic impact mitigation fees fund.

I see Matt Redmond thanks for coming on behalf of public works and transportation so I'm really I haven't heard of any traffic issues that have been going on in that area where Trick filet now is I've driven by a number of times I checked the parking lot there isn't uh uh doesn't seem to be impacted in the parking lot in fact there's always spaces right there next to Chick fil A so I'm just curious um what kind of traffic calming measures are we looking at and I don't need the specifics but just like in general what we normally think about that kind of an area yeah sure um Matt Redman traffic engineer for the city um so I think in front of Chick fil A on citrus there I think there could be some additional vertical delineators that prevent the U-turn where the sign is that's kind of the main issue that I've heard of from residents and and people in the area but I think since we have this fun these funds we can also use that to improve some crosswalks in the neighborhood there um and just enhance safety around the school okay that that's great yeah I actually living in the area and of course there were a lot of concern among residents I have really not heard of any concerns from residents or neighbors or people that have said that there is problems with traffic with signals or or really almost anything else uh I would certainly hear about that being in that area.

So interesting how things turn out.

Well, great job to public works to playing department to the council for a very long meeting on that night when we were really going over everything with a fine-tooth comb.

So thanks.

Appreciate that and look forward to seeing the improvements.

And with that, I'll make a motion to approve item 2G.

And I'll second.

We have a motion to second.

Councilmember DeVinny.

Hi.

Council member darling.

Aye.

Council member Silva.

Hi.

Mayor Pro Tem Francois.

Hi.

And Mayor Wilk.

Hi.

All right.

Moving right along.

Next on the agenda is public communications.

This portion of the meeting is reserved for comments and items not on the agenda.

Under the Brown Act, the council cannot act on items raised during public communication, but may respond briefly to statements made or questions posed, request clarification, or refer the item to staff.

Consistent with section 9.5 of the City Council Handbook, 30 minutes will be allocated at this time for public communications for items not on the agenda.

Additional time for public communications for items not on the agenda will be provided at the end of the meeting if necessary.

Written comments submitted have been posted to the city's website for public review and are included in the meeting record, but will not be separately read into the record.

So at this time I'll note that the time is 6.15, and we'll take public comments on items not on the agenda until approximately 6.45, and then the remainder of any such comments at the end of the open session portion of the meeting.

So this is the time to speak.

If anybody has any items on public uh public communication for not on the agenda, please come up to the podium, line up along the left side, and uh state your name and city.

You're first.

Come on up.

Thank you.

I think I'm quite nervous.

No worries.

Is it does it start now?

Whenever you start with your name and city.

Oh, okay, yes.

My name is Alex Williams.

I'm from uh Walnut Creek, California.

I was uh born here in 1987 over in um John Near Hospital off of Ignatio.

Um I wanted to speak to you on behalf of an item or an idea that um sits in the heart of my generation that they um remember and recall uh with Walnut Creek.

So if I may give you this speech if that's appropriate.

Oh, the time, great.

Mayor Wilk, members of the city council and my fellow neighbors.

You know, it's been said that the public comment periods are reserved for airing of grievances, and heaven knows we have enough potholes to keep us busy.

But tonight I didn't come to look at the ground, I came to ask you to look up, look back, and remember who we are.

I want to talk about a long-standing resident of this town who's been part of our story since 1911, but has been quiet for far too long, and that is uh King Walnut.

If you remember, if you remember him.

Um now we have uh wonderfully dynamic and forward-looking council, and I believe your youthfulness is not a sign of an experience, but a magnificent opportunity, a chance to bridge the vibrant future you're building with its uh the timeless wisdom of our elders like King Walnut.

And some might look at our history and see a bygone era, but those of us who remember when uh Barnes and Nobles had a second floor that was beautifully air conditioned with a cafe will know better.

And we know that King Walnut represents the very soul of Walnut Creek.

The generations before us didn't just want to build houses, they built a community where civic pride meant something tangible in our rush toward modern progress.

We must never make the error of thinking that new is always better.

Um a town that forgets its roots loses its footing.

Bringing back King Walnut is not about resisting change, but preserving the character and warmth that made us want to raise our families here in the first place.

Um, is that it?

He is a symbol of the treasure and the whimsy and the unique identity they that sparked the fire in our hearts during our childhood and reminding us of the Twilight Parade, the Walnut Festival, and the pure joy of growing up here.

So let's breathe new life into this classic icon for our public squares so future generations can share in the same sense of wonder.

Let us make the city once again a shining example of a community that honors its past while confidently stepping into the future.

Let's bring back the fun.

Let's bring back the heritage and let's bring back King Walnut.

Thank you, and God bless you.

Hey, thank you, Alex.

And well, first of all, he called us youthful.

So right there he's got us on his side.

And he might not realize that many people have often thought that Mayor Pro Tem Francois just might be King Walnut.

We'd no know.

We would never be spotted in the same place.

It's never been splattered in the same line.

Uh I, you know, uh, you bring up an interesting point because I think a lot of people also uh conflate a bit between the city of Walnut Creek and Walnut Festival, um, parade.

And then we'll get your we have your contact information, I think, and then we'll figure something out.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, good evening Dan Buckshaw City Manager.

Yes, the Walnut Festival Association has a has run the previous Walnut Parade as well as the annual festival that would be at Heather Farm.

And so they are an independent entity that has coordinated that for years.

Obviously, some city streets and coordination occur, but they have uh led this, they've chosen for the last several years not to bring the parade back.

Certainly there's the option to do that, but they've not pursued that at this time.

And then with the festival that occurs with all the construction that's occurring at Heather Farm Park, it's temporarily relocated, but would certainly be welcome back once the construction's done out there.

So I think we'll do Alex.

We have uh they have a website.

There there is a website, although I'm not again I'm not sure if they're active and if they're even planning on anything.

Okay, so uh check the Walnut Creek Festival website.

Um you can try emailing contact and um see if you can uh connect with anybody, and on our end, we'll we'll keep your information on file as well.

And so anybody that's in the communication or arena where there should be some discussion about the reinstitution of the Walnut Festival or Walnut Parade, we'd all be very interested in that happening, but we'll keep that on hand.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for coming.

Do we have any more people for public communication?

All right, seeing none, yeah.

Seeing none, we'll close public communication.

And we will be moving right along now to council member and staff announcements, reports on activities or requests.

Um, start with city attorney.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor.

Welcome.

I want a report of an action by the council to prior closed session.

At the closed session on March 13th, 2026, the city council by a five-zero vote uh concurred with the MPA Karma and the excess insurance companies to enter into a settlement agreement to resolve the Chulin bot versus City of Walnut Creek litigation.

Um we're reporting this a little bit later than the event because it took a few months to put the the final settlement terms together with the parties, but that has now been completed.

Okay, thank you very much.

City manager reports.

Uh I do not have an update this evening, Mayor.

Okay, let's uh we'll swing to this.

Actually, we're gonna start with Councilmember Darling reports.

Thank you.

Um couple interesting things this month.

Um DRAA had the business leaders um event uh up on the stage at Lethsher, which was always a lot of fun, and they brought in a couple musicians, and we got around a chance to visit about how important the business community and the arts community cooperating is.

Um I won't talk about the mayor's conference because that's your job.

Um, and then I helped sell tickets at art and wine until my little ticket selling fingers were sore.

Um it was a beautiful day, it was nowhere near as hot as last year, and so it looked like everybody had a really good time.

Um, the other thing that I got to do this month, I I am the representative on um MCE for the city of Walnut Creek, and we have an ad hoc committee that has been working to provide coordination and oversight over short-term power contracts that they're buying.

They are the electric utility for most of us here in Walnut Creek.

They go out and buy the electricity, it comes through the PGE lines to your house, and it's a greener product with uh local control.

Um and so I got to sit in on, I get to sit in with all these power nerds, and so they had run a solicitation for power to help us hedge during the summer months because you can never predict how much electricity people are gonna use in the summer, so they always buy a little bit extra.

And they had gone out in an open solicitation and gotten back contracts, and the good news is the prices that they got in that solicitation were very reasonable.

One was well below what we had in our budget, and I think we're gonna save a couple million dollars on that particular acquisition.

So that was fun to see that one from beginning to end.

And then lastly, I got to go see jagged little pill and it was really fun and I love Alanis Morissette and her music.

And so I didn't sing along too much but it was fun.

Thank you Councilmember Silva.

I'll pick up where Councilmember Darling left off and say that yes as the liaison to the Diablo Regional Arts Association which is the fundraising partner for the Leisure Center for the Arts I too saw jagged little pill last week you have until June 28th to get tickets the house was full and it is a moving musical and so that it was really important to see so I strongly recommend that and while you're there you can also get in on the Aztec stories at the Bedford gallery.

Both of them closed the last day is June 28th so there's no time to waste on that.

Diablo Regional Arts Association had its um bi-monthly board meeting a couple of weeks ago three things to note for my council colleagues it's um on Broadway is October 3rd and planning is well underway they are using a new auctioneer this year and we got to talk to them as part of the board meeting and they are having a big fundraising plan that really what they raise funds for is to support the arts in Walnut Creek at the Leisure Center but also the arts access programs which provide arts programs and experiences for underserved youth across Contra Costa County so very important work.

So and I will mention that they're also in the process of hiring a new development director for the association.

Who's the current one?

Heard me?

Who's the current development director?

There hasn't been one for a while I think the um yes I sold tickets at art and wine I don't think I lost any money.

Very important right but I wasn't drinking any wine while I was trying to sell tickets.

That's very important.

I was not drinking wine the um on behalf of the city of Walnut Creek and as liaison to um Walnut Creek Sister Cities organization I attended the eighth US China Sister Cities Summit.

It was a couple of Fridays ago in San Francisco.

This was the second time I had the opportunity to attend this summit.

The first time was actually when I was in China in Shanghai in 2023.

It's a one day summit and the bottom line is they bring a lot of people in from China there are a lot of people in from across the country in the United States they're trying to encourage um friendship between our cities in China and our cities here and encouraging people to establish relationships sister city relationships with Chinese cities.

That's an amazing feat because Chinese cities there are corollary city for a city of 70 thousand people which is what we are would be two to three million in size so there's nothing small like we are so um also Walnut Creek Sister Cities had their annual meeting a couple of Sundays ago it was well attended it was a picnic in Redgear Park or an ice cream social and it was very celebratory as well because they were welcoming the new class of youth ambassadors who will be visiting our two sister cities in Europe Sheo Foungary and Cetto Italy in the fall recently Cal Cities League of California cities had their policy committee meetings in June and as vice chair of the revenue and taxation policy committee I was moderating facilitating the meeting we had three interesting presentations one from Michael Coleman many of us will know who is a fiscal consult the lead fiscal consultant to the League of Cities and he talked about um tools to assess fiscal health of cities, which is very important.

You can't just look at your checkbook on any given day and say, oh, everything's fine.

That's long-term long-range planning.

Um, we also had a presentation on state unfunded mandates and what the rules are to get reimbursement, and it's complicated.

And the third was from Cal Ed, the local government economic development entity, which they talked about local economic development and opportunities and how it was done in Ontario and UKA, two very different cities.

And I would mention also that I decided to take this on the SB 827 fiscal health um workshop.

It was it was excellent.

I learned something, and it was important because they had a whole section on fees and cost recovery, and it was the Thursday before our last Tuesday meeting, and even though I've been on this council for 20 years and have been through budgets over and over, I learned something, and it was definitely the experts had put it together.

This Thursday, the Association of Barrier Governments will have its annual general assembly meeting, which there will be representatives from the hundred and one cities in the nine counties of the Bay Area and representatives from each of the nine counties.

And also the General Assembly will be asked to affirm the new president and vice president of ABAC.

The new president will be Sue Adams, who's a council member from Road Art Park in Marin County, and the new vice president will be Solano County Supervisor Wanda Williams.

Also, this will be my last duty as a member of the executive board of the Association of Bay Area Governments as I'm being replaced July 1st by Maureen Toms of Panel, and I'm she will be assuming my job, and I'm trying to make that transition as smooth as possible.

Recycle Smart is in the middle of the transition to a new contracts for collection and reprocessing of organics, etc.

That will go into effect next March, but in anticipation of that, a group of us are going on a tour of Recology's organics processing facility in the Central Valley tomorrow.

More to follow.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Well, I um my youngest graduated eighth grade.

We uh hosted uh party for the class at our house, and we went on vacation and just got back.

So I have uh no C business to report.

Okay, thank you.

Mayor Pro Tem Francois.

Thank you, Mayor.

I I too do not have much of an update since our last meeting, but I do have an announcement that I would like to make.

Uh after a lot of thoughtful consideration.

I have decided not to run for reelection this year.

Uh I can honestly say it's been one of the true honors of my life to represent my fellow residents as a council member.

I respect immensely the trust uh that these residents placed in me, and I worked hard to try to never take that for granted.

I'd like to thank um staff, obviously starting with our city manager and city attorney, but everyone in this room and everyone who works in this building for everything they do to make this city run so smoothly.

I saw a first hand in countless ways over the last eight years on council and uh uh 11 years on the planning commission before that.

I want to thank my council colleagues uh for making this experience a truly enjoyable one, and for making me a more thoughtful, informed and better person as a result.

We accomplished a lot together over these last eight years.

Uh, chief among them, in my mind being the passage of Measure O, that will continue.

It'll live beyond me and beyond some of us, and continue to enhance our high quality of life.

Not going anywhere anytime soon, though.

I will be here and committed to serving the remainder of my council term this year, so it's not goodbye yet.

And in November, of course, there'll be an election to select my replacement, and I vow to do everything in my power to assist that person in making the transition a very smooth one, and pledge him or her my full support.

In the meantime, uh to my colleagues, let's keep being good stewards of this city, leading it with humility and grace, and serving as good models of leadership and civic engagement.

Thank you.

Well, thank you, Matt.

I mean, it's been uh a pleasure to get to know you and uh and consider you a friend now over these last eight years that you've been on council and even several years before that.

We're gonna have a lot more to say through into December, so you're not gonna get all the goodbyes and everything now.

In fact, uh being my mayor pro tem, you're gonna be working very hard for the next several months, too.

But uh it has been a it it has been and will continue to be a pleasure working with you on this, and I know that your family lives here, so you're not going far.

All right.

Uh well, I have been kind of busy in the last couple of weeks.

Uh as we heard Council Member Darling mention about the DRA business leaders and celebrating the upcoming events for the Diablo Regional Arts Association.

There's just a tremendous amount of enthusiasm with within the arts community.

We're seeing that uh from the DRAA events that uh that are sponsored, and uh we had several of those business leaders that were sponsor that our sponsors that were there, and uh and thrilled to see that continue because as we've unfortunately seen ever since the pandemic, there are far and few between art centers remaining now.

Uh and we are one of the last.

Certainly we're we're the biggest and well, the best, let's just say it.

We're the best in the East Bay.

However, there are unfortunately a fraction of what there were prior to just seven, eight years ago.

So it's important to keep that going.

Uh as the liaison to county connection, I did want to mention that there was a background state audit recently that was done.

Now, some of you may be aware that, of course, County Connection is one of just many different uh public transit agencies throughout the East Bay in the Bay Area, and there has been discussion among a couple of state senators about combining all of them and and essentially aggregating all of them into one entity.

And so the request was done on behalf of State Senator Aisha Wahhab in District 10 requesting that the legislative audit committee approve the transit agency's audit concerning this fragmented transit landscape.

Uh the audit reviewed six bus services agencies, including County Connection, uh, and the five main takeaways from the report are that the audit found the East Bay agencies regularly coordinate amongst each other, which actually is what County Connection, our staff has been saying, and that travel between different systems was accessible and easy to navigate.

That was a key point.

There are no recommendations for the East Bay transit agencies.

Another key point.

So there's they're not recommending for any anything to happen in that regard.

And that MTC agreed with the three recommendations presented, which were that the audit recommends the legislature consider amending state law to extend the innovative clean transit regulation deadline or allocate new funds of transit agencies.

Uh combining the East Bay transit agencies specifically was not a recommendation due to the analysis that it may not provide significant financial benefits and would likely have higher costs.

So we are hopeful that this ends this phase of the push from a couple of the state senators of consolidating all the agencies.

We think, first of all, it would cost jobs as well, and we wanted to make sure that that wasn't going to happen.

Frankly, it would cause more issues than it would resolve.

So I hope you won't have to hear more updates from me on that.

I hope that's it, but uh I'll let you know if if that does happen.

Uh the mayor's conference.

So it's something that uh occurred here a couple of weeks ago.

And the mayor's conference is something that goes throughout the 19 cities in Contra Costa, and and each city hosts it, and then it moves on to another one.

And so I want to thank staff immensely for this.

This does not happen with a hard without the hard work of staff, our city manager Dan Buckshai and City Clerk Susie Martinez and Ellen Branson and Cassava Washington and Nancy Sear, and really the people on the executive team that helped make this happen.

It was it was greatly attended.

It was in the library oak view room.

Uh the restaurant where we had dinner afterwards was La Fontaine down the street on Broadway.

They did a tremendous job in making sure that I mean the service and the food was excellent, but it was all very smooth.

We have been to mayor's conferences where that was not the case.

So uh just want a huge uh thank you to everybody on there.

And the presentation was by White Pony Express, which rescues surplus food from businesses like grocery stores and restaurants and delivers to over a hundred local nonprofits serving 125,000 people annually.

So they gave the presentation, very well received, of course, by everybody, and people were even making donations right then and there.

So again, just kudos all over uh for the city manager's office on this one.

Uh we heard that there were policy committee meetings from Cal Cities this last week, and in fact, I am on the environmental quality policy committee, and a lot of the discussion this last week was on Baca, which is building an affordable California Act, and really pushed to try to alleviate some of the regulations that's special procedures under CEQA, and the idea is that it would only apply to essential projects, but that could include a whole host of different areas from types of housing and water, clean energy, public health, wild wildfire safety, and the list goes on.

The idea being reducing the regulations and essentially easing CEQA a bit is going to make it easier to build.

But there was a lot of discussion and a lot of pushback, and really it divided the environmental quality policy committee.

Uh, the recommendation fact from the committee was to oppose the act.

So I'm sure you'll we'll hear about more about that coming forward.

Yeah, I know it was it was it was a heated discussion.

It was spicy.

Um the Art and Wine Festival, Chamber of Commerce Nicole.

I thought it was terrific.

I was there morning and afternoon, both Saturday and Sunday.

Uh people loved go.

I mean, I I heard so much positive enthusiasm about it, and I look forward to even making it above and beyond for next year as well.

So, congratulations.

Big kudos to the chamber on that one too.

Uh, I also attended the Shadlands Car Show by the Shadow's Historical Society.

They had their 200 cars out there that were fantastic from a 1915 Model A car.

Yeah, I know it's like 110 years old to to probably a 2024 car that's probably a half a million dollars.

Uh amazing, amazing event.

I also went on the tour and the family friendly day of Central SAM event that was this last weekend.

Uh Florence Weddington is our elected representative for there, was there along with most of the Central SAN Committee.

Um, yeah, it's good to certainly bring a nose plug, but uh it was really interesting to hear what happens when the water goes down the drain or the toilet and it's and how is it recycled?

So I I found it fascinating.

Uh just a few more here.

Fiesta Cultural was this last uh this last Saturday, and congratulations to Carolyn Jackson, the staff of the Leisher Center and Chris, uh your team.

Um it was it was great.

Uh I was there for a few hours, and the performer it was a warm day on on uh uh it was what Saturday?

It was Saturday.

Losing uh it was a warm day, performers were great, uh, vendors were out there.

It was just a terrific event.

So look forward to seeing that in the uh in the coming years as well.

And uh there was a something at Remembrance Park that NAMI sponsored yesterday, and I bring this up because first of all, I was presenting a check from uh Lunacy Lounge where I was a celebrity bartender event a couple of weeks ago, and the a part of the proceeds donated along with my tips and some additional monies went to National Association for Mental Illness.

And the whole idea is reducing the stigma of mental health.

And why that is something that people tend to not talk about, but they there's not a problem talking about cancer or diabetes or a number of other illnesses, but mental health is something that's still sort of in the shadows.

And so the whole idea is what can we do to reduce the stigma of it and bring it out into the open.

So that was a really nice event yesterday.

This morning was coffee with a cop.

We had our chief of police, we had captains, we had lieutenants and sergeants and all sorts of officers there at Coin Coffee and Shadelands.

Lots of residents that were there, always great to see that event, and thank you so much for putting that on and reaching out to the community.

And I'll be seeing Jag Little Pill this week.

And that's my update.

Alright, we're done.

Next, we have a consideration item.

And it is the authorization of the city manager to execute a memorandum of understanding between the city of Walnut Creek and participating agencies for the Interstate 680 corridor ramp metering projects.

I invite traffic engineer Matt Redman forward to provide the presentation.

Good evening.

Matt Redman, traffic engineer.

Um I'm just going to introduce this before I hand it over to CCTA, Caltrans, and their consultants.

So good evening, uh Mayor Wilk and Council members.

This item is to execute a memorandum of understanding between Wana Creek and CCTA and Caltrans to agree to operations of the 680 on ramp changes.

So a ramp meter where you have an on-ramp is a traffic signal on a freeway on ramp that's used to regulate the flow of vehicles onto the freeway.

I just want to make sure we're clear because we're going in depth with this technology tonight.

Um so uh there's really kind of two projects going on.

Caltrans has a shop project, a state highway operation and protection program.

This is for communication infrastructure upgrades as well as ramp metering upgrades along the 680 corridor, um, and they have technology um to meter the ramps.

Now CCTA has an additional project that layers on top of that shop project called the CARM project, which is a coordinated adaptive ramp metering project.

So this will install um advanced freeway monitoring technology and updated algorithms at the northbound I-680 on ramps from Alcosta Boulevard down in San Ramon to Burnett Avenue in Concord.

So all of our northbound ramps on 680.

Um, none of these currently have ramps.

In this MOU, I've reviewed it.

Legals reviewed it.

My main comments are related to putting an agency, a local agency focus in the MOU so it's not just a care about the freeway mainline.

We also care about local arterials.

And so I went through that and updated that and provided those comments throughout the three revisions of this MOU.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Stephanie Who of CCTA.

Good evening, Mayor and Council members, and thank you, Matt, for the introduction and the quick summary, which is really well done.

Um we are happy to be here today.

Uh, my name is Stephanie here, Director of Projects at Contra Costa Transportation Authority or CCTA joined with me our staff on Caltrans, Sam What is some Mayat from District 4 as well as our consultant um project engineer on the CARM project.

Um, just as what Matt was saying, 680 grant metering deployment.

We're doing something different in the other corridors on in Contra Costa, ramp metering have been deployed without very much uh collaboration and coordination with the local jurisdictions.

And in this case on 680, we have been collaborating and coordinating with all the jurisdiction along 680 with the local staff, the traffic engineer of each of the um cities along 680 um for the past year and a half, and the result of that is this MOU that documents the roles and responsibility, expectation, goals, policy, governance structure of ramp metering on 680.

So you're all note that 680 has uh is pretty congested.

This uh bar graph here is actually taken from a recent article from SF Chronicle where Northbound 680 uh was made it to the top 10 uh most congested free main segments, freeway segment in the Bay Area.

Um, you guys know northbound 680 is very congested in the PM peak period.

So white ramp metering, it is a uh a strategy to regulate flow of traffic entering the freeway.

It helps to smooth out the traffic flow entering the freeway.

It also discourages those who sometimes take the off ram and then get on the freeway and the mediate on ramp to bypass some of the congestion.

Um it also reduces the uh crashes or likelihood of crashes in the merging area where folks are coming onto the freeway and sometimes folks are also exiting.

So having ramp meter to reduce that crashes, uh, the crash, the probability of crashes in those areas.

Um, ramp meter also have the potential to have more reliable and efficient travel on the mainline freeway so that um folks don't want to get off the freeway to find other ways to cut through city streets, for example.

And this uh strategy also improves efficiency of the freeway system without building more freeway lanes or widening the freeway, which is consistent with the state policy of reducing vehicle miles traveled.

So, as Matt mentioned, there are two projects being proposed for ramp metering on 680.

Originally, as Matt said, uh Caltrans had already had plans to implement ramp metering using adaptive ramp metering or ARM.

This is a little bit it's a little bit better than the traditional time-of-day ramp metering where ramp metering goes on at a certain time of day.

This is adaptive in nature, and they had plans and funding to deploy ramp metering on the entire corridor of 680 in both directions.

CCTA had saw an opportunity to partner with uh with Caltrans as part of the Innova 680 program.

We had plans and goals to deploy coordinated adaptive ramp metering where all the ramps talk to each other, and Scott in a moment will um talk about that.

Um, so we partnered with Caltrans to basically carve out a segment of 680 to deploy CARM, and the segment that is in blue is what we're proposing for CARM, which is northbound 680 from Al Costa to Burnett, and this will be a three-year demonstration project.

Through the partnership with Caltrans, we were able to find efficient uh ways of delivering the both project, either by sharing cost or sharing scope for more efficient delivery, and then we both agreed to have some common agreed upon performance measures to help us reevaluate the both systems intermediately throughout the three years as well as at the end.

Just a little bit on Innovation 680.

It is a suite of project, it's a program of projects that help to reduce congestion of the corridor.

The adaptive ramp metering or CARM is under the advanced technology projects, but there are other projects that are on this menu of projects to help um reduce congestion, not by really widening the freeway, but using other technologies or strategies such as part-time transit lane for buses as well as share mobility hubs to promote share modes and basically not build ourselves out of congestion.

So the CARM project is part of the advanced technology project, which tackles cooling the hot spots of the corridor, using innovative operational strategies, and also preparing the corridor for the future.

And these strategies really will help to avoid costly expansion of the freeway to tackle the congestion.

It also has the potential of high benefits with lower cost investments, and also again being consistent with the state policy of not basically widening more lanes and increasing capacity.

So with that, I'm gonna invite Sam who will talk about the Caltrans ARM project, and then after that, Scott Petera will come up and talk about the CCTA CARM project.

Good evening, Mayor, Council members.

My name is Samuel Le Samething.

I'm Caltrans project manager covering Contra Costa County.

I would provide a brief overview of Caltrans planned ramp metering project on the 680 corridor.

As Stephanie mentioned, uh Caltrans has been collaborating with CCTA to deploy ramp metering along the 680 corridor.

And as part of that collaboration, CCTA implements a coordinative adaptive ramp metering system on the 680 northbound or ramps on a three-year demonstration project.

Caltrans plans to implement a similar rammetering system called adaptive ramp metering system or ARM on all southbound ramps and some of the on northbound ramps that are outside of the CARM limit.

Caltrans and MC has been uh implementing adaptive RAM metering on around the 300 freeway or ramps across the Bay Area on some major highways, like so of I-80, uh I-880, uh, US-101 and San Francisco uh Oakland Bay Bridge.

Uh, we are also expanding uh CARM coverage on some major freeways, including the 680 corridor.

Unlike the traditional RAM metering system, uh ARM is not time of day system.

Uh in fact, it uses uh real time traffic data to optimize traffic metering and also responds to uh incidents on the freeway when there's a slowdown or accidents, it does automatically has a capacity automatically uh turn on and off dramaters.

Uh there is a QR code and also a link on the uh at the bottom of the slide where more information can be found.

As I mentioned on the earlier slide, uh, some of the major freeways that received upgrades to ARM are US 1-1 from Blu-ray to Brisbane and I-80 from uh San Jose all the way to Oakland.

From the early demonstrations where performance measures were conducted, ARM has shown strong performance uh resulting in 10 to 30% reduction in travel time.

This is an example uh taken from the performance evaluation for US 11 uh on one segment.

As you can see, uh, there is some uh 10 to 50 percent uh travel time reduction.

Drivers also uh experienced a smoother merge and fewer uh shockwaves as well as uh constant speed on the freeways on the US 11 segment that we performed uh performance evaluation.

This is also another performance evaluation example that's taken from the I-80 corridor uh segment on the northbound direction.

Also here, uh special on the PM peak.

Uh, there is significant uh travel time reduction, and same as uh the benefits that was experienced on the US 11, such as uh smoother merge and also uh constant speed.

We are planning to use the lesson learner from this uh uh deployments on our refer to uh use ARM on the three-year demonstration period when uh CCTA is implementing CARM on the northbound direction.

With that, I'll pass it to Scott to uh provide a brief overview on the CARM.

All right.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm Scottero GHD.

I'm a consultant to CCTA.

So the Innovate 680 coordinated adaptive ramp metering projects, so CARM will operate as a three-year demonstration project as a proof of concept for a new ramp metering approach in the area.

Uh it'll operate only in the northbound direction of I 680 from El Costa to Willow Pass.

Um CARM expands on the capabilities of the Caltrans system.

It adds additional vehicle detection to provide real-time data and additional uh ramp metering capabilities to respond in real time uh to manage the flow of vehicles along the freeway mainline while managing the conditions on the ramps and preventing backups onto adjacent arterials.

The key difference between CARM and other systems is that it's coordinated.

As Stephanie mentioned, all the ramp meters all talk to each other, they all work cooperatively to uh address any traffic issues that may pop up on the freeway or on individual ramps.

So this will be the first project of its kind in the Bay Area, uh, but a very similar project just went live at the end of last month in Riverside County, the uh I-15 Smart Freeways project that's operating right now near uh Temecula, California.

So there are several components that go into CARM operations.

It involves advanced vehicle detection technologies installed along the freeway mainline as shown on the diagram here, as well as additional detection on the ramps themselves.

So all these new detectors provide real-time data to the system, and then the system responds by manipulating ramp metering rates throughout the entire corridor to manage congestion on the main line and prevent backups onto adjacent arterials.

The project will also include select ramp modification improvements that provide more space at certain ramp locations.

It gives the system more operational flexibility, more storage on the ramps to keep queues from impacting arterials and to keep wait times under control on the ramps as well.

The project will also install a number of new CCTV cameras along the corridor to give operators a clear view of what's going on so they could take steps to make changes if any issues arrive.

So the CARM system is really powered by a software platform called Streams.

Streams uses advanced algorithms to power the system and it allows that coordination between all the ramp meter signals.

It'll continuously monitor what's going on on the main line and on ramps.

It'll take in all that real-time data, that real-time traffic data, and then adjust ramp metering rates throughout the entire corridor, balancing ramp queues, keeping wait times under control throughout the corridor to uh and uh preventing impacts onto adjacent arterials.

This is actually uh image from a web dashboard as part of the Riverside project that I mentioned previously.

So this provides a platform for monitoring and data sharing.

So CCTA anticipates creating something just like this and making it available to stakeholders along the corridor, including the city of Walnut Creek.

The uh northbound uh Olympic Boulevard on ramp will also be modified as part of CARM operations.

So a part-time shoulder lane will be installed along the ramp.

So it'll provide a temporary third lane on that ramp that'll be controlled by overhead lane use management signage.

Um so it'll only be open to traffic when the ramp meter is turned on, when it's metering traffic.

It'll provide more storage on the ramp to prevent backup center arterials, and it also provides an additional lane so the system can release vehicles more quickly when it senses the ability to do so.

When the ramp meter is not activated, the overhead signage will display a big red X, it'll close that lane.

So during off-peak periods, that lane will just operate as a normal shoulder as it would normally, and it prevents vehicles from speeding down the ramp at relatively high speeds and merging into that extra lane space.

So again, this uh northbound improvement at Olympic Boulevard to provide it's uh meant to provide more operational flexibility to allow the system to respond in real time.

So CCTA and CalCrans are following a collaborative approach to ramp metering implementation along I-680, which has already been explained by the other speakers, and memorandum of understanding has been put together that outlines uh key assumptions for implementation policy and roles and responsibilities for each ramp metering system.

It establishes a framework for how each system will be evaluated, including key performance indicators, and it also creates a structure for stakeholder coordination and governance to oversee operations of each system and provide a forum for any operational comments or concerns that stakeholders may have.

The ramp metering operations and maintenance procedures document, so the OMP, this will be a more detailed user's manual that gets more into the weeds on how each system will be operated and maintained and how the performance will be evaluated.

This document is already in development, and we're anticipating multiple rounds of review with local jurisdictions before the document is finalized.

In terms of implementation schedule, so the Caltrans ARM project that Sam discussed is already under construction.

Uh is in final design stages.

Both projects are expected to be finished with construction in 2028, and we expect them to be fully operational in early 2029.

So we ask uh the CCTA and Caltrans asks uh city manager to execute a memorandum of understanding for the Novate 680 corridor ramp metering projects on behalf of the city of Walmart Creek.

Um so I think with that the team is here to answer any questions you may have.

Great.

Thank you so much uh for the multivariated presentation.

Uh let's first start with any questions that we have here uh at the council.

And looks like Councilmember Davidny has a question.

I do.

Thanks.

Um thank you for the presentation.

Um I'm curious about sort of responsibilities.

I know that the uh CCTA you spoke about um monitoring the ramps and the arterials.

Does the adaptive light and adaptive ramp metering from Caltrans have that same technology to monitor the on-ramps at all?

And my question kind of getting to is there a responsibility for um Caltrans to uh respect the arterials and not cause additional congestion on those, because it would seem like a very easy thing to do, just slow traffic onto the freeway and the move of the tra the freeway the freeway traffic will move faster, but it's just because it's sitting in the side street.

So is there a is there a Caltrans aspect to what we heard about from um the CARMs?

Yeah, that's a very good question.

Yes, unlike the traditional rammetering system, the arm system has a detections at the end of the ramps when uh those detections are activated when the Q uh goes all the way to the end of the ramp that activates the rammeter to just the metering rates, so that uh traffic would be uh into the freeway, and that way we will not lead uh traffic parking up into the arterios.

And I'm curious then for for both uh agencies, and it's funny that you mentioned Olympic on ramp because that was the one I was thinking about.

Um that that uh backup is frequently past the entrance to the on ramp.

So how does how does this technology keep track of, you know, once you get to the end of the on ramp, is there anything to monitor what's going on in the streets?

Exactly.

Uh yeah, so uh first question on the ramp itself.

So there's detection throughout or along the entire ramp.

So the CARM system in particular will have a very good idea of the length of the ramp queue or the number of vehicles.

So as the number of vehicles starts to approach that arterial, um, it'll start speeding up the ramp metering rate to keep that queue under control, and if it backs up all the way, then it'll um go to its maximum release rate.

And how the coordinated system works is if that happens, it'll then talk to ramps upstream of Olympic, if you follow me, and and it'll change those ramp metering rates to prevent um sort of a bottleneck from forming on the mainline, it'll work cooperatively.

So the the Caltrans system as well, they they also have those back of queue detection.

Um, so that's what uh Sam was talking about.

The CARM system is a little bit more sophisticated, I guess uh proactive in terms of controlling the ramp queue as it grows.

And um we will be uh one of the key performance indicators that came about as part of this MOU process is we will be monitoring and evaluating any impacts to arterials as part of the performance.

Which leads me to my next question.

That looks like the metrics that you're gonna use to monitor those arterials are arterial travel time, arterial arterial travel travel delays, and arterial impacts.

Can you can you speak to what to what those are?

That was in the metrics uh section of um the report.

Sure.

So travel time would be um looking at the actual travel time on a section of the arterial that that you know the call it a quarter mile, for example, that that crosses the freeway.

Um so we look at the travel time average um when the ramp meters are active and when they're not active um over the course of the three-year pilot and make sure that uh we are not impacting the arterials, making travel times worse for people when the ramp meters are active as far as that through movement on the arterial.

Um as arterial impacts go, um, I think that's truly if there are occurrences of the ramp meter spilling back onto the arterial and and seeing an operator seeing impacts, seeing vehicles walking the through traffic on the arterial.

And you mentioned a third one, if you could remember.

And also, just to clarify, I mean, I understand there's technology on the on-ramp.

Is there technology in the streets around the on-ramp?

Because you're talking about the arterial.

Is the arterial the way you're describing it the on-ramp, or is say Olympic boulevard the arterial?

So the uh sorry, the the arterial is a city street, so Olympic Boulevard.

So as far as new hardware, it would only be on the ramp.

Um, but it for evaluation purposes we have access to to other sources of data, including third third-party probe data, um, that'll give us an understanding of what's happening on the city street.

So is that the the city's responsibility then to provide that data uh to CCTA or to Caltrans or how I'm still unclear as to how you'll you would say on Olympic Boulevard, well it's already backed up all the way to the bottom of the on-ramp uh every day and and past that.

So I I imagine that whatever metering system you have will be at its max every time during during peak travel times.

And so then the question is how how will you measure whether that's negatively impacting Olympic Boulevard around that uh on ramp, like as it goes um east and west of there.

So it it would be focusing not just on the ramp but Olympic Boulevard itself and looking at making sure travel times are not slowed during ramp metering operations, making sure throughput remains consistent with um when the ramp meters are not um activated.

Uh essentially that we're not not causing a delay.

So yeah you ask the question about would that be the city's responsibility?

No um CCTA and Caltrans would um work with cities.

Um we would be open to using any data that's available from cities, but if that's not uh provided by local jurisdiction then it would be up to CCTA and Caltrans to obtain that information.

I I saw that it was um it said that um arterials um would be selected that it wouldn't be all arterials around these metering maps, that they were just selected arterials that would be monitored.

Have you designated some of the arterials that you're gonna be monitoring and others that aren't, or have they all been selected?

Is it it kind of specified that they would they would select certain arterials to be monitored?

So uh speaking for CARM specifically.

Well, I don't know, maybe it's a combination of both, but yeah.

Uh, I could only speak to the CARM component, but all ramp locations and those adjacent arterials will be monitored.

That's why we're installing the the cameras.

Okay.

Can I just build on that for one quick second?

Yeah.

So at at the um northbound treat bus kirk on ramp.

So that's a strange one because you end up having a backup on treat, which is actually not the arterial bus kirk goes into the next street that then goes into the on-ramp.

So how far back you're monitoring?

Because in the mornings, just unfortunately from personal experience, bless you.

That is that backs up and it can be several cycles of signals before even being able to make a right on the busker.

And a lot of that is due to the traffic backup, people walking across the street at that point, and it it's it it's a pinch mark.

So I I agree with you, that is a complicated uh intersection, and that's actually the one location where we're anticipating putting additional detection um along the city streets.

We've also been working with Contra Costa County that has jurisdiction over that uh city traffic signal um to coordinate it directly with the the ramp meter to adjust um metering rate.

So we we I guess to answer your question, we flagged that um the difficulties at that location, so we're um uh making some additional accommodations there.

As well as ones that could be on north main street, uh especially when there's very a very short lead up onto the ramp, you'll be checking that as well.

I'm thinking of uh southbound at north main street uh just near tree.

Yeah, so that location also is is one we'll be looking at.

Yeah.

So that we I I mentioned earlier in the presentation uh having additional storage on the ramp provides more operational flexibility.

So where there are shorter ramps or complicated approaches from city streets, that's something the operators are gonna be looking at very carefully so we don't uh impact those arterials.

Okay, thank you.

Just to comment on the buskirk and Ocramp, we are reconfiguring the ramp uh on buskirk to add additional close to one thousand linear feet to storage.

That way uh at least it can elevate some of the backup on the uh treatbillard.

Okay, the configuration will add some of the storage.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for allowing me to interject there.

Maybe come back to me.

I'd like to answer.

Thank you for the presentation.

Uh interesting uh project.

Just big picture uh are the improvements that you're talking about, can they all be accommodated within the existing right-of-way?

Yeah, I think well the designers can speak to it, but uh most of them are within the existing right-of-way.

I think we try to use the limited space, the physical space that we have as much as we can.

Um, we're not acquiring additional right-of-way as both CARM or the ARM project.

So, to your question, yes.

Okay.

And then this is northbound only initially.

Um, so northbound, no, it's both direction.

Northbound from El Costa to Burnett and Concord, that would be CARM, the CCTA coordinated adaptive ramp metering the rest of the corridor with the would be the CalTrans adaptive ramp metering arm.

Um the difference again is that CARM is able to coordinate all the ramps are talking to each other and coordinating, and Scott talked about like if one ramp location is in trouble, it communicates with the ramp adjacent to adjust their ramp metering rates to kind of help that one in trouble, either holding back traffic or accelerating getting cars on faster or slower to help the uh ramp in in trouble, I suppose.

But yeah, they're all kind of talking to each other, and that's the main difference between CARM and ARM.

So both directions essentially effective 2028 CARM only northbound with the flow of traffic essentially.

So the commute following the commute direction.

Yeah, 2029 it's when it's uh both system will be turned on.

Um we we came into agreement that they will be all on at the same time.

What sort of outreach?

I mean, obviously you're here tonight.

Thank you for that.

What kind of public outreach and notice?

So yeah, the first step is really coordinating with the technical staff as I mentioned.

We have goals to have videos to explain um what the ramp metering experience would be like.

The public should understand that this is new.

We know there's no ramp metering again on this corridor right now, so we plan to do either uh different strategies, one being some short videos to explain what ram metering could look like.

Um we've done videos on other things on the corridor for Into Phase 680 to explain expla express lanes and all of that.

So that's something we'd like to continue.

Um and then we've been doing a lot of outreach during our summer months uh on outreach to the community farmers market.

We've been doing that every year.

So this is another way we can kind of touch the public with the project and updating them on what's gonna come.

And then finally, you meant you mentioned the average savings and delay once you're on the main line.

Is there that's gotta be counterbalanced a little bit by the delay it takes you to get onto the freeway?

Is there information or metrics on that?

Yeah, the uh metrics we have right now is mainly focused on the freeway.

So the delays uh we would be doing the same uh performance evaluation before we turn it into our meters own on on 680 quarter as well before and after evaluation to uh measure the effectiveness of the metering system and car is going to do the same as well and we'll continue doing that over the three administration period comparing both systems carmine are to see which system uh effectively uh uh manage traffic when it comes to uh target monument the freeway as well as on the arterios do do you have data now that tells you what the delay is in terms of once meters go in kind of how long much longer it takes to get onto the main line there I think probably maybe able to provide some formation for yeah so um the the CARM system uh for this project we're taking a lot of lessons learned from a pilot that was done in Colorado um with the same software system.

So in that implementation um the results showed that there was a slight increase in the weight on a ramp in exchange for a shorter more reliable overall trip um and the data uh showed that um the average wait time and and we can provide that uh evaluation report from Colorado if you're interested the average wait time was only uh I believe one or two minutes at certain locations and then it would increase from there.

Um one of the components of the CARM system is if a longer um wait time like three plus minutes is detected that's a component where it'll take steps to speed up the metering rate to bring them back down under control.

Thank you.

Council Member Durman.

Thank you.

Um just a couple quick questions.

Um and thank you for the the presentation all the thought you've put into this um thinking about future proofing um is there the algorithm is set now can you um modify it over time as you learn?

Um so there's a a set of base algorithms um part of the process and and part of the reason why there's folks uh monitoring at all times is there's actually a lot of calibration that takes place so um throughout the the three year pilot um the first three months for example um it may only take two months may take four months um there'll be a lot of incremental tuning and calibration and then um as uh we anticipate every three to six months there'll be a review of data and then continued and calibration.

Yes and do you um as you're tweaking it are you going to be reaching out to city staff to see if they're getting um complaints and you know I think part of the part of the MOU has a section on sort of ongoing like working group we have a technical coordinating committee as part of Innova680 we're basically drawing from that group the same like Matt who was on it just continue to monitor and meet regularly quarterly whatever how whatever if there's issues we can meet more but think we're thinking about quarterly at first and then maybe pivot to something um less frequent if there's no issues but yes the cities are um I think what's good about the MOU is that we have a common understanding of what the partnership looks like and what is required from each party and if there are issues we are all in agreement to to meet and resolve them.

If there's a specific ramp that's of an issue um CCTA Cow trans are um committed to work with the locals and um to resolve it not to walk away after the install installation of the meters.

So that's what the MOU is really for.

Yeah.

Um and this is gonna be a silly question.

Why are you doing detection on the freeway?

Can't you just use the cell phone data that Google uses?

Um that's a really good question.

So we hope to be able to use that probe data at one point.

Um currently the system needs to know where every single vehicle is at any time.

That's why there's a lot of new actual physical detectors put in place.

Um probe data like from cell phones or connected vehicles.

Um that's something that we're really interested in using to adjust the algorithm and we might use samples of that to sort of tweak things and calibrate, but the actual control of the system requires knowledge of where every single vehicle is.

It's uh kind of based on industrial control logic if you can imagine like a assembly line.

Um so until every single transferring smoothly along the you know that's that's the idea.

So um there there are uh other ramp metering systems though um they're not quite as sophisticated as carm but they're they're relying on that that cell phone data or connected vehicle data but as technology continues to improve that's something we're looking at for sure.

Great thank you.

Um thank you very much for the presentation and all of the work that's going into this and oh my gosh Matt Redmond must be very excited to be participating in this project.

So my question starts with the premise that we're trying to improve the performance on the main line by improving the performance on the ramps, on ramps.

But not impacting negatively the performance on the arterials.

Correct yeah so how do what kind of baseline data are we going to have before you turn it on right to know how the arterials are performing.

So Scott spoke a lot about a bit about the three years sort of sorry three months of calibration on the arm s carm system.

Part of that is collecting data of the existing prior to turning it on so we know what we're comparing just one week's worth of data on schools out or something like yes yes a a representative set of data to help us understand the existing condition pre-ramp metering being turned on.

Um that will be the basis from which we would compare um and then we talked about sp you know working with city to collect data from the local streets that they may have that could be useful for us in that comparison moving forward.

I guess I will say Olympic on ramp backs up every day all the way to the CVS.

Correct that's why you guys have the six eighty at the bottom of the on ramp it is and then it backs up in two lanes and p and the third lane that has going through to what on westbound Olympic is just don't go that way.

Yeah.

I I know during certain hours.

So we have three northbound on ramps that are in this Red Gear Road, Olympic Boulevard and North Main, Lawrence Way.

Beyond that and b south of that those are in the unincorporated area on the north.

Those are really unique on ramps.

We all know we're all aware of that, right?

Because two of them are in the middle of an interchange.

And then the red gear road northbound on ramp starts from the west side and goes how are you where are you going to put the signals for an on ramp that you can't see when you're turning onto red gear road on ramp.

So I don't have the the designs in front of me but there's advanced warning beacons that are in place on the ramp meter so it'll let drivers know that a ram meter is ahead.

That's there's also signage that will be installed at the the entrance of the ramp so on the uh actual arterial telling folks that the ram meter is on.

So to look for that.

But you know what I'm talking about it is a blind on ramp where you turn you come from two different directions but you cannot see most of the on ramp when you're going onto the red gear road northbound on ramp.

So the the traffic signal itself for the ramp metering signal is placed based on site constraints and storage requirements so um that will be placed and then there's additional signage letting folks know that it's that's happening and when the rammeter's active we anticipate other vehicles to be there.

So a driver shouldn't be surprised um when they're see um Olympic on ramp feeds right into the off ramp into Ignatio Valley Road.

That's part of the problem is it's not really a free flowing freeway at that point.

It's m if there's traffic moving like this up there you know that and then the north main Lawrence Way on ramp is just a very long city street.

So all of those make them make these three fairly unique.

So we'll have good baseline data to start with.

Why are we testing it if it has been tested and it's in play in Riverside County?

I two fifteen and the I fifteen, yeah the Riverside County one is also a demonstration project.

It's for two years.

It's for a lesser stretch of the freeway.

I think it's four interchanges.

The reason why is that we need to demonstrate to Caltrans this is an effective system.

They have in deploy ARM throughout the state and CCTA is interested in proving that this demonstration that the demonstration of CARM would be successful in order for us to do more CARM elsewhere in the county well else in on 680 as well as other parts of the county we know it's been successful in Australia in Colorado that Scott spoke about and then also with the um demonstration project in Riverside that's just starting we kind of overlap a little bit we're hoping these two pilot projects will help demonstrate that is effectiveness.

So that's okay.

So the point is to demonstrate that this is more effective than ARM with it's a better system.

Yeah, fuzzy logic I don't even want to and want to know what fuzzy logic is.

It's a name technical term.

Yeah it's their algorithm just like streams is the algorithm for CARM.

I think it you've answered my questions thanks.

Any for the question otherwise well why don't we well one point of clarification and um that I'm glad you asked that question that's exactly what I was thinking about collecting good data ahead of time how are we going to monitor it.

Maybe it's a question for our uh traffic engineer but are we do we already have like is this already data that we collect because I'm I'm when I'm listening to the project I'm getting the sense that we're installing additional monitoring systems on these arterials to collect this data but is this is this data that we're already collecting and will like from the traffic department like I imagine you already have your eyes on on these challenging ramps.

Is there new equipment or are there preparations that we're making as a city to prepare for monitoring and impacts or is that being done purely by from the CCTA Caltrans standpoint.

Maybe I can add just one more note related to that I don't know if you guys are aware that CCTA is also doing a more countywide smart signals project that are that are being deployed in all the major arterials in the county so part of that work will also have a way to collect data but I just wanted to add that before Matt comes on for that question.

There's other um initiatives or strategies as CCTA is deploying outside of this what we're talking about on the signal side that can help really inform the ramp metering project the countywide smart signals that's ongoing and we're going to construction in a couple months and then we're also doing a phase two of that um hoping to cover more areas and even deploy more smart signals technology as part of our strategy for smart signals will help kind of inform the um the ramp metering have the connection between them and then the other thing is innovate 680 had a corn has a coordinate adapted traffic signals project that is a companion piece to ramp metering but that doesn't have as much funding but that's something we're thinking about on how to like make them all connect better the arterial especially at the ramp junction and the term I just want to add that before.

Thanks.

Yeah we definitely have some existing data sources mainly traffic counts and some intersection turning movement counts so this is like how many people took a left at this time of day at a certain intersection.

Actually right now as part of the general plan we're deploying we're collecting those counts at you know 20 locations citywide and as along a bunch of other you know another 20 segments of streets and so I don't know how much of those overlap here but I think we can get a general idea about how many vehicles are flowing and essentially what's the performance of our intersections.

So that can provide a baseline and then the other aspect here is the probe data.

You know, I mean, think with the cell phones um it we're able to anonymize those and provide aggregated information about speeds on any roadway in the city, and we have our our own subscription service that we could look at, and then it sounds like they're going to be doing their own study independent that we could verify and make sure that their data is accurate and we agree.

So we do have a few data sources that that we could use for before understanding.

Thank you.

Okay, why don't we um bring it uh to the public communication now?

If there's anybody from the public that would like to make a comment on this, now would be the time to step forward and ask any questions that you may have or any comments you may have as well.

Uh there are speaker cards back there.

Umce you're at the podium, please introduce yourself in the city of residence for the record, consistent with city policies related to public comments.

Each speaker will have two minutes to make your remarks, written comments submitted if any have been posted to the city's website for public review and are included in the meeting record, but will not be separately read into the record.

So if there's anybody that would like to speak on this particular agenda item, please come forward now.

Once twice, okay.

We will then close the public comment portion of this and bring it back to council for discussion and/or a motion.

I had one follow-up question, I think, for Matt.

Um just in hearing about kind of some of the improvements that are being made, and it sounds like most of it's happening within the right-of-way, and I appreciate my colleagues' concerns about the arterials and about challenging nature of some of these on-ramps.

We haven't really talked about Lawrence Way and we have our major city corporation yard located there with a lot of ingress and egress of trucks.

Is that being factored into the plans?

Do we have concerns about how that's all gonna work?

Like a little bit.

Do you want to take the you want to go?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, so the Lawrence treat boulevard area, that will be um, I think you're speaking more of the express lanes project.

That whole interchange will be modified.

In terms of ramp metering, though, once the express lanes project is complete, the ramp metering will be installed on the Lawrence Way on ramp.

We don't want to put on a ramp meter before the completion of the express lane project because we'll just wipe it out and it's kind of wasting money to put something up there that's gonna be demoed.

Um for the express lanes project, the modification to the Lawrence Way area is that the treat boulevard off ram will now be elevated above the Lawrence on ramp.

So there's it's called braided ramps.

So basically it grace separates the treat boulevard off-ramp folks will be above Lawrence on ramp.

That will be alleviates the weaving movement that happens there.

Those who are trying to get off treat are it's weaving with the those who are trying to get on from Lawrence, and additionally, there's the uh truck scale at the end of treat, so you're also competing space with the trucks.

So, as part of the express lanes project is the operational improvement to basically grace separate the uh Lawrence on and the treat off, and um the impact to the corp yard is something we're studying.

We actually had a really good meeting with staff your staff this week and went on a field visit to really understand the current operations of the corp yard and CCTA working with our designer will really minimize the impact to the corp yard and making sure that the corp yard operations will be will be made will be made whole, whatever improvements we're making.

But we've already tweaked our design for the express lane side to really minimize the footprint of any impact that we have and working with your staff to better understand what will work best for the corp yard operation.

So, excellent.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

So help me understand how far back if you're going to elevate the treat off-ramp.

Where does that start?

So um what happens with um I don't have a picture here.

Um I should have maybe put in the backup slide, but uh in the future, those exiting on treat will get on the loop ramp where North Main is right now.

So North Main exit is at a loop.

So treat folk people are exiting on treat will take that loop ram and it'll come up and then it will elevate over Lawrence.

I'm happy to provide a visual afterwards to your staff to Matt perhaps if he wants to distribute it to you all and happy to come and speak on that project if that's desired.

Um I know it's hard to matt hard to visualize, but I'm happy to we have pictures and visual on it at a presentation.

So yeah, you get off on treat.

If you want to get off tree in the future, you take the loop ram as if you're going on North Main, but it will you will then come up and there will be a like through to go parallel to 680, and you'll be higher up than Lawrence.

A lot of interesting construction.

Yes.

But that will greatly alleviate the whole weaving um issues that we have at that location.

That's this far on my iPad.

You have to zoom in.

Oh, now it's shorter.

That will be interesting to see.

I would be interested in seeing.

Okay.

Um I'm happy to provide the materials to Matt.

And if you desire a presentation, we'd be happy to come back.

There's a lot of commercial properties as well as the corp yard.

Comment comments.

Um overall, I'm I'm excited for this project.

The recent uh CCTA workshop I went to.

They were polling electeds and other stakeholders around the county as to what are the most important things traffic related.

Um the number one choice was always the traffic congestion on the freeways was the the biggest thing that people talked about.

So anything that we can do to improve that, um, you know, I think that's great.

I just hope it doesn't come at the expense and the offset of spending more time on the air materials and the on-ramps, and so um I'm glad to hear that in the MOU will continue to have those discussions and um appreciate that process.

Sounds like a great project though.

Great.

Well, um basically the action that's recommended is of executing the memory memorandum of understanding.

So if anybody would like to make a motion.

Um I appreciate the time effort you guys have put into this, and so I am prepared to move to authorize the city manager to execute the MOU for the interstate 680 corridor ramp metering projects on behalf of our city.

I'll second.

Thank you for the presentation.

Thank you for coming here tonight.

Uh we didn't have a lot of public comment, but I suspect in two years we might.

You start building things up in the air, yeah.

So just would encourage you, and I it sounds like you're on it to do the outreach that you're talking about, robust outreach, explaining to people how this is actually going to be a benefit and improve their lives.

And then I appreciate your comments about working with our staff about any potential impacts to the courtyard or any city facilities, and if you could just keep doing that, we would appreciate it.

Right.

And and to that point, not just letting our transportation and public works team know, but also communications manager who can put that out through our own social media channels.

That would be helpful.

Alright, thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

We didn't vote.

Oh, we didn't oh we didn't vote.

Oh, you're right.

I guess we have to vote.

We should vote on this.

Alright, we have a motion and a second.

Councilmember Davin.

Aye.

Councilmember Darling.

Aye.

Councilmember Silva.

Aye.

Mayor Pro Tem Francois.

And Mayor Wilk.

Aye.

All right.

Now it now it passes.

Oh, we're good, all right.

Uh see, Mayor Pro Tem.

We need you to need you around.

All right.

Um, okay.

How are how's everybody doing?

Good?

All right.

Move and we'll move on to the next um item, which is adopting resolutions approving the assessment report and the annual levy of assessments for the Walnut Creek Tourism Business Improvement District for fiscal year 2027 and setting a public hearing for July 21st, 2026.

And I ask economic development manager Mike Neiman forward to provide the presentation.

I'll give him a good evening, Mayor Wilk, uh members of the city council as well as members of the public.

I'm Mike Neiman, and I'm here to introduce this next item, which is an annual assessment report for the TBID, which stands for the um tourism business improvement district.

As you know, uh the city of Walnut Creek has had this district established since 2010.

It's managed by the Walnut Creek Chamber and uh visit Walner Creek DMO, which stands for destination marketing organization, and it promotes our city and attracts visitors.

Uh there are currently eight hotels in the city.

Uh two are in unincorporated county, but they're part of this district.

And this district is funded by an additional three percent assessment on the uh transit occupancy tax, which is collected from visitors by the hotels in the district.

As part of this district, there is an annual assessment renewal, and it consists of two steps.

The first one is tonight, it's uh to receive a report and presentation uh from the district and set a public hearing date, and then the second step would be a public hearing that would be set for the next council meeting on July 21st.

And with that, I would like to introduce Nicole Henkton, who is the in the room CEO for the chamber.

Good evening, everyone, back up again.

Um thank you for your help at Art and Wine, Cindy and Cindy and Kevin.

It was a great, great festival, very proud of it.

Okay, here we go for our renewal report for fiscal year 25-26.

Obviously, as uh Mike touched on, these are our eight hotels.

Um Marriott, Embassy Suites, Renaissance Um Bay Club, Residence Inn, Holiday and Express, Hilton Garden Inn are one of our newest ones, and Super Eight, previously Motel 6, and then it was another brand for just a hot second, and now we're at Super 8, and uh Diablo Mountain Inn.

Total room inventory of 1,311 rooms in Walnut Creek.

These are our partnerships and memberships that we uh maintain this fiscal and we plan to move forward with.

Helms Briscoe is a third-party organization that helps organizations book rooms and book conference space.

Cal Travel is um an organization that keeps us abreast of everything that's going on in California related to T-Bid funding, tourism funding, and how much we have coming into California and how much it trickles down to us.

Destinations International is a very strong marketing organization association that the DMO belongs to.

MPI, Meeting Professionals International, helps us with leads.

We belong not only to the Northern California chapter, but also the Sacramento Sierra Nevada chapter, which kind of helps us converge and cover most of Northern California.

Associations West is the associations market.

So there are several associations in California, and our membership and partnership with Associations West has been beneficial for regional meetings for all kinds of associations.

We tried a membership with BAPTA this year, Bay Area Business Travel Association, and also GBTA, Global Business Travel Association.

We are also very strong with sports, so we joined Sports ETA as well.

So this is more partnership driven.

We have a partnership with COPA Soccer Training Facility where we have signage displayed inside the facility.

They list us our hotels on their website.

We get a lot of visibility in their newsletter and their socials.

So that is helped with event and tournament organizers.

Ultimate Field House has also been a beneficial partnership where we bring tournaments to them and they bring in their own tournaments.

We are also listed on their website, and the hotels are happy with the return on the tournaments that come to Ultimate Field House as far as rooms go.

Of course, our partnership with the Walnut Creek Chamber in regards to East Bay Women's Conference and the Art and Wine Festival.

Specifically for Art and Wine, we run a hotel trolley from we have two routes.

Um one route takes three hotels and the other takes the other um three hotels, and um we don't include the two ends, but they can walk to the nearest hotels and get on the trolley, and it just does loops and picks up um hotel guests that would like to visit the Art and Wine Festival, drops them off, and it comes around every 15 to 20 minutes.

It was a big hit last year, so we did it again this year.

It was good air conditioning, good music, and we partner with the Livermore Valley Wine Trillium, so the trolley, so they look really good.

So we're doing we did that again this year.

Our partnership with Walnut Creek downtown has been very beneficial.

The hotels love to offer tickets and anything that where their guests can attend these events, Oktoberfest, Walnut Creek on Ice, and on Corked, and it's been very beneficial.

The guests love it, and it gets them out in Walnut Creek, gets them spending money.

We like that.

Broadway Plaza Summer Concert Series, the hotels love this one because they get tables at this event, and they can talk to locals and local businesses about their hotel and what they have to offer.

We are also still part of the Mount Diablo Marketing Co-op, which is ourselves visit Walnut Creek, visit Concord, visit Tri Valley, and visit Pleasant Hill.

We all pool our money into when there's a sponsorship opportunity and we can't afford it on our own.

For example, Bay Area Host Committee that hosted Super Bowl and uh FIFA, we all pool our money together and do a group sponsorship, and it's worked out very well for us.

Art and Wine Hotel Shuttle, just mentioning that again.

That's the route that we took, and then also we ran a special online called Stay and Play.

So if you booked your hotel wine, your hotel stay during Art and Wine, you got two glasses and two free drinks, and you could take the free shuttle around to the art and wine.

And this year, we ran it for the first time last year, and we only sold two.

This year we sold five.

So we're getting there.

We are getting there.

Um, so we're going to keep going until we can build this up.

Stepping into our visitors' guide, um, as you know, in past years we have done a actual printed guide, and we wanted to really push AI enhancements on our website.

So we decided to do an AI visitor's guide this time instead of print to replace print, and it not only costs us less less, but we're not having thousands of visitors' guides sitting in the chamber office.

Um, and this is great because you can go on to the website and you can go on and just ask on the visit walnut creek.org website and ask a question.

Where's a good place to have brunch?

Um, please build an itinerary for me on a Sunday or a Saturday or a Friday night in Walnut Creek, and it will answer.

Um, we're also building favorites lists for hotel staff.

Uh so if there's a front desk person who has like a list of favorite restaurants, we've been naming those lists after the hotel staff and listing them on in our AI visitors guide, and the hotels love being a part of that.

Social media, we're doing really great.

Um we are up to almost 10,000 followers.

It's leisure focused on our Instagram and all of our meta.

Actually, we're also on TikTok, and we're just giving people great experiences in Walnut Creek and trying to bring them in from out of town and running this in addition to our meta ads, bringing people into Walnut Creek.

Um, so please check us out on Instagram.

If you don't already follow us, please do.

Okay, there we go.

This is a breakdown.

Um, so for Google, we're looking at 106 million impressions and over 55,000 website clicks on Meta.

We have 1.3 million impressions, and those ads led to 33, almost 33,800 website clicks.

So we're doing what we what we're supposed to do.

We're getting people driven to the website where they can access everything that's going on in Walnut Creek and also take them to other websites like Walnut Creek Downtown if they need to.

So we're just bringing the people in and dispersing them where they need to go.

Uh, we're doing we also did some e-blast to specific markets.

So weekend Sherpa, we ran an article there.

It's more of the outdoorsy audience, um, birders, hikers, um, that's what weekend sherpa covers, and then also we did a blast with unique venues, which is which was specifically our small meetings big impact campaign.

Uh, we know that Walnut Creek in our hotels does not have the capacity to hold these big 300 to 500 people groups, so we have decided to embrace that we do small meetings the best.

So we name the campaign small meetings big Impact, we offer small incentives, we send out meeting um, we send out email blasts and we target meeting planners and executive assistants specifically.

We did a brand refresh this fiscal year.

So if you all remember Go Calapolitan, some of you were there.

When we first started this rebrand, we didn't have a thing, so to speak.

So we kind of had to make up a thing, which was Go Calopolitan.

But this that we were reviewed with our team and in our board meeting, everyone loved always in season because Walnut Creek is always in season.

This can apply to our weather, this can apply to our outdoor activities.

This can apply to our food, to our uh retail stores.

So everyone was in agreement that always in season is where we wanted to go.

And these are the two versions of our new logo, refreshed.

We still trademark Go Cal Politan, so it's not going away, but this is our refreshed tag.

Collateral Refresh.

This is our meeting, our meeting planners guide.

So we have highlights about Walnut Creek, accessibility by the numbers, and of course, our hotels are listed.

Our sales manager takes this piece out on the road with him to give meeting planners, especially the ones that don't know where we are, a quick look of what we have to offer.

These are the data platforms that we use to inform us to make our digital marketing buys.

So arrivalists we're using right now.

Nolan gives us the meeting market intelligence so we can see who is booking what, and that can inform our sales manager on leads and who to go after.

Ripe is our direct room booking engine, so that is connected to COPA's website and ultimate field house website, and then we're also going to be using it for our upcoming cycling race.

And if you go to our website right now, you can book a room at any of our uh hotels or inns directly from our website.

These are visitation insights, 345,000 overnight trips.

85% of them came from within California, so we get a lot of traffic from Sacramento.

They love us up in Sacramento, and we did see an uptick in LA.

NYC had the highest out of state area volume.

Seattle had the longest average stay, and the highest volume day was when JP Morgan Chase was at Moscone.

So we love that San Francisco is picking up those huge conventions at Moscone because we get traffic from those.

Sometimes people don't want to stay in the city, and they're willing to take the Bart to Walnut Creek.

This is Ripe that I just went over.

We got 32 bookings, 62 room nights, about uh 10,639 dollars in revenue, and that is collected by the hotel properties, not by us.

Oh, sorry.

Hang on just a second.

Oh, wait a second.

Okay, I got ahead of myself there.

Sorry.

Hang on, can you start that over?

Sorry about that.

Uh, from right there.

Yes, thank you.

So I wanted to give you an update on a new campaign that we're doing called Very Local.

It is a set of videos that we're going to be running mostly up in the Sacramento area and also in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it just gives highlights of Walnut Creek.

We have what we call micro docs, micro documentaries, which are two minutes long, and then we have 15 second spots and 30 second spots.

We're going to be running those on Meta and Google, and um it just gives a just a brief description of Walnut Creek and things that we have to offer, and we focused on outdoor specifically.

Only 30 seconds.

There's a true sense of community here.

You could get lost at Mount Diablo for hours and hours.

It really gives that vacation feeling every time I come here.

World class dining, driving downtown, all of these amazing lifestyle things all in one place within a minute for one another.

Regardless of what you're looking for, you can find it in Walnut Creek.

So that is one of our very local videos.

These are the conferences and sales events that we've attended to bring meeting planners in to Walnut Creek.

You'll notice where we've been in several areas of the country, and these are all the organizations that we partner with on conferences.

Uh familiarization tours, aka fams.

We've done three this year, and we've brought them down to what we call microfams.

Usually other destinations host anywhere from 10 to 30 people, depending on the size of the destination.

They're very expensive, and you may get an RFP out of it.

So we decided to shrink it down, bring in people that book locally specifically, and do a more one of the biggest complaints we heard from planners is a lot of destinations keep them for like two or three days, and they just can't spare the time.

So we got it down to one day.

We pack in one day, we give them a bunch of information, and we've gotten three RFPs so far and estimation of 550 room nights.

And out of three tours held, it was 30 total.

So we keep it small and we keep it relevant, and it's worked out for us.

Some of you may have seen this at our tourism update.

Back in was that April?

Yes, April.

This is California numbers.

So uh travel related spending 159 billion, and that's up year over year.

We love that, and that relates to 1.16 million tourism jobs.

This is the visitation forecast.

So kind of flat, but it's going up.

Um there's been a lot of changes, but it's going up.

So we're happy about that.

This is the big news that we also mentioned at the tourism update that the GFNY race is scheduled for April 18th, 2027.

That is an international cycling race.

They also booked a cycling race in uh Ventura on April 11th, 2027, and they are setting up a four-day bike tour in between the two destinations.

So the GFNY is really going after California.

These are their first two races ever in California.

So the race will end on the Mount Diablo summit, and we're really looking forward to the room nights that that's going to bring in with 500 to 1,000 cyclists expected for the first year.

And we've signed a three-year deal for this event.

We actually had the hotels pick the month that the race comes in, a month where they're soft, and the hotels agreed on that date.

So we had uh some changes to our budget, and I just wanted to uh go over some highlights.

We made increases to all travel hotel meals, conference registrations.

Everything is higher.

Uh, hotels rates are higher, conference rates have increased from 500 to a thousand dollars just for registration more than last year.

Uh, more money was applied to our outside services category to capture new vendors and new campaign creation, uh, updates to personnel and outreach to capture annual salary increases and projected payroll taxes, and then also an increase to our dashboard economic impact to reflect crossover on a new vendor contract.

So we'll have some crossover in between our previous vendor and our new vendor.

And are there any questions?

Any questions?

Councilmember Silva.

Thank you very much, Nicole.

And thank you to the convention and visitor bureau for all the work that you do to help our local hotels.

So I remember when this was established.

And the comments from the hotel years was we need more heads and beds.

Yes.

Statistics related to that, or are they moved, you know, occupancy levels, etc.?

How is that going?

So we're still averaging between 71 and 73% per month on occupancy, which is actually pretty good as the state uh the national average is around sixty-seven percent.

So we're still above the national average, which is great.

We also are leading in our region on occupancy, with the exception of Pleasant Hill, but that's because Pleasant Hill has long-term stays.

Most of their properties are long-term stays.

We do lead the region very much so in our eighty uh average daily rate, which is ADR.

So we're still moving, moving along in the right direction and holding occupancy between 71 and 73.

Would I like more?

Absolutely.

But that's where we've been going, probably for the last two years.

And the opening of the Hilton Garden, what has been that in how is that affected?

Yeah.

Occupancy levels, et cetera.

So I know that has affected occupancy levels at embassy suites because they're the same brand, and they can use their points at either one, and everyone loves the new kid, right?

Uh love a brand new hotel.

So it has affected embassy suites a bit.

Um I think kind of I think as we see time go on, I think it's going to balance itself out because I had just come on board when residence in was built, and we saw the same thing.

They pulled uh occupancy from the Marriott, and then after about a year or two, it kind of balanced itself out.

So I think we will see that, but right now the Hilton Honors members are heading over to the new property.

Well, I guess your question is generally speaking, are we adding more or are we cannibalizing?

And you can understand that it's what the market itself is doing is what's I don't think it's cannibalizing, but I don't uh so far I have not seen that it's bringing more.

So we're going to keep an eye on it, and they are back to being fully staffed.

They had some staff issues early on, they're back to being fully staffed, but I don't think it's cannibalizing.

Okay.

The um are all eight operators involved in the um convention in the TBID in the governance of it.

How's that going?

Um we have our regulars, our can our consistent properties that show up every single time, and we have our properties that I have to go get them to make them participate.

But yeah, the for the most part, they're getting more engaged.

We're going in the right direction.

And my last question has to do with I noticed that you're running an a net loss.

Mm-hmm.

And then you're running one budgeted projection this year, and you may have been doing that for a couple of years.

Yes.

Are you spending down reserves that you acquired during COVID?

I mean, what what's going on?

Because you can't do that in perpetuity.

Mm-hmm.

Agreed.

Um, I will ask Anthony to come up, he's our treasurer, because he can give more um detailed answers on that.

But yes, you are correct, we can't continue to do that, and yes, that was reserved from money that we did not spend during COVID.

Correct.

Yes, yes to those two.

Yes.

Okay, thanks.

Okay.

So at what point will you be looking to basically have your income align with your expenses?

It depends on um the the revenues are still a little shy of what they're spending, obviously.

But there's the a million and one point two million dollars in a fund.

And so the the DMO's job is to spend that money to get heads in beds.

I've attended every meeting since October at the DMO, and it's crystal clear what the hotels want.

They want visibility for the city, they love the city, they love deploying their capital in the city, and they feel that once they have people coming to the city, people want to stay here.

So two things visit Walnut Creek and Heads and Beds, and so that's what that fund is for.

So I as the treasurer, I want those monies to be spent um judiciously and for the appropriate things, and the DMO is that the board has been very involved by Clark on the budget and the key decisions of the uh DMO since I've been involved.

Thank you.

Um further questions or okay.

Let's um open up the public comment right now.

If anybody from the public would like to come up and uh ask questions or comments on this, please complete a speaker card.

Uh once at the podium, please introduce yourself and city of residence for the record.

Consistent with city policies related to public comments.

Each speaker will have two minutes to make your remarks.

Written comments submitted have been posted to the city's website for public review and are included in the meeting record, but will not be separately read in the record.

If we have any member for the public that would like to speak on this, please come forward now.

Okay.

Well, I guess we will close the public comment on that, bring it back to council for any more comments, questions, or motion.

I would just say thank you, Nicole, for your enthusiasm and for taking an industry that got battered pretty hard by COVID and finding ways to start to bring it back.

Um I appreciate all your work.

And if anybody, so I will move to adopt the resolution approving the Walnut Creek Tourism Board, tourism business improvement district annual assessment report for FY25-26 and adopt the resolution of intention to levy assessments for FY27 for the T-bid and set a public hearing for July 21st, 2026.

We have a motion and a second.

Councilmember Davin?

Yes.

Councilmember Darling.

Hi.

Councilmember Silva.

Hi.

Mayor Pro Time Francois.

And Mayor Wilk.

Hi.

And thank you, Nicole.

That was uh yes, as we just heard regarding um during COVID.

We know that one hotel at least opened right at the beginning of COVID.

So it's great to get them back on track here.

Uh thank you very much.

Why don't we take a um 5-10?

What do you want?

Let's let's do a five-minute break till 8 05.

All right.

And we're back.

Next on the agenda is a consideration titled Presentation of the Draft Economic Development Action Plan for Fiscal Year 2027 and 2028.

And I invite again economic development manager Mike Neiman forward to provide the presentation.

Thank you.

Good evening again.

I'm still Mike Neiman, your economic development manager, and I'm joined here by Cassava Washington.

And we are your economic development division.

So before I start telling you about this new action plan, I did want to caveat that while the two of us are your economic development staff, our city's economic development efforts extend much broader.

So when I talk about economic development in this effort in this plan, some of it is uh headed by our division, but a lot of it is done by other staff and mostly in collaboration with other staff because the key essence of economic development here is the quality of life.

So a lot of projects we work on closely with community development, with public works, with the police department, and all of these staff are committed to the quality of life here.

So we'll start with the background.

Um we've always done uh economic development planning in this city, uh, but the 2018 effort has been done on a five-year cycle, and that's been historically done here.

However, since COVID hit, there's been a lot of change in the economy, and uh to be more proactive and more adaptable to some of the rapid changes, the city uh turned uh the next economic development to an action plan, which is more task-oriented, and that was presented to you all in 2023 for the 24-25 cycle.

There was a lot of uh community outreach and a lot of input received, and there were 12 tasks identified within uh that document that we have implemented and carried forward.

Uh those tasks were mostly focused on on the city's office and retail base, uh promoting this location and the city's image, uh creation and uh support of the existing jobs, uh support of the key industries, which are health care and uh uh auto sales, exploration of emerging industries and partnerships.

I mentioned some of the partnerships within the departments within the city, but also external partnerships with economic development organizations outside of the city.

So the idea behind this new document in front of you tonight is to extend this two-year cycle into the fiscal year 26-27 season, and I'll highlight some of the uh baseline trends as well as the thinking that's encapsulated here, building on the work and the input that has been done to date.

So first, a number of accomplishments for the 24-25 action plan.

We have completed many of these tasks.

We hosted broker forums in collaboration with the Walnut Creek Chamber, where we have closely collaborated with the broker community to make sure that we understand what the current trends are and stay abreast of the new and emerging trends to make sure that we capitalize on those opportunities.

We reinstated the mayor's business retention program, and we're happy to report that we are on track to complete for a year with two already completed this year alone.

We also implemented an outdoor dining pods grant program last summer and happy to report that it's been an award-winning program via Cal Ed, and we have now have seven pods.

Before the grant expires in June, we have several more in the pipeline, which we're really happy about.

We also engaged a consultant in the lean process designed to improve the uh permitting process here and focused on streamlining streamlining permitting.

And we have been underway since last year and involved in that effort through the uh permit review team, and you'll see the updates going to council later this year with how that uh process is improving how the city is processing applications from customers.

We've also continued to provide exceptional service and support strategic customers such as Madsen and Five Star Bank, which were our major success stories from last year.

These are two major office tenants, they came to town.

We've continued or adopted uh an ordinance in collaboration with Walnut Creek downtown, enabling an entertainment zone, and are excited to see the entertainment zone events come to light.

First one in the beginning of July, and the second one in the beginning of August via the Locus Street Festival.

We've also completed an office demand market study, and that's something I'll touch upon in a bit more detail later.

We continued meeting with hospitals and tracking opportunities and health care as those emerge, given that healthcare is a critical employment cluster in the city.

We've also continued meeting with auto dealers, providing support for their operation and tracking opportunities in that industry given the uh significant impact that we are receiving from auto dealers via the sales tax and employment.

We've also supported various tech focused efforts, more notably in collaboration with the chamber via the funders and founders event, as well as an ongoing collaboration and partnership with DVTI, Diablo Valley Tech Initiative.

We also operate the city's economic development website, social media.

I mentioned that we share a lot of success stories and promote the city.

We are also the city's data broker, and we track a lot of data and build customized reports in efforts to attract business and publish economic indicators.

Those are available on our website, Walnut Creek Connected.com.

And lastly, we continue to partner with stakeholders, which include Walnut Creek Downtown, as I mentioned earlier, the Walnut Creek Chamber, as well as Diablo Regional Arts, East Bay Economic Development Alliance, and Conch Costa Partnership, among others.

So I mentioned the Office study, and we have conducted a study last year, which is called the spacewalk analysis, where we have retained services from economic forensics and analytics to look at what the future of employment is via looking at employment growth, identifying the portion of that employment growth and converting that to demand for office and comparing that with supply of the existing office stock in the city.

And you could see that the finding of that study is that given that we have somewhere around 13 million square feet of office space, no one knows what the future of office is.

There's a lot of changes that are happening with the return to work, with the changes in employment densities and the types of industries that are occupying office space.

But given a range of likely scenarios that you could see in the chart in front of you, the consultant found that we have somewhere between three and 20 years of future employment growth that could be accommodated in the current office space, depending on the scenario.

And this is important because this is an example of the data point that is supporting the general plan update, which is a very important effort that we are embarking on that will be a feeder for a lot of the data that we collect.

And it also informs policy discussion about how do we continue keeping a balance of uses and how do we continue keeping a jobs housing ratio that is focused on employment, given that we're seeing some of the more recent trends with office, particularly older and obsolete portion of the existing inventory being converted to other uses.

We also wanted to share a composition of the local economy.

Here you see the top six largest industry clusters.

Not surprising, healthcare and local government are the top two, and these are large office drivers.

Then you see number four is restaurants.

We have a very large cluster of eating and drinking places in Walnut Creek with over 120 in downtown alone.

Those have not historically created higher paying jobs, but they have been important for creating a quality of life, attraction of tourism, as you heard in the prior conversation, and also sales tax generation, which then has the spillover effect from visitors to some of the other industries that these visitors support.

We also see a lot of large nursing and residential care facilities cluster here, reflective of the gradually aging population, and then the sixth one is insurance, which is really part of that, what we call fire, which is finance, insurance and real estate, which is part of that core demand for office users, which we have historically seen here in Walnut Creek, but due to some of the changes in office, we're starting to see a reduction in that office user base.

As far as the fastest growth industries, local governments been one, healthcare continues to be really strong, and a lot of our local office demand is driven by healthcare in particular and specialized office space that they look for.

So again, part of the general plan process would be looking at how can we enable that growth?

How can we create a policy environment that is friendly to health care, reusing some of the existing office space inventory or potentially even creating new office space?

Personal services has been one of the fastest growing industries here.

Some of it has gone into mixed-use buildings, others has replaced retail, and also the personal services.

A lot of it is not known for higher wages.

It's been an important industry driver because it's something that has kept retail vacancies low and has gone hand in hand with traditional brick and mortar retail.

And then you see federal government and this the fifth category, religious grant-making civic and professional is largely nonprofits, and then the sixth fastest again is nursing and residential care facilities.

Here's an example of the type of data that we collect and present.

This is an annual snapshot that also lives on the economic development website.

Not a lot of surprises there for 2025.

You could see that Walnut Creek continues to be an affluent community with a highly educated labor force.

And what's interesting is we have a population of 70,000 and roughly just as many employees, which means that we have just as many people here during the day from employment as we do in the evening when some of the uh some of the residents who may work elsewhere return home.

Now, this number has been again uh affected by some of the changes in the uh recent office shifts because with employment from home, not as many employees come to the office or at least five days a week as historically been the case, which again brings up some interesting questions about the types of office employees, with health care typically being the most proof from this trend where healthcare employees do show up to work more frequently than some of the more professional and financial service industries.

I also wanted to highlight some of the recent vacancies, uh, and these are broken down by land use.

You could see that the retail industry continues to be strong in part because of the emergence of the services that have been occupying uh traditional retail space.

Uh retail in general has been turning to be more experiential.

So we're hearing from brokers that there's going to be this continued growth in the service industry going forward, and we're seeing a lot of it even in downtown where we see an emergence of gyms and other types of services.

The occupancies in downtown are particularly strong now.

We're also seeing a trend where a lot of restaurants have taken up previously retail spaces.

Uh, so that shows uh strong demand for the eating and drinking places over the traditional brick and mortar, and we're also seeing that the downtown uh retail has been particularly strong.

Uh, we've seen 20 million visitors in downtown alone last year, so you could see that in part reflected through a low retail vacancy numbers.

Uh, as far as the neighborhood shopping center goes, uh the number is a bit higher.

As far as office, uh, it's no surprise.

Office has struggled all over the state and the country as a whole since COVID.

Uh, we have been somewhere in the middle with the city-wide average vacancy of office being 20%.

Some interesting trends is since COVID, there has been a segmentation within office, and many communities are seeing that uh strong well-positioned buildings with high amenities and a lot of occupancies have done even better, especially when landlords have invested in amenities, and you're seeing a little bit of that around downtown, because those are the office buildings where proximity to downtown is the amenity, so a lot of them continue to do well compared to Bart.

But also what's interesting is Shade Lands has the lowest vacancies, and that's another trend because a lot of the office inventory in Shadlands is older, and it's class C.

And what uh older class C is the most affordable office.

Uh so this particular strength in shade lands shows that there is still a strong market for for affordable office space.

And some of that space uh through the Build the Remedy project, uh maybe lost as well as some of the other um proposals.

So the question for the general plan would be how do we continue?

Certainly, when you look at the region, a lot of office space is being repositioned.

Uh, for example, Bishop Ranch alone is taking most of the Chevron campus, former Chevron campus, I should say, some of the other offices that have been vacated, and uh converting that to residential, for example.

Now that will certainly reduce vacancies at Bishop Ranch and make us a bit more competitive on the regional scale.

At the same time, those uh the opportunity to support jobs at Bishop Ranch will not come back.

So that creates uh some uh questions about the right balance from the land use perspective in Wilna Creek as well.

And then hotel, you just got the presentation, so the citywide hotel occupancy is 75%, and average in the industry uh is about 70, so we are doing better.

And to try to attempt to answer the question if we are oversupplied or not, it it's really hard because hotel is a highly cyclical industry.

So I'm glad to report that we're doing well now, but hotels have also been affected by COVID, and the range in hotel performance has varied widely, so it's it's really hard to say long term, and it is important to caveat that a lot of our hotel performance is part of a much larger tourism ecosystem, not only with the tourism that's happening in San Francisco, but even national tourism, but a lot of changes in uh national tourism trends, such as uh policy of visa issuances and things like that.

So we will continue seeing some of that reflected through the numbers on the ground level in Walnut Creek.

For this uh 26-27 uh action plan, uh we have continued conducting outbreach, and we've spent several months doing robust outreach focused on the business community.

We have shared the draft document with over 40 stakeholders, and it includes a mix of a vast representation of businesses, uh, of course, the boards for Walnut Creek Downtown and the Chamber, as well as the board for the P Bid in Shadowlands, as well as the T-BID.

Uh, we've talked to brokers, uh developers, uh businesses of various sizes, landowners, consultants.

Uh we've uh shown the draft plan to educational institutions, as well as the local and regional economic development organizations.

And this document in front of you encapsulates the spirit of the 24-25 action plan.

It's largely business as usual, and the strategies remain a coarse.

Uh, a few smaller changes that we have made is uh while we retained the major strategies and goals.

Uh, we did uh reorganized the document a bit.

Um, we did uh continue to capture some of the prior market studies.

There's been a number of market studies that were completed in 2023 office, medical office, and retail.

We've incorporated the 2025 office market study that I just shared the slide with you off.

Uh we've refined some of the tasks that have already been completed, and we've also probably most notably added measurable goals for tracking performance.

So going forward, we will be not only sharing the completed tasks but also the goals that I'll highlight in a second.

Uh we thought really hard about what the right metrics are to measure the performance.

And there are no perfect metrics because similar to the hotel performance, a lot of the economic development performance in the city just depends at least in part on some of the macroeconomic factors that are beyond the control of staff.

But nevertheless, there is at least some correlation between the efforts of staff and some of these.

So this reflects the best thinking as reflected through the outbreach.

And you could see here that uh local unemployment rate continues to be an important one, and with a rate of 5% or below.

We'll be looking at year-over-year business license growth for the city, uh, sales tax growth, website visits to the economic development website.

This is an important window uh into the city for many prospective businesses.

Uh, and we'll continue looking at vacancies, office, retail, and hotels, as I uh just showed to you earlier.

Uh, these are some of the baseline indicators of where we are.

You could see that employment uh right now is above 70,000, unemployment rate in as of April, which was the latest month available, is well below 5%.

That's a very encouraging number.

Um, we did experience uh business license growth decline slightly between the 24-25 period.

We're hopeful that that trend will reverse in 26.

Sales growth comparing Q4 from 2024 to 2025, which is the last available data is largely on par.

It's reflective of largely the rate of inflation, so it's flat otherwise.

Uh we now have a baseline number for the website visits at 11,000,700.

And we've also decided to track uh average uh commute time for Walnut Creek residents again.

There's a lot of uh macro factors that affect this as well, but it would be an interesting one to report based on the input we've received.

And with that, I will pass it on to Cassava to talk about our strategies.

I'm Cassava Washington, economic development specialist.

Thank you for having me.

Mike covered all of the homework that we did in the last ED action plan, and I'm gonna cover the group project, basically.

In other words, you heard the why and the how, and I'll focus on what's next.

For the fiscal year 2027-28 economic development action plan, we identified six strategies.

As Mike just demonstrated, we're doing good work in a great community.

Um, and so many of these strategies build upon existing efforts and successes.

I'll provide a high-level overview tonight of the action plan, and the action plan has all the details.

So you guys have that attachment.

Our first three strategies focus on growth, investment, and maintaining Walnut Creek's position as the East Bay's premier destination to live, work, shop, and do business.

Strategy one, we'll continue promoting Walnut Creek as an economic epicenter of the East Bay by building on key regional partnerships and leveraging our competitive advantages, including our strong health care sector, and also working with organizations such as the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Brewer, the Walnut Creek Downtown Association, the East Bay Economic Development Alliance, Workforce Development Board, Contra Costa, and Diablo Valley Tech Initiative.

Just name a few.

Strategy two, we'll continue our efforts to attract and rate retain businesses, particularly industries that provide quality jobs and help diversify our community or our economy, rather.

While attracting new businesses is important, maintaining and supporting the businesses that we already have is just as equal as important.

So we'll continue with our mayor's visits, our walkabout Wednesdays with the chamber, our business pop-ins with the Walnut Creek Downtown Association, as well as other informal efforts.

Sometimes the best retention strategy is solving the problem before it becomes one.

So strategy three, focus on continued downtown vitality and quality of life enhancements, and that's with working with our partners to enhance the visitor experience, support events and outdoor dining, and ensure downtown remains vibrant, welcoming, and competitive.

We'll also track best practices to attract visitors.

While these first three strategies focus on our economy today, the next three strategies focus on Walnut Creek for long-term success.

Through implementation, strategy four of the general plan, we'll explore opportunities to align land use, economic development, and market realities, while identifying ways to strengthen and balance our commercial corridors and employment centers.

Strategy five, we'll also continue supporting the auto industry, which remains one of the city's most important economic sectors.

By doing this, we'll be we'll meet we're maintaining strong relationships with dealerships, identifying opportunities for growth and staying ahead of emerging and merging industry trends.

And finally, strategy six.

We'll continue serving as the business resource and the city's data broker, whether it's a major employer like Matson Logistics or a local small business like Dad's Barbecue.

Economic development helps businesses reach the right city departments, navigate the process and move from application to business opening.

We'll also continue providing quarterly economic updates, annual community snapshots, and customized market data to support informed decision making.

These six strategies serve as our roadmap for the next two fiscal years.

As implementation moves forward, staff will periodically inform council with updates on measurable outcomes and performance indicators.

So progress could be tracked and evaluated over time.

Okay.

Um let's bring it for questions then.

Why don't we start over here with Council Member?

Does anybody have any questions?

I guess we'll ask it that way first.

Council Member David.

So first I I just want to thank both of you for doing such a great job with the economic development department.

It was really um cool to look at all the accomplishments and all the things that are currently going on, and every event we go to, you're always, you know, every the chamber event, every um business event you're always there and supporting.

So I really appreciate the work the two of you are doing.

Um I wanted to um just look at those last six uh strategic actions, and I was curious.

We we singled out the auto industry, and no doubt the the fiscal impact of the auto industry in Walnut Creek is significant, but um I wonder if we wouldn't have the same wording and the same strategic action for healthcare, which while not the same fiscal, as a huge economic impact and is maybe our largest industry.

What were the thoughts that went into picking out the auto industry and and why not the healthcare industry?

Yeah, thank you for your question.

So we we actually did uh identify both as strategic industries.

If you look um, and it didn't make it into the detail of the slide because we only showed the strategies, but under each strategy their underlying actions.

So under the business uh retention and attraction, uh, there's a lot of actions that that focus on continued focus on health care because of its importance and its sheer size and growth and opportunity in Walnut Creek.

Um, so it's very much a continued focus for economic development is just that with the auto industry, it's its own strategic action because of the uniqueness and focus on that industry that is a little bit different than business attraction and retention.

Uh, particularly the thinking is when it comes to other industries, if you convert them to land use, uh, there is a similar uh progress where you're you're you're you're talking certain industries, you're attracting them, the retention converts to your occupancies within land uses.

When it comes to the auto sales, it's a bit unique because the manifestation of the land uses is a bit different, it doesn't nicely fit into retail or office, and the trend within is is kind of densification and even new dealerships going into mixed use development.

So the thinking is that it's its own action because of the additional layer of the need to understand beyond working closely with them and the impact on on land use that that would have, specifically within the general plan context.

Okay.

If I could just add a a little more background for why the the focus on um auto if you go back to the plan that was created a few years back, which this is building upon, the city's long had a lot of open lines of communication with health care due to the two big hospitals, health care is a little more organized and coordinated.

The auto industry hasn't necessarily been that way, and so the big focus was to really outreach to the auto industry, establish those relationships and try to have more coordination amongst the industries that we can interact with them, understand their their needs, their wants, their concerns, that sort of thing, and help address those going forward.

So that's why there was more of an intentional focus on auto.

It doesn't necessarily downplay health air care, other industries, but recognize the importance of auto in the attempt to strengthen that relationship and it further coordinate the industry overall.

Thank you.

Another question, um well, actually this was just sort of a comment.

Yeah, tw even at the baseline for our um current office, you know, the the black line there, it was uh 2036 when when we'd break even.

That's that's not that far away.

I thought that was interesting, even in uh just sort of in the baseline.

So that would speak to maybe that we're not over supplied with office right now.

Um, uh, and then my and the question I have is local governance the fastest growing.

What what's the analysis there?

Why is local governance the fastest growing faster than healthcare?

What what do you think that's all about?

I think it it I think it really depends on the classification.

I certainly think that it's more than just the city of Walnut Creek.

In part uh this data is is based on zip codes, so it incorporates some of the unincorporated area, and I think CCTA, for instance, is part of it.

Um perhaps the fire district certainly their their jobs in that that it's capturing.

Um office vacancy statewide, 12%, Walnut Creek 20%.

Did I miss in the analysis why we're higher than the state?

I might you might have said it and I missed it.

What what is the thought on why word 20 and the states 12?

Yeah, we we're hearing that a lot a lot of other communities around us are anywhere between uh high teens to twenties, so uh we got we got the state average from from a data source that really aggregates, you know, it I think it really is kind of a reflection of the kind of data that's used.

Maybe just not not that okay.

Um, that was my questions.

Thank you.

Just following up, building on Council Member DeVini's questions about the office uh vacancy rate.

I had the same, there was that discrepancy between the state and walnut creek.

Have we considered outreach?

Who's doing well in office statewide?

Who's more at the ten percent range than the twenty percent range?

May I offer a question that also goes along with this?

Perhaps the um denominators changing.

If you have a hundred empty office spaces and you convert half of them to housing, you no longer have that's true.

So that could be part of it.

Yeah, another part of the answer is certainly each city's economy is different.

Uh right now, a lot of the uh media has been captured by headlines of the San Francisco office market, and you're seeing a large uh net absorption there with vacancies reducing in the last year.

Now most of it is driven by AI investment, and it's an interesting industry because everyone loves to talk about tech, but AI is kind of a unique subset of tech, and uh one it's very San Francisco focused.

We haven't seen a lot of spillover to the East Bay or at least yet.

And second, it's been highly cyclical, and having gone on some of the tours of the skyscrapers of some of these office buildings in the city, even talking to landlords, it's been really interesting from their standpoint that they're seeing some of these tenants coming in starting with two, three thousand square feet, and then they grow to ten or twenty thousand within a year when they get the next uh venture funding um uh phase, whereas others that come in and start with two thousand just disappear overnight.

So it hasn't been a stable industry, and there's just a lot of dynamic movement between winners and losers because it's such an early phase of development.

Certainly there's a lot of venture capital investment that has been focused on San Francisco, and uh, but that's been one of the anomalies in in the office market, at least in the Bay Area.

Okay, and then related to uh you'd mentioned that, and I had heard this anecdotally that the downtown office space is performing better than BART, but the vacancy rates they look pretty much the same.

Is it is there something the numbers aren't showing there?

Yeah, and that uh they're similar, they're a little bit lower, uh in downtown.

That comment was more based on just uh the regional trends.

What we're hearing from other cities is there is a much wider uh vacancy difference than what we're seeing on Walnut Creek.

Okay.

And then just finally on retail, obviously our overall vacancy rate looks pretty healthy.

There are some though high profile, highly noticeable vacancies in Broadway Plaza and a vacant site across from the theaters.

What are kind of what's kind of our strategies about working with Mace Rich and with property owners on seeing redevelopment of those spaces and the that site?

Yeah, we work closely with Mace Rich, and in some cases we even try to pursue our own tenants.

We go to the ICS staff goes to ICSC conference, which is the primary uh retail focused conference where we pursue tenants and try to make deals.

I know that Mace Rich is really involved in that as well.

Uh so we work closely with them to try to make sure that that their spaces as utilized as can be.

Okay, thank you.

Is it up based on the um I just want to make sure that we hit everybody, but I have a quick question.

So measure O was tied to the previous economic development action plan.

Or do we see how does how will measure O play a role in this moving forward for this plan?

Well, certainly uh one of the measure O uses is downtown, and I mentioned downtown being our strategic partner, so we'll continue working closely with them and deploying some of the funding from measure O towards uses that further the city's economic development.

Okay.

Yeah, and I would just add that you know, to broaden that it's a little bit beyond this plan, but as you know, measure O was um used to fund five officer positions for downtown B, which enhances safety, um, which is a big economic draw.

It's one of the biggest things that we hear of why people like Walnut Creek, it's safe and it's clean.

We have also invested considerable measure O monies in the Leisure Center and other programming to help draw folks into downtown.

So I think when we're looking at economic development measure O investment to look at it broadly, um obviously what's specific to this plan, but beyond that as well to support not only a healthy downtown but a healthy city in which people want to be here.

Thanks.

Just a couple quick ones.

Thanks for a great great presentation.

Um thinking about general plan, one of the things that it might that have I want to find out if you guys have thought about including it in the general plan.

We've seen a number of uses that have come to us, and they are a mix of personal services and health care.

And it seems like there's been a couple times where people have come in with an idea, but because it's too far over to health care, it's not allowed in a retail space.

Have we thought about doing something to address that either through the general plan or in other ways?

Yes, we have, and I'll I'll answer this question more broadly.

But I mentioned the broker round table is one of the ways that we continue seeking input from brokers, and we certainly want to hear if we have missed out on the opportunity to capture a tenant, especially if it's a desirable tenant for the city's economic development.

So we'll continue looking at zoning and and making policy that meets our objectives.

So having healthcare come in and having it come in and be enabled in a way that would really help that cluster continue to form here uh is something that we continuously look at.

Okay, and then when it comes to um portraying the city, I just want to pass on an interesting observation.

I had lunch with all the young people in the family.

And um I'm always advertising that they should move to Walnut Creek because they all have babies.

And one of the interesting things that they observed, they they wanted to know well how white is Walnut Creek, because they're all in mixed race marriages and they're like we want to raise our kids someplace where they'll feel comfortable.

And that was that was interesting that that came out from all the kids, including one who's a venture capitalist I would love to have moved to Walnut Greek.

Just wanted to pass that one on.

But anyway, thanks for your work.

The question's all right and uh do you want to go back here?

Um it was about retail and we were pointing out some of the the spaces that are that have been vacant for quite a while and I know um there's there's a been uh history of certain spaces and certain property owners that just seem to keep the places unoccupied or sort of dilapidated.

Um has there been and I'm not advocating for it I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on it but what about something like a vacancy tax has that been discussed?

Oh actually why don't why don't I just interject we we brought that up about 10 years ago eight nine years essentially that has to be a full tax of the entire city voting to do that and it puts our weight behind a tax that actually has to hit everybody in the city similar as we do with measure o and so our city attorney at the well it was still still Steve Mattis advised that did we want to use our weight behind that where we're essentially targeting one owner that has perhaps been um vacant in in taking care of the of the vacancies but we're penalizing potential landlords that are actually trying to fill the vacancies and so at the time 10 years ago we decided not to.

But I mean if you have anything to add to that please do I I just wanted to give you a little history there.

Okay.

And that is exactly the trade off that that tax would create it has been implemented by some other communities more notably in Oakland and it frankly every community has seems like one landowner who um is kind of disproportionately affecting some of the vacancies and really from the policy standpoint you have carrots and you have sticks and it's considered best practices to try to find the carrots approach without risking negatively affecting other landowners who may be experiencing or are good actors and that's um that's the challenge with the vacant taxes sometimes when you implement it you are inherently penalizing other property owners who may be experiencing vacancies despite their do not due to the lack of trying but if it were to be proposed I'd assume it would be proposed in some way where only the most egregious outliers would actually get hit by the tax it wouldn't be like oh you've been vacant for three months like start paying I mean it would be like oh you've been there for five years now you know that kind of thing so um that's where you get into the details yes yeah and you were going to say I was just gonna add and it wasn't related to that but I don't so I didn't I was thinking of we talked about the the business retention and attraction efforts but another thought would be have you considered um exit interviews with I mean there's Kachatai Noah's left I I've heard about that people you know I'm sure it's increased rent you're gonna hear that but it'd be interesting to talk to owners about St.

Paul's cleaners is leaving on Newell.

You know, come up with a list of five or six businesses and may if the owners are willing kind of sit down and talk that could be another data point that maybe you're not getting from brokers or from some other aspects.

Yeah, that's a great idea, and we try to do this.

We don't have a formal process yet, but we do have an informal where we do try to uh get as much feedback as we can.

And if something works, we'll want to know about it, but if something doesn't work, we want to know about it as well.

Great, thank you.

Why don't we open up to public comment if we have any?

And if anybody there's do we we have a public comment.

Sir, please make your way down to the podium and give your name in the other part of the I'm at Double Caro and I run a business here in Walnut Creek for over 40 years, a brokerage company.

I'm also vice chair of EDA, so dance on that.

Mike and I are on the DVTI um economic committee that's gonna do a case to bring tech to North 680 in Walnut Creek.

So I have three sentences.

You have a fantastic staff.

Erica and her staff have made the brokers and developers have noticed this the process is faster and better.

The economic development people have done a great job of concierge services and reaching out.

So I just wanted to make sure you know you have a great staff here.

And then I'll unquote one answer on the office development.

Um there's several markets in Walnut Creek.

The reason why the state has a lower is sometimes the stats, as you mentioned, they count state-occupied buildings.

Which has nothing to do with the vacancy rate.

So the denominator is not the same.

So it's just that.

And in the case of downtown Walnut Creek, we have several kinds of buildings.

So the upper floors are getting high rents, lawyers and accountants, and they have smaller bay depths.

The lower floors in the Pacific in the um golden triangle, which are 20 and 30,000 feet with deep bays, those were meant for the cubicle farms, the insurance companies and the banks, those have categorically left the Bay Area.

And so they're in one sense the lower floors, the wedding cake lower floors or the dinosaur floors, but the upper floors of Growers Square, 1333, they're all rented at uh rental rates.

In terms of the vacancy rate, San Francisco after leasing five million feet to AI is 30 percent vacant.

Oakland is 35% vacant.

Concord is 28% vacant.

So if you compare it just to the immediate Bay Area, only the Silicon Valley is better at this point.

Um so that's worth it you have a great staff.

Thank you, Ed.

Uh, and that's a helpful comparison figures too.

Uh all right, so with that uh we'll close public comment, bring it back to um to council.

And again, thank you very much for the presentation.

Always helpful, great.

I mean, I can definitely vouch for the fact that between Mike and Orkassava there every time we have a new business that's opening, and uh it is great.

They love seeing the involvement from Walnut Creek and and from you and us being there.

So thank you very much for all that you've done to date on this, and we'll have a a good next what, six, seven months still to come, at least for this year.

So, any further comments or yes?

I didn't ask questions, I just wrote comments.

Ah, okay.

Thank you very much for all of the work, and it's good to hear from the public that you're doing a a good job because oftentimes we will hear random complaints, and you know they're outliers, but you can't find enough information to balance it.

Um a couple of comments on the auto sales and service.

I think it's important not only to recognize that that economically because of the sales checks generation, but in this day and age, these are not grease monkeys anymore.

Those employees are high-tech jobs, and so I think that's important to recognize and and acknowledge because the public at large tends to think still old school and not why these are important from a job perspective.

Um, when we talk about visitors coming to Walnut Creek, we have this little outlier industry called the short-term rentals that we need to straighten out what our policies are so that we're not getting in our in our own way, strongly encourage that.

Let's keep an eye on the innovate six eighty that we heard about earlier because it plows right through the auto sales area and the hotel area.

So we don't want to we need to keep an eye on it.

And we're coming into long-range planning at a regional level, and Silicon Valley has a lot of office, low office vacancy because they want the jobs, they want the housing here.

They want us to be the colonies, housing the people.

They don't care about jobs out here, and so we need to be advocating for it's not job housing balance within this region.

It's making sure our region doesn't get set to the wayside and that the jobs all go into Silicon Valley.

How do we create a mini Silicon Valley here or a place where it's satellites for those jobs so that the those industries and those the metas of the world so that people don't have to get in their car, but they don't have to sit at home either.

Any further comments here?

I don't think we're we have an action on this one.

So thank you very much, and we look forward to seeing how this goes and uh into the next year and too.

Thank you.

Um so next on the agenda is a closed session.

We're going to uh reconvene in the second floor consorts room for uh conference with legal counsel regarding existing litigation.

Uh if there is anybody for public comment on that one, I don't see anybody here that's going to do that.

So uh we will move on to that closed session.

Our next open session meeting will be July 21st.

We've got a council break until then, so we will not be having a council meeting the week of July 4th for Independence Day.

Uh go to the city website to see what's happening in around town regarding Independence Day, and we'll see our open session again July 21st, and we'll move to closed session at this time.