Speaker 5: Well, I wanted to have our citizen group come up first, if that's okay. Sure. I think that's first on the item. And just to be clear, there's there's no relationship between the two reports. We usually get a report from fire leading into 4th of July on their outreach efforts. And I hope to do that. But but as if we can take up the item 26/1 and I can give a little bit of an intro. So so we have before our residents begin talking, I wanted to just highlight a few things. So probably about eight months ago or so, one of the third District residents can Weiss, who's here, reached out to me. Ken is an active member of the third District and Long Beach resident and often brings forth suggestions on issues that he's observed in the community. And he and many other neighbors in the city of Long Beach, and especially on the coastal areas, have expressed a lot of concern about the use of illegal fireworks every year. So Ken suggested that we put together kind of a citizen.
Speaker 4: Group that studies the.
Speaker 5: Issue, that calls other cities to find out what their rules are, that looks at outreach efforts, that looks at opportunities for improvement for city wide practices. This group of individuals spent countless hours. I can't even begin to tell you how hard they worked on this completely volunteer task, and their only goal was to come up with some recommendations that the city can incorporate. And I'm happy to report they're going to go through their recommendations, but that our the council office has actually started to implement some of the recommendations, including a PSA. I know the city already does. PSA is what we hired a recent graduate from Cal State Long Beach's film school to help us create a PSA that was, you know, hip with the with the teens so the teen age group. And so they've already, you know, been working on that. They've shot the PSA and they're working on First Cut. So we're in the process of that. But I wanted to just recognize this group of residents, let them do a presentation on what they've done and tell you their names. So we have Ken Weiss, who's here with us tonight, Eric Whitten, who's going to be doing the presentation for us. Sandra Rangel, Leslie Patterson, David Val Tierra, Jeff Dawson, Peter Hodgkinson and Jason Bollman. So these are our residents who were served on this committee, and I want to thank you on behalf of the City Council for your excellent work and for the folks in the back. I don't think this is the presentation that we're going to queue up.
Speaker 4: Did it did you.
Speaker 5: Guys send it? Yes. Okay. So hold on 1/2. Let's see. It's got some fireworks on the front cover, the white background.
Speaker 4: Jack. Did they get it? I look. There we go. Okay, so, Eric, take it away.
Speaker 8: All right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and council for having us here. This has been a really wonderful process for all of us to learn to come together and learn as total strangers to take on an issue and and try and and see where it takes us. What I have here tonight at five, the next slide is to describe the process that we went through. We had two separate parts of this. One was the city departments that are involved and or impacted by fireworks. And what do the other cities do? And you can see here, we had an extensive list of of departments and cities that we spoke to and met with in person over about a four month period. We had 21 sessions and more than 344 committee hours in a four month period to take a look at what people are doing with regard to fireworks. And the next slide, this is kind of the CliffsNotes version of what we found. And on the left hand side, I'd like to call your attention to the emergency call center this last 4th of July. These numbers are for last 4th of July. There's were 3200 calls received by the emergency call center in a 24 hour period. And this was about a 60% increase over a normal operational period. So the workload for the call centers is really, really significant. On July 4th, there were 1365 calls that were directed for a response. And of that, 1092 were fireworks related. And in the period between a 45 minute period, between 830 and 915, there were 715 calls from from residents to the call center. And of these calls, there were 40 felony and misdemeanor arrests and 40, 46 citations. And to compare that, we looked at July 3rd also, and I only want to summarize that that call volume on July 3rd was 1000 calls. We also discovered that there's a lot of calls that we're holding. And so that becomes a significant impact to the enforcement of the four fireworks rules that the police have to deal with in the collective agency. We listed all of the things that we found here that have to be dealt with or were dealt with actually on July 4th. And there's a lot of medical responses. Both rescues assist at the beach, the arson department. So department. But that unit, they they made 11 block party visits and issued five citations and confiscated £150 of illegal fireworks. The actionable results just in review of that and I wanted to mention, because this was very significant, that the police department seized £7,000 of illegal fireworks prior to July 4th. I can only imagine what would have happened if they hadn't had done that. But there were a total of 80, 86 citations, 46 citations and 40 felony arrests, which I think was pretty significant. But by comparison to the number of calls for service, I think there was quite a few residents that were not happy about the response . On the next slide is the police department's logs for that night. So you can see that they're quite busy. And in fact, we talked to Commander Herzog, and in the police department, it's essentially all hands on deck that there are no days off, there are no special circumstances. Everybody has to work because of the high call volume. And we think that probably is a big impact on morale for the police department. Have to do this because we're all enjoying July 4th except for the police department. I believe this held true for the fire department, too, and the Marine patrol. So essentially what you have is all the public safety personnel are on duty on July 4th. That also relates or results in somewhere. And we didn't do an audit and we didn't look at people's budgets and we didn't really calculate. But what we did was take a look at some some averages. And it looks like maybe the cost for overtime on July 4th may be as high as $600,000. So doing something about fireworks has a fiscal impact as well as a morale impact and has an impact for the community at large. In the next slide, we took a look at the Long Beach animal shelter and it's hard to read these numbers and it didn't turn out quite straight. But what happened was that the animal shelter collects a lot of stray dogs and cats that are loose on July 4th and only in 2017, only 39% of them were returned . So it turned out that animal control is all hands on deck also, and they're overloaded with animals on July 4th. So our recommendations are kind of we looked at the whole group of what does a city do and what do they have possible right now? And in the winter, when you look at what the police and the fire department have to do, all of the enforcement right now is criminal enforcement, which requires the policemen or the firemen to actually witness the lighting of a fireworks. And when you recognize the calls you're holding for service, the police don't get the call or the fire, too. Don't get the call until after the fireworks are even lit. So the ability of the of the police and the fire to see the lighting and the fireworks is in our estimate was pretty, pretty impossible. So we need to come up with another strategy to get the message out to to the public. And so what we believed was for the Long Beach Fire Department, they were significantly involved in pieces and doing an excellent job. And what we wanted to do is support that. Let everyone know that that is happening. But what we thought is a recommendation is that the social science research and social websites and social videos and contacts and things like that is evolving very, very quickly. And the fire department needs to take a look at that. We found that the impact of fireworks tends to be more on the younger side than on the older side, like old guys like me. The you know, I'm not going to be a problem for fireworks, but some some are. The next step is administrative code enforcement. We discovered that there's a mechanism in the city to have administrative code enforcement for fireworks penalties. Or there's it's in the code, but there's no mechanism to actually carry it out. The only mechanism to carry out enforcement is through misdemeanor and felony contact. And I think we put our police officers, officers and our arson unit in a very difficult position to be successful when they have to witness the lighting of the fireworks. And we find that that doesn't really happen. So we would like to recommend that. The city. Take a look at code enforcement. And I'm not speaking of the code enforcement necessarily, like on housing codes and water heaters and things like that. I'm talking about more of an administrative process of the fireworks code. The Long Beach Police Department in the short term could also take a look at that and provide input on that. But I do the committee believe that we they're in an ineffective position to actually witness this. So there's got to be another another focused on a mechanism that is not as stringent as a criminal criteria that requires witnesses, that doesn't rely on other forms of evidence, like a neighbor report I saw it or a video even or photographs of a party going on were lots of fireworks. The other thing that we had recommended to Miss Price was data collection is kind of a. Not really happening. We have a lot of data on what responses are and who does what, but what neighborhoods are impacted the most. And so we've recommended to go Long Beach be extended so that people could maybe report the fireworks. They know that there's not going to be anything, no police response as a result of that. But it could take a load off of the call center and it would be a mechanism to collect data so that the next year the plans can be fine tuned based on data as opposed to let's just put everybody out there and let them go where they're called, which sort of I am critical of that because they do go where they're cold, but maybe they don't have to go to every call that that was the community's point. And then in the long term, I'll go through there. They're essentially extensions of these short term recommendations. And then you can see up there some of the administrative enforcement concept was that the administrative citations can be citations and warnings that we felt more could be issued by the city attorney so that if the call center takes a call, we would ask them to get the address so they could then compile an address and maybe a response is not required, but they could forward that address to the city attorney, who then could send what we called a courtesy letter to say, Hey, we just want to remind you that fireworks are illegal and there's no criminal penalty. We're not putting Dad in jail because he was trying to have fun with his kids. But we're getting the message out. So when you take a look at this list, there's there's citations that go through the city attorney's office. And maybe I'm speaking incorrectly about the city attorney. Maybe it's a city prosecutor. We didn't try to determine who would do that. But there also could be different evidence requirements so that maybe if if the violation is severe enough and someone has submitted a video of people lighting fireworks, say, in one of our parks, then that would rise to a different level for the city attorney to maybe pursue a citation or some other action. But it would keep the police and keep the fire department focused on things that may be more important on July 4th that they can't get to because they're dealing as best they can with a fireworks situation. That's really a no win for them. And so I would like to make those short recommended more, but I thought this kind of summed up what we found and gave you a good feeling for what we did do.
Speaker 5: I want to thank you on behalf of the Third District for spending as much time as you did. It's unbelievable to me that you guys would have volunteered 344 hours to researching something you care about. And I appreciate the presentation. I thought you did a nice job highlighting the great work of our fire and police departments and understanding the challenges that they face. There are some recommendations there that are certainly recommendations that we're going to follow up. And the first is the PSA that we hope to get into the schools, which I think is important. But also the administrative citation option is something that my staff is researching now to bring back as a potential agenda item in the future. So I want to thank you and Ken for your service and for sharing with us your recommendations. And it's unusual to gather a group of residents together to research a subject like this, but this is something that you're very passionate about, and you definitely rooted your energy to a very productive place. So thank you.
Speaker 8: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you. And I just want to I just want to thank you guys also. I think that that's a lot of time for community members to go in and just do the level of research that you did on a topic. It's a very important topic across the city. And so I just want to thank you guys and the whole committee as well. Well, thank you. I wanted to.
Speaker 8: Thank the councilman's office, she and her office, because they.
Speaker 2: Really helped us a lot.
Speaker 1: And one of the things how we wanted.
Speaker 8: The message we wanted.
Speaker 1: To send was that the committee is while we serve at the pleasure of the councilwoman, we're planning on sitting down in July.
Speaker 8: After the fireworks and look and see what worked and what didn't.
Speaker 2: Work. We have other.
Speaker 8: Recommendations that are more long range that we need to work on, but we think.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of good things that can happen to kind.
Speaker 8: Of get a handle on the fireworks issue here in Homage.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you. And this will be, I think, all part of the public comment as any other public comment on this topic. Seeing none. Councilman Mongo.
Speaker 4: So thank you for your suggestions. I think the go Long Beach up add on is really important. We're already having issues with fireworks in January and so we've had even more recently and I think with the administrative process, the go long recap is helpful because when our Assistant Chief Brant and I were in an area last year watching fireworks go off, it's easy for everyone to videotape the fireworks. But soon as the cars come, the fire department or the police department, everyone runs and scatters versus with the go Long Beach up, you could actually take a picture of the person lighting the firework and save that into the app in the same way that you take a picture of the broken sidewalk. So great idea. I whispered to Councilwoman Price that if they are doing fireworks, perhaps their community service could be required on 4th of July the next year. So they couldn't possibly be lighting fireworks again. But I really appreciate the work that you've done, and I may have a few residents who are interested in talking with you more specifically because they have their own kind of dialog about the same issues that we've been having over on the fifth. So thank you for your work very well.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Councilmember Pearce.
Speaker 4: I want to echo I knew that Councilmember Mongo was going to talk about the goby job. I think that's a great idea. If we could figure out a way to work with the city attorney's office or somebody like that to send some letters, sometimes all people need to know somebody is watching. And so I know in my district also a beach neighborhood, we have a big issue as well. And so let me know how my office can get involved with you guys and any of our neighborhood leaders as well and keep up the great work.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 8: This would be Councilwoman Royce.
Speaker 1: I got to I received an email yesterday today.
Speaker 8: Asking for advice on the.
Speaker 1: PSA and we were talking about tonight.
Speaker 8: It might be a really good idea to put a little tag on the bottom.
Speaker 2: On it for.
Speaker 1: The Go on beach.
Speaker 8: App so that when neck goes out, they know how to.
Speaker 1: Go to the next step. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. And to close Councilman Anders.
Speaker 8: Yes, thank you, Mayor. You know, I cannot thank the council Councilwoman Price well enough to bring in this item forward. You know, bringing this fireworks, you know, beginning at the fireworks are illegal in parts of the state. But I know that it is tough to control them. But we really do need to try, you know, as a city to put some sort of prevention, education and enforcement.
Speaker 2: On this issue.
Speaker 8: My residents, especially the ones in the regular area, deserve some sort of peace of mind. They heard illegal fireworks and those being set off in the Wilmington area. I know my office requested a meeting minutes from the fireworks advisory committee from June 5th. And still has not received the copies. Thank you to the Third District Committee and the fire department for working together, and I hope we can have a better 4th of July than the past. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you. Please cast your votes.
Speaker 4: Councilwoman Mongo.
Speaker 0: Vice Mayor.
Speaker 3: Richardson. She's. Yes.
Speaker 1: Motion carries you item 46, which is also filed which related.
Recommendation to receive and file a report from the Long Beach Fire Department on the status of illegal firework outreach, education, and enforcement plans; and a presentation from the Third Council District Committee on illegal fireworks mitigation recommendations.