Speaker 3: Vice Mayor Andrews, I. Councilmember Urunga. Hi, Councilman Austin. Councilmember Richardson. Ocean carries.
Speaker 10: Now we move to item 33 clock. Please read item.
Speaker 3: Report from Development Services Recommendation to receive and file a report on the results of the Nuisance Motel pilot program by the Office of Civic Innovation and Development Services Department, and request City Attorney to prepare an ordinance to establish a nuisance motel program citywide.
Speaker 10: Would you like to do a public comment on this or you. We just had to start reporting this. Yeah. Oh, fine. Grahamstown report, please.
Speaker 2: Yes. Tracy calling the.
Speaker 8: Honorable vice mayor and City Council. In October of 2018, the Innovation Team coordinated an interdepartmental team to explore strategies to reduce nuisance activities at motels, as well as those motels that affect quality of life in their surrounding community. We partnered closely with the city prosecutor, city Attorney's Office, Development Services, Health and Human Services, Police, Fire and Financial Management to develop a task force to look at these particular properties, as well as develop procedures and recommendations to reduce criminal activity and nuisance on those property locations. We really want to thank all involved departments for their commitment to tackling these issues. This multidisciplinary approach to solving such an important problem really came in handy in working together. The staff report includes a compendium of the work that we've completed over this last year together, as well as recommendations for moving forward. I would like to turn it over to Oscar Orsi, our deputy director, and Alejandro Sanchez Lopez, a planner from both from Development Services Department, to provide the rest of the report.
Speaker 5: Good evening, honorable Mayor and members of the City Council. This presentation serves as the final update to Council on the Nuisance motel's pilot program due to the program's results, which I will cover shortly. Staff is recommending to move forward with an ordinance that codifies a nuisance motel compliance plan and establishes a review process for all hospitality locations in Long Beach. Finally, staff also research other programs and policies to address nuisance motels and bolster the ordinance effectiveness. In 2017, staff first examined data from Long Beach Police Department analyzing calls for service.
Speaker 2: And incident report levels at all hospitality locations in the city between January 2014 and May 2017. After the pilot program was first implemented, a second data analysis of police activity.
Speaker 5: From May 2017 to.
Speaker 2: May 2018 was conducted to determine the overall effect of the pilot program at.
Speaker 5: The six selected locations. As a reminder, the two data sets were analyzed separately and weighed by activity type. They were then combined into a single index or score and given a standardized score out of 100, then accounted for the number of rooms at each location. Finally, staff selected six locations out of the top 15 scores for the initial pilot program based on size, spatial clustering, site history and other contextual factors. These locations are the Colonia Motel, the Greenlee, the luxury in the Sewer Motel, the Stallion Motel and Travelodge. Following the establishment of the pilot.
Speaker 2: Program, the interdepartmental task force coordinated with the pilot program hotels to implement nuisance and crime abatement procedures such as environmental design features, lighting and safety improvements and additional private security on site.
Speaker 5: These procedures were developed, assess research and adopted practices.
Speaker 2: From other jurisdictions and programs. Concurrently, staff also presented research.
Speaker 5: Conducted research on long term policy solutions to address the use of motels to pair with a compliance plan. The results of this three pronged approach is evident with the data that follows. Firstly, when looking at police activity, hotels and motels citywide, we did not see much change from the pilot program transaction. Effectively, we saw no change in the control group that is all locations across the city for the program, as calls for service levels remained relatively stable.
Speaker 2: However, when looking at only the six pilot locations, we saw a significant reduction of about 30% in calls for service levels, going from nearly 230 calls for service in the three years pilot prior to the program to about 160 quarterly calls for service.
Speaker 5: And perhaps more significantly calls for service levels job that all six locations. Anecdotally the locations that work most closely with the city team to implement the compliance plan experience the greatest drop in calls for service.
Speaker 2: As a result. As a result of the program's success, staff is recommending that we move forward with the Nuisance Motel ordinance. The audience will consolidate the existing regulations that affect hospitality locations in the city. It will codify the best practices from other jurisdictions that staff identified and piloted and establish an intercontinental action team to implement and monitor compliance of the ordinance regulations and identify development services as the lead agencies. Lead agencies for the Action Team Coordination and Ordinance Compliance Excellence. In addition to the recommended ordinance, staff pursuant to counsel's direction, have researched additional policies and programs to address nuisance motels, focusing in particular to a longer range solution that can come back the structural factors that lead to nuisance and criminal activity. These include motel conversions, zoning regulations, amortization and motel acquisition for motel conversion staff research the interim model excuse me, motel conversion ordinance from the city of Los Angeles, which allows for a ministerial approval process of temporary conversions to supportive housing that can be scaled on a citywide basis. A similar program in Long Beach could allow for applicable motels to be converted to permanent supportive housing on a temporary basis. Staff also researched, and this type of ordinance, coincidentally, could be something that we could develop by second quarter of next year. Staff also researched zoning regulations to discontinue motel uses in certain parts of the city, most notably the plan in North Long Beach could be that could designate motel uses as legally non-conforming use as meaning that they would no longer be allowed to operate after a certain period of time. This could be a more immediate step that would also serve as a precursor to additional regulations. As the Council is aware, the the plan is now moving forward and should be completed by the fourth quarter of next year. An additional tool that staff considered is the amortization or the phasing out of motel users. As most of you know, the amortization would terminate motel uses completely within a given period of time. That period of time is typically assessed through a study that allows the either businesses or the property owners to be whole of their investment. In order for us to move forward, we would need to identify revenue resources to be able to prepare the study and that direction would be needed from the council. An additional program that is essentially on a case by case basis is the acquisition of motels in order for this resource to be moved forward. Obviously, we would need revenue resources as well as the opportunity for vacancies or opportunities to purchase motels. This would allow the city the flexibility to redevelop the motels to either a supportive or additional housing or other commercial ventures. In conclusion, staff recommends that the City Council request the city attorney to prepare an ordinance to establish nuisance and motel program. This concludes staff's presentation, and we look forward to answering any questions that you may have.
Speaker 10: Thank you. Is there any public comment on this item? Look what you can learn about this world. Excuse me. We'll go behind the guy's house first. Comes from noticing.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Vice Mayor. So so first I want to thank the entire team, the multi departmental team that worked on this pilot. This was in response to a call from the community to find some short term and long term solutions, specifically for the Long Beach Boulevard corridor. But that widened in the pilot was extended to, you know, six, six motels citywide. And I think the fact that we can and we've all watched this process, you know, in fact, just raise your hand if you've been following this process from the beginning. So there's a number of people who've been, you know, following this process to come back and say that we looked at the control group and then the pilot group, and they've seen a 30 plus percent drop in calls for service. I think that shows that give this additional attention. Attention has been working. And so I'm glad that we use the data to demonstrate the results of this pilot. And so I'm supportive of moving forward on the recommended recommendation to move forward with an actual ordinance. I like the I like the approach that we did a pilot. We evaluated the pilot. And then we move forward with creating the law. This is the same approach that we did with the Alcohol Nuisance Abatement Ordinance, and that's been a success. And, you know, it's been recognized as a as a best practice. And I like that we took that approach here. So I support that. And I'm going then within my motion request, I'm so concurring support for establishing this ordinance. The second thing I want to pull out is the mention of, you know, beginning the conversation on streamlining the motel conversion process and creating that ordinance similar to Los Angeles. And Oscar, you mentioned that this could be possible, possibly done in Q2 of 2018. I'd like to include in my motion to move forward on on that process based on the timeline that you presented, the Q two for the conversion, I think that makes sense, gives us enough time to move forward and work for next few months on this ordinance before moving on to next. And then additionally, we mentioned both the, the, the zoning approaches with a plan. I'm very comfortable with that. That's beginning the long term conversation. And we said we want to be very clear about short term, immediate solutions, but also addressing the long term problem that there's, you know, a concentration on this one corridor. And we need to talk about what the core of the vision for the corridor in the future. And I think that is appropriate in the land use document. So thank you for that. But the other the last thing that stood out was the fact that in order to pursue amortization is going to require additional study beyond the capacity that what we have. And so I would ask that we don't leave it there, that we do forwarded to city staff into the Budget Oversight Committee to think about this, because we looked at amortization as a solution citywide, not just for North Long Beach, but when you have outdated out, you know, when you have corridors with multiple motels, you know, Long Beach Boulevard, for example, as motels were in place before the 17 freeway had very different use. And, you know, the land use didn't keep up when the 710 was built. And so now you have these outdated land uses that we may need a tool like amortization to address. And the same is, you know, the case on other corridors like, you know, PCH or Anaheim, you know, some of the other corridors where these motels were. So I'm going to add the third thing here is to refer to the Budget Oversight Committee and to to and city manager to evaluate potential funding solutions in the next fiscal year's budget if available. So again, this is this is amazing work. I'm very proud of this work. We're going to be talking about this with with the Long Beach Boulevard community very soon. And many of them are here to follow this. But I think this is a good, important step and we've made some incredible progress. Thanks a lot.
Speaker 10: Thank you, Councilman Richardson. Councilwoman Pierce.
Speaker 9: Thank you. Yes. I want to thank Scott for their work on this. I think the numbers on some of the graphs are are very telling. On Councilmember Richardson's third note around the acquisitions, where we get funding for I know that we've amortization. I just looked at acquisitions because it was in front of me. Thank you. The idea of getting these motels into being some housing solutions, I know that we've talked a lot about villages of Cabrillo, and I wanted to ask staff if they've had any conversations with them in regards to this motel item.
Speaker 2: We have not.
Speaker 9: Okay. I've had a couple conversation. We can talk offline, but they basically have been building up funds to be able to go out and purchase properties like this. So yes, we as a city need to identify funds that we can use. But I think there are some entities in the city that are willing to step in immediately, that they're actually out there scouting properties right now, that if we had a motel that fell into one of these categories might not be on our we might not need to spend our taxpayer money to do that, but we could rely on some of our community partners to do that. But I definitely think that this has been a great model. I think had some questions on what's the pilot program? What exactly did you guys do to get some of these numbers down all the way? It says that you guys monitored, but maybe I missed it. Sorry.
Speaker 2: Well, the pilot program consisted of, again, multiple disciplines from throughout the city, meeting with the property owners on a regular basis, identifying potential improvements to the way either in security and signing and their operational characteristics that would allow them to reduce their calls for service. And we would meet with them on a regular basis to to check to make sure that those items were implemented. It's a menu list, if you will, a compliance plan, a list of items customized to each hotel. And those items would actually help improve the way they operate their business and hence reduce the calls for service.
Speaker 9: Thank you for that. And just refresh my memory. I know that when the Human Trafficking Task Force started some of their work here in the city, that some of that had to do with signage in hotels. Did that include these motels as well?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: There was staff from the health department that went on site visits and spoke with motel managers and owners regarding human trafficking and putting up signage. That's more of a recommendation, but it's something that we're looking to integrate more fully as a compliance plan looks forward.
Speaker 9: Okay. Thank you. Fully support this. Think it's great work.
Speaker 10: Thank you. Yes. Councilwoman Gonzalez.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much and great work to staff. I'm glad we as Councilmember Richardson said, I'm glad we started with the pilot and now we're moving towards an ordinance. And the first, we personally have lots of unfortunate motels along PCH, a few off Alamitos and Seventh Street. So I'm looking forward to seeing how those sort of interplay with with the ordinance and where we can get some some progress on those PCH. And it has been a major issue. It actually has deterred businesses from receiving ABC licenses. The businesses are really good standing, but the crime and areas around it, because the motels are such, you know, for poor behavior has really deter them from getting licenses, unfortunately. So just something to put out there. But relative to the presentation you had mentioned 15 locations, six of them that were piloted. What were the other locations and do we have? Addresses on them. I had to look up the locations you had in the presentation just online. But what were the other locations? Do you have just that information?
Speaker 5: Yes. So the other nine locations from the original study were the Grace Hotel, the Slumber Inn Motel, the Palms Motel, the Liberty Motel, the Belmont Sure Inn Motel, the Rocky Inn Motel, the Inn of Long Beach, the All eight motel.
Speaker 2: And the Royal Inn Motel.
Speaker 8: Yeah, very fancy names, right? Royal and luxury. I love it. Nothing. But if we can get that list. I don't know if it was in the. I didn't. Oh, was it in the original presentation? Okay, great. Then I'll go ahead and look at that. That's great. As far as an enforcement mechanism, I know the ordinance. I know there's an action team that will be put in place. But is there any other sort of enforcement mechanism? I know in the past we've done, you know, calls for service that could be charged to the owner. What other sort of enforcement mechanisms are we exploring?
Speaker 2: So some of the the.
Speaker 5: Mechanisms that have been research are related to citations, charges for police activity and increased calls for service levels. And some of the compliance measures are actually already within the municipal code. So this would kind of centralize them and make motel managers and owners aware of everything that they already have to comply with and then any additional regulations that would come down the pipeline as well.
Speaker 2: These and these items would be subject to citation as well as city prosecutor.
Speaker 8: Great. Another two questions. So outreach about the program. So once the ordinance comes into play, I would love for us to I want all of the motels to know that this ordinance is alive and good so they could hopefully change their practices. What are we thinking about that?
Speaker 2: The the idea is, is to establish a marketing campaign once the council approves the ordinance and and be able to communicate that to all the the hospitality establishments, especially those that are near or over the thresholds for calls for service and to again, solicit input from the community as well as the hotel. Hoteliers should be able to discuss the compliance plan and move that forward before we begin the compliance planning efforts.
Speaker 8: Okay, great. And last question and I had this question before when we had the conversation about bad actor landlords, about future projects. I know a lot of these property owners, they may come to Planning Commission and they have a brand new project. And oftentimes we as council members or planning commissioners don't know that they have a problem with Project A, but now they have a brand new project that they want to build or they just think there's got to be something that we as a council body should know of, that they have issues. Sometimes we don't. We often don't know about that unless we dig into the details and research that. But I'm just wondering if there's anything that could be flagged for us knowing that, you know, they may want to own multiple properties or have, you know, another copy or another permit of some sort, and that we at least know that before going into a decision and making a decision on a new property.
Speaker 5: So that's actually one of the first research efforts that we undertook as this will be housed primarily within development services. We fortunately have the greatest amount of access to property ownership information. We're looking to include that in some way and mitigate any issue there on back end data gathering to make sure that we understand the full context of of these sites, that property owners and property managers that may be related to other sites or to other nuisance issues throughout the city are included within whatever efforts that we have going forward.
Speaker 8: Great. I think thank you very much for that and great work again.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember Richardson.
Speaker 4: Just wanted to clarify, the funding that we talked about was the 150 K referenced in here as a need to evaluate the amortization piece. Just just to be clear, between that and funding for conversion. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Did you have a chance to do public commentary on this? Any public comment on this case? None. So there is a motion at a second on the floor. Please call the roll call.
Speaker 3: Councilwoman Gonzalez, Councilmember Pierce, Councilwoman Price, Councilmember Supernova. All right. Councilwoman Mongo I. Vice Mayor Andrews. So for me.
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 3: It. Councilman Austin. Councilmember Richardson.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yes. When you. Motion carries.
Speaker 0: Thank you. With that, we're moving on to the next item, which is 42.
Recommendation to receive and file a report on the results of the Nuisance Motel Pilot Program by the Office of Civic Innovation and Development Services Department; and 

Request City Attorney to prepare an ordinance to establish a Nuisance Motel Program.  (Citywide)