Speaker 2: Motion carries, we'll.
Speaker 1: Go to 14, then back to 13.
Speaker 2: Report from City Clerk recommendation to execute all necessary documents to receive and extend grant funding awarded to the Office of the City Clerk by City Fabric as part of the night city's challenge for the place. Make the vote. Put our engagement initiative in the amount not to exceed $30,000 citywide.
Speaker 0: You.
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn this over to the clerk, I believe. Right. And then you can introduce Sheila Swirsky.
Speaker 2: Yes. Thank you, Mayor. So I want to just say thank you to Citi Fabric for engaging my office and the city of Long Beach in this great initiative. And I will reserve the majority of my comments until after Brian gives his presentation to let you know about what place make the vote is and how the initiative is going to impact our great city here in Long Beach. So, Brian, if you could come up to the podium.
Speaker 7: Great things. Honorable Mayor and city council. Thank you for having me this evening to share some excitement, exciting work that we're doing with the city clerk's office, the county registrar, and some of our community partners, including Long Beach Rising. We were fortunate enough this past year to be the second recipient of a Night City's Challenge Award. Long Beach, the city of Long Beach, obviously getting the other one for the outdoor office space. The idea that we had four place make the vote was to use people use placemaking as a way to expand voter engagement and hopefully get voters to linger with their fellow residents and hopefully spark the synapses within the community to continue being civically engaged within their neighborhood. So I'll just give a brief presentation and a little bit of overview of the project. But also we had a prototype this past June election and we can share a little bit of that. So the project background place Make the Vote PMT is a toolkit that helps expansive engagement encourage voting using pop up social spaces around bowling our polling booth locations. And this is a process that we had initiated when we had the proposal last year. It's a little out of order. We actually had the grant awarded after our primary prototype, but our partners were willing to come together even before the contract and grant check were signed. So I appreciate everybody what we're going to do. We had one prototype site for the June election in the second District. Congratulations, Councilmember Pierce at the Fourth Street Senior Center. And the idea is we're going to expand to have four sites during the general election in November, and we're going to also do some voter engagement drives between when the ballot is set and the election. Then we will also do some vote by mail event at those four sites before the November election. And so our partners I mentioned before Long Beach rising ourselves, city fabric, the Long Beach City Clerk's Office, the county registrar. And we're actually very fortunate enough to have had some help from Parks and Rec at our fourth Street Senior Center site. And Public Works really did come through for us on some last minute assistance to make some better spaces on our street. So there's the overall branding of the place make the vote. We want to do something fun, but yet still patriotic. And we expanded the voting for vote. And so we expanded upon that, doing some fun ideas around graphics, posters. And really the idea behind this kit is that while we are going to activate four sites directly, we are also building a kit, a website material that can be printed, downloaded online, also ordered through manufacturers and fabricators that people can actually do place make the vote not just on those four sites, but any sites in Long Beach , any sites in California, even in Ohio. Florida really trying to make this a grassroots initiative where people are throwing block parties and trying to get their residents, their fellow neighbors, to participate in the voting process, but also be part of the civic engagement that takes place beyond. And so I was mentioning in June we had our prototype. It was at the Fourth Street Senior Center. It was a great location, a lot of foot traffic. We introduced a parklet along Fourth Street to really kind of grab attention. We had a lot of graphics for banners and posters and seating had food. We were fortunate actually. We also had Health and Human Services partake in this program. They had a healthy, active Long Beach, had a health food demonstration. So it was really nice that we were able to bring in a lot of partners from the city. And, you know, we had seating, we had games, we had some customized flags made and big six foot V for vote symbols. We also had a photo booth, which was probably the most popular part. We had a lot of people of all sorts of backgrounds participating and doing fun stuff with various bowlers and wigs and glasses and definitely something that we will take back and definitely use on future plays. Make the both sides. And part of the idea with the prototype was to test out some initial ideas before we go out and foresight before we build this toolkit that others can use. We did user intercepts, we asked residents, we asked voters. We got a lot of really fun feedback about wanting to participate in this process and wanting every polling site to be this way. We also had a lot of good press coverage locally as well as nationally Smithsonian, CNN, NPR, but also Long Beach Post, Signal Hill, L.A. A lot of really people perking up. We've even had some other foundations take a page from what we were doing the and doing this in L.A. at other sites. And we also had a lot. Lessons learned as part of this idea of prototyping. How do we evolve this to be something that can be successful on a larger format? And how could this be expanded to be something that other people can take advantage of? And so we did Pro Tips based on interviews with our city clerk's staff through the county register. Our polling workers are participants, and we're also still looking at some of the data from this prototype to see if we were able to make any sort of significant impact. It is within the what was taking place across city. We saw voter participation generally increase. One thing that we did notice a significant increase on was provisional balloting spiked at one of the two precincts here. It was actually highest in the city. So that was something that we could really point to as success. We definitely saw people walking up and asking, Hey, can I vote here? I live in North Long Beach or I live in Santa monica even. And so we did see a receptive voter audience that just saw it and wanted to participate. And so those are things that we'll try to adapt and incorporate going forward. And, you know, Next Steps is looking at those four sites that we're going to program, moving this voter education program forward and then looking at the kit that we're going to release online in the next month or so for others that take advantage. So this is a really exciting opportunity. I mean, we're very fortunate to have the city clerk's office participating as well as a number of other departments. Everybody has been very open minded. This is a great opportunity to try to you know, there's rock the vote, there's vote, turbo vote. There's all sorts of different voter initiatives. There's something that's very localized, something that can be very grassroots. So we see a lot of opportunity for this proceeding forward. I'm here for any questions or comments.
Speaker 2: And I just want to add that this this project is very dynamic because it targets and aims its efforts at the lowest voter participation rates in the city. So we're really focused on getting those neighborhoods that are not engaged in voting or in the democratic process and getting them activated in and create a culture of civic participation in those neighborhoods. So we're really excited to to be part of that effort. And thank you, Brian, for engaging our office in in that project as well also.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Next up, council member Pierce.
Speaker 10: Thank you, Brian, very much for your vision and thinking outside the box. I really was excited to see this on Tuesday morning, especially because I was in my district at the senior center, as you mentioned, and just want to say thank you for doing a good job of partnering with folks that are doing civic engagement. I think partnering with an organization like yours that has the ability to think outside the box. Talk about branding. Talk about messaging. You've always been great at that and partnering that with people that are on the ground, knocking on doors, trying to get canvasing. Yeah. Doing the propensity voter turnout, you know. And so, you know, as you guys are doing the next four, it's exciting to see that those are going to be in the lowest voter precincts turn out. And I would just encourage you guys to partner again with Long Beach rising to do the the walk pieces so that they can also encourage people to go out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're an official partner as part of this this grant. And so we're very fortunate to have them with the boots on the ground. And so we've got a number of other partners also coming forward really excited about this. So I think, you know, this idea is worth pursuing in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 10: Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, it's a very proud moment to see you guys partnering with Long Beach Rising, an organization that I helped, you know, back in 2010 started. It was a sad year for me to not play any role in working with them. So and then just I would love to hear how you're partnering with, you know, if we're doing something in the sixth District or are you working with organizations there and how we're partnering with organizations based locally. So. Great job. Congratulations.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Councilwoman Mongo.
Speaker 2: I've always been a person who talks a lot about why voting matters, and many have heard me talk a little bit about how we can continue to get people out to vote. And we also need to engage those communities in a long term strategy about cleaning our voter roll because we have an artificially low voter turnout when hundreds of people who've moved and or passed away are still on the voter roll. And it makes it look like we have less civic engagement than we really have. I think a great example of that is there's a precinct in Long Beach where there had been the same poll worker for 35 years and she took personal responsibility to work with the city I'm sorry, the county registrar and send in letters every time a neighbor would pass away. And their voter list is remarkable. She's 93 now and I'd be happy to meet with you and talk about it. But her polling place about three years ago hosted a lemonade stand, morning coffee and donuts. And to this day, that polling place is still one of the highest voter turnout to the whole city, and that does not exist anymore. But that sense of community that she built over 30 years. Her name is Lou. She's amazing woman served our country as one of the first women in the Navy. It sticks with that community today. So what you're doing is meaningful and powerful and the fact that you're providing the tools for it to be carried on past a single person is remarkable because Lou won't be with us forever. But if those tools were available, it'd be a lot easier to get a neighborhood leader to step up. So I'd love to work with you on getting information into the communities through the neighborhood night out, which is always in August. So it's really a good lead time for a community to say, We just had a great time. We're taking community watch and taking care of our neighbors seriously and we have a good lead time before the election. Let's let's place make our local polling place. So thank you for applying. Thank you for taking a small idea and making it a national standard.
Speaker 7: Thank you. These are actually really, really fantastic.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Vice Mayor Richardson.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to say, you know, congratulations on on applying and winning that grant to city fabric and to our city clerk. I just want to say, this is this is fantastic. I know you played a tremendous sort of significant role here to us. A lot of times, you know, we've had conversations about, you know, cracking the code on voter turnout. And a lot of folks believe they, you know, have it down to a science. But, you know, every once in a while there's an innovative idea and it changes the way things operate across the country. And, you know, this is one of those things that I think has that has that potential. So I just want to say congratulations and thank you. And I think it's great that you came and gave a report at city council. A lot of great things happen in our city and we don't you know, sometimes we don't hear the results. And even though it's not finished, I think it's tremendous to know that that particular precinct had the highest amount of provisional ballots and that that's data and it's it's important. So thank you so much for doing that.
Speaker 1: Thank you. You know, Brian, one thing also, I think this is great and I love that we're focusing on on getting people to vote. I think it's really important. I'm not sure the process that you guys will go through to select these these sites. I'm not sure if they're selected already or not. But throughout, I think it's important to certainly your target focus is trying to address precincts that have not traditionally voted, which I think is great. I also think it could be interesting to also look at a precinct if you have four, where there is maybe high turnout, but can you make that turnout even higher? You know, and so I think hopefully when you select the sites that you guys are, hopefully the sites are are are diverse as far as geographically across the city. So we're really capturing all types of voters because I think we want to encourage higher voting everywhere. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, we want voting all across the city regardless of of the district. And so I think I think that the start at low propensity areas, I think is really good. But, you know, it's also interesting to know, you know, how do we get more voters in certain high propensity Eastside districts, you know, and if that's possible as well. So just a thought and great work. This is this is good stuff. Councilman Price.
Speaker 4: Thank you. I do know what everyone has said. I want to echo the accolades. You always bring fresh ideas and a fresh perspective to the city, and you think of things that others don't. And in terms of voting, we need that fresh approach. We need that fresh attitude. We're dealing with a whole new generation of people that think differently and do things differently. I'm dealing with it all the time. When we hire new attorneys in my office, they just do things differently. So in terms of training, you know, we're having to reprogram the traditional ways that we communicated. And I see that that's what you're doing with the message that you provided for us tonight. So I want to thank you for being a great partner to the city always, and especially on this project. And one of the things that I would recommend is if there's any of this that we can implement long term into our council districts. So in terms of pushing messages out or pushing marketing out, that's consistent with the logo that you're using. Please let us know. We've done a really we've been very aggressive in terms of our counsel office and trying to get the message out about voting and engaging our residents to vote, reminding them to vote. But we could use that fresh perspective, too, because creativity is not abundant on our staff. We do we deal with a lot of mundane things all day long. So I really appreciate any influx of creativity that we can get to our efforts as well. So thank you for everything that you're doing on this and the presentation tonight. It was really wonderful. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzales.
Speaker 4: Brian and Madam City Clerk, I want to thank both of you for your joint efforts and trying to engage more voters. I think the first district is not surprisingly, it is one of the lowest voter turnout in the city. And so we'd like to see that change, especially with the high rises that we have. People don't like to get out. How do we make it more accessible to them? Even youth that are starting to vote? Spanish speakers, I mean, we have an influx of different, you know, like other parts of the city as well. But I think the first district in some areas may need a little bit more attention. And I think just engaging them in that sense would be great. But I think, as my colleagues had mentioned, your creativity never ceases to amaze me. And I really appreciate your efforts in this. It's it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: Everything's great. Good work, Brian. Good work to our city work team as well. Any public comment on this item? CNN members, please cast your vote and they receive and file report.
Recommendation to authorize City Manager to execute all necessary documents to receive and expend grant funding awarded to the Office of the City Clerk by City Fabrick as part of the Knight Cities Challenge for the Place Make the Vote Voter Engagement Initiative in the amount not to exceed $30,000 for a period ending April 11, 2017; and increase appropriation in the General Grants Fund (SR 120) in the Office of the City Clerk (CC) by $30,000.  (Citywide)