Speaker 1: Motion carries.
Speaker 0: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Item 30 Report from Health and Human Services recommendation to receive and file a report on the results of a survey to for a vector control funding measure in areas of the city not currently covered by a benefit assessment, and to proceed with preliminary development of the engineer's report and ballot preparation to establish a benefit assessment district at the rate of $8.21 per single family residents per year and returned to City Council for final review and approval in May of 2019. Citywide.
Speaker 0: There is a motion on a second and I do think we need to hear a report on this because this is an important one. So I'm going to turn this over to Mr. West.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Speaker 0: Councilmember, I may refrain. They're all important, every item we have.
Speaker 2: On every item.
Speaker 0: But this is one of of high interest to the public.
Speaker 2: Just as important as all the electrical vehicles are. Just pop Kelly Collopy and Nelson CR.
Speaker 13: Good evening, honorable mayor and Council Members. The item before you tonight is a continuation of the Vector Control Benefit Assessment Project, which we originally approved by the Council in October of 2018. We've updated you with a memo in January of 2019 to let you know the progress. As a reminder, the purpose of this project is to explore the feasibility of establishing a benefit assessment to fund vector control services in parts of the city that are not currently covered by a benefit assessment. This represents approximately 60% of our city and includes areas touching, at least to some extent, on each council district. As the world becomes more connected, we're seeing new vector borne diseases and species emerging in Southern California. These present serious and complex public health issues to our community and require intense resources to properly address including coordination, equipment, materials, human resources, door to door efforts and many other pieces. This increase in demand makes it necessary to explore this benefit assessment project. This project involves multiple steps which we have shared with you in the past. Includes the survey to gauge the level of support and the priorities of the impacted parcel owners. The survey results and recommendations are what will be covered tonight. So with that, I have our Environmental Health Bureau manager, Nelson Kerr, and the SCA president John Bliss, who is our consultant on this effort. And Nelson will present the survey findings and John Bliss and Nelson will be available to answer questions.
Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you, Director Colby. I would first like to acknowledge the engineering consultant, C.I., Maria Adobe and Jean Bless for putting together this information. I would like to give an abbreviated version of this report. You have the full report in front of you, and I'll try to get to questions and answers as quickly as we can. Kelly, can you help me advance the slides to number seven, please? Okay. Basically, what we're here to talk about tonight is the results of a survey that Kelly mentioned earlier. The the the two scenarios that we tested were two different rates. We wanted to see what the level of support was. So we tested two rates. One was $8.21 per year. And another the other rate was $14.92 per year. We did mail out about 2000 sample surveys, and we did receive almost 3000 back, which is a really good rate of return. Normally, we get between eight and 10% back. We received close to 15%, which is a really good rate and creates a good survey result that that is more reliable are margin of error on the survey was plus or -1.75. Normally or typically, we'll see a margin of error of between three and four. So we're very pleased with that. The result. Okay. Next slide, please. Thank you. Okay. This is the. The level of support was very strong among the single family home owners coming in at 67.9% for the $8 and 20 $0.01 rate and still strong at 62% support for the $14 and 92 cent rate. Now, that was for single family home owners only. Okay. Now, this next slide does show the different the different property types and the support there. You see, the support is a little bit less than some of the other property types, but still very strong overall for the single family residence. And you see on the bottom, the overall support for just supporting an assessment in general is 52.3. Can we skip to Slide ten? Okay. Here we are at slide here. Yep. Okay. So this is the overall support for both rates. So you see that there's the the rate of $8.21 has a support rate of 53.7%, which is above the 50% threshold. And that's that mark that we're looking for is that 50%. And the other the other rate is also supported at 50.8%. The engineering consultant recommends moving forward with the $8 and 20 $0.01 rate due to the high accuracy of the survey. They're very confident in the survey results and also because it's within the margin of error of 1.7 plus or -1.75. The the $14 and 92 cent rate is not within that margin of error. So the consultant recommends the $8 and 21 rate. Can we skip to number 14? Okay. Thank you. So number 14 go is a summary of the the other part of the survey that we looked at, the rate that they would support and we looked at the priorities of our property owners. And I just like to restate and remind that this survey only went to the property owners in the impacted district that we serve. So among the property owners, their priorities for for the vector control program are to control the emergence of invasive species such as AIDS aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito that can carry life threatening diseases like Zika virus and dengue and chikungunya. Their other priority, the second priority was to prevent future outbreaks of Zika and dengue, West Nile and other diseases. And this tells me that they're very plugged in with this issue. And the third priority was reducing mosquito populations, using environmentally sound methods, which we do. And finally, the fourth priority among the property owners and parcel owners was fiscal responsibility, ensuring it was important to them to ensure the proceeds were used only for mosquito and vector control services and they couldn't be taken by the state or the county . With that, I can turn it off. That's the very abbreviated version. You have all your your slides. Maybe we can bring the map up and just remind. Remind the council that we're only talking we're really addressing the area in pink, the the areas in green that's greater Los Angeles Vector Control District, and that's east of Lakewood. That line is Lakewood Boulevard and the diagonal line is Pacific Coast Highway. So if you're north of PCH and east of Lakewood, you're generally in greater Los Angeles Vector Control District. And those residents will not be affected at all by this measure. And the other area up there is Compton Creek. It's a really small corner of northwest Long Beach. That's along Susanna Road and Delta, I think up to the up to our city border. And those folks in that area will not be impacted at all by this measure. So, again, we're just speaking of about 60% of the city that's in that pink color there.
Speaker 13: With that, we close our report. But one thing I did want to share, so the L.A. Vector District currently charges approximately $12 for their services, and they do only vector only mosquitoes. And we do a much broader range of service. So and we are seeking to move forward with the $8 and 14 cent rate. So we'll still be a lower level than the other half of the city moving forward.
Speaker 2: So number 16, just just for a sum up.
Speaker 13: Moving to 16.
Speaker 2: Okay. So so this is just just a brief timeline of what we're looking at with this project. But I just want to reemphasize that tonight is just the survey results. And we are seeking some direction from council in terms of continuing on with an engineering study, but they'll certainly be for city council. Another bite at the apple because we'll be coming back in May. But I just wanted to reemphasize that that tonight is just the survey results and some direction to move forward with the engineering report, the May 7th date that you see up there. That's the real decision night. That's the go or no go date. So you'll have another opportunity to look at this council. And the final thing that I want to mention is that August 9th date that's really driving this process. That's the date that the that the county auditor needs to have all this information in order to get this on on the rolls by FOIA so we can receive funds by December of 2019.
Speaker 13: With that we close the report and we're open question to.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Let me Israeli public comment on this item scene and let me close it. Councilmember Pearce.
Speaker 6: Oh, yes. I want to thank staff for their work on this. I've talked to several residents in my district that are very supportive of this. I don't have any questions at this time. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Ringa.
Speaker 2: I pulled up the Andrews moment. No. One question that I did have in terms of the phones I would rate. How much are we looking at to expect to iterate on this? What with the $8 and 20 $0.01 rate, we would be looking at approximately $700,000 and a lot of most of that those funds would go towards what is a general description.
Speaker 13: All those funds would go towards vector control. So the amount coming in would go through, they would be the expansion of services. So at this time, you know, the mosquito season is pretty much focused on the summer. It has been expanding earlier and later. We're finding much more much more impact from additional mosquitoes coming in and other sorts of vectors. So these funds would go to expand the operations and the ability to serve the community as well as education, greater outreach, greater education, those kinds of services so that communities know how to respond and that we are doing our response while we're out there.
Speaker 2: Would there be any effect on staffing, for example, hiring more vector control specialist or part timers or not careers or anything like that? In that respect, this funding would allow us to continue at the staffing that we have now without we have seasonal vector control specialist assistance that we would be able to keep year round because of this funding. That's all. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Richardson.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I'm familiar with with this and I have a few questions. Just, you know, looking at the map, I see this will be the third ventral vector control special district in the ninth district. And so that raises a question for me about coordination of efforts. Miss Colby, have you thought about how we will coordinate, coordinated and coordinate with Greater Los Angeles, as well as Compton Creek to make sure we have one cohesive message.
Speaker 13: Is certainly already coordinating with them. So in Compton Creek, when we had the outbreak, remember that two years ago? Yeah. With the Zika outbreak or the Zika concerns a couple of years ago, that was a very strong coordination between services in that space. So we already are and are doing that in the L.A. District. They do primarily mosquitoes and we are already called upon and coordinate and work services within the vector district as well.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 8: Secondly, there's a lot of education in and around the the Compton Creek. How can we anticipate, you know, looking at the L.A. River, the Forest Park, all the wetlands in this area and creating some sort of will there be an opportunity to create some sort of permanent education apparatus or signage along the river?
Speaker 2: These are these are known breeding sites that we treat on a routine basis, that we're very aware of those as far as posting permanent signs we do, we will post signs when we are surveillance detects positive activity. However, we have not posted permanent signs at this juncture, but it's certainly something we could look into and consider.
Speaker 8: Right. A couple more things. So I heard it. The rate comparison with Greater Los Angeles. How's the rate comparison with Compton?
Speaker 2: The rate comparison with Compton Creek residents pay $9 per year. This rate would be slightly less than that at $8.21 per year and also provide a comprehensive service.
Speaker 8: Rate and then oversight. I know Compton has an oversight board. Greater Los Angeles, I believe, has more oversight board. How we handle governance.
Speaker 2: Sure, Mayor. Members of the City Council. My name's John Blais. I'm president of ACI Consulting. Great question. That's something that we can look at. Typically, when those two are both special districts, not a city or public health responsibility, we'll work with city staff and make recommendations. Whether you would have an independent advisory board. Those used to be popular. They're not popular much anymore for county and city programs. So we typically advise against them, but we're open to input and then we'll provide input to staff and they'll ultimately make a decision on that.
Speaker 8: Okay. So if it would defer to the public health board that we have, which I think makes sense, I think we may need to think about, you know, shifting it from I think it's city wide appointees that are getting some district appointees there to make sure that there's actual geographic representation in those areas represented here. So we should we should look at that conversation when it comes. Last thing I'll say is just figure 11 really interesting. Not often we can look at something partizan here at at city council and I just see in households that say d d to democratic to do to Democrats and residents. Something interesting happens at the 1492 rate, the rate as you go from Democrat to peer Republican, the support for the rate goes down. But when you go from Democrat to double Democrat, the support for the rate actually increases, which is, you know, says something. I think it's just interesting to see that there's more support for the higher number in these Dem double Dem households. So that's that's just something I wanted to kind of raise up. Thanks a lot.
Speaker 0: Always the case that I find in almost any survey that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 0: Uh, let's see. Councilman Austin.
Speaker 11: Thanks. And I appreciate the conversation thus far. I do have a couple of questions. I wanted to just just understand how are vector control efforts? Or just be clear on how our vector control efforts in those peak areas that were identified in the map, how are those areas funded now?
Speaker 13: They are currently funded directly through realignment funding, which is our state funding to the health department we utilize. So while other areas have vector districts and people pay for the service for the for I mean since we started that program, it has been funded out of the Health Department's budget.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to add that throughout our state, the the most common funding mechanism is a benefit assessment for vector control agencies, and that's what we're trying to establish here.
Speaker 11: I get it. I'm just kind of curious as to if it's currently the service is currently happening.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 13: Councilmember I think the, the, the key thing is that, um, as you know, the realignment venue within the city of Long Beach is our only source of funding that is not connected to a grant. Right. That has any flexibility. Those funds are currently being utilized to support vector control and they will continue to be utilized. This would build our as more strongly build our capacities. Um, because this isn't our extending all of the other. And what we're seeing is a much greater presence of mosquitoes in the possibility of disease. We do not have the capacity within the realignment fund to build our staff to be able to address all these issues. So over time, what you would find is a diminished capacity in a space where we're having increased increased increased disease and increased mosquito and other things to be tracking on. So what this would allow us to do is to build our capacity. There would still be some realignment funds utilized for this process. Um, and then the also is that realignment at the state level is not a consistent source of funding. So as the economy goes up and down, these funds go up and down. And so as we're looking at, as, you know, realignment also funds it funds are the administration at the health department. It funds our labs, Flint, our clinics and other things. So as realignment does go down during bad economic times, we would not have those resources to support Vector.
Speaker 2: And just just to add on to what Director Colby mentioned, the emerging diseases that we see with we just in the species that we see with AIDS, aegypti and in the Zika threat are very resource intensive and require enormous amount of revenue to address. We have to research it, coordinate with our oversight agencies like CDC in the state in many of the the responses required door to door. So they're very heavy in resources that we that we need this benefit assessment to fund.
Speaker 0: Councilor Rubinoff.
Speaker 2: Thank you. This is always a very important issue to the fourth District. That border line between L.A. County and Long Beach, Lakewood Boulevard and PCH pretty much divides our district perfectly in half. So we're always interested in equity. So would this measure bring more equal services to both sides of the district?
Speaker 13: Um, at this time we actually so the mosquito portion of the vector services is provided by L.A. County, by L.A. Vector District. We actually, as the health department already support that area as well. This builds our capacity to support both the additional resources within one portion of your district and to build our capacities overall within the other side of your district.
Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. And whenever this topic comes up, I'm compelled to mention Bob Bryant, who is co-chair of the Stearns Park Neighborhood Association, very active in Wilson High School PTA. And Bob died five years ago, a victim of West Nile. So it's been front and center with the residents of Fourth District for the past five years. But as Mr. Nelson Kerr just mentioned, we have emerging issues that are actually more serious than they were five years ago. So thank you for this effort and I'll support this item tonight.
Speaker 0: Well, thank you. Seeing that there was no public comment, please cast your votes.
Recommendation to receive and file a report on the results of a survey to determine the level of support from property owners for a vector control funding measure in areas of the City not currently covered by a benefit assessment, and

Authorize City Manager, or designee to direct the City’s consultant, SCI Consulting Group, to proceed with the preliminary development of the engineer’s report and ballot preparation to establish a benefit assessment district at the rate of $8.21 per Single Family Residence per year and return to City Council for final review and approval in May 2019.  (Citywide)