Transcription Metadata

Whisper API Version 1
Generated 2025-11-19 19:31:16 UTC
Archive URI berkeley_7a0957be-b34c-49af-a657-a5ad54aa3f30.ogg

Segment 1

Okay, hi everyone.
Thank you so much for your patience.
It's 6 43 and we had a special meetings that ran late, so apologies for that.
I'm calling to order the Berkeley City Council meeting.
Today is Tuesday, November 18, 2025.
Clerk, could you please take the roll? Okay, council member Kesarwani.
Here.
Taplin.
Present.
Bartlett.
Present.
Tregub.
Present.
O'Keefe.
Here.
Blackaby.
Here.
Lunaparra.
Here.
Humbert.
Present.
And Mary Ishii.
Here.
Okay, Quorum is present.
All right, we have no ceremonial items this evening, so I will move over to city manager comments.
Also no city manager comments this evening.
Thank you.
Very good.
I think our city auditor is here and has some comments, so I will call her up.
All right, good evening.
So I wanted to share tonight a few items on the council agenda.
The 2025 audit recommendation follow-up report that my office released in October and the results of an independent third-party audit we initiated of our payroll audit division.
Before I do that, I just wanted to make quick comments on item 8, the annual appropriations ordinance.
As you know, the city has a very large $28 million deficit and during the budget process in June, my office offered $200,000 in salary savings to help with that.
And while the BMC exempts the auditor from the same salary savings as other departments, I do want to share tonight that thanks to information from our budget office, we do have about another $30,000 in savings and so we'll be able to contribute some of that, actually most of that, into the general fund.
So I'm just happy that we can contribute in that way.
So next, I wanted to share highlights from our 2025 follow-up report.
Our annual report provides a comprehensive overview where the city stands in implementing audit recommendations and what risks still exist.
From November 2024 to September 2025, city departments implemented 23 open audit recommendations.
As of this update, the departments have implemented 48 percent or 45 of the 94 total audit recommendations released since 2020.
And I just wanted to say that compared to the last follow-up period, the implementation rate has gone up 11 percentage points.
That's a really great accomplishment.
I'd like to thank the city manager, department heads, staff for their efforts in closing these recommendations.
But there's still more work to be done.
So there's 48 audit recommendations remain and you can learn more about these open audit recommendations on our public dashboard.
Next, I wanted to share the results of an independent third-party audit we initiated of our payroll audit division.
The city of Berkeley's payroll audit division organizationally sits within our office.
While the payroll audit division is one of the smaller divisions in terms of staff, it's a small division.
It has one of the largest jobs, reviewing and processing bi-weekly payroll for approximately 1,800 city employees.
In fiscal year 2025, the division processed approximately 47,000 checks and direct deposits.
It's important to ensure that all those payments are processed correctly because personnel costs represent about 65 percent of the city's general fund.
In fiscal year 2025, I want to first recognize all the payroll clerks in each department.
These are the workers that make sure that all of that information gets entered as well as the payroll auditors on my team who ensure that these paychecks go out accurately every two weeks.
It's no small feat and during COVID, my team, they divided themselves into two teams without contact.
So if someone got COVID, there would always be a healthy team up and willing and being able to process the payroll so that all employees would get their paychecks.
So what we do is within this unit, we periodically will initiate an independent third-party audit to look at the division's internal controls, ensure there's sufficient safeguards against fraud, waste, and abuse, and ensure that payroll is accurate and complies with policies and regulations.
To safeguard our office's independence, we had to contract this out and GPP analytics was the one that conducted this audit.
The external audit found that payroll audits procedures ensured and city employees received accurate pay and benefits in the sample they tested.
So let me just say that this is really amazing for them to say that there were no payroll corrections that needed to be done within the sample that they tested.
It means that the system is set up to catch incorrect pay before pay goes out.
The external auditors also found that the staff in this unit demonstrated detailed command of critical payroll elements within their within a very complex operating environment.
They also pointed out a few ways we can strengthen our controls to reduce risk going forward, including working with city management to update the payroll policy and procedure manual, as well as prioritizing the implementation of an electronic timekeeping system.
My office is committed to working with city staff to implement these recommendations, obviously based on staffing and resources.
So in conclusion, I just wanted to thank City Council for your commitment to accountability, providing this form to share the results of these two important reports and I want to thank my team of staff auditors for supporting this work.
They're really the ones that power this work and I'm really grateful to them for their dedication to the city.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much Madam Auditor and I just want to say I really appreciate your proactiveness in finding funds that you can give over to the general funds.
We are really in a scary budget time and I really appreciate you taking the time to do that to figure out what funds could go over.
So thank you very much and also just to your team.
I know they're working really hard so thank you.
Okay so we will now move on to public comment on non-agenda matters.
Okay we have five speakers and you can come up in any order.
We each have one minute apiece.
First is Stephen Alpert, then Chris Boissieri, Ed Iskander, Alex Marenkov, and Carol Morozovic.
In any order.
Yep come on up folks.
If your name is called please come up.
Thank you.
Thank you.
If there's an echo is someone have Carol please please come up.
We've got to go.
So I return to the Rockridge business owner on College Avenue who has been in the same location for 27 years and after the upzoning there she was only offered a three-year lease as were the other businesses there.
I asked her if I got everything right that I had said and she said yes and she told me that not only did the property owner only provide short leases to all the businesses there but he doubled the rent and told the businesses he wanted to keep his options open.
How secure would you feel if your spouse or partner said to you keep doing what you're doing but I'm going to raise the bar double my expectations because I want to keep my options open.
And if we really need to take care of our small businesses they're the heart of our community they provide character and they provide revenue.
Thank you.
Thank you.
My name is Alex Marinkov.
Chris Boisvert is going to be yielding his time to me.
Does he need to come up here and say he's doing that or what? Sorry so you were saying that he's going to give.
Yeah I'm Alex and then he's yielding his time to me.
Who's yielding? Chris is yielding to Alex.
Chris is yielding to Alex so you have two minutes.
Okay go ahead.
Ready okay.
My name is Alex Marinkov.
I'm a disabled low-income below market rate tenant at K Street Flats and after I reported health and safety issues in my unit to the city's environmental health department this summer management retaliated.
They canceled my confirmed renovation, refused to schedule me for months, ignored my doctor's disability accommodation request and kept scheduling other tenants ahead of me even people who never asked for renovation whatsoever.
The renovation wasn't just delayed it was with health in a way that left me feeling singled out and pushed out of my home.
My DMR unit has lacked parity, stability and I was cut off from all communication from the landlord regarding my housing needs.
I have now filed a complaint with California's civil rights department and I'm not the only tenant to do so in this building.
This is happening inside a city monitored DMR program where disabled and low-income tenants should be protected not excluded.
I'm asking council and health housing and community services to strengthen oversight of CalCHA and FBI management and to ensure disabled DMR tenants receive equal treatment, timely repairs and real accountability in our city.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay folks if your name got called please come up.
Yeah go ahead.
Hey guys just really briefly I was on my way home but I'd stop by.
I write the Substack Marin County Confidential at marincountyconfidential.substack.com and I've been covering a lot of the Israel lobbyist activities in the Bay Area, Northern California including Berkeley.
Did just want to let you know I have some video coming up.
I went to the presentation at UC Berkeley law building today.
It was John Torture Memo U speaking on how Israel won and it was I wanted to make sure that I went.
It's definitely a historic moment, a terrifying moment.
John you did absolutely lived up to his reputation as a war criminal and I will be releasing that video of my brief interview with him after the event.
Just want to let people know because Berkeley used to care about war and peace and hopefully some people still do.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Very nice.
My name is Ed.
It's so nice to hear someone talking about pressing issues so many tens of thousands of miles away but I would like to attend to something which was much more localized if you will.
As a you know I don't want to sound like a broken record here but this is the first only second time in my life that I've felt absolutely compelled before I've come before the Berkeley city council although I've either lived or studied here for decades.
I'm a little disappointed that our friend here Igor Tragub has not been responding to me as well as the mayor's office.
Sorry so you're not supposed to call out specific people.
You have to make your comments to the council.
Yeah go ahead.
You know something this matter is not going to go away.
Something very serious had transpired a few a few months ago three months ago almost to the day in right on the corner of Kittredge and Shattuck which falls into district number four and I've been trying to make contact with both the mayor's office as well as the council member's office to no avail and this matter is not going to go away.
I made a special point to come here.
I drove many many miles to come down here to talk to you to address you in person.
Thank you for your comment.
Is Stephen Alpert here? Pardon? I'm sorry whose whose name? This is for non-agenda public comment.
This is the end of the in-person minute.
Are you waiting till the end of the night? You have one minute to share.
Okay okay it's up to you.
All right then are there there may be well there's public comment.
Is there public comment online? Yes so there this is for non-agenda public comment.
We'll take the first five hands raised on zoom and there are five hands raised.
First is a phone number ending in 000.
Press star six to unmute.
Okay.
Now maybe we can come back to them.
Next is Ken Bukowski.
Yes hello.
I just wanted to come with the speaker who described the upzoning of the commercial property and how it threatens the small businesses.
I think we should reconsider the upzoning procedures because we're just answering to answer the developers.
Thank you.
Okay thank you.
Next is David Scheer.
Hi it's it's really disturbing to hear some of these stories about tenants being mistreated in 100 affordable buildings.
We spend millions and millions of dollars and on these on these buildings and these projects and they're there to to help people.
So you know I am hoping that this is something that that we will be able to do this kind of oversight more closely.
And if anybody has like has this experience it would be they should email or reach out to or speak to the housing advisory commission because I know that members of that commission definitely want to definitely want to know about this stuff.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Okay next is Della Luna.
Yes thank you.
I wanted to second what I'm hearing a request for increased oversight for the affordable housing projects that the city of Berkeley is financing.
A lot what I see is a lot of the projects like the organizations they do things in order to check the box but they don't actually engage in the full work that is their mission.
And then secondly I wanted to bring up something I mentioned before but I would like to see some sort of education for bikers about how cars drive on the road and vice versa for drivers about how bikers navigate the road.
I feel like Berkeley puts in infrastructure for these bicycles in the vehicles lanes but there's no education about how those two bodies work together.
And then with the tourism and the turnover with the student body we need ongoing education because the spaces are quite dangerous.
Thank you.
Okay we have a speaker with a phone number ending in 2-1-1.
You should be able to unmute.
Hi good evening.
So this is my assistant again delivered your demand for 1.2 million dollars and also in a celebration of one of the best city council person she quit because of us with the way this horrible x-mayor again back in his word taken over by an employee she had no just hired a month ago damage because our business not just our business our family employees hundreds of thousands of Bay Area consumers that you have nowhere else to get a high quality product and the product a product and also low prices shame shame shame and you just came and you broke him I left you a message mayor we could go to call me you never did have no let's solve this thing in a peaceful way and uh we need to help our customers thank you thank you and um last is a speaker with a phone number ending in 0-0-0 not not there okay um well we can pick one more card there's been nine speakers so we can pick one more card oh eva spoke celeste marks well your card was still chosen mr alpert so it's up to you so good evening my wife and I have previously expressed our concerns regarding middle housing ordinance and the proposed upzoning of college north shattuck and solano avenues council members assume we are opposed to all new housing also new residents that is not true we object to the we do not object to reasonable size health structures which are not over on adjacent buildings or dramatically alter the existing neighborhood character regarding middle housing if by law a three-story apartments to be built next to our 1912 craftsman I and others on my street with century-old homes should have some input into the design of that structure to ensure it is compatible with the neighborhood middle housing allows for a glass sided or concrete burla structure within five feet of our property thank you regarding three upzoning corridors this city's workshop presentations depicting 8 to 12 story structures were utterly disingenuous the majority of these units will be market rate but few will be affordable we reside just 500 feet from the cooperative appointments at 1685 solano avenue we are delighted to see this 13 unit building was renovated by bay area community land trust with seven units designated for those earning at or below 80 of area median income and three units for earning less than 50 unlike the eight-story 50 density bonus structures displayed on solano avenue corridor workshop and the clear omission of 11-story structures permitted with 100 density bonus this five-story building is set back from the sidewalk provides one ground level parking for each unit and does not overwhelm the neighborhood new construction on this similar scale is most welcome thank you hey um that finishes public comment on non-agenda matters uh just a couple of comments really quickly someone mentioned biking and lessons for biking and bikers and drivers and bike east bay actually does do some of that so please look into it um and then in terms of the person who spoke earlier about their below market rate unit i'm definitely interested in following up i think that they've left already but um hopefully they'll reach out and let us know what's going on so we can provide some support um okay so moving on to our consent calendar do council members have comments council member blackaby thanks madam mayor just a few comments um first on on item three asked that the clerk mark me as a no on item three on consent again i support the policy on the transfer tax rebate for welfare hardening but don't support the hard cliff that that we amended it to um now we've got a seismic program and a home hardening program they're out of sync so i look forward to bringing some amendments next year that hopefully would be something i could support unless the council could support but i'm a no on it for now um i want to thank the city manager on item four for providing some amendments to the coordinated pricing algorithm item that we passed earlier this year and i'm hopeful that will help kind of help us move forward in a in an effective way with that policy on item eight which is the annual appropriations ordinance the budget committee spent a couple of meetings reviewing this proposal i just want to thank the city manager and his team the budget manager mari car my colleagues on the budget committee for a pretty thorough review of what's been proposed here and also look forward to future budget processes where some of the carryover and some of the big items that end up here in this ao will be considered as part of the regular budget process and i think will just help streamline it and give us all visibility into the next year in a more comprehensive way so look and i really appreciate that um the budget team is already thinking about that and i look forward to working with them on that process um on item 18 um to um scott gilman and the parks team i know this is a license agreement for the temporary parking piece for the regional sports complex but this is also a great sign that we're about to embark on the new construction um at tom bates which will be an additional restroom additional soccer field six pickleball courts a meeting facility but really enhancing what we have there making it more usable for the community so it's a great step and i'm looking forward to what comes next um i want to thank my council colleague terry taplin for item 26 again it's kind of a budgetary item but it's helping us um we already you know do a good job at thinking about our bond capacity but continuing to plan ahead and being strategic about um what kind of bond um program do we need to embark upon how are we making progress towards um our overall infrastructure needs we just again looking to the long term and being thoughtful as we do that planning and so i just want to thank councilmember taplin for putting this out there and helping us embark on that process and last and you'll see by the way in that item there was a a fair amount of work also with the budget committee to tweak it refine it and make sure that that the finance team the city manager's office and our committee were all aligned with councilmember taplin and you'll see all those edits listed in the packet then the last item item 27 i was proud to be a co-sponsor of this item that councilmember lunapar authored so thank you for letting me join that item this item updates protections for our residents personal data ensures that city contractors aren't assisting federal immigration enforcement really updates our existing policy with the new sanctuary city ordinance and we shorten the cure period to make sure that if we find a partner that is out of compliance that we address it much sooner working with the city manager and team to make sure that we can implement that in a way that that makes sense so i think that's it thank you thank you councilmember councilmember lunapara thank you um i am very proud of the community work and my council colleagues support of the sanctuary city contracting ordinance this item updates the contracting ordinance to align with our newly passed sanctuary city ordinance i'm also very grateful for the work that the city attorney's office and city manager's office have done to ensure that this ordinance is feasible for staff to implement and i also really wanted to thank city auditor jenny wong for and her team for producing a really outstanding audit of our payroll services this is some of the most important work that our city takes on we need to be able to implement legislation properly and receive updates about its effectiveness so thank you very much for taking that on and congratulations on those items thank you councilmember lunapara just a clarifying question do we um we're just adopting the version that's in sub two yes correct also includes the amendments that were in sub the changes in sub two yeah it's a cumulative okay great thanks thank you councilmember traig up thank you um continuing on with the round of thanks thank you to madam city attorney for her continued impressive work and thank you to everyone on your team we're so fortunate in the city to have such a wonderful team of auditors um uh really appreciate your efforts on item four uh amendments to the ordinance prohibiting the use the sale or use of coordinated pricing algorithms um i am very grateful to um many uh but in particular city attorney brown and her team for helping us land this i believe that even with all the changes um it still is one of the strongest ordinances in the nation of this kind um item seven i want to appreciate uh our city manager and carrie arredondo and uh everyone on the team uh for this important step forward um to launch a transitional housing and wraparound services program by january 1st 2026 that will provide trauma-informed culturally responsive case management treatment connections supportive services and so much more and then last but not least i would like to thank councilmember taplin for his item 26 to help us um when we think about budgeting in the future um and uh looking at our investments to do it in a more predictable fashion um and on item 27 um i um am very grateful to councilmember luna para um for authoring this item and to the co-sponsors and i am uh elated to be able to vote yes on updates to the sanctuary city contracting ordinance thank you thank you other comments from my council colleagues uh yes councilmember humbert yes excuse me thank you madam mayor i just want to appreciate being added as a co-sponsor to the important item number 27 sanctuary city.

Segment 2

Contracting Ordinance Updates, which will bring our Contracting Ordinance into, you know, into a lot, you know, I'm missing the word, it will mirror, it will allow it to mirror key definitions with the language in our new Sanctuary City Ordinance.
Important, a very important item.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Anyone else? Okay, I want to just add, I'm very happy to be approving the contract for options recovery to administer the CARE Bridge program and look forward to getting this program off the ground.
Big thank you again, Carrie.
I'd like to thank the City Manager's Office, the Budget Manager, and all the departments for scouring their budgets and looking for what are necessary expenditures and carry over for the AA01.
We had a thorough discussion in budget and finance, and I'm glad that we're able to move forward this recommendation.
So thank you all so much for your work.
I know that was a lot.
And for 27, I want to thank Council Member Linopar for working with staff to update and improve the Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance so that we can better provide safeguards to our immigrant community.
I'm really happy to co-sponsor this important item and really want to thank staff because I think this was a good example of us working together to figure out how to get to yes.
So thank you all very much for that.
Next, is there any comment on consent calendar or information items only? Yes, come on up.
And folks online, just to get yourselves ready.
We are taking comments on consent and information items only.
Okay.
Let's see.
First, thanks so much.
I'm really looking forward to number 7, has the CareBridge program and moves forward options is absolutely the provider that is experienced and will do an excellent job and is collaborative on every level and making things happen.
And this is a clear need.
It'll be interesting to see how the Golden Bear Homes partnership transfer evolves.
That's not really clear.
I do want to say that I'm pleased to see that Council and the City Manager's Office continues to develop the various nuances that are constantly evolving with the Sanctuary City Contracting.
This is not only undocumented immigrants.
Actually, permanent residents are in jeopardy too.
There are permanent residents that are being deported for such quote offenses, such as marijuana and other and having had drug offenses against them.
There was a recent case where someone who has been here since he's 8 years old and is now 35, even though the judge upheld him being able to stay here because they said he had not sufficiently showed rehabilitation for his drug offenses, was deported back to the Bahamas and he's a permanent resident since he was 8 years old.
Same thing with a woman who was Canadian, who has been here since she's 5, a permanent resident.
So it's not only touching the undocumented immigrants.
And of course, we know what's happening in North Carolina now.
And as we see that list of these dangerous offenders, it starts out with gang violence and kidnapping and then it goes to shoplifting.
Thanks, Carol.
Thanks.
Yes.
Go ahead.
Hi, I'm Mike Thomas, the Senior Director of Programs from Options Recovery Services, and I'd like to thank the City Council, the Mayor, the City Managers, the Patel family, Carrie Arredondo, and the whole city for giving us the opportunity to do the new CareBridge program.
I'm really excited.
I've oversaw many programs, partnered with the city, and I'm very, very excited about this one because I think we're addressing a huge need in a very innovative way.
And I'm really excited to see you all again to report the great outcomes that I anticipate.
And again, thank you very much for the opportunity.
And yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening to you all.
Really grateful to be here.
Thank you all for this opportunity.
You know, when I was a boy, my grandma used to tell us it takes a village.
I didn't understand that until things like this take place.
So as well, I echo what he says, what Mike says.
My name is George Smith.
I'm a Director of Reentry and Violence Prevention for Options Recovery Services, and I have the privilege of being able to help build out this program.
And I really look forward to being able to house these folks, get them what they need, get that safety, and also really align folks with the resources that they need.
You talked about the trauma-informed care, the life skills and things of that nature.
We know that safety housing is so important to folks.
You know, it's one of the foundations of Maslow's hierarchy.
So again, thanks to Dr.
Carey.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Thank you to the Patel family.
Thank you for Options Recovery Services.
26 years ago, Dr.
Davida Cody founded this company with the hope that anybody, anywhere, without funds, without resources, can have the treatment that they need.
And to see this thing come to fruition today in 2025 and 2026, my heart is just blessed to experience it.
So thank you all again, and I'll give you back your time.
Enjoy the rest of your evening.
Thank you so much.
This is the family that owns the hotel? Is that right? Okay.
Well, thank you also.
I was curious which item you're here for.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
It's not often that we get to see people come who are really impacted in this way.
And so I just really want to thank you all so much for being here, too.
It's for me, it's very special.
It helps to bring some of these things to life that we're working on.
So thank you all so much.
Okay.
Any other comments online for consent calendar information items only? One speaker with a phone number ending.
Oh, two speakers.
Phone number ending in 000.
Public comment on consent.
No? Okay.
Thank you.
Next speaker is Theo Gordon.
Hello, council members.
My name is Theo Gordon.
I'm asking you to pull item 19 from the consent calendar and take it up independently.
This is a tax giveaway to one property owner in the city because the Baja and LPC have decided this property is more special than the rest of all of the other 1915 properties in the city.
As a homeowner in Berkeley who owns a very old property that is on Berkeley walking tours, I don't get any special tax treatment from the city to maintain my own property.
And I don't think that in this budgetary environment, we should be handing out tax breaks willy nilly.
This should be taken up by the full council.
Thank you.
Thank you, Theo.
Okay, that's it.
No other speakers.
Okay, very good.
Okay, so we have a motion to approve the consent calendar.
Is there a motion to approve the consent calendar? So moved.
Okay, second from council member Tregub.
And is there any opposition besides the noted no from council member Blackaby? Okay, then our consent calendar has been approved.
Thank you all so much.
Thank you all for coming.
Okay, so we are moving down to our action calendar.
Okay, moving on to item 28, adoption of Berkeley building codes, including local amendments to California building standards code.
And I'll give you all a minute to get all set up.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mayor.
Good evening, council members.
I'm Jordan Klein, director of planning and development.
I'm joined at the staff table by the Berkeley building official, David Lopez, and the assistant building official, Jeff Jensen.
So every three years, the California building standards codes are updated to reflect the latest advances in technology, energy efficiency, safety, sustainability.
And then local municipalities adopt those codes by reference, including any local amendments to reflect local conditions.
And so that's the action before you tonight, second reading, which is required to be a public hearing.
We are carrying forward all of the previous local amendments.
The action doesn't include any new local amendments.
There is work underway to consider new local amendments, but that's not part of this action at this time.
We're hoping to bring to you some consideration of new local reach codes at some point in 2026.
So that concludes the staff presentation.
We're available to answer any questions.
Thank you for that long, complex presentation.
Are there any questions for anyone? Okay.
Oh, you do have a question.
Thank you, director.
That was helpful to know.
So, so you're not proposing anything new here.
So, because I, because I, I looked at the bullets at the beginning and I see some what, so, so my perspective on this and I think I don't know if you're watching, you know, with the fire code updates, you know, what I, what I want to make sure we're sensitive to is increasing the cost of housing and considering the trade offs.
You know, oftentimes, you know, I appreciate what the code is trying to do.
Obviously, we need safe buildings that are sustainable.
So, so I did just want to pause for a moment.
Can you help me understand the bullet on the top of page 2? It talks about retaining Berkeley's more stringent requirements for technical structural standards, climatic and geographic design criteria and readopting these appendices.
Are you able to explain that a little bit more? What those are about? Well, the technical support, yeah, the technical structural standards and the climatic and geographic design criteria.
Okay, so the structural standards will being in a seismic zone that we are okay.
The standards that we have are, we don't allow certain share walls like drywall.
We don't allow drywall to be a share wall.
Okay, Berkeley.
We also don't allow just plain concrete in certain instances.
I believe we only allow plain concrete in 1 instance.
Now, where the code allows it in a lot of different places.
The other standard that we have is for existing buildings.
So, for soft story or renovations, which are mandatory programs in our city, those are structural standards that we have.
They're more stringent than the model codes.
Okay, thank you for that.
And then the other 1, I just want to note, so we have more stringent electrical vehicle charging requirements in all building types.
And anecdotally, I am seeing folks who have purchased an electric vehicle.
They don't have an off street parking space and they're doing the wires on the sidewalk.
Can you just briefly describe that requirement? Well, the state actually now requires all new dwelling units to have a capable EV charging infrastructure.
So, the state's actually.
Oh, so it's not more stringent.
It's not really more stringent.
But that's for new dwellings.
New dwellings, right? Okay.
We don't have anything for existing.
The reason the amendments are written the way they are is that our previous adopted ordinance, those amendments were written under the mid-cycle code text.
And so we had to rewrite them to the new code text.
And the state changed it around.
And that's why you see such a breakdown as single-family dwellings, multi-story with assigned parking, multi-dwelling with assigned parking, multi-dwelling with unassigned parking.
There's new requirements for office and retail and also for non-residential other than office and retail.
And also amendments were done by the state for existing parking facilities.
Okay.
And so adding the electric vehicle charging requirements in these various types of uses.
So, I don't want to go off on a tangent on this.
But so with a single-family home, can you remind me, does our code say you're required to have an off-street parking spot? It does not.
That's a zoning.
Yeah, that's a zoning thing.
But the reason why I'm asking is, so if somebody wants to remodel their home and they come with a permit seeking a remodel, are you looking at that to see that they're adding this requirement for electric vehicle charging? Is that only going to be for new units? New single-family dwellings.
Okay.
And it is, if somebody has an accessory dwelling unit, they're not required to have parking in the city.
But if they choose to have off-street parking, this is saying you do have to have electric vehicle charging for that ADU parking spot.
Correct? It's a brand new one.
Yes, it's a brand new.
Okay.
So, all right.
I'll just leave it at that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for your question.
Are there any, is there any public comment on item 28? This is the adoption of Brooklyn building codes, including local amendments to California building standards code.
Any public comment online? No.
Okay.
Any comments from my council colleagues? Okay.
Is there a motion? To close the public hearing.
To close the public hearing? I so move.
Second.
Is there any objection to closing the public hearing? Okay.
The public hearing is closed.
I will entertain other motions.
So moved.
Second.
Okay.
And any objection to the motion, which is the adoption of the building codes, Berkeley building codes? Nope.
Okay.
Motion is passed.
Thank you very much.
Moving on to item 29, which is the zoning ordinance amendments.
Thank you all so much for coming, by the way.
Apologies.
Zoning ordinance amendments to title 23 of the Berkeley municipal code for consistency with state law and technical edits.
SLT 2025.
Good evening.
Hello.
Robert Rivera is here to present for staff.
Take it away, Robert.
All right.
Good evening, commission.
No, sorry.
Council staff is bringing forward state law, technical edits, which are routine, non-substantive, non-substantive, technical amendments to the zoning ordinance to correct errors, update references, and clarify existing practice in order to maintain consistency and integrity as directed by council.
In 2021 staff recommends the city council approved the proposed ordinance amendments and were available for any questions.
Okay.
Any questions? Thank you Madam Mayor.
Thank you.
Madam Mayor, is this the process that was started under as part of the committee process known as ZORP, my second least favorite acronym of all time? Correct.
It was a process started to update the zoning ordinance and correct those typos and errors.
ZORP, zoning ordinance, great.
That was my only question.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Is there, are there any other questions? Okay.
Is there any public comment on item 29, the zoning ordinance amendments to title 23 of the Berkeley Municipal Code for consistency with state law and technical edits? Okay, very good.
Is there a motion to close the public hearing? So moved.
Second.
Okay.
Is there any opposition to closing the public hearing? All right.
The public hearing is closed and I will entertain other motions.
I so move to end just with appreciation to staff for continuing this process.
I used to serve on this committee along with council member O'Keefe.
Oh, you were not on there.
Okay.
All right.
Very good.
Is there a second? I second.
I also wasn't on the, on this one either.
Okay.
All right, then.
Is there any opposition to approving the motion? Okay, then motion is passed.
Thank you all very much for being here.
All right, moving on to item number 30, pausing City of Berkeley authorization for Mills Act agreements from, well, from all of our names.
Council member Humbert, author Mayor Ishii, co-sponsor.
Council member Keserwani, co-sponsor.
Council member Luna Parra, co-sponsor.
I'm just reading.
Did you want to make a presentation? Sure, Madam Mayor.
I'd be happy to make a short presentation, but before I do, I want to read into the record, inserting into the item under the environmental sustainability and climate impacts section, that, quote, the city finds that this resolution does not constitute a, quote, project, end quote.
Within the meaning of the California Environmental Quality Act, peren, quote, CEQA, end quote, in peren, pursuant to CEQA guidelines section 15378.
Thanks.
I want to thank all members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission for their prior work reviewing these applications and District 8 LPC Commissioner Denise Hall-Montgomery for her work, and for discussing the Mills Act considerations with me and helping inform this item.
I want to emphasize that this item is not about devaluing landmark preservation in general, or whether any particular landmark is worthy of preservation.
This is about our budget, which is constrained at this point, our priorities, and whether this program is achieving preservation and equity goals.
Given our current budget crisis, the lack of strong evidence that relinquished tax dollars are cost effectively helping preserve landmarks, and the equity implications of this program, I think that pausing is the only responsible course.
The Mills Act was passed at a time when California homes and commercial properties, especially those which were historic but distressed, were much more affordable.
In that context, it made sense to create a program that would provide relief to cash-strapped families and small businesses that wanted to purchase these properties and fix them up.
But this is no longer the case.
Even our most distressed properties now go for prices that tend to lock out all but the most affluent, and that's certainly true here in Berkeley.
And those folks, by and large, do not need these tax breaks.
As it currently operates, the Mills Act program tends to remove funding from the city budget overall, and from the schools, and from the county.
But the city budget would provide services for everyone to create a tax break for those toward the upper end of the income spectrum, and this is a regressive policy.
There may be ways in the future to adjust this program so that we're ensuring the benefits are more equitably distributed in terms of geography and income.
But again, given our budget crunch, I just can't justify calling for the funding and staff time this would require at this point.
And until we have the resources to undertake this, I think that a pause is appropriate.
So again, I want to thank everyone, my co-sponsors, the planning staff, and our Landmarks Preservation Commission for their previous work to review and administer these contracts, and I look forward to taking this small but fiscally responsible step.
Thank you.
Council Member, is there anything you want to add in terms of any changes in language or you might want to address? It was just that one item that I read into the record, and we did file a supplemental so that I would bring attention to the supplemental, which changes some dates.
Do you want to speak more to that at all? No, would you like to? Well, I just was thinking that maybe it might be good to before our public comment.
Sure.
Well, I can tell you that, let me call up the supplemental.
What the supplemental does, there are three pending applications at this point.
One, I think we just passed on the, actually just passed on the consent calendar.
This allows the two pending applications, one of which was approved by the Landmarks Commission, to go forward, but inserts a cutoff date of, I think, the end of this month.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, 19th.
Thanks.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Any questions for, all right, public comment on this item? Come on up if you want public, if you have public comment.
So this is public comment on number 30, pausing City of Berkeley authorization for Mills Act agreements.
My name is Julie and I've lived in Berkeley since 1980 and Mark is, I understand you both have studied the Mills Act and the financial involvement with the budget.
But I think that there's a lot of points that have been made by Baja and they presented a document to you, which outlined a lot more factual data about why these 360 buildings that have been landmarked are contributing to the architectural heritage of our state and our city and that they are, they generate income by the permits that are required and by the contractors and architects who work on them to maintain them and by the house tours and visitors who come to Berkeley to see the architectural heritage, which is unique.
So, I think you should consider taking a little bit more time before you decide to pause the program and look at what Lila Montchart had outlined in her program and her details of facts about the Mills Act, because it is the single most incentive program for architectural heritage and restoration in the state of California.
That's all.
Thank you, Julie.
Hello, my name is Jeff Baker.
And first, I want to thank you for bringing this very common sense reform forward with alacrity that suits the kind of budget and fiscal situation of the city.
There is only one thing that I would like to add that I think that the language of the recommendation could be slightly improved and that would be in terms of these contracts are not self-canceling and that they will not not be renewed in the absence of action to cancel them.
So, to me, having studied the matter, that didn't jump out in the recommendation.
If you direct the city to not renew them, that's not really an event that happens by itself.
So I might suggest, if you wish to amend it, that you would direct the city to affirmatively cancel the contracts at their first opportunity.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Is there any other public comment here in person or anyone online? Yes, there are five hands raised online.
First speaker is John Bernstein.
Hello, everyone.
Okay.
Yes.
Great.
Thanks so much.
I'm a Berkeley neighbor.
My background is in land use and mathematics.
I got interested in the evidence that is presented to justify stopping, pausing the Mills Act.
I looked at the spreadsheet that formed the primary evidence for Council Member Humbert's proposal.
And I want to thank Council Member Humbert sincerely because, in fact, he accepted the fact that there were some major flaws.
The major flaw is that the cost of the program is not $600,000 a year.
The cost is actually much lower because of math errors, which were created in the performance of the spreadsheet.
In fact, the program costs about $186,000 a year, which is a tiny percentage of the school budget.
Having said that, I realized that there is a budget deficit, but this thing is just about 0.002% of the city budget.
It's a tiny amount.
But the spreadsheet also leaves out a bunch of other important facts.
First of all, the city charges major fees to the program, and those now total about $500,000.
Second of all, from the permits that were granted for this, which are online, it's possible to estimate that the value of the work on all those Mills Act properties is over $5 million.
So, I would say that the City Council is acting based on very faulty and erroneous information.
I suggest that a referral to Council agencies to verify some of our assertions and some of the proponents' assertions would be a very good idea.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Okay, next speaker is Mike.
Mike, you should be able to unmute.
Hi, thank you for your time.
I am 1 of the 2 applicants that I believe is in the gray area right now for the Mills Act for Berkeley.
I don't know where all the things are going to net out.
We are 1 of the folks who actually, of our own accord, raised our hand and tried to get our house looked at by a 3rd party and rendered as a historical resource.
In order to try to do the maintenance work on the exterior, it does not cover the cost of the maintenance work.
It just helps to be able to defray some of the costs.
It's kind of a sense of public-private partnership on trying to maintain the historical nature of the home.
I don't know where the Council is going to net out on this.
There's a lot more information around the notion of why preservation pays back pretty quickly.
The 1 thing I will say is that, similar to cities like Los Angeles, there needs to be an off-ramp for people that self-select if they're going to take away the Mills Act.
In other words, you shouldn't be saying, yes, here's the process by which you can potentially be available for this act.
In a sense, all the rug.
People have to maintain the cost of trying to do all the things that come with owning and trying to upkeep a historical property without being able to avail themselves of the statewide considerations.
Okay, thank you.
And just to clarify, because I think this is important, that in the earlier presentation by Council Member Humbert, he mentioned that those applications will still be considered.
Just none, the pause happens essentially for any applications that are submitted past the November 19th date.
Is that correct? That's correct.
Just because I think that person was unclear, so I just wanted to make sure we clarified that.
Okay.
Next is Kelly Hammergren.
Okay, can you hear me now? Yes.
Okay.
So, I have been hearing that there are some problems with the cost of this program.
So, I would hope that you take a long, hard look at that.

Segment 3

that it's disappointing that the recommendations from the Landmarks Preservation Commission have not made it to City Council because the Landmarks Preservation Commission put together recommendations for better management of the Mills Act and limiting the number of applications per year to three and to end the automatic renewal of the land.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission put together recommendations for better management of the Mills Act applications so that they just don't continue forever if there is an end.
And also reporting at the five-year mark on the Mills Act and all of these recommendations from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which I read from their minutes, found to me to be far more reasonable than to just say, we're going to pause this for some indefinite period.
I do think that as we are remaking the city with new buildings, it also serves us to preserve our historical buildings.
And so this is not evidence to be the great expense that has been purported to be.
And it looks like there are many benefits that would come from continuing it in a limited fashion.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Kelly.
Okay, next is Theo Gordon.
Hello, Council Members.
I actually want to echo one of the previous callers, I think John Bernstein, who was questioning the math and whether the math is clear or not.
And I think that he might be right there.
And that's exactly why we need to stop the program.
The idea that LPC and their friends at Baja are willy-nilly handing out tax breaks, and no one knows how many are out there, what they cost, and whether any work is being done, just shows that this program has been grossly mismanaged.
And the people defending the program today had plenty of opportunity to fix it.
Maybe LPC wants to wait and know how to fix it.
They could have done that over the last 30 years, but they haven't until we started calling attention to it, because it was benefiting them and their friends.
I can tell you that there are several of these buildings in my neighborhood where no work has been done.
This one in particular on Ashby is a derelict hazard and an eyesore.
And I want to know why I am subsidizing, through my property tax dollars, this building that has had zero work done on it and looks like it's about to fall apart.
Thank you.
Thank you, Theo.
Next is David Scheer.
Hi.
I support this pause tonight.
I feel the same way about the Mills Act that I felt about the recent landmarks referral.
I appreciate that some people really care about architecture and really like the way that neighborhoods look today.
We should not be spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance what is truly an incredibly niche hobby that some people have, which is fine.
As far as cost is concerned, I don't know if the numbers that we're talking about include staff time for managing the Mills Act, following up on all these contracts, staffing the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
There's, I would say, uncertainties on both sides.
If this kind of preservation and landmarking and these Mills Act subsidies are important, we need to do it in a systematic way.
The Landmarks Preservation Ordinance was passed, what, 40 years ago, 50 years ago? I don't understand how we're still discovering new landmarks.
There's something that's a landmark and historical today that was not so 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
It seems like there's a real problem in this process if it's been 40 or 50 years and there are not that many buildings in Berkeley.
So, yeah, I think that we need to hit the pause on all of this.
We need to, I think, take like a first principles approach.
What is the point of these policies? What is it that we want to accomplish? How much money are we willing to spend? What is the criteria for success or for failure? And what is the definition of done? Because it seems like there is no, it seems like that we don't have answers to any of these questions.
And it seems like kind of the basics of policy when we're talking about the kinds of dollars that we're talking about.
So, thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, 2 more speakers.
We have 1st Sarah Bell.
Hi, thank you so much council for recognizing me.
I'll be brief.
I'm here to speak in favor of passing the Mills Act reform tonight and pausing any future applications.
I think the data speaks for itself.
Many properties that are receiving this benefit aren't even having work done on them aren't even being actively preserved and indeed many are derelict.
Even however, if this system weren't so clearly being abused.
I think there's still many more important ways to spend our cities right now.
Very constrained.
We could be spending that money on schools, affordable housing, street safety.
Anyway, yeah, please, please pass this item and thank you so much for doing the work to reform our Mills Act implementation.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Last hand raise is Jeremy Butler.
Yes, everybody hear me.
It's a little bit of fame if you could speak up.
I just wanted to kind of echo what some of them.
I just wanted to kind of echo what some of them mentioned about the data being presented.
Really lacking in sort of painting the whole picture.
I mean, I think I think somebody pointed out.
Gross overestimation of what this is costing the city.
Obviously there is staff time associated with these Mills Act contracts that that needs to be factored in.
I think until we really have all the information and all the implications of what this program really does cost the city, how can we be making an educated vote on something that is at this point really just sort of speculated by one, one member of the public.
Let's see, I had another point.
I think that, you know, we're taking away.
The one.
The one incentive for homeowners to really preserve properties and to self certify their properties as, as historic through a pretty onerous process with the LPC and city council that ultimately approve those applications.
I also want to point out that the city of Berkeley, unlike many other jurisdictions didn't do their own historic assessment and survey of their properties and so at this point, it's the onus is now on homeowners to sort of, you know, take the step forward and apply for these landmarks, and there isn't a sort of A survey that's been done on the city property.
So, It just seems like we sort of missed that vote.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
Your time is up.
That's all.
That's all the public comments.
Okay, very good.
Thank you very much.
Are there comments from my council colleagues, starting with Councilman? Thank you.
I want to thank first want to thank Councilmember Humbert for leading the effort on this.
Our city is facing a structural deficit, and we are inevitably going to have to cut programming and none of that is without sacrifice.
Ultimately, I don't think that the city is able to retain these programs programs such as this one while we face our structural deficit and weighing this program with so many of the other programs that are that and staff that our city has to maintain.
I don't think it's worth to continue prioritizing this.
So I want to thank Councilmember Humbert for allowing me to go sponsor this as well.
I also want to thank my LPC commissioner for being such a strong thought partner in this process and for advocating in advocating for the critical importance of equitable and thoughtful landmark preservation.
And I'm grateful to the commission broadly.
I want to kind of defend them a little bit and their work as well.
I want to caution against painting the commission and negative light when they have been looking into how to amend the mills act in good faith.
And we did kind of leapfrog leapfrog them a little bit, but I still appreciate their efforts and I think that.
They're they're working towards the same issue that we are.
Thanks.
Thank you, Councilmember.
Thank you.
Councilmember check up.
Thank you.
I have some questions and then brief comments.
My questions are I actually well, I, I don't know if in my lifetime, I will ever own a mill.
Act eligible property, so I just don't know what I don't know.
So how does this work in practice? What is the length of a contract and what would be the administrative procedure around tracking or monitoring? If whether it's through a local jurisdiction or through a different agency.
Planning Director Klein can answer some of those more nuanced questions.
I mean, the length of the contract is 10 years and staff in the planning department are the ones that administer the contract.
So, if you have more specific questions, I think Dr.
Klein can probably answer those more easily.
Okay, so after 10 years, what happens? So the initial term of the contract is 10 years.
Each year, the contract is 10 years.
Okay, so after 10 years, what happens? So the initial term of the contract is 10 years.
Each year, starting the 1st anniversary of that 10 year period, the term is extended by 1 year, unless the city sends a notice of non-renewal.
So there's always a 10 year period term remaining.
So, and as soon as the city sends a non-renewal notice, then the 10 year term does not grow from that point on.
And at that point, the value of the Mills Act benefit gradually decreases so that it's not turned off immediately.
And by the way, this is all governed by state law, including both the government code and the revenue and taxation code dictate how this program works.
So once we send the notice of non-renewal to the contract holders, they will still enjoy, in that 1st year after non-renewal, about 90% of the benefit.
And then the 2nd year, about 80% of the benefit.
And then after 10 years, they will pay what they would have paid under a normal assessment, as if they were not a Mills Act contract holder.
I really appreciate that explanation, Jordan.
And I have one more question, and I think it might be for Paul.
And it's just, notwithstanding whatever action we may or may not take tonight, what, if anything, would preclude the LPC from forwarding a recommendation to the council? They would be free to forward a recommendation to the council if they so chose.
Okay, thank you.
So I will just say I appreciate Council Member Humbert's change in supplemental 2, because the 3 pending applications that did give me pause, and that is no longer in the item.
And I think that is the appropriate way to deal with this matter.
Given the budget situation that we are in, I will be supporting this item as amended.
And I would just like to associate myself with Council Member Lenaparra's comments and appreciate the good work that the Landmarks Preservation Commission does.
These are individuals with expertise in historic preservation, and we do rely upon their expertise quite often.
And so to the commission, if there are other aspects of this that you feel the council should look at, I certainly would be very interested in hearing what the commission has to recommend.
But yeah, I wanted to just thank the author for, you know, this item did not start in a way that I probably could support.
But so I also appreciate the work of building consensus on this item.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council Member Humbert.
Yeah, I appreciate folks have raised issues about how the individual contracts that have been approved expire.
And we have a one of our whereas clauses, or rather one of our be it further resolved clauses reads as follows.
Be it further resolved that any existing Mills Act contracts and any Mills Act contracts approved for properties applying before the cutoff of November 19th, 2025, shall be allowed to expire at the end of their contract terms and shall not be considered for renewal unless and until the city council takes further action to reauthorize the use of the agreements for historic property preservation as specified in California government code sections 50280 at SEC for qualified historic properties.
And I'm concerned that maybe we need to add an additional clause in there or some additional text that would instruct the city manager to send out termination notices so that that 10 year period expires for each contract.
I would say council member that that would make it abundantly clear.
Our reading of this as it is, what we would do if you pass it as is, is that any any contract that had reached that 10, 10 year mark, the director client described would be getting a letter of non renewal from us.
And we would just start that we'd stop at 10 o'clock and they'd start that process.
So that is how we're interpreting that.
Okay, however, if you want to add that clarification, that makes it completely clear.
So, but I think it's pretty clear as it is.
Okay, I think I would like to add that clarification.
Does somebody have some suggested language? What would what would we include? Maybe what I suggested that, that with respect to each one of the contracts, the city manager shall send out termination notices.
She'll send out a letter of non renewal or letter of non renewal.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate you clarifying that council member.
Council member testimony.
Thank you very much.
Madam Mayor.
Thank you.
Council member Humbert for authoring this item.
I just wanted to clarify.
So the, the, the letter of non renewal goes to everybody who is currently receiving this benefit.
It would go to everybody who has a contract that has hit the 10 year mark.
So they, well, I mean, I guess it seems like it needs to go to everybody.
You're right.
It could go to everyone.
And now it's after o'clock.
So I wanted to clarify that because the way that director Klein is describing it, it needs everybody needs to be notified.
And then, because if you've been experiencing this benefit for 1 year, you need to start being ramped down over a 10 year period.
So, okay.
So, director Klein, is that correct? Yeah, that's right.
That is right.
Okay.
So.
Council member Humbert, can you just say that again? What your proposed amendment is then? Perhaps.
Can I make a recommendation? What if the city council would direct the city manager to initiate non renewal proceedings of all Mills Act contracts at the earliest opportunity? Yeah.
And I think that's my language.
Okay.
As long as it says all.
I think that was the clarification that I wanted.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
I'm sorry.
Did you get that? Mr.
City clerk? I just want to make sure.
Thank you.
Okay.
Very good.
Okay.
He got it.
All right.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone.
Council member Blackaby.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
I just want to thank council member Humbert and colleagues for authoring this item.
And also just want to make a distinction that, again, I think we're most of us are saying the same thing.
But the Mills Act piece itself is separate, very separate, distinct from the fact that we value preserving historical landmarks and sites of historic value.
And we want to continue to support that.
It's important to the historical fabric of the city.
And as a matter of fact, I think a number of us are having some conversations about whether or not we want to launch a historic resource survey effort to proactively start that process.
That's important to me.
And so my support of the Mills Act item is separate, you know, completely separate from the point that I do think that landmarking is important where appropriate.
And that we should be preserving those resources where appropriate.
It's an economic question, a budget question in terms of how we finance it.
So I just wanted to thank council member Humbert for authoring this.
Thank you.
Other comments from my council colleagues? Okay.
I just want to add a couple of things.
Just to say that this action is important for the health of our budget.
We had some really challenging conversations in some of our previous meetings where I basically said we have to cut everything that isn't absolutely necessary.
And that I'm really concerned about what our budget situation is going to look like in the next year.
And one of the things I was really proud about in our last budget was that we were able, we did freeze positions, but we didn't have to have massive layoffs.
And I am really concerned about that.
So I do just want to say that that's why I'm supporting this item.
But I also want to appreciate the change in sub two that allowed for the two applicants in the two applications to progress and close the door for new applications.
So I think that that was valuable clarification.
And I know we had some of the applicants come and speak with us after our last agenda and rules committee meeting.
So I appreciated hearing from you all.
And thank you for being here this evening.
And I think with that, is there a motion? I so move.
Second.
Okay.
Let's take the roll.
Okay.
Motion on the motion to adopt the resolution for the mills.
Pausing the mills act agreements with the amendment added regarding the non renewal proceedings.
And with the changes in supplemental communications packet number two.
On the motion council member customer wanting.
Yes.
Kaplan.
Yes.
Bartlett.
Aye.
O'Keefe.
Yes.
Blackaby.
Yes.
Lunapara.
Yes.
Humbert.
Yes.
And Mayor Ishii.
Yes.
Okay.
Motion carries.
Very good.
Thank you all very much.
And now I think we need to take a 10 minute break and we'll be back for the final item.
Thank you all.
Meeting stopped.
Meeting resumed.
Meeting adjourned.
Recording in progress.
Hi.
Okay.
We're back.
All right.
So, I'm going to turn it over to council member.
To introduce the item.
Unmanned aerial systems and drones as first responders.
And I think that we're actually going to pass it over to council member.
Kaplan to introduce the item.
Yes, thank you very much.
And we have chief Lewis here and capital keys and chief maze online.
I would like to thank my co sponsors, vice mayor Humbert, council members, customer.
I would also like to thank my co sponsors.
A number of public agencies are utilizing drones to support disaster and safety operations, including barricade subjects, search and rescue and vehicle pursuits.
The deployment of such tools amplifies the advocacy of the 1st response while minimizing risk and exposure to hazards.
This item recommends that the city council referred to the same manager, the initiation of the process outlined.
And the city of Berkeley's real technology ordinance to acquire and use systems and drones for responders, consistent with all auditing and reporting requirements in all transparency, data and privacy protections required for every useful.
Every policy and acquisition report.
Under every use policies, policy, and I was in for under the.
By developing these policies and utilizing drones for responders, the city will mitigate the service impacts of our police staffing shortage.
Supplement our recruitment and retention efforts and bolster disaster and safety response by giving responders a tool to survey the locations of critical incidents before deploying personnel.
The public safety committee did recommend a positive adoption and I'll restate the items recognition to refer to the same manager.
The initiation of the process outlined by BMC 299, the surveillance technology ordinance for the Berkeley police department to acquire and use unmanned aerial systems, including drones as first responders consistent, consistent with all auditing.
Transparency data and privacy protections required for all use policies.
And acquisition reports under the, and in closing, I'll say it's important to consider what we heard earlier this evening about the need to triage calls for service.
I don't require certain kinds of response.
Modern tools are valuable for their ability to gather Intel on site to ensure that we deploy appropriate response levels before mobilizing personal resources.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And did you want to go ahead chief? Yeah, I was going to, but it sounds like council member Taplin covered it pretty thoroughly.
So good evening.
I joke, but really that we want to go through and share a lot of the information that we've identified during our initial research and talk about some of that.
Obviously, we're here today to to look for counsel's direction on whether or not to enter the STL process, which is a whole process in and of itself to write use policies and bring forth acquisition reports to cover the use of technologies and what technologies we would bring.
Tonight, we will provide a foundation to explain what these programs are, how they work, and how they could benefit Berkeley.
And as we've shared previously with this council, the city gate assessment report, let us know that the staffing shortages that we were experiencing were affecting some of our service levels.
They did recommend an additional 15 patrol officers to meet our current service level demands.
Along with the rest of the country, our department is facing severe staffing shortages.
We are currently operating at a 20% vacancy rate for our sworn personnel, regardless of these constraints on our resources.
That hasn't changed the community's expectation and level of service that they deserve to be both timely, transparent and accountable across a broad range of calls that we respond to.
We do know that drone technologies offer a way to improve both efficiency and safety without relying solely on having to have additional police personnel across the country.
We have seen that both police, fire and emergency service agencies are using these tools to improve response times to improve outcomes, reduce risks to both the community and officers and support more effective and equitable service delivery.
So I'm joined tonight by Captain Oakes, who's going to speak more about the two kinds of drone programs that are identified in Councilmember Tapley's item and give you some more background on how those things are used.
Thank you, Chief.
So, overview of the drone program.
There are two distinct components under consideration.
Drones as first responders, or DFR, and traditional unmanned aerial systems, or UAS.
Drones as first responders are programs where departments position drones in fixed sites, usually on rooftops, where they can launch autonomously in response to a call for service or a 911 call when those calls come in.
They typically arrive within two to three minutes of a call for service, often before patrol officers arrive on scene.
Then they live stream video to officers in dispatch, responding officers in dispatch.
This early information helps to determine the safest and most appropriate course of action for officers to take as they're responding, including whether or not an in-person response is needed at all.
Unmanned aerial systems are drones that are operated directly from trained officers in the field.
They are used for a wide range of incidents, including search and rescue, special response team calls, crime scene documentation, traffic collision investigations, and support disasters and hazard responses.
UAS platforms can access areas, confined areas, or dangerous spaces, detect heat signatures, identify chemical hazards, use onboard speakers to communicate with subjects, and deliver small items like cell phones and medical supplies.
There are a number of benefits that drone programs can bring to our community.
First, a faster and more informed response.
Drones can reach locations within minutes, as I referenced earlier, provide real-time video to help officers evaluate their situation before arrival.
This is critical in that the more information officers have before they get to a scene, the better they are able to make correct decisions by the time they arrive there.
This improves resource allocation as well and enhances our ability to respond to things like ALPR hits with timely and updated information.
Another benefit is enhanced de-escalation and safety for our community.
Early visual information helps reduce the risk.

Segment 4

By giving officers a clearer understanding of what it is that they're walking into, whether somebody is armed, whether somebody is in a mental health crisis, and whether a situation can be resolved without any enforcement action.
Another key component, as we've talked about before, with de-escalation is distance, which allows officers time and the ability to slow a situation down.
This technology gives us that distance to allow us to slow situations down and frequently results in better outcomes.
As the Chief talked about, another benefit is better use of our limited resources.
DFRs, or Drones First Responders, can clear calls without requiring an in-person response at all.
Preserving patrol capacity, for instance, that truly need them.
Some agencies have reported in the area of 20% of calls for service being cleared by a drone as a first responder without requiring a police response.
Finally, another benefit is support for emergencies and investigations.
Drones have equipment such as thermal imaging that provides search and rescue efforts.
Aerial perspectives can assist with traffic collisions and crime scene assessments.
It can reduce the amount of time that roads are closed and allowing for more precise documentation.
Some specific use scenarios of this technology include area searches for missing persons, tactical situations, including high-risk search warrants, hostage and barricaded subject responses, and active shooter response.
Vehicle pursuits, when the drones are within the capability of pursuing and evaluating a vehicle and determining where it's going and directing other units to respond to it.
And finally, counter drone operations as well.
We've seen as recently as last week at the Turning Point event on the UC campus, individual actors actually bringing drones into our community and using them to oversee events.
So having that counter drone capability is an important thing to add as well.
I've talked about some general uses, but I think it's valuable to actually bring that into a specific case study.
So a helpful comparison for us is the city of San Mateo.
San Mateo is roughly the same size as the city of Berkeley, slightly larger at 12 square miles.
They launched a DFR program recently and within the first three months.
Their drone's first responder responded to roughly 600 calls for service.
More than 70 of those calls were resolved without requiring a single officer responding to that location.
Response times dropped from 6 to 10 minutes down to 2 to 3 minutes, and their system is now flying 15 to 20 missions per day.
San Mateo is a good example also because they face similar staffing and growth challenges and pressures that Berkeley's currently facing, making their experience particularly relevant to us.
We're seeing this also, this technology being used rapidly becoming the standard in the Bay Area and in national policing locally.
Agencies including the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, Richmond Police Department, San Francisco Police Department, Fremont, Hayward, Oakland, and San Leandro already operate either DFRs or deploy drones from their vehicles.
Several other agencies are actively exploring this technology as well.
Nationally, cities including Santa Monica, Portland, Oregon, New York City, and Los Angeles are also leveraging this technology.
Many of these agencies report improved response times, reduced risks to officers, better outcomes for critical incidents, and a strong community support when programs are implemented with transparency and clear policy oversight.
I've talked through some of the benefits that this program brings to the police side of public safety, and I'm now going to hand this off to Deputy Chief May, who will discuss some of the benefits this technology can provide to the Berkeley Fire Department.
Chief.
Hi, good evening, Council.
I'll start with some of the more, maybe the more exciting, the more well known uses of drones that are being used across the California and also the United States.
The first one is the FLIR, which is Forward Looking Infrared Camera ability, which is the ability to detect heat sources.
So, this is very useful for fire departments across the United States when we're looking at a burning structure and trying to locate where trapped victims might be, or down firefighters, and even hotspots where we cannot see from the ground or from our position at the Unified Command Post.
We use this technology through a mutual aid partner in November of 2020.
With the fire alarm fire that we had on University, the agency was able to come in, deploy several drones, and because we couldn't enter that multi-story structure because it was still in construction, the drones were able to pick up where those heat senses were, where the spot fires were occurring, and help us direct streams into that structure to help put out the fire.
Another useful tool that we see a possibility is situational awareness.
Drones can get to a scene a lot faster than our apparatus because they do obviously line of sight.
This is especially useful for the wildland urban interface areas along the eastern limits of the city.
Also, once the drone is able to get to a scene or an incident, it's useful because of the live intel that we can either increase a response, add more units, add more apparatus to an incident, or downgrade a response and limit our liability.
That's based on the live intel that we see through the video feed.
Also, during large scale evacuations, we can quickly confirm what intersections are heavily congested, and when resources are available, we can send personnel out to direct traffic and help the flow of traffic through those intersections.
And then there's the search and rescue operations, especially because we're right close to the bay.
Again, the drones can pick up that heat signature of victims that are in the water somewhere.
Normally, we would have to send out either a boat or jet skis and do grid searching.
The drone is able to do a grid search, but on a much wider pattern and able to pick up heat signatures and direct our personnel directly to where that person might be.
Earthquakes, obviously, you know Berkeley, these drones can help support our post-earthquake responses.
Right now, typically, what would happen during a large earthquake is our apparatus would go out and do what we call window surveys, and that's where they have to drive every street, look at every structure, talking to citizens, and just listening to where the problems are, and then reporting that back to the command post.
Obviously, a drone can do that a lot quicker with live footage, and therefore a unified command post or emergency operations center can send resources directly to where it's needed most.
And probably one of my favorites, which is probably the last on the list, is cost recovery for declared disasters.
After a declared disaster, we're able to, with the drone capability, I should say before a declared disaster, map a city topography to find out where and how the city looks before a disaster hits, whether that's a wildfire, tsunami, or even a mudslide.
Then, after a disaster, that drone can get back up and map the city again and provide proof to our government agencies that are going to provide aid and recovery and verify that the city has had damage.
So cost recovery becomes a lot quicker and more efficient.
So those are some of the things that I think the fire department would be enhanced by having a drone operation or the UAS.
And with that, I'll turn it back over to Chief Lewis.
Thanks, Chief.
It always strikes me when we start to really talk about the different ways we can use these technologies that there'll be so many opportunities for both police, fire, and some of our city departments to use this technology to increase efficiencies and really recognize the value in these tools.
And so as we work to answer questions that the council has, that the community has on costs and use and how it impacts us, you know, we'll be looking to build use report, use policies that allow us the space to explore technology and grow into it so we can make best use of the technology if we acquire it.
I can share, though, that very important pieces of a use policy will always include transparency and accountability.
It will be instrumental to us to ensure that those pieces exist in our use policies and are very clearly articulated.
For example, all DFR flights can be recorded and consistent with the way that our department speaks about the transparency about our work be produced on our dashboard or on, you know, a product's dashboard to show exactly where we're flying and give real-time information about why we flew and what the outcomes were of that event.
Also, as part of the STO process, we will develop those clear and robust use policies, and those policies will go to the police accountability board, will be written in alignment with privacy and fairness issues, with our city and state laws and requirements, and the data security protections that we demand for vendors that come into our city to provide us services.
So, with council's direction tonight, not only will we continue to do the research that we're engaged in, we will prepare official formal surveillance acquisition reports, but also look to comply, ensure we're complying with the community safety ordinance and AB-41 that relate to military equipment ordinance.
All those three different ordinances or policies or laws guide us on the information that has to exist within use policies before we implement this kind of technology.
So, there'll be a lot of process discussion and things that are laid out in those policies to really define how we would use these technologies.
With the idea that not only that, but when we come back to council, if council directs us to move forward on this, my intent is to bring information about the different vendors that are out there providing these technologies and how they would interact and work in tandem with both our LPR technologies and our fixed camera technologies, so that council can guide us in an informed way and make decisions around how we want these technologies to all work in concert with each other.
So, that's the end of what we are presented on today.
I know it's a lot of information and there's still a lot for us to dive into and share back with council, but happy to answer any questions that we can at this point.
Thank you, Chief, Captain, Chief.
Starting off with Council Member Traiga, we're going to start with questions, please.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Thank you, Council Member Kaplan, for bringing forward this item, and thank you to Chief, Captain, and Chief, respectively, for being on.
I will reserve my comments for later, obviously.
I just want to say off the bat, I appreciate the value proposition for this.
And so, to me, I have categories of buckets of items I wanted you to speak through.
I believe there are five.
So, first one is security.
How do we ensure that whatever vendors we do business with, that the technology is secure, it can't be hijacked by someone with nefarious purposes? What is the interplay between national standards like NDAA compliance and what Berkeley might need to expect for any vendor around security protocol? Second is privacy.
I imagine I will be the first Council Member, but not the last, to ask about this.
I wanted to better understand what kind of privacy protocols other jurisdictions like that are using drone technology right now or are authorized for use, such as Richmond, what they employ, and what some best practices around this might be.
Coordination between agencies.
I understand that a city of Berkeley's population size and relative geographic compactness, maybe the optimal use case could be a single drone, if that is the case.
How would the agencies like BPD and FHIR coordinate among themselves for usage of the same equipment? Also, what are the specific use cases? For example, I probably would appreciate the use of floor technology when it comes to rescuing someone from a burning building, but maybe I would not appreciate the same technology if it's just a drone flying overhead, such that folks that are just going about their regular lives in the building that is not burning, that they are not being surveilled or get a heat signature from the drone.
And then transparency and community engagement.
I wanted, you know, obviously that's a priority for me.
How will, if we move forward tonight with this referral, what will be the process to engage the community and let them know that this is a technology that the city of Berkeley is contemplating? And lastly, I know we have a variety of policies that I would put in the ethical procurement category.
I want to make sure that any equipment we purchase, we don't use vendors and we don't use equipment that may also be sold to world actors, whether they be nation states or entities that are up to nefarious things.
So how do we ensure, do we need to, can we do that within our, are the existing policies we have around procurement sufficient, or do we need to actually create a new set of policies and how will it interplay with the military procurement policy and the others that we have? So those were my five general buckets, and thank you so much again.
And before you answer, I just want to say that keeping in mind, folks, that we're not talking about a specific company yet.
So when the chief's responding, it's really on, you know, what could potentially happen, just to make sure for the public that you all are clear too.
Yeah, and maybe another thing to share too is that the questions we get both from the community, the questions we get from this council about things that are important, are going to help us, guide us as we go through the SDO process.
Like that's what we know, and so my intent is to be able to come back with probably a long chart, right, that kind of compares the different vendors and the different ways they hold protections and the different ways they interplay with the other technologies, so that we really can put it all on the table and have an informed conversation about which is best.
Because there are certain vendors that we know only service public safety, but a different vendor might have a better data protection elements, right? And so as we look through all those pieces, we can kind of understand, you know, what fits best for Berkeley and Berkeley's values.
I can share a couple things.
The technology is, for the most part, the vendors, the technology exists on the drone, and is then either a thumb card or a downloadable.
When it lands, it downloads into our evidence system, or it's held locally and preserved if it's evidence in that manner.
So the controls are tighter.
Like some of them may be cloud-based, but a lot of them work in that manner, so it's much more secure, right? We have control of that.
One of the vendors that it's out there is actually the same vendor that does our evidence system, you know, evidence.com system.
So, you know, those are some of the considerations about the ways that it's holding.
We absolutely know that both how data is collected, where it's held, who has access, and who has keys to it are of utmost concern to this council.
I've been paying attention to the questions.
We know that those things will be important to bring back when we have our acquisition report.
As far as the number of DFRs you might need for a city in the size of Berkeley and things like that, and how many we would need, again, there's best practices, and there's different ways that cities have rolled this out.
A lot of cities have just started with one and then expanded out once they started to see how uses were.
Some of the vendors have products where they can be interchanged.
A lot of them can only run for 45 minutes at a time, and so having some redundancy built into your system, whether it's to go to a fire call or to a police call or to stay on a protracted police call for a long period of time, having more than one of the system can be important.
And so the same way that we dispatch personnel for public safety needs, both our fire department and our police department, we set priorities based on the type of call.
Life safety is always our primary concern.
So if we were mapping the city for a potential future cost recovery that's lower down than, hey, we've got a fire in the hill that we want to get a drone up to right now to see how large that fire is.
And so it's all dispatched from our calls for service, and our calls for service are already built with those priority codes in them.
Is it in progress? Is there life safety issues? Things like that would help guide how we would use it.
My goal would be that whenever we had a tool that worked well for other departments or for the fire department versus police department, we would be sharing that technology in a way that makes sense for our city on behalf of our city.
Community engagement.
Obviously, it's important for us to hear via the council what the community is saying.
We also have been contacted by members of the community, and we've already started talking about how we can do information similar to this, where we provide the community information about what the different technologies are.
When we say DFR, what does that really mean? Here's some videos of what it looks like.
I'm thinking about ways to do some kind of community forum to share that and hear back from the community about their specific interests.
And then the last piece about making sure the equipment we use and the vendors that we use don't do business with people that we don't want them to do business with.
That's absolutely, again, something that we would want to raise forth as we look at the acquisition report and kind of tell you what we've discovered around vendors.
And I think you maybe spoke around this, but can you speak to between BPD, BFD, if hypothetically there was another agency that presented a use case for a drone, how would that be worked out at the interagency level? I can just say that our primary mission is to make sure people are safe.
And that's the balance that we're going to be doing.
And if the fire department has a competing need for safety, we're going to respect that.
And that's the way we dispatch is a police and fire from our comm center.
So that could be done in one venue.
Thank you, Council Member Tapley.
Thank you very much.
And thank you, Chief Lewis and Captain O'Keefe and Chief May for your close partnership with my office, the other offices, and also for making yourself so available to counsel for our questions.
I have 2.5 questions in the name of transparency.
On the PD side, when you're piloting a drone, when would you start collecting visual information? Would you be collecting from the moment the flight begins or when the drone arrives on scene? So there's a couple of different ways these technology works.
Some of the cameras are oriented skyward on their flight in.
Some they're oriented in a regular manner but are completely off.
But filming and collection of data doesn't happen on the way to a call.
It doesn't activate until you get to the scene.
And as a follow-up, if a drone is deployed to respond to something happening in one building, is there any utility in collecting data from an adjacent building? No, we would be looking at the event, the incident.
Obviously, if there was concerns, there was an active shooter call and you thought there might be a suspect in another building, you might do a pan around there.
But the idea is that it's providing us intelligence about the incident, where the incident is occurring, and that's what our focus is going to be on.
Thank you so much.
And on the fire side, you mentioned that these can be used to carry and transport objects.
I'm wondering, Chief May, you mentioned – you gave the example of responding to a call for service involving a building under construction.
But I'm wondering if whether a mid-rise or a high-rise building, if there were a fire that broke out in one of the units, could a drone be used to dispatch flame-combating material, like through a window perhaps? Yeah, I think some of the demonstrations that we have seen so far, there is a weight limit for what the drones can carry.
I do not – I have not yet witnessed a flame retardant, more so on the medical side, such as Narcan or an AED of light weight.
But I have not yet seen one that has a demonstration for any type of fire retardant.
I will say that the technologies that they do have allow them to break windows.
And, you know, I don't want to speak for the fire department.
That's, you know, Chief May's area of expertise.
But sometimes communication with someone who is in a building that's on fire and letting them know, stay where you are or, you know, do some other – you know, that line of communication.
And that's one of the things that the drone provides is the ability to speak to that resident.
And so while they may not be able to put fire retardant in that area, they may be able to give specific instructions like, you know, come out and go to the right or go to the left or, you know, wait to come out a few more minutes.
We're going to make the area safe.
Things like that could make a real difference in a response.
And follow up to that, could one be used – I think you spoke to this in the example regarding the building under construction.
But I'm wondering if we have a nasty fire in a building, could a drone be used to guide responders in a route while they're inside the building? Yes, to answer the question.
We didn't use it on the one on University.
That was more for water streams.
But should a drone be deployed and be able to tell exactly where a victim is, yes, that information could be relayed to the search and rescue crew that's inside looking for victims.
Thank you very much.
Those are my questions.
Thank you.
Council Member Bacoby.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
And thank you, Council Member Taplin, for offering this item and inviting me to co-sponsor it.
And thank you to Chief Lewis and Chief May for being here.
I said a few questions.
You know, we've talked a little bit about some of the privacy concerns.
And again, I also realize all these questions are premature because this is all stuff that you're going to work out in the policy.
But just some initial thinking as we go.
Do you have any early thoughts on maybe a few of those sort of privacy limitations and safeguards you might put in place? I know Council Member Taplin just asked a few questions about whether you're viewing neighboring buildings.
But are there some other kind of no-brainers already, just that you've already thought about that would likely be part of this from a privacy perspective? Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to explore, you know, if we, a DFR goes to a scene and it's a non-police call, you know, do we want to retain, you know, retain or not retain for as long that, you know, the video is collected, you know, things like that, questions that we'll get into.
Very strict guidelines on, you know, where the operator looks, you know, directing them, specific language that Council Member brought up about like to the incident, you know, may only be used to observe related to the incident.
The other thing that I do know is that this has an application to cost a lot of different types of calls.
And so I want to define these policies that are really clear about what we expect around how they use it.
But I'm also cautious to not over limit us unintentionally so that we don't can't use maximum, you know, ability of this technology.
Like you might say, well, they only use this for the most serious cases.
Well, but the way you use it as to address staffing shortages is you send it to things like vehicle in a roadway.
And is that vehicle even still there anymore? Can you not send an officer and things like that? So there's, you know, where we think about it in two ways.
One is, do you define the ways things something can be used? Or are you just very clear about the ways it will not be used? Right.
And so then you don't create some limits that that, you know, unintentionally stop you from making good use of a tool without going through a whole process to be able to add that back in.
And then building a frequent like look back because it's like, hey, let's look after X months and see how we're doing.
And then we can make adjustments.
Okay.
Thank you.
You've talked a little bit about the DFR versus UAS.
Can you talk, is that that's a different technology for each? Can you just talk a little bit about how maybe cap and no keys, like what are the different technologies for each? Sure.
Generally, technologies are very similar.
It's the main differences of the size.
So a DFR tends to be respond and be out for longer periods of time.
That requires a bigger platform because batteries are what carry most of the weight.
And also the DFRs are usually set up on rooftops and automated versus the UAS, which is a much smaller drone, usually in the trunk of a car, back of a vehicle that's deployed out there in the field by an officer that just takes it, sets it up, takes a few minutes to set it up and then deploys it straight to the location that they're, that they're dealing with.
So very, very similar, slightly different use cases and really it's about scale.
Okay.
Again, both departments would sort of jointly use the technology.
You'd kind of work all that out.
Do you have any kind of rough estimates on, given a city of our geographic size and population size, like how many, how many units are appropriate? Like maybe where would we start and maybe what could you envision? How many of these units would we have at any kind of point in time? Yeah.
So a couple of different vendors that we've talked to said you could get it done with one DFR to start.
Again, there's the limitations around how long it can fly for.
Some of the vendors, the product can be landed and a battery swapped out, right? So you can have one unit and multiple, you know, you just buy more batteries.
And so then you don't have that same issue.
The scale up is easier than, right, than spending a bunch of money and having to scale down.
Once you get, once you kind of understand the use of the technology, I think if we want to get to the point where we're maximizing how many calls we can clear, knowing that a city like San Mateo is using 15 to 20 times in a day, that tells me that they're probably at the capacity of one, you know, and are very close to probably needing two.
So we probably want to look at the pricing and what, you know, whether there's a deal for a longer, a little bit longer contract or buying multiple at one time.
And then I will say that for the UAS, the smaller handheld devices typically.

Segment 5

You want to see a handful of those, right? Because they they can be used, they can be out of the city for a special response team operation at the same time.
You've got, you know, smaller calls that they're responding to.
So you'd want to have more of those to have in that.
Those are much more affordable, affordable product.
There is a licensing and training component for people to be able to fly them.
So that there's those costs that we have to build in as we're looking at all these pieces.
Another component to that is the technology.
There's some companies out there that their model is to have multiple drones as first responders set up.
And so when one runs out of battery, the other one goes out.
Another technology has a larger battery and a different model.
So some of it's going to really depend on what the technology is that we're looking at and what makes the most sense for the city.
If we're ever in the position where we're at one and a half or two and a half capacities, the kind of thing where we'd be able to partner with a neighboring jurisdiction, like a Albany kick in for, I mean, is that appropriate? Or would you rather this just be deployed Berkeley specific? That's interesting question.
And, you know, the military equipment ordinance actually says that that jurisdiction has to have a use policy in place before that technology could be used in their city.
So we would have to make sure that we weren't loaning it out to someone who wasn't authorized at the time to use it again.
You know, our priorities are going to always be life safety first.
For example, is the homicide event that we had at Toyota Albany, right? We aren't so worried about a jurisdictional border when someone's life is in danger and the fire.
We know there's implications of cloud coming over the hills.
And the last thing we'd want to do is say, well, our drones can only fly in this in this area.
And these drones have the capability of flying well beyond our borders if needed.
Yeah, great.
Captain Oakey, I love the data about the percentage of cases that sound like upwards of 20 percent or 30 percent in some jurisdictions or maybe San Mateo 10 percent where calls for service can be responded to with just the drone clear them without an officer responding.
I'm also wondering if so that's appealing.
Is there also a case where maybe you'd have calls for service or maybe you'd have two officers that would normally respond? You could do with one or things like that.
So it's not just driving it to zero, but even things where you'd have multiple units could be reduced.
Yeah, absolutely.
So there was one of the examples that one of the companies uses is a response to a call, a man with a gun, and the drone goes over there and determines it's a cigarette lighter, somebody that's in a little bit of distress, but no big deal.
They reduce their response significantly, and the officers knew what they were getting into.
Obviously, they're going to respond very differently to a call of a man with a gun than somebody who's acting erratically and has a cigarette lighter.
So lower response and a more appropriate response.
And if I could just add a small thing to that, too, one of the best uses that we've heard about has to do with vehicle pursuits.
And if you and not so that's not only a personnel power thing, but it's also a safety thing.
And so we're typically if you had a vehicle pursuit, you might have three units in the pursuit, plus follow on supervisors involved in that pursuit.
Instead, you can use DFR technology to safely follow a car, wait until it parks somewhere and then deal with the suspects in that manner.
It's much safer for everyone and significantly reduces the number of personnel.
So you don't even have to just deploy it to a physical location.
You could say literally follow that car kind of a situation.
OK, a couple other quick things that will be done.
Chief May, on the fire side, you know, I've definitely got some kind of residents in D6 who've been are interested in the idea of drones for wildfire safety prevention detection.
Is there a scenario where on those extreme weather days, you might just have a drone or multiple drones up kind of around the clock for some period of time? Is that something you'd envision doing? Is that a possibility to detect and scan? Yeah, I think I'd have to look at what detection equipment is available for a drone because I know our units right now go out and do weather samplings.
We do spot forecasting with NOAA or the Weather Center.
It's very possible to look and see what type of detection they can do with and I see Chief Sprague is on or was on here.
Some of the work that Moraga was doing with some of their sensors.
But that's something that's a very good idea and something we can look into.
Chief, are you going to jump in? Yeah, Council Member, the only thing I'd chime in on is so far, we understand the significant barriers to that specific use.
Are that oftentimes on those high weather days, there are winds that may prohibit the use of drones.
And additionally, we have issues with airspace and East Bay Regional Park's helicopter.
So we'd also have to explore that conflict, but it's definitely a potential.
Okay, cool.
And I thought, given the evacuation study, I think Chief May already mentioned this too, but just the ability to, like, we know that in a fire, getting people out of the hills and relieving those choke points is going to be extremely important.
So the opportunity to fly a drone and say, hey, avoid the circle, go this way or go that way would be enormously valuable in moving people around.
So I think that that's also a really interesting use case.
Last question for the team is, so if we do proceed forward tonight, what would you anticipate is the rough timeline? How long would this process potentially take to go from here to policy and potentially acquisition deployment? Well, I think we know there's some primary players in the field as far as vendors, and we've done some of the initial research to identify who those vendors are.
We're starting to build out our list of all the questions we're going to ask and information that we want to bring back.
I anticipate with that, plus knowing that whatever use policies we develop, we're going to want to include having had a conversation or at least getting some input from our community.
And it goes to PAB for at least a 30 day review of our use policies and acquisition reports and knowing that Council is about to enter into recess.
I think reasonably in the early part of February, we could be bringing something back for Council to consider.
Good.
So, okay, great.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Council Member O'Keefe.
Thank you.
I have 7.0 questions.
Okay, get ready.
First question is, these drones can be equipped with microphones.
Is that correct? Can you let us walk us through some of the scenarios where you would imagine using the microphone? Yeah, of course.
So there's a ton of medical reasons why, including a delivery of Narcan and instructions how to do it, delivery of an AED, the example I gave about telling somebody don't evacuate yet, the fire department's clearing the fire, stay where you are, being able to fly in a specific area where a missing person was last seen and putting out announcements, being able to do evacuation notices.
A lot of times now we have to use either the LRAD or PAs and go to areas and evacuate.
A great example would be the tsunami when we were trying to evacuate.
We had a very short period of time to evacuate a lot of people and get personnel coordinated.
We could have sent the drone to the farthest end of the marina and just started working way back there and been there within 45 seconds from the station with that kind of flight and started doing that.
There's things as simple as, hey, we see the gun in your hand, please put it down and come out, and there are clear instructions on how to deescalate in that or even start negotiations.
Some drones are capable of carrying a cell phone, dropping a cell phone, so we can start communications that way.
And so it's like, hey, we've just dropped a phone, pick it up and please talk to us and things like that.
Thanks.
By the way, how does it work? Does my time go only when I'm talking or when the questions are happening? Okay, it didn't stop.
Okay.
I just want to make sure.
Usually I don't have so many questions, but I want to make sure I get to ask them all.
So thank you.
My next question is, I think Council Member Patrigio already referenced this, but if you answered it, I didn't quite catch it.
I'm concerned about being able to, like, this heat signature thing seems cool.
It'd be great in search and rescue, but can they also just see where a person is in their home? Like, if they're sitting on the toilet or if they're in bed, like, is that something that they're also able to see? I would think so, but I want to give you a chance to clarify.
Yeah, it's typically what you see.
I mean, you could see them in a seated position.
I don't think you could tell exactly what they were seated on.
But, yeah.
Okay, thank you.
Next question.
You know, you mentioned the San Mateo example a few times, and I'm wondering, you know, it seems compelling, but also fairly anecdotal.
And I'm wondering if there is actually any data that shows that outcomes are better with drones.
Yeah, I know I've seen a number of different presentations that I've attended where they're reporting, the vendors are reporting, which, of course, has to be verified, but are reporting that their customers are experiencing, I've seen as high as 25 and 30% of their calls are being cleared by DFR.
So, one of the metrics you're looking at is how fast they can get there.
So, how good is your response time? Whether or not you've sent officers or not, whether they're safer outcomes or not, that's a little harder to judge, right? Or to attribute one way or the other to whether or not with the drone observed or the drones.
So, you primarily see the data around that, like, how fast they can get there and how they resolve calls.
Thanks.
Yeah, I think it's hard to study, but it sounds like it hasn't actually been studied yet.
So, I hope somebody does that study.
It would be interesting.
Next question, also regarding the San Mateo example, was any data collected there about how people felt about having, like, a drone come and maybe probably not know why, because the cop never came? How did people feel? So, I don't have specific data for that.
I do know that in the presentation that I saw, the city manager was the biggest proponent of that program based on both the efficiencies that it created and the quality of service that they were getting to the community.
And so, I don't have specifics to how people felt.
I do think that on those cases where we, you know, where you're going to send a drone out and they determine, hey, no police response is needed.
Sometimes, you know, we get calls frequently of like a 9-1-1, what we call a 9-1-1 ascertain, where somebody calls and we try calling them back on their cell phone.
They don't answer.
We send an officer to go look and try to find someone.
Nobody's there.
Something like that would be a really good use case for a drone.
Similarly, we get a call of an alarm system that's going off, going and evaluating us.
Hey, are there any signs of a break in? Something like that might be another use case where you don't have that human contact, but there wasn't really an expectation of one.
Okay, but I'm sure sometimes there was a person who experienced the drone, and so it sounds like the answer is no, and that's fine.
I just wanted to find out about that.
Do you have something to add? No? Okay, thank you.
Next question.
Next question is for Chief May or Chief Sprague.
This idea that the drones can carry something, there's actually a cool idea that I heard.
I'm wondering if you could comment on, can they carry a flotation device to somebody who's like in the bay, drowning? Is that possible? That is possible.
Yes, because the flotation device that we saw in the presentation was light enough.
And the flotation device could activate when hitting the water.
So, yes, it could.
That's cool.
Okay, last question.
One use case I don't think was mentioned or hasn't been discussed, at least, is if a drone could be useful for surveilling a large public event.
Would there be a safety benefit if there was, let's say, the Solano Stroll, if there was a police drone kind of just going up and down and checking things out? Is that a use you would have? Yes, so Albany has used the drones before for the Solano Stroll specifically to do a flyover.
A lot of use policies require for an event like that there to be a crime that occurs first before the drone will go up and start flying.
I think it's an interesting balance, right? Like, do we want an event where a visible drone is flying overhead while people are enjoying an event versus we want to be able to address issues and get ahead of something before it becomes an issue? And again, that's the balance that we have to strike about a use policy.
And I think I lean more towards that.
I'd like people to be able to enjoy the space and not feel like there's somebody over them all the time.
And so how do we make sure we're in the right place? We're close enough to be available and useful if needed, but we're not living in a community where there's somebody always right above you watching you.
Okay, actually, that was my second, but I have a follow-up.
I guess what I'm getting at, and I think I'll ask a little more specifically, I'm wondering if that's something that the Berkeley Police would be interested in.
And I'm asking because if so, I will, in my comments, I'd like to suggest some guidelines.
But if it's not something you're interested in, if you think you probably wouldn't want to do it, then maybe it's not worth it.
Are you too much on the spot? You can say you don't know.
No, I think what I would say is, if it's a use you would like us to explore, then provide us what would be good information to gather and understand about it.
We can research what other jurisdictions are doing.
Is anybody doing this? How are they doing this? What are the best practices? And come back to this council with a consideration for it in our use policy.
If after we go and see that, I still think it's a good law enforcement use, then I could put it in there.
Like I said, it's so early in the process.
I don't want to start crossing things off.
Our values are good privacy, good accountability, good transparency, public safety.
That's what we're going to try to land all our prohibited uses to prevent.
But I want to be wary of defining too many things without having done all the research.
Fair enough.
And I just realized I missed one of my questions.
I have time.
So drones, my understanding is drones are already allowed under our current use policy.
We just borrow them from other jurisdictions.
Is that right? That's correct.
The UAS.
OK, right.
We have used them a few times.
Can you talk about how those have been used in the past? Yeah.
So we talk in depth in our surveillance technology report that we turned in.
So if people want to really dive into what those use cases are, most often they're used for our search warrant operations.
So our special response team doing a search warrant is able to clear a residence and safely do that without having to send people in to do that first, which de-conflicts potential violence.
We've also used it for calls like someone's asleep in a wheel and somebody thought they saw a weapon in the passenger seat or whatever.
We've sent a drone up to look in there and observe.
And in one case it was, yeah, there is.
There's this or that.
It changed our response.
In another case, it was like, no, that person, that's not what you thought you saw in there.
So there's those kinds of uses to date that we've used.
A lot of agencies are moving towards starting to charge when you borrow that technology.
And we also know that we're still exploring the technology.
So we haven't really even experienced all the ways that we could use it as an agency if we had that technology in our city.
Approximately how many times have you used it in the last, I guess, since it's been allowed? Five years or so? I don't know that I have the five-year data.
I think last year was six or seven uses.
That's good.
I just wanted to get a sense.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Those are all my questions.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
And I just want to say if you have thoughts of, you know, for feedback, Council Member O'Keefe, you should just give them during your comments.
I think that's fine, like regardless of how they're.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Council Member Bartlett.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And thank you, team, for coming out and presenting this.
I know Council Member Kesarwani had volunteered to answer all my questions, but I'm just, you know, thank you for filling in.
So one question.
This is on my mind.
The auto dealer that we had the incident in Albany last year, right? In your experience, can these drones enter and navigate confined spaces? Yeah.
One of the primary uses of our special response team when they do use this equipment from other agencies is to go into confined spaces and use the cameras on the drone to clear them out and to ensure that nobody is in there before officers go in there to check it.
So that reduces the likelihood of a potential conflict and likelihood of violence.
So it's actually a better outcome for everyone involved, a safer outcome, and one of the primary uses that we currently use this technology for.
Okay.
That was a very risky moment.
Thanks for doing it.
So what have you seen in terms of chain of command? Like who's in charge of issuing the call for the drone and calling it back? So for the DFR technology, you set parameters on what kinds of calls it gets deployed to.
So you would get an alert saying this is a possible DFR call, and your drone operator that would be monitoring that would say yes or no that it's going to go to that call.
It can then be redeployed on the way to a different call for service based on, like if it's on its way to something that's a priority two or priority three call, and a priority one call comes up or a fire priority one call comes up, you can divert it to that call by that drone operator.
And then, you know, in the same manner that the deployment in the field, so it's not just anybody gets to drive a drone that because we have drones, you go through a specific training program and certification program to be able to use it.
And so you're going to get deployed to a certain call where it's indicated that it's needed.
Our scene supervisors, so our sergeants and our watch commanders would be the ones kind of calling the play.
If they're like, you know what, go to this call instead or do something like that.
That's typically how we manage specific resources in that manner.
And have you seen any evidence of their redaction protocols like blurring of faces, that kind of thing? So, for instance, in an instance where, you know, the cameras being used, you scan a bunch of people, you get the one you want.
Are the non, you know, the non assailant people or the people who don't need to be swept apart, are their faces blurred later, private parts, things like that? Yeah, so probably I've not seen any technology that can blur in live time, right, so as you're recording.
And I'd be hesitant to do that because if you're still trying to develop what's happening on a scene, you wouldn't want to miss evidence because you've blurred.
But absolutely, before we release, as long as we're not running up against implications with PRA rules, when we release footage and things like that, we're always looking to redact data privacy or, you know, things that might embarrass somebody from a video.
And then have we considered the use of other city departments besides for law enforcement and emergency response? Like, for instance, I can imagine those people that have to go look at the tops of trees would appreciate this.
Question for the city manager.
We have discussed potentially things like that, like assessing trees, assessing building and safety, code violations, those kinds of things.
Thank you.
Prevent injury, you know.
And are you seeing the use of any artificial intelligence analytics or autonomous response at all? So the DFR technology allows it.
It could be that you had to have line of sight and there was an operator that actually flew this.
And the new technology that's in the DFR allows it to fly autonomously to the call based on the coordinates of the location it's going to.
And then I guess my last question is regarding the interactivity.
Have you noted any interactivity with private drone operators? Because believe it or not, I heard about the emergent, you know, neighborhood watch drones even.
Yes.
Capnokia shared earlier we were aware of at least two drones that were flying during the event on campus last week.
There are companies that are coming out with technologies to interrupt those drones that are in the air.
We understand that someone in the same way we're trying to use this tool to make things safer and more efficient.
There may be individuals that use these tools to do damage or spy on people or do things that are against our values.
Okay.
So would that be something we would consider for our deployment? This sort of defensive tooling? Yeah, it's absolutely something we can look into.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you, Council Member Bartlett.
I'm moving on to Council Member Linopara.
Thank you.
I have a couple of questions.
I'm curious if you're looking at FLOC as a potential vendor? So FLOC doesn't produce a DFR or UAS drone.
They do partner with ‑‑ I'm going to get this wrong.
There is one of the drone companies, Aerodone, that they partner with that connects well with their system, but they are not a drone manufacturer.
Okay.
So are you, I guess, looking at the FLOC adjacent system as a ‑‑ Yeah, so there's only a couple DFR companies in the market, so that is one of the ones that we would probably look at and see how they compare to the other ones and obviously bring that forward along with some of the other larger vendors that are in the market for that.
Okay.
Thank you.
I'm also curious.
I know that there's still a lot of analysis to be done about this, but I'm curious just generally if you know how much one of these drones costs.
I understand that we don't have the specific numbers, but just the range.
Yeah, so the UAS can be in the area of $5,000 to $9,000 to $14,000 and or upwards depending on how big the model is and what the capabilities are, the flight time, how quiet they are, how long the batteries are, things like that.
The DFR systems, there's the station where it docks and lands and charges, and then there's also the drone itself and the spare batteries and things like that and the platforms.
We've seen prices range from $60,000 to $90,000 to $125,000, $150,000.
I mean, it really depends on how long of a contract you get into, how many stations you're going to have and things like that, and whether you buy multiple of one.
There's some vendors that you can buy a replacement plan, so as part of your yearly cost, you pay a little bit more, but at year X, Y, or Z, you get a brand new upgraded model.
There's a lot of different ways that vendors do this work.
There's also a lot of vendors that will step into a one-year free trial period with you for these technologies and things like that.
The work on us is to try to bring all that information together into one place and try to hit how the data is held, what the costs are, how long the contract periods would be, is it a lease or a purchase program, what is the replacement plan, and really try to bring all of that forward so you can see everything together and make an informed decision about whether you want us to move forward and with what.
Thank you.
And then my last question is kind of following up on some of Council Member O'Keefe's questions around San Mateo and some of the other case studies that you're looking into, and if you have any information about what those jurisdictions have done to balance effectiveness with community concerns around surveillance and safety and privacy.
Yeah, I can just say that the better job the agency does with checking with the community first, with building use policies that are clear, that are public, with having a transparency portal that provides the information that the community needs, and doing a good job once we start using a technology, talking about it through our platforms, and providing data and information about it, the better it seems to have landed in jurisdictions.
I have not heard of a specific jurisdiction that launched DFR and that there was then an outcry about the use of DFR.
That doesn't mean that that's not the case, that my initial research has not uncovered that.
Most places where it's in place, there's been a marked improvement in actually the delivery of service and people like that.
Thank you.
Those are my questions.
Thank you.
Do any of the other Council Members have questions? Okay, I just have a couple left because we already asked you a million questions.
So I know you mentioned that some cities are starting to charge for use of the drones.
I'm curious, have you had to pay so far? No, we've been fortunate so far that we haven't had to utilize.
So if you imagine if that other jurisdiction that has a UAS program is busy with theirs, and we called for it, it'd be a no.
We've been fortunate that we've been able to call another jurisdiction or call a jurisdiction that aren't currently charging.
We've avoided that to date.
But if I had to choose between the risking an officer's safety or paying for a drone, I'm going to be asking to pay for the drone.
So we're trying to get ahead of it as everybody's facing these budget constraints and the staffing constraints.
They're going to be less available to come to us and help us.
Thank you, that's helpful.
And then the other piece of using other jurisdictions, drones, I'm curious if we've ever had an access issue where we weren't able to get access to a drone when we needed access.
So generally, agencies are willing to help when they can.
We have had a couple of incidents where we've had significant delays in cases where, in one case where we were serving a high-risk warrant in another city and a suspect we believe to be armed fled into a house and we had a significant delay.
And that time increases risk in that the longer we had to wait, it was about an hour and a half, two hour wait for the drone to arrive, then create additional risk for the community, for our officers on scene and for the safe resolution of that incident.
Thank you, that's very helpful.
Appreciate it.
And then just for the city manager, I know you mentioned just a couple of instances that other departments might use the drones, but could you elaborate? Are there any other instances where that drone usage was discussed? And if you can also share under what conditions? Yeah, I actually haven't, Mayor, discussed with the other departments what use cases there might be.
But, you know, the ones that I mentioned and the ones that I think Council Member Bartlett was alluding to are certain circumstances where there might be a worker safety or worker ease of access considerations to think through and whether a drone could go up there and put a visual, you know, have a visibility into issues that we would, somebody would have to like climb the outside of a building or climb up a tree or, you know, do things that would be challenging for staff to do.
Thank you, that's helpful.
Okay, back to Council Member Blackabay.
One very last thing.
On the deployment of the drone, we're thinking, will this be sworn personnel, non-sworn personnel, dispatcher? How would that work on that piece? Thank you.
So far from the general conversations I've had, it seems like most agencies are using sworn personnel because they have to assess what they're observing.
I have heard of community service officers, analysts in real-time crime centers, you know, I think Dave Sprague and I were talking a little bit about, like, he was trying to assess whether he would want to have someone that had some fire training to be able to look and see what they're observing.
So that's one of the things we would be working out as we step into this process.
You know, another interesting way we could use some of this technology is if we have a UAS deployed for a fire call and there could be a fire personnel standing next to our drone operator, right, to look at the screen, because they're just reading the screen and what the screen's telling them, that might be able to help us bridge that gap, right, until we figured out exactly what we needed.
Thank you.
Council Member Trakob, did you have an additional question? Yeah, actually that prompted a question I had around certification.
Could you speak to what, like, I understand that FAA certification may be required for certain types of drones.
Can you speak to would it be on a per-use basis, like, or annually? What's the recertification period? What's the cost of that? Also, if there are any operator-specific certifications that may be needed to operate certain categories of drones.
Yeah, there are some specific operator requirements that you have to do.
A lot of the vendors for the DFA,.

Segment 6

NCFAR's Build In the Costs for all the certification processes in the price tag they give you.
And they, you know, have worked through those processes and commit to, you know, not letting go of the process and absorbing a lot of the training requirements that are part of that and we are aware and have started to kind of capture the different licensing requirements that individual operators would have to be under and what kind of schedule that would be on so that we're clear what our ongoing training costs would be you know, to support this program.
Okay, thank you.
Any other questions? Okay, is there a public comment on this item? Are there folks online too? Just, we've got someone making their way up but I'm curious to know.
If you're participating remotely and you'd like to give public comment on item 31 regarding unmanned aerial systems and drones, please raise your hand on the Zoom application.
Okay.
So it seems like we spent years debating cameras when people are on camera all the time, dozens of times during a day.
And so, as has been said, drones are now common and are becoming more common than they were at the turning point of it.
So drones like cameras have their purposes such as has been stated in the disaster situations, de-escalation, crisis and hostage situations and understanding the scoping out of scene.
So one question I'm thinking is the depersonalization.
I understand about sending a drone into a crisis situation or a hostage situation.
I'm wondering if these drones have cameras on it so that you can see the person that you're communicating with because there's something eerie about the fact that you're negotiating with a robot instead of a human being.
And of course, I'm concerned about the tracking but it was stated that would start only at the site so other unintended people wouldn't be picked up.
I'm concerned that we protect people who are not related to the situation.
And so if you're looking, using a drone to find a suspect that's fleeing, how do you not get other people involved? How are other people not surveilled? And who can access this information? I mean, the last remaining privacy that we have is in our homes, maybe.
And so can you stand on your patios and your porches or can you keep your windows open? Are you in danger of being surveilled as this drone is looking for somebody? So these are the concerns I have and also who is gonna be able to access the footage? Thank you.
Thanks, Carol.
Let's go to the folks online.
Okay, the first commenter for item 31 is a phone number ending in 211.
Good evening.
I think it's a great idea, great idea.
Our good company, Eats TV, caught two murders, one in Telegraph and one in Durant Avenue.
And actually both people prosecuted.
It also kept hundreds of people in the area safe because we had 24-hour cameras at Telegraph and Durant and one in Telegraph and Blake.
And criminals don't want to be seen.
So we never had robbery in our whole 50 years worth of business.
That's a good idea.
Meanwhile, I'm sorry about harsh commentary early, but we need to go forward.
We need to get Eats TV back in a physical location while doing business.
We'll never go out of business.
I appreciate your help and have a very good evening.
Take care.
Have a good night.
Thank you.
Okay.
Next speaker is Cheryl Davila, former council member.
Yeah, so I don't think that this is a great idea.
For one, if you're gonna use Flock, Flock is notorious for, and in the news currently, because they cooperate with ICE.
And you won't own the data.
So that's a problem.
And why do we need, if you only have six uses in 365 days of the year, why do you even need it? That's not really worth the money, it seems.
So I don't think that's a great idea.
And Free Palestine and don't, this is like just what, I don't wanna say that man's name, who knit me on backwards, but, or mixed up, which he is, or it's not real, does, they surveil people and they use drones to kill people.
And yeah, like why taking on the same tactics? Not a good idea.
We're Berkeley citizens, residents.
We're not enemy combatants.
You don't need drones.
Free Palestine and free yourselves from the police industrial complex.
Thank you.
That's it.
Okay, comments from our council members, starting with council member Chaplin.
Yes, thank you very much.
And thanks to all my colleagues.
I am very committed to the efficacy and efficiency of the city services and programs.
So I would definitely wanna see how our policies and the technologies, both informal and other, and evolve over time, so that we can ensure that we're using all of our tools in an optimal way to the best of our abilities to increase our delivery of services and improve all of our operations.
I know we're still at the beginning of the process, but just for my part, I'm way more interested in the kind of targeted scenarios where these would be very helpful, more so than using these to surveil large crowd events, unless there was some sort of critical incident that needed to be addressed.
I just don't know if that's a very effective use of the resource to just fly them around during the slum stroll.
But I really appreciate the discussion tonight, and I wanna thank both departments for being here to walk us through some of the potential uses and also share what they've learned through their interaction with other agencies.
With that, I move adoption of the item.
Second.
Okay, council member Bacowy.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
And again, thank you to Council Member Taplin for authoring this.
Thank you for our public safety team for being here and for their support and their work on this and as we embark on the process, because this is just the kind of beginning of, if we pass this item, the beginning of what's gonna unfold here.
I'll note that under BMC 2.99, if we refer this to the city manager under that legislation, we're called upon to establish a thoughtful process regarding the procurement and use of surveillance technology that carefully balances the city's interest in protecting public safety with its interest in protecting the privacy and civil rights of its community members.
So again, this process is designed to try and strike that balance and to begin a public process where we all can talk and explore some of these limitations like Council Member Taplin just identified.
Council Member O'Keefe had also highlighted it.
There might be things that are very community specific where we have concerns and we need to figure all that out and I look forward to kicking this process off to do it.
It is a proactive process.
Again, in the item from Council Member Taplin, we wanna establish a thoughtful community-informed framework so that we ensure that any future deployment of drones, whether by the police department, fire department, or other city divisions, aligns with Berkeley's values of racial justice, civil liberties, environmental responsibility.
So I think, again, I'm encouraged by what we heard tonight.
I know the chief and our team and the fire department take that responsibility seriously and take that balance seriously and that's gonna be important as we move forward.
So thank you again, Council Member Taplin, for bringing this and I look forward to supporting the item tonight.
Council Member O'Keefe is next in line.
Thanks.
Just a procedural question first.
So I'm happy to support the item.
My understanding is, you know, this is a referral to the city manager, so I have things I would like to be addressed in whatever comes back.
And if I just kind of say them and then hopefully everyone will hear them.
Is that appropriate? Okay, great.
I'll support the item as long as these things are taken seriously.
So I'm gonna start with the positive.
Things I love about this, and I really hope we can make a good solid use policy that allows this.
Search and rescue is great, great use.
I really like the saving a drowning person scenario.
That's why I specifically asked about it.
My husband is actually a kite surfer and I worry a lot.
He's a great swimmer, but you never know.
And so I think having that, that's a really powerful thing.
And I actually think we should consider, this is too detailed for right now, but I think we should consider having a drone, dedicated drone just at the marina for that.
But I think that would be worth, you know, the cost of a second one, because then, you know, it wouldn't take two minutes to get there, which could make a difference.
So I love that.
Vehicle pursuits makes a lot of sense.
That's a clear safety win.
Large events, I brought that up earlier.
I'm not necessarily in favor of that, but I think it would be good to explore that.
And the reason I wanna talk about it is, it seems like it could be useful to improve security at a big event, but I think we have to be really careful about the line between like the Solana stroll and a protest.
And I don't think that line is always super clear.
And I really, I don't think we should allow drones at a protest.
I think they would have, potentially have like a chilling effect on people's ability to exercise their freedom of speech.
And that was for the lawyers on the council.
Then I, that's a real concern.
So if we did use them for like crowd control or crowd safety, we wanna be really careful to make sure we're not including protests.
I think we should not allow them for any kind of free speech activity, unless there was a really big safety risk.
Anyway, I want that in there addressed.
And then the anti-drone action makes a lot of sense.
I think that's the only, if that's the only tool we have and that's a new kind of threat, great.
Then that makes a lot of sense.
So that should be used for that.
So those are my yes to drones comments.
I have concerns.
First one is the microphone, which I brought up.
I think we need to be really thoughtful about this.
Some of the use cases that were described made a lot of sense.
Hostage negotiation, you gotta communicate.
That's clearly a win.
A medical call in order to communicate back and forth with somebody while help is on the way.
Other uses mentioned like aiding and evacuation and all that seemed fine.
Although I think that's more of the speaker.
So speaker's fine.
I don't have a problem with the speaker as long as it's not annoying, but those cases all seemed fine.
But exactly, yeah, don't, yeah, be careful.
So yeah, I can't think of that many other uses where the microphone would be, I think, justified.
We don't live in a world right now where there's a lot of law enforcement audio surveillance.
There's none as far as I know, except maybe I guess the body cameras pick up audio, but.
I mean, like Alexa and Siri are audio surveillance, but that law enforcement is a totally different thing.
So I think we need to be very careful.
Video surveillance is normalized, but audio surveillance is not.
And I want to be really, really thoughtful about how and when we allow that.
Similarly, I'm concerned about the heat signature thing.
I think, you know, I don't really want a drone to be able to see me in my house unless my house is on fire, in which case it's fine.
So I think we need to be really careful about when that particular technology is allowed, just only when it's clearly in the best interest of the person it's looking for.
And then, you know, speaking of being normalized, I just want to say in general, I don't believe we should be using these for routine police calls.
I do understand the argument that it saves police time and has a potential to deescalate the situation by getting information before the officer arrives.
That makes a lot of sense, and I think that has value.
But the other side of that is it creates a new and extremely unsettling experience for people who have the police called on them for no good reason.
And nobody likes this, but I know that this is a great source of pain and anxiety, especially for people of color.
And, you know, nobody likes it, but the question I have, and this is actually a question because I have not personally experienced this, but the question I have is, is it actually better to have a drone come check you out? And here's my thinking.
Oh, shit, really? Can I have one more minute? I'll say it quick, thanks.
I never go over, come on, I'm the safest here.
Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I'll be quick though.
I just, I'm concerned that we're trading one bad experience for another.
I think, you know, our police are very well-trained and they don't come with their guns out for no reason, as far as I know.
And so typically I'm imagining if the police get a bogus call and the person's obviously not doing anything, it's the interaction is gonna be very human.
And so it sucks, but at least it's a human and a human.
And replacing that with, Carol used the word, what is she, depersonalization, which I thought that was a really good word.
And I think to depersonalize that interaction actually makes it worse.
And I hate the idea of a person just minding their own business and then this police drone is just staring at them and they don't get to like have a conversation about it because the microphone's off.
And I just, I'm concerned about that.
And I think these are really great for some specific cases, but I personally don't want them to be used for routine calls, even though I get that it would be, have a lot of benefits.
Those are my comments.
Thank you for letting me going over.
Thank you, Council Member Traka.
I'm glad I gave Council Member O'Keefe one of my minutes because she has said a lot of the things I, well, I just wanted to echo, in general, want to associate myself with those comments.
Those, her concerns are some of my concerns and vice versa, the use cases that she supports, I support as well.
I wanted to just start out again, the five buckets I listed that that is my North Star for when something comes back, how I'm going to be evaluating this.
Again, that security, privacy, coordination between the various departments, transparency and community engagement, and then making sure that we do not procure technology that is being built by a vendor that may be also selling that technology or allows the technology to end up in the wrong hands.
And with the drones themselves, that is easier to track than parts.
So I am, I know this is easier said than done, but I feel very strongly about this piece.
Look, the technology is here.
We have a variety of neighboring jurisdictions where they're currently in use.
And I understand that maybe this is an item that some did not expect to come to us this quickly, but I feel like we do need to look into it head on.
We don't, I would hate for us to be the last jurisdiction to adopt it when the chapter has already been written because I think we can really shape whatever policy we adopt to be the guiding North Star.
And I would suggest, like my feeling is in terms of the range of options that come back to us, I would support making them as broad as possible, not necessarily because I would feel comfortable supporting the full range of options, but just so that we have a better understanding of the trade-offs up front.
And that includes if the forestry department wants to use it for tree trimming and whatever else, let's put it in there because I think it will be important.
The more departments want these, the more effort it will probably take to resolve potential conflicts and just work out an inter-jurisdictional, inter-departmental policy.
And I'd rather have that up front than have to make changes later.
So I think, I think those are all my comments and I will be supporting the referral tonight.
And again, my gratitude to Council Member Taplin and everyone who has shaped this to what it is right now.
Thank you.
Council Member Bartlett.
Thank you.
And I just want to run through a couple of just thoughts I had.
I definitely think there's a good use case here for environmental monitoring around fire.
A safer form of pursuit.
We've had those incidents where people got hurt from these high-speed chases.
So this is a really interesting way to maybe alleviate that risk while achieving the outcome as well.
Let's see, the response times, of course, being greatly reduced in time.
The issues we want to keep in mind, and I think a lot of this is probably covered by our existing policies that we painstakingly went through those years ago with Council Member Taplin around privacy and all those elements.
So the data management is gonna be important to get right.
Who retains it, who controls it.
The chain of custody.
So we can actually make sure that we are able to achieve our goals prosecutorial-wise.
And acute deployment as opposed to sort of continuous passive surveillance.
I don't think anyone here wants just a roving eye overhead.
And equity of coverage came up in my research as a criticism.
Make sure that we're getting deployed fairly everywhere.
And of course, a good indemnification policy, as a city attorney, probably get in there and work out, because if things hit power lines and they can cause some damage, we want to make sure that we're not in the hook for this stuff.
Those are all my points, really, honestly.
I think we've done a lot of thinking around similar technologies, so we're kind of braced for this.
But to keep the policy open to the evolutions of the technology.
Because this is really just, we're just one step up from the Radio Shack quadcopters, right? And step by step, we see, if you watch the activity in Ukraine, you see the evolution of drones happening every month.
And so we have to be ready to just, you know, to brace ourselves and handle whatever comes our way.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council Member Casarwani.
Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.
I want to begin by thanking Council Member Taplin for bringing this item forward, and I'm very pleased to be a co-sponsor.
Thank you, Chief Lewis and Captain Okies for the presentation.
And I just want to note that some members of the Council had an opportunity to receive a presentation and see a demonstration of one of these drones that we may be acquiring, you know, assuming this item passes tonight.
And I think that, as Captain Okies, as you noted, there's tremendous potential here given our staffing shortage that we face to be able to leverage the drone and keep our officers safe, you know, in instances where we don't fully know the circumstances around a call.
I didn't think of this question until now.
I know this is technically not the question time, but Chief, when you said that we had used a drone six times last year, if we were to acquire a drone, I'm expecting that that number would increase, correct? And in terms of use cases, and I want to thank my colleagues because there has been so much thoughtful questioning about, you know, securing the privacy of members of the public and how we would use the drones.
And so I just want to clarify, you know, once we develop, would you expect with this use policy that we would have some framework around instances in which we would be using the drone? Because it seems like there's some concern that this would, you know, maybe just drastically replace the human response.
And so I wanted to get your sense of how you think the use policy might cover that.
Yeah, I think the way that it has one piece of value is you never have to send a uniform response.
You can send a mental health crisis worker or something else instead.
Like that's one use where you'd send a different individual rather than a police officer.
And then there's other instances where it's just providing you information so that you can come in a safer way or reduce risk until you can be there and resolve.
So you are engaged in a connected way.
There are probably plenty of circumstances where the DFR is going to provide us information and the person on the ground that we then interact with, it never even knows that that's there and that was part of the process, right? We're just able to respond in a safer way because we have information by being able to observe as we approach.
Okay, okay, great.
And I think, and no one has suggested this, but I just wanna say, you know, this is not a customer service chat bot.
You know, this is a very sophisticated technology that is going to provide, you know, actionable intelligence that can help us deploy our costly and hard to hire and hard to retain officers as smartly as possible in dangerous circumstances.
So, you know, I'm really excited about the potential for this.
And Captain Okies, you talked about, you use a set 20%.
Can you just clarify, I think you were talking about a 20% reduction in instances when you would need to send an officer out, is that correct? It is, and again, those are the use cases where we get a call for service that just either proves not so, calls for service that don't require a police officer to respond.
So it's not that the drone serves as a replacement for a human being, it's more along the lines of, it's separating out a call for service that requires a police response from one that doesn't.
Okay, because we get a lot of, you know, I expect that we get a lot of calls for, you know, suspicious activity, right? Where it's not really clear if this is actually a danger.
And so being able to send this technology in lieu of the individual or of the human response, that's what we're talking about potentially.
And I really, I wanted to underscore, I think something that I found very interesting in the demonstration that I was able to attend and what you said tonight is this ability to use the thermal imaging for search and rescue efforts.
I mean, this is just like the ability here, a human being just cannot do what the technology is able to do in terms of being able to detect, oh, that a certain individual was on this block within a certain period of time because of that thermal imaging.
So I wanted to note that as well.
So having sort of talked about a lot of these benefits to preserving staff resources when they're truly needed, to giving us tools to, I think, fight crime more efficiently and effectively, I do wanna acknowledge what I heard from my colleagues around some of the data and operational concerns that I expect we will resolve when we work on the use policy.
So, and I just wanna note some of the points that were made, something about consideration of when the microphone is used, consideration of who is operating the drone.
And another sort of question or thought I have is, it seems like our dispatch, the people who answer the calls are also going to probably require some kind of training because I imagine this is gonna flow through our entire emergency response system.
I don't know if you have thoughts on that.
Like, will dispatch need to make those determinations of, oh, is a drone more appropriate than an officer or? That's not the traditional model.
The traditional model is you have somebody who is trained or has the experience to be actually operating it while the dispatchers are gathering information and or dispatching actual police units.
Someone else is navigating as a drone operators is watching and seeing and observing and saying, hey, you can clear that call.
You don't need an officer or routes units responding, coming in this direction.
There's like a lot of pieces that you would require some level of expertise to be able to do that outside the traditional realm of our dispatch responsibilities.
And we know that we are busy supporting and building up our dispatch center.
So we're not trying to add an incredible burden like that into their work.
Got it.
So that would, so that responsibility still reside with the police department or the fire department.
Okay, that's helpful to know.
And then I also just wanted to note the sort of issue of a protest or a crowd control situation.
That also seems like something that can be addressed through our use policy.
Yeah, that's correct.
There's obviously considerations, absolutely it's invaluable and important to make sure that what we're doing with a drone is not chilling people's ability to have free speech.
It's also really important to me to make sure that the venue in which someone is exercising their right to free speech is safe.
And so a perfect example is last week, if we had a drone team up, we could have potentially identified somebody that was causing harm, come and remove them from that area so that the event can go on peacefully, right? So there are spaces and times and ways.
And that's why what I shared about this last straw was like a lot of the use policy say, the drone doesn't go up and start flying unless a felony occurs, or there's some crime of violence or something, and then they'll go up with a distinct purpose to go and address that, right? And be focused on that, not flying over the whole crowd and surveilling everybody that's there, right? And catching everybody that's coming in.
Okay, so great.
So I just want to underscore that.
Like our intention here is not to just have general surveillance.

Segment 7

When there's a large group of people, but to use it strategically when we know that there could be a threat to public safety.
Okay.
Well, that's all I have and I look forward to voting on the motion, which is a referral.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Councilmember Humbert.
Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor.
And thank you, Councilmember Taplin, for bringing this forward and the work that you and your office have done on it.
And thank you to Chief Lewis and May and Captain Okies for your presentation here tonight and all the questions that you've answered, the good answers that you've given to very good questions.
And I'm privileged to be a co-sponsor and thank Councilmember Taplin for asking me to be a co-sponsor.
I got to attend one of the demonstrations and what I found really compelling was the story that I think Captain Okies mentioned where somebody reported a man with a gun.
The department dispatched a drone and saw that this idiot was lighting his cigarette with a gun lighter.
So the police did show up and we saw the docudrama version of it and we saw the real kind of raw footage.
The police did show up, but they didn't show up with guns drawn because they knew that he wasn't truly in possession of a gun.
And I think they went and talked to him and said that that was a really dumb thing for him to do.
That was the sense I got from watching the raw video.
So I found that really compelling.
I also, at this demonstration, at this demo, heard from the presenter there that, you know, the drones can get to a crime scene so quickly and in one instance the drone got there so quickly it could take a thermal image of the shell casings that were still hot after being ejected from a gun used in the crime.
And I think that's amazing, the speed at which these devices can get to a critical situation.
They don't have to stop for stop signs.
They don't have to turn corners.
They go straight from, you know, they go as the crow flies, and that is a real advantage.
I understand that people have concerns about privacy and civil liberties, especially in this current political climate.
And I'm honestly very hard-pressed to see how BPD having access, though, to these particular tools represents an appreciable threat in that respect.
If for any reason these tools are being abused, it's going to be as – and this is a panzerism – as plain as a drone in the sky.
And the Police Accountability Board and the City Council will be able to review such instances.
And on the positive side, the technology has extraordinary implications for our ability to safely respond to dangerous situations, monitor natural disasters, safely monitor fleeing vehicles – I find that really, really important – and even perform search-and-rescue operations and detect people where the naked eye, you know, wouldn't be able to do so.
Somebody who's lost in the woods might be under, you know, a bush or something.
Somebody couldn't see them, but the drone could detect a thermal image.
I think that's really important.
Private citizens – I think it bears noting that private citizens already operate drones within Berkeley for any number of reasons.
I don't think it makes sense that we would prohibit them for this application, which is very useful and not frivolous, where we actually have a great degree of oversight.
We don't have that for private use.
So, thank you.
I'm going to be supporting this.
Thank you so much for your presentations.
I really appreciate you all taking the time to go over it and share all the information with us.
I also went to one of the drone presentations, so I got a good chance to ask my questions and to understand, you know, how this could potentially be used.
I think that we're in an interesting time where I expect that this will be a pretty standard piece of police equipment.
Like, right now, I know it's not necessarily there, but I expect that this will be the norm.
What is really important to me is that we're really clear about how we want to use it, and I really appreciate, Chief, what you were talking about when it comes to making sure it aligns with Berkeley's values.
I also want to acknowledge that there are many folks, especially in this city, who feel really uncomfortable, although we haven't seen much public comment tonight, which was a little surprising to me.
There are many people who are uncomfortable with surveillance and have expressed that to us a number of times in different ways in different meetings.
So I do just want to comment on that, even though those voices aren't really in the room tonight.
It's really important to me that we're engaging the community while we're developing this policy.
I really like your idea, Chief, about having some kind of public presentation.
I think that we've had some really challenging meetings recently, partially because I think we could have done more public outreach.
I really want to make sure that we're really doing very robust outreach there.
Of course, I'm sure my Councilmember colleagues and I would be really happy to help get the word out about any events that you are interested in having on this.
Of course, I know that part of this surveillance technology ordinance includes community engagement.
Generally, when the plan is complete for that, we'd really love to give input.
We want to make sure that there's community input, especially from communities of color and unrepresented communities, communities who have typically not had good experiences with the police department, of course, including the LGBTQ community.
This doesn't come up at all, and I know this is not something you were talking about necessarily, but I want to make sure it's really clear that I'm strongly opposed to weapons being on drones used here in the City of Berkeley.
No one's brought that up yet, surprisingly, but I think when most folks think about drones, they're thinking about weapons of war.
I know there are police departments that are having weapons on their drones, so I want to make sure it's clear that I'm opposed to that.
I also want to encourage that, as you are doing research, Chief City Attorney, City Manager, that we're looking at how we ensure privacy rights, First and Fourth Amendment, looking at First and Fourth Amendment issues, and want to comment on training being very important in this.
I hear you, Chief, what you're saying about this likely being a sworn officer.
I feel like that sort of undercuts our opinions on how this might save us money or staff time, so I just want to look into that a little bit more because I think training is really important, and I also like the idea if it's possible not to be a sworn officer.
Let's see.
And then when you're doing your research of drones and policies with other jurisdictions, I'd really like you to look at other departments to see if they've received any citizen complaints to Councilmember O'Keefe's concern around people feeling uncomfortable with that or having issues with the drones.
And yes, if yes, if there have been citizen complaints, how many, what types of complaints, any trend in demographics of these complaints.
And then also would like to know if there are any lawsuits in other cities that have deployed drones, of course lawsuits about drones, and how they were resolved.
So that's kind of just like a handful of things, but just hopefully really practical, tangible things for you all to look at as you're moving forward in your research.
And yeah, again, just want to thank everyone for your questions and for your thoughtful remarks, and thank you all so much for your work.
And also to Chief May, thank you for being online.
I know you're getting left out of some of this conversation, but I appreciate you being here and going over how you think the fire department would use it as well.
So that's it for me.
And I know we have a motion on the floor, so I would like to take the roll, please.
Thank you.
Okay, the motion to approve the recommendation for item 31.
Council Member Kisarwani? Yes.
Taplin? Yes.
Bartlett? Yes.
Trago? Aye.
O'Keefe? Yes.
Lackabay? Yes.
Lunapara? No.
Humbert? Yes.
And Mayor Ishii? Yes.
Okay, motion carries.
All right, thank you all very much.
I just lost my laptop, but we have also the four.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
For any other public comment for items not listed on the agenda? Anyone online? Well, there's one hand raised online.
Phone number ending in 000.
In memory of the great Chief Judge Butler, he was great.
He saved me, saved my life, actually, and my family's life, because we had embezzlement in San Francisco store management.
And very good prayer for him.
He was a great man.
Dash Butler.
Have a good night, and let's do the best we can to make the city the greatest city it was in the past.
Have a good night.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comments.
Okay, any other public comments? No.
That's it.
No, that's it? Okay, very good.
I will entertain a motion to adjourn.
So moved.
Second.
Okay.
Any opposition to adjournment? Oh, I'm sorry.
We're actually adjourning our meeting right now, so our meeting is adjourned.
Thank you all.
I'm sorry? Is this the what? Oh, he missed the opportunity for public comment.
Yes, I'm so sorry.
Yeah, you missed the opportunity.