Thank you Madam Mayor and I'll do a brief staff report on this one. I know that's not very typical but every now and then I got to jump into the game and still keep sharp can't have the staff do all the work So this opportunity that's before the council tonight came to us just before the end of the year. Councilmember Reyes-Martin and I were invited to a meeting mid December or maybe towards the latter part of December but certainly before the holidays, and some people in the room who I'll introduce in a second were on this Zoom meeting and we then received a presentation kind of a nice PowerPoint presentation The World Cup that is coming up in the United States in June, and kind of the way the organization for the logistics and planning of it works.
And then the opportunity for host cities for base camps for teams. There already are 16 host cities for the games. I read somewhere that this is the biggest one yet. There's 48 teams, there's going to be like 104 games across 16 cities all across United States maybe a little bit in Canada and Vancouver also in Mexico but then the 48 teams need a place to kind of camp out While they're waiting for their games. And so early on, I think a lot of planning went into that to market potential facilities and sites for teams to choose from themselves and give them the ability based on if they are playing West Coast mid you know middle of the country what have you I think this goes back quite a while.
But fast forward to this past December, I think there was still scrambling going on by some teams to find their base camps. Maybe some had already found base camps but an opportunity came up here in Goleta that Goleta with some partners would make a great base camp and so Jaime maybe if you could put up the first slide I can explain what I think will become obvious in a second why our area is such a nice area for a base camp for a country traveling here.
And these slides are slides that were loaned to me by UCSB. Again, I'll get to the guests that are in the audience in a second. But here you're looking at a slide that was probably used as some kind of a marketing brochure to teams like hey this would make great base camp and so what is being proposed is that a team would stay at the Bacara and you can see the picture of the Bacara on the bluffs of the ocean in Goleta, beautiful shot.
And then they would practice at Harder Stadium, the shot right below there and then of course upper left the Santa Barbara Airport which is a wonderful airport managed and operated by the City of Santa Barbara actually not in the city of Goleta but very close to UCSB very close to the Bacarra and surrounded by the city of Goleta And then I guess if the players have any spare time, they probably won't. They can get out and play golf at Sandpiper Golf Course.
But the proposal was that a base camp essentially takes place during the entire month of June. So they need a hotel. They need comfort. They need practice facilities. They need team rooms, media set up. They need everything. Again, I think logistics of traveling to their games in and out of an airport are important. Safety is important. A nice hotel is important. Really premier practice facility with all the amenities is really important. So you can see how Goleta sold really well.
But fast-forward to today, we have some folks here from Visit Santa Barbara. Kathy Janega Dykes also Vanessa who I've just recently met and Vanessa I'm sorry don't know your last name Bechtel I think yes okay who I've spent a lot of time talking with over the last three weeks actually they're the ones who brought this to our attention and with Councilmember Reyes-Martin on Our rep on Visit Santa Barbara, that was the connection there. And so we were just so happy that they did bring it to our attention and so that we could say yeah, let's see what the council in the community thinks about this cuz it seems like such a cool idea. And then Johnny Whalen is from is in the athletic department at UCSB. So he's been involved I think he's been working on this nonstop for several months probably a big deal for UCSB to be able to use harder stadium.
So I've been talking to this group and others quite a bit as this whole thing has come together. So that's the kind of the setup in the story on how we got here, as you know, we had the holidays, the council went dark between mid-December and January 20th so that presented some logistical challenges for us And whether or not this would even work. But it came, it did come down to FIFA granting us an extra week they initially wanted a decision of whether or not we would be a host city or all host cities apparently and Apparently there's some wiggle room there by January 7th. And given that we just didn't have much time, that was looking like it was gonna be very challenging especially with the council not meeting but they did give us the extra week.
Some negotiations were going on an opportunity came up for us to ask them would you give us another week and with that we scheduled this special council meeting so that you guys could weigh in in the community could see all this and have an opportunity to see it as well So in this, I'll go through the staff report a little bit and if you could flip to the next slide maybe. Maybe getting ahead of myself on the venue, Jaime. Yeah, this is another shot of Harder Stadium and all the facilities they have. They have rooms, locker rooms, etc., etc. So I just thought I'd show that. This was again used to show to teams that this was a good facility for a practice facility and a home base. Next slide.
And there is Carlton also has been a partner in this. They've been talking with lots of different teams, still unknown who this team might be and if it works out but they also had to talk to teams about reserving rooms. We're talking about June and it's really important for them to know if they're going to have commitments to rooms and stuff way out in the future and this is a big deal for them as well.
And then last slide, this really gets to the importance I think of how this area works so well. We've got the Ritz Carlton about a 10-12 minute drive to Harter Stadium. They actually will not go quite the way shown on here because there is construction going on there. So they'll probably go down El Colijo. Anyway, I timed it myself. It's 11 minutes. And I was not driving that fast. And then you have the airport just sitting right there and of course beautiful city of Goleta, the environment for this whole thing so pretty awesome.
So what FIFA requires is three agreements. They require an agreement with the practice facility, in this case UCSB. In lots of instances that facility might be controlled by the city so it might be a dual agreement on being a host city and a facility. In this case we got three different things going on. We got yeah FIFA wanting an agreement with UCSB to use the facility for a month We have the VCARA wanting to enter into an agreement for what they can provide, what they can commit you to the team for a month. And then FIFA does require this city host agreement for kind of everything else and that's the agreement that is before the council tonight.
And it has requirements for the city and so I'll go through those briefly and we did list them out on page two and three of the staff report And I do think that's the last slide. So this is a template agreement, again we saw it for the first time right before the end of the year but we did have time to review it. Our city attorney had as much time as he was granted to review what became like a 200 page agreement or something like that.
And things were moving quite fast. But on page three, you can see some of the requirements making sure the team can get safely to and fro from their hotel to the facility if we need to help with the roads signage, direction make sure they don't get lost obviously that's stuff we can do. We have public works crews that can do all that kind of thing if there's parking unique parking requirements we can be really flexible like if they can't find a place to park a bus you know would we allow them to park it at City Hall yeah of course we would you know that's easy so there's things like that that we can do but I will call your attention to safety and security I think that was the one That jumps out the most. They obviously want a safe base camp for all teams, and it's a big deal and there's lots of requirements that come along with that.
So this is something that we paid a lot of attention to. And we certainly when we bought the extra week were able to make a few changes that they agreed to so essentially We're required and you can see the language in there to commit to safety. Why are the teams in our city? And primarily, primarily I will say you can imagine that that's kind of to and from so when they're on the Bacara property their certain security that comes with being at that hotel when they're on UCSB property They have a separate agreement and UCSB has made certain commitments about providing security while they're practicing at their facilities. But they do have to get back and forth, I assume there'll be in a bus. And specifically in the agreement they do require a police escort for that.
So that's the biggest thing that will jump out, I think as something that will certainly cost money and certainly is a commitment on our behalf. But it's beyond just the escort. There are other subtle commitments in there, and if there are questions about that I can answer. Isaac is pretty familiar with some of the more subtler commitments that we just have to pay attention to. We just, to some degree, don't know what we don't know here.
There's not a lot of wiggle room with this agreement. FIFA was kind of, this is our template take it or leave it and there wasn't a lot we could do and we certainly talked to some of our other cities that we know that are doing this to find out similar things that it was kind of take it or leave it if you want to do this. This is the agreement. Some positives that happened in the last week I would say was at one point the agreement we saw was going to be between the city and FIFA I don't know if that's a bad thing.
There's probably some positives to that, but as it turned out now it's between the city and the actual country, the team whoever that might be. And so down the road when it comes to certain requirements, there is no doubt there's language in here. It's FIFA's contract that you know they're their requirements and they're going to certainly watch out and make sure that this meets certain safety protocols that they may have but But I think when the devil gets in the details and we're getting closer to June, and we're asking the country does this work for you? Does that work for you? Should it come up? I think it's gonna be happening that way.
And so I wanted to point out what i think is the most important section in the safety sections. That 7.2, they do require us to prepare and submit a safety and security plan. So we will do that. We'll put...I think it's going to be really important for us to think about that and put our best foot forward on why this community is safe and why a plan that we put together will work for them And we will submit that, and I have no doubt that we'll get agreement on that. And that will have details on scheduling and we'll have excerpts of our sheriff's contract and the resources that we have at our disposal, how we will escort them back and forth when they need to get to the airport and so forth and so on. So I think that's really important, and that section alone gave me more confidence that hey, There's a lot we don't know here, but we have some room to put our best foot forward and I think it'll all work out.
So let's see so we got some changes like I said it's with the country those were two really important things that were a little touch-and-go but we got those in there and then here we are today So I want to go back to page one, the recommendations. There are three. One is to authorize the city manager to execute the contract and I will note in that recommendation there is some wiggle room that if there's a few minor things that need to be changed that Isaac and myself have the authority to make those changes after tonight Probably not going to happen. Like I said, it's a template we already put our best foot forward with FIFA.
If we went back with one more thing you know it's not clear that we would get that but if there's any if there's typos if there's things that we have to change we would want that authority after today but it's pretty much locked the way you see it And then recommendation B, we did have to make a stab at a dollar amount that this might cost the city. So it does say in the staff report this is an estimate. I would caveat that. I don't know if I would qualify it as an estimate. We do great work estimating costs here at the City. We estimate construction projects. I mean that's what we do all the time In this case, there are so many unknowns that at best I would say this was kind of an allocation of costs worst-case scenario because we just don't know.
But we do have to start somewhere. We do know that we have to escort them back and forth every day. We can kind of estimate that. We can kind of estimate miscellaneous but some things it's just hard to know. So I can certainly ask questions about that We don't need the money tomorrow. If the council wanted to acknowledge that there's going to be costs and wait for the appropriation, I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. We're probably not gonna start incurring costs till April or May.
We'll be back with the third quarter review so there's time. There's...I think there's some options there but our thought was you know to come forward with our best foot forward allocate the funds so we could be ready to go But certainly if there's questions about that, we will do our best to answer just our feeling about trying to be conservative on what it might cost and then we'll know more later.
And then finally recommendation C. is that this is not a gift of public funds. Of course, that's a law that governs us and we feel and certainly will take questions or hear from the council or the public about just kind of the benefits of being a host city I mean you know this is a really cool opportunity comes across that way there's economic benefits, you know goodwill for the community, good partnerships. So there's a lot of kind of subtle and not so subtle things why this is just kind of pays off in a lot of different ways but it's very hard to put a dollar amount on it But anyway, if we were to expend that much money yeah we want the Council to adopt the finding that this is a good use of public funds. So those are the three recommendations before you today I do think I have covered everything but we're happy to take questions and like I said we have our partners here if you have questions for them they might be inspired to speak again it's been really great working with Both of them and the Bacara as well.
I've been in numerous telephone calls and meetings with all of them kind of over the holidays, and as they started to come together. So I think they're pretty excited about it so if they're excited they can certainly speak when you provide that opportunity.
