Ojai City Council Regular Meeting

Thank you. Welcome here, everyone, to our regular Tuesday, May 27th meeting. Mr. Montgomery,

And

commission reports? I know of none, Mayor. Thank you very much. I'll move on to public communications. And I have Jeffrey Starkweather and Larry Stangold.

Good evening again. At your last meeting, you approved a RFQ for a city attorney. And I just wanted to point out that one of the Areas that was left out, which I think is a big hole, is the Brown Act. But secondly, that's not really what I'm talking about. I think one of the big areas we need a good attorney for now is elections law. because I feel very strong that our district voting has been a disaster for the city.

And if we were to, and as your attorney pointed out, there would be legal problems with going with at-large and rank-choice voting, and it would be a cost problem to set up the system. It is illegal to go to ranked choice voting because we are not a charter city. We are a general law city. Secondly, there's nothing that prohibits us from proceeding to at-large, except for a lawsuit.

I don't think that we would lose a lawsuit, but regardless, I think it would be worth going for, because if we consider all the things that we've done in the last two years that have brought on lawsuits, Hundreds of thousands of dollars. It doesn't seem to stop this council in the past, anyway, from going forward, like, I mean, like the Reach Code, which you were told in the beginning that was illegal.

Also, if you look at, we've had a history since then. We've had one Hispanic elected since 2012, Severo Lar. He ran in a three-person at-large race. He got the sec- second highest vote, almost the same percentage as the incumbent mayor at the time, Betsy Clapp. He ran in 2016 for mayor. He came in second out of the three white- two other white voters. Uh, he lost fairly significantly, but in 2018, running against the incumbent mayor, he came within, uh, well, he got 47.39% of the vote.

Um, and I would say we have a system now that the highest percentage of vote, besides the mayor, of the people that voted in the election, was Mr. Whitman, and he got 15% of the people that voted. We have two other council members that won by, what, 35 and 17? And got 9% and 12%. So there's only one person on this and one person that didn't have any council at all. So there's only one person on this board that actually represents the city.

That is unacceptable.

Thank you, Mr. Starkweather. Larry Steingold.

Larry Steingold. Oh, hi. Good evening. I actually agree with Jeffrey. All right. The fact that districts are not being treated as districts, whereas you're a city councilor for a district, you should be swapping votes to get things for your district versus other districts. That's how districts function. You fight for the district that you get, and you give something to get something. That's why there are districts.

One district wants a road, the other one wants this, they trade votes, they get it accomplished. You're functioning as all for the city, which is a good thing, which is why we should just go to at-large city council. So you could represent the whole city instead of your district, which you're not doing, because there's no particular reason to do it. It just sounds good to make other people feel good that they're getting representation.

But everybody's getting represented here. So, thank you. And the Arts in the Park was a wonderful success, I believe. Most of the people made money. We had a lot of people come here, and they all left. And that's great. They don't hang around. We don't have condos on the hills. We don't have lots of other things. They all leave, and it's very nice. Sunday at 1 o'clock, Monday was wonderful, and today. So,

thank you. Thank you, Mr. Engle. And just to remind people, our goal number nine, one of the tactics under communication and relationships is research feasibility of enacting Measure M, meaning it's on our minds. So, Thank you very

much. I just wanted to respond to one thing Mr. Steingold said. Swapping votes is potentially a crime. Let's not have a big wait, Larry. Thank you. I'm just raising it. I don't want the public to be confused about that, but it's a tricky thing to do without committing a crime.

No crimes will be committed on our watch, if at all possible. Renee Roth, please. Save us from the rabbit hole. Thanks.

Oh my gosh, the three musketeers are at it again up here. I'm sorry to have to make you endure this, but Renee Roth, I just want to bring up that at your May 13th Goals, Priorities, Tactics workshop, You had identified wildfire safety and risk mitigation as a top priority for our community, and you had all agreed on that as a number one priority at the very beginning of the process.

You discussed defensible space, building standards, public education, and a yes-no landscaping checklist. I was so happy to hear all these great things you were discussing. But there was one important major gap that I do believe we need to address. And I'm glad Lucas is here because he can help us do this. Ojai needs to formally identify and remove high fire hazard trees and flammable vegetation, especially in public spaces, city-owned parcels, and along evacuation routes. It's commonly called a vegetation management plan.

And what that means is, you know that there are certain fire hazards around residential areas that need to be removed because they cause spreading of fires. The City of Ventura has already adopted Ventura County Fires Prohibited Plant List, Guideline 410. and Published Bilingual Fire Hazard Reduction Program Guidelines. As we all know, the deadline for getting your vegetation managed was June 1st.

And our church had somebody come through and wipe everything out, including the vegetables in the vegetable garden. So, there are best practices that we really should be following, and they're available for us to look at and follow, and easily. The City of Malibu has FireSafe Malibu website that has a lot of great information. and the Fire Safe Council has also urged the removable of flammable invasive plants and written grants to do so. But most critically, Cal Fire has designated nearly all of Ojai as a very high in a very high fire hazard severity zone. I see the fire chief is one of the fire people is here with us tonight. So Measure C was passed by the voters specifically to fund wildfire prevention.

Yet, I've seen almost none of that money spent on vegetation management or fuel reduction. That needs to change. I hope tonight your CIP project budget can change that. I understand you're not plant or fire hazard experts. You don't need to be. That's okay. You can work with people who are, and we do...

Thank you, Ms. Roth. Anything online?

Mayor, we currently have no raised hands, but let's just speak to our Zoom participants and give them one last call to raise their hand for general public comment on tonight's regular meeting agenda. Last call, no raised hands, and we will move on.

Thank you very much. Moving on to the consent calendar, does anybody want to pull anything from the consent calendar? I

have a question about something.

Okay.

With our minutes from last meeting, closed session item number one, where it says public employee performance evaluation. It wasn't a performance evaluation. It was discussing the requirements for the RFQ. So I just think that it's, you know, we had done Mr. Summers' review a couple meetings before that, so it wasn't discussed at that meeting, and I just wanted to make the record clear to state that, please.

That's okay. So my understanding of the meeting, it's similar, slightly different. It was that we had talked about the performance review, which led into what we would want to be on the RFQ. So to me, they were very closely aligned, not one or the other. So that's my take on it.

I will just say I don't remember us reviewing the city attorney during that meeting. I remember us deciding that we would at the next meeting review the RFQ. That's my memory of what happened. So please.

So, without opening up closed session information, Things that we talked about in meeting number one, which was the meeting before this one. That was a continuation of what we had talked about before. And so the performance evaluation part came in that meeting, and this was the response to that. So I also see them as being connected because we didn't finish with the business of the review in the meeting before.

Yeah, I don't want to belabor the point either, but I will say that the standard for the Brown Act is to be narrowly construed. So the question is, were we reviewing the city attorneys? Was it a personal review for the city attorney? That's the standard, but I will defer to Councilmember Mang as to what she would like to do. We can take a vote to change the minutes and more accurately reflect what at least some of us understood to have been going on in that meeting. Or we can say that we are satisfied with having verbally discussed it amongst ourselves and deliberated.

So it's up to Council Member, I mean, I'm sorry, Council Member Mang, how she feels and, you know, Right.

So I'll let me just comment quickly before. So the agenda was listed for performance review. And I would agree that we didn't spend any time Talking about performance per se. We ended up talking the majority of the time about the nuts and bolts of how a RFQ was going to go out to, you know, candidates. I think the way the minutes are written It actually accurately reflects. So it was agendized as a performance review.

And it does reflect that we Discussed sending out the request for proposal. I don't think we talked about much else of substance during that meeting other than the nuts and bolts of how the process was going to happen.

And I would agree with Councilmember Whitman that the minutes actually do reflect, and the question is broader, which was, actually, it's not, what do the minutes reflect, but how is it agendized? And that's the real question, but that is not a question for the minutes, actually. The minutes say what we did. So, once again, I'm going to defer to, we can, right, so there's no changing the minutes because that is what happened.

There are other discussions we could have about the agendizing of the meeting and whether or not that was proper. And, you know, I am working with, with Ms. Anderson to figure out ways that we can have guardrails at each step of the way, whether it's before we go into closed session so that the public is aware of certain things, not what we're going to discuss or how we're going to discuss it, but things that are not prejudicial against the city, that do not put the city at a disadvantage, which is also the standard. The standard is not if you are You know, having a litigation, whether or not there is initiation of litigation. The standard is, would discussion of that publicly disadvantage the city? And that's very different than we have litigation, you know.

So anyway, but that's a discussion. I just wanted to let you know that I have been working on this, trying to figure out where these guardrails and at what point these guardrails can be put into place where the entire council can agree or deliberate and vote.

Well, I thought something was suggested last time. We haven't decided this yet, but the suggestion that I hope we do take up is that in our closed session, if somebody is uncomfortable with something, they bring it up right then and we do regular check-ins. That sounds like a very good practice. It's something I want to do. This could have happened then if somebody was uncomfortable, but So, I guess my question now is to move through this now instead of having that big closed session conversation is, do we feel comfortable with the minutes as is? Do we feel something needs to change?

I guess I'm willing, you know, to have that there and then, you know, reading what Mr. Harvey reported after it covers what we discussed in the meetings. I guess there is And

I can point out that there will be minutes from this meeting where this was discussed. That hopefully, you know, it probably will represent correctly what this discussion was so that it becomes referential in its own way.

I just will jump in on that. We will not capture this conversation in a way that is going to be easily transcribed when you look at the minutes from this meeting, but you can go and watch it online. Thank you. We do action minutes.

Yes, and we can once again, when those minutes come up, we can say that these minutes don't accurately reflect. We would like it to be these two sentences instead of those two sentences. We have the ability to do that. I realize that the videotape is the official record, but they're usually four hours long.

I know, I'm just pointing out that our minutes are action minutes, so if somebody's looking for a blow-by-blow of a conversation, they're never going to find it in our minutes because we don't do that.

Okay, and I think we've taken enough.

Okay, so

then... So if Kim, if Council Member Mang is satisfied. Okay, thank you.

Is there any other items on the consent calendar that anybody wants to question or pull? Then do I have a motion to accept the consent calendar? Oh, there's one public comment. Thank you. Oh, man, doing great. Mr. Steingold.

Indemnification Analysis for $37,000. What is that? Are you analyzing the indemnification, all the clauses or the one involving council person rule or why are we spending $37,000 to analyze indemnification when it's either pay her or don't pay her and go to war one way or the other? Putting it succinctly. We're not going to have question and answer, so you're making a rhetorical question? No, okay, through the Mayor to the City

Manager.

What is an indemnification?

I don't want to do this right now, but that's something we can ask. We've accepted it on consent. Thank you, Mr. Stengel. Okay, Mr. Montgomery. Oh, I'm asking Mr. Montgomery to call the vote. Okay, was there a motion and a second? Public Comments Online on Consent. Thank you.

There are currently no raised hands, Mayor.

Sorry. My mistake. And do I have a motion to accept the consent calendar? Anyone? Thank you.

I'll make a motion to approve the consent calendar.

I second. Mr. Montgomery?

Thank you, Mayor. As we have done for the last couple of meetings, I'm going to hand this over to the very capable Mr. Seibert and a cast of seemingly thousands for this next presentation. So, Mr. Seibert, please take it away.

It's been an army of individuals working on this. To bring this forward. So good evening. My name is Lucas Seibert. I'm the Community Development Director for the City of Ojai. The item we have before you is the Cabin Village, which is a permanent supportive housing project located at 408 South Signal Street. PowerPoint. Thank you. Next slide, please. So from an overview standpoint, I think it's important that we kind of do some belt suspenders just to kind of set the table for the discussion. I know really kind of the focus for tonight is the DMA or the Development Management Agreement as well as the Phase 2 and the information that came forward on that. So we'll talk about both of those, but let's set the table for everything else.

As an overview, the applicant is the City of Ojai. That's basically all employees that have been involved in this. Myself, Brian, Ben, as well as Legal. We've also got the proposed developer, which is Dignity Moves, a non-profit. There are a number of individuals that have been involved in that process as well. And included in that is the architect, Dylan Johnson, who will be speaking tonight, as well as Kathy Nolan for landscape.

And then the civil engineer has been Caitlin Bush, who brought forward some really critical and important information regarding the engineering pieces and grading. From a recommendation standpoint, we're looking at three different pieces. The first is to approve the proposed lower public works yard. The second is to adopt a resolution, which is Attachment A, to the staff report that's before you tonight.

Within that includes the CEQA, the DMA, or the Development Management Agreement, and that is approving the sole source development and the developer as Dignity Moves, a California nonprofit corporation. And then the development of the project or the Cabin Village project and approving the design review permit or DRP 24-006 for the project. And lastly, is the authorizing or authorization for the city manager to execute the development management agreement. So basically giving him authorization to ink it.

Next slide, please. As I said before, kind of a belt and suspenders approach to this, the site conditions as they exist. Here you can see highlighted in the yellow is the site itself, sandwiched between Ventura Street as well as Montgomery Street. The existing use is the lower public works yard. The zoning and general plan land use designations are consistent as public. The lot size is approximately 1.74 acres in size, and the surrounding uses to the north include vacant parcels, which are mixed-use and are highest zoning as it relates to multifamily. To the west and to the south is single-family residential. To the east is the remaining public works, maintenance, and facility offices, either to the east and to the northeast. Next slide, please.

Here, I'll actually turn it over to representatives for Dignity Moves. I think we're going to have Joanne. It's kind of an overview of what they do and what they bring to the table.

Thank you. Good evening. I'm Joanne Price. I'm co-founder and chief real estate officer with Dignity Moves. We were a non-profit startup that was born out of the pandemic, and we specifically focus on unsheltered homelessness. That's the most visible, that's the most inhumane, and we believe that it's the most easily solved What we realized is it actually costs twice as much to leave somebody on the street.

And by concentrating on innovative solutions, we could build at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time to bring people in with rapid, deployed, cost-effective structures at a fraction of the cost and time it typically takes to build housing. So, known for our innovation, we also passed legislation to help facilitate the construction of these communities, and we, in response, we've used a range of solutions to build. It's not just modular. We use prefabricated structures. We've also resorted to using plastic, like where we're saving the plastic bottles out of the sea, and we're turning it into plastic, and we're turning it into permanent housing. And these are the solutions that end up costing typically half the cost of the average cost of housing in California is $650,000.

We're building at half of that and sometimes like one-tenth of the cost of a million dollar units in some of the high cost areas at Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. So before, I think we were at Council, in that time, when I was last speaking, we have opened 200 units, and that's in under 12 months, and all those units came in at less than $100,000. And that's on top of the 500 units we've already opened, that's already served thousands of people.

and what we're discussing here today is a great solution for the city of Ojai because what we found is every jurisdiction that we go into has unique needs and they have a finite amount of resources. So we work diligently with the city teams, with the county, the city, to find the resources that can build a project that's appropriate to the neighborhood, to the city that we're moving in. And that sometimes takes a long time. I think we've been at this for over a year, which is great because we really want to understand the community, understand your needs, understand your concerns and respond to those concerns and make sure that we can complete this project to your expectations.

Thank you, Joanne. Next slide, please. So this is one of the two pieces that we're really looking to talk about and kind of unpack tonight. The first is what we're referring to as the DMA or the Development Management Agreement. And the deal points here are highlighted in, I want to say, 10 points. The construction budget has been identified as $9.5 million. Within that $9.5 million is the management fee of $500,000, which has been earmarked.

Dignity Moves initially receives, through this, cutting a check basically for $5.9 million. City approval required for each invoice thereafter. That could be on a monthly basis, that could be on a quarterly basis, but it does require certain parameters to be met for that. Budget and Schedule. Both of those pieces are not included within the DMA at this point, but are required to be provided by or before August 30th of this year. Once those are received by staff, it will be brought forward to this body for review and consideration.

Dignity Moves is contracting as a competitive bid. City Council to affirm contractor selection. What that means is, instead of selecting it in-house, privately, it is being an open source competitive bid process. Brought before this body for final consideration. From a design standpoint, there's been lots of discussion, and in the coming slides, we'll see the Hacienda style.

That has been baked into this development management agreement, as well as the floor plan and general understanding of the design features that we've been seeing and that the Planning Commission considered as well. Progress, Meetings. As this project moves forward, regular project meeting updates and reporting will be required by Dignity Moves and the Builder itself, and staff would be involved in that to ensure that they're moving forward in a timeline that, from a scheduling completion date, is by July 30th of 2027.

There's a requirement from a technical standpoint of general liability insurance. Here we're identifying a $1 million per incident or $2 million aggregate, and there's an umbrella coverage of $5 million. Upon construction completion, There's been a clause identified that any unused grant funds will be returned to the city. So basically, there'll be a housekeeping effort from a financial standpoint at the end. Any residual money from that 9.5 will be returned to the city.

Next slide, please. From a phase two standpoint, is Andy on?

Yes, we have Andy Nelson on.

Okay. I'm going to just generally speak to this, but I'm going to have Andy also... Andy's with RENCON. He oversaw these efforts and provided us with, I would say, some pretty technical advice in terms of how to proceed. But as you recall, when we met in March, we identified that there was an area, which is RB6, which is highlighted here in red. Highlighted it even further by giving a red dot around it as a dashed line.

The red dot is the RB6 boring. That's where we saw the initial lead exceedances found at the five-foot level. At that point, in talking with RENCON, they felt the best strategy to kind of get an understanding is to do additional borings in each cardinal direction, which is what you're seeing here in the kind of Blue, Color. In addition to that, they redrilled the initial RB6 and went down as far as 10 feet.

So there's a 3 to 5, and then there's as far as as deep as 10 feet. Now within those areas, the result of that was that not all four areas came up with exceedance of lead. In fact, it was three of the five, the North, the East, and the West step outs. I'd like to have Andy, if you could, kind of speak to the why we went into that direction and kind of the process that we're going through right now with the Department of Toxic Substance Control.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, that was a pretty good summary. So with the additional assessment, what we were intending to do was just get a better handle on the extent of the lead impact. So we had the five different borings, one in the original location, and then four step-out borings. We went a little bit deeper to see if we can get the vertical extent. So we wanted to see the bottom of the contamination, but also we wanted to see how far out in each direction it would go.

That's a typical way of doing a stepwise fashion in an assessment like this. You first get an initial detection, then you step out from there, and you want to get the extent of it by doing additional step-out borings. So, the findings that we got back, like was stated, the lead impacts are really limited in extent. It's between 3 and 5 feet below ground. It doesn't seem like it goes to the south very far, and we have borings to the west that have Defined that extent. And then also to the north, it seems like we've got a boring that does have a detection, but then the next boring farther to the north does not. So at this point, we've got enough data that we've got the extent delineated to the point that we know that if we could go out there and just excavate the soil, we can remove it.

And that's probably the quickest and easiest way to remediate this. And we're going to have the DTSC provide oversight. We've had conversations with them where they can give us a no further action letter once that soil is excavated out and we have confirmation samples showing that nothing is left in place. They'll give us a no further action letter. And at that point, the site is clear for development.

Thank you, Andy. And just to clarify, Andy's been critical in this. We've been working with, and when I say we, I mean we've got staff also working closely with Andy and his team with the Department of Toxic and Substance Control to ensure that we kind of all understand the next steps throughout this process. And I believe we actually have formally submitted the paperwork and information to get this process started. We are working forward and diligently, but also carefully, making sure we're following the process.

So with that, next slide please.

Before we do that, I do have a question only because, can we go back?

Sure, let's go back one slide.

And maybe Andy can answer. What are the Greenish Blue. What are the teal dots? What are the red dots? And what are the black dots on

that? The red dots are our initial assessment when we first went out there. We collected the samples down to five feet throughout the site in different areas, sort of targeting where we would think that there might be contamination based on what we were seeing. There's some debris out there. We just wanted a good coverage of the site, so those are those initial borings. The black ones are from a stockpile of soil that's on site, so those two black locations We targeted pesticides, herbicides, because that stockpile is sort of from an unknown source. Different projects throughout the city might bring soil and stockpile it there. So we sampled those and tested for a couple different things than the rest of the samples on site.

Once we got those results, we had that detection of lead in RB6. So the bluish, the teal borings, that's the second round of soil sampling that we did. We came back out in April. We did four borings in each direction of RB6, and we did one boring right next to RB6. So there's two different phases of fieldwork, the first one, and then the second one.

is now a time when I can ask a clarifying question about this on this on this piece. Yes.

How does that feel?

OK. OK. OK. I can wait if it's. So I actually had a question on page two of 97 Exhibit B of the E.R.F. There it is. So it says that there's one line here that I just wanted some clarification on. Its program funds should not be expended on site restoration. Remediation is not restoration. Is that correct? I just want to make sure that we have it within the budget or that we can include it in the ERF grant to do any kind of remediation.

Assuming that the City Council decides to move forward, yes, we will include that within our revised budget request application to HCD. We're intending to be reimbursed for that effort.

Thank you, because as I was reading this, it looked like that particular line, site restoration, had more to do with taking an existing structure and restoring it. That's right. OK, thank you. Just wanted to clarify.

Great clarification. Yeah, please. Or do you have more to say?

Yeah, I did have one question, and I'm going back into my mind, but we were going to do 10 newborns, is that correct? Do I remember that correctly?

That's for Mr. Nelson or Mr. Seibert.

No, I don't remember us saying 10 borings when we had identified... 10 feet?

It was 10

feet? Okay. I think it might have been 10 feet. Okay. All

right.

No, that's... Yeah. I

mean...

Ask everything. Yeah. Well, here's what I think is important. I think... I do remember having a conversation before council and saying, look, there's a number of different ways we could approach this. Going deeper is one of the approaches. And I do recall having a conversation. I don't remember the 10 piece specifically, but the depth of 10 feet is where we ended up landing.

Okay, and we ended up landing and doing the four new borings within the sphere of influence of the red dot. Yeah, okay, great. That clarifies it for me. Thank you very much.

Yes, please.

I have one more question. I'm just trying to visualize where the structures are going to be built on the property in relation to the lead. Is there going to be a building right above that? Is that part of the garden? What is that?

So the area in question there is really the sidewalk slash parking lot is what we're looking at. It's a combination between the two. It's kind of slicing, kind of in the middle there.

Great. So there won't be someone sleeping right on top of that area, in other words?

Right, so, and I would also identify, while, when Brian and Ben and I were walking, and Andy were walking through the different types of scenarios, the four cardinal directions seemed like the most logical. I mean, Andy talked about a bunch of different variations that we could do, but we've, I mean, initially, in my head, I was like, oh, is this in the middle of the lead site that we're looking at, or is it on the edge?

And he said, look, the easiest way in which to do that is to do four cardinal directions, and that way you kind of get an understanding. So coming back with lead exceedances within the north, east, and west areas made us understand that we're kind of on the southern end of it versus on the northern end, which was encouraging to hear. So then that had them go even at a further depth to understand how deep it goes at that point.

So that was kind of the rationale that we went through. I mean, Andy went through a couple different scenarios that we could be looking at, but this one seemed like the most plausible one, given what we were presented with.

I think the other important thing to add here is even if there was a sleeping structure right over that location, with the work that we are doing and the oversight and the sign-up we are receiving, it's safe. That's the important thing to know. We're doing this under supervision from DTSC. This is a recommendation and everyone feels confident and comfortable that this is going to safely remove this naturally occurring lead.

So I just have a question. So if the contaminated soil is removed and they find no further action, is there some sort of a certificate or something issued so in the event down the road somebody gets lead poisoning and they can't come back to say

Andy, can you respond to that in terms of the Department of Toxic Substance Controls?

And as you respond, explain what a NOFA is, and that's really the certification.

Right, yeah, so at the end of this project, once that soil is excavated out, we are going to be collecting confirmation soil samples from the sidewalls of the excavation and the bottom, and that's going to show that there are no more impacts left behind. We're going to submit that report to the DTSC. The DTSC is going to review it. In addition to our company providing the conclusion that all that soil has been removed, the DTSC is going to give their own internal review and they're going to give that no further action letter. The no further action letter is a legal document that states with our findings and conclusions, there are no remaining health impacts or risks to the environment from the concentrations of lead at the site.

So at that point, yeah, that serves as your legal document saying that you do not have to do any additional corrective action. There's no more health risks. There's no more environmental risks.

Great question. Just to follow up on Council Member Mang's question, which is, and this is probably more for Matt, So I understand the concept. If we got a clearance, no one's going to say we were negligent in allowing the construction to go forward. But that doesn't really end the inquiry about whether someone can pursue the city for damages if they claim they received lead poisoning as a result of living on the property.

The challenge they'd have to prove is causation. They'd have to be able to prove that the facility, after the cleanup, still had enough lead to create an unhealthful level, a poisonous level, and that would be a really difficult hoe-to-row. There's no guarantees that someone won't sue us in the future. That doesn't exist. But the clearance from DTSC, after having completed it, so it's not just a document, but it's hard work on the ground to clean it up before anybody moves in, will give us as good protection as we can get.

We've reduced Our risk of being sued, but we haven't eliminated the possibility of being sued.

And there is no way to eliminate the possibility of being sued. This is America. Everyone can sue anyone at any time for any reason. The difference is, can we win the case? Do we have a good defense? And if we've done everything needed to get a DTSC clearance, then we'll be able to win. We have a good defense.

That would be true of any construction project is the scenario, it sounds like.

Just one more question. So getting that no further action needed, when you remove the soil, I know it can't all be removed, so what's the scope, what's the percentage that Do you go, if 80 is the acceptable, do you take it down to where it's 70, you know what I mean, the testing, what degree will it be approved at?

To Council Member Mang's question, could I also add in the sidewall studies that you'll be doing and the scraping? Could you just speak to that? I know you talked to us about it, but I want to kind of hear for the entire audience here what the process looks like and then what levels you're looking at making sure it's below in order for it to be safe.

Yeah, so we have a handheld instrument when we're out in the field and we're doing excavations that involve metals. It's called an XRF, an X-ray fluorescent handheld device, and that can give you measurements in the field of what those concentrations are. We use that as a screening tool, so we will be chasing the contamination, so we'll have a company come out with an excavator, and they could dig out where we know it is already, and then we can take sidewall measurements with that XRF. If we need, if it's above 80, which is that residential level, then we will continue to step out and chase it until we get down below 80. Now we might be more conservative in the field because we want to make sure we get it all, so we haven't set a concentration yet for what we're going to be using in the field, but our goal is to get those concentrations down below that residential level.

So we'll chase it in the field, we'll collect our samples that we send off to the lab, The lab is the final say in whether or not we got it all because their instruments are way more precise than our handheld instrument. Once we get those sample results back and it is below 80 and we've done enough sampling and the DTSC concurs with that, then that's when we're done.

Thank you. And if I could add one more key there is it's an iterative process with DTSC. So it won't just be our staff making the decision. Of course, our staff have the expertise to do so, but it's in consultation with DTSC. Have we got out enough as they make each next dig?