City Council — March 3, 2026

Good evening. I just want to call the meeting in order for the Oxford City Council for Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026. Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call and posting of the agenda please?

The agenda for this meeting was posted in the kiosk at city hall, the Oxford Public Library, the city administrative offices and on the city's website on Thursday February 19th.

Thank you Thank you, Madam Clerk.

You

want another box out? Yeah. I'll leave some out for the audience and then I'll bring her a box, set it over here somewhere. Once they see me on

the agenda

they

don't show up.

I don't want it to look major on me.

Good to see you.

Okay, we're back on the record. The City Council has just emerged from closed session. I'll ask our council, our city attorney Mr. Fisher to make an announcement. Thank you.

Thank You Mayor there are no actions to report out of closed session this evening.

Thank You Mr. Fisher.

Thank you, Mayor McArthur, members of the Council, staff and the overflowing members of the audience here. Thank you very much for doing that. That's how it sounds in my head. Good evening. I am David Maron with Ventura County Civic Alliance before I begin, I would like to also acknowledge that the chair of the Ventura County Civic Alliance is with us Selena Zacharias who is a longtime resident of Oxnard she's also the Oxford Harbor Commissioner and a member of RDP and Pleased to have her with us today so if we can bring up the PowerPoint I can get started So we cannot go around the county and share this report with all of the residents without the generosity of our larger sponsors. These are a few of them, Ventura County Community Foundation, The Community Colleges of Ventura County, California Resources, The County of Ventura, Lima Neira, Channel Islands, The Port of Waimea, that's where Selena is Harbor Commissioner, and of course, the Ventura County Office of Education.

The inside back cover has the full list of all of our sponsors. So some highlights from the report. We publish this every two years, this is the ninth one overall all of our sources are listed beginning on page 113 if you or staff want to dig into something we'll show you all of those websites for the audience at home. You can read this online or download it at www.civicalliance.org And also just a point of information, Ventura County Civic Alliance is a neutral unbiased nonprofit 501c3. We're focused on quality of life here in Ventura County.

So I'll start off with agriculture lot to cover tonight the top 10 crops we show this every two years and you can see that strawberries continue to dominate over 700 million dollars in Ventura County Avocados comes up second at about $139 million. Avocados is interesting because it's a cyclical crop, it's up one year and down the other but strawberries continue to dominate and then you can see some of the others that are listed here in Ventura County. Now the overall size of our agricultural economy is about two billion dollars and it's been that way for many many years.

It hasn't been able to get above that, and you can see that the diagonal line there is the percentage of the overall Ventura County economy. So at one time agriculture made up about four and a half percent of our economy but now it has dropped to about 3.3%. Obviously farming in Ventura County is very challenging. There's three big issues labor, of course water, and then also these Insects with the viruses that can just decimate our crops. So it is a very challenging profession Now this one here shows about employment and earnings about 24,000 25,000 people work in the ag economy And oftentimes I don't think young people realize there are some very good jobs in the ag economy working in some of the packing houses the automation doing the marketing a lot of other things mission produce here in Ventura County In Oxnard, Lima Nera and others there's quite a lot of opportunities.

You can see that the wages have risen that's the green bar but the blue bar is inflation adjusted and those have stayed pretty much the same actually declined a little bit so we are paying well but it is a inflation focus okay next up is community engagement Here's one that's not so great news for Oxnard. The amount that is spent by the City of Oxnards library system is the lowest in the county and also the number of people that visit your library per capita, so Oxnard certainly the largest city But per capita, very low usage of the library system. Thousand Oaks and Camarillo tend to have the highest amounts. Now one qualifier, so this isn't the amount of money the city gives the library. It's the total amount spent by a library. Some of these other library systems have very robust friends of the library that fundraise for them and that money then can be spent.

So it's not a reflection just on the budget It's a reflection on all of the money that comes into the libraries. Phil, through you then Rob.

Just a quick thing I wanted to wait till the very end for questions Mr. Mayor can go back to the previous slide? I know we want to highlight the Oxnard items here but I'm just curious if we have any information about the change between fiscal year 22-23 and 23-24 for Camarillo Library

You mean when it went from part of the public system to the private, I forget the name of the company that took over the management. But is that what you're referring to?

Well, I just see visually the

drop. Wyatt jumped. No, I don't know. I think they went to the private organization that runs...you may remember that they pulled out of the Ventura County Library System and they went independent. But I think it was before 22-23 so that may have just been a year of perhaps it was a donation Or some other thing, but it's a good question to catch me on. That one I don't know. Politically blue are Democrats red or Republicans green are no party preference we're looking back about 25 years here we can see that Democrats have slowly risen in the amount of registration The Republicans have lost quite a bit and that has come at the expense of no party preference. So it isn't as important as it was 25 years ago to register with the party because we have open primaries now, people aren't so affiliated with a particular party but no-party preference has certainly grown.

Now that's the overall county this is it by city. Of all the cities Oxnard and Ojai had the highest percentage of Democratic registration. In fact, Oxnard and Ojai have a majority and Ojai is so small I really have to say that Oxnard dominates in that category. Simi Valley is the only city that has a plurality of Republicans. Now this is voter registration not voter turnout as you all know your elected officials it's getting these people to actually vote but you can see how No party preference, interestingly, is about consistent across all of the cities. Even though we see the registration between the two parties vary that no party preference is still pretty consistent.

We've added some new data in this year's report, the nonprofit sector we're breaking out as far as categories so you can see just how much money is both revenue and assets by various categories. You can see education is very large. That could be Cal Lutheran money at the very bottom you see health and hospitals that's Community Memorial dominates in those areas. So even though Community Memorial seems like a for-profit business, they are a nonprofit so they have tons of revenue and tons of expenses.

We break out the largest nonprofits here by both assets and revenue. This one is assets so you can see that Community Memorial is doing great up there as far as total assets Gene Haas Foundation, related to the Gene Haas company here in Oxnard. Very much has a lot of assets there and you can see some others and in your report itself it goes on a little bit more as far as how some of these non-profits have accumulated money.

Certainly organizations that should be around for awhile And I'd like to share this slide we're looking at nonprofits here and this is employment, I think a lot of times some of the audiences I speak to don't realize that we have almost 11,000 people in Ventura County working in the nonprofit sector. It is a huge safety net and some of these organ and these are non This excludes the hospitals. These are the everyday non-profits like Community Action here in Oxnard and FoodShare and all the others, and they translate to over half a billion dollars of wages so an important part of our community.

We also added a new slide here regarding the creative economy So there was data out there that we were able to access to show and Oxnard, I think Moorpark has a big operation with studios. There's a lot of different types so whether somebody is a graphic arts designer their performance like you have your Oxnard Performing Arts Center and other places. The blue in this screen is W2 employees, so somebody's a hired graphic designer, they're working for ABC Graphic Design in Oxnard let's say. The green are the contractors and so you can see certain industries if you have a child who's thinking about going into fashion for example probably want to get them to go for W-2 job because that pays much better than the self employed. So you can see some interesting data in these charts.

Moving on to the economy, there's several charts that look like this one, the service providing. There is also goods producing and also government. So goods producing is the manufacturing, the agriculture, oil drilling. Service providing are these jobs that we see here like financial activities and IT, hospitality education Many, many years ago goods producing was where our economy was built. But over the years in Ventura County, the state and somewhat the nation service providing jobs are the ascendant type of industry that's happening as manufacturing moved offshore or became highly automated. So on the top half of these charts it shows the number of jobs. On the bottom it shows you the salaries so if you look on the top oops Okay.

So if you look at, let's say financial activities we can see that there has been a decline in the number of people working in this industry but this is an industry that has increasing amounts of pay over 112,000 a year similar as the IT sector very high paying but we're losing jobs where we're seeing a growth in jobs is more like leisure and hospitality but that doesn't pay very well. So this is the imbalance that's throughout the county as far as trying to not just have jobs, but to have high paying jobs. So whatever we can do to attract more of these financial service companies you may recall we had a big Bank of America operation in Smi Valley. Farmers was out there countrywide all of those companies have left so that's why we see the decline in that particular industry.

Our gross county product. If you have earlier reports and you look at this report, lines are completely different. And that's because we readjust this report every two years to make the city managers happy. No, that's not what we do is we readjust it because of inflation. So this is showing that back in about 2008 before they are six before the grant, the great recession, we actually were doing pretty well about 70 plus billion dollars for our overall economy. But after the great recession, We took a real hit and we've never really come back. It popped up a little bit the last year, but if you look at the actual percentages down here for the growth it's been anemic and The concern that I would share is that this is when we've had pretty good growth in the overall state and national economies so if we get hit with another recession It's going to hurt here in Ventura County because we haven't been able to go back up.

So much like the nation but yes, we need to bring in more industry more jobs. This chart's a little hard to process on the screen, but what we're trying to show is how expensive it is to live here. The blue lines represent average income for various jobs and so you can see at the top you have things like health care support maybe make $20 an hour. You move down to management and legal you get into a much higher salary range And then we contrast that with just how expensive it is for, let's say a single adult. They need to make about $29 an hour to survive here in Ventura County. So those first set of jobs don't even work for them. They have to find a job that's more in the middle of this chart and if you have children now you're moving further and further to the right And a lot of that is the cost of child care, of course.

We can talk more about that later but it's an interesting chart to just see how much of a struggle it is for people here in Ventura County. Good news, taxable sales. We have the various cities here. Oxnard way at the top you have that amazing number up there over five billion dollars just amazing I'm sorry I mispronounce it it's a Amazon not amazing that's your amazon number which is obviously very much desired by all the other cities and I'm sure something will happen there at some point But great news for Oxnard. Now on the tourism side, Oxnard's been steady growing and you can see the other West County cities have the highest percentage of tourism dollars. Ojai is off the charts and that's because of the Ojai Valley Inn. They just get so much from their hotel bed tax because their hotel rates are so high.

And it's very fortunate Oxnard isn't in that situation, because that city depends on Ojai Valley Inn. If the Ojai Valley Inn closes for several months, that's a huge hit and Oxnard is a very diverse income base. So you're not too worried about that. Port of Wainimi continues to be just a very strong economic engine here and right on your shores, and I bring this up because I know a lot of your city residents work at the port. And so you can see the overall income has continued to grow And one interesting thing, just to look at it. You probably see it on your screens but the number of autos that are shipped in and out of the Port of Wainimi went from about 280,000. It's now up to over 400,000 I mean every day and you're in the Oxnard plain over a thousand cars are coming or going.

It is just quite an achievement for the port and quite a lot of economic activity Naval Base Ventura County, it is very hard to find data. As I mentioned, Selina's on RDP. I'm sure maybe one or two of you are as well and it is hard to find data but we did find a reliable source to give us some indication of the amount of spending that happens out at the base and the amount of people that are associated with the base both active duty civilian type of thing so some more information for everybody on that.

Education, this is the important chart as far as declining enrollments. So City of Oxnard is no different. The green line is K-8 high school. The blue line is K through eight and we have a little thing up here in the upper left corner. 50 years ago, the population in Ventura County was about half of what it is today. So we've doubled in 50 years but when you look at the number of students, we went from about 107,000 to about 122,000 We are not having enough children in Ventura County.

This is your school districts here, Ocean View lost a little so the top line is 2021-22 and it goes down to the more recent years you can see Oxnard Elementary has lost about 10% of their enrollment over the last four years. Oxnard Union High School has had a big decline and Rio Elementary has held their own but I don't think we're gonna see a new high school built in Ventura County for a couple of decades Now I'm often asked, well isn't this because everybody's homeschooling now? So we put this in here as well. The private schools you can see the private schools have also declined so it's not private school enrollment it is just a lack of babies Test scores are in here. It's a hard chart to look at, but there's a lot of fantastic data showing how every school in the county is doing on these scores for English and math.

It's our wonderful writer Tony Biasati explains all of that.

Mayor? Yes, sir. I really appreciate the fact that you have the data for the schools and the education here, but this chart is an eye-opening chart for residents in this city and others throughout the county, but really appreciate that this has been included It's important to the citizens of this community and the county to understand. And it's also important to understand there's two governments, there's a civic government, the educational government, right? And there's tax bases different things because it is still amazing to me how many people think the city of Oxnard is responsible for the education in the

city of

Oxnard. Thank you very much for including

this. Thank you. This chart is showing the number of students that met or exceeded the standard And there's only one high school in Ventura County that 100% of the students met the standard for English. No schools in Ventura County met 100% for math, so it is an eye-opening. It was jarring when we put it together.

David, I've got a question on the previous slide we were just looking at. I noticed Oxnard Union grades 9 through 12—I don't see Del Sol on there.

We had a start at 20%, but I'm not sure if they had the data, but it should be if their data was there. I don't know if it's truly there because they don't have all four years enrolled yet And this is looking at, I think, third, fifth, eighth and juniors. So the way the data's pulled together, I think that's why Del Sol might be missing.

Okay so yeah, Del Sol only has, I guess freshmen and sophomores right now. This

is their first

year

they

have

juniors? Yeah. Thank you for bringing

that

up.

So next year it will show up.

Community colleges have mostly come back. Oxnard College is there in the green as far as the number of students, so good work for the community colleges. But our four-year university, Channel Islands, is the top line there. You can see that their enrollment has plunged, mostly COVID and the pandemic. But from what I understand, the numbers will be better coming up. And I may have overlooked mentioning that Selena also is the government relations person for Channel Islands University.

I'd love to show this chart because it shows the value of education. The longer you stay in school, the better your career earnings. So if somebody graduates high school, I'll use a female, she would get about $34,000 as far as her average annual income with a high school degree. But if she was able to stay in and get a bachelor's degree, you can see that number is double And if they go on to get graduates. So if somebody is debating, is college really worth it? This chart says yes, it is and it's really worth the student loans if you have to even do that. Now there's a great inequity between the males and females but either way education pays off. Housing starts have come back a little bit in Ventura County but we're still not building enough Average home prices, the blue line is the prices countywide.

The green is inflation adjusted which is interesting to many people because inflation adjusted our housing prices really haven't gone up at all in the last 20 years but you have to buy your home with inflation dollars and that's much more expensive. Apartment rents continue to be the challenge for our young people trying to get a job after college or high school. And then you have to pay for like 2,900, 2,600 here in Oxnard.

It's just staggering as far as how expensive it is. So young people go and they move to Fillmore where the apartments are cheaper but then they're on the road all day driving to get to their jobs in Oxnard or Santa Paula. So it all adds up very complicated as you all know. Good news, we're continuing to add solar energy in Ventura County. So not quite the size of one of the generating stations but we're getting pretty close to what we've added And good news for Oxnard, as far as the amount of water used per capita. You are the second lowest in the county and that makes sense because your yards for homes are a little smaller you have the coastal breeze some of these eastern cities have a much higher or dryness so they're using a lot more water for landscaping This is the chart that also I think is really shocking to many as our birth rate.

So, the peak in 1990 we were showing about 18 or 19 births per thousand residents and here we are in 2023 and that number has dropped to 10.2 so almost half of the birth rate that we used to have in Ventura County. And you can say, well that's because of the high price of housing. I think a lot of it is also young people waiting longer to have children and young people deciding let's only have two kids instead of three or four like our parents may have had.

This chart is similar to the state and the nation but Ventura County is worse than the state. We've had a precipitous decline in that birth rate, which means obviously we have a lower number of students going to our schools. And that means our average age is continuing to creep up. Good news, fentanyl, that's declined. A lot of that is naloxone as far as the emergencies. We've added cancer rates here in Ventura County.

We have four different charts in the book but this one is all cancers Surprisingly, what we did was we ranked the top 25 or 30 counties. And Ventura is near the top as far as the number of cancer rates. So this is incidence which is different than prevalence. Incidence is the number of people that come down with a disease in a particular time frame usually one year. So how often do people get it? You can think about if busloads of people moved in and they already had breast cancer, that wouldn't change incidence because they had already had it. Prevalence is the one we often think about. It was just how many people have it in general regardless of when they got it? So the state measures it by incidence and we have leukemia and breast cancer and prostate cancer surprisingly Ventura County is often near the top and I don't know why.

Is that you'll see many of them are coastal counties, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara? Is it related to being near the ocean? Is it related to we have better doctors and so we detect it faster? There's a lot of questions. I don't have an answer on that one Public safety, Ventura County continues to be the safest large county in the state. It's been this way in several of our reports as a former police officer Mr. MacArthur and sure that I've taken a lot of pride in seeing these kind of numbers.

In the city of Oxnard, the violent crimes have gone down a little bit. The most recent year they did have a surge back in 2023 but you can see the numbers for all the cities And we also show the property crime rates. Ventura has typically been the leader as far as the most property crimes. This one's interesting to see a jump in juvenile crime. I'm not sure what's driving that. These are arrests, so you could say well maybe there's better policing but this surprising thing is how many girls are also now committing juvenile crimes? I don't know what's causing that at all.

Social services We have great non-profits, FoodShare continues to deliver quite a few meals. That's about 7.2 million pounds of meals which isn't quite, that's really pounds and they use a metric of 1.25 pounds equals one meal. It's not quite 7 million meals, but it's pretty close. And you can see their numbers across the board. But every city has people that are hungry.

Homeless counts by city. I'm sure you've seen other reports about that. You can see Oxnard's had some great progress there in the declining number of homeless in the city and the percentage of workers who are Working at home started with Zoom and the pandemic, and these are measuring the five different counties. But even after the pandemic ended we still see more people working from home so that continues to rise.

And I'll just wrap up with well Transit Ridership Gold Coast has done a great job recovering from the pandemic. We can see they're the blue bars so they've come back to pretty much pre-pandemic numbers And I do want to take a moment to talk about populations. So this one, these are not in the book when we did the report there was a government shutdown and we couldn't get census data for these numbers but I can share it with city manager's office if you're interested.

Highlights though Oxnard is the youngest city. You have a greater percentage of young people living in Oxnard than any other city You also have the lowest percentage of people over 65 living in your city. So you did have population declines 2020-19, 21, 23. Here's what the county overall looks like. So the green is total residents, blue is the number of people younger than 18, so zero to 17 and you can see the purple line is showing the median age of the county. So we keep getting older because we're having less children. Here's how Oxnard looks at by comparison. So Ventura County had an average of 39.6 in 2024 Oxnard is much lower, 34.4. So you've been below the county's numbers and that makes sense right? The previous slide I showed that you have the highest percentage of young people so whatever you're doing to attract young people is working.

What's interesting though when you look at your population here in Oxnard you can see about 206,000 and that declined a little bit to about 200,000. So you lost about 6,000 total residents But almost all of that, 57,000 down to 51,000 was young people. So it's not like we're losing young people but they're turning from 16 to 17 then they become 18, 19, 20 so they're aging out and we're not refreshing that list of young people with birth rate.

City of Camarillo similar numbers. They are a very old city. They had a little bit of an increase Fillmore is one of the only cities that had any growth in the number of young people. So, obviously it's less expensive but some fascinating data and then you can see how their median age has declined a bit. Moorpark sort of same story they lost about 6,000 as far as resident or sorry they lost about 1,000 residents but 500 of those were young people And Ojai is the oldest city. You can see that at one point in 2022, they had an average age of over 50 in the city of Ojai.

Very few apartments available. They don't do much construction. It's hard to attract young people. So they've lost a lot there. Port Hueneme, Santa Paula has had some growth in their total population but a decline in the number of young people. It's across the board that we're just not having enough babies. And part of that is child care, $15,000 a year for a toddler in childcare.

And I say this in all the cities advocating for businesses and the cities to work together to figure out how to provide more childcare services. Can the cities reduce regulations? Make it easier for when somebody wants to establish a family childcare center maybe take five, eight kids It's a lot of work, especially for newcomers. So First 5 and EDC are working on programs to do that. Can employers offer better opportunities for young people? Maybe a little bit longer or flexible hours.

Could we work with industry to say it'd be just amazing if we could open a child care center over there on Del Norte Road where all the businesses are so people didn't have to drop off their kids maybe in Ventura and come back to go to work, that type of thing. So I will stop there. Thank you for allowing me to go a couple of minutes over. Very thankful for the opportunity if you have questions, I'm happy to take

them. Councilwoman Perez, go ahead.

First, I'd like to just thank you for the presentation. I think some of the data is a bit alarming especially as you kind of highlighted this theme of the city of Oxnard having an increased number of young people in our community And then we point to the layered issues that I think oftentimes are, as mentioned pretty layered and have to do with perhaps the cost of building, the abundance or the lack of housing in our community. And just really reflecting on the numbers that were shared tonight particularly the numbers of the costs to buy a home across the county being 975,000 To, you know more localized here the cost of rent being $2591.

to be able to live here in the city of Oxnard. And considering we have such a large population of young people living in this area, I definitely resonate with the notion that many of this generation is finding it very difficult for home ownership but also do even live in the city that many of them have grown up and have had families that have lived here for generations And so I think it's just really telling to see even the comparison of the various industries that are in our community and what the wages are and the salaries that point to it. And so, I'm hoping that this is an opportunity for a collaborative partnership to look at Ways in which uplift our youth generation in terms of upward mobility opportunities, but also paying wages that are far beyond just the average.

Which I think in looking across the sectors It seems to be about $50,000 a year. And even just thinking about that and considering the cost of living whether it's home ownership or renting that in itself I think creates this you know some of the experiences that I think I come across often in my district where you see multiple generations living in one household to be able to make ends meet and so I'm hoping This is an opportunity from the economic standpoint of partnerships and employers in our community to look at the cost of living. And if wages are actually sustainable, because I know that there are in addition to our four year education pathways There are other economic opportunities that people can get into right away that'll pay them a livable wage.

And so I think when we're talking about declining birth rates or population size, it's no surprise when looking at some of the numbers in terms of what it costs to own and to stay local near family. I think the other thing I wanted to also point out was the incarceration rates for young people in our community and would be curious to know what the age ranges are. I've had the opportunity to tour the youth facility here in the city of Oxnard and know that There are young people in there as young as 13 years old and know that, you know, cognitively neurologically at 13 years old decision making is a big part. And I'm sure there are so many different partnerships and nonprofits and organizations out there that could really ensure that our young people know that there's a community here to support them if they don't get that at home or that there are resources to ensure that there are other outlets outside of the incarceration system for them to go into like job pathways, mentorship skills training and other social emotional capacities that allow them to thrive instead of you know creating this trajectory of incarceration that therefore You know, sparks the increase of homelessness or other issues that we see far too present here in the city of Oxnard.

And so really kind of wanted to share that and really appreciate the data and the overall analysis of the county. And those are my comments. Thank you.

Thank you. And to your point as far as the economic, I applaud the city of Oxnard for doing the studies looking at how you can work with the Oxnard College because you seem to get that we have to have a highly educated workforce to attract Those high-paying jobs. And I think that, I know the city is doing some analysis there so that's very welcome.

Yeah. If I can just make a comment Mr. Mayor and I really appreciate the comprehensive report that has been done and to what you just stated, I know that our city leadership is working closely with the college with the major employers here in this region specifically recognizing that many are from Oxnard us being the biggest city in the region And also the challenge that we have in working with our educational partners. I think we've got some great educators, one of them's here tonight, Ms. Alma Romero is one of the principals over at Del Sol High School and I think we all are committed to enhancing our workforce here starting with the young people.

We have some challenges but we certainly are committed to this. So thank you for this comprehensive report that puts us in the right direction, thank you.

Thank you and as a person who was born and raised in Oxnard, I'm always very proud to come here and speak

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, we'll go to Council Member Perrella first and then Council Member

Starke. Number one, thank you very much for the rest of the council. This gentleman's mother was a St. Oxnard City Council member. One of the issues that I have and I hope we can put this in a future item that you have when you bring forward with respect to the young people and the birth rates and the various things and the amount of people here and the educational thing Can they break it down, how close to the poverty level each age group? We have seniors that are single senior women going into homeless group. Youth that can't afford rents coming out with educations. The level of skills that they can get or they don't have because they didn't get them either they were not available or they didn't succeed in acquiring those skills. To present to the council any Anywhere in the city, in the county of Ventura.

Because there has to be something where we have bright young people that have the skill sets just as you said. You gotta have the skills to get the job that the job will pay for you to live in a community that you want to live in because it's not inexpensive to live here but if you can't provide the skill set an employer is not going to give you enough money to live here just because you can't provide the skill set to them It's a matter of what do you have to offer? And what are we trying to do the city of Oxnard working with the UCLA study and pointing out highlighting some things that they Some of the schools don't appreciate I really appreciate the fact that you had that educational thing on there, and I can tell you Whether it's the east south north or west part of the county when you go to places Neighborhood Council which I have been to whether there are affluent or not affluent neighborhoods.

There is a tremendous amount of non-knowledgeable people to think the city of Oxnard is responsible for providing everything from the streets, to the trash, to the educational quality that comes out of the school and I'm really grateful that you put that in there and those are my comments again thank you very much for coming it's always great to hear you make a great presentation. Thank you appreciate it

Thank you, Council Member Starr.

Yeah I'd like to echo it was a it's a great report yeah there I think a lot of a lot of work went into that. I have a maybe my thought on something that maybe we could add in the future and it would be nice to see what the national trends are compared to where we are so I don't know whether we're just mirroring what's happening all over the country or if we're kind of an outlier in some cases Regarding the lack of children, I know one of the things that we have today thankfully is we have a lot of economic opportunities for women that we didn't have many years ago.

And it results in at least delayed childbirth and probably fewer of them. It'd be great to see a stat if it's available of what the average age of a first-time mother is over time. I suspect that what we'll find is That average age probably goes up, simply. And that's often because of economic opportunities competing for their time and attention.

Right. And that's actually a worldwide trend. The more educated women are the less children that they have because as you said, they have more economic opportunities.

Opportunity costs, absolutely.

Thank you. Great suggestions.

Any other comments or questions? If not we'll go to our city manager. Go ahead Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you. Also, I'll echo the comprehensiveness and just the amount of data and the quality of it. So thank you so much. I just have a couple items here. You don't have to bring the slides back up but on slide 36 where it was the Gross County product If we have this level of detail, I'd be interested in hearing it as a follow-up. But I noticed on the graph that from 2005 to the following, there was a 10... It went from 5% to 10%, I believe. I should have it here in front of me. I should look.

36. So on the line graph Appreciate that. Since this is not a Measure M presentation, we're allowed to show people what we're looking at here so they have context. So while they're bringing that up Mr. Mayor and you'll see that 2003 was 6.4%, 2004 9.5%. These increases are these representative in totality of all the sectors? The economic sectors in Ventura County

Yes, it's the overall gross. I can't think of what's excluded and so... And it is the same across all the years. So let's just say they left out flower growing. It would be consistent across.

We make the data match for all the years. Okay. And the only reason I bring that up is 2004 to 2005 is a significant decrease followed by significant increase 9.5% to 5% to 10.9%. And it just caught my attention because I thought, wow. What happened 04 to 05 and then 05 to 06? And then we know what happens in 07 after that. But I'm just wondering if there was ability to follow up later with us about which specific sectors may be factoring the most into those jumps.

I'd be interested in hearing that. I can make assumptions on it given the time frame there but I would just be interested for my own

knowledge. The city manager knows how to get a hold of me. If you would like me to talk with you a little bit about anything, feel free to reach out. What's interesting we talked about housing affordability and there is a chart in here and you look at maybe 15% of our population could afford to buy a home but if you look at 2012 that was the last peak and 50% of the people could afford to buy a home so what has happened in these years that has made everything less construction perhaps other things? What happened, we were going gangbusters. If you look at the housing starts, we were building so there was a lot of activity and then that great recession that happened with the financial collapse and all of those things. That's what put us into that tailspin.

We lost countrywide. We lost Bank of America. So jobs left people, a lot of defaults on mortgages where people lost their homes. And then yes, I mean as you point out Councilman Turandot just slowly trying to come back But bringing in Amazon is certainly a plus, bringing another industry. And we often talk about bringing in the industry but we also need to talk about retaining. So Ventura has the trade desk they should be working on them 24-7.