City Council — April 21, 2026

Good afternoon, I want to call the meeting to order for Oxnard City Council Tuesday April 21st 2026. Madam Clerk may we have the roll call and posting of the agenda please?

Thank you. Councilmember Peralo? Here. Councilwoman Perez? Here. Councilwoman Rodriguez? Present. Council Member Starr? Here. Mayor Pro Tem Teran?

Here

The agenda for this meeting was posted in the kiosk at City Hall, the Oxnard Public Library, the city administrative offices and on the city's website on Thursday April 9th and the amended agenda on Wednesday April 15th. Thank you.

Thank You Madam Clerk Prior to closed session, we will take public comments on the closed session agenda. If anyone would like to make a comment on the closed session items, please submit a speaker card or raise your hand if you're on Zoom using star nine. Can the city attorney provide the statement prior to closed session?

Thank you Mayor Pro Tem. The City Council will recess to a closed session pursuant to government code section 54956.9 subdivision D1 to confer with its attorneys. The matters being discussed are Debo versus City of Oxnard and Clayton versus City of Oxnard. The city council will also recess to a closed session pursuant to government code section 54956.9 subdivision D4 based on existing facts and circumstances to decide whether to initiate litigation in one potential case.

Thank you very much. Madam Clerk, do we have any speakers for public comments prior to the closed session?

And Mayor Pro Tem and Council Members, we do not have any public speakers in person or virtually for closed session. Thank you.

Thank you. The City Council will recess to a closed session and at 5 o'clock p.m., we'll begin with two appointment items followed by the regular meeting at 6 p. m.. Thank you. City Council just emerged from closed session and we will ask the city attorney for any announcements to make.

Thank you Mayor Pro Tem, there is one announcement to be made out of closed session The City Council, by a unanimous vote of those present—Councilwoman Basuah and Mayor McArthur were absent—has directed the city attorney to join an amicus curiae brief to be filed on behalf of defendants in United States v. Illinois in which the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Illinois, Cook County and the City of Chicago alleging that their so-called sanctuary policies are preempted and obstruct federal law enforcement agents from enforcing federal immigration laws, and seeking to compel defendants to assist with federal immigration enforcement.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Good morning everybody, Mayor Pro Tem City Council members. My name is Kathleen Ashmore I'm the library manager for the Oxnard Public Libraries. Thank you for giving me the chance tonight to give the 2026 annual report and talk a little bit about what we are doing at the libraries. Tonight I want to walk you through the progress we've made, the challenges we've addressed and some of the exciting work that we're doing at all three of our location branches.

Awesome. Is that better? Oh, yeah. Okay, perfect. Okay in September of 2023 a vision was laid out for the reinvention of the library. A report was given laying out the vision of what a contemporary library should look like for the community of Oxnard. In that presentation Renee Raikstra, Assistant Director of the Cultural and Community Services discussed the vast changes that the public libraries have seen over the last few decades Changes like maker spaces, workforce development, education classes and digital resources.

Public libraries have also seen the importance of third spaces for community members to converge and meet safe places for teens to explore their worlds, homework centers for kids to meet for tutoring assistance. Public libraries are now a place of mirrors and windows, places where you can see yourself in the books and services provided as well as safely viewing the world from another person's perspective.

As we discussed in the chamber over the last year, California Education Code requires public libraries to have a library board and that an annual report be given to the municipal body by that board. In absence of that body, the annual report must be given to Library Administration. In light of this code, I will be giving this year's annual report as the board re-establishes itself and presents the reports starting next year.

With this in mind tonight we will touch on reestablishing the library board, library units and services, community partnerships, space design improvements, safety and security, as well as our other major projects. So let's start with reestablishing the library board. Okay. In 2024, the process of reestablishing the library board began with seeking guidance from the state. The library board had been inactive since 2019. In February 2025, California Attorney General clarified that our library board must be a separate five-member body and Ordinance 3059 took place in May of 2025 officially reestablishing the library board.

The five appointments were made in March 17th of this year and our first meeting was held this month on April 15th. Having this board re-established will allow us to move forward with our reinvention efforts by supporting updated policies, presentations and programs and representing the views of the community to the library and we're very excited to see what comes out of this body The next thing we're going to talk about is our non-profit partners.

The Friends of the Oxnard Library continue to be a really great partner. They host book sales and fundraisers, they run the Friends Books and Things gift shop and that is at the library if nobody has come by it's very cute They promote community awareness and they fund programs and materials across all three libraries. They operate independently from the city, and there are a 501c3 but their entire mission is to support the library and we're grateful for everything they do.

There is a typo on here that is not April 24th it's March 24th I apologize it was last month um okay so our units within the library Before I go into detail on the different units, I want to give a huge thanks to all of the staff that we have at OPL. Our staff are hardworking and they're dedicated to the mission of the library and providing services to the community of Oxnard.

They're committed to the vision of creating a third space with thriving hub of activities. And without this staff, none of this work would be possible and as I go through these slides, I want to know that they're the ones that make this work happen for the public. So circulation, these are the first friendly faces that the patrons see when they come in the building. They check out materials, they check in materials keeping the collection organized. This is the team that manages your library cards, your holds. They make sure books are on the shelf in the right places and that the library has the information they need to navigate the library.

Our information reference and programming unit They help research digital literacy and they help run educational and creative programs. Our Information Reference, or IR as we refer to it, provide assistance and guidance with reference in research inquiries, reader's advisory, and digital resources. They navigate questions also regarding patron accessibility.

Our programming provide a variety of opportunities for community members to engage with one another and through the library with educational, social-emotional, literary, artistic and entertaining events clubs and classes. Our technical services unit, they are responsible for processing all new material entering into the library system. Repairing damaged items, maintaining metadata, the online catalog and other catalog records.

Located at the main branch this unit operates behind-the-scenes supporting operations and collection management for all three locations And then our branches, our branch locations allow the library to reach residents from the different parts of Oxnard. Each branch serves as a community hub that provides books, digital resources, educational programs, technology classes and safe public spaces for learning and gathering.

By distributing the services geographically, the library system reduces barriers such as transportation time and cost. So a snapshot of what we were able to do in 2024. Since 2023, the library has seen a 50% increase in our visitors, a 10% rise in our library card holders and the growth is due partly to the introduction of a lot of community focused programs and partnerships as well as a lot of work from the library team.

Thanks to strong community partnerships, expanded and targeted programming designs around community needs and wants, and enhanced outreach, marketing efforts, programs attendance. Program attendance has increased by 40%. In 2021 we had 222 programs. In 2025 we had over 1,000. Library program offerings have expanded to provide more opportunities and resources for our community.

So let's take a look at some of the programs that are part of our services and where we get some of those stats from. One is our Oxnard Special Populations, we have two programs that are dedicated especially for this population. We have the Chill Color and Craft, they meet weekly at the main library and we have Puzzles in Play and that is twice monthly at our South Oxnard location.

For our early childhood demographic, we hold family story times, bilingual story times, music story times and baby story times. And those all target specific age groups and family dynamics. We provide stories, musics, crafts. We also provide dance parties for our little ones which they love that provides a lot of social emotional learning in an environment that toddlers are well good at.

Lots of movement, sorry I might bring back that for a second. Okay moving on our school-aged children we provide homework help STEAM programming arts and crafts and entertaining programs for our family For our teens, we offer native gardening, art programs, teen advisory council so that they can speak to what they want to see in our libraries. Among events and programs that are presented as opportunities provide themselves, we also have a volunteer program that assists with job skill development.

For adults, the adult programs are offered. We have senior specific programming. We have guest speakers, art programs, crafting programs. Some examples of this is the Tiny Art Show. We have a lot of talent in Oxnard and we like to present that. We have a quilting series, which is an intergenerational program. We have a fiber arts program which includes embroidery, felting, and crochet as it's also intergenerational. And we have a senior social club that helps fight isolation in our older adults.

Some of our all ages programs, we have multiple book clubs. We have a writing group that meets twice a month as well as open mic nights periodically to give an outlet to that craft. We also have author talks and we like to prioritize our local authors. Our literacy program is another one we're rebuilding. The literacy program fell to the wayside for several years due to staffing shortages, and we're very excited to begin rebuilding this program by hiring a literacy librarian in 2025. This program provides ESL classes in clubs, cyber seniors, tech literacy appointments as well as English and reading tutoring.

Some early successes for this is a patron, a student who passed their citizenship test as well as one student who came to improve their English and they are now a tutor themselves. Some of our large programs and highlights are annual Garden Fest. We just had that on March 17th, we had over 1,000 participants, attendees, presenters, vendors, crafts and more.

We also had 30 volunteers who helped get plants into our new native garden. The garden is on the north side of the building on 2nd Street and will be a program driven garden to provide outdoor activity, social interaction and educational elements. We also have the annual local author showcase, which we just had this last weekend on the 18th. We had 20 authors. This day presents panel discussions, author signings and panels on the writing process.

With our partners, these are all of the partners we currently have that are operational. We have many others that we're working on. We collaborate with more than 20 partnerships. Some that I want to highlight are Many Mansions, Mercy House First Five, Family Place, Ventura County Workforce Development Board and Autism Learning Center. We're excited to announce that the Ventura County Workforce Development Board now has a mobile job assistance bus. It's called Workforce on Wheels, and they will be assisting patrons on the fourth Thursday of every month at the South Oxnard Library to assist our patrons.

These patrons expand our reach, strengthen our services to something far beyond what we can do alone. Let's talk about our space design improvements. This is one area where the public will really start seeing an improvement within our physical spaces. Some of the things we have done, we are updating our teen spaces to make it more comfortable and safe for our teens. We're updating our children's spaces to ensure that collection space and toys are in good shape and in working condition for the families.

We're planning out maker spaces to give the public a space for tech and analog steam discovery. Redesigning the main library help center to make it more accessible, inviting and intuitive for the staff and patrons. We have upgraded our homework centers with furniture that the kids respond better to as well as working on upgrading the technology. We have redesigned the South Oxnard Library computer lab from an underutilized computer space to a flex space that can be used for study, for programs as well as computer use. We are removing outdated materials. We're reducing excess shelving. We're creating conversation spaces. We are improving accessibility and we are opening up sight lines for safeties. And those are what we're currently working on and this will be an ongoing multi-year project as we improve the space.

Safety measures. Safety continues to be a top priority for Oxnard Library. Some of the things we've done just to name a few, we have added a security monitor position at the South Oxnard Library. We've installed bubble mirrors to reduce blind corners. We've added Narcan dispensers at our locations. We include walkie-talkie and staff codes to increase the speed of communication if help is needed.

We're working on redesigning the help desk, we are increasing guard coverage and we hold regular meetings with security and community partners to continue to iterate this process and continue improving. Some of the steps we have taken for staff development, we provide a lot of training for our guards and our staff That includes safe and compassionate libraries. That is with a consultant who is an expert in the field, has come down and met with our staff multiple times. We've provided several de-escalation trainings, behavioral health awareness, and security protocols.

with our security company to continue to improve communication and processes there, as well as our beat coordinators within the community. And this security especially is a very iterative process. We also do debriefs with our staff when incidences occur so we can learn from those situations and continue to improve those. So let's talk about our next major project currently which is our technology refresh update.

We have been working for the last year and a half or so with the Oxnard IT department as well as Carson Block Consulting on doing an assessment and technology update design, so that we can move forward with upgrading our technology in a deliberate and effective way so that we can see the most Upgrades as quickly as possible for our patrons, as well of our staff.

Some of the things we've done is we've assessed our current systems. We've installed new firewalls and when I say we, I am talking about IT and the library staff it's been a really good partnership so far. We've added new wireless access points, we've updated our filtering. Some of the next steps we're working on is replacing hardware, updating our integrated library software, applying for e-rate funding as well as upgrading security gates and RFID systems.

Once we complete this initial assessment and design phase, we'll begin putting a lot of these projects into and active build phase. And this is also very much a multi-year project as we work through each project. Oxnard Public Library is evolving, strengthening, expanding and improving. And we're modernizing our spaces in technology. As I close, I want to show you an example of our routine programming that you can find on our libraries at the right. You can find this on any of our social medias at Oxnard Library on Instagram or Facebook and I also want to introduce you to our library mascot. This is Barry.

He is the brainchild of the staff and very beloved and with that I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. Do we have questions from council members? Councilwoman Perez.

No questions, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you and your staff. I know you're always open to feedback. Your staff members had the opportunity to come to one of our community feedback meetings over at Haycox Elementary in Southwinds and a lot of the recommendations that came out of that community input meeting was more investment in more programming, whether that be ESL courses, workforce pathways, STEM pathways and even consideration hopefully to plant the seed a bit.

I know oftentimes the south end would love to explore opportunities around robotics. And so definitely just wanted to take the moment to appreciate the outreach the engagement of just getting the word out to community about the opportunities that are available and just activating the space at the South Oxnard Library, but also some of the events that have happened there with the South Oxnard block parties and other efforts that have been pushed forward by city staff in City Corps and other departments. And so I just wanted to name that and recognize the work that you all are doing.

Thank you very much, Council Member Perlow. First off Ms. Ashmore I'm glad to see you here after the severe accident that you survived and thank Europe about number one mayor I would like to recognize a councilwoman from the city of San Buenaventura Miss Liz Campos who's in attendance it's very rare that we get council members coming to our council meeting thank you I would like very much to appreciate Presentation you made and the opportunity that I had to go to a volunteer recognition meal. It was tremendous I didn't understand how that worked? I learned a lot there the Improvement that can come from a library system in this country the library system You don't need money. You just need a credit card you need a Library card, and you can actually do a lot of things without a library card in there The fact that you're improving the visibility for safety, I remember some time ago when a person OD'd and died in the library.

Tragic several years ago but I really appreciate you looking out for your staff and the patrons of the library. It's a big deal. In this day and age, you never know what a person is going to do that's coming into the library. A suggestion I have. During tax time there have been requests for donations to the Friends of the Library Party wished to make a business donation to the library, but there was not the ability to have a credit card donation I know I mentioned that and I hope you guys look at that because it's an opportunity to hustle up Some businesses do a little bit better at the end of the year And they want to make a donation You could possibly do very well by doing that certainly recommend your entire staff For applause from this council and the reason is this is when I first came on this council This was what we considered the weak sister They say weak sister because if there was ever cuts it was always cuts to this area of the city of Oxnard To take care of other departments.

It should never be this way This is the one that she's scared mr.. And mrs.. John Doe City of Oxnard resident Thank you very much

Thank You councilmember we have additional questions councilmember star

I Was just wondering if you have other colleagues here today that you might want to introduce I

I do thank you. Um, I have some friends members if you can stand up. So this is the Friends of the Oxnard Public Library and they as far as donations Councilmember Perello. We can we can connect you with them they are now taking credit card? Yes. And then we also have my supervisors here, if you can stand up. These are our two new supervisors. We don't have more staff because we're short-staffed today. Everybody got sick. But these are and both of these ladies have been with me working on all of the projects that we've been talking about.

Thank you. I just want to say thank you to your staff for the work that you're putting into this. On one of the later slides, you were talking about the technology refresh update and there was something that I wasn't quite clear on which was the apply for E-rate project. What is E-rate?

Okay so E-rate is a federal program and it is available for public schools and it's available for libraries And it's a discount program, basically. So if you apply for E-rate funding we get partial E-rate funding through our internet and the discount we get is based off of the demographics, the population of the city and is based off of free lunches at schools So we get a significant discount. We have the internet portion, they also have opportunities for IT construction. The way I try to explain it is anything from the power line to the outlet can be covered or assisted through E-rate grants.

And so as we start working on these large projects improving IT, I want to make sure we capitalize on that opportunity. So it's federal, so it's very complicated. So we are working on getting that in place so that we can use that when we do some of the construction work on upgrading the technology.

Any thought as far as what the magnitude of that grant would be? Are we talking hundreds of thousands, millions? What are we talking about?

It's based on the cost of the project and it's 90%. Oxnard gets a 90% discount currently. I don't know that at 100%, but it's 80 or 90%. Okay. It's significant so that's why I want to make sure that we can bring that into play

I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for answering my question.

Okay, any additional questions?

Yes, I just wanted to again with my colleagues just thank you all and your hard work. I love hosting my office hours the first Saturday of every month. It's definitely been an adventure. I know I flagged some concerns about like the safety and not it's safety for all but I also think that we should all expect to have a safe and welcoming environment to work in On a daily basis, so I just want to thank you all for your patience and for your good work because Like somebody else shared we you know folks are just in different places in their life And I know I've seen the library when I was in high school I would go every day to finish my homework before 830 before I get kicked out But it's a safe space. You know so Thank you all for the good work you do and providing that safe space for our community and our family so I love the seed collections that you all have.

And it's just, you all are thinking outside the box and I really appreciate that. I just hope that folks in the community understand that you have access to so much with your library card. Not just here, but online. So not just the physical books, right? But like Duolingo or other things that you could have access to a lot of possibilities at our library. So I love the programming y'all are doing. I've seen a lot of families with young kids coming and doing some, not just the reading with different guest speakers, but a lot of hands-on learning. So I really appreciate that and keep up the good work.

Just know that you can also share with us how we can do better and support you all. Absolutely, thank you.

Thank you Councilwoman. Okay, thank you Ms. Ashmore at this point. Madam Clerk, do we have any speakers for this appointment item?

Mayor Pro Tem and Council Members, we do not have any public speakers in person or virtually. Thank you.

I want to thank you and your team so much for all of your work. I will second everything that was stated by my colleagues up here. You all do amazing work and it's important work for every community but especially communities like Oxnard. So thank you so much. Okay, if there are no speakers as a receiving file, no action is required.

Good evening everybody, Mayor Pro Tem, council members, city managers, city staff. Thank you so much for having me here to present to you about the Museum of Ventura County, Ventura County's premier museum. For those of you who don't know that we are an art history and culture museum. We were founded over 110 years ago. We have four sites two in downtown Ventura one an agriculture museum in Camarillo and office space in sorry Agriculture Museum in Santa Paula excuse me and office space in Camarillo and we are the largest repository of history and culture in our county.

We are guided by the wisdom of a volunteer board of directors, many of whom are here tonight. Our Board Chair Dr. Dick Rush, our former previous chair Bill Kearney, our vice-chair Al Lowe, our board member Betsy Chess and our official liaison from the Ventura City Council Liz Campos. Thank you all so much for being here I have the best board of directors that I work for, and we have over 100 volunteers who also guide the institution. And these volunteers and board members come from all over the county. So that's who is in charge of the museum. And here's what we do. Predominantly, we collect. We collect art, we collect archives, and we collect artifacts. Our job here is to preserve them, and one of our goals is to make them as accessible as possible.

Ooh! Every council is a different kind of pointer. This one is very cool. I want to, it's the best absolutely! I want to draw your attention right here this is the number of items that are available digitally and if you were to go onto your phone right now you can go into that and if you typed in Oxnard you would get over 900 items that include Oxnard in the title We use those collections to mount exhibits. We present exhibits in six rotating galleries, we do about 30 programs a year which is not as much as the library I was very impressed with the library 15 programs a week exhausting!

We also try to bring as many people here And remove barriers for attendance. Our most recent way of doing that is we have gotten sponsors to allow us to have free attendance. Ventura County Creative Union is doing that right now, it's quadrupled our attendance and here's who coming who's coming to the museum about two thirds of them come from the venture from the county of Ventura 25% from other places in the state and 8% are national and international.

We are an educational institution We provide on-site school tours for second graders and third graders. We serve over a third of the school districts in our county, two thirds of the elementary schools here in Oxnard go to our classes and about half of all of our school tour attendance are students from Oxnard because of grants we can provide Buses, completely free. So a Title I school's experience at any of our sites is completely free from start to finish. We also have a paid internship program so students who come will have tours often from college students who are paid over $20 an hour because we are a living wage institution and this is where our school tour participants and where our activities are happening and I hope you can see we've got quite a lot coming from Oxnard and happening here These collections, exhibits and programs in education all serve the museum's foundational principles which are these.

We work to engage participants in meaningful experiences and our vision is to build community and connection. And one way we build that connection is to highlight our shared history and to demonstrate the kinds of collections we have tonight I'd like to use some of that collection to tell you a story about the origins of the city of Oxnard. So, to do that i'm going to go back in time a little bit and i'm going to sort of place us here in history. You all learned this in fourth grade but you may have forgotten it since then so a little short history about this area that we're standing in right now since before they kept track of such things it was the home to the Chumash indigenous people In 1542, we were discovered by a Portuguese sailor who was sailing for Spain and Spain colonized this area.

They called it New Spain along with Mexico, parts of Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico etc. In 1769, Spain began to actively move people in here and they did that with the missions establishment 1822 saw a huge upset. The people of Mexico revolted against the colonists of Spain and they won! It was amazing that they did, and where we are standing right now became part of Mexico. We were governed by a Mexican governor.

We were part of Mexico for about 25 years until the Mexican-American War in 1848. Spoiler alert! The U.S. won. Suddenly we're part of the United States And two years later, we achieved statehood. Now the part of the story I want to start with is this era right here when we're a part of Mexico. So when Mexico had governance of this area they wanted to populate it. They were afraid that other people are going to come in and take it from them. And one way they did that was they created this rancho system So the governor of Mexico could give away these huge ranchos to soldiers, to friends, to relatives etc. 17 ranchos were established in Ventura County and as you can see here this is the overlay of the cities now those ranchos kind of roughly correspond to city limits in the county today So most of what is now Oxnard was on Rancho El Rio de Santa Clara o La Colonia.

I'm going to start calling it Rancho La Colonia for short. That was almost 50,000 acres that was awarded to eight soldiers in 1838 and those soldiers used that rancho as most of them did for livestock. Incredibly lucrative business especially as the gold rush took off Unfortunately, the livestock system completely ended in the 1860s. There were extreme weather events droughts floods droughts floods and which killed off 95% of the head of cattle in this county ended the livestock industry in Ventura County forever many rancheros were forced to sell their land and that was true here at Rancho La Colonia Most of the land was purchased by one man, Thomas Bard. May have heard of him? He then took the big rancho and he chopped it up into little lots and he sold those little lots off to farmers.

Some of them were people from Mexico who had lived here for quite a while. Some of them were immigrants mostly as you probably know from Ireland and Germany. Those farmers turned what had been open range into orderly smaller farms where they grew dry crops which are crops that need no irrigation corn, wheat but mostly barley. The La Colonia Plains exploded with barley during this time which was shipped out of the wharf at Port Hueneme and Ventura County completely controlled this commodity so much so that if they sent off too much barley in any one shipload it totally drove the prices down globally So by the early 1890s, times are good. Farmers are making money but so much barley is being produced that they're worried about an oversupply in the market.

The farmers on the La Colonia Plain are sophisticated and they're following national-international events and are always on the lookout for new crops. One of those farmers was this man Alfred Molhart whose family had immigrated from Germany He was a reader, and he read about an interesting development in 1894. The government had just passed a tariff on imported sugar.

That tariff opened the market for domestically produced sugar from sugar beets. Now that tariff was really the result of the hard work of these four men. These are the Oxnard brothers, Henry, Robert, Benjamin and James. Their father had grown sugar. They were getting squeezed out of the market by sugar imported from the Caribbean and Hawaii so they worked to identify a source of domestically refined sugar and modeled the European sugar beet practice. Just so you're aware, these are not beets like we eat.

They are up to five pounds, maybe even a little bit longer. They're about a foot high. Believe me, these are not beets that you would want to eat. And in fact, the only farmer that was growing them on the plains at that point was Ed Borchard who grew them for feed for his horses in the winter. So these were not meant for human consumption. So Ed Borchardt and Alfred Mohler created a plan to get the Oxnard brothers to build a refinery on the La Colonia Plain.

It was an almost impossible undertaking. They knew that to get the Oxnard brothers to build a refinery they had to have enough beets, and they knew that to get the farmers to grow beets they had to know there was going to be a refinery. So they talked the farmers into setting aside little tiny acreage, one to five acres to grow beets. They brought those beets up to the Oxnard brothers to prove to them that they could grow superior breeds of beets. It goes back and forth, back and forth ultimately in Hold on, I want to get it exactly right. September of 1897 the Oxnard brothers agreed to build a factory worth $2 million. That's about $80 million today and the factory that was September of 1897 right? The factory was up and running in August of 1899 less than two years later.

It was a huge complex of buildings filled with sophisticated machinery The impact of the factory changed this area practically overnight. It's almost impossible to conceive there had been maybe two or three dozen farms on the whole La Colonia and a few stores. The factory itself needed over 700 people to operate and it created more jobs. It's astounding what a huge impact, what a huge footprint it had. So there needed to be more ranch hands. There needs to be more equipment building. They needed people to sew the sacks to put the barley into.

Sorry, the sugar beets into people flock to the area new businesses opened and just a few years later. The town of Oxnard was founded named for the brothers who built the factory so I'm going to end my story there. This is just one tiny episode in the history of this city. Um, but I think it is a really important episode and I want to share with you this is a graph that we created that shows the population growth of all of the cities in Ventura County starting in 1910. And what you're going to see here is this surge forward in Oxnard stalls a little bit and then it really goes forward so you can see how No, you can't see it because I don't know how to work it. But anyway, I will send this to you and you'll see. It's really interesting just trust me.

Oh there we go. There we go here yeah so Oxnard is going look Santa Paula overtakes Oxnard which is always very surprising to everybody. Yeah I think we could be sure. Oxnard pulls forward and holds the lead as we all know As I said at the beginning, everything I have shown you here tonight and shared with you comes from the museum's collections. I started this research by looking at this journal that the Museum of Ventura County published in 1973 in partnership with the City of Oxnard. It's filled with history.

Documents as we went on here today and I want to point out, we've done a lot of things in and around Oxnard. I want to thank you for a $25,000 actual contract for services that we received from you in 2024 which made it possible for us to put in satellite exhibits. We were able to give out almost $7,500 in community grants to non-profit organizations right here in Oxnard to help us serve our mission. But part of our collection you have over 10% of the oral histories that we have and at least a quarter of our journals are about Oxnard. You're a huge presence in our museum And so now I want to end by thanking you for letting me present this to you, but also I have an ask.

So I told you a story that happened about 125 years ago and I'm able to do that because the museum has that story we have oral histories just like you heard about in our collections. In another hundred twenty five years ago we're not going to be here and Oxnard won't look like this And our absolute mission is to make sure that we are collecting so that then people will understand the decisions that you all made today, that the community made today and can understand what came before them so that they are positioned to make better decisions in the future. So to that end, we would like to actively collect oral histories from people in Oxnard.

We just collected former Mayor John Zaragoza's oral history actually as a matter of fact People can send us photos, that QR code. Send us photos and they will go into our collection and they will be part of the official historical record for Evermore. And here's a whole list of other ways that we would love to partner with Oxnard formally Informally whatever may happen and lastly we do have exhibits our two exhibits inventor are closing this Sunday I highly recommend that if you can you take a look at them They're wonderful, and our Smith gallery and enfocated at the Ag Museum are up for another year, and thank you so much

Great. Thank you very much Hey, do we have any questions from council members? Yes Councilwoman Perez

Just to comment, I want to thank you for your presentation and really uplifting the importance of knowing our history and where we started in the direction that we're going into. I think a part of some of that history as well is the upliftment of the Japanese Mexican Labor Association and the sugar beet strike and the need to continue to fight for worker protections, livable wages especially because our community here in the city of Oxnard is a large agricultural community, a large farm worker community. And definitely folks are still kind of paving the way to ensure that legacy and that history is incorporated in that direction. And so really appreciate just like the foundation of the presentation and the work that we will continue to do as a community.

Thank you and I'll just tell you, I ended the history the year before the labor strike with the Japanese Mexican Labor Association. And we're doing an exhibit about it in two years. So working with Frank Barajas, Oxnard resident and scholar. Thank you.

Thank you. Additional questions?

Councillor Perello. Just a comment. I really appreciate this. I've been to your museum a couple of times. I appreciated the time that I went to the Ag Museum in Santa Paula. There were things from the family that are still there but thank you.

I really appreciate that you're trying to capture everybody's stories. I was a little embarrassed with all those pictures, but thank you very much. I especially want to highlight the Enfoque exhibit that y'all have had at the Santa Paula Agricultural Museum that has just been phenomenal showcasing a lot of local people from indigenous backgrounds and highlighting their stories It's been absolutely wonderful. I know is there for a few months? I'm not sure if it's if it's still it's still up Okay, I think it's been up for a year, but I loved it I think it's every time I go. I just I see something new so thank you for all that good work

Okay additional questions council restart

yeah, I just want to say that your your museum is a It's a jewel, it's a secret jewel. And so few people even know about it. I wasn't actually familiar with everything that you offered and I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually go visit and have a little bit of a tour there. So thank you so much, you've really opened my eyes here today. Thank you.

Okay anything else from folks? Oh well we have to see do we have any public comments Madam Clerk for this item?

Mayor Pro Tem and Council Members, we do not have any requests in person or any virtual speakers. Thank you.

Thank you Madam Clerk I'll just end by saying again echoing the comments of my colleagues up here thank you so much for the service you provide to the county and Just the historical nature of what you have is important because not only is there nostalgia tied into that, but there are some important lessons and also some important history of people who live here now whose ties go back to that time. And not just those who are in this room tonight, but people all from out this community. And thank you for highlighting, to start with going back 13000 years pre-written history for our Chumash people were the original caretakers of this land.