City Council — February 17, 2026

Meeting to order. The time is now 530 p.m. Madam Clerk, please take roll.

Council Member Perez? Yes, here. Council Member Lopez? Here. Vice Chair Hernandez? Here. Chair McQueen-Lachon? Here. Let the record reflect that Council Member Cuomo is currently absent.

Great, thank you. We'll now move to hear public comments related to our closed session item. Are there any public comments?

No public comments.

Great, thank you. City Attorney will you please read the closed session item into the record?

Yes, thank You Madam Mayor we will be going into closed session tonight with respect to conference with real property negotiators pursuant to Government Code section 54956.8 Regarding property at 700 East Port Hueneme Road here in the city of Port Hueneme, California The agency it will be represented by Mr. James Vega and myself and The other party is Red Mule Group LLC and we will be discussing Offers of price in terms of payment regarding the property

Great. Thank you. We're gonna pause for just a minute before we

if everybody can stand up, place your right hand over your heart. Ready? Begin.

Okay, Madam

Clerk

can we have a roll call

May I request that we have public comments before inspiration We're waiting for one more group of students to get here if that's okay

Yes, can we do

that? Thank you so we'll go ahead and move that. We'll move to the closed session report City Attorney.

Thank You Madam Mayor there are no reportable actions from closed session tonight

Great, thank you. We're gonna now move to public comments not pertaining to the item on the agenda. Madam Clerk are there any public comments?

Yes we have some public comments first up is Becky Bruning that will be followed by Luis Mendez

Good evening Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem Council staff and audience. I'm here representing Real Guppy Outdoors tonight and want to remind everyone we're going to be out at the end of Hueneme Pier on the 28th from 8 to 11 so come out and have some fun with us and come by our Learning Center and check out what we got going on there.

Great thank you

Hello, everybody. Good evening Mayor Pro Temp, council members, staff and residents. I'm here to speak to the Council about the Ventura County Area Agency on Aging. I was appointed by the Council three years ago to sit on the advisory board to represent Port Hueneme and as an advocate for the aging population I take my oath and role seriously. A couple of weeks ago, I emailed all the council members and the city manager about the changes in the Human Service Agency and their discussions to discontinue providing funding for non-state mandated services to the aging population. I did not agree with these changes and neither did a lot of members of the advisory board.

I thought it was important that the recipients of these services be provided the information in person by VCAAA, specifically residents that reside in the Mar Vista, Casa Pacifica, and Hueneme Bay areas. I met with our county supervisor and Gabby Wiseau, our housing manager. Both thought it was very important that we do outreach to the residents being serviced by the VCAAA.

I made a formal request to the VCAAA program director and communications director to coordinate presentations. Unfortunately after some back-and-forth with emails they determined that there was no need warranted to providing additional information to residents in our community. I was advised that the residents could find the latest information on the website or any existing clients receiving services from their agency would be mailed letters. Needless to say, I was unhappy with this response and since the announcement of the services being transferred to the State of California Department of Aging there has only been one public presentation that was in January and one more scheduled for March that is geared towards stakeholders and service providers.

I feel that the residents and clients who receive these services are being ignored. I am here to implore you guys, the City Council, to rattle some cages on behalf of the residents in our community and to reach out to the county and BCAAA and advise them or encourage them to prioritize residents over the service providers and community stakeholders And request that efforts be made to provide in-person presentations to the community members that receive their services. Thank you.

Great, thank you. John Burke?

Good evening Mayor, council members, neighbors and staff. I am Jan Burke board member of and resident of Anacapa View Beach Homes. I'm here to celebrate the amazing life contributions and achievements of Diane Fresh and her late husband Don Fresh. Diane's vision to create a foundation and to honor her husband should not be a surprise to anyone when she told me she was had started a new deal fresh foundation.

I thought why of course? Of course she did, how amazing. Diane has always been a strong and accomplished woman, never shy to share her thoughts and opinions. And I love that about her. Diane and Don are founding owners and residents of Anacapa View Beach Homes. She and Don have been very special neighbors committed to supporting our association and to our city, our little city here by the sea.

Today Diane and her foundation are inspiring young people to develop strong moral values, build character through hard work and give back to others. These are important in sustaining life skills for our youth and I have no doubt that Diane's philanthropic generosity in Hueneme and beyond will make significant impact on their lives. Diane and Diane and the DL Fresh Foundation is the greatest gift of inspiration for our city and our citizens.

Thank you, Diane We are so very proud of you to have you as a neighbor and in our community

Thank You Jonathan Soto

Good evening. I'm Jonathan Soto and I am here with the Thunder Vikes, Hueneme High School's robotics team and we're here just to recognize Diane's contribution and you know last year we did have a it was our first year being a team where we were you know We had a robot, however it was the kit bot that's kind of included with like here you go. Thank you for playing. Here is a robot and it's meant to be modified.

Her support our students have been able to train in the off season, compete in additional events and even attend an overnight competition this year. More importantly her contribution gave our students confidence and the opportunity and a belief that their community believes in them and wants them to achieve more so I am here with Miguel Rodriguez who is our What officer?

Programming lead and Osvaldo Perez. He's our financial officer here, and I'm the lead mentor. And this is Brianna Ramos, another mentor for our team. So on behalf of the students, thank you, Diane, for investing in our futures, and your impact is truly life changing.

Okay, and that concludes public comment.

Okay. Okay great. Thank you Okay, let's go ahead now we're gonna move to our Inspiration yeah

Thank you We have a brief PowerPoint that I would like to share with everybody and it should be no surprise that our inspiration tonight is honoring the Don DL fresh foundation which is headed by Diana fresh And I'm going to get the control here. And we might be disrupted by a Hueneme High School band, which I hope. I know they're on their way. We wanted this to be a celebratory inspiration honoring the legacy of Don L. Fresh and his lovely wife Diane. So here we go.

The D.L. Fresh Foundation was founded approximately two to three years ago, I believe, transforming obstacles into opportunities and it was founded by Diane Fresh. And I've said it before and I'm gonna say it again being the council person delivering inspiration is by far the best part of being on City Council because it's an opportunity for me to recognize people that are doing great things in our community Many years ago, I had a neighbor by the name of Don L. Fresh.

He wasn't exactly my neighbor. He just happened to own the two houses next to me. Don Fresh was a legendary scientist because most of his work was classified. His skills remain a mystery to his family and his neighbors. Don L Fresh among other things with extremely frugal Right? Very frugal. And he was an avid saver. He was one of those who understood the time value of money.

He traveled the world with his wife, Diane. They visited all the continents in the world. They visited over 70 countries together In 2021, June 26th, Don passed away. And Diane came to me thereafter and she said I have a problem. I said oh really what's your problem Diane? She said Don left me too much money. I will never be able to spend it all so I established the DL Fresh Foundation so that I could give back to the community that I love so much Not too long ago Council Member Lopez realized that the Hueneme High School robotics team needed funding and I handed him an application. He completed it, and the funding came through for the robotics team that you're seeing right there.

She also has helped the Junior ROTC program. This is a picture of Don L. Fresh. Looks like he's working on a rocket, but it's classified we can't talk about it. And who are they? They're world travelers. Interesting enough I said this to Diane the other day. I used to have dark hair and apparently she used to have red. So you can see the Don Fresh Foundation, it's a family with a heart for giving and with the good fortune to be able to do so. So they rely on a circle of friends who guide them to causes that enrich lives of individuals, improve community and benefit society.

Here's some of the world traveling that they did. Don was a character, he was hilarious to be around and he is very frugal and you could tell that with the time value of money, frugality has its purpose So the foundation is partnering with those who work with youth, and you can see that today. And also the foundation works towards mental health, helping people overcome things such as traumatic brain injuries.

They have a strong being in Montana because they grew up in Montana as I understand it and found the city of Port Hueneme to eventually be their home Hueneme High School band. You can see on the left a brand new tuba, and you can see on the right a tuba that was probably born about the time I was. And without hesitation Diane stepped up and gifted the money to buy a new tuba and other things as well. We think the band is here so don't get disrupted Mr. Gama.

It's funny as I was looking through the band photos, the Hueneme High School Band has this thing whenever somebody has a camera they wave and there comes Jasmine. So the band wave is really cool and we see them starting to come in right now. The band rejuvenated itself over the last couple years in large part to Jasmine Keys, but also to now the funding that was made available by the D.L. Fresh Foundation.

Also there is an individual in our city that was a part of the Sea Cadets. His name is Caden and he went to Missouri State University of Science and Technology Caden is the second Sea Cadet here in the photo. That's when he was a little kid and then here he is in the red, the guy with the red hair and he called me right about the time Diane reached out to me and asked if I knew anybody that would consider funding them and so again I put him in contact with the foundation And they were able to get this car on the track, and Kayden is racing it.

It's just a beautiful thing. And Kayden wrote this, Mrs. Fresh's contribution was crucial to our team success last year. Due to her generosity we were able to finish our car, go to competition, complete the 22 kilometer endurance race for the first time in our team's history. This was rewarding both emotionally and academically as hours of work paid off. And we're able to showcase our car to industry experts.

And then here we go, the Thunder Vikes. They're hopefully an aspiring robotics team. We want to promote them and root for them at their upcoming March 6th robotics competition at the Port of Hueneme which is sponsored by Haas Automation. If you haven't been to it, it's a wonderful thing and again they're becoming competitive And it takes a lot of money. If you go and see what goes on there, it takes a lot of money to be competitive so we're hopeful for a good showing there.

And of course they want to say thank you to the Don L. Fresh Corporation as well. I want to end on a positive note. This is my dog. His name's Marshmallow and because of AI he could cook noodles. So I want everybody to realize that anything is possible With that, I would like to call Diane Fresh up and I have a certificate for you. So I invited the Hueneme High School band to come in and make some music for us.

I'm going to read this and then if you could play a quick little number for us, we would much be appreciative. In recognition and honor of your outstanding philanthropy, steadfast commitment to youth empowerment and compassion service to individuals and families in need, I Stephen Gomez, Council Member of the City of Port Hueneme express my sincere gratitude for your leadership generosity and enduring contribution to our community and celebrate you as an inspiration to all Music.

♪ Hi. So a lot of people don't know this, but I know this because a couple years ago when Jasmine Keys was hired there were nine people in the band. Yeah and so the hard work of Jasmine and with the support of Diane look at the band now and so we are inspired by all of you and I just couldn't think of a better way to honor Miss Diane Fresh so thank you so much would you like to say a word?

I grew up with the band. I was the band. I played clarinet, then I got moved up to bass clarinet and the band director said well I always put the talkative ones, the ones with a lot of wind kindly put on bass clarinet and then he got on laid his hands on the contrabass clarinet you'd never guess who got to play that so I was the windiest kid in school And as far as robotics, it was my husband's thing.

I'm not that good at that kind of thing. I was a liberal arts major but he would so love this. You guys are doing what he wants to do. Okay, I grew up in Northern Montana and there's no water but Don was in the Navy in World War II And he loved it. He got to eat three meals a day, and for him that worked. So he always loved to watch you guys. So it's just all these groups. And then I have my Young Life family back there.

They've been with me and with Don, and they're part of who I am also. So all of these groups. I will say to all of you kids, now you need to give back. It's called play it forward, sweat equity, whatever you want. You need to reach out there and touch somebody else. Who else needs help? And you don't know. And for you adults, you don't have to have a bunch of money to reach out and help somebody. Jasmine could use help.

We need a booster club here for Hueneme High. We've all read about finances of the high school district, this is our group these are our kids it's up to us to make them great and we see Caden in Missouri State And interestingly enough, I said well, I have a connection with Missouri. All my family members came from various states and ended up in Missouri and then they all married each other and here I am! So who knew?

But just whichever little area you reside, grow from it. Learn from it. I want to tell you, I have the greatest HOA around. We're really good socially. We may have some problems in meetings but we're really good socially so and I love Hueneme. It's my place And yes, I love Steve. And Jess stepped up to the plate and helped me with robotics. And a number of you when I called you said we can't get this permit. Can you help? And yes you did.

So we're community. We need to help each other. And right now my big thing is to get the imagination library here So our kids have books. If you're interested, you contact me. They

already are. I need your help. I gave them an application. Good.

Yeah and we'll just end on this note. Diane and I have talked a lot over the last several weeks and one of the things that were wishing for is we want to continue the DL Fresh Foundation into the future. And so anybody out there that's looking to donate to a worthy cause please You could go through the whole work of establishing your own foundation, which is a lot of work. Or you could donate to the DL Fresh Foundation and you know that your funds will be going in the right direction and benefiting causes like this. And I'm so inspired with everything that's gone on and everything that I've learned and everybody that I talked to I just want to thank Diane from the bottom of our heart, from our community's heart for supporting our kids. We have the Junior ROTC Lieutenant Commander that wants to come up and say something real quick?

And then we'll move on dot org and hopefully...

Hello good evening to everyone here. I am Darlene Jimenano the commanding officer of Hueneme High School's NJROTC. I would like to sincerely thank the Dale Fresh Foundation for their generous support because of this grant we were able to expand our learning through out-of-state travel, an overnight trip and a museum visit. We brought home a total of nine trophies and three individual placers out of 200 cadets that were there, qualifying us once again twice this year for our area's regional championship competition for the first time in 10 years.

Most importantly this opportunity greatly boosted our unit's morale as we made sure to make the most out of this exciting opportunity. We are truly grateful for your support and investment in our program. Once again thank you Dale Fresh Foundation

Good evening council and everyone else in the room. My name is Julia Yamomo, and I serve as the executive officer here at Hueneme High School's NJROTC program. In addition to enabling our cadets to compete out of state this grant has significantly increased our programs visibility within the area as well as out-of-state we are deeply grateful for this opportunity to receive this much support and for the many accomplishments that has been possible for our unit thank you Thank

you. Good evening Madam Mayor, Council and audience my name is Angelina Ruiz the Command Master Chief of the NJROTC unit at Hueneme High School I would love to thank Miss Diane Fresh and the DL Fresh Foundation for their generous grant and because of your support our cadets have gained meaningful experiences and confidence that cadets didn't know they had but more importantly They strengthen this grant has strengthened the love morale and sense of community within our unit which has always been my goal as the command master chief of my unit. Your investment helped create more confidence in you and a united connected family. Thank you so much.

Good evening everyone, my name is Alyssa San Luis and I'm the administration officer of my unit. And I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the DL Fresh Foundation on behalf of our cadets because of their support our program has been able to provide meaningful opportunities that allowed us to make most of our experience grow as individuals and create lasting memories together. Your generosity has truly made a positive impact on all of us and we are grateful for your support. Thank you.

Good evening Council, staff, friends, family and neighbors. So my name is Jason Gray and I'm actually the one who propelled this grant forward inside of Hueneme High School's NJROTC but really this all started because I'd like to specifically thank Jess Lopez putting forward grants and stuff throughout his campaign so it really led me to push for this opportunity but in special recognition of you This was my first time ever doing something like this. I've never applied for grants before, I've never tried to go through that process and in that bringing it forward to my instructor, my SNSI, it was extremely new for me, it was extremely nerve-wracking Not only can I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity, but also to give all these other cadets inside of our unit this opportunity.

Truly, you've gone above and beyond for the community and we can't begin to thank you enough so thank you very much tonight.

Good evening. My words will be terse because I'm under the weather, but I am Lieutenant Commander Pabito Kia-Chon. I'm a Navy retired. I've been teaching in Hueneme in the last 10 years and this is the first time that we would be receiving a donation Thank you very much. We have never been qualified to go to the championship. Our championship is on February 28th at El Camino Real, and thank you ma'am for your outstanding support.

Great, thank you for all your comments. Thank you to Council Member Gama for making this event happen. And thank you to Ms. Fresh for all the work that you're doing and all the support that you're giving our folks. And I thank you to Hueneme Band. Thank you all for coming out tonight. With that said we're going to move on back to our program. So we're going to move to the agenda approval for City Council. May I have a motion and a second to approve the agenda?

Move to approve.

Second.

Great, Madam Clerk please take roll.

All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Hearing none motion passes unanimously.

Great do any members have a conflict of interest to disclose for any item on the agenda?

None.

No? Okay, great. We'll move on to our presentations. First we'll have the 2025 State of the Region Report presented by Ventura County Civic Alliance. So please welcome Mr. David Moran from the Ventura County Civic Alliance to the podium.

Good evening I'm David Moran and I'm quite capable of clearing a room So I've spoken at many councils. That was just wonderful It's gonna be all downhill after that But it was very impressive And it was wonderful to hear all about miss fresh, so I'm with Ventura County Civic Alliance every two years We put out the state of the region report we go around the city. We distribute thousands copies We can't do that without the generosity of us some of our larger sponsors Ventura County Community Foundation community colleges of Ventura County California Resources, County of Ventura, Channel Islands University, Lima Nera, the Port of Hueneme and of course the Office of Education. So thank you to all of them. Some quick highlights we publish this report every two years.

This is our ninth overall. All of our sources are listed starting on page 113. This report is available to all of the audience and people at home who want to download it for free at civicalliance.org And the Civic Alliance is a 501c3 nonprofit. We're neutral and biased, and we're focused on sustaining our quality of life in Ventura County. I'm gonna start off with some of the demographics. This is not in your actual book but there was a handout. The Ventura County median age has been growing. Some of you have been here and heard me speak many years, and every time it keeps going up so where started at 26 years ago in 2000 at 34.2 Now we're at 39.6, very unfortunate. We have population by each city this chart shows the 23 21 and 2019 totals you can see Port Hueneme circled you happen to have a fairly low percentage of your residents or under are over 65 and a high percentage, 21.7 over under 18th that's very good as far as that goes but you have a median age of 36.1 which is overall less than the county average.

County average is 39 year or less but looking at this chart this shows in green the total population of this city going back to 2017 You can see a decline from 22,200 to 21,580. But more importantly looking in the blue column which is those children zero to 17 you lost about 640 children in that time so Your overall population is declining and all of that decline is young people. So you still have the same number of older people but we're, you're losing that and that you're not the only ones it's very, and we'll talk about it more in the report.

I'll move on to agriculture. Strawberries continue to be the top crop in the county, over $700 million. Ventura County's agricultural economy is about 2.17 billion. That number has been about the same for many years right around two billion which sounds good but our overall economy has been growing so that means agriculture It's becoming a smaller percentage of our economy and as you all know they're dealing with challenges such as water, such as labor, such as certain viruses that kill some of the trees.

So it's a tough area. Community engagement your elected officials I like to show the demographics of the county Green is no party preference, red is Republican blue is Democrat. You can see that the blue Democrats have stayed about the same grown a little bit in the last 23 years but the Republican registration of Ventura County has declined during that time and mostly those people have registered as no party preference In the city of Port Hueneme, you are fairly a plurality of Democrats. Almost 49%.

You can see the other numbers. Simi Valley is actually the only city in the county that has a plurality of Republicans and that's registration. That's not turnout. One other chart that I'd like to highlight in this section is the nonprofit sector It was great to hear about all of the great work done by the DL Fresh Foundation. There's many other foundations across county, over almost 11,000 people work in the nonprofit sector in Ventura County. I don't think people realize just how large that is, over $500 million of wages. There's a lot of detail in this section including some other nonprofits invite you to read through that when you have time.

The economy, Ventura County we peaked way back in 2007 at around 72 billion dollars in our economy and we have had a decline from 2008 when there was the Great Recession. And then we've started to bubble along there in the 62 millions. We crept up a little bit but if you If you look down at the bottom here, you can see that around 2018-2019 we were just 1.9%. Then we had the pandemic so we had a drop of about one percent. We had a nice increase after that, about 3.9%, but it's all back to zero. So we are not growing our economy. We really need to attract more businesses. We need to retain those great businesses that we have here in Ventura County.

Taxable sales certainly one of the ways that your city provides for its residents. Port Hueneme has been about the same over the last few years, a little decline there from 204 million to 163. That's not unusual looking at all the cities you can see most of them have declined a bit. Oxnard that's the Amazon effect from having the warehouse there and each city has different ways that they earn mostly it's the car And outlet malls, which you really don't have dealerships or outlet malls here.

And then another one is the tourism where you do have a—because you're a coastal city, you attract a lot of people to come to the area. You've had a nice growth in tourism. Ojai, that is the Ojai Valley Inn effect. A staggering amount of income to them from that. But Ventura and Thousand Oaks, number two and three there. And then your Port of Hueneme continues to be an economic engine this just shows the particular revenues which accounts for a lot of their revenue they actually have a little bit of other revenues that are not reflected here but overall the port is It's like a $2.5 billion engine for Ventura County with all of the effects from their labor force and many of your residents who do work there.

Could be, or maybe it's a signal to cut me off. Madam Clerk are you telling me something? Can you advance it just by page down? All right, education next slide. So we have a declining enrollment of Ventura County blue is TK through eighth grade green is the older grades nine through 12 so if you look in the upper left corner you'll see that I highlighted Ventura County population 50 years ago we had about 419,000 we've doubled that to 838 over about 50 years but 50 years ago we had 108,000 kids and today we have 122 So we've doubled our population and we only grew the number of children in school by about 20,000.

So the projections are for a continuing decline. I don't think you'll see a new high school built in the county for decades. Okay well, so now it is working. Okay, here's some interesting demographics about the number of students in your high school district and your local elementary. You can see the top line is 21-22 and the blue is 24-25 school year. Oxnard Union has had a large decrease And your Hueneme Elementary as well. I'm often asked, but isn't this because people are homeschooling? Isn't this because people are sending their kids to private school? The answer is no. The number of kids in private schools has also declined over the last five years.

We're just not having babies anymore in Ventura County. Please. Very hard to read, but when you study this later in your books these are the test scores for all of the districts in Ventura County and it lists every single school. So the important thing there's an English report and a mathematics report. This is English There are test scores given to students in different grades and the state measures the number of students that meet or exceed, and that's what we're reporting. They also measure students that don't meet the standard almost met it but we combine the number of students who met the standard or above so ideally you would see every school up there at 100% level That 100 percent of the students met or exceeded the standard that was expected of them in English for their grade level.

But that's not the case and Hueneme actually is goes below there but you can see there's even within a certain district like Kaneo on the blue on the left. There's a range from 90 percent down to 50 40 30 percent so there's a lot to dig into there about why we're having challenges educating our children and preparing them for the workforce. Land use, some quick highlights. The number of housing starts has grown.

Home ownership in Port Hueneme is about 46%, which is a good number. Some other cities like Moorpark are much higher and the median home price was 714,000 in 2025. The apartment rents, this is what's killing our, I shouldn't say killing, this is what's making it so challenging for our young people They get that first job and they can't afford an apartment. So the average apartment cost in Oxnard-Port Hueneme is $2,600 but just looking at the chart from a distance you can see every city keeps going up. Now there's good news that we're starting to see some plateauing in apartment rents but I'm sure for most people in the room $2600 sounds like pretty expensive mortgage let alone apartment rent Natural resources, Port Hueneme is leading the county as far as the lowest amount of water used per capita per day so congratulations on that.

I started off with demographics and this is the reason why we are getting older in Ventura County. Back in 1990, we were up around a birth rate of 19 per thousand residents and in 2023 that number is down to 10.2 so our young people Are waiting longer to have children when they do have children. They are maybe only having one not two or three or four like families used to a long time ago and Frankly our children are being recruited to move out of the area other cities around the country are offering that Programs or lower cost housing they're offering jobs and our young people say well That's where I'll go start a family and I'd say this to every council and anybody who will listen We have got to work on this to figure out how to make it easier for young people to have children And I think some of that is child care.

Child care costs $15,000 a year for toddlers even more for infants So what can we do to make childcare more common? How can we help our workforce? So there's many things that should be happening there, and there are some organizations working on that. Can we provide more flexible work hours? Could the City of Port Hueneme be the city for young families and get them to move here and enjoy the beaches and grow?

So that continues to be a challenge we've added cancer Some data in this year's report and we break out for all cancers leukemia prostate and breast cancers Surprisingly Ventura County is at the higher end of most of these charts These charts are showing incidence which is different than prevalence Incidence is the amount of times it happens per hundred thousand people versus prevalence Which is just how many people overall? Next slide.

So great news, Ventura County continues to be the safest large county in the state of California. I've told you that on other reports and we're good for that. Here it is broken out by city in the book. You actually have property crime and violent crime. This one on the screen is violent. It does show a big jump there for poor Hueneme in 2024. I don't recall the exact reason for that in the data. I'm sure there were some probably was assaults that cropped up And oh, I do have property crimes. So you're about the same there. I know we need to wrap up. Well, we definitely have to wrap. Food aid, you can read about that. Next slide. Transportation and people continue? That's perfect.

Yeah. People continue to still work at home and that's growing so thank you for your time. If there's any questions happy to answer and the clerk has more reports if anyone needs it, and again it's available on our website at civicalliance.org Great

thank you are there any questions?

You know, throughout the Ventura County and perhaps a nation but focusing on Ventura County we are seeing public agencies beginning to struggle. And it seems to me that declining enrollment may be the number one factor because it all starts with population decreasing so what is... What are we looking at in the next five to ten years if the trend doesn't change?

Well, it'll be hard to attract employers because we won't have a workforce that's as skilled and large as we need. It'll be harder to find people to staff certain jobs because we won't have enough young people coming out of the school system. And as we all know the jobs of the modern work environment require more skills even if you're working in some of these factories you're using high-tech equipment and so we need to support the universities and the colleges that are producing the workforce But I think in the healthcare side, the city of Ojai has an average age almost 50, 49.

So there are some strong challenges if we can't do something to reverse it because we'll just have too many old people and not enough young people to take care of us all. I count myself looking at me. No So, I mean it's great question It's like but we do it's an issue around the state of course declining birthrate But I think there's an opportunity for the cities to work together or even independently To try and figure out how to get those young people to say oh wait, I can have a family here

Yes, so this is going on in other countries prevalent we're seeing like China it's like has a really strong curve. So what state in the United States are actually doing well? Is there any or are we all following the same trend line?

So there's a couple of things going on. I mean, it can be more expensive to live in California but we have higher wages so there's the affordability factor. Certain states are, have programs and policies to try and encourage families You mentioned China. They actually have policies to deter families because they grew up, Japan is getting to be in very dangerous territory because they're getting so much older. So I think each state has its own issue. We certainly have a lot of reasons to attract people because of the wonderful weather but it's the cost of housing. So can we bring down the cost of housing? Can we make things more affordable? Can we raise wages? Can offer the opportunities and experiences that young people want? One of the things when I do my other hat as far as League of Women Voters Do the forums as young people say there's nothing to do after 7 o'clock 8 o'clock and they move more towards the urban areas So I can't tell you which state has got has cracked the code Type of thing.

It's a great question. I'll try to think about that more But I think we all have to look at our own areas and say well, what can we do because San Diego is growing? Why can't Ventura County? Thank you

any other questions If not, thank you so much for coming out tonight. Okay we're gonna

Hey, February 21st is International Mother Language Day. Whereas language is a complex form of communication consisting of sounds words grammar and nonverbal expressions it is conveyed through spoken written and visual means reflecting the cultural richness and diversity of the human experience. And whereas languages vary across the globe by country region and culture and one's native language often referred to as mother language or Mother Tongue, is the foundation of cultural identity and heritage. And whereas certain languages and dialects are fading or disappearing resulting in the loss of unique customs shared memories and cultural knowledge nearly half of the world's 8300 plus languages are endangered with roughly one language vanishing every two weeks.

And whereas February 21st has been recognized as an international mother Language Day to promote the preservation and protection of all languages, fostering linguistic and cultural diversity. And whereas the global observance of International Mother Language Day serves as a reminder of the value of linguistic diversity and the need to protect and promote languages has essential tools for communication, cultural expression and unity. And whereas the city of Port Hueneme is home to a proud and diverse community Reflecting a wide range of languages from around the world that enrich our city's cultural fabric. Now therefore be it proclaimed that the City Council of the City of Port Hueneme does hereby proclaim February 21st, 2026 as International Mother Language Day.

Proclaimed this 17th day of February 2026.

Great thank you for reading that Mayor Pro Tem. We're going to move on to our consent calendar. But before we do that, we want to ask if there are any public comments for a consent calendar?

No public comments.

Great. So these items will be approved in one motion unless the council member has requested remove an item. Are there any items to be removed? If not is there a motion to approve our consent calendar?

Move to approve.

Second. Great, Madam Clerk please take a vote.

All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Hearing none motion passes unanimously.

Great so we're going to

yes madam mayor

great will staff please present the report

Yes, thank you. I'm going to introduce our city engineer Charles Cable to give an overview of the job order contracting and joint powers agreement authority and I'll hand it off to Charles