City Council — February 10, 2026

2021 it's 61% of our students completed in six years. I know it's a two-year college and most individuals don't complete it in two years. It's nationwide. And then you see 63% completed that this is actually the bachelors completion rate so those who go back and transfer to CSU or UC this is their completion time rates. And then look at the finalists. We are doing much better than even the best community colleges in the nation. And the we I'm talking about are our students, members of our community, members of your community as well.

So this is a quick overview of transfer. So I give you a list of our top 10 transfer institutions, but also one of the reasons why we have transferred so many people is that we have something called the Associate Degrees for Transfer. The Associate Degrees for Transfer allows individuals to transfer to a CSU and get guaranteed admission to the institution, not always necessarily to the department but to the institution. And that is an incredible thing.

And when we think about why we have that many, it's because our faculty work with the CSUs to build that pathway from Montpelier College to that institution. Now you see the articulations that we have as well. The other reason why we have a really stellar transfer profile is that we have an honors program that gets students directly into top-ranked universities.

So you see the data point for UCLA there. Three out of five people who apply from Montauk College get into USCLA at first try, this is first try. Aspen Transfer Network, one of things we realized is that a lot of our students apply locally which is wonderful but we have students who could go anywhere in the country And so part of what we've done is we've joined this Transfer Scholars Network, so that for students who want to go to MIT, they want to go Harvard, wherever they want to go that is a selective institution. They get mentoring from that institution before they go and apply. And then there's a process that they are a part of. That process helps prepare them so they're competitive candidates at those institutions.

We also do onsite admission and on-the-spot admission days. So CSUCIs, CLU, those institutions listed there, they come on campus and they accept people right on campus on that day. So when you talk about why we have high transfer rates, that's why. And then we also have events like our Transfer Social, and Lizette works in the Transfer Center and the Career Center as well. So these are the awards, you've heard of them right?

I want to point your attention to the fact that we are consistently being recognized for stellar academic achievements both statewide and nationally. So we do that work in collaboration with the schools and we do this work in collaboration with our businesses, with your businesses. So these are businesses in the city of Simi Valley and organizations in the city of Simi Valley that we work with.

We work with them in terms of partnerships so they take us for internships, we work with them because in some instances they help us build programs together and in some instances we work with them because we utilize them as vendors at our institution. I call attention to this because the theme is how we work together on economic success. This is an example of that.

OK, so it's the programs that we offer that lead to student success. So full-time employment, this is really an opportunity for us to celebrate the work that we do We have more and more students who are earning those degrees that you see there, but the important part of it is that when they finish at Mo Park College they're getting employed. One of the markers of our success is post-graduation success. So they come to the college and they get their degree, what do they do after that? We follow them. We follow them and we ask them how relevant is the degree preparation you received at Montauk College to your life after the institution? Are you still in the same program? Are you still in the same discipline?

Did you get a job in the discipline for which you were trained? And what we hear from those students is that 93% of them say, yes. We are still in that same discipline within which we were trained. This data point also focused on the fact that students are going directly from mobile college into industry. Directly from our intelligence industry, so biotech game design engineering technology. And these are sometimes local companies and sometimes companies across the country who recruit our students to work for that. And then internships we have 227 students who participated in internships last year. We would like to increase it and grow that part of that partnership comes from the reason from the fact that we have funds that we can pay employers to take us.

Which is an incredible thing that we can do. Some of those are in CNSC, Computer Network Systems Engineering. We work with a technical theater which is in the city of Thousand Oaks. We have engineering tech that we work and then we have incredible support from our biotech corridor. And they not only hire our students and our students go directly into work for them as interns but 80% of those students who work as interns get employed full time. It's a fact that we're very proud of. So we asked our students about the internships, and how do they feel about it? What is the value of the internship? And those are some comments in feedback that you get about the value of the internship from our students.

Increased confidence and readiness to enter workforce, hands-on real world experiences. They get to have a better understanding what their expectations of employers are. And so they build professional culture and career pathways in support of their work. And then this reduced anxiety from transitioning from college to employment, which is incredibly important. We have quite a few students who just want to stay at the college and have to go, OK, it's time for you to go now. Go get a job. And we help them do that.

Now so this is our employment outcomes. I point to the entrepreneurship that comes out of certain programs at our college. So our game design program, two of our students have designed games that are now being marketed to big game design companies, right? So those are examples. At the Navy Base of Ventura County, the largest employee in our county, 4,000 of those individuals are Civil Air employees.

They have partnered with us so that they can recruit students directly from our institutions, so those students can then go work for them. And in a couple of instances, they're actually paying those students to come to school at Moorpark College as they saw them through the internship process as being prospects that they would like to keep. We have the same kind of partnerships with Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Bank of America has been an incredible supporter of Mopar College through scholarships, but they're also an incredible supporter of Mopar College through employment of our students and they do recruitment on campus. Wildlife Games is one of the game design companies that are now putting together a game that was designed by one of our students at Moparc College.

So this is some stats that is important for you to note. 83% of a former Moorpark College career education students are fully employed full-time or working in a job related to their field of study. Moorpark College ranks number seven on return on investment by Community College Futures Foundation. Moorpark College students increase their salaries by 37% within a year after leaving the college, There are institutions that never recoup the cost of going to college.

So within a year, that's incredible. Over 300 local employers are engaged in our partnership with the college. You saw some of those that serve the city. And then the spotlight on our nursing program, 100% five-year licensure exam rates. So you go to our program, you take the NCLEX, you pass it, 100%. The same thing with our radiology technology program, 91% five-year average pass rates So what's coming up next at Montauk College, right?

We just got approved on January 23rd for a bachelor's degree in cyber defense network operations. So you all know that the criminals who want to steal your data identity, the ones who break into various businesses and defraud them, we need to address it. The people who do that work I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're doing. And we're not only very proud of the fact that it was approved on the 23rd of January, and as of this fall, we will begin to offer a bachelor's degree in cyber defense network operations. The additional benefit of this is that we're partnering with California State University Channel Islands. They are building a management of cybersecurity program in their business school, and so our students can actually leverage into that or transition into that, and our goal is that they'll also build a master's program, so then if our students want to get the master's degree, they can do that.

All within miles of their homes. The reason why we're pursuing bachelor's degrees is because they are place-bound individuals, and as place-bound individuals often cannot leave. And often we don't want them to leave, we want them to stay in the community. The other thing that's coming up is one we're very proud of, and I've talked to you about the fact that we were in the process of raising funds to build an amphitheater. $60 million takes a while to get and recruit folks who invest in it. So what we've decided to do is to start off with a temporary amphitheater stage. Our foundation purchased a temporary amphitheater stage as of this summer.

late summer, we will begin a summer fall concert series. We're very excited about that. We're excited about it because we'll be partnering with individuals who can bring high quality entertainment to the area and we also hope that we can work with tourism and city agencies so as to promote the cities that we serve so they see us as part of a destination. So that is my presentation. I'm very grateful for you giving me the time to share with you what's going on at Moorpark College. If you do have any questions, I am here to take those questions but I do appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

I think we do have some questions. Mayor Pro Tem Litster?

Thank you Dr. Silken, I so appreciate what you're doing in our community and for in Moorpark College we are really, I know much of the success stems from your leadership. Oh thank you! Thank you, thank you. Just a couple questions, I love your discussion of the internship programs etc., my curiosity is how I'm going back to my college days, that was something I did as a senior.

How does it work in a junior college setting? How does that get set up? Do they have to find something? Do you have an office that does that

for them? Yes. So we have an office that does that and actually they have an online platform. That online platform allows companies to post jobs on our campus. We vet them And then students have exposure to that platform. And then they can apply for positions there. We also have courses that are actually, the students earn credit but they can also then find an employer or we find them an employer and that allows them to have an experience of the workplace environment.

Our goal is to integrate work-based learning into as many of our courses as possible particularly the courses that are happening in their second year of the college or the second-year level courses. Because we know that students who participate in internships, students who have worked with learning opportunities or who are exposed to industry practice and just as the feedback we got, those students are much more successful. And now that we know that they will hire our students and then some instances pay for them to go get bachelor's degrees while they're working for them, we are leaning more into that.

Beautiful. Wonderful. One more, just follow up. This is unrelated. At a presentation recently the Chancellor was talking about some of the plans for housing on some Junior on community colleges is but some of the discussion was that has been the pipe for it to ever take advantage of grants. Is there any of that kind of discussion taking place at Moorpark as

far? Yes, so we received I want to say it was about six years ago was right at the sort of the tail before COVID. We received a planning grant of I wanted to say it was $200,000. Thank you. No more state funding to do that. And so we've been looking at all the other opportunities, the reality of this time is a formal college. We're looking at other ways of partnering. So we looked at partnering with universities in the area so that our students can stay in the student housing there, and to benefit from the experience of actually being on that college campus for the students who want that and who need that.

But we also have resources that help support students who are housed and insecure so we have grants for that and vouchers and other opportunities to do so but at this point in time them funds are not there and so even though we've done the planning... So you've

got the plans if the funds miraculously occur?

Yeah so if we have any public-private partnerships who want to do that work, we have the place on campus. We know where it will go. So that's an opportunity for us as well.

Wonderful thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank You Councilmember Ayala.

Thank you a comment and then a question yes so I love I was visiting as you know the campus a couple months ago as part of the leadership program and one of the Best things I saw was how you guys are so good at breaking down silos and not just saying we're just doing a two year but what happens after. Yes, and the professors we were talking to have relationships with employers in our area.

And as you know, and this is more for the community benefit is They are learning from those employers what skills the students need to know, and then changing the curriculum so that these students actually graduate and are able to be successful at the next step. It's not just a stagnant curriculum. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Can you comment on that?

Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for raising that point yes we are career education programs work with local businesses so each career education program and Robert is the dean of our career education program at the college. Each program has an advisory committee, and that advisory committee consists of members from industry and government et cetera. And these are folks who are working in that area so they help them build curricula. So this is annually there's a meeting where they look at the curriculum and they give input but more importantly there's ongoing dialogue so as things are happening as people read about things And also, our faculty participate in externships where they observe those industry partners and it gives them insight as to what technology they want to integrate into the classroom or what behaviors they want to elicit from students so that they can be successful.

So that's one of the ways in which we continue to do that work and what that work has done is that it's built a pipeline of information From business to the college. So that we can match students when they need to, but that is one robust aspect of the work that we do with the advisory committee.

Is this now the third? This is the second one.

Yes, so we are going to take a little break. The good thing is that actually I should have shared this. The first cohort of our biomanufacturing students are graduating on May 20th. So we're very excited about that. We started with 15 students. I think 14 of them are graduating and I'm very excited by the fact that those people have gotten jobs in Ventura County And they stay. So that's great. And then the second cohort just started last year, and they're continuing. And then the CNSC, the cybersecurity will be recruiting really shortly actually so that we can have a class for

them all. Great update. We always love to hear all the good stuff and it's always good stuff coming out of Moorpark College right? So thank you for being here. Thank you so much.

Council Member Judge.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for that great presentation. It's very exciting the stuff you're doing over there and congratulations on getting that cybersecurity bachelor program because in this day and age it's going to be a very lucrative career for a lot of people. Thank you again for coming here and telling us all about it. Thank you I appreciate it.

City Manager Argybright.

Thank you for coming tonight Dr. Sukunu. I also just wanted to let the council know that one of the initiatives that we've taken on in our recruiting department To increase interest in city careers is reaching out to our local colleges. So Moorpark College, CSUN, Channel Islands and we've already done our day with Moorpark College. We're hoping to do another day this year but our recent day was in October and when we did that we do a tour of city facilities. We talk about city careers and Dr. Sokunu was kind enough to join us for that day to show his support of the program and that partnership with the city so Thank

you so much for hosting our students. They still talk about that experience and you were the first who did it, and so now the other cities in the area are doing it. So thank you.

We like to be a trendsetter, so that's great.

Council Member Rhodes?

Thank you Madam Mayor. You just touched on one of the questions I wanted to ask because I got to see the opening of the lab, the biotech lab. And so that had a relationship with Amgen as a partner. How many of the students would stay here in Venture County but also ended up there.

Yeah, so for the biotech program and for the bachelor's degree program I know that we have about six students who are currently working at Takeda and at Amgen who came out of our program. And they are looking at a pipeline. And that's why we have the baccalaureate degree. And then we have a lot more of that in the associates program. That associates program in the biotech at least has I want to say about 60 students in it. So a good chunk of those people are working

here. I think that's one of the most brilliant things is to go, OK this is what our community needs. This is our hub. Let's offer those classes. That's great. For the students that can't make it to campus, what percentage of that 14,000 enrolled are online

only? Yes, so I'll give you the percentage of our classes that are online and percentage that are on ground. So you get it. So it's 48% of the classes are online and then another 43% of the classes are on ground. And then we have something called hybrids. So the class meets one day and the rest of those are hybrid.

Awesome.

Thank you for the presentation too.

Thank you Dr. Sokinu, I always brag about how great Moorpark College is so you just proved it and gave me more stuff to brag about so we appreciate you being here tonight thank you.

Madam Mayor and members of the City Council,

Good evening Thank You madam mayor councilmembers I appreciate the invitation to come speak and give you some information about LAFCO especially considering that there's some future annexations in your future so I've been asked to provide an introduction and overview to LAFCO, and then also an overview of the city annexation process. And Luis was very clear that I had 15 minutes to do this so I'm going to go pretty quickly, so I apologize.

So part one, I'm going to give a LAFCO introduction and overview. I'm gonna talk about what is LAFCO? Who is LAFCO? What are the purposes of LAFCo? And how does LAFco achieve those purposes? So what is LAFCO? Well, first of all, what does LAFCO stand for? Well it's an acronym for the Local Agency Formation Commission. And that kind of is a misnomer because we very rarely form local agencies. That is one of our duties but it is rare. We mainly focus on boundary changes to cities and districts and then also doing studies.

So there are 58 counties and there's a LAFCO in each county so we have 58 LAFCOs. They exercise jurisdiction over the cities and districts within each county LAFCOs are an independent quasi-legislative agency, so LAFCO decisions are final. They cannot be appealed. There's no body above LAFCO to which the decisions can be appealed. There's no second guessing a LAFCO decision.

And we function as a state agency. We do implement state law. We operate under state law and we do that at the local level meaning in the county. And those authorities come from state law of the government code specifically beginning with section 56000 And the State Court of Appeals has referred to LAFCO as the watchdog that was established by the state legislature to achieve the state's legislature specified purposes.

And this is Cortes and Oxfordsburg, this is the portion of the government code that LAFCO's operated under. I have highlighted one section, I won't read it but that section essentially says that regardless of the laws that you might be operating under if you're a city and even a special district I mean or even a city, LAFCO law takes precedence so LAFCO has sole authority over all boundary changes to cities in special districts formations of new districts, incorporations etc. And I'll touch on all of that here in a minute So who is LAFCO?

Well each LAFCO is different but about half of the the LAFCOs throughout the state are made up like Ventura LAFCO and there are two County Boards of Supervisors on Ventura LAFCO and one supervisor who's an alternate Two City Council members and one alternate Two independent special district board members and one alternate And then a member of the public plus one alternate. So for 2026, the commission is comprised of Supervisor Jeff Garrell and Supervisor Janice Parvin with Supervisor LeVere as the alternate.

For the city council members we have Jenny Crosswhite with the City of Santa Paula and Burt Perrello with City of Oxnard with Susan Santangelo with Camarillo being the alternate For independent special districts, we have Raul Avila with the Cayugas Municipal Water District and Chris Stevens with the Ventura Port District. And the alternate being Mohamed Hassan with United Water Conservation District.

And our public member is Jean Talmadge with Joe Pachowski as the alternate. When commissioners are sitting on the Commission, they must wear what we commonly refer to as the LAFCO hat. And this comes straight out of state law so it says that while serving on the Commission all Commission members shall exercise their independent judgment on behalf of the interests of the residents property owners and the public as a whole in furthering the purposes of this division meaning LAFCO Law Any member appointed on behalf of local government shall represent the interests of the public as a whole and not solely the interest of the appointing authority. So what does this mean in practicality?

Commissioners do not represent the agency upon which they were elected to serve. They do not represent special districts, city or county. You might be a supervisor but when you're on the commission, you're acting as a commissioner, not a supervisor. Commissioners must work on behalf of the interests of residents, property owners and the public as a whole And they must work to further the purposes of LAFCO.

And what are those purposes? Well, they're laid out specifically in LAFCO law. They are to discourage urban sprawl, preserve open space and prime agricultural lands, encourage the efficient provision of government services and encourage orderly formation and development of local agencies based upon local conditions and circumstances. How do we achieve those purposes?

Well, AFCO has oversight over the 10 cities, the 29 independent special districts and the 19 dependent special districts in the county. And what does that oversight consist of? Well we have several primary duties. The primary one is to coordinate the logical and timely jurisdictional boundary changes for the cities and special districts. We establish what are called spheres of influence for all of the cities and special districts We conduct special studies recommending ways to simplify and streamline governmental structure.

We determine or approve the services that special districts are authorized to provide, and we also consider out-of-agency services requests, and I'll touch on each of these briefly. So boundary change types as I mentioned that is what we primarily do is change boundaries for cities and districts and that consists of annexations which is adding area to a city or district and then detachment is just the opposite it's detaching an area from a city or special district We have the formation of new districts, special districts or the dissolution of existing special districts.

Incorporations of new cities or the disincorporation of an existing city and then mergers which are combining two existing special districts into a new district or consolidating a district with a city so that the city takes over those functions. Spheres of influence, I mentioned that LAFCO is responsible for establishing spheres of influence for each city and district. So what is a sphere of influence? Well it's defined in LAFCO law as the probable physical boundaries and service area of a local agency as determined by LAFCO. So LAFCO sets these spheres of influence and basically what it is, it's LAFCo telegraphing to the city or district that the commission anticipates the area within that sphere to become part of that city or district at some point in the future So this is just a map of all of the cities in gray in the county.

The red are the existing spheres of influence, so everything within that red that's not gray, that's unincorporated county area that the commission does anticipate becoming part of that city at some point in the future. And this is the sphere of influence and the city boundaries for Simi Valley. The yellow is the city boundaries, and the red outline is the sphere of influence again. Everything in white is unincorporated county that is anticipated to become part of Simi Valley at some point in the future.

I mentioned that we do studies. This is something that every five years, we do have to review the sphere of influence for the senior district and when needed, we prepare a municipal service review which is a comprehensive study to determine the adequacy of governmental services being provided by the local agency that's subject to LAFCO jurisdiction. We are required to do this whenever we wanna update a sphere of influence, meaning expand it, make it larger or to establish a new sphere of influence.

So what do we study when we do an MSR? We do growth in population, adequacy of the current and future public services and infrastructure needs, financial ability of the agency to provide services, opportunities for shared facilities, and accountability, governmental structure, and operational efficiency. So we need to do a deep dive into all this before we expand the future service area of a city or district. That's the intent of the MSRs.

Other LAFCO duties which I won't go in, as I mentioned we do determine or approve the services that special districts are authorized to provide. A district can't just go out and start providing services they have to get LAFCO authorization to do that. And then we consider circumstances where it might be necessary for an agency to extend services outside their boundaries.

Okay that was a really quick overview of LAFCO there's a lot more detail so if you have any further questions feel free to contact me afterward or in the office So part two, this is specific to the annexation process of a city. And this is what is the typical the process that will typically be followed to accommodate some type of development? And this is nine times out of 10 in the process. There are some differences, but I won't go into those.

So I'm going to start with what's the what are the city obligations to initiate an annexation? LAFCO doesn't have the authority to initiate an annexation that has to come from a city or or a district. There's a different process that can be initiated by petition but that has never occurred in Ventura County, though it might in the future here soon. So city obligations to initiate an annexation and then we'll talk about the LAFCO annexation process once initiated.

So what are the city obligations to initiate? Well, the first is that the city has to approve any land use or development entitlements. Any subdivisions that might be required anything like that a specific plan it's up to the city to approve that first most likely it'll have it'll be an action by the City Council so as part of that the city would have to conduct CEQA review environmental impact report or what-have-you LAFCO of course would be involved as a responsible agency so LAFCO would be part of that process from you know the city's process from early on The city would also need to amend the general plan if necessary and also adopt a pre-zone for the affected territory. And what a pre zone is, it's required under LAFCO law and it's the zoning that will become effective should the annexation come to fruition.

Then the City Council must adopt a resolution of application so this is specific. The contents are specific in LAFCO law and it basically authorizes the city to submit an application to LAFCO And then the city prepares the application for submittal to LAFCO. So you'll notice here that the LAFCO process comes at the very end of the development process, all of the approvals everything conditions of approval mitigation measures, all of that has to be done up front before it comes to LAFCo.

And then that begins the LAFCo process so there are six steps in this process. There's the application to LAFO, the LAFO review, the commission consideration, reconsideration if approved a protest process, if no reconsiderations filed. And then there's the final step is the recordation of the certificate of completion which finalizes the annexation. So application to LAFCO.

Once we receive an application, we have 30 days to deem it complete so we have a specific list of the contents of a complete application We have 30 days to review it, to make sure we have everything. If we don't, we inform the city or the district—well, the city in this case—of what is needed to make it complete. We notify the applicant and then they have 90 days to provide that information. If we don't get it within 90 days, we stop the whole process and send the application back.

If it is complete, we issue what's called a Certificate of Filing and that begins the formal review for LAFCO. So the LAFCO staff review, what does this entail? Well we will consult with all of the affected agencies. An affected agency is any agency whose boundary or sphere of influence incorporates that area that's gonna be annexed or any agency that provides a service or any agency that might be affected and we do this very broadly.

The commission is required to consider any comments that are provided by these agencies We will review all of the services that are going to be provided by that city to the new area, including the level of service and the method of service delivery. And this is where those MSRs do come in handy because we would have done a whole lot of that if the MSR's are up-to-date.

We'll look at the cost for the services and then the funding for the services. Again, this is all information that is going to be submitted by the city. And then we will review it for consistency with the LAFCO laws and the applicable local policies. Okay, following that, we're going to schedule it for consideration by the Commission at a public hearing. The Commission has three options after we've made the presentation and our recommendation. The Commission can continue the matter to another future meeting The commission can approve with or without amendment wholly, partially or conditionally. So the commission actually has the authority to say we're only going to approve part of that annexation that you want or we're actually going to approve a larger annexation than what you want as proposed or as often the case with conditions.

And the other option is that the commission can disapprove. And as I said, there's no appeal for either of these. Now should the commission approve it, which is usually the case, it goes into what's called reconsideration. So this is a 30-day period in which anyone can file a request for the commission to reconsider its approval. The bar is really high. It involves information that wasn't known or knowable at the time the commission made their decision But if we do get one and it meets that bar, then the entire process stops. And now we have to go through the reconsideration process, review that, schedule that for a public hearing.

It's really rare that happens but we do have to wait 30 days. If there was no reconsideration or following the reconsideration process, we go into what is called the protest process. This is usually 30 up to 60 days, depending on the size and number of property owner and registered voters. It's a period where those register voters and or property owners within the territory that's going to be annexed may file written protests against the commission's approval.

Following that 30 or 60 day period, it'll culminate in a public hearing. We can accept the protests, the written protests up until that the public hearing is closed and then we start counting if we can. If there's too many to count, we continue and schedule us another public hearing So if there is greater than 50 percent protest, meaning if more than 50 percent of the voters or property owners meeting specific criteria submit written protests, then the proposal's terminated. It just ceases. It's over.