 Hi everyone. Thank you for joining and being a little early or right on time. I appreciate it. Let's give it another minute or two. I like to wait for more people to show up before we begin. Usually people are a little late so let's just pause for another couple minutes. Thanks. I don't know if bike bike is happening this year. I'm not sure. I would assume cancelled or rescheduled. Anybody know? You're really cool to see a virtual. Thanks again for everyone joining on time. I'm expecting at least another handful or so participants to join. So let's give it one more minute before we begin. Thanks for your patience and for being on time. We're still gonna end at two so no worries on that. I've seen a couple more join. Just do me a favor as well as I think as we all know with this new world of Zoom. If you're not speaking and I didn't put the restrictions on just go ahead and mute yourself just to make sure we don't have any background noise when folks are talking or are distracted. So thank you for doing that ahead of time. And we'll get started in about 30 seconds or so. All right. I don't see anybody else joining at this point and they're just gonna be a little late. That's okay. So let's get started. Thank you everyone for joining. This has been a meeting that's been in progress for a couple months after being in touch with many of you being this started. So really appreciate you being patient waiting for this and still being interested in involved in shaping it. So really appreciate that. Just to start let me get my notes up here. I'm Jared Sanchez if you don't know me. I'm a senior policy advocate at the California Bioschool Coalition also known as Cal Bike. And I've been here for several years and have been involved a little bit here and there around community bike shops or bike kitchens or whatever you want to call them. And I'm really excited that you all are here. Appreciate that there's enough interest for folks to uplift and continue to think and work on these issues. And I appreciate of course all the different shops across the state and of course across the world just mentioned a bike bike there in terms of really having a resource for different populations who either don't have the means or access to either paying for services and also creating wonderful community spaces in many different parts of the state which is what I see community bikes bring into fruition. So I think you all for joining and being involved in creating that. I would love to talk more after this on different levels around how bike can be helpful how the state of California can be helpful. And of course you know anyway that we can uplift the work that you're all doing and all the expertise you bring. So I really appreciate that. Let's start off with review of the agenda really quick. I see a few folks in there if you can to be helpful to have it open on your screen because I added a couple of links at the bottom which I'll talk about in a second. But again so this conversation which really is just a conversation is scheduled for two hours. We're gonna start off just with a quick welcome which I'm beginning right now. After that we'll do very short introductions of everyone on the call. It'll be very brief just name where you're at what shop you're working at or associated with. From there we'll jump into the first meaty part of the conversation which is around funding opportunities for bike shops during COVID and beyond. In a great way Lori Waters from the California Transportation Commission is on and will be presenting on that topic. There'll be some Q&A around that that would love to have some just general conversation and questions from folks. Really a free for all for all of us here to learn from each other and to also share the knowledge that we all have around funding or lack thereof. After that which Lori needs to depart we're gonna move on to the COVID pandemic and the impact on community bike shops. This is coming from a lot of federal state and local guidance on participating or opening up safely operating safely during this time. The community bike shops are very hands-on space to be involved in and I would love to go over some few key documents through my research that I found but then I would also love to hear from you all doing the work. Being involved in some of the best practices you have and sharing it with others. Unfortunately I tried very hard to get California Public Health Department various local public health departments and even some epidemiologists themselves and nobody was able to confirm with me. So we're gonna move on through the way I designed here but I certainly have been talking with different folks so if there's any outstanding questions that I can answer or that we can't answer ourselves I can certainly find the right context that we can go to to get more specific answers on that. So just wanted to sum that up and then I left just 15 minutes for just open discussion whether we want to talk about more funding or more operations during the pandemic or just generally around community bike shops around California. I've heard from several of you that there really isn't a space in California for community bike shops to converse with each other, organize, think and really coordinate. So I just wanted to open that up and see if there's any other open discussion we might have and in the end just a quick conclusion to wrap up. I just want to note one thing I add to the agenda just now on the second page of the agenda are some important links I'll be sharing and talking about some documents in the second half of this conversation. So go ahead and look at the agenda to click on those links to open them on your computer. I'll most likely put them in the chat box over here as well in Zoom just to make sure we're all on the same page and I'll be referring to these specific documents and talking through them through that stage so it'll be important that you if you want to look along as well and explore those while we're talking. So again that's on the second page of the agenda those important links. So let's go ahead and get started. Well first let me ask maybe just some head nods and feel free to use the hand raised tool in Zoom. Is that agenda sound good for everyone for the next two hours or so? Great thumbs up sign is good too. Perfect. Great and Steve I see your hand raised is that a question or okay great just means good all right. All right let's move forward with introductions I think the best way to do this rather than just calling on people I like going across scanning the state maybe just from South to North where you're located all call-out counties or regions and then there might be several from the same area just you know be kind to another and just you know kind of speak over folks and just I'm looking just for you know your name your association with the community bike shop or not or some other agency and I think that'd be good for now just to keep it down to time so let's go ahead and start let's start from the south. Do we have anybody from San Diego County on the call? All right I thought there was something to be joining but maybe they'll join soon. How about just north in Orange County anybody from Orange County? All right I should have started more broad let's go with LA County I know it's got to be a few in LA County. Hi my name is Danny I'm with Healthy Active Streets and we're based out of Long Beach but we do regional work throughout Southern California. Hi I'm Dave Poyeroy everybody calls me Poy and I'm associated with Bicrowave which is in the west side of Los Angeles County in Los Angeles proper. I'm on the board of directors and have been a volunteer at that shop for six years. I'm Jane also with Bicrowave also on the board along with Poy and Rachel Horn who's here as well. Hey I'm Rachel also on the board also part of Bicrowave been involved for about seven years at that shop. Rachel you have no video. Thank you yeah. My name is Peter Choi from Bicycle Kitchen in LA. We're located on the eastern side sort of east Hollywood. I'm aboard there. I also have another cook from there named Gabriel but he can't really participate he's only listening in because he's at work right now. Thank you. Thank you anybody else from LA County? All right let's move just east the Inland Valley or Inland Empire out in Riverside or San Bernardino counties. Let's go up on the central coast maybe Ventura area. Hi I'm Zooey from the Bicycle Club in Ventura. Yes good to be here excited. Well I don't think your microphone's working Joey but is that just me? Okay this is Joey also from Bicentura. Sorry. No problem thank you. How about us Santa Barbara? I'm from Santa Barbara. I'm Heather Deutsch. Can you hear me? I'm Heather Deutsch the new executive director for the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition and we represent three well two real bike shops, PC Centro in Santa Barbara and Santa Maria and sort of a bike shed at the Santa Barbara City College and I have some of our shop managers are going to be in and out listening. Great. How about anybody else along the the central coast up to let's say Santa Cruz area? Anybody on the line? So Jared Rick Ellison executive director of Bicycle County and Gary is hitting his mute button. Gary have us. Board President Bikeslow County we have the bike kitchen in downtown San Luis Obispo. Wonderful thank you. Let's move inland. Do we have anybody from the Central Valley? Anywhere from Kern to Stockton. Hey guys my name's Asha I'm with bike Bakersfield and beautiful downtown Bakersfield. Nice to meet you all. Great. Let's I think that's it from the Central Valley. Let's go to the Bay Area maybe starting off on South Bay, San Jose area. Hey I'm Andrew Yee. I'm from the Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange. We are in Palo Alto and we serve Santa Clara and San Mateo County. Happy to be here. Hey everyone this is Steve. I'm from the San Jose bike clinic in downtown San Jose. Great. How about anybody from Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco counties? Hey everyone. Sorry one second. This is Benji from the Bikery along with my co-workers Andrea, Taj, and Ken and we're all listening in from Oakland California at the Bikery. Hello. This is Diana from Biketopia Community Workshop. We're based in Berkeley. We serve the general Bay area and I'm the only volunteer joining today. Great. Thank you. Anybody else from the Bay Area? You need the onion, paper, flavor once. Remember just go ahead and mute yourselves if you're not talking at this time so we don't pick up any background noise or embarrassing stories or anything like that. So I appreciate it. How about Sacramento area? Anybody from Sacramento? I'm Howard from the Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen. I'm wearing a wet sack shirt but I live in Davis and I volunteer at the Davis Bike Collective. My name is Robert. I'm from Sacramento Bike Kitchen. Great. And I hate to do this but everybody north of Sacramento, north of the Bay, it's a big area but less are populated. Anybody from Northern California here? All right. And then anybody I missed or who joined late? We want to go ahead and just introduce who you are and we're associated. I came in a bit late. I'm with Rick and Gary. I manage the Bike Kitchen in San Luis Obispo. I'm Dan. Hello. Hi. I'm Sylvie. I'm with the Sandy O'Connor Bicycle Coalition but I'm also with Bikes Del Pueblo in San Diego. Great. Is that it for everyone? Thank you for everyone introducing themselves and yeah I'm just super excited to see everyone here and I know that's such a good presence across the state where you all are working. I forgot to mention Dave Snyder, the Executive Director for Cal Bike is also on. So Dave you want to give a welcome as well? Yeah I just want to welcome everybody and express my gratitude for all the work that you do in your communities. One of the reasons why we support community bike shops are doing this to try to help is that we think that the kind of principle that public health has about food deserts ought to apply to bike shops in public health and economic justice work. There's a knowledge that a lot of neighborhoods don't have good grocery stores, good places where you can get healthy food. There's only corner stores and unhealthy food and those food deserts that need to be fixed. The same similar idea ought to apply to bike shops. Every neighborhood needs a bike shop. If your bike is broken you can't ride it to go get it fixed. So you all serve a lot of bike shop deserts and I pass along my gratitude to you for that and I hope this is helpful. Yes to all that I definitely hope this is helpful for you all and then definitely I look forward to future conversations as well which I'm sure we'll get into later. Let me just set out a little background first before we get it into the presentation from Laurie Waters from the CDC around funding. As most of you know a lot of this this conversation was sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic early on in March at least here in the US. Due to that as we saw the bicycle kind of I guess re-emerge or emerges again as being as a vehicle kind of best suited to getting around the area as folks are we're avoiding transit or other enclosed spaces such as cars or car share bicycles really hit a boom again and I think that's still true today and from that that conversation and just what people were doing on the ground Cal bike thought we'd be help facilitate that so a big part of what we did which is wrote Laura McKinney who is a consultant with Cal bike really close associate with Cal bike led up a study slash article interviewing several different bike shops and then volunteers and workers from those shops to see how they're working through the pandemic and around issues of COVID or around funding or around challenges and also just lifting up some of the great things you all do as well so I hope you had a chance to read that article it came out I think in March or April and there's a few of you on the call that were helped greatly being interviewees and you know shedding light on all the work you're doing there so out of that article were a few kind of next steps that we gave ourselves the three top ones were around awareness government support specifically around best practices for operating during COVID and then any funding opportunities that would be helpful for the various kind of smaller bike kitchens and bike shops so the next step was to really facilitate a conversation among you all and that's where we are today on this kind of lifting up the awareness which we've been doing through our Cal bike report and other channels and then having conversation again around best practices for COVID and then funding so I had been communicating with few key interviewees in San Jose, LA, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, San Diego to really form this conversation and see would be most helpful and that's where we are I just want to note real quick I'm sure I'll say this later I'm just a facilitator for this conversation I'm certainly not an expert on a lot of the topics will be discussing so I really would love to hear really participatory conversation among you all around navigating during these times whether it's funding or best practices or you know whatever else comes up through this conversation so I just wanted to to make note there that I'm certainly not an expert on any of these issues and love just to have a general conversation about it so with that let's go ahead and start with part two or three of the agenda here and around the funding opportunities and to do that we'll start with Laurie waters from California Transportation Commission go ahead Laurie okay thank you Jared so my name is Laurie waters and I am the program manager for the active transportation program at the California Transportation Commission so the California Transportation Commission is not the same as Caltrans we're a different agency but we work very closely with Caltrans on this program so I'm located in Sacramento and actually Beverly Newman Burkhardt she's going to take herself out video for just a second she also works on the program so just so you have another face hi Beverly so anyway I'm kind of surprised because I actually recognize some of your names so that's good and you you might be wondering why I would be on this agenda and first of all I really want to thank Jared for including us because we work a lot we work a lot with David Jared and that's great we work a lot with other state-level organizations however I think we would like to work more at more local and regional and community levels too so what I wanted to do today is I have a brief PowerPoint that's about the program just so you know what it what it is but then I just wanted to talk to you more about where how you could be involved what opportunities that there are for you to be involved and and then answer any questions and so we don't provide funding directly to bike shops but as you know the facilities and the programs have to be there for people to ride their bikes and I think that our program is probably the main funding source for active transportation projects in the state and it's just going to be more and more important because I don't think what's happening now with people working at home and and the current situation I don't think we're ever going to go back to the way things are and I know I ride my bike a lot more now and I think that's going to be the case for everyone so so that's my introduction so I'm going to go over the PowerPoint and see if I can figure out how to share my screen okay did I do it Jared yep looks good Lori okay okay so we are in what the fifth cycle of our funding we call it the 2021 active transportation program and I'm gonna go through these fast and then we Jared can send them out but I just wanted to be very brief on this overview these are the goals by statute of the program increase walking on biking increase safety help regional agencies meet their SB 375 goals enhance public health ensure disadvantaged communities fully share in the benefits of the program and provide a broad spectrum of projects okay the the program is a competitive funding program and that means that agencies and other entities and I'll get to that who can apply in a minute here they submit applications to the program at the beginning of each cycle and then those are evaluated by evaluators and given a score and then we fund the highest scoring project up to the level of funding that we have and it's broken down into three different funding components which I'm not going to go into too much if anybody wants to ask me about that they can and then the one statutory requirement we have in terms of where the funding has to go is that a minimum of 25% of the funds in all of the three components must benefit disadvantaged communities okay and these are the eligible applicants unlike a lot of other funding programs we have a lot of eligible applicants any local regional or state agency can apply that means any city county health department school district they are all eligible applicants Cal Trans can apply transit agencies can apply a transit agency might apply if they were wanting a safe rest to transit project a natural resource or public land agency can apply because they might own a facility that they want to do a project on public schools or school districts tribal governments and private nonprofits can apply only for the recreational trail funding we a small portion of the funds are specifically for recreational trails and private nonprofits can apply for those sorry okay eligible applicants we fund infrastructure projects that is anything from bike networks to sidewalks intersection improvements anything that's infrastructure we do fund plans plans need to be benefited disadvantaged community those are active transportation plans but they could be more specifically a bike plan or pedestrian plan or a just a general active transportation plan and then we also fund non-infrastructure projects those are programs that educate people different kinds of people on how to use facilities a lot of them are safe routes to school programs but they can be different kinds of programs we we funded safe routes to seniors programs things like that their education programs and then we fund projects that are a combination of both infrastructure projects with non-infrastructure components okay they are broken down into various types we from large medium and small infrastructure and then non-infrastructure and plans every cycle we have about 450 million available each cycle that's every two years and then and we do every two years we do a new four-year cycle so the last two years overlap with the first two years of the of the next cycle so far we've programmed over 800 projects most of those do provide benefits to disadvantaged communities we so far we have a very good delivery rate and all of the projects from the first cycle are either complete or under construction so this is just very brief on some of the program challenges the program is very oversubscribed we we only last cycle we were only able to fund about a quarter of the ask that we got and which is actually even less than our first cycles the funding requests are getting larger this is a challenge and an opportunity the good thing about it is is that means we're getting more projects that can have more of a transformative benefit on a community the downside to it is because they they're so much larger in terms of funding requests the funds don't spread around as much the program funds all project phases that does probably doesn't mean a lot to you but it's because we fund from the start of a project to meeting the environmental phase all the way to construction and a big challenge we've had that we've been working on is how do we measure the performance of the program this gets asked a lot by legislators and we need to be able to answer that question so we can continue getting the funding and it helps people like Dave and Jared tried to get us more money money for the program we also have an actor transportation resource center this is run by Caltrans but the program provides funding to it and it provides resources and technical assistance to partners across California we have a mailing list and then various kinds of trains and things like that it's it's a very helpful resource and then these are the commission staff who works on the program me a leak of changiji and then Beverly Newman Burkhart so that's a very brief overview of the program so I would so right now I just wanted to briefly tell you how community members and bike shop owners like you can get involved and it's really important because you know best what your community needs so the ways that you can be involved are with your local agency make sure that they are applying for the projects that the community wants and needs and help them plan that project and then also you can get involved at the state level you can be part of the process as we develop the program every cycle meaning that you can be involved in the guidelines process either directly anybody can be involved in our process you can attend workshops or you can get information through Jared and Dave that's another way to but even though we are a state agency these projects are so community driven and so community focused it's really important that all of you are involved in that we're not just hearing from other agency people all the time because I'll tell you that's who is mostly involved and like I said I think some of you actually I have either met or you attended a workshop or something in the past the other thing is that we use volunteer evaluators when we evaluate the projects this is probably very different from other grant programs the reason that we do that is because we get so many applications we need a lot of people to help us get through them but also because we feel like the ATP is it's not our program it's all of our program so we'd like to have as many people that care about it as involved as they can be so we already have our evaluators for this cycle although Beverly always likes getting more alternates just to make her feel better to know we have plenty of people there for evaluating and but then keep in mind about this for next cycle to that we always need people to evaluate and it's it's really good way to learn about the different kinds of active transportation projects that are going on in the state and it just helps us a lot sorry that's my dog so I want to stop now because I really want to hear from you to see if you have questions for me and then I also wanted to make sure that I told you that I sent to Jared a kind of a nice it's a nice table of all of the funding opportunities for active transportation projects in the state I think it's a very useful way for everyone to know the different funding sources that are out there so Jared is that okay if I stop now and just take questions or whatever whatever you want definitely and before we do that I just want to pull up I just shared my screen hopefully you all can see it I just shared my screen for the document that Laurie shared with me in terms of different funding programs across the state and how they may apply to bike elements and there's a variety of programs here that I'm familiar with some of you also might be familiar with the big one here is the office and traffic safety grant program but there's other programs that can fund bikes and bike elements and I'm gonna put I'm gonna stop sharing I'm gonna put the link in the chat box for you check that out and thank you very much Laurie for your presentation let's go ahead and start off with just any questions that folks may have for Laurie and then after we go through all the questions if there's no longer I kind of want to just open it up for kind of general discussion around funding so first questions for Laurie and you know it'd be helpful it's to raise your raise your hand tool and I can develop a cue over here and go ahead and do that way so I see a first couple hands let's first go with poy you want to go yeah Laurie a microwave is organized a little bit is not exactly a public non private non-profit we are organized as a not-for-profit business so it's at some point somewhere buried in the paperwork even though we operate as a non-profit and get donations without giving tax receipts we are not a non-profit classically so I know I have two other members of the board on with me so just for the self-interest of our particular bike co-op is there anything that we would be eligible to by eligible for so this is what I would say I think that you can partner with somebody who's eligible I think that would be the best way for you because I'm going to be totally honest about something even though nonprofits are eligible for those rec trails funding the problem is anyone that gets funded has to be able to enter into a master agreement with Caltrans and the few non-profits that have been successful have not been able to get those master agreements it's really really difficult so I would say in that you're a better way for is for you to partner with somebody who already has the master agreement with Caltrans so that would be a city or school district or a health department something like that okay thank you I'm complete great any other questions I thought I saw your hand up do you have questions do take in so um Laurie my question was I saw that nonprofits can apply for trails but that's very limited because there are zero trails near Long Beach and LA why is that why is it only applicable to trails I was wondering if you knew why so I think it might be in legislation but it's also because of it has to be generally our applicants are or are is an agency that owns the facility or like in the case of like a school district they would be applying for a program so that's why that's that's the limits of the eligible applicant does that make sense not sure if I answered that right no I don't think you answered the question actually so okay why why would nonprofits be applicable only for trails why can't they just be applicable for something within a city so it's only for trails because that is in legislation that's I know that so and there's there is this record recreational trails not a funding which I can't remember how much of our how much it is I don't know if I really you you probably don't remember either it's not very much it's only a couple million and it's split between our program and parks they also have a recreational trail program but that that is it's a specific funding source that has that in their legislation private nonprofits are eligible that sounds similar to like a case we have here in Long Beach we have the Port of LA but the Port of Long Beach can only support the Cerritos wetlands with it's what are they called the funds that they want to like help the environment or whatever the Cerritos wetlands are located opposite to Long Beach it's actually closer to Orange County than it is to LA County but um Jared it sounds like an opportunity for us to like look at that legislation thanks really great thanks Danny I see a right hand raised Gary you want to go next I think you can finally make the phone do what I want it to do Gary had the spikes low county San Luis Obispo on behalf of another organization that I am friendly with and left playing around with because they do such good work is the Central Coast Concern mountain biking group and they do trails in our local open spaces and when the state parks are open they do trails in the state parks is there anything I can pass along to them and their group because they're doing mountain biking trails and cooperating with hikers and equestrians anything I can pass along to them from this from this discussion yeah so what I'll tell you is that this is probably the number one point I can tell you with projects like that the the program is extremely competitive as I said so while projects that are recreational focus can compete the more that you can show that a project is serving a diverse function the better it's gonna do meaning if not only is it recreational trail it's also gonna get people somewhere that they need to go that that will make it much much more successful is that there do you have anything else that you can add to that no that's good thank you yeah and like I said I think so we I know some of the bike coalitions work with local agencies on their projects and the more that that you can do that the better projects that you'll see the projects that you want not not the projects that somebody else thinks that you want great thank you Joey I see your hand raised want to go next Joey sure is everyone able to hear me yeah thanks Laurie for your presentation so looking at some of these applications and having some experience with them they're all pretty cumbersome to begin with and a lot of these bike shops community bike shops are like small and maybe don't have the capacity to fill out something like an ATP I mean maybe supporting them but I noticed a lot of like the non-infrastructure and like encouragement programs I think encouragement is probably the closest thing that you would vile I guess a community bike shop under but most I think the traditional what's seen as like an encouraged program encouragement program is like a lot of youth programming which is great but what can we do to like really get community bike shops included and recognized as a really important part of the encouragement aspect of some of these grants because I think that some you know it's not something that many people really know about or realize is being so vital to at the very least encouraging I think is kind of a weak word for it but promoting that active transportation so I think what and you're kind of mentioned this maybe and that now I think I'm understanding it better now too so so is it is it possible that bike shops actually could do non infrastructure program that that's what I'm hearing right okay well yeah a community bike shop and itself like is an encouraged program outside of the traditional bike shop I think right and just to be just to clarify a little bit Lori yeah definitely different than just your standard retail shop it's more of like a hands-on teach folks how to work on their bikes and then very much more community driven so okay so so now to do that if if a community bike group was to be an applicant I think that would require legislation change I think because I don't think you would be you could apply on your own you could apply jointly with maybe a health department or a school district or something like that so that would be the first thing and then I think we would have to look at probably our guidelines and just to make sure that there aren't other obstacles but this is actually a very interesting issue that I hadn't thought about and I probably need Jared's help on that to see if if we could broaden that eligibility for non-infrastructure projects and to address your first part about the application process it is it is a difficult application it's but particularly it is for large infrastructure project that the non-infrastructure application is screen so before it used to be everybody filled out the same application and it was very difficult for non-infrastructure projects and plans to fill out the application because it was more suited to infrastructure now we have an application that is specifically for non-infrastructure and specifically for plan and we're always working on those to streamline them if we can so that is another way that you could be involved to help us if we need to keep working on those applications make them accessible to anyone. Thank you Laurie yeah that's a question I was gonna ask as well and yeah I think there's further work needed there to to make it more accessible because yeah this is a specific subgroup of the bike community that yeah traditionally either doesn't have the resources or access to a lot of state funding so it's a difficult question and yeah moving a lot millions of dollars is a is a very cumbersome process so it's going to be difficult but I do think it's something that we could explore a little bit more and see what see if there's more we can do and one of I didn't mention this but this cycle we're trying a pilot program for quick builds and and we're doing that and it's we'll see how it goes and we're learning a lot what we're going to be releasing our recommendations for those soon but I think there's interest in us doing other kinds of pilots too it helps us if there's something that we want to try out but there's a lot of questions that we still have if we can do it as a pilot that helps because then we we don't get in too deep right away just in case there's things that we can't figure out so if that's another thing if there's if there's a some kind of a pilot that we can do we can think about that too for next cycle yeah thanks Laurie I see a couple more hands raised here so the next one I saw was Stanley Stanley you ready for your question I'm going to help price I'm watching with my husband Stanley price and a few years back I was an evaluator on the active for the active transportation program and a question I have is about eligibility of facilities that are closed at night for example and at that time there were applications that were closed at night or had limited hours that wouldn't really serve particularly people from disadvantaged communities and I'm wondering if that's been adjusted to consider that the facility function as a transportation facility that it's a 24-hour all-weather type facility so I'm not sure I totally understand the question is it I don't think I understand it, Jerry can you help me sorry I was preoccupied you want to kind of restate it okay I'm I'm wondering for active transportation program facilities is there an expectation if there being if the application is putting them forward as a transportation facility versus a strictly recreational facility that they be a 24-hour all-weather type facility at least comparable to our roads so that people particularly people in disadvantaged communities who don't have other options if they're relying on say bicycling to and from work that it be available to them I don't know if we I have to look to see if we ask specifically about that but if that if that's something that needs to be addressed we could make sure that that's that we think about that for the guidelines and then and the application for the next cycle great um I see one more hand raised um Asha do you want to go next did you have thanks I was also sorry I have a little background I was I was also an evaluator a couple years ago with the ATP program and one thing I noticed is the the scoring rubric for the non-infrastructure programs it seemed really hard for education and encouragement programs unless they had some sort of public agency backing it seemed hard for them to score high enough to even be funded so I wanted to know if I haven't specifically looked at this year's this cycle scoring rubric but I wanted to know if there were changes to kind of allow more flexibility in what scores high because for us like leading education and encouragement programs will indirectly you know decrease the vehicle miles traveled but it's hard to quantify that you know in a smart cycling class or a community-led ride through a neighborhood specifically and also a second question I have is are is would there be a benefit in combining the planning and non-infrastructure applications because I think having the non-infrastructure projects brings more community residents into the world of active transportation and could improve on the plans being developed so Asha what what cycle did you evaluate I believe it was cycle three or four I can't remember it was a 2017 2016 okay that was cycle three so okay yeah so like I mentioned since since then in the last cycle cycle four in this cycle we broke out the non-infrastructure and plans as their own specific applications with their own specific scoring rubrics so my short answer to that is yes we we have addressed that to the extent that we could right now and we did notice last cycle non-infrastructure and plans were more successful so I think that helped we and I think that we need to continue working on particularly the non-infrastructure application and the scoring rubrics to make sure that we're getting those right but but yeah but that you are correct that was an issue before the last cycle and then I knew this was gonna happen forgot your other question it was about getting pairing non-infrastructure programs with planning programs to get better resident feedback okay so right now plans and non-infrastructure cannot be combined and there's a reason why but I will be totally honest I don't remember right now I'm not sure and it could be I don't know if that's in legislation or if there's another reason it it might be because it's the way that they are delivered I think it might be difficult to combine those two but but I have to get I have to get a better answer on that okay thank you thanks so Lori's only with us for another five minutes is there any other questions specifically for Lori or her presentation okay good and then you saw Lori's contact information go ahead yeah email her directly I'm sure she would be very responsive she is to me always to any questions you may have further with the remaining time and we don't have a lot of time before I move on to the COVID-19 discussion but I in a few conversations I've had with a few of you either as a group or individually I yes thank you Lori for for all joining us and and all that and feel free to leave I know you have to leave in a couple of minutes so feel free just to jump off but thank you and I'll be following up as far as other funding opportunities and I shared that PDF that sheet of things that are applicable some of them are really far out of reach like you really need to be dialed in to some of these programs and be paid to be a paid advocate like myself to really get involved to understand some of the details of that and that's something I can further do if folks are interested but what I'm interested in maybe we can extend this for the next five or ten minutes is hearing from you all about funding opportunities that either you've received or sought after or that you've heard of or had questions on and there's one thing that came to my mind that was a great example and Sylvie from San Diego was on earlier and I hope you're still on Sylvie if not I can best summarize this but Sylvie was great you were talking about an OTS grant and the process of that is okay to just share very briefly maybe in a couple of minutes about how that worked out for you what the process was and maybe others can kind of chime in as well around that if they have any experience with it is that okay to put you on the spot right now yeah that's all good great so I actually when I came to the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition we had an existing OTS grant so someone else had made a good partnership with OTS and then through them the San Diego police and so we get subcontracted as you know a legal nonprofit that by coalition to kind of help fulfill the OTS grant that the police get so I think you know kind of what Lori was talking about is that a lot of how like little nonprofits and even like community bike shops get the funding effectively is by building great partnerships with places like Cal bike in the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition because what we'll end up doing at the bike coalition is we'll then subcontract you know places like Bikesville the community bike shop but I'm also at and we'll ask them to help us fulfill the grant so thankfully you know that I think the all of like the heavy lifting of applying to grant which is so tedious and like also takes some level of skill can be done by a different organization and if you can find out who it is that's applying to those and then come in and like you know offer something that they can't do and I think community bike shops usually have a totally different reach than some of the bike coalitions and you know local nonprofits that would be getting these grants that's one of the best ways to go about accessing something like the OTS funds. Let me know if you have any questions about that that was it's yeah it's pretty simple on the end of the bike collective just because it's just about finding those people that already have the funding or can you bring them to get the funding with you? Absolutely and yeah thank you for for explaining that Sylvia I guess though the other piece that I was curious about that you could share and you shared with a couple of us already a couple months ago was the specific like OTS scan from the San Diego Police Department I think this is a key thing to bring up now especially in terms of where we are with George Floyd and all of the racial justice work going on. Are you able to explain in a couple of minutes about how that process worked with OTS the police department and how the bike shop was able to get funds for that? Yeah I think I saw I mean do you mean in the context of like the challenges now of being allied with the police and the work we do? More about how that worked and like how you were able to either I forget what the story was whether you yeah connected with them or yes somehow received funding it was a really great story and maybe I shouldn't have brought it up and put you on the spot but I don't know if there's something more to add. Yeah again you know this is the grant that the bike coalition got before I was involved in them so I was just kind of passed down the existing contacts they had but my sense that is you know we've reached out to the police department and I looked at the OTS grant with them and the police have decided that they wanted to do a lot of outreach and engagement but they didn't have a way to do that specifically with bicycles they wanted to focus just on kind of pedestrian traffic safety so some combination of us saying is what we can offer and then saying this is the gap we have it needs to be filled we're able to come up with a way to like build a program that accomplish the bike side of the you know traffic safety they've been hoping to implement through education. So is that what you mean kind of? Yeah exactly and you know what that's the key point is that and I didn't mention it those familiar with those OTS grants only specific agencies are eligible to receive those so in this case I think it was the police department that received it I think that's probably the case across the state and in that example they didn't really have the connections or you know wherewithal or knowledge about how to implement that so there was you know a variety of community bike shops and the one in San Diego was able to connect with them and do that work so this kind of connects to other work that Cal bike is working on in terms of you know thinking about you know diverting funds that should be going directly to community bike shops and not other agencies who you know may not know what they're doing in that space so I think that example that thank you very much Sylvie for for trying to lift up after putting you on the spot I think is a good one and if others have examples like that or others that are helpful would be great just go ahead and raise your hand and I want to extend this for at least another couple of minutes I think it's a good discussion to have and luckily I see Danny with your hand up so do you want to chime in Danny? Yeah I've initially had a question about the San Diego Bicycle Coalition's OTS grant because I facilitated an Office of Traffic Safety Grant 2017 now instead of partnering with the Long Beach Police Department I partnered with the Long Beach Health Department so you don't necessarily have to go through a police department the police department after our grant cycle ended ended up taking over the Office of Traffic Safety grants and applications and all of that money now is funneled through the Long Beach PD the Long Beach PD is currently using Office of Traffic Safety money to do DUI checkpoints and they also started doing a pedestrian safety and like outreach engagement which I believe is not necessarily what my community needs we do not need to have additional interactions with armed police officers in my community I don't know about you know the rest of the state but I don't I don't advocate and I don't agree that you know my state dollars should be used to pay police to interact with people while they're walking down the street that's just how I feel about it but like I said within my city I know in 27 after 2017 I think it was very difficult to get a bicycle education and a bicycle youth education money from the OTS it difficult to impossible and we haven't done it since thanks for bringing that up Danny and yeah really highlighting some of the things I was trying to say I think I think that's important and I do think there's like and I think this is a good example I think why I wanted to bring it up is that there's different parts of funding at the state level that could fund the work you're all are doing but it's currently not not set up that way and it's going to take a lot of work on Cal bikes part and other advocates who you know have that knowledge and time and money to invest to know those programs and to share it out with others to see what can be made eligible and you know what could be changed and I will say the last thing is is that as you can see with the Lori's presentation there's a lot of that what she was talking about is very helpful useful information but at the community bike level with not a lot of resources it's you know quite hard to get access and to get those resources and there's not specific part of funds that the governor or the legislature has authored to make specific to community bike shop so I think on top of just kind of advocating with your local agencies I think there's a lot of work to do around the state and with state local or state officials and the governor himself is to you know advocate for specific funds for specific needs that you all need that are you know either being ignored or not addressed or just been not you know be paid attention to so it's just a general kind of shout-out to bringing up advocacy into all the great kind of hands-on work that you all do in the community they know it's very hard to do both but I hope these conversations kind of make that I guess partnership with that coordination a little easier in the future. Are there any other questions before we move on to the COVID-19 work around funding anything or questions that maybe you want me to pursue that maybe I can follow up on just any last words on funding before we move on. Joey I see your hand raised go ahead. Well I think Heather from the BC Central and Santa Barbara might not be here but I know that they have access to some of their county's self-help transportation sales tax funding and that's something that they get a lot of help from as far as like another source of revenue. Absolutely I think yeah that's a really great point only a third of the funding for transportation comes from the state over 50% comes locally from those sales taxes so that's exactly a good point most of the counties you live in have them and are being tapped by your local agencies and the last thing I'll say as Lori mentioned most of the conversations that are being had at the state level are between agencies and CTC staff as Lori or you know certain legislators so there needs to be yeah a lot uplifted with their local agencies that either they could bring into the conversation or that maybe you or advocates that you know can also bring into the conversation because most of the times it's just elected officials you know getting stuff they want funded and not so much of you know what the actual needs are that you all experience with on a day-to-day basis so just to put that out there kind of like my advocacy hat on as always so just wanted to point that out. Anything else before I move on? Well this is this was a one-time thing but very recently the Paisa Kitchen in LA we apply for the EIDL loan you know the one that federal government just pretty much gave it to everyone in response to COVID-19. It was a large sum and then there are a lot of well there aren't that many but there are some restrictions on how to use it so we decided to use it exclusive for mortgage payments which is more than 50% of our expense anyway so that was a pretty good loan it was given at 2.75% interest which was pretty good compared to any other loans out there so I mean that was a pretty good opportunity I thought. Yeah it's a good example to bring up Peter anybody else have experience or questions for Peter on that? Go ahead and move on thank you everyone for yeah sitting around with that and for your questions I really appreciate it. So now to transition to the second part of the conversation around COVID-19 the impacts on you all your spaces and just generally around the state again I was unfortunately able to secure a speaker for this a lot of them were saying of course they were dealing with their own issues within their workspaces environments and they didn't have a lot of time for this so completely understandable so I definitely took time to learn a little bit more and I wanted to share that with you just a little disclaimer first I think it's just a safe thing to do that anything I say or Cal bike says is you know not professional advice I will be quoting like official public health documents which I shared the links to and may share on my screen which is I guess professional medical health advice but certainly I am not an expert on this we weren't able to get an expert on this I'll be sharing a video very soon that I think consulted experts so the information will be very important but again I am not an expert myself and we'll have to hear from you all about how you are working on this so to begin this conversation I would like to do a presentation Charles Dandino I think I'll tell you pronounce his name I believe he's at the LA bike kitchen or somewhere in LA County what offered to talk about how his employer is working through the pandemic and some of the best practices they have I didn't know his employer was JPL which is the jet propulsion laboratory it's called over there in the Pasadena area and he said in the last couple months they developed a video a 14 minute video that I looked through and found to be pretty helpful as well so to start off I'm gonna share my screen for the next 14 minutes and play this video along with the audio and I'll be back right after that so just hang tight as they transition there and please let me know if the audio isn't working but I tested out earlier and it seemed to be fine so here we go the health and safety of our employees contractors and visitors are of the utmost importance the COVID-19 impact to society and the mitigation strategies such as social distancing and shedding prevention have impacted how work is performed across the country as a result this training provides guidance for protecting anyone that requires working indoors in close contact with others or sharing common workspaces we hope to minimize the risk of exposure illness and spread of the disease thank you in advance for your willingness to adopt the safety measures that are presented in this training together we can break the chain COVID-19 is caused by a new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and in many different species of animals the complete clinical picture of COVID-19 is not fully known reported illnesses that range from very mild including some people with no reported symptoms to severe including illness resulting in death the virus spreads mainly from person to person between people who are in close contact with one another through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs sneezes or talks these droplets can land in the mouth or nose of people who are nearby and possibly be inhaled into the lungs you may also contract the virus by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then by touching your mouth nose or eyes in light of how COVID-19 spreads along with evidence of the widespread COVID-19 illness in communities across the country you are required to wear a cloth covering to cover your nose and mouth when near other people working indoors and sharing a common work area or surface this is to protect the people around you you still may be infected but do not have symptoms knowing the pros and cons of different face coverings will help you understand why a face covering is more appropriate for certain circumstances you may not feel sick but you could be asymptomatic no one knows for sure if they are carrying the virus wearing the face covering protects others from you and in return they are protecting you from them face coverings must cover your nose and mouth you want them to fit snugly but comfortably against your face remember to make sure they are secured with ties fans or ear loops face covering should include multiple layers of fabric while still allowing for breathing without any restriction they also should be able to be laundered without damage or losing shape when putting on and taking off your face covering take care not to touch your eyes nose or mouth wash or sanitize your hands after handling your mask let's work together to ensure the N95 masks and surgical masks are available for health care providers working on the frontline of defense against the virus protective eyewear or face shields should be used only in the short term or when working in close proximity work is unavoidable using eyewear will accomplish two things first it will reduce the likelihood of drops contacting your face second it will remind people not to touch their face without first washing their hands safety eyewear should be washed with soap and water before and after each use now that you have a general understanding of COVID-19 how it is spread and the personal protective equipment used let's go through a typical workday from sunrise to sunset if you wake up and you're not feeling well please stay at home anyone with symptoms like fever cough or shortness of breath should notify their supervisor immediately follow the CDC recommended steps to help you get through your recovery when you are feeling better contact your supervisor they will share HR's return to work process with you if you are well but have a sick family member at home with COVID-19 or have been in close contact with someone who is symptomatic you should immediately notify your supervisor and stay home even if you wake up feeling healthy a good practice is to take your temperature perhaps you are concerned about contracting the virus maybe you have young children or you may be caring for someone who's at an increased risk if you do not feel comfortable for any reason contact your supervisor to work out a plan don't forget to put on your face covering bring your hand sanitizer at a paper towel you should have your face covering on before you arrive at work when you approach the security guards make sure to keep your distance you are now required to scan your badge at the secondary security checkpoints be careful not to touch the card reader with your bare hands after passing the checkpoint and parking your car it is recommended to carry your paper towel with you as you walk to your work station the paper towel will help you avoid touching surfaces with your fingertips there is an increased risk of transmitting the virus when touching surfaces without a barrier if you're going to use an elevator take note only three people are allowed in the cabin at one time if you witness someone who is not following the Safe at Work protocol kindly remind them if the individual continues not to follow the Safe at Work protocol or you do not feel comfortable approaching them contact your supervisor and inform them of your concern supervisors will talk to the person and ensure that protocols are followed immediately while keeping all sources confidential when you arrive at your work station make sure to disinfect all surfaces and the devices if you work in an open area make sure to clean your area frequently it is important to wash your hands often before you leave the bathroom grab a new paper towel for your next journey if you are feeling sick and are at work or were physically on site within 48 hours of your symptoms developing go home immediately and inform your supervisor the definition of shedding according to the Miriam Webster dictionary means to give off discharge or expel from the body every single one of us could have COVID-19 without even knowing it to protect ourselves and others we must do everything possible to prevent the shedding avoid areas that are not in use and avoid using office equipment whenever possible cover your mouth and your nose with the tissue if you sneeze or cough and use the inside of your elbow avoid sharing equipment whenever possible and if you do share equipment disinfect the equipment before and after each use you must regularly disinfect your own work station any shared work areas and equipment be sure to wipe down desks counters refrigerator doors microwave controls doorknobs shared tools and shared machinery the clean room environment offers an extra layer of protection as a result of the ventilation design gowning room should be used by one person at a time air showers also one at a time and change your clean room garments based on your work area procedure increased air circulation contributes to reduce risk of exposure to the virus during this time it's important to eat lunch at least six feet away from anyone else preferably much more since face coverings will be removed remember six feet is a minimum distance stay as far as possible from other people particles can travel up to 26 feet clean your area before and after you eat no one knows where the virus is people can spread the virus before they ever know that they are sick face coverings may provide a false sense of security and it is imperative to maintain social distances in addition to other safety measures avoid crowded areas and mass gatherings avoid shaking people's hands if possible avoid using any kind of public transportation ride sharing or carpooling if you can continue to work from home protect your family and loved ones upon arriving home make sure to remove your shoes before going inside make your first stop the bathroom carefully remove your face covering and wash it in hot soapy water or as per the CDC guidelines to reduce the risk of shedding the virus in your home it is important to wash the clothes that you wore during the work day it is also smart practice to take a shower before going into the rest of your home or conversing with other people change your clothes and make sure you wash anything that you might have touched on your way into the home if you or anyone else in your home starts to feel sick at any time notify your supervisor immediately understanding what measures you can take and what is the most effective prevention to the least effective protection will help keep you your colleagues and your loved ones safe have symptoms stay home put on a face covering use hand sanitizer wash your hands frequently do not shake hands stay at least six feet from co-workers wear safety goggles or glasses clean your workstation and don't put yourself or others at risk if we work from the assumption that we are all potential carriers of this deadly virus we will protect each other at work our loved ones and the world break the chain thanks for everyone for sitting through that I felt like it was a good summary of what I've learned and what I've read and what I've heard others say around generally prevention around the virus I am gonna go through a couple things that I've learned I wanted to share that I think were particularly useful I see in the chat box and definitely feel free to use this chat box and share resources as well I love to hear from you all too about what you're doing from our article we learned that many of you are already operating safe and healthy spaces for bikes and mechanics volunteers others some have been doing curbside type operations and I think there's a variety of other ways of doing it I think generally yeah if you learn from each other around this a lot of the points raised in the video I thought were helpful and a lot of the documents I'll share in a minute are helpful but a lot of them are yeah I think are common sense at this point kind of six months into the pandemic we're all been inundated with the variety of different things wherever we're at so I just wanted to give a little more overview of that and especially since there are no official guidance documents that I'm aware of specifically for community bike shops the closest ones I've seen are retail or auto dealers or other places like that and you kind of have to adapt to your situation is difficult and that was I was really hoping for to find an expert who could speak to the bike shop space but given that it's relatively small I don't know if that exists I think there's some consultants out there that can be helpful and I reached out to one private consultant that offered to be available in the future about how they could provide guidance hopefully for free but we'll see how that goes but how about for now I'm going to be using the chat box as you all are as well and putting some links into here as I go through a couple pieces I also put the links at the second page of the agenda so that's easier for you I'll just be going from the top down for what I'll be talking about here I'll be talking about the federal guidance state guidance and some local county guidance as well that you all may be familiar with have already seen and I'll go over it kind of quickly because again I think they all cover the same material but maybe not the same way and there may be a few pieces you might learn from it that you were unaware before as I certainly was when I was going through it so to start off at the federal level I'm using the first link here and it's kind of like a general guidance for employers and spaces this was developed early on into the pandemic and there's a variety of pieces talking around the workplace safe practices of course about how to encourage your employees to stay home and then other health checks and a variety of things that this page has as resources what I thought a very good resource was for kind of reopening or resuming business or a community bike shop is in this link and it's through the CDC called the resuming business toolkit and if you've seen this already there's or if you haven't there's a variety of kind of different resources here there is an employer sheet which kind of puts off like a checklist if you really want to make sure to be thorough in your safe and healthy space there's a checklist here that I thought was very useful if you're kind of running and organizing a shop there's infographics on this tool kit and also a worker for a bag type tool as well a couple of different infographics that you could use that are helpful that I found were great moving on from the federal down to the state level when I was talking with the California Department of Health they suggested that a few key guidance documents would be helpful and again since there isn't anything specific for bike shops or community bike shops or bike kitchens they suggested the retail guidance document might be most appropriate so I'm linking that into the chat box now and as you can kind of scroll through this and there's a couple others they recommended too but I'm also linking there's an auto dealership kind of car rental place and then there's kind of a not kind of but there's a hair salon and barbershop guidance and documents well that I put in the chat box and they're all very similar around 10 to 11 pages from what I could tell they covered mostly the same information around physical distancing of course face coverings the hand washing and training workers and others around a prevention plan so it goes into some details that you may find useful in your workplace specific sites that you may be able to adapt that the California Department of Public Health recommended to me and of course they're using CDC guidelines to guide a lot of the work that they're doing as well to jump from the state down to the local as I was searching for other resources that might be helpful I came across the LA County sites for COVID-19 which I just linked into the chat box and again also in the agenda and I felt this was a really helpful web page because they have specific dependencies for a variety of different industries but then if you scroll down in the page they also have kind of PowerPoint toolkits for reopening for example there's a hair salon and barbershop toolkit that is a PDF that I'm putting in the chat box now if you want to check that out it's like a what 10 page or so kind of PowerPoint presentation talking about of course prevention practices requirements around physical distancing infection control so using disinfectant protecting employees and those who come into your shop or retail space and then of course a variety of other resources and protocols that are helpful so there's that LA County version which I thought was really good and then there's also a San Francisco County and I'm sure there's a variety of other counties doing the same but I just did some of the two largest ones and I found the San Francisco one which I just put a link in there to be particularly helpful because they had these Q&A tips and frequently asked questions for reopening in store shopping or services and for an example I was checking out the retail version which I'm just putting into the chat box that you can check out I think it's very succinct in talking about all what the others have already done but maybe in a different way and maybe brings up again issues that you weren't thinking about before and again to give kind of the same resources which everyone I think is recycling at this point as again I think there's kind of a standard now that we're all kind of paying attention to that can be applied to any spot across the state or really the world that this place if of course that the resources and protocols are there in place so those were some of the key parts through my research I'm trying to figure out what to convey would be most helpful again if the links are in the chat box and in the agenda and I can send it along after the meeting too and this record this conversation is being recorded too if you need to go back and look at it so I think that's that from me I think what I think would be very helpful which I did with a few others a couple months ago is learn about what you all are doing who actually have operations going either before now or in the future and something that we can all learn from each other as best practices those who are in this space who are doing again day to day that have been useful and as I see over the video I see some of you are already at shops you know wearing face coverings and gloves and other things so I see you're already at practice so I just wanted to open it up to see if anybody had questions either about what I was sharing the video the documents or if you want to share your own kind of personal experiences for others to learn I think again would be most helpful so I'll stop there for now plug my computer in as it's dying and again I'll just wait for some raised hands in the side or you can physically raise your hand if I'm looking at the screen either way and that'd be great and if there's no questions I might be calling on some of you all who I know shared in the article with Cal bike some of what you're doing and I think you'd be useful for others to hear on here if they didn't read that article as well so I'll stop now look for those hands plug in my computer and see what comes up great I see one Danny you want to start us off yeah I know so I can share like just to give you an idea what like big corporations are doing on my day job I work for Toyota and research and development and every morning before we go to work we have to fill out a questionnaire on your phone that asks you a whole bunch of questions and they're the same questions that you would get asked if you walk into a your doctor's office like do you have a temperature have you been around have you left the area it asks you a whole bunch of questions and then once you fill those out you walk into a triage area where there's a nurse who takes your temperature and then there's a little code that you get when you fill out this thing and you show her the code and then your access you're allowed access into the facility but given that our community space was located inside a high school and how high schools are they're not going back right not not in not in Long Beach Unified we've we've lost our community space they're thinking about going back to a hybrid version in a couple of months but it's unknown if they are going to allow other than teachers and students on campus so for now our community bike hub which is located inside Jordan High School is on hiatus and then our other projects are pop-up based so we do pop-ups with corporate sponsors at open street events and then also farmers market type of pop-ups those are no longer so we technically have stopped and we are invited to participate in a bunch of events but to be honest our folks are young folks and I don't think it's it's really different to go to a pop-up and put young folks and their families health at risk so what we've decided collectively is to not do anything not go to any pop-ups not put anybody's lives at risk for us to just to fix people's bikes right so that's that's where I would I kind of wanted to ask y'all is how how did y'all mitigate that risk how did you did y'all have that conversation with your volunteers with your employees are y'all paying a hazard pay like I really wanted to learn you know those are the questions I had coming in here from from y'all thanks Danny yeah I think those are the same questions I have as well and I again I think it'd be useful to learn from each other on that I don't see anybody's hand raised does anybody want to go next this is Sylvie with the bike felt by blow we were you know closed for a couple months and then decided to open in the way that we felt with safe which was that people could drop off a bike we would have a volunteer mechanic fix it and they would come back the end of the day and get it so it totally changed the model of us being an educational space like usually we don't touch anyone's bike they do all of that but we didn't feel like it was going to be possible to do that safely but what we've done now and the decision to you know reopen in some capacity was that you know it was so difficult to like weigh the need of like especially like the into the communities that we serve so we're focused in the neighborhood cuts called City Heights which has really diverse community and a lot of folks who you know have suffered from major job loss and just the challenges that those folks faced because of like the results of COVID not having it but you know everything else that's going on seem to outweigh the the risk a little bit like giving these people opportunity to like you know be able to get jobs again or get places like more easily more you know safely and cheaply felt like that was more important in this community anyway so what we have done now is we have a gated space and it's all outside so we only operate outside and we tend to set up canopies to make like specific stations so that you can have kind of one on one attention with a mechanic but like really limit how many people you interact with and then we have a hand-washing station and you know a little like hand-sanding stations kind of dotted about the space but during this outside spacing out a whole lot and limiting how many people like come into contact with any one individual or a bicycle and you know just changing the business model quite a bit and that's been effective we still have way more people than we can possibly help in a given day but the need just keeps going up because people can't wait you know weeks at a bike shop or afford to go to a bike shop these days. Thank you Silverie for sharing your experiences there. Zuli I see you in the chat can go next thank you for that and then Poy, I see your hand raised so you'll be after Zuli. Zuli you want to go? Thank you hello. Kind of similar to what Sylvie was kind of talking about everything kind of being more of an appointment basis and then it's not so much doing it together anymore it's kind of doing it for them but we've we're kind of really just kind of doing it for folks who really need transportation that that is their only option and so that's exactly why and then Sylvie kind of touched up on that point as well how like when we were kind of closed down for a little bit for the safety of ourselves and everybody there was a real need and folks like we're just kind of waiting and yeah there's other bike shops that we would kind of guide them to that we're still open and doing the whole drop off the bike in a safe setting but they can't afford that and so like that was completely out of their range out of their league so they're still kind of patiently waiting for us and so what we decided is and it's still experimental kind of week by week we kind of check in with each other just to see how everyone's feeling exposure wise and everything that we're doing whether it be a bike repair a bike sale or bike parts sales is all by appointment and so we're writing it down like a little agenda so that we're all kind of letting each other know taking terms with who's going outside who's kind of staying inside nobody's coming in the shop so that's kind of like our safe space for ourselves and our volunteers and then we've limited to like only five folks at a time in the shop including like because we have an upstairs as well but like that's including both because of just the same space being shared and it's just consistently like getting feedback from everybody it's a consistent conversation similar to how our other friends shared about like asking about the clinical like are you feeling are you feeling any fevers or anything it's nothing like super set like the clinic style but it is a conversation that we continuously have and we are adapting consistently and so in that sense we're being transparent with everybody that we're helping and telling them that we're you know trying to meet their needs but also provide safety for ourselves so that we could continue meeting those needs and then so this week at we actually also have like a little survey going on so that we could get feedback from the customers that we are helping right now in terms of like maybe what we could improve on or what it is that's working what's not working so that maybe later on kind of how Rachel was talking about in the beginning how the reality is most likely we're not going to go back to before March so therefore we're kind of trying to think of like what is this new reality going to look like how are we meeting folks needs that are still like capacitating folks to fix their bikes in this community space like mentality and yeah that's that's what I had to share. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think it was very useful. Poy, I see your random hand that we need. Do you want to go next? Yeah, I think our experience has been similar to Zule's. We have normally about 30 volunteers and we normally would have the shop open in the evenings and weekends to serve people when they're not not working. In response to the era of COVID, people like me have decided to socially distance to the degree that we don't even come to the shop anymore. But I would say about 40% of our volunteers are so interested in serving the public or so and so I so I'm fed up with the idleness that happens from just staying at home that they have been willing to to take a certain amount of risk and to run the shop. So you know we we through negotiations and ideas and our regular monthly meeting where we work out our own our policies we determined that we could do about a third of our business and our business is is most of our time and our effort is spent in teaching people to fix their bikes, which is really shoulder to shoulder effort. And while that's a majority of our time, it only it only accounts for less than about a quarter of our income. So we we've cut back on that we now have a line of people who are at the front door and they can come and and one at a time come to the front door and they can ask for a part and in the shop we limited the the we have a 1700 square foot shop. We limit it to a total of four volunteers in the shop and one will maintain the front door restrict people's access into the shop we don't allow customers in the shop and the rest of the people will search for parts or we'll be working on what we get a good deal of businesses bikes that have been donated to us which we then sell fix up and sell as ready to go bikes. So that has been sustaining us at a at a sustainable loss every month. But but it's been provided us a most of our income is selling of bikes that have been donated. Having said that we we serve we have traditionally served a lot of the socially marginal populations homeless and such. And that has been a challenge for us because the desire to socially distance and follow the rules is a little bit harder for those communities to manage. So anyway, it's we're getting by and we're you know we feel the loss of not being able to spend more time educating the public. The other thing that we've been doing is that has been helping us financially is the barks that the bikes that are stripped down we are searching for more of the specialty parts that we can sell for good money on ebay and we've been using the ebay sales of rare and unusual parts or expensive parts as a way of of getting those to flow through the business since we don't have people coming in and browsing it at our cabinet which has the finer quality parts. So I think I hope that that can be helpful to others who are running shops. I'm open to questions. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think that was yeah, very comprehensive. Thank you. Is there any questions for Poi, Zuli, Danny or anybody else or anybody else want to talk about what they're experiencing at their shop and how they go about it? So just really quick. The question that I have is for those that are fixing other people's bikes that you guys carry the bike shop liability insurance because the whole thing of getting around that for coops is we teach we do not fix but now y'all are fixing and if somebody gets hurt with that bike that you fix you are liable. At this point here I want to say that we've argued about this quite a bit in our in our management meetings and circles and officially we do not fix bikes we then we do not we do not charge for them. So so but it's been quite a controversy. It's been a quite a controversy of people who feel like they want to give back and help especially those people who are transportation poor. It's a problem but officially we are doing it. There may be those who are doing it in a non kosher way. We ask them to not we ask them not to and with a wink with a wink that we understand that they may be personally on their own doing something. Uncomplete. This is Dana from by Topia and Berkeley. We are not holding our workshops at the moment but we have liability insurance for this reason and we fix bikes at events and so it's really important to us. I don't think it's that expensive for us. I don't know the exact amount but it's definitely worth it. It's just not something that we want to risk at all with the workshop and I want to say that we're operating in a really similar way. We're having people drop off bicycles to get them fixed but we just moved to a larger space that has different areas like within one space and we're thinking about what we built a platform we're thinking about having like one person maybe make an appointment to have them come work on a bike and that being something that we test out or trying to acquire some fans to get airflow moving in there but I think that it would be far enough from the volunteers that it would be okay and the volunteers could help support if people have questions but that's something that we're thinking about piloting. Our other space is definitely way too small to even hold any sort of workshop educational thing right now which has been really challenging for us because it's been hard to not do the core thing that we do by wanting to mention that we do have liability insurance and that I recommend getting it if you can. Anybody else have any questions? I see a hand raising air and you want to go ahead? I got a question about scheduling. How are you guys are you guys using some sort of program or is it just like call this number and let us know what time you want to be in or is it like a form that you have people fill out interested in that. Andrew, I see your hand raised. You want to respond to that? Yeah, we're using square appointments and it's a free application and it works great and it's on mobile devices on tablets and on computers and so for everyone who needs to book an appointment with us and that could be a bike donor, a volunteer to pick up a homework bike is what we call them or a customer who paid for a bike for curbside pick up. We just send them a link and then they book the appropriate slot. We have a 30 minute window for a homework bike volunteer. We have a 30 minute window for someone who purchased a bike and a 10 minute window for someone just dropping off a donation and that's been working great. I get text messages. They can change their app. They can change their appointment and they can cancel and edit and they get text reminders too. So I definitely recommend that. We also use square for our purchase system and it has some integration capabilities as well. Thank you, Andrew. And I see Steve, did you want to add to that? Yeah, I can tell you what we're using. We use a free service called Calendly. So it's like calendar, but instead of AR it's Ly. So Calendly and you get one like appointment type for free and it connects to a Google calendar or other services too, but we use it with Google calendar. And so the nice thing about that is when someone books an appointment that slot gets used up and someone else can't book that same slot. And they have other niceties like you can have like a clean up setup, clean up time. So if you want to like have 15 minutes on either side of the appointment or that kind of stuff, it has different features. And it's working great for us. It's super low tech. They have a little embeddable control you can just put right on your web page. And then people interact with that. And then you get an email, you know, a Google calendar email notification, and you can communicate with them through email to follow up and give reminders and that kind of stuff. It's actually been working really well for us as well. Thanks, Steve. I see some some stuff in the chat box. Thanks for sharing that, Joey and Alvin. Appreciate it. Anybody else have anything and also any questions for me that I don't know that I can take with the contacts I was mentioning earlier? I don't know if there's any kind of questions around, yeah, health concerns or other things that folks have been need answers to that I could try to seek and define them. Definitely open to that. So definitely ask away or send me an email. I'm also curious about if anybody on the call hasn't reopened or doesn't have an operation going what would like to and I would love to hear, you know, about some obstacles, whether it's just, you know, volunteers unable or something else, you know, I want to hear how we can be helpful and supportive to getting where you were at. Anybody? Well, Jerry, this is Rick from San Luis. I don't want to actually, I can't address that one, but just to give you a little recap. One, this is great because our little core group and Dan was on the call and Gary, we tried to have tried to maneuver through all this and, you know, read as much stuff. So this discussion is very valuable pulling the different perspectives because, yeah, you're right, there's no guidance out there. I've read the retail, I've read all those booklets, you know, and a lot of the things that the others share, and I think we're doing some of those, our space is probably smaller than even some of those that, and so we're limiting access, back there's no, call it, educational customers in our shop. Though one of the things that we do on the used parts, we keep drillers in a milk block, built crate and then, you know, in cassettes, and if somebody needs an essential part, we will actually carry it out to the curbside and let them go through and look for that derailleur, or caliper, or whatever they're, whatever they're looking for so that we can get some people on the road. We also do quite a bit of work related to donated bikes, rehabbing and then selling them, but we also, because of the limitation of the challenge of the supply and demand on new, you know, from tubes to tires and things like that, we have a lot of bikes that we call project bikes that they might need some loving care, or a lot of care, and so we will let those go at a bargain price and take it home if they're mechanically refined to, you know, put the cables or brakes or whatever it needs. The liability issue that was raised is a really interesting one. We do have a pretty extensive liability, but the comment about being bike shop, I think I have that, but I'm going to check into that. The other thing is that I am curious about the instruction sign. When and where is the guidance going to come related to social distancing instruction, whatever that means. You know, I went to a community bike shop in Colorado a couple months ago and they were doing it socially distance outside. You know, they weren't working on the show, but where's the instruction? We need, because that is our bread and butter in serving our communities and what's some of the future guidance on that. Anyway, I appreciate all the feedback and thought provoking. And for, you know, Misery Love's company or whatever, you know, pulling us together like this is very valuable for us to a group learn. Great. Thanks, Rick. I think, yeah, I was wondering that same question about when is instruction or, you know, actual side to side, what you all do, you know, most importantly with others, when is that going to happen again? And yeah, I don't know. And I don't know if others have any thoughts around that or experienced or seen other people to do that safely. And it seems like a very difficult thing at this time right in the middle of the pandemic. But any thoughts on that? Or anything else? We only have two minutes left. So I want to save at least 30 seconds for some final words. But any thoughts, Peter? Well, I don't think, well, I used to think we have to be either 100% safe or not do it at all. But I've come around that, you know, you've got to do everything you can to kind of reduce the chance of spreading, you know, germs basically. And just do your best and kind of make sure everyone's on the same page. So the bicycle kitchen, we are like installing a roof fan that's going to suck the air out. But at the same time, we're lucky to have a pretty big yard space. So everything, all operations are outside only, only one person's allowed inside. But something totally different is we also have a weekly online shift where we do this Zoom. And it's been kind of interesting, like people would really like show their bicycle with their video and you know, we will tell them to move your camera this way or that way, get closer. And we would kind of like discuss what might be the problem or what might be the solution. And it turns into like just talking about, you know, what's your favorite bike and it's kind of fun. But at the same time, sometimes we have only one person, it's kind of erratic. But it is kind of doable to do things online. At the same time, it's not the same thing. It's as point mentioned, you know, there's this urge to just wrench together. And it's really hard to get around that. Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Peter. I saw in the chat box, Daniel, you put your sanitizing protocol. I think, yeah, I had a question about that and I'm glad you put that in there. So thanks for doing that. And yeah, I am curious as well as like if we're, you know, being 100% safe about mass and protocol and everything else. Yeah, when would be the point to do, you know, side by side instruction and other things. And I'm not an expert. I can only guess and along with the rest of us, I guess. But I could end there. Is there any last burning questions, comments before I kind of wrap up and point you all to the form that Dave put in the chat box? Any last concerns, feedback, comments? I see a hand. Gary, go ahead. I did not know how to use a chat box properly. But one of the things that will come up eventually through any of the private or public education institutions doing tech head and shop classes, they were gonna, they will have to come up with the protocol, I think in some fashion, to be able to teach their welding program, their wood program, their drafting program, things of this nature where interactions with students are going to be very important. I don't know what that looks like yet, but they may be inventing the wheel just now that we as educators also can use their program or modify their programs. No doubt they'll be state approved or they'll be educational institution approved. It made it save us some leg work. Thank you. Great, thanks Gary. I promise we would all end on time and we're only going to be a minute or two late, so I'm sorry for that, but thank you everyone for joining, for your patience in setting this up and sitting through a two-hour Zoom call. I know we're already on this enough. So I appreciate for being here, sharing your knowledge, your experiences. I just want to do a couple things. One is Dave put a link in the chat box for a survey to provide feedback for this two-hour conversation. It would be great to get some feedback, so feel free to fill that out if you can. Secondly, again I'm good to be contacted with questions, resources, or anything that you have in mind or want to convey to the larger group here or others who weren't able to join. I know doing it in the middle of the day is hard for folks who have daytime jobs and are busy, so this is being recorded, so I'll be sending this around to everyone broadly and probably link it up to a couple Cowbuy emails and other things if you're on that thread. So feel free to check out the recording and probably some summarizing notes that I'll provide. And again, I'm yeah, feel free to follow up with me, with Lori, or with each other. And the last thing I'll say is that I truly enjoy connecting different folks, different parts of the state around similar and shared interests. So I look forward to future conversations among you all, either on this topic or others that we can tackle at a statewide level. I think Cowbike is uniquely situated to be a coordinating and convening force for that if there's interest for things to talk about or listeners or whatever. So I just want to put that out there and if anybody has any interest, you know, bring it up with me, with Dave or others. If you think this could be a helpful space because I'm definitely love the community bike shop space, the bike kitchens and all of you doing that work. So again, I appreciate it. Sorry for running a little bit over time. And I'll end there. So thank you everyone for joining and I'll talk to you all later. Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Jared. Thank you.