 So two, so we may have some people coming in as well. So let me start off by saying I'm Mike Shannon. I'm the Development Services Director here for the city. Couple of housekeeping items. This is our noise ordinance task force meeting for those that are here for the first time. Welcome for those that have been working through it since the summer. Thank you for continuing to be part of it. It's an important issue I think for the city that we'll continue to work on. I'll see it for the next probably several months or so as we try to work through the issue again and find some solutions and those of you that have been part of it, you know some of the topics. And we'll have a lot of discussion tonight but a couple of housekeeping items. First of all, anyone that came in, we have some food available for anybody. Not just people on the task force but certainly those of you that are here. I'm not allowed to take any of that food home so help me out please. Feel free to help yourself during the meeting at all and it won't be a distraction. So that was, I don't know why. Number two, if you need a restroom during the meeting, there's two things you can do. You find out it's there, it goes through the front there and there's one through the lobby kind of that direction. But the easiest thing to do is walk through this door, head down as far as you can to run into the break room, hover right and you'll run into the restroom. So I just wanted to kind of mention that. Sir, this is kind of something new. We have, is it Scott or Taylor? Taylor. Taylor, Taylor with, I'm sorry? My middle name is Scott. Okay, it's on your tag, that's why. I think they put, I think that's right here. Taylor is here and I don't know, let's say Taylor is gonna, he's with. Now past SA. Now past SA. Someone has invited him to this meeting and he's the one, I don't see. And you're gonna record the meeting, your plan is to record the meeting from now cast and give it to them. Give it to them, I don't know what happens to them. Okay, so I wanted, just the first time we've done that here with this meeting set up, I wanted to make sure everybody knew that. I'm not really sure who invited them, but you're welcome of course. This is an important meeting for us all to go to participate in. But whenever we have an unannounced video recording of a meeting, I'd just let everybody know it's being recorded. I think we're doing this on our Zoom calls now and all that, kind of the normal thing. So we're not, but certainly also wanna give anybody if you're not comfortable with that and you do wanna participate, that's certainly okay too. But I think we're gonna continue with the meeting and just thank you for being here. And wherever we're invited, thank you if it's one of you or someone else. Maybe someone else that couldn't be here and wants to watch the meeting later. Okay, that being said, I'd like to start with, we have an agenda tonight, right? And we're gonna continue our discussion on kind of where we left off. We know we have a lot of work to do. We'll try to get you out of here right about eight o'clock. For those of you in the audience, we call you our community members. We have a task force that's been assigned to kind of work through this and on this. And they've been doing that really well. It's a challenging issue over the last six months. We have community members, although you are allowed to just gonna listen, take notes. At the end of the meeting, somewhere around the hour and 40 minute mark, we will open it up for comments from you all. So if you haven't been here before, I think some of you have been here before, you know how it works. But the task force, which includes some of us city staff, we'll be looking for any input that you want to give us. Okay, now you've got required to, I'm just gonna open it up and we'll go in an orderly fashion. That being said, there'll be other meetings like this. There'll be other community meetings that are just really open to the community and the task force, some of them will attend and not, but just to give you a format as we move forward. That's not about right. Everybody understand any questions with that format? I don't think so. I think we've had a lot of people here. Now we do have an agenda. We're gonna use, of course, the screen tonight. We're gonna try to use some microphones here. If anybody in the audience can't hear the discussion, just let us know. We'll get a microphone where we need to, I will ask our task force members, certainly to speak to the microphones if you can, unless you're super loud and everybody can hear you. That's not about right. All right, we've got Art driving it for us. He's gonna do some introductions, kind of a roll call for the meeting of the task force members that are here and present and then we'll jump into some of the agenda. Okay, thanks again everybody for being here. Hey, please, no one has moved. Ever since I said there's food here, no one has moved. So, all right, I'll check on that food in a little bit. Okay, we get started. All right, we're gonna start with our introductions last roll call. Hey, everybody, we are going to start a roll call for our noise task force. Gemma Kennedy, Gemma Kennedy, here. Steve versus Steve, there. Steve, thank you Steve. How about Bianca Marconado? Patricia Garcia Duarte, calling weathers back. Here, here, thank you. Marta Salomon, Marta Salomon, she's right here. Okay, Gina Eisenberg, Gina, Blaine Tucker, Blaine Tucker, Don LaDios, Jody Bailey Newman. I'm gonna fill in for Jody today, David Euler. Gotcha, thank you sir. Jarrett Bingham, Jarrett, I'll fill it in. Sir Joe Costas, sir Joe Costas, thank you sir. Sir Joe, if you're gonna fill in his alternate tonight, you might send him to the task force table for us. Thanks, man. Sam Aguirre, he's a little bit of a weird guy. Here, all right. Hi, I'm Lee. Hi, I'm Lee. Hi, I'm Lee. Thanks, I'm Sam's alternate tonight. Thank you. Parker. John Dusty. Present. John Bremen, John Bremen, thank you. Randall Smith, he's re-assigned. I'm here. Thank you. Me, Tomas, sir, Salita Ryder, Felix Ramírez, Michael Uresti, Daniel Ligens, thank you sir. Jeremy McDonald, Jeremy Paul Jimenez, Jenny Ramírez, the needs-based station. Samantha Whitwire, Ashley Desi, Ashley, David Dotsy, David Anissa Schell, Pete Peterson, Pete Peterson, Michael Shannon, here, Bianca Madonado, no, Jimena Coco-Wiggins, here, Stacey Jones, Margaret Leeds, Bo Anderson. I can feel it from Margaret. Bo, Bo's here, yes. Bo is here, thank you. And I'm sorry, okay, I'm sorry. I'll explain in a second, so we'll just keep going on the list, I'll explain. Marcos Barros, Marcos, David Cunard. We have Andy Rodriguez, Christine Hill, Gina Eisenberg. René Zamora, René Zamora. Okay, thank you, all right, thank you, all right. All right, so when we get there, just scroll up a little bit, I just wanna make sure everybody understands. Go all the way up. The first thing we do is we take a roll call of our task force members. That's kind of all the way up until we get to Sabina Ross, okay, and some of the people have offered it. So we're pretty tracking kind of attendance and participation on this task force. Those other names there are some additional city staff and others who have probably participated. I'm gonna ask Jimena in our office to, if you want to, this is your first time here, if you want to sign in, give us your name, your email, and your phone number, we'll add you to the list. You're here because your contact number is good, but if you want us to add this to the list just for kind of record keeping in the future, that'll help us, but we'll have that up in a little bit, but thank you, all right. My question to the task force members, one of the things we always look at now is do we have enough people here to really have a good discussion forum? As you know, we always go ahead through the forum, but we have how many of us here? Three, seven, eight, seven or eight before we get to the seven, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven before you get to city staff and then you have the three city staff. Everybody comfortable moving forward with some discussion on the agenda? Okay, all right, all right, thank you very much. Good? Don is here. I'm sorry? Don, don't log in. Oh wait, did Don just come in? Oh, Don, you're on the task force, come on out. I know we haven't done any impression like this. Don, how are you? I'm fine. Come on in, have you seen it at the task force table if you're okay? Oh, sure. You think there's a couple seats here, we can roll a couple more? Okay. I didn't see you sneak in. Oh, that's okay, I'm fine. All right, let's mark her as present, okay. All right, let's go back to the agenda. So the last meeting we had, the first thing we'll do is we'll look at the meeting minutes from last meeting. Those have been posted for a little while and we just asked if there's any comments or questions on those from the task force members or if everybody's okay with it, we'll kind of take a motion to approve or everybody's thumbs up, doesn't have to be too formal, but is everybody okay with the meetings that meeting minutes from last meeting, accurately represent? Yes. Okay. I think generally everybody feels good about that. For those of the audience or the community members, we do actually post all the stuff on our website. If you missed a meeting or want to follow the history of the meetings, just go and you can skim through the task force meeting minutes, pretty simple, okay? All right. So I think I'm gonna take everybody's head nodding and nobody yelling or screaming at me as those are good to go. Okay, we'll go back to the agenda. So we want to take a few minutes and we'll let Amin and our team go over the update. We have not only this task force, but another thing that's happening in conjunction is our pilot program, which is our noise enforcement, utilizing code officers on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights. So we want to give you the updated numbers, statistics and pass and lessons learned and I want the task force to kind of review those and talk about anything you see in the course, okay? So if we could, I mean, I'm gonna let you go through that. I'm gonna hand over the mic. Yeah, yeah, John. Hey, John, how are you? I'm sorry, I'm retired and there's a traffic. You're good, you're good. All right, how about that? All right, good evening everyone. Yeah, good evening to you too, sir. Again, my name is Amin Thomas. I'm the Deputy Director here at the Global Services. I was tasked by my boss, Mike Shannon, to basically work on this task force and it's a challenge, but hopefully we get to a good area where everybody is happy, for as happy as possible. So as Mike said, you know, we have a pilot program for those who don't know that in that task, basically we have the noise ordinance. SAPD is responsible for enforcing that ordinance for most of the years in the past. We were ordered by the mayor and council to basically help PD because they want to reduce their workload input on anything that is not really super emergency, like a murder or a robbery, progress, and things like that. So we are trying this program only for three days. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. We respond to the calls that PD gets. The calls still go through PD, through their dispatch, but then we go out there and respond to them or to as many as we can. We have six code officers that cover the whole city. So basically we cannot get to every single code they are seeing. So this is the information and some updates. Can you scroll up? So this table, if you look at it, you have two columns. The left column is last weekend, basically. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The one on the right is the total so far. We started on October 7th. So basically about eight weeks or nine weeks weekend. That's the total. So basically the total for the program right now on those three days, PD received over 4,000 calls on those three days. We responded to about 35% of them. So we managed to get out to 1,464. We physically went out to those locations and we inspected those locations. Out of those 1,465, there were 189 locations that we confirmed violation. And the way we do it is we have the meters, the dv meters, sound meter. We get the readings and we get multiple readings and we make sure we take average. If it's way up high, higher than the limits, then we say it's violation. We take picture of the reading, then we dispatch that or send that back to PD so they can go out there and issue citations. So out of those 189, PD issued 99 citations for those. There was about 68 locations that we were not able to get to. So what that means is we get the call, we get out there and they say it's a house party and there's 50 people in that room that are screaming and kicking whatever they're drinking. We are not peace officers. We don't have any tools and weapons, anything. So we tell our team to not stop. Just keep going and send that call back to PD because again, their safety is very important. Any questions about those numbers, your memory? Okay. So the same numbers that we just showed you, we broke down by council distance. I know this is a question that task force members mentioned in the last couple of meetings, they can be break it down to council distance. So we know which distance I get more or less and they can be break it to residential or business commercial because obviously we're getting a lot more residential calls than commercial. So again, this is by district. It shows you a column for all the residential calls that we responded to, the businesses and the river walk. The reason why we put river walk by itself it is business, but remember in the current code today, the business have a 70 dB during the day and at night it drops to 63. The river walk has 70, 24 hours so it doesn't change. That's why we listed that separate. So you know that the reasons we are getting for river walk to be in violation needs to exceed 70 anytime during the day or night at work. Any questions about these calls? And again, these are only the calls we refer to PD. The 189 remember that number. So this is the 189 calls that we received and confirmed violation. Then this one is the 99 citations that SAPD issued. Remember we confirmed 189 violations, PD issued 99 citations for some of those, for 99 of them. And this is how it's broken by industry, residential, business and river walk. Oh, this time is 50,000 words. Maybe just explain. So again, as Mr. Chan said basically the task force is the one that's gonna be basically interacting with this conversation and discussing these issues if they have questions they are welcome to ask it. At the end of the meeting the last 20 minutes or so we opened up to the public. So any questions? I have some comments for later but specifically related to the data if you're investigating about 35% of the calls how are the calls being triaged to respond to or not respond to? Great question. So I don't know if everybody heard the question. The question is we responded, code enforcement responded to 35% of the calls that PD received. How are those being triaged? How are we picking against the calls? So the way this works right now is as I mentioned we have six code officers citywide and we have a supervisor on duty at that day. Every time PD gets a call, the first call they get from 8 p.m. they send it to us. So we dispatch the first code officer, we get the second one, we send the next code officer and so forth. Then we line up at least four calls for each code officer. When they have four calls and they're already on another one, so that's five in a row. We don't want to wait longer than that because remember the whole purpose of this pilot is to respond as fast as we can. I don't want to have more than four in a queue for each code officer. So then if additional calls come in we can PD you guys handle those. So they handle them. Until we free a couple of code officers or a couple of calls then we again keep stacking those in a row. So we always have four in a row and a queue for each code officer. So we don't pick and choose. We might get orders not sure. We might get all businesses. We might get banks. We have no idea which one we're gonna get. It depends on when the call came in. I think to summarize John, I think we're really right now looking first come first serve calls. I think part of the discussion moving forward is how would we in the next three months or so if we modify the procedures should we prioritize them a little bit differently? If the task force has any recommendations this would be the time we could try some things out. I think for the first three months though it was important to try to just get to as many as they come in as they come in. But I hope that answers the question. So if one investigator has four cases and they happen to be in an area where they subsequently after his or her four cases there are three calls that come in about a particular business but that this individual's queue is filled then those three calls could potentially not be investigated if it is a first come first serve and then you roll it to the next group of current complaint. I would not say they will not be investigated because they're gonna be transferred back to PD. Technically, they come to PD, we tell them we are maxed out right now so they continue taking those calls and then respond to them. So they still respond to the calls. You said that there are calls that are not investigated and then when that person is freed up then they will investigate current calls or they go back to the hour or two before? Sorry for the confusion. So the code officers will not investigate all the calls that PD is getting. Oh that's for sure, yes. So any calls that we did not get to investigate PD is still doing that. They are still taking care of those calls. So we are not saying if code doesn't respond then just put those calls on the side. No PD will take the calls and we'll respond to it. So they're still doing their job. So that's why we are happy with 35% of their work. Let me help you clarify and I think this is something, this is what we're learning. So the calls that we can get to is code enforcement. Code enforcement has one priority that night. Right? That's all they're doing. They're not doing the other normal code enforcement stuff. They're not going to call for a house or go to vehicles or anything like that. When it does, if we're full, being our capacity because this pilot program was, it's not the end of all, the all solution but it is, here's six resources, see what we can learn, see what we can do. Either different, better, worse, whatever that is. When it goes back to PD, and I don't want to speak to the captain here, but they have a priority of calls. And PD is doing other things and you're right. It's not the top priority like it is for code at that evening. So again, that's some of the challenges we're working through and learning from. But I think if we think about that and captain, did I say anything correct? I mean, I forget how many priorities. So many calls that you lose but this five or six or seven priority levels, right? So I think that's the balance we're trying to strike down. And I think that the task force is, how do we handle that? I mean, during the pilot program is one thing but what are we learning that we can recommend at the end to our, you know, our budget resources, et cetera. What's the best way to handle that? So I, John, I think it's a good point and I have already a couple of notes but something we have to follow as we move forward. And I think that we're learning from some of the data. So thank you. I may have a fact to you on this. Okay, so just to understand the process fully. So if code enforcement backlog is full, let's say, then it stays with SAPD. And so now both SAPD and code enforcement are working off a backlog. Yours is limited, SAPD is unlimited backlog, right? They're going to take care of it. You have a limit on yours. So later off, say two hours later, your backlog's gone. Do they, do they never send those, if they still have a backlog, they don't send those to you because you already rejected them? I'll say you a good question. How did that develop, though? That's what you do. So just for clarification on the PD-SATA house, PD receives calls continuing to PD-SATA and 911 operators. And those calls get prioritized based on the type of call they use whether it's currently active, whether it's a report, if there's danger currently to the public or not, as Mr. Shannon already suggested, we have seven priority calls. Party 1s would be something that has an active element to it, whether it be shooting, robbery, progress, some of that effect, and there is danger to the public that then proceeds down a big list of various categories. Take for example, like the family violence, that would be a priority of three. General disturbance would be a priority of four. Loud music is a priority of seven. So it's the lowest of the priority calls for us. What that means is that about the evening, and this is due to the primary or the evening type calls, about the evening, our queue for each six of the substations, each dispatcher will have their call filled by PD-SATA and it will begin to prioritize those calls. So every time, anything above a priority seven comes in, it's going to push that priority seven down. So even if a priority six comes in, a reckless driver, non-trivial, that's a priority six call. So that will push the priority seven call down and it will continually push that priority seven call down until there's finally an officer available to respond to that call on busy nights. That can be several hours on non-busy afternoons. That could be 10, 15 minutes. There's no way to predict how long that priority seven will continually remain pushed down further and further into the queue. That being said, all of the calls that code is unable to respond to, they go to our queue and they will eventually get responded to in some way shape or form. How long just depends on the business of the night and the size of the town. Right, so the question was, once they're in your queue, they will never come back out to go into their queue. They can pull them back to their queue whenever they'd like. If their officers finally finish up with their backlog and they're ready to receive additional calls, then by all means, they can pull them off of our channels whenever they'd like. I would not recommend that they go back in call order. I'd recommend that they would take the next call in line as far as what calls come in because they're the greatest likelihood that disturbance or problem is still ongoing. If something's been waiting in our queue for two hours, a priority set in disturbance, probably not still going on by the time they get there. So they're basically wasting gas and time to drive over there and find nothing. So the better option would be, they get that next call that has just recently come in for the greatest chance of success in being able to record that call. Okay, sounds like maybe we don't know what you just suggested is happening. So can we? Yeah, I'm not sure. I think we do, Steve, but I think to your point is we need to take a look at our dispatch and how it can get batched into it. I mean, it's a constant moving, more calls are coming in, but I mean, if you have a recommendation, that would be good, but I think through this discussion, we can take that and work a little bit closer with captain and dispatchers up with our field. I mean, they're on the radio all night long. But just, is it your suggestion that we make sure that if a call gets back to PD that it still has the opportunity to get back to code that same night? Well, I think the suggestion, he did, and it was a good one. I just don't know. Okay. You got, I mean, didn't know the answer. He answered it. So it sounds like there could be a dis, maybe there's not, but there could be a disconnect on whether his suggestion is even can and even doesn't happen. And to be clear, I've not worked the code enforcement in the evening. So I'm not exactly sure how they're being dispatched. I'm just trying to explain to you the progress of dispatching code. So let me try to clarify again a little bit. Maybe I wasn't, that's clear. I have six code officers. We get this as long as they, we get the first six codes, every officer gets one. We get the next six codes, everybody have another one in line in queue. And we get another six and another six. Every code officer have four in queue. I finish one, I get another one. So I will never be free, because I think you mentioned when code officers are completely done, what happens when they're both competing? We don't wait and we are done. We always have four in a queue. And as you can see from the numbers, and we are doing only 35%, and we always have something in our queue that our shift is over. So I don't think we have the capacity to take anything from them anyway, because we are taking whatever we can and we keep going. So before, if I have more code officers then I'm free. Okay, I understand that. So you're saying the four in the morning, everyone has a four in a row? Yes. We have to keep on queue, I guess, available for the code officers, available in green slot for you to keep going from one code to the other. Yeah, and there's another thing we talked about before, and I don't, we haven't solved this yet. Actually, when they do give the violations, then SAPD gives the citations. And so there's that, sometimes they can't give the citations. So you see the violations, and though they were giving a lot of citations, not as many as they have to be done by SAPD. And I remember, I think we mentioned earlier, just to put it out there again, that when they did this before, they actually had some peace officers who acted as code for code compliance, and they were able to give the citations at the same time. And so I don't know if we wanna mix them, I know at this point in pilot, I'm just looking down the pipe. These are a lot of calls coming in, and then how to sort them. This is a lot of work. There's a lot of noise going on, and so you're gonna get all kinds. And also, I'm not sure some of these things that we're looking at, they don't result in violations. But we don't have the information is, why do they keep calling? So what is it for people? What is the noise that they keep hearing that they're calling in that don't actually meet the decibel levels? And I don't know if there's any way to track that or really understand it. There's a lot of calls here that we're not addressing. Yeah, definitely, good comments. Yes, taking to all kind of code enforcement had some peace officers, and they used to do that task of this task. For a long time now, we don't have peace officers. So that should be an open discussion for the task force to have a load on what's their recommendation gonna be. But for the time being, yes, we do have them, if we find violation, then we send it to PD to issue the citation. And I mean, Captain can explain a little bit more, but definitely again, based on the priorities they have, even when we send it back to them for citation potentially, if they show up two hours later, sometimes the party's open, if it's a house party and they're done, everybody's asleep, they're not gonna go on waiting long. And that's why some of those violations are going to issue citations of that vote. Dr. Tomoski, can you talk a little bit about when you guys are evaluating whether or not, when the code enforcement officers are evaluating whether or not there's violation? I would assume there's some sort of protocol that everyone's following on this. Is that public? Is that something that you guys have kind of coalesced around that you're standardized on? Let me make sure I understand the question. You're saying how are they getting their meetings, I guess, or how are they confirming the violation? You mentioned that they're taking averages from different areas. I'm curious as to whether or not there's a protocol that's standardized to make a determination as to whether there's violation. Well, yes. So based on the current code now, it says to get the reading out of the property lines. So obviously, if it's safe enough for the code officer to stand there, that's where they stand. And sometimes they get to the property and they don't stand out of the property line. So they might go around the property and find it anywhere they can stand and safely. And then they get the reading. Obviously, you don't just take the reading and get like one number and you say this is it because it gets out of the flesh with it, right? And you want to get a little bit, you know, like a range. So the device will give you the number at this moment and will give you the average as long as it's on, and you know, you're looking at it. So if you wait 10, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, you can't get that range and 10 seconds at average. Again, it's a requirement of the average DBs that say 70 DB, but then we'll get an 80 or 82 DB as an average. Then that's a violation. Is this written down anywhere? Is there a written program? Yeah, so internally, and I'll add to the question. I think you're asking if we created an internal SOP. Yeah, we do. When we started this program, we purchased some meters for the six code officers. That's the three shifts, the six code argue by 25 or 30 of these seconds. And then we wrote down and trained our staff on how to take the readings and what to do for our current ordinance. So we do have that as a view right now. And they're estimating where the property line is? I don't know. They're estimating, I mean, most of them are very obvious, but I mean, we don't have a plat of the property if you will. That's an estimate, it's an estimate. Well, most of the properties are fenced, or you have some kind of outline that you can't tell. Now, this is good conversation. This is important information. It's helping us move it along. However, it's time to check. I'm just gonna say it's 638 and we have several things, including some sound experts or engineers. I don't know if I'm words in your mouth, but just some folks that we've asked to come and talk to us. So, but I don't want to stop the conversation. I'm just gonna have the time to check, right? But there was a question, did you have a question? Oh, I'm sorry, I'll need you to do a question, I'm sorry. So, say it's not a house party, it's an establishment and you get a call and a code officer goes out and verifies that there is genuinely a violation. When the officer gets there, if he's not hearing that, can he still issue a citation? If the appointment has the leader readings, I would think you could still do that. They are different. Yes, they can't do that. They're legally allowed to do that. Thank you. Yeah, okay. If we're looking enough to have a slow night and a police officer is unlucky enough to have to do those level sevens, are they carrying the noise meters, the devices that measure and decibels? Are they carrying those in their cars? No, the patrol officers do not have any visible rears in the vehicles themselves. Each substation has one assigned to it for current problems and for the safe officers that are community-oriented police officers that work specific target problems with the patrol officers themselves at night. Yeah, all right. Any other questions or comments on this agenda items for now? We've got some good notes and again, part of my job is trying to keep our facility, right? It's the big tier we get the most, if not all they've done that, so. Okay, so what's the next item on me? Going to the agenda. We're gonna talk about the homework, I'm sorry. The assignment, I'm not supposed to call it homework, I'm not sure why, but some people didn't like that. We asked you to do an assignment, so one of the questions task force members, right? We've been talking decimals since day one, right? And many of us before, and I'm not gonna talk too much about, we have some people that are gonna talk a little bit later about it. Now, this is not a scientific study that we've asked you all to do, but we just asked you all, we all agreed, the task force agreed, let's have some fun, let's download, which is probably strike one. We downloaded an app, one of the sound apps that we found, right? The sound meter app that you can put on your smartphone, because it's easily accessible. And we asked you all to do a little homework, walk around your home area and take some readings with the app. And we just asked you to send it in, because some of us on the task force were asking, look, 63 is too much, 72 is too much, 85 is too much, not enough, but some of us were asking, well, what the heck is that amount of decimals? Because that's what our current code uses, decimals, right? So we asked you to kind of send in your numbers. We haven't fact checked, we're assuming an honor system here, right? We use the honor system on these numbers. But we looked at ambient noise, air conditioners, dishwashers, the washing machine, the dryer. We even asked you to turn the TV on your normal, right? And then we asked you to turn it, turn it up so that it's too loud for you, right? Which, again, is subject to everybody's hearing, and we all know that, look, it's not daytime, Friday night, daytime, back at night time, and stuff like that. So we took your numbers. Not everybody was able to get it in, and it's okay if you want to send it in after, you know, late, we won't dock any points for that assignment. But this is what we have so far, and we're getting average, where's the average number of units in spreadsheet, there's always averages, all right? All right, well, you didn't leave me the top row up there. All right, you're gonna work on that. So the first row, average. Ambient. Is ambient around, is it the 40? 40. 40, okay. And I'm not gonna go and do this without the heading, it's all right, sorry, hold on, hold on. Pre-spaced top row. Yeah, pre-spaced top row, here we go. All right, if you're asking me to meet our expert on the data, pre-spaced? Data, pre-spaced for you. Where are you? For the review. View, thank you. I need someone, where is it? Pre-spaced, boom. Oh my goodness, all right. I'm getting an extra cookie later. All right, thank you. Ambient noise 40, air-conditioned, these are averages. Just taking what you've given us, that's it. You can take it for what it means or not. It's not, don't say this is all exact. Air-conditioners, 47. Dishwashers, actually I've readin' the top green. Should I ever readin' the bottom green, I mean? No, the top. Top green, yeah. Dishwasher, 46. Some of you have quieter dishwashers. Washers, 54, dryer, 57. TV, usually around 56. TV, too loud, 70. Daytime, 36, front yard. Your backyard is about the same, 36. Nighttime, front yard, 43. Nighttime, backyard, 43. Okay, that's just using the data that we all kind of, did anybody have fun with that little app or not? Or was it confusing? Anybody spend more than like 20 minutes on this assignment? No, okay. All right, probably that's how you did, okay. All right, okay. Well, part of this was just to get some numbers that we see around the house. Now, is the app a scientific calibrated instrument? No. I will tell you though, our team did some, with both readings, is that up here? The three readings here, those are with the meters. With the meters, with the meters only, okay. And we did that just to see the average. So using the calibrated meters that the code officers are using, right. You'll see the app had a delta, and again, this is how many data points we're talking, but 45 versus 40, 47 to 47, that one was kind of close. But again, that's different air conditioners, and you know, three of them, 39 versus 46. And so you can look to see the difference. And the reason we did that, right, we talked about this, is we know many of our residents in town, and including the businesses, are trying to understand what's going on. And not every one of them purchased $100 or $200 calibrated audible meter. They downloaded a free app, that if you look at the app, it tells you it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's probably awesome. But we just tried to say, we know that there's a resident out there that might be calling, and says it's 60 more dBs. So they call it in. But we may get there, and it's not exactly 64 dBs. We're using a calibrated meter, taking a decimal reading. So there's a little bit of difference there, but it also says they're not that far off if, again, this is just a small sample of that. So I'll open it up for discussion. Just one more comment. I missed something. So you can see my name. I listed it twice, one time with the phone, and then one time with the meter. So I stood at my house with the same location, with both devices. My phone, with the app, and my calibrated meter. And I recorded that just, you know, so you guys can't see that. Because again, as Mike said, when we are comparing the averages, we are comparing two different houses, two different environments. Here, these two rows are exactly the same location, same area. So just again, for your info. Now, thank you, I mean, that's a good point. Now, I'm not sure that we can make any real decisions based on this limited, unscientific data. We did think as a group, remember last meeting? I think it was a virtual meeting. Thought this was a decent exercise, so at least try it and start a conversation. But I'll just open it up to the task force now, anybody that has any comments or questions about this. Now, this is the first, you know you're dead. You've tended to us. But now you're looking at some other people's recordings. Does this, does this get us anything? Is this something we need to work more on? Does this mean, I mean, yes, it was a great exercise, just throw it away, you can do it, help us. What do we think? Anybody want to jump in? I throw it away. Throw it away? All right, throw it, we have one vote for throw away, but you can't just vote, you can't explain your vote. The one that reveals is the wide difference between people's perception of sound. What is one person's loud TV versus another? I mean, these are pretty broad differences on that sort of thing. Like, that's a good point. So it's loud to you, may not be loud to me, but I'm gonna eat it that loud just to be able to hear it. Where are you measuring from the dryer? Five feet from the next room in your bedroom? I, you know, where? Yeah, we, when we had the assignment it was set up about five foot. Now again, if you can't or you don't have that business, obviously you might be closer, but. Yeah, we get some general instructions, it wasn't to begin. No, I get it. Yeah, I don't, did anybody go to the next room, close the door and then take the reading of the equipment that they were doing? I hope you didn't do that, that's a little. All right. I thought I didn't check it out, you know. What I was surprised about was that it was so quiet. I thought because when I'm listening to like the washer or the dryer and all that, it's moving up, it's higher, but it really wasn't that high. So I was sort of impressed how quiet it was. But also then I got really curious, could be of traffic issues and different parts of the day than your noise, you know, change. But that's what just surprised me. I don't, we can't use the data, but it made you aware of, especially when you have new appliances, how quiet they are. Sure. The old ones. Sure. Okay. Now, anything else? This is open for discussion, comments? Yeah, I think it just shows you how easy it is to be at the top of the desk or where you're at. Don't put TV on it and it just, it sounds like you're already in violation. You know, I'm sure that, you know. But my TV, yeah. In some cases, I mean, again, like Chad said, it's just all over the place, but in some instances, they showed you how easy it is to hit that one. Actually. Yeah, it's interesting that, yeah, I guess the TV normal is pretty good. I mean, some of us like it at 79, others like it at 50, I guess. Like I said, what's loud of you might not be loud of me in my first. Of course, yeah, I think we, I think, yeah, we know that. We also see you guys nice appliances and who doesn't. I think they charge more for the quieter. Quiet, this one's a good one. All right, all right. All right, anything else? Now, we'll put this with some big qualifier. This is not a scientific, this is just a, but we're gonna post this for you guys to all see. I mean, I hope our community members, when you look at this, don't take this as scientific, right, this is just an exercise we did to try to take some readings around our houses. And I'm sure, when I look at our first sign guide, we're gonna stop at anything over there. We're gonna yell at us for doing this because we probably sent ourselves back, I don't know, a few feet or so. Okay, well that was just the exercise we did. I would say if you didn't submit anything, feel free to send us your data if you want to. If you don't want to send in assignment results, that's fine too. We'll see if this helps us in the future or not. That sound about right? All right, all right, thank you. All right, I'm gonna move a little bit from the sound demonstration. We were talking about maybe doing a sound demonstration by taking out the ass, taking out some meters, cranking up some music. I'm not sure it's gonna get us any more than we just had. I think it's more important because we do have a couple of gentlemen here that we're gonna ask to just maybe talk a little bit about and they've been, we've had, we've told this group. We've been looking for someone with a little more sound experience in the real world science behind it. Some of the real world issues that they've seen, maybe in other jurisdictions that would have you. So I mean, I'll ask you to introduce the two members. You'll mind if we ask you to talk for, you know, but okay, I'll overview it. Don, if you're willing to help us out, right? All right, put you on the spot, okay? All right, I mean, I'm gonna hand it over to you and then hand it over to our speakers. All right. So again, yeah, we have two experts here. I'm glad we got them and they're willing to help us out. So I'll turn it over to Arley. That's what he likes to go by, but he can talk a little bit about himself, you know, his expert experience, and then he can talk a little bit about sound, DB levels, things like that, and we can again ask any questions. You can use this one, what is it? That one's live already. Just so you know, we've gotten tickets on the Riverwalk about five times from this microphone since we started in this room. I would say that the earlier chart shows that their app is probably, the average com app is off quite a bit from a calibrated sound pressure level meter, and if yours are $100 or $200 a professional calibrated microphone is about $149, so they're all gonna be a little bit off. My name is Arley Blackstone, I'm a recording engineer, producer, musician, sound designer, kind of feel like that makes me sound like I'm in an ATV meeting. I've did some consulting at Gallin Logo, worked with Chick Korea and Ricky Stags and designed 14 studios and helped people with sound problems and have some considerable background in this. What I wanted to talk to you about was just an overview of some of the concepts that you're dealing with. First thing is I think that the task force is named, or we're talking about measuring the sound and you get that right on the mic. Or we're talking about measuring the sound whether it is noise or whether it is music or whether it is subject to judgment. If you take your, if you go to, you're the major gentleman's third symphony, that's music to me, but to your 14-year-old who wants to get back to the bass, but it's just noise, it's in the way, right? So we need noise ordinances and noise control for things like drill presses and industrial machines. We need sound management for music and things so that we get along. I've probably been a perpetrator when it comes to being too loud. I've also been someone who couldn't sleep if there hasn't been too loud, so I'm on both sides of this discussion. Many of your, the apartment that we see here, so the sound level meter, making a proper sound level meter of measurement is not trivial, which is why it's good that officers are not carrying a sound level meter because you have to have some knowledge of what they're measuring. If you're an engineer and I mean we'll agree with this, I'm sure if you're an engineer, it's very easy to make the wrong measurements. And the fact that those are all over the map shows that also the fact that statistically you have a self-selected sample of people who probably have nicer houses than a lot of people. My house at two in the morning on a C-weighted is 50 or 60 dB because of the highways they're on. There's nothing to do about it and I know we got to do something about it. So sound, if you don't know what it is, compression and retraction of air. It's not actually air-moving. Sound travel is about 770 miles an hour or something like that. And if it was actually wind, we'd all be really gone. Sound is just compression in the air and it will find a way out if there's a hole. You can put a 30 dB lost door in a wall and if you don't seal it, you will do nothing. So a lot of the businesses that are having trouble managing the sound just keep talking to them. They just need to manage some of the structure so that when the door closes it actually seals. Sound is traveled 1,000 moment 20 feet per minute C-leveling, I got it. And what that means is if you've looked at an equalizer on your stereo or something, mid-range, right around the 1K is the center and that wave is about a foot long. Up at the top, the wave is about an inch long. Down at the bottom, base wave is 20, 40, 50 feet long. And so you might, you know, maybe one of the favorite rates on your wall or do something to improve sound besides needing a fire marshal to talk to you, they won't do anything because they don't see that with sound at all. So, okay. So the way sound propagates in a free space is it drops off. We've heard the TV thing pass around a lot of it. Decimals come from Alexander Graham Bell, which named the bell with a measure that they used in a bell telephone and it's since been used to turn to the decibels or 10th of a bell. And it means nothing unless it's related to something. For decibel sound pressure level is decibels related to the threshold of hearing. And when you look at one of these readings that says decibel, SPL, you have to, it has to be calibrated and marked with something to be correct. And there are two different ways to listen. There's a C-weighting, which means that it records everything at the exact same volume. And that's handy for doing measurements of speakers and things that you're doing with instrumentation. There's an A-weighting that more closely across the nature here, which is the correct weighting for them to use when they're measuring locally. And every time you double the distance from the source that you're at, the sound goes down about 60 feet. So if you're five foot from the dryer and you're out in the middle of a field in a free field and you step 10 feet away, you can see the sound over there. And another 10 feet away, I mean, five feet away to 10 feet, then you double the sound. And in order to get the same amount of rock you need to go from 10 to 20 feet and 20 to 40. So when I see noise, I'm gonna say, when we measure at 80, we'll measure at 100 feet, but now we're gonna measure at 150, you aren't really doing much of anything. So where you measure the sound from is very important. I'm sure nobody measured the dryer inside the dryer, but I'm sure that's a lot louder than it would be at five feet, right? The way our current ordinance is written, the measurement is taking the property boundary of the person creating the noise, is that correct? Yeah, thank you. Okay, so that means that if you're in the middle of the national section and there's nobody's house for half a mile, you're still judged by your volume of that location. That doesn't, that might reflect a noise code compliance point of view, but it doesn't reflect community along with each other view. And I think that this is, things I've come up to this point are mostly facts, but this is my opinion. I think that it should be measured at the complaints boundary or the nearest property boundary that's called City Bound. So that you actually have some measurement of how much they are affecting other people's lives, not a measurement of how loud they are one foot from the front door. There's a club on St. Mary's that got a ticket and I was happy to observe it. The band was not playing. The Code Compliance Officer took a reading with a bus. And they didn't realize that it was a bus, I think. So I'm sure the reading was way out of that. Thanks for that. I think that it would be helpful if each sound recording, each SPL measurement was coming by an audio recording so that you could ascertain what was being measured. There's also, I remember another place they got a ticket on a Sunday because of the noise complaint they were notein' and so there are, like you mentioned earlier, multiple complaints. I don't think you're likely to track the computer IP address. I don't know if you track the complaint as phone number, but there are some people that just make, you know, their time to call in every day and complain about something because they don't like the idea. So anyway, to me, in my home, in our homes, we want to have quality life and we wanna be able to sleep and it's the work for Apple. I also think that art and music are required for me to have quality life. And so you might want, it takes you quiet in your home, but musicians need to get paid so that they're not homeless and a lot of people are otherwise. So that's the hearing perception of sound. You sound with them is perceived by a person. So anything that you hear is also involved with your brain. So if you like it or you don't like it, people have a different perception of how loud it is. Maybe I'm just gonna stop here for a second because I wanna give you some time. Don, I think you give us some good information. I know this is not the end of the discussion, but Don, would you mind, came up, maybe I want you to stay. I just wanna make sure we have time for a good Q and A as well. So I wrote down a bunch of information already and I want, if you don't mind, Don, if you could introduce yourself. And again, I think it's important to have multiple people here helping us with some of these key issues, things like how sound is measured and those type of things. So, Don, can you introduce yourself a little bit, talk a little bit about your experience and some key issues that you see that the task force needs to think about, the science of sound or the real life things that we're hearing. Again, we have multiple people here, both from just residents, businesses, residential residents, and in between. And then what I'd like to do is open it up for the task force to have some comments and questions. And I know, I didn't speak to Katie before, I know we did, I know Don had said, this is something that you'd like to be part of moving forward, so this is, hopefully not the last time we see you, I think that's the goal. They are volunteering their time, we didn't take them or anything like that, so, but then like, Don, if I could, if you could add or subscribe to what we've heard, but anything you can add, but to tell people who you are and what you do. I am Don Pitts, don't throw stuff at me, I'm from Austin. I was music program manager for the city of Austin for seven years, and this meeting kind of brings back a lot of memories, but, under, we, once we understood that psychology, the noise and sound, and I've mediated a lot of disputes about whether to call it noise or sound, but I think it's both, depending on what you end up with your own, but we reduced some complaints, 74% over three years, by introducing some practical policies to really, enforcement we found out is the most expensive and not the most accessible approach. It's more about, I mean, we do it, but it was the regulation and the self-regulation and the smart policy that included problem solving in the ordinance. I've said to many residents and businesses that you can add 40 pages to the sound ordinance, and it's more than likely not gonna solve a problem unless you have the right policy that's gonna allow them problem solving. So I do, Barbie, I agree with the sound is very complex, and I think the challenge that cities have is how do you regulate that, and I think what I sense tonight is from the conversations that there's a lot of expectations now about enforcement. I had one other person besides me work my department. We had a review and sign off on 227 now for these venues, as well as about 500 special events a year. But it is possible, I mean, there is the neighborhood or associations and the venue associations in Austin are now 95% thick as thieves. There is hope. All right, thank you, John. And I will say, well, that our people are at a good point on the measurement, where you measure it. We debated, I think our ordinance in Austin is at the same measure from the property line. This is where I think self-regulation is key. The challenge with doing it from the complaint to the property line, we found out, we tried that for about six months. The judges came back to us and said, this is where it's thrown out of your case, because they've got good attorneys that says, how do I know it's not this, this, this, or this, it's hard, it's a challenge. Thank you guys for coming here. Thank you. All right, thank you, Don, and get me, I'm already hungry. I'm gonna get home for the reading today, so I'm sorry about that. All right, so the purpose today, as the task force has asked us, is to search out and see who's in sound, who knows some of the issues, not part of this group, you know, sound scientists, someone who's been in sound, and we wanted to bring them here today just to have some conversation or at least be a sound, I won't say it, I almost said it, a sounding board, you've got it, I know. To me, some of them we can throw some questions at or maybe help us ask the right questions so that we can do some research and get some answers. So I'm gonna really open it up, I mean, I really do thank you guys for being here, and I really hope, I mean, in some conversations we've had, I hope you'll be part of this with us. The task force is really trying to get as much information as possible so we can figure this thing out, but I think you both agree, and you both said it a couple of times, it's a very complex which we all know. So I'm gonna just kind of open it up, I thought John and I was, okay. Okay, I got a couple, I'm gonna go this way around the room. Next time, John? Okay. Either one of you are fond of this. Sound, the main problem we have in our area is really the bass and the vibration, and that's not necessarily measured by the decimals. And then that really, somebody can be out there screaming, now that doesn't really matter too much, but especially when you're inside your residence, but the vibration in the bass penetrates, and I don't even think the vibration sometimes, I need somebody to comment on that or expound on that. I'm not sure that even a decibel begins. Can you feel it in your feet? Pardon me? Can you feel it in your feet? Yeah, yeah. It's vibration and sound. So the question, if anybody didn't hear me just repeat it quickly, I get this, I see somebody in the back doing this for me. John asked a question about really vibration. We talked about decibel levels and stuff, but sometimes the challenge that a resident is facing that they've been able to another property making some sort of, I'm gonna use the term noise, of course sound, I don't, the chapter in the tone is noise, I just have to go with that. But John asked, what about vibration? Is that an issue, and what was your comment? Can you feel it in your feet? Well, that's one way to tell if it's vibration, yes. Another way to think about it is this. If your neighbor in your, if your neighbor in the next door of the apartment, for instance, hits a two by four in air with a hammer, it's not very loud. If they hold it against your wall, it's a lot louder, that's vibration. And sound travels at a certain speed and a certain efficiency through air. Travels more efficiency through solids. And so, vibrations are a tough guy to deal with. I would ask the question, where is it coming from? And is it transmitted through the air? Or sometimes you can lift speakers up off the ground and do some things to help reduce that transmission. But like the one, the one ordinance, you know, vibration 21, 2153, basically it states, self-control for any person to maintain or cause any ground or airborne vibration. So, you know, it comes through the air, as opposed to the ground. So you don't need to get in the dump trucks and the trains and take it every time you go by. I mean, it's just not going to be a good reason. What's annoying, I compare this to like the Chinese torture drill. You know, you lay there and every second of a drop of water goes on you. You know, for five minutes that's no big deal. And like the train comes by, the truck comes by, the bus comes by, but it's temporary. But when you have this constant base, you know, it goes for hours. It's a different kind of noise. Thank you. So let me just see what I can say. So John, I think, so John read a section of our code, that's already in our code. And we know the task force does, we have to kind of find a way to address how do we measure too much or too much? You know, I think your comment was, John, we don't have a DV meter that can measure vibrations. At least we're not using it right now. So let me phrase it this way to either of you, do you have experience with, in any type of noise ordinance or sound ordinance, sound mitigation ordinance, how to address if we get a complaint or a neighbor is sending to a business, hey man, that is some, that's some big base vibration. It seems to me that the letter of a code, how do you want to even measure it or enforce it, but how do you mitigate it? Is that something you guys have some experience with? I have, there's been several situations we had downtown where the buildings were, Is it in Austin? Is it in Austin? In Austin, okay. We're gonna have to sound vibrations. Up one building was up to the sixth or seventh floor and the other one was up to like 12, 14. One of them was an easy fix. It was, when we reached out to find out where the source of the sound was, it was really with a simple fix of just decoupling the speakers from the wall and setting on rubberized stuff. And the other room was a little bit more complex that we went up solving it. The policy that we installed was the sound impact plan. So that everyone had had a permit and the sound impact plan and review found some of those sound vibrations because they were just calling 3-1-1 with four of the citizens were just calling and it was kind of going nowhere. But we would, that was how it sounded from a policy standpoint, was each location had a sound impact plan. So I'm gonna take this. So vibration is fairly down, you know I think everybody here knows that's one of the issues that we have to try to tackle. I mean the CCR tells us to tackle that. What can we do to improve if there is a vibration complaint or a confirmed violation, even if the code stays the same today, or if it's sweet, whatever that is, not only identifying it and calling it out, right? But also maybe some sort of mitigation plan in the code or requirement. So that vibration topic is one of the main topics we have on the list down in the dashboard. We don't know that, right? On the topics we have to continue to go through. Probably one of the more challenging ones, but I think, you know, that's gonna be the conversation. And John, I'm gonna put it that, we're gonna have to solve it tonight. But I'll look to some of the business owners at the group is if someone complains, hey, you're in your base or your vibration is really out of the norm or something. What would that conversation, or what would that enforcement, or what would that mitigation look like? I think that's gonna have to be part of this discussion as we get to that topic. Is that about in the realm of what you're kind of identifying now? And you guys, I think, John, you talked about that. You've had some experience with that, and I mean, you've been in sound forever. You said, I mean, it's not just about the noise, you said noise and vibration. Is that about right? We have to find a way to address that a little bit. Well, we both were talking, he mentioned decoupling. That's what lifting it off the ground most. It's really, I just put a different term on it. Yeah. I wouldn't be bad if the task force had a group of people that could come help diagnose the problem and work together to solve it. I also thought it would be nice if the sound, I would like to do a ride along with them, which I'm actually, but it'd be nice if there was a community advocacy kind of group that would go with the people measuring it and then you would have somebody who is with them who says, yeah, it was annoying. I don't know whatever the number was, it was annoying. They need to fix it. Another annoying, like annoying is another difficult term, right? It's annoying to me, it may not be annoying to you, but I know what to say. Okay. Don, I'm gonna go to you next. Okay. And Arby and Don, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here today, and I appreciate you all and your expertise. And that's, you know, touching upon what Arby was just saying. If we were to look at the list of the frequent calls, the calls are made frequently on specific businesses, I would guarantee that it's the same businesses over and over again. Why can't we hire these consultants to come in and whether do a ride along or consult with these businesses and help them to figure out how they can improve whether it's their speakers, their sound system, their wiring, whatever it is. And let's solve the problem that way. And that way everybody at the end of the day is happy. But we all have to coexist. And us going back and forth, it's not helping, but let's find some solutions. And I think having these two experts, it's a start. It's a great start, and I think it can really help us. So thank you, Don. So we talked last meeting about, we gave you an update of the summary of the data, right? We talked a little bit about grabbing the detailed data and certainly identifying some properties, both residential or commercial, right? This is a residential that maybe have the largest number of calls and more confirmed violations, right? So we haven't really decided what to do with that yet. But so Don, do you think we should take a look at that and find some, I don't know, I'm gonna call it examples of some that have gotten more than one call or more than one violation and see if we can use that as part of a plan to mitigate what the real issue is. If it is as simple as turning down the volume or is it some other techniques that they talk about? You know, I assume that there's a specific placement for speakers and wiring, and you know, again, they are the experts. So why don't we have them consult with the city to help these people that are getting cited? I mean, you know, if it's the same people getting cited every single weekend, how is that helping anybody? How is that helping us? Yeah, I agree because I'm in an area where there's a lot of other businesses around me. I have a highway next to me and I've been signed multiple times. So it's like, they could come in here and say, you know what, it's not 100% you, it's 25% them or whatever. So just trying to help identify, except the problem, I mean. And so right now, I just feel like I'm being targeted and it's because when I have five other businesses around me, maybe you know, if I say my own sound, it sounds traveling. So, Sergio, to that point, I have one of the businesses that I have is a 1400 person capacity music maybe. Yeah, I can see that. I think that if the issue is, are there treatments and things that we can do to achieve better harmony with the neighborhood, I think that self-serving, I think it'd be pleasantly surprising a number of business owners that would take reasonable steps to do that. Not all of them, but hopefully the good actors are now with the bad actors. My problem is gonna be taking these steps. Is it going to do any good? The steps that I take are they offset by the fact that people need to cop their windows for that we're Jason The Token Hill, it's a historic neighborhood. A lot of those buildings don't have insulation. They're old houses. I live in old houses just up the street. I guess that part of my concern as a business owner is are we trying to address residential concerns on a one-off ad hoc basis? In other words, I don't use the term fighting battles, but are we fighting 50 different battles with 50 different people in the neighborhood with 50 different houses and 50 different perceptions of what's loud and what's not. I really am glad you guys are here because I think if we can get to a point that Mr. Pitts referenced it, I mean, the calls and the citations, it's just this silly cycle and it's wasteful and it's not really, it's trying to treat the something without really getting the bottom of it. I do think if there was something that that we could collaborate on and say, you know, we're going to do sound treatment, sound bath and all this sort of stuff, I think that you'd be, you'd find a pretty receptive audience on the business side. And I know some friends in Austin that a lot of the music venues in particular near downtown, they had to be halfway on a lot of things. It's some of it was time, some of it was treatment. Speaking for myself, we would be, we'd certainly be open to that. I think that's, to me, that makes it feel like we're moving towards a solution and we're not just continuing with butthole. I was struck by the number of the percentage you talked about. Your cases, your calls are tracked by how much percent? Have you started with it? 74%. Well, and it's not an enforcement piece, but it's the policy piece and the going and evaluating businesses and working with them. So I'm with you guys, if you're not in the room. Yeah, I'm gonna, I think that sounds awesome. Hold on a second, I'm gonna get to Fargo and then I'm gonna come back to you. But before we get on, I wanna make sure my staff understand, because I think the task force, you know something, I wanna say, the fact that the perimeter around you, let's say the properties around you, but there was an industrial example. Was that you, no? Oh, sorry. So there was an example of, well, what if the homes next to you are built a little bit differently and they're not, you said cough, they're insulated. I think it's gonna be a challenge for this group to come up with some recommendations that are, I mean, this is a city noise ordinance, right? Sound like it's a noise ordinance. So how do we, how do we come up with some, either the policy procedure rules that could be consistently applied? I know that's one of the benefits of doing it around the property that's creating the sounds and what it sounds like. So it's consistent. No matter if it's a brand new insulated home that meets today's insulation standard or under a whole. But I'm just putting a pin in that, right? So that's an important piece of the equation. But I know my team is gonna have that on our notes, but something for us to consider. I think it's gonna go farther than the back of the circuit. Is that right? Oh, I want to show this part of it. Oh, Ari, you want to say that? There's one, somebody said it's as easy as turning it down. And I think, I don't know, I said that, I know this is a very common meme, so I'm gonna address it. When you have your spirit at home, you are completely controlled with your volume and you can turn it down. It seems like it's a really simple thing, right? But he's, I'm sure he's dealt with this. Can you, those guitar, you know, talk to the sound guy and turn your cars down and the faders are all the way at the bottom. They're already off. So some of this noise, can we all get along kind of program? I think needs to involve musicians understanding how loud they are off the stage. Because until this, the guy that you want to pick on, who's at the sound board, you know, is actually producing 80 or 90% of the sound in the room, he's not in control. You can turn the PA off and the drums and horns and guitar players, guitar players, guitar players, can be way louder than the PA. And all the guy at the front is going to kind of get the voice up enough where you can hear it work. So it's a multivariant problem. And yeah, not one and all. Thank you for that. I'm not a musician. I only understood like a fraction of what you said. So those questions don't bring to me about turning the volume down to nothing and stuff. But I'm going to partner next, and you're going to like it, so you get on. So I think with remediation, the city needs to bear the burden of remediation and not put it on business owners because the city has created a problem by approving the COOs of properties that are adjacent to residential homes that have been there for 100 years. So I think that's something that needs to be brought up is that the city should also bear some of the financial responsibility for the businesses to create remediation, to enter sound for those homes. Some of these homes, there was a real estate office and then a dog room. And then over time, it became a nightclub and a bar. And so you have these people that have been in these homes for years and years before those businesses were there. City of Jersey's businesses to operate with amplified music, and it changes the entire, just quality of life for those people on those homes. So I think it's a burden on the city to tell the businesses to improve remediation. So it's not just on all businesses. Here. Okay. And thank you, Parker. We wrote that down. I think that's the reason for the death force to talk about more of the death that we may have heard a little bit of that in some of the previous meetings, but that hasn't been elevated a ton. So let's make sure we keep that as part of the discussion. I'm going to start you, and then Gemma, and then. I just want to touch upon something that proper. Well, I know, I know, hold that. I want to give everybody, I want to give everybody. Okay. But I did say I was going to go start you and then Gemma. I'm going to go start you and Gemma and Don. You can like, I'll pass. I just want to clarify my statement. I wanted to clarify my statement. Gemma, is that right? I'm going to clarify my statement. You giving that? Always good. Okay. Thank you, Gemma. Thank you, Gemma. Now I'm going to give everybody Gemma. When I stated that we could hire the consultants to come out and go to these businesses and let them know, this is what you could work on. I'm not talking about now having the business pay for astronomical fees to get new wiring, new speaker system, new sound system. I'm talking about them just advising them this is what we could do. Maybe this speaker is in the wrong place. Maybe you have it pointed in the wrong direction. I know there are ways around it because the last thing our business community needs is now this new burden of having to buy a whole new sound system or wiring. So I just wanted to clarify. I'm not saying, let's make the businesses pay. Okay. I think that's good clarification. I think I had that but it's good to make sure it's crystal clear. Gemma, you have a mic right there. You're good. Right. So actually, I was fortunate I found the article on the 90 Brown Cafe in Austin which led me to what Don's work has been. And it's really interesting because we're looking at mitigating, trying to mitigate noise across everything. Neighborhoods and stuff. So it's just not the bad bars or the good bars. It's having this knowledge of where to place speakers or really how to look. And I know in Austin you've done that and that's why you've got less complaints. Really looked at it from a broader way how do you mitigate noise? What fascinated me too was, yes, noise does sort of decrease. But when you look at it like I know in the 90 Cafe when they look, why are certain houses get the noise and others don't? And so sound travels in a very complex way. And we need to understand that just going to say I live in a residential. But the noise we get because I live in a park. And so the sound crosses a golf course in a river and you can sing along in your home. And so it's a stone building, you know. So for different ways, sound really does travel. A word of measuring, how to do it, how do we make everyone, you know, at least sing a little bit kumbaya here. And the fascinated me just by replacing speakers in a different way or pointing down, we'll go for the businesses. Neighbors, then mixed uses we're doing. Are we really having the correct construction in the building if you want mixed use, you know, for the neighbors upstairs so they're not complaining. I don't know what to do with neighbors in neighborhoods and partying that sort of thing on me. But I think we'd welcome your help, thank you. You're experiencing a really cool thing. You know how people say you can always hear well over a lake? It's because sound continues to bend back down towards cold. So what you're hearing across the river and across that is that same effect of being on a lake. And that's not something a person who is making sound has anything to do with it. All right, yeah. Okay, thank you, Gemma. It's really, really good. Okay, I'll give you that. Thanks, that says, Samita or I on my legal, I just want to remind the task force to, the focus is not exclusively on businesses, it's across the board. And if you will note on your statistics and it's been proven out by the pilot program, over 63% of the complaints are coming from residential properties. And so I would caution the group from focusing too much on this business versus residential. We need to put in a policy in place that can be applied across the board, regardless of the type of structure that is emitting that noise. Yeah, I know. Oh, there you go. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. I agree. But I think, again, I'm in an area where it's becoming a lot denser and it goes back to what kind of urban, not bi or culture that we want to live in. And I think a lot, it seems like everybody kind of agree that, hey, let's use this as a fact to find it. Let's use this to collect data, let's get professionals involved. It ran out, it seemed like businesses are just constantly inside it or constantly in the taggers, or will constantly be targeted. And so I think maybe shift the focus is, hey, guys, let's work together. And expect, yeah, I think, I mean, 99% of us are willing to work with our residents because we rely on their business to support us. That's how we pay our bills. They come in and work with the city and I think there's a note like that. Here. All right, I'm going to do my little time check. Right, we have about 7.30. Specifically, we do about 7.40. And then we've kind of led into the question from task force members, but we have about 10 minutes left of that. So we're going to open it up to the community to offer any comments. And then kind of wrap it up by the eight o'clock so everybody can get home. All right, so just a time check. That's all it is. Just a quick clarification to Don. I'm going to ask you because we should have a way that you're aware of. Just a quick clarification to Don. Did you say in Austin you are permitting or they are permitting? Yes, but the music office. Music office. We were given the responsibility to do all the sound permits. So permitting is in Austin? Yes. Okay, because that was very extensively discussed and dismissed so far. So we'll come back to that. I will pass. Thank you, Don. Just a clarifying, Don. Nothing's been decided by this group. Nothing's been decided. All right, we've worked hard for several months. So nothing is off the table or off the table with every way you look at it. But I think the permitting issue, as you just mentioned, is something that, I think there was some other cities, you said Austin, and when we started this, because the Jews can have some format, that's going to be something for the task force to consider, right? But this has been a good staff strategy to you, but it hasn't been dismissed. I'm just going to file it out a little bit just to be fair to everybody in the room, okay? But good point, though. I think this is a good point, God, thank you. All right, what else? I just want to comment on Don's. You got a mic right there? Can you, yeah, use that one, thanks. I think last time, I think we saw seven establishments that had multiple citations. And I really liked our point, because I think all of us here realized it. We're not talking about most businesses. We're talking about a select few. And you know, secondly, you supervise people. You spend 80% of your time on 10% of the folks, you know, either good or bad. And it's sort of the same thing here. So I think, you know, we sort of know some of the bad apples, if you will. You focus on that, and I think a lot, at least from the business side, a lot of this is solid, okay? The residential thing, that's, you know, can't cap, you know, run all this out of it anyway. That's just my comment. Thank you, John. I understand that the past course has been fairly consistent from the beginning, that whatever we end up coming up with, and I'm going to look for some consensus on this concept. If we change anything and the ordinance moving forward, you know, and our policy procedures, clearly the main focus would be on repeat or multiple violators, you know, but we have to define what that is. Like, what is that, what is that, repeat seven or so out of 100 or whatever it is? Is that still what we're looking for is some improvements on it, but it's really, you know, we need to find something for the repeat violators, too. It's something that is, hey, help us, help you. Let's get into compliance, but if you still don't, whether you're a house party or a person or a business, this should be telling the ordinance to address that. Is that, am I not on the same page with that? And that's what I've been saying since the get-go. You know, let's focus on those bad actors, let's help them, let's not just go out every weekend and cite them, let's help them, let's educate them with these experts. I resent the term bad actors and bad apples. We've been cited for something and we're going to aggressively start fighting this in court because it's not gonna hold up. They are gonna be thrown out. You can cite me every day for a jaywalking. If I'm not jaywalking, then I'm not breaking the law. And I think that you're gonna find a lot of resistance for business owners when you're saying we're breaking the law and we don't believe that we are. You've been cited for a violation. We're not invioling, we do not believe that we are invioling. Yeah, and excuse me for using that term. No, I'm with the business community. All right, well, you know what? I thought I was bringing a lot more head nodding to my contents of something we'll continue to work on. But we've got a few more minutes before I open it up to the community. It's John. I just wanted to share with the committee that I had forwarded some comments to developmental services specifically related to a pilot where we are looking at 35% response to calls coming in where we're not even at a majority. So there are an awful lot of calls that are coming in. We have specifically been working with the neighbors trying to encourage involvement and calls coming in. We actually have some neighbors in the audience who are extremely frustrated with some of the responses from this Sunday that I also forwarded to you. So however it goes that the pilot is in effect, we are again appreciative, but the fact that we are looking at the types of answer, the answering of calls and investigations and then those investigations where we're actually looking at a much higher percentage of violations which are confirmed by PIA officers is something that we have, there are an awful lot of numbers here and we need to be appreciative of that. The frustration with the neighbors where this past Sunday, three separate neighbors have three separate calls in, each of them with responses absent the pilot program where we don't have officers to send out meters led to significant numbers of frustration. So again, not using the term bad actor, but for the businesses here, we would love the health of the businesses to interact in moving forward and there are neighbors in the audience. I said two, Jesse, do you want to partner? Yes, partner, okay. Part of the problem also is that the business owners aren't always there. So a lot of times it's somebody managing a place that could be a new manager and they're going against the business owner's wishes. So you have the business owners being punished also by a mad employee, you know. That's true, but ultimately I wish, yeah, my managers, if they did everything I wanted all the time, my life would be a lot better, but at the same time, I mean, I would say very seriously to residents, I'm accountable for that, you know, they're answerable to me and, you know, I have to, yeah, I mean, I don't think that I can pass the buck to them. I appreciate you saying that, but yes, it happens. I mean, in particular, you telling the DJ to keep it telling a sound engineer or what he was describing earlier in that scenario, a band that's touring from Los Angeles who's got a manager who's an egomaniac and wants his band's music up louder and they're doing it without our consent. I mean, things like that happen, but I would just say it's a gesture of good faith that it's on us to do better to the residents on that. It's not enough for me to say, well, that wasn't, that was my manager, that wasn't me. I had my feet up in my quietest state. Well, you guys are getting it. I just wanted to make a comment. I mean, that's the wrong term, but you know, it's annoying to a number of folks and then you're welcome to say it's not, I was a, I have a lot of sexual assault stuff about what I worked and you know, I heard this over and over, especially, I'm not picking on mails here, but that's, I didn't sexually harass her as well. It's not what you thought, it's what the lady thought. I mean, I was sexual with that. Well, sexual harassment, just because I don't think I'm sexually harassing somebody, it's really not what I think, it's what they perceive. Yeah, we'll let the board figure it out. I mean, it's the same thing there, there's no annoyance with this, no annoyance and vibration. Okay, so. All right, we're gonna find time for one more quick comment. If anybody wants to take it out of the bathroom before I open it up to the community. Um, anybody? No one wants to do it, no one wants to do it. Something we also gotta consider is, you know, what if it's not really the music that's making the noise? Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not, something we gotta think about is, what if it's not the DJ or the band making the noise? Okay, so. What would it be? Give me any, you know. For example, say, I'm trying to fit 1,400 people, I can fit, you know, 1,000 people, my establishment, I get a portion of them to come and take a reading, but all the noise is coming from the people talking. Or a call shop line, you know, so. I think it's, I feel that there are instances where that does happen, a lot of times. Sure. So. I mean, I think that's something we need to consider. Like, how are we gonna address that, you know, as we move forward, with either enforcement, with the criminal ordinance, we tweak the ordinance, right, and all that other stuff. Okay. And then, good, oh. One quick comment. Yeah, one more, before we get, you do that, you feel like, one more minute, there you go. Quick, all right. Listen, think back the last time you went to an macaroni grill or a restaurant, and you left, and your voice was tired because you were gonna yell back and forth. You don't do that until 86 or 88 dB. So, that restaurant, you know, of which probably 85 or 90% of the sound was people and dishes and not music, is an example of something that would have blown by all of these noise violations. And you went there voluntarily. That noise wasn't at the property line. You didn't have to make any sense to me. That's nonsense. That was my time of that work. So, that's inside the establishment, not outside the property line. I'm just saying what it is that you're prescribing my knowledge there. I know what you said. I just don't think it applied to anything we're doing. Yeah, but you got something about patio bars, too. I mean, that's the thing, but there's, you can't, you're not closing off. Okay, all right, that noise can be touched. And first of all, thank you, everyone, and thank you to John Harvey. I mean, I think having a little bit different perspective, experience, expertise on this issue, I think it's gonna help us, it's already challenging. But, this is the time of the evening, and I feel like I'm locked in, I'm gonna try that. Sorry, any members that are in here? All right, so we have time, and Rick, you're raising your hand first. Okay, we're gonna, you're in the area, just give me a nod, raise your hand, and we're gonna try to get your mic. You're about to have some comments from the group, and try to help move this along in the next couple of months. So I have done a little research as well in this, because, oh, okay, Rick, Rick Schell, it's over here. I have done a little research on this as well, and I've taken a look at some different things. One of the things that the task force needs to consider in their discussions is that when you increase decibel level by three decibels, you are doubling the energy that is being emitted from that sound. And so, it doesn't sound like a lot, three decibels is not a big of a deal. In the example that we were looking at earlier, where you were in industrial complex, for example, if you have one machine working at 90 decibels, you have another machine that fires up at 90 decibels, it doesn't double. You're now operating at 93 decibels, right, because it doubles for every three decibels that are being used. So it's one thing to think about with the task force is to make sure that when we're talking about levels and measurements and those types of things, that you're talking about the energy that's being displaced outside of the property that's being evaluated, right? And so if they're at 70 or 75 or 80 decibels at 11, 12 o'clock at night, the house three or four or five houses away is still likely to feel the effects of that sound and that energy on the property, even though the decibel reading will decrease over that space, which is what you were talking about. So again, it's just one of those things. You know, the fact that you all are investigating 35% of the calls, that tells me that if we were to reverse engineer that and multiply the number of citations and the number of calls being actually cited at 100%, that number would be significantly higher. And I'm not sure that that's necessarily what we want. We would much prefer to have folks working together and trying to find the solutions. But right now that's what we've got. And so I think that the community is still expecting that those enforcements are going to occur. I was disheartened to see that 189 instances were not cited, because I think that would have maybe raised some high ground source and some thoughts on things. Thank you, Ray. Ahoy. I'm going to go back to us. I'm going to stand first. Is that all right? There we go. I'm a spotter. I see a lot of good business owners in here. I'm a business owner. And I'd like to talk about the task force and something that happened a few weeks ago. There are several businesses and I think you were talking about this too. There's several businesses right across the street from us. Okay. Not to mention the street that I'm talking about is Broadway and it's a very busy street. We've had sound testing with experts that have gone around and done all kinds of sound testing around our business because we always work with the neighborhood. We've built a big wall in the back to keep the sound. I invested in a $10,000 sound system that we can totally control and my staff has no access to it. So the staff can't turn it up. We set it where we want it. And we do everything we can to work with the neighborhood. And whatever problem ever comes up, I mean, one of our neighbors right here is John Breneman. And the reason why I got the sound system was because of his vibrations and he was having issues there, which weren't coming from my business, okay. But I still did it because I want to work with the neighborhood. Well, I got a citation a few weeks ago for noise violation. And it was just how you guys described it as a co-compliance came out. They stood out about 20 feet from the front of my business and took the reading right there on the edge of Broadway, which we already know the ambient sound on Broadway is between 65 to 70 decibels. It's already over the limit. Like someone had mentioned earlier that the business was closed and got a ticket. We could have been closed and we would have got a ticket right there. Not to mention also talked about one of the businesses that is a big problem that has all these problems is right across from us. They're so bad that 150 feet away, across the street, in the back of my business, on my patio, we hear their music over our music, which is detrimental to my business. A lot of people complain and when the bartenders who have no access to train up the music, they'll turn up the music they get up and leave. But my problem is if I let them do it, they turn up the music, now we become a problem for the neighborhood and I won't allow that, right? Well, the co-compliance person came and took the reading right on Broadway. With that business over here with, their noise is so loud, I mean, they shouldn't realize that's where the noise is coming from that they took it right in front of my business. And then an hour later, an hour later, SAED shows up and is giving us a ticket. I got a phone with the officer and I asked him, are we too loud? He says, no, you guys are great. So why you gave me a ticket? He told me I'm being ordered to give you a ticket because they got a meter reading of 68 and he said it came from your business. I know it didn't come from mine and they should have known it too. So I'm wondering what kind of trains going on with these officers because like I said, we go to the nth degree to work with the neighborhood. And we've never got a citation for noise, 20 years. And now we have a citation and we're gonna go to court, we're gonna win. And my recommendation to you all is, you know what, the troubled business that's making all the noise, they're probably gonna win when they go to court too because they're gonna say the same thing. They took a reading right in the middle of all this noise. So how can you attribute that to us? Now, that business is bad, bad actors. And I would love to see them going because they've been there about a year and a half. They get calls and the police come out and a lot of times they come to my business because the neighborhood, they don't know. They just call, see it's loud over there. The officers usually don't even get out of their car. They stop or they get out. Oh, the noise is coming from over there. We're gonna go, you know, talk to them. They'll go over there, the music will get turned down for about five minutes and the officers will leave and they'll just jam it right back. Man. So, you know, I don't know if you can feel it. You've probably seen me. I'm very upset that I got a citation and I, you know, and I'm also upset like, let's just say we were too loud, right? If we were being too loud, that co-compliance officer should come talk to us. And see, hey guys, I'm gonna read in here that you're too loud. For number one, if we are too loud, I wanna turn it down so that the neighborhood's not disturbed for another hour. Okay? Or number two, to have a conversation with them and be able to be like, listen, that's not us. Where do you take the meter reader in here? Obviously, when you're right on the street where you got a 68, and you have me in reading here with 65 with 70, okay? And it's less than that. And all the noise is coming from across the street there. Tell you what, give me three seconds. I'm gonna run inside. I'm gonna turn everything off and we'll retake the reader. Something like that. But when we're not getting an interaction, how can we fix it? Or how can we show that it's not us, right? What you've described is what every single business owner is dealing with right now. I'm very sorry for that. And it's wasteful the extent to which we're gonna have to go through the legal system. A lot of lawyers are gonna make a lot of money off of this current strategy. It's also why the three business owner representatives that are sitting here right now are not the original three business owners. That's it. Hold on, hold on. I just wanted to finish up. We got those people I wanna talk to. So we got your point and I wanna make sure that we got it. And so I mean, you have me, a business owner that has a $10,000 system to keep the noise down. We built a big wall in the back towards the neighborhood with a covering to keep the noise in. We do everything we can and then we get ticketed anyways. And I know we weren't too loud because when I'm talking to the officers, I'm like, is it too loud? He's like, it's not. I'm like, what's the same as it was before? We don't know that. Well, of course they don't know that but my staff can't get into the system and turn it up. It's the same as it was. So, and I was like, how can you write as a ticket? I'm being ordered to write you a ticket. I don't think that's right. And I'm on your side. We're on your side. We're on the neighborhood side. I mean, John's known me for years. We do everything we can. If there's a complaint with the neighborhood, we're proactive and we do whatever we can. And I just feel like maybe some more innocent businesses are kinda getting caught up in this past force. What I was told by them was that the co-compliance officer was too afraid to come in. Well, just so you know, at that time, the two people that alerted us that someone came out there and took our meter, we knew we were my two paid licensed security guards, that are weapons and they don't feel safe to go up there with security. I mean, this isn't like a house party or something. This is a business. We have security and we need to have that interaction as a business. If they think we're doing something wrong for us to fix it, number one, or for us to explain to them that this noise is not coming for us, so you have no need to write us a ticket. And I just hope that you guys can figure a better way to go about that. And I'm the current owner of the new village for right down the block there. And I believe that a citation here, in fact, that my manager did. I wouldn't do it at the time. And I was in the same situation just the other day when I heard the only difference is the way co-compliance is actually between the ones. I came in Thursday and I spoke with one of their supervisors. He's not here right now. And he spoke with the LA. And he told me that they go to the providers, as explained earlier, all four providers, and they take readings. If one of them is in violation, then the place gets a citation. I can see that's not a problem. I said, okay, we're always in a violation, but I guess I have to talk to that co-compliance officer earlier today when we were discussing their business, which is right down the block. I said, okay. Now, a little bit of history about myself. I'm a retired safety officer, 13 and a half years. I was a safety officer. I used to attend these meetings here all the time. And so it doesn't seem animal dogma audios. I've worked with brothers, I mean, I've been here and done that, but now I'm on the other side of the rock here. And so I said, well, I better come in top of somebody here when I would just be in the district office over there. And it just explains yourself. The way it was done over there is that they, I have a movie, they came, take the movie, they're my parking lot. On the soft side, for the apartments way back there, where the complaint would've come from, but it's a quarter mile, the link is a quarter mile. Back around the state officer, there's a complaint. I know that co-compliance is not proactive, meaning that they don't go out there finding businesses to go sight. They respond to complaints just what the director here will say earlier, as I know it. Okay, so I don't know when this complaint was, it had been months ago, it doesn't matter. The point was that it was there. So they're there legally for a reason. But they didn't take the reading from where the apartments were at, or from, they contacted even a complainant. I would say, hey, so many complaints, you don't have to give me the name, just contact them, take them to read from their residence, their house, whatever. I don't have a problem with that. It didn't violate you. Come talk to me, it would be great. You know, come talk to me and I'll do whatever I can to make sure. And this is just here recently. They never had a problem before. Well, they take it from the south end and toward the cruise site where the apartments are, not far. They take it from the, I'm sorry, these guys, they take it from the south end and go down with that, not far, because there was no residence there. They take it from the front as you drive into the business, the highway there, they couldn't take the reading according to the supervisor here, it's too loud. They had to wait for the traffic to die down in order for them to get a meeting or they're gonna need a reading just like the one on Broadway, you know. But this is the highway. This is the highway, which is way too much. Instead they went next door, I mean to the north end, where the railroad track right there, we have a slide, we have a big cardboard door that was up and they take the reading there on the property fence, which is about 17 feet away exactly. And they said it was 68 decibels or whatever it was. They told the officer, so my manager called him, hey, I've got a citation notice. I go, what? He says, for the noise. Well, this is fine, I said I was at home, I have the officer talk to me, he goes, hey partner, he goes, can they know me? He goes, hey, we were seeing a citation, he started with me, he called compliance calls, no questions asked, you have to get a citation. They're not gonna, if they say, did he make a call? They'll call and say, hey, you're over it, we've got to complain about this and that. That I saw was a big difference, because Coco points out there is no, there's no black and white, there's no gray area, you have to get a citation. So I said, partner, just get the citation, we'll go to court, I'm sure there's many ways we can fight this, there's gotta be not a problem. Here's my question to y'all guys. North of us, where the meeting, where the reader was taking me, from there it's a quarter mile to out of the street. There is no residence. The city owns all that property, they're doing all the renovations with the river, things like that. There is no complaint, there is no complaint. It just, the Coco puns also went out there, took her meeting at that point, she's open, Laura's open, I can hear the music, it's a little bit over, not to tell what the highway is, we're just right next to this, that's the consideration, I like what this gentleman said right here, I think there could be anybody to call, anyone here can call. But I think that the media reading was done, of course, and that's a little bit of why, the noise in the highway along was maybe the music for something that thick, it's understandable, there's just a lot of you video where it's like this, no one where we could go and verify it for something that thick, I would be like, just show me part of it, you know what, okay? Not a problem, I can see that, I've done it, I'm wrong, and that's it, I'll sign the citation, I'll have my guys sign the citation. Now I need it happen Wednesday night, we have a light ban on Saturday, no complaint for no residents or anything else, I have the music facing the highway, it's facing the highway. They took the media reading, again, it was only from the railroad side, no people lived, no one is the old north side, we went out a lot, a quarter mile, no residents, houses there, there's two faking houses there, it's the businesses that are closed, everything from the city had an act that they're doing the renovation on the river. There is no complaining, there is no one saying that, hey, you're using too loud, blah, blah, blah, this and that, code went out there, because of the violation at that end, we got another citation. So I'm here today just saying that, you know, it's gotta be, I like the idea of this task force, I've been on many task forces before, I just think it's gotta be, and this is what it's for, it's a pilot program, it's a pilot program, but there's a lot of way that it can be a lot improved, gentlemen here on the business stuff, I can see it now, I can see it on my hand where I go, wow, now I've got two sets of things that I've got to do, and of course, we're gonna go believe away, and I know it's gonna cost me money, I know it's gonna cost you money to buy these tickets to court, you know, because I'm gonna bring everyone, you know, the Pokemon, everybody, you know, everybody's saying, who sent the people out to you? If there's no complaint, there's no complaint, ask for complaints, they'll take it to court. You also, what do you got there? I have to be an officer every time I go and say, partner, is the music too loud? I ask, I don't think, I know there's a cost for it to do. Bro, is it too loud? And you see the Coca-Cola's in the property, on the property, you know, I don't know, they didn't walk the way, they didn't drop the way over there, I don't know, we have to ask people who want to come. Okay, anyway, thank you so much, I just had to get my opinion there, and hopefully, thank you for letting me speak to the speaker. Thank you, partner, we'll have more time for that. Okay, partner, okay. So I just wanted to get, this is a time check, okay, I've really tried to try to get everybody out of here at eight o'clock, but we have, this is a good room to hide in terms of, so I don't want to be able to pretend there is none of us do, but if we go a little bit beyond two more minutes, I'm okay with that too, I hope everybody else is, so I start with a couple of the hands right here, I saw this hand first, then Mary, back here, and then okay, I'm like boom, boom, boom, and maybe four or five more. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Bel Laracy, I have been to Delta area, kind of the statewide area, but I just, one quick question, was it possible to get the make of them, the decimal meter that the enforcement people use, so that others could buy them just like theirs? We can put that in here, that's putting that on our page. Is it gonna just close to there or something? Yeah, we'll put that on our door, or it'll get us to that first page, and just so you guys, yeah, I don't know if I want to say, but we can get that one. Okay, if you do that, you might want to institute like a five or $10 fee and let them calibrate it for you, so it really means something. That'd be great. Sure, that'd be great. I won't try to make anybody a fee for anything, I promise. It would just be nice to be able to be using the very same instrumentation that, but the other question is, why can't code enforcement just write a ticket when they go out? I imagine this has been answered a lot, but I worked in the anniversary attorney's office for years, in Michigan, in upper Michigan, and we solved a lot of problems by the code enforcement people just coming out. This was housing code violations, not the employees, but the same thing, and they just write a ticket, and that's it. I don't understand the dual process here, maybe someone can explain that, but the obvious solution would be if those folks were authorized to write tickets, the way they must be for high grass or tall grass or whatever, I assume they write tickets during the day, right? Okay, so the question would be, why can't they just write them at night and skip the calling the police who are gonna put it down at a level seven, understand it? Yeah, okay. All right, I think we'll be at some of our future meetings as I know that's gonna be discussed tomorrow. Mayor, I'll show you the mayor next, thank you. Is there a simple answer to the word now, city? Well, we've addressed it several times in the past, I'll talk with you afterwards, but right now, I wanted to start in the past when we're trying on this policy procedures. You may have made some tweaks as we move on to the rest of the platform, so, but I'll talk to you in a minute. Sure, that'd be great. All right, Mary. Mary Johnson, I live in my visitor's right down the road from Tobin Hill and this is a very intricate, in-depth subject. It goes beyond just the noise. I think that crowd control is part of it and I agree with Parker that some of this is on the city. I don't know what y'all were thinking, giving eight or nine bars a CEO in a residential area. This is, I know that on the strip down there, there's an angry mob. It's like a mob descents in this residential area. Neighbors have had their windows broken out and I don't know how you put that on the club owners when you have this angry mob, we've had one woman killed down there. A car has driven through one of the restaurant windows. You know, who's culpable here? Do we need more police down there? Because I don't ever see any police down there. I'm terrified to drive through that area on the weekend. And just a note to the city attorney, it's like, I know that the bar owner that of the person that was driving and killed that woman is being sued, but at what point is the city culpable for part of this? And I just want to leave you with that. Here at the back corner again, in hand. My name is Alberto Sainz, I apologize, I'm not the greatest public speaker. But I just want to give you guys my history. So we've heard some of the business owners, so this is an actual homework. I used to live, I thought about the, I'll tease out the Grand Laya downtown. Am I allowed to say the business that I was by, bad actor? So I used to live on top of the LTSA, right? And then in January came, and the Smokes Barbecue that used to be in, at Central Station, Sunset Station, whatever, because of COVID, they ended up getting a parking lot across the highway and turning it into a cabin, basically, right? And Sunday, then it started at three o'clock, all the way until like two o'clock. Monday, they'd have their normal thing. Tuesday was country night. Wednesday was their day off. Thursday was Tejano night. And then Friday is Saturday. And then rents repeat, right? So I went to the business owner and I said, hey, I'm at the 30th floor. I'm half a mile away from here, and I'm getting readings from, I actually got them from Amazon. I didn't get them, I didn't get them by the $1,000 thing, right? And I told the guy, hey, I can't sleep because five days out of the week, I'm up until two, and I can hear your DJ doing call outs, right? He's like, oh, we'll work for you, bro. No, no, we'll work, we'll give you free beer, blah, blah. I call him and I say, hey, it's pretty loud. Can you turn it down? You need my phone to be 11, it's a 10, right? And then I'm like, hey, it's still pretty loud. And then I went from a 10 to a nine. And I was a squeaky wheel. So then I said, hey, you know, it's still pretty loud. Well, send me a video of what you're listening to inside your condo. And I did. And his response was like, hmm, right? He didn't say like, dude, you're just a very sensitive guy. And maybe I am, right? And after that, he never returned my text, right? So then I used to call three or four times a week. And, you know, I'd get a call back on the officers. I didn't tell him, dude, I know. Of course, we hear you pain, but we can't do anything about it. As far as I know, out of the three times, I would call three to four weeks, three or four times a week. I don't know if that guy was ever cited. He could care less because, you know, he used to, and I read up on this, he used to pay 30K a month and rent at Sunset Station. Now he's got a kegger out in the parking lot that probably pays, what, a thousand bucks a month. I don't know, right? He can easily go to court and fight it, right? I no longer live there. And this is not a trivial thing. There's another guy by the name of Clay. I'm not gonna say it's last name. He, you know, one of the penthouses, very connected, he emailed the assistant to the chief of police of McManus. Yeah, they had a very intimate conversation. And even that guy couldn't, you know, move the needle. He no longer lives there. It was so much that he, I mean, I know a poor guy sold his penthouse, but that's not much it affected his quality of life. $1.8 million, he said, you know what, he moved, and I didn't want to sell my condo, but I at least did, but I wanted to live down there. So when people ask me, how did you like living downtown? You guys want to be like Austin, be dense, have a bunch of property taxes coming your way? That's how you guys get funded. I tell everyone, unless you're deaf or you like, you know, having two o'clock parties with your, you know, people from half a mile away, do it. Or else don't do it. So just, I feel your pain. It's horrible, but guess what? I no longer live in the place that I buy because of some dude who has a character half a mile away. On the other, yeah. On the other side of the highway, right? So you're talking about bad actors. This guy was a bad actor. He could care less. We had detectives came out and took measurements from our balcony and the top of the building and it was still exceeding the building. I was like, it's 70, and this isn't early. It was like midnight, you know? But I know that he is not a representative of every business, but it was definitely enough to get us to move, which is very unfortunate. Yes, Mr. You were a very good speaker. So, all right. Yeah. I'm gonna go back here and then anybody else? I have a good one. I'm gonna go back to you, so I don't mind. I'm Greg Joby. I live on North Alamo Street. And bad actors for us are the Crossfit Gym and Bentley's Gear Garden, both of which are outdoor. The gym is, of course, indoors, but they have their doors open wide during the day, blasting music and light voices. Bentley's Gear Garden is an outdoor place. I don't know why they moved into the neighborhood where there are residences like mine, where they play live music and recorded music until two in the morning, and don't seem to have any care about the people who live in the neighborhood. But I think this comment session of residents and businesses, that's just indicating the problem. It's not indicating any sort of solution. We can hear from every business person. We can hear from every residential person. That's not gonna solve the problem. So for the task force, I want to raise some issues because I think these are some of the things that are coming up. Number one, I lived in San Antonio 20 years ago, and now I'm back after 20 years, and I see the big change in downtown, particularly with lots of residences, which is something that the city was trying to do. But zoning is a big problem. I live in an industrial area that's been converted into residential use. And so how do you tell the industries that are there? How do you tell the residences that are there? You've got to work together. You've got to reduce your noise. It's a problem of different types of businesses and people living right on top of each other. I wonder if this is a good use of police resources. It seems like such a waste of police resources to send out for noise complaints. There seems to, there needs to be a better way to do that. The response time for the police, is that really very effective? Somebody's having a party, a bar is playing music at two in the morning, and it takes two hours for the police to get there. What is that going to solve? That doesn't do anything. Are the fines high enough for violators? Businesses are not all innocent. Bentley's beer garden makes noise, and they don't care. I've called in complaints. Other people have called in complaints that they've gotten citations. Bentley's other bars are going across from the street. That's what you hate. I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this. So I'm wondering if this citation process and hearing from businesses that we're just going to fight this in court and it's going to get thrown out. I don't know that this is fairly effective either. And I know from living in California that when you threaten the liquor license, that's when you get something that happens. When you threaten to take away the liquor license, that's when you finally get some change. So I want to mention that as something too for the task force to consider. Thank you. My name is Brian Clancy. I'm a lifelong resident of San Antonio. One of my dreams was to move downtown, growing up in San Antonio. So that's why I worked for SAAS team, athletic director. And one of the places I really wanted to live was the August Towers that open looks out on the state. Those are things that I had dreamed of doing. Now that I come out in an empty master, we move downtown. It's a great way to live. We love party life, love nightlife, we love tabooing, you know, the song. But one thing that has to stop, one to me is the infrasound, the constant vibrations that emit from, we know COVID haven't direct impact on our society. We've had more places now convert from indoor facilities to having outdoor arenas and facilities. We get that. We understand that. But everybody getting tickets is not a solution. That is not gonna solve our problems. But if we can live together and talk to each other besides going to code compliance, I think that's our best avenue. And this task force, this is the first time I've come. I saw something on, my wife sent me this text because she's the one that really is sensitive to sound. So we're walking out wherever and all of a sudden you hear that bass beat somewhere. She almost drops like she has PTSD. And she's threatening to move from the place that we always wanted to live. So I'm coming to this task force to say, hey, we got some problems and the city did want to gentrify downtown. That was part of San Antonio 2020, the vision for all back. Well, we're there. We got to where we wanted to be, but we're gonna have to be harmonious in the way that we do things. So thank y'all very much for taking the time out of your schedules to come and to hash out these. I have my list of bad actors, but calling them out by name for me is not gonna solve my problem. So business owners, I know you got to make money and residents, we have to sleep. And that's all you gotta think, thank you. All right, thank you. I thank everyone. I know we're over, did I miss anyone? That was really dying to... Okay, no, I didn't say anybody. Okay, so that gets us, I think to the end. I mean, thank everyone. All right, so after we wrap up, I do want to say thank you again to the task force. But also, I mean, this is, I think probably the biggest community group in addition to the task force we've had. So thank you, everybody. I know it's a super busy time of year, all that stuff. I really appreciate it. We have some homework to do ourselves. City staff will take some of this, prepare kind of our notes from the meeting. There's a couple of action items I saw. The next meeting is scheduled for January 11th task force members, so be up for the new year. We did at the last meeting, just a reminder, we agreed to kind of first block in person and then a WebEx virtual meeting and then in person. Is that still everybody's wish on this task force? Yes. Thumbs up? Yes. Do I have a general thumbs up? I mean, I would tell the rules, okay. Now, for those of you that are not part of the task force, you can still participate. We'll have the information. You can participate and be on the WebEx. And the format will be similar. We'll have a lot of conversation, some data, some of the new stuff that we've been talking about and near the end of the meeting, we'll look for feedback from anyone that wants to weigh in, certainly via the WebEx, okay. I think some of you are right, participated like that on one of the previous ones. So again, I will say thank you to everyone. Certainly, Don, Arby, thank you for being here and I really look forward to working with you both. And so if you have any other questions or comments in the meantime, we send them generally to city staff. I mean, it is here. We have our contact information on up there, but if you have any questions, we'll be sitting around for a couple of minutes. I can't sit around for hours and security guards will take you out, I'm sure. But thanks, everyone. Happy Halloween, be safe, and have a safe new year. Oh, I just said, you're hungry.