 So, we're here with Councilwoman Anna Sandoval talking about the resolution that you put forward last week and was passed unanimously by City Hall, by all the City Council people, and that is about increasing public participation in San Antonio government. So what prompted that? Where did that come from? Sure. So I would say it's a combination of a few things all happening at the same time and Jeff Coyle from our Public Affairs Department called it the perfect storm. So on the one hand, we have increased expectations from the public. We have a lot of technology available to us. We have people becoming experts on their own, finding information online, and there's an expectation of open and transparent government. The tools are there. Why aren't we posting this stuff online, number one? Number two is we're in a period of growth in San Antonio that's really, really rapid. It's growth like we've never seen before in our time living in San Antonio. So there's also an expectation of you've got to tell me what's coming before the crane hits the ground, before the dirt is being turned. So there's also an expectation that comes from that. And third is I come from the background of engaging the public. That's one of the things I did in my professional life before I was here on council. And there are just some best practices I learned along the way that can go a long way of building trust with the public and really empowering them in the decisions that we make in City Hall. So I think it was a number of things. And in full disclosure, I mean, now Cast's non-profit mission is to promote, facilitate an inclusive civic conversation. So it's kind of near and dear to our heart. And it's not something that I can pretend to be unbiased about. And you're not. No, I'm not. No, clearly I'm not either. Yeah. And and I heard it again last night at another neighborhood meeting. People said, hey, you know, by the time something gets to City Council, it's already kind of baked. And so if they don't have access to the planning meetings and they don't have access to HDRC meetings, or if they can't get in on any of those commission meetings, then it's gone and it's been decided. Well, I mean, nothing is ever final, right until the vote is taken. There are occasions when things change on the dais. But the truth is of the policymaking doesn't only happen at the dais, right? It does happen in a lot of meetings, like you mentioned. So it's important to know them. One of the challenges that I had previously as a professional in this field and even sometimes now is it is sometimes difficult to engage the public early on in the planning process, because you have so many other things competing for your attention. And unless you're really involved in the work of planning, you don't always you can't always see what the outcome means. What are the implications? So that's really where it's incumbent upon us, the city leaders and also the city staff to make that case about why it's important for you to participate in that scenario. And and and tell me what you find as a person who is practicing it. Tell me what you find when you engage the public and things that, for instance, if you were a city staffer, you kind of thought you really understood what the answer was and then you engage the public. Tell me sometimes. So sometimes when you engage the public, do they come up with completely different perspectives on things? They come up with a different ramifications or unintended consequences and things like that that need to be considered. Right. OK. Yes. You're you're getting at one of my my key tenets for for why I think it's important to do this is that. Engaging with the public isn't just about checking a box, right? We did this transparently. Transparently, the public knows we're doing a check. It's about the belief that the public has information that will help make this better. Whatever we're developing will help make it better. Now, we have to ask the right questions. We have to make the public feel comfortable in bringing things forward. So, for instance, there could be something that's very helpful from the public is you'll know if you're using the right language, right? When you're when you're talking to them, whether or not they get it or not or based on the question. So that's important, right, is having the same language. They know details about their neighborhood and patterns of activity there that we won't always know from from being here on the dias unless you live there day to day. You don't know those things. So that's that's that's a big part of the input that they can give and and it's recognizing that it can be very valuable and it can help prevent unintended consequences and help help make a policy better. Right. So my team and I talk about what are the best analogies that that we can use in this discussion? And we we've settled for the time being on it's public input is really the foundation of the policies that we're building. If we were to say all the policies we build are like buildings, we need those those that foundation at the bottom. Otherwise, we're going to have shifting of the building. You're going to have some deterioration later and we don't want that. We want this building or this policy to stand the test of time. So we need to kind of test it out in the in the public by getting input and public is not just residents of San Antonio. It's, you know, not just the homeowners or the renters, but the folks who are going to be affected by that policy in some way or other. It could end up being a business owner. It could end up being a landlord, but different people will bring different perspectives to see. OK, so so you've the City Council unanimously passes, which is terrific. And that suggests a real a bunch of shoulders behind this thing. So what happens next? Because this was a policy, right? This wasn't something that said, and if you don't know. So what happens next? Right. So we adopted it as a as a resolution. There are 10 principles in there. And I I describe them as being a commitment from council to the public, saying when we seek your input, we will follow these 10 principles that we will be transparent, we will be inclusive, we will be accessible. And you can read more about those online. But what was really wonderful about what happened last Thursday is it wasn't just the presentation of the principles. There was actually a lot of meat that staff had been developing in the prior months, since the in the almost year that we proposed this CCR. They said, OK, we are going to have what's called an administrative directive, right, something that comes from the city manager to all of staff, saying, these are the minimum things you must do every time you have a public engagement process, like the materials must be in English and Spanish. You must promote it on, you know, such and such channels. So that is coming forward. Another thing that's happening is the mayor and I are together, putting together a public participation advisory committee. So the the direction won't just be coming from myself or from staff, but we want to know what does the general public think about this? So the types of people that we're looking to get engaged in that is folks that have been active with the city and maybe folks that have not been active with the city, people who are social media influencers, it's just really a broad range of stakeholders for whom we can run some of these issues by, you know, we all have blind spots, right? And I think they would bring expertise to the table. So that's one of the things that's coming up. Another thing that's already underway is we do have an umbrella website called Essay Speak Up, where anything that's open for public comment will be posted. So it's kind of like a one-stop shop for the general public. Again, it does require the public to go look it up, right? But if you were if you were bruising our website, at least it would be a little bit more convenient. Another proposal that we put forward as part of the CCR was live streaming our committee, our council committee meetings, planning commission meetings, zoning commission meetings. We I think the public is really interested in seeing and seeing that happen. Even if they don't watch them, they want to know that that's available, right, because it's a public meeting. And if you can't drop what you're doing in the middle of the day to go to that meeting, we're not really meeting that spirit of being a public meeting. And then they meet at one o'clock on Tuesday afternoon every other Tuesday and one o'clock on Wednesday afternoon every other Wednesday. And I say that from experience. We have the most video of anybody of all of the planning and zoning and HDRC and yes, we do, but it is by popular demand. People begged us to go to those meetings because they couldn't. They couldn't. Right. So so staff is looking at what will that cost to be? And they will be bringing a proposal to council. Now it will be up to council to decide, you know, or do we put that money aside for that? I think it's a worthy investment part of the cost of doing transparent business as a city government. And I think that's the one other thing that's coming up is we are looking at reimbursing people for parking or giving them some kind of bus pass for coming to participate in a meeting that's in the middle of the day when you have to pay for parking. And, you know, right now people will park at either on the street where your meter may expire right in two hours and maybe your item doesn't get heard in that time. Or you go to the cross building and you could end up spending six or eight dollars and that just that adds up, right? And that's a barrier to participating in government. Absolutely. It's it's tough, even for those of us who know the secrets of downtown, you know, you know where to park without paying. Well, I mean, there's a lot that is a visitor lot that we're allowed access to, but you kind of have to know the secret password to get to that. I don't even know that. Well, it used to be outside of City Hall before it was under renovation and all of those parking spots were lost. So so so it's plan C at this point. So earlier, I had seen Jeff Coyle, head of the government of the public affairs department, quoted in the San Antonio current saying he wanted to do a cost-benefit analysis of of Livestream and and as somebody who's really been involved in civic engagement, what's the cost of not engaging the public? That's a that's a good question. So I think, you know, staff and even us, we have to be responsible stewards of the taxpayers' dollars. So I think that's probably kind of a go to for our staff, right, as they have to say that, you know, what's the benefit going to be in this case? It really may end up being more of a value proposition. Right. Is are we committed to transparency and accessibility and then there's as long as it's not breaking the bank, there will be a cost to that. So and, you know, Jeff may come forward and tell us, you know, 500 people watch it or a thousand people watch it and it'll be up to us to say, well, if they could find it, it would be a lot easier for them to watch it. And if it were easily accessible. And I mean, and that's very sincere. We also go online and capture city council meetings and put them on our YouTube channel, because people cannot find them on the website. And so that it's not necessarily the engagement. It's whether or not people even know where and how accessible it is. Correct. Correct. So it is sort of like the difference between Facebook Live and YouTube, right? So Facebook Live is inside of Facebook. And so you have to be a Facebook person to get to a Facebook Live. So how many people are you excluding when you do a Facebook Live and how many people you're not making it accessible to, you know, when you do that versus when you do something on YouTube outside of the wall garden? I mean, there's a whole lot of policy questions. So for instance, right now I live stream my committee means the ones that I chair on Facebook Live because it's a tool that's easily accessible to me at no cost. Right. But I realize not everyone can join in that in that conversation. So so we will look to the city to make some of those improvements. I think Council, it sounds generally supportive of it. But you're right, the conversation is not over there. Right. Right. It's it's not a quick fit conversation. Then she was nobody watches it. It is. So so I mean, the Wi-Fi in Central Library is blocking the city channel. That's also why people don't watch it, you know. So these are the wonderful weeks that we will get into in the advisory committee. When we when we go through each of these topics one by one, I think there's probably a top 10 or top 100 list, right? Of things we can quickly and easily do to improve access to local government. And this is one of those discussions, right? OK. Well, and and and when we get back to cost and also, you know, what the city is capable of doing, obviously, you were where we did a report card that showed the top 10 cities in in Texas. And even the smallest of the top 10 are better than San Antonio. Laredo, right? Laredo is kicking our ass on access to public records and meetings. So so thank you for putting that report card together. I think it's always good to have a third party. Yeah, do that evaluation and a competition is always great, too. Right. There's a lot of city pride in San Antonio. But so the report card that you issued was shared with our staff internally, including the planning staff that puts together those those committee packets. And there is I think that was probably in use to them. So they are currently evaluating how they can improve that packet to make it more helpful. I think sometimes things have just been done a certain way for a long time and we don't stop and reevaluate. So it's it's perfect. This is what nonprofits are supposed to do, right? It's help us do our job better. That's what we're doing. So we'd like to try. So about the committee, committee or commission on the advisory. I don't know what it will be called yet. OK, OK. So so is that something that people kind of like to be on? Yes, we don't have it posted yet. But I think if people are interested, please keep in touch with my council office and we can go from there. We, of course, we want people who are interested in the topic, right? So we want to don't want to force people to be on it. But we also want it to be a manageable size, right? I've been on committees and I'm sure you have to where you have 30 people in the room and it's really hard to get an idea to go forward. So so we'll we haven't finalized what that structure will be yet. But we'll be coming out. Let me ask one more one more quick question. And I know you can't talk about what went on in the executive session. But but but when we were Eric Walsh is doing this listening tours all over the place and he was suggesting last night in a neighborhood meeting we were at that some things were going to change having to do with the city's relationship, perhaps with neighborhoods and the open meetings, the public access really comes from you guys as a policy, but it also gets comes down from the city manager's office. Do you anticipate that that the real push for open or openness, more streaming, more, more public documentation available is going to be something that's going to be a priority from city manager's office? Well, you know, that administrative direction directive that I mentioned is going to be coming forward in the next few weeks. So during this transition period from our current city manager to our future city manager and I for your viewers who may not be totally clear on this. So because of our form of government where we've got the council and the city manager government, there is only so much the council can dictate in terms of what the city staff does. We direct the city manager and the city manager will direct for staff. So it would be inappropriate for me to tell staff exactly what to do. That's why it's so important to have an overarching policy, right? That really speaks to this and then give feedback on how it's going through through a citizen's advisory committee. I think that's really what's what's going to help us. In terms of what I was looking for in the new city manager, absolutely the commitment to transparency and to engaging meaningfully, respectfully with the public was very important to me. And it was part of my evaluation. And I have to tell you all the candidates expressed even though I can't say what happened in an executive session, I all the candidates expressed a commitment to that. Is there anything else I should have done? She should have done it all.