Good afternoon. It is that clock is never right. It's 3:06 p.m. Um and uh hello. Hello. Um we're still waiting for a few folks who we hear are caught in Dodgers traffic, which is understandable. Um and uh we are we'll see if we end it at five. We all know
that there's a game uh that uh we are hoping to see. But um welcome to the first committee meeting, first facilities and procurement committee meeting of the 2526 school year. Um I'm thrilled to jump into the wonderful world of today, both facilities and procurement uh with the folks here
today. We have a a packed agenda. So we're going to jump right in. Um if we move to the next slide, we'll just kind of remind ourselves of the purpose of this committee. We do have some new committee members and we will introduce ourselves in a minute. I have a clicker. Oh, cool. Okay, wait.
No, now back. There we go. This is power. The facilities and procurement committee will examine district facilities and procurement processes and projects to promote public transparency and awareness. The committee will identify barriers and make recommendations to streamline and improve current policies and practice.
Um, this is our agenda for today. Welcoming introductions. Then we have a special guest uh the state architect um from the division of state architect since it was some appreciation and overview our procurement updates um actually will be after our MGT report. I think that's still the right I think
we're going to do MGT first and then procurement and then public comment and we will adjourn um on this slide you will see some previous recommendations of the committee um and that we're going to return to. We decided when this committee was formed a few years ago
that we wanted to um while covering the the breadth of topics maintain a focus uh so that we can come back and really try to see improvement in progress on some of these recommendations uh cost and time comparison which is the MGT report also kind of number two modular
structures which is what conversation we've had a few times spec uh specification reviews revenue opportunities we won't be discussing explicitly today but in the future buying contracts, scope of qualified biders to at least three, which we'll talk a little bit about in the procurement context, maintenance and
operations capacity, um, and alternative project delivery approaches. Um, when I ask questions about things that seem to not be working in LA Unified, we're told, you know, a lot of what, um, you know, that we're so we're unique, we're an outlier, you know, what I've deemed
LUSD exceptionalism. Um, the sense that LA Unified is so different from everyone else that things just have to take longer and have to cause more. Um and so one of the things we really want to do in this committee is learn from best practice best practices from other districts from our state partners um to see if there are better ways to do
things. Uh and some of that will be in today's presentations and then we'll continue to circle back to these recommendations. Uh and I hope by the end of the year we'll add a few more to the list. Um so welcome and introductions. Um many of us are continuing members of this committee but
we'd like to start with a round of introductions to welcome our new members. Um, so I'm hoping that each of us, including our committee staff members who are here, um, can share their name, their role or connection to L Unified. Um, maybe a childhood school facility or part of a facility that
really sticks in your mind, and then maybe one goal or one topic you'd like addressed for this committee. So, we're going to start with Nicole and I'll remind you your name, kind of who you are, your connection to the committee. One, like childhood memory of a school facility, um, good or bad, I guess, and
then also one thing you'd like to see us uh, and my team will be taking notes on these as well so that we can add to our already robust agenda. Nicole. >> Okay. Hi. Uh, my name is Nicole Fefferman. I am an LUSD parent. Um, I've been an LUSD teacher for about 20 years.
Um, I taught at Jefferson High School and at Marshall High School. So, in my opinion, two of the most beautiful campuses in LA USD high school um campuses in LA USD. Gosh, I went to Lockhurst Elementary, Hail Middle
School, and El Camino High School. I don't really have like any particular connection to the spaces. They were lovely, but for me, actually, I want to just give a shout out to LUSD. I also live by North Hollywood High School and
I had a chance to go on that campus uh about a month ago to see my son's girlfriend played her tennis match. Um and I was blown away by the North Hollywood campus and what's happened there. It it is it is so beautiful and it feels so good to walk on that campus.
So shout out to L USD for North Hollywood. >> Love that. Thank you. And we have a new committee member here. So I'll turn it over to you, Mr. Rodriguez. >> My name is David Rodriguez. I'm a stock worker at the procurement services warehouse in Pico Rivera. I have over 22
years of service and my remembrance is I did attend an elementary called Cortez Street Elementary over in the Echo Park area. I believe the name's changed. I don't know what it is now, but I went there for a kinder first and second and I remember that place. So that's my shout out to them.
>> Great. Is there something you'd like? I know you're a new member of this committee. I actually I'm here as a I I I I gave myself the self-appointed title of the procurement uh warehouse representative because I'm representing all of the all of the people who work there. >> Great. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. And board member Hendy Newbell. And I'll
say too, look, I mean, John Burrows, we have a ribbon cutting there. It's not even one of my schools. It's one of board member Hendy Newbell's, but we share the love in this committee. So, >> um, Charlotte Hindi Newbell and I am proud to be able to serve in District 1 and a proud alum of LA USD. Went to 24th
Street Elementary, Patrick Henry Middle, and went to Dorsy High School. And I think one of the schools actually I just went to visit that I thought not John Burroughs is amazing but in the essence of John Burroughs because this
elementary Vermont elementary which is where my sister and brother went to elementary school uh they are so unique. The walls are brick similar to what's at John Burrows and I didn't know that they
tape some of the Abbott Elementary there. >> So I learned that and I was like and that's one of my sister's favorite shows and I was like it's taped at your elementary school. So um but it is a very unique school and the brick and
architecture there is so amazing that you know some of these schools just really stand out kind of like John Burroughs. So and for me I too want to see how we can do things more efficient as we are kind of the pioneers I want to
say in one of the largest school district. how we can get things done faster and more efficient and um just kind of lead and trailblaze in that way. So that's why I'm here. >> Great. We'll have to talk more because I actually recently spoke to some writers
on the show Abbott Elementary because they're having a a plot um arc about having to potentially move the school to a temporary facility because of like flooding or something. And they asked about our experience with Pali High and Sears taking an old mall and turning it into a school. And so it was fun to talk
to them and like you know art imitating life in that regard. Um great Mike you want to introduce yourself? >> Yes. My name is Mike McClean. I'm the executive officer of the board of education. I went to Limmerch Elementary School in Kenoga Park and I went to Nobel Junior High in the San Frano
Valley. I love both campuses. One is an open campus or used to be. Um and something that I'm very happy that has changed is Limmerch was an all concrete all concrete the whole thing. We played soccer on concrete but all that has changed. So, and it's due to the effort of of the board.
>> Um, thank you. And, uh, Mr. Ortiz Franklin, you'll notice we also have board district 7 projects in our slideshow. So, love for your district as well because it's where I taught as well. Yes, indeed. Good things happening everywhere. Tanya Ortiz Franklin representing South LA in the harbor area where I grew up at President Avenue
Elementary, Fleming Middle School in Narbon High School. And as soon as you said that question, I thought about the circle area at Narbon, which is this like sacred grass area that you can't cross except for when you have lunchtime activities. And so it's sort of one of those traditions that has carried on for
years and has also been featured in films like G's Tripping if you haven't seen it uh featuring Donald Faison. Um, and something I want to talk about in this committee is similar to my colleague here, um, efficiencies, but also how do we save money? And I think, uh, you've already crafted a great
agenda today on that topic. Um, and I look forward to saving time and money for the district. >> Thank you, Miss O'Brien. >> Okay. I'm Alex O'Brien and I came to the district in 2009 as an owner's owner
authorized representative in the construction management side. I'm an architect who just recently retired my license and I oversaw design management since 2011 here and I still continue and I look at all those pali projects every
single week. Um my passion is design, my passion is excellent planning. Um and I'm the deputy CF. So I oversee actually all of facilities under Christina To's uh
executive position. So, and I love my job. >> Great. >> Oh, and yes, I like North Hollywood that they're all my babies, but besides liking design, yeah, I'm the key person trying to make us more efficient.
>> Thank you, Alix. Um, Becky, Miss Cunning, I'm a new committee member. >> Oh, clearly I'm new. I'm learning. I'm Becky Cunningham. Um, it is my 14th year as a parent in LA USD. Um, I cannot talk about a great uh childhood memory here
because I'm from Indiana. Um, but I had a radically different experience there because I went to a kindergarten through 12th grade laboratory school located at Ball State University. Um, but I got to experience its own modernization where we moved out in my freshman year and lived in trailers on the playground and
then moved back into a brand new building. So, I've firsthand experienced what facilities can bring. And then as a parent, I was a parent at Ply Vista, which was a brand new school. So certainly everything was perfect, right? But it actually wasn't. There of course were things that slipped through the cracks. And then uh I got to experience
collocation as a district school with the brand new Katherine Johnson STEM Academy where we were colllocated at Westchester High or Wessum and which you would think that should be no problem, but of course anytime you have multiple people in in the same space, it can still cause challenges. And then now I
have uh students that have one graduated and one is a freshman at Venice High and it's a they've done a phenomenal job there. So >> you've really found a way to track except for well KJ was a new campus even if it was coll-located but apply Vista in Venice new campuses. >> Yeah. I mean it's you know you still
have old plumbing at Venice. So like I think that's what's you you think that it's all taken care of and then you're like oh yeah but the plumbing doesn't work in the old building so that shut that bathroom off. Right. So there's still uh and whenever you have a great problem, my passion since we were
talking about that uh my passion for LA USD is enrollment and uh anytime that you have a school that is bursting at the seams and more people want in I think we need to learn more about what's going on there and that's what Venice has right now. >> As Venice is the um most populous school in all of region west so we're excited
about that and that hasn't always been the case. So it's a great tradition. >> They're doing great work. >> Um do our other team the staffs just want to quickly introduce themselves so folks knew who else is here too? She has a mic. Patrice has a mic. So yeah, >> Patrice McKenzie, chief of staff, District 1.
>> You just project to >> Emma Watson, policy director, BD7. >> Tenner, chief of staff, board, District 4. >> Mark Wall, associate general counsel with the district. >> Great. And we have a few um folks who weren't able to join us. Cammy Anderson,
Eric Guyer, Dana Greenspan, and Steve Newton. Randy Johnson, who's a managing partner at RSJ and Associates Development Services and was very helpful with that Palih High relocation is on his way. Um and uh should be here shortly. Oh, I'm sorry. Dana is coming
as well too. Um so, thank you. And I should say for my part, Nick Melvin, LA Unified board member for district 4. Um, I will say I have a a great picture when I was a student in Kendrick Canyon Elementary School of an all- metal jungle gym on an all asphalt. You know, I don't think we would do that anymore.
But I love but is a fun memory. And I will say what in addition to the efficiencies, what I'm excited for, thinking back to Ker is Ker Canyon, if you haven't been, the library, which was also featured in the show Big Little Lies on HBO, is an old craftsman house that was donated to the district and we
had the creativity to say, "Yeah, let's make that work." And it's in a a really cute um library. And uh I just think when we think of things like Ply Vista that has chickens or um Paul Rivere that has a farm or Wallro that has the wildlands like I I am interested in
those elements of our schools that feel a little different than traditional school and how do we think creatively about things that we can do um with our facilities. So thank you for those great introductions and it's appreciate you all joining our committee. Like I said, Dana and Randy are on their way in that
Dodgers traffic. So, I'm now going to turn it over to a very special guest who has graciously come down from the bay for today's conversation. Um, Miss Ida Claire is the state architect for the division of the state architect of California, also known as DSA, um, which comes up a lot in our conversations at
this committee, but also in the board. Um, she has acted as the state architect since January of 2019 and has concurrently served as the principal architect for DSA, managing the accessibility, sustainability, and fire and life safety programs for public K2 schools and community colleges, among
other duties. She has also overseen improvements uh in professional standards and training for architects and has decades of experience in private architectural practice where she worked on housing facilities. She's going to help us understand her division a little better um and how they can be partners
in our work uh to improve schools. Like I mentioned, we've discussed um DSA in a few different ways in this committee. Um and we wanted to both celebrate and thank you and your team for the incredible work in the Palisades over the last year. Um, and I just want to say we're going to have an opportunity
um, I think in the new year at kind of the year anniversary mark to have the board in our regular board meeting kind of honor and thank all the folks including the division of state architect who were really helpful in that incredible quick uh, move the interim housing at both Pali High and
also Marquez um, and uh, and hear more about you um, and and the work that you're doing. Um, I also want to thank, you know, and and I met, um, Miss Claire when we were at, um, uh, convening within a week of the fires of all the state partners who were helping us
rebuild and our constituents, and it was so nice of you and your team to be there. Um, and I'll say too, you know, candidly, I think a lot of in my tenure on this board, when we talk about cost overruns or when we talk about delays, uh, folks in this building will often point to your division and say, "Oh,
it's DSA. It's DSA." And what I have found at least in the last few months and I think your your deck will talk about some of the improvements is um that there's a real effort to streamline those uh policies and protocols to be a partner understanding your your uh role as kind of safety and the arbiter of of
what is safe statewide. Um and I found uh that there is a way to work with you and continue to do things quicker and more efficiently. And so I appreciate the opportunity to hear from you and I think create this um relationship with the district and the committee too so that when we are told oh it's going to be 17 years to build a place structure
because of DSA. We can call Miss Claire and say I don't know that that's true. Let's talk through it. So without further ado I'm going to turn it over to you and I think we have your slide deck up ready as well. So thank you. >> As uh Mr. Melvin stated I'm Ida Clare.
the state architect. I'm here to talk a little bit about uh DSA and the work that we do. Um trying to keep it clear because we do a lot of different things, but I I don't want to make it too fussy and complicated just to understand. Uh this presentation's a little bit
tailored more to LA USD and the work that we're doing to always improve and the work that we're doing to uh support LAUSD. Uh next, do I have a do I just say next slide or or you >> Oh, button. Awesome. Okay.
>> I think the button is probably best. >> It's No, that works great. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So, a little bit about looking ahead to 2026 is the theme of this presentation. But as an introduction, we have a headquarters office in four regional offices, one of
which is in LA, not too far on Bunker Hill. Um, Alix, I think, is there often. And uh this is our staff and headquarters that uh manages the the whole state and our regulatory development program more so um our codes
and standards development. And then of course we have four regional offices as I stated one which is in LA. You could see from the map the different areas of the state that are covered. LA is a little bit broken up. Uh interestingly more it's travel distance. We have field
engineers who are out in the field and visit our schools as they're under construction. And so it's catered around the weather and the uh distance driving so that we can efficiently serve the state. Oh, my slides are kind of going a little off. Sorry about that. There must be a a
formatting change here, but anyways, it's okay. Um you can see that we have uh there's 1,5 K12 school districts in the state and close to 10,000 campuses as well as 73 community college districts with 116 colleges. All of them
come to DSA for their facility development. So uh we also do um state essential service buildings uh CHP offices um at mostly CHP offices but other Callowes
offices and then also um access compliance for all state funded construction. Yeah, this is a little shifted. Okay. So, um there's one thing that's important to remember when we're processing workload is that every three years there's a new code and that occurs
in January of next year, January 1st, 2026. And when that happens, we have a really big rush of workload in November and December. So, we are experiencing double the amount of workload every month from now until the end of the month as people are trying to beat that
code change. And this is one of the issues that we really worked hard with LUSD. what and their architects especially on Pali Marquez and Pali Ele Pali High, Pali Elementary and Marquez is to break up the projects so that the
architects could get the projects in in this December. So they would be under a code that they're familiar with to streamline the process. And when we're talking about a new code, it's not that there's significant changes coming up in the 2025 code. So there is no real compromise necessarily in safety. It's
just some things have shifted which could make it um difficult. And specifically when we're talking about even fire safety, all the requirements for fire safety are now in a whole new book. And so while things have shifted, we wanted to make sure that we could
streamline. So we um broke up the project so they could be start submitting in December even though they'll be finished um earlier next year. I do want to say while we have this workload um DSA is committed to um processing the fire damaged schools as a
priority. So that's why I'm giving you this context is that yeah we're facing a lot of workload. We have different means to manage that workload but um our commitment is still to getting the schools affected by fire up and running whether they are temporary facilities or new builds.
Um, so I'm This is all numbers and in effects of time because there's a very important game tonight and I'm sure you'd rather watch that than me. Um, you can abs absorb this later. This just proves how busy we are and that's really the the gist of it. So, I'm going to
pass that on. Um, I just want to say that if ever there's a question on a project, we offer free pre-application meetings. It's very important that you meet with us early and often. The best way to be make a cost-effective streamlined uh project
moving forward is to meet with us early and often at the head of any project. Um a little bit about emergencies and what what we look for. Um C when there is no declared emergency, you can call your
DSA regional office. And when this may sound a little weird, you know, I usually say any earthquake that's under five is not like a major emergency typically, but you may have had some kind of shifting or issue with a a building. If it's not a declared emergency by the governor, call us and
we can send someone out to look at it and let you know right away if it's safe to occupy. Um, of course, if the governor declares an emergency, uh, there is a process to work through the local jurisdiction and the state office of emergency services and then we are mission tasked. So, for the Palisades
fire, we did receive two mission tasks. We had staff out in the field visiting 22 schools. Because we're disaster service workers, we actually can get called for both public and private schools um because a lot of the private schools go through the county office of ed and they asked us to go out and visit
those sites. So, we did visit 22 schools and write up reports. Um, and that took about a week for each mission task, visiting the schools and writing the reports. And with that, it it starts the process of rebuilding. But there is some really good information out there at
Callowes about schools and safety assessments after a disaster. And then we also have a video where we partnered with the office of public school construction and the California Department of Education on planning and for and addressing natural disasters. So, I just provided links to those on
there in case you're interested. Um, all our DSA architects and engineers are safety assessment professionals. What that means is that um they there's a process and protocol that's administered uh internationally actually on how to
assess buildings for safety in a rapid fashion. And um as dis as state disaster service workers, I require all of my staff to be SAP trained because when they're out in the field, it protects them and knowing how to work with the local jurisdiction in and being deployed
out into the fields, but also they know what to do and they don't have to have a big delta and training. So all our staff, we have go bags ready. All our field staff carries go bags in the car. If there's ever an emergency, they're able to deploy from their homes right away whenever we receive the mission
task. usually within 24 hours. And then we also have go bags in the office for our staff who are not out in the field and they can go grab those and also be deployed. So I just want you to know that we are here and ready to be responsive to uh the district in any
emergency if you need us. Um a little bit about the work we do very quickly. Uh we review for structural safety, fire life safety, access and sustainability. Of course our goal is safe, accessible and sustainable schools. Um, a little bit about the
school rebuilding process. Um, for three of the schools that were uh that are being rebuilt, Palih High um Pali Elementary and Marquez Elementary, we've actually moved those out of the DSA LA office and put one in each of our
other regional offices. And it's they're actually working on a protocol um for uh a collaborative ongoing review to try to shorten the time and work one-on-one with the design professionals. And what that does is that it's um trying to
create a process where we can expedite this and then after um all this work, we will gather all three documentation on all three projects and actually try to establish a um accelerated plan review for emergencies such like this that we
can implement elsewhere in the state when we need to. So you guys are a little bit of a trial, but we're we're very confident that the ongoing engagement really will shorten the time frame overall. And so um this is some of the process uh that we've discussed. So
I'm not going to get into the details. It's there. If you have it, you can always ask questions, but just know that um we are here and committed to working with you. Our LA office is focused on getting the temporary projects and any other projects that you have coming in.
Um and also uh your sister district Pasadena as well with their fire rebuilds. So um because these are all brand new school rebuilds which Pasadena has not yet uh addressed um we fig we thought it would be better to move them
out and and deal with them one-on-one to get them uh moving forward. Okay. Um obviously on uh some of our efforts we do have a sustainable schools program. Our goal is educate before we regulate. So we have a lot of resources
on our website for sustainability. Um this is part a big goal for DSA to get the school sustainable obviously because it's al obviously a big goal as well with the administration. Um so two ways that we do that besides our um education
and outreach program is we have now hired uh well we're in the process of hiring four uh regional sustainability architects, one in each office who can meet with you and discuss your projects, the sustainability of your projects early in pre-application meetings and
and encourage uh that advanced sustainability and they will they will assist with that. Also, um we've uh assisted the office of public school construction that when you're pursuing the energy efficiency grants from Prop 2 funds that we will be providing that
analysis and review for OPSC so that you can get those EV uh energy efficiency grants if that's what you're targeting. And then um a little bit what else is coming this year is a eracker is our tracking system for all projects. Every
the district has access to it. the design professionals do as well as DSA and you can um track where your project is in the plan approval for DSA. We are launching a new and improved e-tracker in the middle of this year which will replace our albatross eracker that's um
on our website right now. So we're very excited about this because this will also provide more information. There will be a phase two that even will provide enhanced um improvement. So that's a good thing for um the district as well because they'll be better informed about where their projects are
in DSA. So when there's a blame about delay, ET tracker will be easy to tell you that it's not with DSA. And then of course um one other thing we're one other thing that we're work working with with OPSC is a building
inventory um which will be better better be able to track your school buildings. are going to be uh issued a building identification number so that um when you have an improvement to a building you'll be able to have at we'll have all that information of every single project
number that's affected that building. So, this is also something else that's happening this year. When you submit a project, we are going to be starting to uh issue building numbers for buildings on your campuses. And that's just part of the site plan
that we're asking staff to uh your staff or your design professionals to prepare that we can start building out that building identifier. And then um I know that there's always a demand for project inspectors. We're also making project inspector exam improvements. Our goal is
to get more project inspectors into the system so that they can support you in your construction efforts. So, um that's it. I tried to get through very quickly. If you have any questions, um I'm here to answer them. So, >> yes, thank you. When I was reading the slides in preparation, I was like the
the density was somewhat striking, but you did a great job of uh explaining it for our committee. We appreciate the time, especially with the Dodgers game. Um I'll turn it over to questions in a second. I will say we were going to have on today's agenda a more specific update about the Palisades rebuild, but in the interest of time and these other
presentations, we're going to punt until um uh I guess that would be our our next committee meeting and also that celebration and uh acknowledgement in January. But just for the committee's awareness, there's a lot of great work happening. Marquez is back in the Palisades Palih High will be back in January. Um and thank you for addressing
uh some of that work in your presentation. Um with that questions, comments from the committee and welcome Miss Greenspan. Um uh yeah, questions, comments? Yeah, Miss Hendy Nubo,
>> thank you for the thorough um report and had a couple questions. Uh, I guess with some of the I guess some of the dollar amounts >> on page six, I think it was
>> kind of help me understand a little bit. Yes. So, page six, it shows the breakdown of the total projects received and then like the total project cost. >> Uhhuh. >> And I know we're in there. Is that that's us in the green? Correct. >> Correct.
>> And so how do we get I guess the number as far as the cost or the received and the cost. Is there an equation or that kind of creates this or how do we get this? >> Sure. So um this is from our fiscal year
which began in July. Um the green is projects in the LA region. So that you saw in that map. So not just LA USD but obviously in the LA region. Um, so we've received in L in the LA office 255 projects have been registered and the
dollar value is the proposed estimated construction cost for the project. So our fees are based on the estimated construction cost, the difficulty of plan review, there's a a relation of uh the fee to complexity. And so if it's an
accessonly project and it's a high fee, then the it's generally the fee is scheduled less because it's a less review. But if there's a modernization and it's complex and there's a high fee. So there's there's a a nexus between project complexity and the fees that we
have established based on project construction cost and the hours that we take to do to review the project. Did that answer your question? >> And then when you say fees because we have been educated on this term fees um exactly what goes into fees and what
breakdown is a fee? So, um, uh, there's when you submit a project to DSA, there's a plan review fee. 70% of that fee is for our plan review services. 30% is reserved for our construction services. So, if a project is proceeds to plan review, but doesn't proceed to
construction, you get 30% of that fee back, but it's for us to review that project to code compliance. So, we ensure that it meets all applicable codes and that it's safe. So, um, DSA is charged by the field act to do the review. So, we're basically your building department and uh in an Yeah,
we're basically the building department. So, you don't go to the locals, you come to us. And the and the field act requires that schools are essentially two and a half times safer than your regular buildings. So, um and that's because it houses our students. And so where regular code um addresses egress
and being able to exit safely and be safe, personal safety, um the field act and the review to the code that DSA provides is that it provides for student safety. So exiting and pupil safety and faculty safety, but also for
preservation of facilities. So however high mostly for structural safety for earthquakes. However high um the earthquake is right uh there should be um is dependent upon you know the school should be remaining standing when other
buildings don't I guess is the simple way to do it so that's why they come to DSA >> and then um towards the end you mentioned the inspectors what is the process to become um an inspector >> like how do we get a pipeline because
you said you're looking So, we're in the field of education here. So, how do we create this pipeline so that we are getting more interested? Is there internships? Is there, you know, on-site training? What how to get our students invested in this field?
>> Sure. So, um, thank you for asking that question. So because we have both community colleges and K12 public schools, our first goal was to modernize our inspector program, get it on computers, get it to local areas, work with existing certifications that a lot
of inspectors already have nationally at your local building department and then build on that so that they can come and be an inspector for DSA. So those are the processes that were will probably be culminated uh through the end of improvements that we're making that
sorry that will probably be finished by uh the end of this year middle to end of 2026. Um we've also reached out to community colleges to start discussing internship programs because that's you know that's where the lot of that training occurs. But we've also received
some really good information about um uh interest programs that we can create in in high schools, right? And trying to get um and so we've been trying to pursue that as well. Our first goal was community colleges because that way they
could take the classes and get them out in the field. Um but if I would love to talk more and see what we can do. I in fact the one that I just heard recently about the interest program, I need to pursue it because that was only happened a month ago and I
need to find out more about um how they're cultivating that interest in high schools and trying to get kids out onto construction sites and seeing how construction works and the fields of inspection, >> right? Because it's cyclical, right? you can create this and be like, yeah, I
mean, we're sitting in this building right now and there was someone who inspected this and helping them to understand that they could be a part of that as well. So, >> yeah, it is a little bit of a challenge because the inspectors that DSA gets already have years of experience. So,
it's that little bit of delta. Getting them into the field though will help and then ha if DSA has that exposure early on then that at least they'll make a connection to hopefully get to DSA and and be certified through DSA as an inspector. >> Thanks.
>> Can I just ask one quick followup to Mission Nubble's first question? When we look at that slide six and also seven and maybe Miss O'Brien can help us understand this too. I would think at least LA Unified which is like four or five times the size of San Diego. Now, I know it's county, but the fact that we're only well, in the in the project
cost less than um on slide six and then in slide seven, you know, only 19 um projects received in LA versus San Diego. Is that typical? Is San Diego having some sort of school building or reconstruction boom or like why don't we see kind of a more proportional? So,
well, I will tell you first of all, this is a snippet where we are today uh in the course of a year. And so, we find that our workload when we're looking at that pie chart really is balanced through all four regions. Um, a lot of that has to do with there's
certain areas that have access to bond funding, other areas that don't, when they pass that, how efficient they are in in how they, you know, progress in utilizing that bond funding. Um but we find that it's fairly balanced. So when you're looking at this snapshot, San
Diego does have a lot of projects as of late. Um but it's not typical that every month San Diego has more projects. Um we it really is pretty balanced. In fact, out of all the areas, Sacramento is usually the least amount and surprisingly Oakland. LA and San Diego
are flip-flop as to who has the most work per month and then Sacramento and Oakland are usually always um a little bit behind. And can you just for the benefit of the committee explain to us like very simply you know what would trigger a project needing to be re submitted to you and
what would not. So like if it's a new school we're building which we're doing fewer but yes but like if it's a a shade structure for example like just so that we understand kind of what >> Sure. So anything that has as pretty much in a nutshell if it's access
compliance work needs to come to us because that's in government code that we're the authority for access compliance. So access compliance improvements um the fire life safety work and uh structural safety work. So if there's a building structure like shade structures are a structure right
we don't want that to fall in the middle of an earthquake. We will be looking for that. Even things like um back stops of basketballs, uh bleachers, right? Things that you normally don't think of buildings, those still come to DSA because if it is a structural system that either supports a pupil or faculty
or shelters a pupil or faculty, we would need to review that. So that's a big part of it. Our sustainability review is much more of an overview and an education and encouragement beyond what is already required in Cal Green. It's not a full review. If we just call it a
shade covering instead of a structure, does that exempt us from the process? >> It's still overhead. >> Um, thank you. Uh, other other I have a few more, but other Yeah, Miss uh um Ortiz Franklin, >> super quick. Uh, I just want to appreciate you for being here. So often I think we are at schools or in the
community and we say, "Oh, that has to go to DSA and it's some this sort of like amorphous organization." But you are a face and you explain things to us and so I just want to appreciate you for um being here and making it real and personable because I think this can often feel very impersonal. So thank you. Um only one question from me which
is I'm very excited about the um innovations and you know trying to also be more efficient which is one of the themes that came up here. Um this idea of like an accelerated plan and you know trying things on um given that you have the opportunity here and maybe to make some improvements across the state like
how will you know what to scale? What are you looking for um as you try on some new things with that? So our metrics indicate that uh provided we're a collaborative force, right? Your design professional um the district um
DSA in working together um our response times has greatly improved. I mean I I will say that historically before my time and I'm not saying it's due to me even my predecessor had made significant improvements. I'm saying historically
there were um when we were in a paper process it was much more laborious, much more difficult to communicate and get through. We are fully electronic now. We have systems in place that um are rigid because they need to be rigid because we need to be fair to everyone that's
submitting their project that we're timely. And so that's why we do pre-application meetings. That's why we have a six week submission window because we prepare staff to see your project. So regularly we are provided everyone does is as responsive right
equally as responsive we can get through a plan review in a fairly timely manner but we realize that um the emergencies are going to be with us forever. I mean you you can't evade them. You can plan as best you can but the the natural emergencies will be here. And so that
this opportunity regarding the fires really started to do a little bit more of a collaborative process handholding that we're trying to say, can we create a fourth option that when a school is leveled and they need to get in, what does that look like? And so it is not
going to be something that's going to be used on a regular basis um just because we can't we're limited, you know, in that bandwidth, but it is something in that's going to acknowledge um an an imminent urgent need due to a
natural disaster, an unplanned emergency that that needs to that that rebuild needs to occur quickly. And so we're trying to look at consolidating that time through these trial processes that we're doing right now. >> And would quickly be like 50% faster or like 25% faster or we're not really sure
until we try it out. >> Yeah. So um our metrics on our school like on a typical um elementary school say K12 brand new rebuild without any emergency in working with the design
professionals. So no rush, right? I'm not saying we take our time, but I'm saying the district doesn't have a rush. There isn't an emergency. The design professional is not in a time constraint and DSA is going through its normal plan review process. That normal process takes like seven months. We're trying to
do this in shorter four months. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Great. Thank you. Other questions, comments? Yeah, Miss Ferman. Um, I have a I have two questions and I'm not sure I'm not sure maybe other folks on this panel can be helpful too.
Um, so the first question is about all this rebuilding that we're doing, Marquez, Palih High, all that good stuff happening on the west side. Um, and I remember last year having conversation about how how that rebuilding was being paid for and you know there was a question about whether it was general
funds versus insurance and FEMA, right? Federal government help. Um, did are the insurance funds and FEMA funds help us? Did does that help us cover the fees working with the DSA as well? Is that included?
I can only answer from I I don't know that literally, but basically you h you assume you have bond funds and then insurance and FEMA will supplant those bond funds and they'll go back to the bond. But I can't answer the question if
it's covering the fees specifically, but I can find out that question. >> Yeah, that'd be good to know. Thank you. >> But I mean, it is one big pot, right? Right. >> The project cost, all hard and soft costs, >> right? And so those costs would be included, >> right? In that.
>> So that's a what we call a soft cost. A fee is a soft cost. Got it. >> Like an architect's fee. >> Got it. Okay. And then my other question I think maybe you can answer is um uh the charter schools that we have here in Los Angeles. Um some of them are
building right something new and some of them are adapting and some of them are colllocating. Um are those facilities inspected by you all as well? So, um, we work with public school facilities. And
so, it is, um, when it comes to charter schools, it's really determined on whether or not the district wants DSA involved for those public school facilities, which typically we are. Charter schools in general, if they're not in a district property, we don't
have the authority for unless they're receiving some kind of state funding, and then we do. And so who is inspecting those charter? >> It would be like a private school, like a local jurisdiction. >> A local jurisdiction. Okay, good to
know. We've got a charter school that wants to build right next to a freeway in my neighborhood. So, we're thinking and talking a lot about that. So, that's helpful. Thank you. >> Yeah, I would check as well with the when it comes to site location. Uh California Department of Education has
regulations for site selection. I'm not sure if they do for charter schools or not. I'm just saying that's not our department. Ours comes when the design's already done or the improvements are already done. >> Yeah, I think the CDE has said it's it's not them. So, just trying to hunt down who exactly is responsible for building
a three-story building on top of the 170. >> Come to Samo High, not one of ours, but right off the um what is uh did you have you shared what typical fees are? Like what percentage of a project DSA fees are? >> Yeah, I did. Well, I don't have that
slide with me today and off the top of my head I can get that information to you because our act we just lowered our fees as of September 1st. So, we have a requirement to lower our fees whenever we have reach a certain level in our budget reserves because we shouldn't be taking obviously more money from you all
folks. Um, I could share that with you, but there is a different scale for access compliance review than there is for structural safety and uh fire life safety review. That would be helpful just because when we're looking at timelines for projects and DSA is used sometimes as a uh like source of obfiscation or like maybe an excuse or a
straw man sometimes not but um it will show the timeline and you just talked about that the seven months versus maybe four months but also uh cost and so it' be helpful to kind of calibrate >> and and I will say that um yeah you know that's our part of of trying to work
through that of course the project that we're working with with LA USD because we're engaging so much in advance is the reason why we're able to shorten it more to four months, right? In that regard. Um, so it's kind of it's it's a fourmonth process, but we're
targeting a specific end date of approval more so than anything. Our fees are on our website as well and also in our e-tracker calculator when you it it does a calculator for you. So, you're able for a construction project to put the fee in on our on our website
calculator and see what the breakdown is. But I will send you that information in that link. >> Great. >> Are are the fees I mean if you had gone through LABS you'd have to pay fees for them. >> Are they comparable or >> I don't know that answer. >> We have plan check and permit fees.
Somebody you have to pay somebody. Right. >> Right. I I will say that our structural safety review is a lot more intensive because of uh the nature of the of the work that we have to do under the education code. But um I don't know about the comparison. >> Yeah. please.
>> Um, at procurement, we uh at at truck operations in particular, but at the entire warehouse, we pitch in constantly for these kind of emergencies. We did the Marquez move uh I think it was earlier this month or late last month. It was supposed to be a two-day project that was supposed to happen over the
Labor Day weekend. It got postponed, canceled. I don't know why. And when we wound up doing it in one day, we had 68 people there. >> Wow. >> Amazing. So, um, anytime anything like that happens, we've have fleets of trucks, we've got bobtails, we've got,
uh, trailers, we've got refrigerated trailers that can help not only get people out there, we can get crews out there, we can also supply them with water and everything else that's needed. So, possibly you want to tie in the procurement services with that also whenever they have any of this kind of stuff going on. >> Yeah. Thank you. And thanks also for
elevating the kind of incredible work that you all did in in both the relocation back in January and then that recent move. Um other questions or comments? Um I have two uh which are broad but I can you know I think this is there's understandable interest in this topic
and the work that you do and so maybe we'll have a follow-up but the first is you know I really appreciate and you anticipated some of it in talking about the learnings from the Palisades fire. That's been one of the things I've been thinking about in the last 10 months is as we do things like relocate students in 8 days or uh get you do it over a
weekend or get those temporary facilities up uh in just a few months like what lessons are applicable beyond the fire. Um especially when we think here about you know we're not building new schools. Um and so the idea that like because a lot of the work we do is
around those critical repairs or shade or heat mitigation. I think a lot of folks including at this committee table will tell you they're all emergencies. They all should be rushed. And so when we think about um uh the breaking up projects or that efficiencies or like you were saying putting the three schools in three different regional
offices so that they're not bottlenecked in one like are there learnings that you've identified? You said there's maybe a new emergency protocol, but just like beyond that that we can apply to all school construction or review. um given the kind of the urgency of some of
these projects. >> Yeah. So um I think I think a big part of it is just really that communication early and often. Um the use of our pre-application meetings really allows uh buyin from DSA and the design
professional early on. You establish that relationship with the supervisors. You have questions as the project moves on that you can ask a question, right? And so you can get to um a a when the project is ready for submitt, it's not
an unknown. We we know what to expect and some of those questions have been answered. So um I think that that's the the most important part, but we have processes to manage our workload as they come in. We're able to we have a series
of um consultants that we can use that when our workload like in the next two months gets very very high. We can send work out so that we can manage our workload. We can also implement overtime and we can hire retired annuitants. We have methods to do that. We can't just
expand staff as we want as a public entity. We're not allowed to do that, but we do have an offshoot to be able to manage that workload. Overall, we're always looking at processes of improvement and targets for each of our plan reviews. We do have a whole metric
system that for projects we see how the performance works so that we know when we budget the time that it's appropriate for that review. So, we do have systems in place to constantly look and improve. Right now though, our focus is to see if
we can have this emergency planning or emergency review process established so that we can better serve the state. >> Yeah. And that would be helpful. I know internally and Miss Tes is here as well like I've been trying to identify like when we say initially there's a project that takes nine months and then we're able to shave five months off. It's like
is it were those five months shaved because we had to pull personnel and work on it and so it's not that replicable. um or is it that we actually realized that five months, you know, or at least three months of that timeline were superfluous or we didn't need and like those lessons then are um ongoing.
>> Yeah. So this ongoing review, we're doing reviews um at least for the for um well for all three some like Palih High doesn't have a 50% de design development review but for Marquez because it's just one building but for Marquez and for uh
Pali Elementary we have our staff is reviewing this project at 50% design development 100% uh design development and s 50% construction document. So what you're getting for your fee is actually
four reviews. And so when we do that part in that review early, we're able to get comments. And so that's not something that's happening at the end that then has perhaps a ripple effect on other processes. So you can see that that's very labor intensive for our staff and it's not something that's
readily replicated for every single project that's submitted because it is an intense um collaborative process. But uh obviously when we're facing issues like the Palisades fire and school rebuilds and we know that you have a a a
need to get students back into school, we can we can implement this and see, you know, and and get that done faster, but it's very difficult to replicate that because we're reserving our staff. So we have target dates for when these um interim reviews occur and we're
reserving staff to be ready to review at that time. And so that's difficult because that staff may be in the middle of another project, right? Is because this is a priority. They're getting pulled off of that. So that affects another school district. It could affect another LA USD project, right? And so um
the systems we have in place keep our work moving along, but this emergency is really to address those specific instances. >> And then as a correlary um and I I'll note it's somewhat of a loaded question. And I definitely have a perspective, but one way is to you know shrink timeline
review and like maximize efficiencies. Another is to limit the the amount of things you review and one of the things you mentioned was um uh you know administrative codes and the field act and um things that like basketball hoops need to be reviewed and shade structures
which is something I delved into a little bit when I was working with some legislator legislators around some what I thought were improvements. And I'm just curious like when those administrative codes are when things are added are anything subtracted or do we review I mean to Miss Feerman's question my understanding is that most
independent charter facilities in the state are exempt from the field act and I'd be curious has someone done a review like have any have charter school facilities been done shoddier than district facilities and like are there ways like you know like are there lessons learned and we say because one of the things um that I found
interesting with the shade structures is that we have very um strict requirements about like how long pylons have to go, how deep they have to go because of like gale force winds and I think our code is on par if not more severe than Florida's and it's like does that make sense? And
you know I know you're smiling I feel like you got this question a lot but I am curious like do those reviews happen? Um is that a legislative process? How can districts like ours like the by far the biggest in the state if we wanted to do things like say and it is a board priority shade structures? We got to find a way to do these more efficiently
and maybe not calling them shade coverings is the way to do it. um how do we think about the code and and update what makes sense and say um you know when we do see independent schools, charter schools, private colleges that just have homes that just have shade sales everywhere and we have
to put these pylons and do these whole structures and so um are there folks actively trying to kind of pull out and say maybe this isn't needed and I know it's tough because of liability and like your job is to ensure two and a half times more safer than the average building but I just have to ask the
question. So I think what's important to understand is um you know we take our responsibility from the education code which is passed by the legislature. Our administrative code only makes what's in the ed code more specific and that's through a public process. So um if
there's any way that you wanted to make change in that regard, there is a public process in that regulatory development process. We have to demonstrate that it's cost-effective. we have to demonstrate that it is uh gives us the authority and the reference to actually
write those regulations and advance them. But understand that we're also charged by other parts of statute that require us to adopt national model codes. So a lot of times what we're reinforcing is national model codes and
so that two and a half time or you know that that um safety level is is specified but it's the national codes that also increase what that safety level is for that level. And so maybe that's why you're getting some of that
information from winds. Our concern really is um earthquake safety, but the codes kind of take into consideration a lot of of the different forces and h and how they act. Um so I guess what I would say, you know, the the process is what
it is. We're not we're not trying to establish um additional requirements because we want to expand what our authority is. Our authority is limited. It's very specific in the ED code. And so it's really an understanding by what's written what is covered on a site
and for so I know that um we've seen many shade structures when they're your little popups how they can flow fly away and perhaps impale a student right and then you have the extreme of a shade structure coming to DSA and being secure but remember even a shade structure is
an investment in a facility and so I think that it's going to be there a while and and that's that part's important right? That it's safe. Um there are processes that we have to make it faster. You know, we do a pre-check process, which means that if a manufacturer wants to send to us their
product, we pre-check it. If it's pre-checked, you can use it on your campus. Yes, when it's placed on the site, it still has to come to us, but we don't review that structure again if it's a pre-check because we've already reviewed it. We just review site access,
access compliance, right? For every project, access compliance improvements are needed. So, there are ways to shrink the review the more you use um products like shade structures that have already been pre-reviewed. >> And I guess Mr. O'Brien, are the shade structures we're doing, are they all pre-approved? Because that seems like a
no-brainer that we should only use pre-approved shade structures. >> Almost always. >> Yes. Correct. >> Yeah, because Okay. Well, we'll talk more about that and I know there's a upcoming resolution about shade in uh in particular. Thank you so much. I know we went a bit over time, but we really
appreciate the conversation. We do also have a um certificates of the board of education the superintendent uh just presented to you uh Miss Eddlair as the state architect and your office just for your collaboration and partnership with the palisades rebuild um and ongoing work.
So I know we're a bit over time but if I could ask we'll do maybe do a quick picture as we present this to you um and hope we can have you back or continue the conversation as we look to uh ensure safety but also increase efficiency uh for our school facilities. Absolutely great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
And reach out anytime. My number's on the website. So, seriously, I will answer any question. So, >> I'm I I'm based in Sacramento, but I'm in LA often. So, >> all right. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Nice to meet all of you. on the committee. So you're not specticient. >> Yes, I know. >> No, that was great. It was really helpful. >> Thank you. >> Oh, sorry. I know. Nobody wants to come on this side. >> Even us out.
>> Come on this side. >> Christina, come on this side, please. Balance. We're talking balance here because we talk about structure. >> I know, right? >> Usually goes from end to end. >> Okay.
>> Alex needs to get the picture. Matt. Matt. Matt. Matt. Over here. >> That means come over here. >> Get on the >> Does DSA have to review you putting this in your office for >> No, but I do want a coffee on
>> Thank you so much so much right there. >> Thank you. >> Hi. Good to see you again. Absolutely. I'm going to introduce our next presentation as folks are still mingling just in the interest of time. Um
>> yes, so thank you again to Miss Claire and for the to the committee. So, um, last spring we heard an update from MGT, an outside firm about a study they did comparing L Unified Construction to other districts. And at the time, they did not yet have a final report, which
has recently been completed. Um, and their presentation from the spring and final report are included in the materials you received uh for today's meeting. That's this kind of hefty one right here. Um, and today's presentation will be from Mr. Brian and the district to share some of the things they've
learned uh from the study and any changes to policy or practice uh that they will be incorporating as a result. I want to note this will be a continuing conversation for the committee and I want to acknowledge that neither the committee nor the board has had ample time to review this um as the report
itself and the follow-up only were received in the last few days. And so this will be a a presentation from Mr. O'Brien. will have the opportunity to answer ask some questions and comments, but we're going to discuss it again in the future because this is something that uh the board is uh I think being more vocal about, making sure we have
materials on time to review them, but something that's hefty, too. We really want to um make sure the committee has time to digest it and understand it and then the district's response. And I want to know that Miss O'Brien is not representing MGT. So, if we have questions about the report now that it's been released in its totality, we can
agendaize that and talk to them. I definitely do. Um, but this will be a the first class at the district's response. So, Mr. O'Brien, >> so I'll just clarify our role or those of us, a few of us who were involved in this provided the information as
requested and made corrections to the drafts and the versions that came through. In other words, if there were mathematical errors or something because we had done um interviews and I was one of the staff interviews. Um we were frequently met with for clarification
for and I'm just going to put it out there when we talked about the specifications and policies and procedures uh that came through that report that actually came from my interview. And then um when they added the information on the fires as well as
the Olympics that was input from the district but basically we didn't manage the process because we're we're being examined. Okay. So what's great and good about this is
facilities was is always working on improving. And one of the good things about this is it turned out that many of the recommendations that came through were also things that we recognized and we're
working on. Um, and that's helpful because then you're not standing there like, my god, you know. Um, we continue to make improvements and, um, we'll discuss some of the ones we're going to continue to
make. We also had previously, as in the last bullet, talked about specifications um, with the district uh, com u, not with the district, with the committee in detail. and we've been working on on that for a long time. Um, so let's go to
the next one. The purpose of MGT's study was to compare the business practices under design and construction and our operational effectiveness to both industry standard
in other words building in general and also to our peers our peer K through 12 educational construction. When you read the report, you'll see because there was um a limited number of peers, they also
included in uh one section of the report, they included other public agencies outside the state of California. And the reason um that is important is because of the division of the state architects are judged uh
differently uh judge our drawings and review our engineering requirements a different way. So there's a lack of comparison but there's enough information you can get a sense. So um what was good is we got datadriven
information and data always is helpful. They um analyzed they asked to analyze 10 completed projects that were completed between 2022 and 2024. They started their study um in 2024 last
summer. So we gave them the information on all the projects really as a data dump as they requested and we gave a variety of projects. They chose comprehensive modernizations which are our largest projects. Those projects
there are 22 of them. They had uh multiple buildings were either replaced or retrofitted. sitewide improvements for ADA, sitewide improvements for um utilities, and then they had roofing and
HVAC and ADA accessibility. So, the the 10 projects they chose were initiated by the district between 2016 and 2022. So, I wanted to point out that we put
this information in. It doesn't come out of the report that says the construction cost escalation in LA increased by 38.4% between 2016 and 2022, which of course is when the budgets were
prepared. And then from 2022 to 24, you see there's another 9.4. Can I ask we are going to hold our questions to the end so I'm modeling improperly but where does that because that's not in the report so I was where does that number come from the 38.4% 4% and then
>> I asked that from our program controls team who provided it >> our program but is it like is it like a regional study is that well okay I'm I'm going to table because I see some people want to type but I just didn't I didn't see a citation for that so that's an
internal number >> based on >> I'm sure yeah >> can I it um it is not an internal number it is based on an industry report that tracks what construction construction escalation is across the LA region.
>> Right. I think I'll have a followup and seems others will chime in. But thank Sorry to interject. I just that one I wanted to >> That's okay. I I don't mind. Um projects the the next one is important to understand that that 42% has nothing to do mathematically with 38
adding 9.4 or anything like that. 42% is the increase of the initial budget on average across those 10 projects. Um, and you can see the bolded statement states we were closely aligned with our
original budgets as compared to our peers. We had a 42% increase, but our peers tend to have the same kind of increase. Um, we just recently uh were at the AGC,
Association of General Contractors, um, annual event, the LA and Northern California event. We were doing Christine and I K through 12 um, discussions. Turns out the other K through 12, they had a very, very
similar experience in their presentations. So listening to them, I'm like, "Okay, yep. We're all experiencing the same. We have to learn and figure it out just like everybody else has to." Um, next next one.
So the macroeconomic information was very, very informative and it showed that we had um limited construction companies in the LA area. I do want to
point out though that contractors can from another county have business in LA County, right? They can move around. Now, when you're such a big area, I can tell you what we know from speaking with our contractors is they look for their
leadership who are going to be on those construction sites. Where do they live? How do they get to work? Where are the laborers? So, it's not like you're going to come from the other side of Ventura if you don't have the right people in the right area. And a lot of contractors
hesitate to actually take projects on the other side of the 405 because nobody can cross the 405 to get home. Um, I already lived that experience in my life. Um, one positive that really came out of this was look at our high
percentage of costs versus soft costs. Even I was surprised. Of course, that's an average over 10 projects, but generally we run around 80% construction. That means we're building very efficiently for the dollars we're
spending. I know that seems counterintuitive, but we have data to prove it. So, let's step back and look at the overall bond program just from some statistics.
So since 1997 we have um built in value 19.5 billion dollars worth of projects. And today we have over four billion in
construction and we have over five billion in preconstruction and we have 6.1 billion more still to go to the board. It's going to be a very active 2026.
I wanted to focus on this and this is super simplified but um starting on the upper left corner project scope schedule and budget. This is a simple process that illustrates a
classic typical design bid build. Design bid build means you hire an architect and their engineers and they design the project, take it to DSA and get it approved and then you hire under a separate contract a
contractor. Under design build, we have one procurement are contracts with the contractor and the contractor has the architects and the engineers, landscape architects working under that single contract. Here's a I'm using this because it's the
similar process except for the ASB. So the first most important thing to tell you in our process is when we develop scope, schedule and budget. You have the design management folks, the maintenance and operations input. You have the
construction management arm which here at this district is called project execution. You have it. That's the everybody who wires up every single thing in the buildings. You have program controls. That's the controls that collects all
the data about all of our projects and monitors our costs and our schedules. Then you have the furniture interiors group because you have to furnish these buildings. And then you have the office of environmental health and safety. I think I captured everyone. Everyone has
input to that scope and that's schedule and budget. Really, everyone has information to commit to scope and budget. And then project execution looks at schedule. The second box is what I'm really going
to focus on in the next slide. The acquisition strategy board. Um the acquisition strategy board looks at a typical project. When you define it, when you've scoped and you have a budget and a schedule, and then again after
design, after pre-construction, you see right in the middle of the page, they look at it again and we discuss the procurement strategy. How are we going, what contract methodology are we going to use? I can always come back and
discuss those another time. And then when after we've bid it, um, procurement comes back and presents to the ASB the contract, who we're going to award to, what the bids look like, and the comparison, and then we go into
construction. So, let's just talk about the makeup of this board. So, um, there's four steps. I didn't show you one because daylighting is optional. Typically, when we start a new program,
we might have daylighting where we just present it to the acquisition strategy board. Hey, we're going to have a new program. We're going to have I'm just going to use an example. Um, we're going to put shade shelters over um play equipment that's coming. Sometimes we
just rolled step one and two in the same one. Second bullet's more important. So what's important is besides everyone working together and having looked at it, it goes to the program controls team and they look at
consistency, thoroughess, accuracy and they look for any red flag like does this schedule look reasonable? Does this b is this budget much lower or higher than the other five projects we saw last month? That kind of thing. Sometimes they make an adjustment with those
project teams and sometimes they bring it to the office of the CF which is Christina and I to look at something that might be off or an outlier. Um the voting members
are the four branches of facilities. So that's assets, that's maintenance and operations, that's project execution and program controls, and of course facilities contracts. All five have to make a unanimous v vote
to proceed with the project. So sometimes we say, hey, go back and look at this. This doesn't seem right. Um or it seems off. And then the non- voting participants who join us in the meetings are representatives from the office of
general counsel of course OHS office of environmental health and safety the bond oversight committee sits in these meetings and the office of inspector general the so they're there watching in each meeting are every other week
so all of the projects go to the that are bond eligible go to the bond oversight committee. Everything is reviewed and has to include um project scope, schedule and budget and then the recommendation goes to the
board for their action. So the details about the project are all in those documents and the strategic execution plan collects all this information. So you have a complete record of every change as the projects develop until
you're completely closed out. So let's talk about um the key recommendations from the port report. There are 22 recommendations and we kind of categorize these into groups
um or the or the most major ones. So we track more than 40 metrics. um departments track branch track so we facilities is a branch and under our department I
mentioned before project execution assets and controls tracks all of these projects at different levels and at different times there are weekly meetings and there are monthly quarterly and the annual in March we
start putting a whole annual review every team has to come in uh and present to controls their projects and answer questions. Why is this off? Why is this late etc etc. Um
we are looking at new KPI KPIs to really align with policy changes and really to align with the recommendations from the report. Uh one thing we're looking at is when we make a change and as the report says we make a lot of
changes. Um what is the origin of the report of the change? Is it a request from the community? A request from a stakeholder like a principal. Does it come from maintenance and operations who said hey
you are doing these four roofs but now this roof is leaking. Could you add this? That's kind of typical on big projects. Does it come from OHS? Was there a safety issue that came up or is there a regulatory change? And I think
that kind of information will help us analyze more specifically um what kind of changes we have. So on this slide, I'll just because there's so many words here. Uh the important thing here is that the review cycles also
watch to make sure that you have the right procurement method in there because they vary in time and they vary um across the across different kinds of projects and also we look at phasing and logistics. So over the course of a
project while you're designing it, you can learn things that can impact the assumptions you made about how you're going to phase and and what the logistics are you're going to use, where where's the contractor going to park or that's not going to work. Um, and then
you see this focus review sessions in the last bullet. So this is where we um where you get an idea from your reports that there's something that we need to go look at. I'm going to talk about that in a little bit more detail. Next slide. So, what do we do in these focus
reviews? So, over the next uh two to three weeks, we have two programs that'll be under review. Two programs are, by the way, similar projects. Um, two pro individual projects we're going to look at. We're going to look at our change order timelines.
How are we doing against, you know, an efficient process? What's lagging? and we're going to have a look at um aging projects. So that is done between the teams and the office of the
CF. We look at those and we say well you know basically what can we do differently? Um I think the last uh one is really important what we ask of our teams and I'm trying to make sure they understand
their role. They're not coming to uh to me to solve their problem. They need to look at their course recommendations. What what can they change? What do they understand about their projects? What are their recommendations? What are our options? And what are the lessons
learned? So that as soon as they are learning these lessons, they're sharing them with their other projects. Uh so fundamentally um though we're talking about cost and budget. Why do we have so much change
and why do we have scope change? That's where you thought you were doing A, B, and C and now you're doing D. So why is that? So these are very classic. They're not unusual. I wrote them up specifically to us, but you see this in
other types of projects, but I'll first of all, there's a couple things that are different. Our projects are 50 I mean, we're on we're on sites that are 50 to 100 years old. 50, by the way, they're really 60, 70 to 100 years old. Um, we
keep our schools operational while we're working. So that means a contractor is working around children testing safety requirements are higher. Coordination with the school is very high and work
has to be phased. There has to be and there is a cost impact for that. The third bullet is just a challenge. Asbuilt drawings of buildings that areif 50 to 100 years old are not necessarily
accurate, nor are they complete, nor did they build them that way. I can tell stories till I'm blew in the face on them. Um, and another very significant thing at the end of that sentence is past repairs
are frequently undocumented. This is particularly important when utilities have a break in some kind of line, water supply, sewer. So what they did was they repaired it and they used
asbestous containing materials but they didn't tell us where they did that. I don't mean literally they just don't mark it on the drawings but we have from that experience we have a solution. Um the last one is important too and I
referenced it. When you have a lengthy complex project and you start out with these comprehensive modernizations, you can be impacted by new regulations, a policy, a policy shift, unexpected building system. So, you
start out and you think like the roofing example, I'm going to replace the roofs on these three buildings, but you're three years later, you're about to have the contractor leave the project and you've got two more leaking buildings. on a project on a bu a set of buildings
that 50 to 100 years old. So, we're often asked we get critical repair dollars to add to those big projects. Um, but roofing the roofing critical repair teams have the same issue.
That's that's a scope change. Um, so what are we doing to be better? So, we put together a cross division task force as soon as we got the first
uh draft outline from MGT. We put together a task force to analyze change orders from the projects that were being completed. This has been going on 2024 and 2025. So, we got the first draft. That's what we started to do. Um, we
identified common ch change orders. We identified the lessons learned and that's important because we've done lessons learned but moving fast on lessons learned was very important because that task order that was rep all the key people were leadership were in
those in that task force so they could spread it into their organizations quickly before you get the the new bulletin right. Um, the other thing we did a year ago is we talked to two subcontractors who do
underground utility work for us. Um, and they came in and gave us a lot of suggestions on what they saw and what we could improve. And one, the last bullet is what we did because you don't know where you're
going to find the asbestous containing materials, especially if they're underground or they're in inaccessible. We put in allowances for the asbestous um removal. Now, that doesn't mean you didn't impact your schedule. It means
you had it in your budget. doesn't always impact the schedule. Okay. So, other other things we've done, we started in January of 2024, January, February, asking our contractors and our
architects and engineers to give us information. Um, give us the truth about what's challenging about us or our practices and um give the other thing was asking about our specifications. What was outdated? what should we focus
on? Um, we also increased our management signoffs during the pre-construction. Uh, that that was just a more just more diligence. Um, making sure management was making sure due diligence was
thorough. And um, the last one is we improved our forms. They're electronic to fill out so that we could monitor change more closely with information so we could grab that
information and analyze it with data. Better documentation always helps. Um I just wanted to focus on the due diligence. It was a factor um mentioned several times in the report. So when we did talk to our
subcontractors who do the underground utility work, they g they encouraged us to use more potholeing than you'll see ground penetrating radar. Um that gave us better information. You really know where the lines are. The ground
penetrating radar wasn't as accurate. Um and they also encouraged destructive testing. So what is that? Well, that's opening up a wall or opening up a ceiling. And we didn't used to do that unless we had to and very rarely because
we didn't like interrupting classrooms. We didn't want a potential for hazardous material. Then we couldn't use a classroom or more than a classroom. So now we've put a um a procedure together. When should we use that? Why should we
use it? How do you do it? Um, under the additional opportunities for improvements, we're still working on those last three bullets. A new procedure for retrieval of record drawings, basically to make sure you've got everything we've got right. It's
really another form of a checklist, but it's a guidance so that especially if you've got people that because you've got a big team and you're hiring new people, they really have a checklist. Um and then we're again developing a
checklist to identify those areas that require testing. And then we're putting um a consistent um template together for testing for under different vehicles. And really the fastest for us is to use
in-house M forces to do that. It it really is the fastest. But for we're looking at at any opportunity in case you don't have the forces you need. Um, next one. Encourage more contractors.
This is another thing we did starting a year ago. Um, we we have a need for as many contractors as we can get. You looked at those numbers. We've got tons of projects. you know, you can have a
lot of dollars, but when you have a lot of numbers, you need more contractors. So, actually on the biggest projects, um, Nick, we had six new contractors compete this year. That's actually six,
but sounds little, but it's a big difference. Um we work very closely with procurement talking about um expansion and engagement and they have um they have their approach too. We we the
collective we Christina and I and other leadership um meet with the AGC. We meet with the inter international brotherhood of electrical workers and na national electrical contractors. We talk to them on a regular basis. They give us
feedback from their um who they represent and then we go to um and meet and share. We actually talk about what we're trying to do and how we're trying to improve and then
at these panels where we are engaged and asked to present then we have the opportunity to talk to people on the downtime and when you know they actually talk to us they actually say hey Alix one time I was going to run for DBIA
design build of America I didn't even get to the bar I only wanted water I didn't even get to the bar and someone comes up to me and says, "I got to talk to you." And that's a great way to communicate. Um, we also we also meet
with um major our major contractors and the new ones. We are reaching out to contractors who may not have bid with us for a number of years. Um, we also sent out surveys.
they could be anonymous and asked the contractors and they told us what they thought. We had meetings last December where we invited I think six to eight of the biggest contractors that do a lot of work with us. This is my favorite story. Sorry, you got to put up with one story.
Um, what time is the game? Um, literally one of the firms sent out a questionnaire to their folks working in the field and they wrote back and they didn't edit it and they read it to us.
It was a little salty and incritical nature and tone. It was great. It was truthful. Anyway, we um we are continuing with this actually handson
call people, sit down for breakfast, have a coffee, talk on the phone, eat lunch together, come in, talk to us, tell us tell us what we really need to know. It's been actually very helpful.
Um, this is the small business. There's a segment of the report that talks a lot about this. So, I want to tell you what we do do because we do a lot. Um we work with procurement on this. They've been very helpful in expanding this in the last two years. So we have a small
business program. We do a lot of outreach. We go to a lot of events. Procurements does some events with us and some other ones. We have an advisory council that meets with us every month. And um then we also have a boot camp. So
the boot camp is twice a year. So people are invited and they they take classes on public law, public procurement and all the rules in the industry that they may not know and then uh they literally
graduate and I think that's a very successful program and I go to those um you know the graduations very upbeat. Okay. So we've made organizational uh
realignments to be better, stronger. Um move complex projects to um teams that we create that have the sophisticated or the experience to handle more complex projects. We've worked really because
our contractors have told us we've really focused on uh fair change order contract estimating and how we escalate from the owner's authorized representative on the site through management through five levels instead
of just saying go to claims you know you have to escalate these issues and make sure that we're listening and working to together with the contractor and his steps. uh we are going to have three more uh cost estimating terms supporting
us because we have a lot of change. There's a lot a lot to work through and we're going to we're prioritizing the aging of change orders and evaluating that. That's one of the meetings I mentioned earlier. Okay. Specs updates.
So Nick, I'm going to there's a lot of words here. Mechanical and electrical that we talked about. Um, we basically completed, we really did a lot of work. And for those of you who weren't with us last
year, we had our subcontractors, our engineers, um, in-house people with those specialty trades um, work together to update our mechanical and electrical specs. We're driven by the VEC regulation. The state
of California was moving us to electrical electrification. We did a lot of that work in 2023, but there was a very limited amount of um components for mechanical that we could
use and that's growing. So, we had to have this team that work through looking at our options and that we have published and the emergency management system should be published by the end of the year. Um and then through that process
we also had Gendler Associates. We had two different contractor uh consultants working with us. One through the workshops and then one through the actual specs and then we uh you can see 88 non- mechanical and electrical specifications have been published and
we have 164 that are almost ready to go. So that's up, you know, that's updating everything. flooring, glazing, doors, just updating everything. Now, by the way, we have an internal team, but we really did this effort to bring
everything up to um current standards. So, still coming, IT, LUSD information technology services is looking at 22 more specification sections. again that side of the business, electronic
communication cameras, that's just changing all the time. They never stop either. We'll expect those at next year. Um, one of the biggest issues is the second bullet. So, now that the market changes and we have new equipment and
electrification, you know, you have to study as soon as you put this in place, is it reliable? Is this really energy efficient? and can we maintain it and then go back out in the market pit place as these things
expand. Um, that third bullet I'll just say if you weren't building, this is an exaggeration. If you weren't building a Stuckco building, you basically had to for file a deviation and say, "Hey, I'd like to use this material on the
exterior of the building." This applied to glass, too. At the time, they just wanted single pane glass. Well, I can understand why M wants single pane glass because when it breaks, it's very expensive to repair. and they can repair single point, but
that doesn't work in the world we live in with energy requirements. So instead of having people write deviation requests, we basically are trying to make our specs up to date so people don't have to do
all that extra paperwork is really what it was that came from our contractors. Um, this is super simple and I'm just going to point to one word. Training. Training really is super
important and some of our teams do a better job at it. And that's another thing we're working on right now. What more training can we do, especially as we're hiring? How can we help people have their boots on the ground? It's
much easier on the construction side than the design management side because not everyone comes in with the background and they really have to um be trained. Um the the asset management does a weekly training is set aside at
time so that they can keep training. So but everyone we're going to look at making that better. It's on my list. Uh so this is the critical part. What do we need to continue to work on? So one is
reducing the scale and duration of the project. So we don't do those big comprehensive modernizations anymore. We do one or two buildings on a site, smaller projects, less complexity, faster. We've reduced interim facilities
and we are still looking at ways because when you have an interim facility, you have an interim cost. It doesn't you you haven't bought something permanent. Um one of the most active things we have to do is look at the pros and cons of our
procurement strategies. We have a lot. Um design build has proven to be faster. It's more efficient in terms of uh management. Um, we need to look at that against the ADB, the alternative design build. We have five projects under that
model and we need to compare it. They're not far enough along to compare. The OIG is doing a job order contracting audit right now that'll give us information. Another key one is evaluating our constructibility review process. So, we
do it, we have internal and we have external. And the challenge there is evaluating it. How good is it? Anyway, um training's the last word there. So, here's here's the takeaways summarized.
Um the findings confirm that the market has challenges in this area. performance metrics really need to be um continually looked at and we're
expanding looking at the aging more carefully and um we are already doing it but we just I don't know we can't I think we have to look at it like we can't accept what
we've done for 10 years can't accept what we've done for five years because you can when you have this kind of escalation these these kind of market conditions, you can say to yourself, well, that's what it is, right? So, that's what we're looking at, Nick. That's exactly what you asked us to look at. Um, we've expanded the due diligence
phase so that we decrease um the number of changes. In other words, we're predicting we're predicting some of the things we've seen before consistently. We're doing our outreach with our contractors and our ongoing uh work with
specifications, policy and procedures and staff training. Super important and we haven't stopped. Okay. Um thank you. And as I noted at the outset, I know there's this report is dense. Um the materials and was presented on briefly in April to this
committee. The district's response we just received late. And so we'll have some questions today um but more to dive in. I will note things like six contractors for when we had two for some of our big major mods in the last few years. And you it's hard to kind of really assess where the market's at with
two. Six is a massive. >> So there were two bids that only had two uh biders. >> Well, we'll of many many other projects. >> You were saying six is the average or we have some projects that had six.
>> Oh, no. We have six new major contractors, the big boys. >> Oh. Who have now >> who are now looking at these bigger projects. Yes. And bidding on them. >> Um >> what I meant but but in terms of uh Fairfax was one and the recent Buroughs
project both only had two biders. >> Um okay. I will turn it to my committee members for questions, comments um noting the time but that and that we will have more of an opportunity to discuss this in coming meetings but
questions comments. Yes, you talked about engaging uh for targeted stakeholders. Have you considered uh contacting or engaging with local 99? We have a lot of our people represent HVAC contractors
and engineers. So we do that two ways. Um one is we're starting to go to their meetings and sit on their panels or be you know we're encouraging to ask us to to come so we can talk to them. Um that's our uh project execution side is
doing that. And then there's a PSA group. They work very closely uh with the unions. >> I also sent the mechanical specs. Oh, I'm going to forget their number. I sent our uh draft mechanical spent
specs. Who is that? Christina, do you remember Star 105? Is it 105? I'm not sure. But I did send it out. Um they that they had uh expressed an interest in looking at the ask for their comments.
>> Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez. Um yes, Miss Ortiz Franklin and then Miss Cunningham. Um just super briefly, you know, I I'm glad that we are ahead of the the competition or our um peers as it were uh in terms of the timing and the cost because you read the report and you're like, "Wow, this hundreds of days
delayed and like 50 90% of the cost has gone up and it feels really hard to consume that. But hearing the context, it it feels a little bit better." Um, I did want to ask though, we don't always, but we often uh award the bid to the lowest bidder. Given the change orders
and how much prices increase over time, is it still the lowest it could have been? >> Oh, okay. So, one, we don't really use formal low bid on very many projects. We use design build, which is a
competition. We use um best value a simple sorry in a complex. So so all three of those look at the firm, the key people, their the safety records, which actually you look at on anything. Uh
their planned phasing and logistics, how they've analyzed the project. I mean I could always do that next time. give you a real quick um brief brief um dis description of each one. We do not
usually use uh formal low bed though we do on roofing and a few others. Not on HVAC either, not big HVAC projects. >> I I think I was confusing lowest bid with best value because in my mind and a lot of times the lowest bid is the best
value. But I guess that's my wondering and maybe this is for a future conversation is is it really the best value if the price goes up 50 90% and it's delayed hundreds of days. And so that's might be something for us to figure out like how does that um
description match the output once we're done with the project. >> By the way, you notice I didn't talk a lot about schedule because the projects that were evaluated were impacted by COVID. So it wasn't studied. Um but
schedule impact is important and uh I think performance of the contractors that's an issue that we should really look at how how are we evaluating their past performance. >> One of the things we've discussed and I think some of my colleagues on the
committee have more expertise on this is that there are ways to bid projects with no change and um require or stipulate no change orders. like you pay a little higher on the on the front end, you pay a premium because the contractor is assuming any of the risk. But to Tanya's point, I think the short answer is no.
If someone like no, there's no like if you're the low bid if you come in and you say a project's going to cost 50 million and then now it cost 100 and there was another person who bid 60 like it's no longer the low bid. Um and when when our um well anyways I'll save some of my comments for the end. Uh anything else? Miss Ortiz Franklin. Yes. Uh Miss
Beck Miss Cunningham and then Miss Greenspan. Can I just make but some of the in this report some of his change orders it's not it's ads >> like Venice Venice High School they did a baseball field like that was not a change and I I feel like that's a little
misleading here in that capacity. >> Yeah. And that's why I mentioned the roofing. That's a scope change. And uh those kinds of changes come with critical repair dollars where you take here's a critical repair bucket. We take
that money and put it over here. And that's happened on a lot of our projects. Um not just it's not uncommon. or you find HVAC equipment that you're doing this over here on these four buildings and then
you know you're four years into the project and this this equipment over here has been bandaged for 20 years. So, can you just do it? Um, and by the way, you don't just do it. You have to make sure you have a fair cost estimate. You have to negotiate that. Yeah. By the
way, any any change order over a million dollars goes to an audit. >> I just have to acknowledge too like we're getting too comfortable here when you're like if there's an HVAC project and it's the fourth year of the project and you're like why is an HVAC project taking four years? I know but you're
right, Alix. That's the problem. Um Mrs. Cunningham, >> I'm newbie so I just want to make sure that I'm understanding one of the more complex problems and a big picture macro. So we're reducing the reduce the scale and duration of the projects,
right? So make it smaller. My thought is great. Then you're getting a little bit of newness at more campuses, right? And so we're not waiting for a campus to get fully dilapitated before we go in and do it. So that's a a good thing, but I do worry that it's kind of the band-aid and that you're just making like one little
piece pretty and not. but is the reason that we're making it smaller because now we're getting more general contractors to get involved and be interested in the project. So am I understanding this is these are all the complexity all the above. >> Okay. But the comprehensive
modernizations, those big 22, I mean you were going the the big drivers, how did we, you know, everything's prioritized basically with data. >> Those were prioritized. Seismic vulnerability, physical condition of buildings, physical condition of the
grounds, percentage of classrooms in portables, uh security at the front door. There were like nine factors. can't remember them all unless you want to give me another minute to but um you
we drove to the oldest campuses by doing that. Um now we're we go to a campus and we look at we did uh the current ones and we said okay which are the buildings we really need to address seismically
where are those vulnerabilities and that's our big focus now is addressing seismic vulnerability >> because it's safety >> in my home area of of Westchester and Venice there's definitely a lot of tension amongst our neighborhoods our
residents on wanting to get more done at Westchester High and you know I was there for three years with one of my kids in trailers but we were thankful to be there with with Katherine Johnson but you could definitely see and then taking her from that campus to Venice it is
such a stark difference but I also love enrollment and I love welcoming new families and sometimes if you just see a band-aid campus that doesn't get you excited to come. So, I'm I'm seeing all the I just wanted to make sure that I was processing the the problems you're dealing with correctly. It sounds like I
am. So, >> and you never have enough money even though we it's a lot of money. I mean, I'm just saying the need far exceeds the the generosity of our taxpayers.
>> Well, in a public meeting, I'll thank the taxpayers for their generosity towards us. uh in the last few years two record setting bonds but yes um Miss Greenspan >> you um we I don't believe you were here when they ca MCT came and kind of gave a
little >> Oh, I was. >> Oh, you were? >> I was in the audience. >> Um did you find their report effective? I mean I kind of just cynically kind of felt like they steered it maybe how they wanted to do. I don't know. I just did you did you mean
>> the KPIs are totally standard basically >> just the projects they picked or yeah I don't know >> oh the projects they picked they had 99 projects to pick through and we did have discussions um on whether or not they were well
first of all we said we said hey these have possible claims so take those off the list but we let them pick we weren't the only people with a voice on I guess 10 is a small study, you know. >> Yeah. I don't know why they picked 10. Um I I I didn't answer. Did you find the
recommendations effective or It sounds like you were doing a lot of them already. I guess >> one we were doing. There's two or three that um might need more focus on. But yeah, I mean, you know, honestly, you you could when you come in when you're
inside like I was in different roles, I could see it. So, I had a a sense of it also, I could read reports. Um, and then I just am always the voice of you got to got to improve. I'll tell you what to me
is the biggest benefit to us in a different way than what you're looking at is it's not just Christina and I saying hey we got to change hey we have a report so guess what we're going to change getting people to change in an
organization especially look at you've been doing bond program from 1997 you can always say well that's how we do it well that's now now we have um Nick and the superintendent and others and you
supporting us in saying we need to change and we need to think differently. >> Uh Mr. Johnson, >> hour and a half late here, so I apologize. Um question. If you took your capital improvement budget and you
looked at how many projects are seismic, retrofit, upgrade, what have you, new construction, long-term maintenance, if you put it in buckets, what percent for each, how many projects and annually
>> and what? >> Just annually just rough ball. >> Oh god, there's so much. I mean, we have 700 and some I don't know. I mean dollar-wise I think >> no forget dollars just say percentage wise I'm just curious just give me a big picture
>> I think we have if I if I just look at the latest measure US I think it's about two billion for modernization seismic retrofits and replacements uh classroom replacements >> I can answer so currently underway we
have over a thousand um projects 1,115 projects underway Okay. Um at a total value of $9.56 billion. And of that they range from very small projects like rebuilding mares or putting up shade
shelter projects to very large comprehensive modernization projects that address historical buildings and seismic vulnerable buildings um at the majority of the campus and then we have everything in between. >> So how many how many people do you have
internally managing that process? So, we have approximately I would say 300 folks between our design and construction teams um and probably another hundred in support positions that are supporting the oversight of all of those projects.
>> And what metric on any job do you use to say here's what it should come in at costwise >> after after the design is permitted? >> Here's what the bids are coming back at. What metric do you use to say, you know what, we shouldn't go forward with this.
This, you know, the market is either frozen or something's going on. >> Yeah, that's it's um it's a very valid question. So, the projects that we bring for the most part are to address issues of safety and operations that would
impact schools if not otherwise done. So, we have air conditioning that is broken down and is no longer um able to uh repair. We have seismic vulnerabilities that if we didn't address, we know we may put kids at risk. We have roofs that are leaking
that if we didn't um replace would create mold issues and we'd have to evacuate buildings. >> So, there's not a lot of discretion unlike the private sector of should this be an investment tower or should this be um you know a suburban housing. We really have to do it. What we do look at
is um you know where is the market conditions if we don't get enough bids. We do look at whether we should re um pull back and cancel bids and rebid projects because we didn't see the amount of competition. Um like the projects that Alix was referring to
where we only got two bids. um we knew what we were coming down the pipeline and if we didn't bid that project now, there was probably not going to be a lot of more interest later because of the volume of work that we have coming. >> But we've also worked very closely with
our procurement team like when we've had a large number of roofing projects that we know we're going to undertake or HVAC of how do we start to pull contractors maybe even outside the LA area who haven't done work with the district so that we're trying to create capacity.
But what the report showed is that there is a lot of public sector work here now and it is a somewhat limited market. Um so it is a tension that we have because we don't want to necessarily delay what is very critical work to our campuses by
putting off those bids, but we also want to ensure we're getting competitive prices. >> And you're required to use signatory labor on any of this, right? >> Yes. We have a project stabilization agreement that was approved by our board that requires it on bond funded projects. >> Is everything bond funded?
>> No, we have a separate whole um M division that does repair projects, but those are repair and replacement more of components. Capital projects are bond funded. >> Have you guys studied modular and panelized type construction just to make
sure that >> and we've used them >> and your your conclusions as to that. >> Um, we're open-minded about using them them again. >> I mean, did it save money? Did it save time? Did it
>> It's It saves time. And it saved some money, but not as much as one would think. Um but we we I mean when we first looked at the uh the Pali projects I really thought hey is this where we
should use modulars but we did not variety of reasons FEMA etc etc. Um, one other thing is that at least in the bigger projects, every
time we have decided to rebid, it never came in lower. >> Now, >> what what what didn't come in lower? >> The bids because escalation is continuing. >> What do what do you think when they when the contractors are bidding these jobs, what do you think their general
condition slashover profit is? Is there an expectation that it's 20% as far as the uh the profit or higher? Well, what we budget and I'd have to ask that question from a technical point of view from people who may have studied this,
but um because it's on operational sites, we just budget and because we have multiple buildings typically and it or conditions, we assume between 25 and 30 pretty typically on the bigger
projects, not on the smaller projects. >> That's huge. It is >> that is huge >> but it's based on operational >> quitting my business as a developer and I'm going to go into that you know it is that is a huge margin >> but is that including general conditions
>> general conditions fencing temporary construction their offices offices for the inspection >> profit >> yeah no it's not profit >> okay I was going to say all right so so maybe it depends on the job as far as general conditions what it's going to be
about that 30% Yeah. And and you have such a range of projects. So you're not going to have much as much GC over and head and profit on some of our green projects, >> you know. >> But one other question before I forget. Uh >> and by the way, that's a budget. So that's what I was saying. That's a
budget. That's not >> factual. Do I have data to tell you what it is? >> When when you're rebuilding Marquez uh in the Palisades, >> um what are you doing differently? I mean, when we're building a home, we
have to comply in a in a uh uh 7A requirements for the uh the building code, class A roof, the defensible space, the dual pane tempered windows. What are you doing differently in building it to um try to ensure that
you've hardened it as hard as it can be? and what are you held uh what are the rules for this where we have rules we got to follow what are your rules >> so it's a great question so we have three firms working on one on each that
all have experience with resiliency and building and fire zones we have outside consultants advising us and actually we're looking at this I think next week we have another meeting looking at all of the options to finalize the design,
the use of materials, but we're using um all the things you're saying because we basically build our buildings that way anyway. So, it's more just the defensible space, the selection of plants, how far they were.
Um use of masonry at Marquez. Um >> yeah, a lot of people don't understand that uh the whether you're concrete, uh steel, wood, everything burns. >> Exactly. you know, it's just giving you more time to get to the uh for the first
responder to get there. That's it. Um Yeah. >> And and we are building and we uh uh building working on resiliency specifications as we do this >> coordinating with DWP out there.
>> Well, we do coordinate with DWP on everything, but >> Well, especially with Yeah. the fire hydrants now are 300 feet apart versus 800 feet and all of that. >> I think too when we have a um our next committee meeting we're going to have a a deep dive onto the palisades rebuild
and so um hopefully we're not fighting the Dodger game and for a number of reasons and we'll have questions about that as well. Um thank you Randy. Other questions, comments. >> Um >> so next time we get to talk more about
this. Yeah, I think we're going to I mean, yes, there's a lot more here. >> Love to hear more about like the change order process. >> Me, too. And I think so, we'll we'll debrief and discuss that more. Um I also I'll just say my two my two questions will kind of form as comments just in the interest of time because I want to quickly do the procurement presentation
and then I know people are multitasking already as it's 508. But one, I would be curious the KPIs that you've addressed. I would love to see those at the committee. Yes. And I'd also like to see them transparently, you know, for the public and also understand >> how they've improved and and based on
this report, what is changing specifically on those KPIs or either we're adding or removing and then are we seeing improvement? Because I think if we're spending $180,000 for a report that to Miss Greenspan's point, um, and this will be my second comment is a little like, well, okay, we're doing
fine when I think this committee feels um, that there's improvements we can make. I'd be curious like after adjusting to this, are those KPIs improving at all? And if not, why? Secondly, I do say, you know, piggybacking off of both Miss Greenspan and Mr. Johnson, I think there's um the
spirit of improvement and continual improvement in facilities is laudable. And I think some of this is uh we're seeing internally, but I have a little skepticism of this report based on how these projects were determined, based on the fact that it went through not this report, but the district's response went
through six different drafts of iteration with technically an independent report that the um I asked at that on that outset about kind of the where we're seeing and I need a follow-up with that 38.4% 4% construction increase because it seemed like we were saying, well, our projects
on average went up 42% over budget, but that's fine because the whole construction market went 38.4%. >> No, I was saying that that does not correlate. >> Well, >> that does not the math for that is totally different than the 42%. There's a component, but there's scope change.
>> Well, that's what drives that. And I'd be curious because ostensibly the other benchmark districts and peer districts and there were only a few which is another concern I had about this report um also were experiencing those same overages. I also think too that like HVAC replacement is a big important
thing we do but it was the only cost only um cost per square foot comparison in the entire report. Um and h you know roofing comp mods major mods that's where we're spending most of our money is wasn't really delved into. So I think uh to your question, yes, we'll have
more time to discuss. I also think, you know, when we think of these new contractors, and I really appreciate the work you're doing with the questionnaire, including if folks are reading uh their answers publicly, is really understanding why folks are reticent to work with the district and how we we improve that and maybe getting some contractors to come. I know it's
tough because they're also bidding on projects, but um okay, with that, thank you, Miss O'Brien. Um >> but but I do want to reiterate, you know, we're the subject, we didn't manage the contract. >> Like I said in the beginning, >> what I will say is that in we got this
the the district's response to this report >> went through a lot of iterative work with MGT to give the district a response on a sensibly an independent report. And I think that just raises eyebrows. You know, I'd like something like the purpose of these committees and these board meetings is from someone to
do an independent report. we review it and then the district can respond. But the back and forth and like choosing the projects and collaborative, it just it struck me with a little bit of skepticism. Um in terms of casting doubt on its independence um to some extent
that's my soap box. Okay. Uh thank you. Um I will note the time but I also want to be respectful of both Mr. Freriedman and um our uh Mr. Rodriguez, our new committee member from the procurement um division. And so I want to have the procurement presentation from Mr. Freriedman and his team. Um I know it's
relatively brief and so again questions are valid but if folks want to kind of hold them we'll we'll pick this up again in the next meeting. We have a few public speakers and then we do want to adjourn in the next half an hour. Um and if folks want to call out dodger scores periodically that is totally fine. Um so
I will now turn to our final presentation of the day. um you know procurement feels like this esoteric term uh but really what we're talking about and it already came up in these presentations was how we uh get the things that we need whether that's a building at a school or whether that's a
pencil for a student um or or an iPad um and uh I think we're going to see in this presentation the kind of high level some of the work that uh is going on in the procurement division to improve both efficiency um and some transparency and then we'll have questions and comments from the committee. So thank you. Well,
good evening everyone. I'm Dana MJ Greer and I'm here with my colleague, Mr. Orhe Ballardo. And in the spirit of simplicity, we're going to show you how we're making it easier to do business with LUSD. So, one of the beautiful things that we
did is we took five policies in five months and we came out with some really clear directions. We changed our procurement pecard policy to address Impress accounts. The Impress accounts were available for schools to buy food
and other ancillary um items and had a lot of administrative processes. So with our streamlined PECard policy, we were able to pick up 9% additional card holders, so about 1500 cards, and make that process
easier. We clarified expectations on background checks for uh for our contractors. Ourou policy is brand new, so we put some structure around that with expectations to make sure they're all done consistently. And we came out
with some additional protocols for our fuel card program, more training that's required for that. And I think the best of all from a simplicity standpoint is we took uh our 10th edition of our
procurement policy which was about 193 pages and we put some graphics in and really clearcut and it's about 10 pages now. So you could read it, you can comprehend it and you understand what the guidelines are.
>> So we're going to go into the internal and external engagement. Um here we wanted to highlight some of the efforts we're doing on the media side of things in terms of outreach uh basically social media and uh we used to have a LinkedIn and and Instagram account but we really weren't using it. We were just kind of
posting our bid list and that's pretty much it. Uh what we did is kind of focused it on a per project basis and event basis and start creating flyers around that and posting that throughout. Uh we've seen our our outreach and views
skyrocket basically. Uh we've been very intentional about what we're putting on there. So for example, the Evans Community Adult School, we've kind of focused on putting schools wherever we can, where we can find good images to kind of engage the community, kind of get the community passing around that
information like, hey, they're doing a modernization. Hey, they're doing a repair and hopefully get in in the local community excited, which gets the local hopefully contractors excited, which hopefully participates in our bids, right? Increases the subcontractors. Um, we've also increased, like Alex was
talking about, our inerson outreach. We're going to a lot of events. We're going to kind of engage with different companies where we can. We're going to city events and local entity events. Uh, we're also partnering with our small business uh, ENT enterprise unit under
um, Christina Tes's leadership and kind of got working there side by side with them to kind of support the outreach efforts. Um I think I just kind of want to pass it on. But um one thing I did want to mention is we've consolidated all of our bids also to one location. So
every bid is now located in our discover SAP website. Uh rather than in the past we had a whole list of different oh jock contracts here formal contracts here if here RFPs here. So that's a big outreach effort that we kind of consolidated.
and our Aribba discovery platform. We have um advertised 52 projects to date. Um I'm going to talk about other internal and external engagement because we're supporting not only schools and offices. We're supporting suppliers.
We're supporting our buyers because we're using a brand new system and we're all learning from each other. One of the things we recognized is that we hadn't had um troubleshooting opportunities for schools and offices. So the monthly Zoom call is what we put in place just
recently to address questions, to help with planning, to help maybe officials understand what to expect from a procurement timeline. On a daily basis, we have calls that are responded to from about seven individuals that address
schools and offices, calls um and questions from suppliers about how to get their purchases done or how to receive items. There's about 400 calls a week and we're tracking that on a regional basis. We're trying to understand what the questions are so
that we can try to put processes in place to improve on that. So using metrics is really critical for that. We have drop-in sessions for suppliers. We heard from the pre-qualification unit, the roofers that are coming to learn
about how to get pre-qualified. We saw um up to 80 attend, maybe as low as 14. So, we're trying to figure out where the sweet spot is and what the interest is. When we have technical assistance for suppliers, we're seeing a big
overwhelming response mostly from small companies that want to learn about the invoicing process. What does it mean when I have a contract? What do I do with this certificate of insurance? So there's a lot of interaction and engagement. Our team has um really
stepped up. We have 120 events on the calendar for this year where we're entertaining and um addressing questions for the stakeholder community. And one exciting thing that's coming up really soon is an in-person engagement. We're
calling it the procurement connection summit 2. We've had two in the last year where we met with small businesses and had more of face-toface interaction. Um, so we're excited about what we're teeing up coming up this December. So, more
information to come. >> Okay. And I'm not going to go through all the metrics, but some of the things we're focused on improving, we kind of highlighted here. Uh, we have a whole slew of metrics, and these are the ones we thought would be good to share in this environment here. Um, primarily the ones I wanted to highlight are the
management processing times. Those are basically the cycle times for all of our procurements. We track all of our procurements, IFBs, um, best value contracts, short job contracts, everything's tracked and we have goals for all of them. Here, I wanted to highlight the processing time for um,
purchase orders, basically the PRs, requisitions. Two days is on average where we're at, and that's basically our goal. And it's a significant change to where we used to be. I've been in the district a long time in procurement all my career. So seeing it two days is
amazing to me. Um it's something that I think we should all consistently message out to everyone. It's a big deal. Um the other one I want to highlight is the enhancement of competitive climate. So one of the things that we focus on in procurement is competition. Getting
competitors getting biders wherever we can and having good quality bids. And one of the things we instituted last year was at least on the construction side was hey we got to have at least three biders on everything. Our goal was 95% was higher but since we didn't have anything to trend towards we were going
towards 95%. We got 93%. It needs improvement but we're we're heading the right way. Um we this year we've expanded that through the whole division and the focus is significant on our end to kind of institute that kind of thinking throughout our teams and
units. It's basically it it's in it started a lot of good conversations within our own units to say hey at at different points of time. What are we looking at in terms of competition? It's kind of got everybody focused on a number which is good because it's kind of kind of breathing that that uh that
conversation of how do we get competition on this one? What happened on that one? Kind of you know basically analyze it from different points of view after the award, during award, prior to award. Thinking about how do we engage more competitors? How do how do we do better for the outreach? Quick example,
we had um a bid where we had 10 biders show up at the jobwalk and everybody thought it was okay, so it closed and it ended up with like three bids or four bids. So, we're like, how can we get at least five bids from from that? So, as we analyzed it, turns out that most of the people who showed up were subs and
not even pre-qualified with us and there was only like three primes who could actually bid the project. And so, we're like, okay, we got to learn from this. So then we instituted some learning lessons from that. Anyway, so I'll pass it off to >> D. I can tell you about another example for our linen services. So we have a TK program and we have a company that comes
to pick up our linens, does the laundry, brings them back. Um we've had the same company for the last maybe six years. We wanted to see um what the market would look like because when the bid response came in, we only had that same one. It
was like there's a lot of linen companies out here. let's figure this out. So, we had to go back out, do some market research, do some courting, tell them about how to do bids in Aribba. We went back out and we got six. It was wonderful that we were still able to award to the same company, but we tested
the market. So, we knew without a doubt that we were getting the best value for the district. In our last slide, we're going to talk about some ongoing improvements because we're talking about data a lot. We're using scorecards with our major suppliers like a Toshiba
uptime. Are they coming out? Are they replacing their equipment like they say they would inside their contract? Um, we're starting business reviews on a quarterly basis with some of our bigger, more pivotal suppliers like our US bank. We want to see what is going on in the
market and what the trends are looking looking like for that. Um, we started to expand access to data for our offices. So, some of our officers are asking for access into Aribba where they can see what their spend looks like. So, we're
starting to pilot what that looks like just to make sure that the information is relevant. and we're going going to come back and sit down with them to show them their portfolio of contracts and spend to show where there's some opportunities to consolidate or maybe
things that they wouldn't even know that they're buying that their departments are responsible for. Um, we're looking forward to streamlining the bid documents. Uh, we're experimenting a little bit with some response sheets. Sometimes we get bids that are a hundred different respondents and they're all
different formats. If we standardize the format, we think that's going to bring about some efficiencies. And there's some excitement around pre-qualification. >> Yeah. So, uh, our pre-qualification process has been long-standing in line with the pro, uh, the bond program, but we've been doing everything manually.
So, everything's paper intensive, spreadsheets, databases, trying to put things together, keeping track of who's pre-qualified, who's not, and make sure everything's updated at all times. So there's a lot of button pushing, a lot of fingers touching things and things get missed at times and you know it causes problems. Um and also we're not
efficient. We have it takes a long time to get these things done. A lot of follow-ups. So this software is something I've been trying to get in place for a while. Our current team has really been focused on where can we do better and this is one of those things we identified as something we needed to focus on. So thankfully we're moving
forward. The soft rollout is scheduled for November. Um hopefully mid November and full roll out in January. Ideally, we'll get people to kind of phase into the process, especially those that have more time to pre-quall and get them used to that system and get us used to it. Um
but we're basically going to be looking at a system that's going to give us a lot of dashboards, metrics, KPIs. Additionally, it's going to give us uh interaction within the system, live interaction within the system. So, the contractor will know exactly where their status is, be able to see what the issue is. We communicate with our team through
the system or phone call, but this the system gives them live interaction, which is great, current status. As soon as they get pre-qual, it gets updated and it gets uploaded into our pre-qual list. There's no more confusion as who needs to put that and post that and that kind of stuff. That's not going to happen anymore. We did test it with some
contractors. They're all excited. The small business advisory committee was excited. Uh so everybody's excited to get this on place. So hoping that comes soon. >> And um without further delay, this is really going to conclude our presentation unless there are some
additional questions that we can do a deeper dive into. >> Yeah. Thank you. Uh and Mr. Rodriguez, we'll start with you. >> Uh you spoke about uh background checks for contractors. Does that include their employees? It does. >> It does.
>> There's some really clear guidelines. We do drop in sessions and it's in ourou standards. It's in all of our contracts as far as what the contractor's responsibilities are. >> Okay. Because there's also the the problem with the orders from Amazon
where we received uh actually we had there was a a call to school police that what the one of the office managers wasn't sure. She was saying, "I don't know if this person's supposed to be here." That he wasn't wearing his Amazon thing, whatever they
were. >> I'll be at Pico tomorrow. Maybe we can follow up and I can get more details about that. >> Yeah, I I would ask I'm not going to be there. I got vacation tomorrow. So, >> no, let's follow up on that. I'd like to hear more. >> You can ask, but thank you. >> That's been an ongoing uh problem that
we're received that at the warehouse. We're getting it because we're getting it from our drivers who go to the schools on a daily basis on the mail routes. So, there's been that. There's also the uh the I the um we're supposed to we're supposed to meet the the lowest price available
for uh items that the warehouse carries. That's part of the procurement's uh uh >> agreement with the district. So in this case that that is not being able to be met because items have been
removed completely from the inventory so that we we don't have the opportunity to meet the lower price. >> We have 170 contracts um with furniture, cleaning supplies, art supplies, office supplies, tools, athletic equipment. I
think we've done over 12,000 purchases with warehouse transactions. It's a catalog that's available in the Aribba system. We do some cost comparisons. I think we're pretty competitive. >> We've there was just over 3,000 items in the
inventory about three years ago. We were down to 738 >> with a 15% markup approximately. >> Yeah. So, I'm not talking about the markup. All I'm saying is that we've reduced the inventory by over twothirds.
So the sales are are down drastically. >> When we take a look at the availability of products, I think there could be a eb and flow. If we see a need in an opportunity, that's a possibility that we could look at it. >> There's a difference between a
possibility and actual fact. When we reduce our inventory by over twothirds by that many items, we're not providing the opportunity for our schools to get what they used to get and now they're having to play it buy them from someone
else. First of all, second of all, it's a higher price and now they're paying shipping because our mail route drivers who go to every single school and facility on a daily basis, Monday through Friday, they can take those extra boxes, that extra pallet in their truck and drop it off. So now in
addition to paying a higher price for that item, they're al also paying a shipping which they never did. >> Let's this has been a topic and one of the reasons Mr. Rodriguez I was excited for you to join the committee is this is a topic that's come before the board a few times over the last few years. And so what I'd like to do is maybe
agendaize a specific conversation of this committee on this specifically because it's questions we've asked you know are the you know our assumption are being the board members who have asked questions about this is that the reason for these are that schools are actually getting a lower cost um and
that we've been discussing uh doing that without any loss of jobs to the district. But if what you're seeing is higher cost shipping, like let's have the conversation and we'll ask and you and I can discuss maybe some of the things we'd want in the presentation cost uh item by item comparisons and really get an understanding. That's one
of the reasons why we have this committee to understand it. So just in the not even in the interest of time, but to really give it the the um concern it deserves. Let's this is one we'll we'll table and then we'll discuss and have a a specific conversation on warehouse items. You still have other
questions maybe, but this one I just >> actually most of them will a lot of them will tie in with that >> with the warehouse >> with with that and in the and the inventory and the sales and the whole bit. So >> great. So maybe we can chat offline too um to discuss kind of how to best put together a presentation that answers some of your questions.
>> Thank you, M. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Can I defer to our CPO, please? And maybe maybe just to jump into you're behind us so we're not >> I think it is a it is a healthy conversation but just to add a little um context to it um annually there's a review of items uh what what we would
call like skew rationalization and it takes a look at what's actually selling within the warehouse and so that was performed about a year and a half ago and that's kind of the discussion that's going on now and and of course we're happy to have that conversation. >> Yeah and that would be helpful for us to transparently discuss because I agree I mean I'd be curious out of those
two/irds that Mr. uh Rodriguez was alluding to like how many of them are things that are obsolete, you know, things that like you used in schools 10 years ago, you don't use now versus things that we have just replace. So that's helpful context and we'll obviously work with you, Mr. Freriedman on that and welcome to the committ. >> Thank you. And maybe maybe one more
thing to add. Um this presentation was primarily around contracts and procurement, but I I do appreciate Mr. Rodriguez earlier today kind of highlighting that under the procurement division there's also a district warehouse a trucking operations team that supports schools and offices um
phenomenally. So I just want to thank um thank him for kind of highlighting that. >> Yeah. Yeah. And the work around the palisades in particular. So thank you. Uh Miss Greenspan I think this is great. Um seems like there's like lots of opportunities for su you're making people succeed and
right is that what you said? Um I just wonder is now is your department gonna need less people because it's going to be so much more efficient. >> There's a lot of opportunity to maybe do different things like catalog management and there are some um like the marketing
opportunities. So we're kind of reinventing ourselves. Our old inventory control team is now our customer support team. So we're just trying to put place people in the places that they're needed. questions,
comments um I know again one of the reasons we did want to agenda like get to this today is in the past we've kind of put off procurement we've been focused so much on facilities but there is good work being done um a lot of it and there's also questions we still have to
answer um as Mr. Rodriguez alluded to. So, if there aren't questions, what I'll say, I had a few, but I'll again kind of just turn them into to comments for future conversation. One is I still think there is um uh some confusion out there in the field around um kind of how
to engage when it comes to both for partners and no cost partners. When is an RFP going out? How do they know if they're eligible? Um, and one of the things that's challenging, I know for our office and I'm sure my colleagues too because we get the questions is we'll get questions from a partner, maybe it's a nonprofit who's trying to
do arts at a school or maybe it's a for-profit who's trying to sell us computers and then we'll be told or they'll be told, "Oh, we can't talk to you because it's a cone of silence because it's an RFP." And they're like, "Well, how do we know about the RFP?" And there's that chicken and egg. I think um I appreciate some of the efforts that you alluded to around the
transparency um about uh and also knowing where folks are in the process. Um, you know, just as an example for a no cost, uh, I had a meeting with LACMA, um, a few months ago, and they had an expired from two or three years ago. Um, and they would, uh, have schools call LA
Unified schools and call and say, "Hey, we want to do this program." And they would be told, "Oh, no. We don't have an existing contract." And as soon as we kind of flagged it for folks, they're like someone had retired within the district and never handed it off, we were able to get it back. But certain things like that, like we should just be more transparent where you are in the
procurement process. The second thing too is when folks are trying to look up um our policies or practices, you know, I think a lot of folks, myself included, will start with Google. And if you Google, you'll find really outdated memos and bulletins. And I know the district and Mr. McClean is working on
that with Gamut and some of the systems that we can share more about and will at the district meetings. But I just want to, you know, I know sometimes maybe it's an IT thing around search engine optimization or just scrubbing the web of old things, but like I've definitely seen people reference a memo and spend hours trying to figure out it only to
see at the bottom that it was from 2004 and like there's been seven other versions. So I just flag that as we're doing this work, making sure that um that folks are uh that all things are up to date on there. >> Thank you. >> Great. I know that's been a lot and so
thank you all. Um, we're gonna uh turn over to Mr. McClean to the extent we still have public speakers here or online. I think we had a few sign up. We'll hear them and then uh we will uh quickly adjourn after that. So, thank you to all of our presenters, facilities and Miss O'Brien and Procurement Dana
and the team and um uh um our first and Miss Claire who had left. But thank you and Mr. McClean. >> All right, we have two folks signed up to speak in person. That's Mr. David Tokoski. Come on up. You have two minutes to speak once you begin. And then Miss Clara Solless also signed up
to speak. Mr. Tokovski, come on down. You'll have two minutes to speak once you begin. >> Whenever you're ready. >> Thank you. Um, by the 18th inning, I'll get ready. Um, David Takovsky, former school board
member, uh, graduate of Marquez Elementary School in Palisades High School, school board member for 12 years. I want to say thank you for the, uh, topics. DSA, having the chair of DSA here today, uh, who reports to, um, a woman named Anna Lasso, who was my chief
of staff at the school board. It's a good team. They are understaffed. They've always been understaffed. And at troubled times, we as a district, instead of blaming them, loan them people to do the work to make sure 120 schools that we're building would get
through the square peg through the round hole. But she did bring up something important. She brought up Proposition two, $10 billion. Proposition, we have not had a full presentation of what is at stake there. We should do that. Proposition four,
another voter state approved bond on our environmental and physical. That's $10 billion. We have not had a presentation on those things. Additionally, parents need to know about the Williams case, which is very important and will get a
reboot soon in its litigation that every school should have posted in every classroom a Williams comp complaint form if the air HVAC or or there's rats or the teacher has the wrong credential, is a special ed general teacher but is not
a visually h handicap teacher. All of that is available but is not being posted in every classroom in every school. The Palisad schools kind of got a little bit there but not enough. Uh Marquez Elementary School is an ripe
opportunity moving so fast and so successfully. Five private schools have closed and they are not moving that fast. It's an opportunity to build back constituents into the district. But if you shrink the size of the school, it won't have as many kids. And if you don't look at
Palisades High and envision what that could be, not just race and rebuild it, you're missing an opportunity to take kids from a lot of elite westside schools. And finally, we used to say design bid bilk, not design big, build. It was a great intervention at a time,
but now I think Miss Franklin hit it. We need more low bidders. Thank you. >> Thank you for your time. Clara Solless, are you here? Clara Solless. All right. Uh, we have a number of folks signed up to speak remotely, but who are not signed on, I'm going to read your name, and if you're not here, we're
going to move on. Maria Torres, not online either. Not here. Marcela Garcia, signed up to speak remotely, also not here. Karina Lopez, signed up to speak remotely, also not here. Maria Daisy Ortiz, signed up to speak
remotely, also not in the room. Uh Danna Guen signed up to speak remotely, also not in the room. And lastly, uh Costa Hamilton, uh signed up to speak remotely, but not here. That concludes public comment.
>> Great. Thank you, Mr. McClean. Uh still scoreless bottom of the second. I know folks are I know everyone's figuring it like I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but um we look forward to continuing the work. Um, there are some additional topics I know we'll hit on, including our local bond priorities, district's housing initiative, the progress of our fire
recovery and construction, partnerships with nonprofits and procurement processes specific to them. Um, as we discussed today with uh Mr. Rodriguez to talk conversation about the warehouse and procurement items and um and uh leasing and our civic center permanent office. I actually have a a resolution coming before the board in a few weeks
on that. And then I think as uh I saw interest from today really diving more into the the two areas of conversation that we had today. So um thank you. I'm sorry that we're 40 minutes past uh you know the first pitch, but lots to discuss. Um and really appreciate the
district staff for their engagement and for their presentations and hope everyone enjoys uh the rest of the evening and go Dodgers. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Let's chat on the west side. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.