New Grover Beach outreach efforts increasing engagement between the community and city leaders

GROVER BEACH, Calif. - The City of Grover Beach is increasing its efforts to promote engagement between members of the public and city leaders.

Through a series of new or reestablished events, the city is providing the community with a number of ways it can speak to government officials on a personal basis.

"Community engagement has long been an important goal for our city," said Matt Bronson, Grover Beach City Manager. "It's something that local governments really need to do to hear from their community, hear those voices, and then have the elected officials take that information and help them, and making the decisions that affect and support our community."

On Thursday morning, Grover Beach held a "Coffee with Council" gathering at Perfetto Caffe, where Mayor Kassi Dee and Councilmember Jules Tuggle met with constituents.

"Today was great," said Grover Beach Kassi Dee. "We had a lot of attendance. Lots of residents came out, whether they had specific questions, whether they wanted to make a comment about a past council meeting, whether they needed more information on what we're doing moving forward in our city with certain ordinances or resolutions. This is a place where they were able to come and speak to us and it was just great to hear from the community in this setting. It was a productive conversation that we had with."

The Coffee with Council event on Thursday marked its return to Grover Beach for the first time in several years.

"We're really excited to be kickstarting this again because it was something that was provided before Covid," said Dee. "We're just coming back to it. This is the very first one. We're planning on doing them very frequently with different council members as well so you'll get a chance to talk to your district representative. At a certain point we're going to be going to different places in the city as well. We have amazing coffee shops that we can help support, but also, spread out in our community and be able to touch all jurisdictions with our community."

Over the course of 90 minutes, several community members had the opportunity to speak with Dee and Tuggle face-to-face, allowing them to provide each councilmember with their questions, comments, concerns or suggestions.

"I wanted to meet the new city council members and it's good to have open communications with the city," said lifelong Grover Beach resident Bill Rea. "It's great to meet with them and kind of with open communications because at city council meeting everything's very structured. There's an agenda, but here you can speak about whatever you'd like and want find out to."

The morning gathering follows other community engagement opportunities held by Grover Beach recently.

Previously, the city has held community forums and special pop-up events where people were also able to speak with Grover Beach city leaders.

"Last year we really kicked up our community engagement work quite a bit," said Bronson. "We did community forums where we talked about key issues, including our fire services, police services, development activity in the city. Now this year, with the new council coming in, they have made a community engagement and even higher priority so we're ramping up our Coffee with Council events. We're ramping up pop up engagement activities to go where people are in the community. We're doing more community forums on key topics, shaping the community to do this with regularity and frequency, so that we hear from all different voices in our community."

In addition, the city has created a new Grover Beach Citizen Police Academy, which is slated to begin next week.

"Our police department does an incredible job engaging our community," said Bronson. "They have different programs and events all throughout the year. A new program they're just offering now is a Citizens Academy that gives residents an opportunity to learn about what's happening in our police department, law enforcement, the way that we work with the community. That program will start next Wednesday and last for the next two months."

Bronson added the next community forum is scheduled for Wednesday, March 19 at Ramona Garden Park.