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Orozco, Norma From:Victor Payan <victor@masamedia.org> Sent:Tuesday, May 04, 2021 3:59 PM To:eComment Cc:Sarmiento, Vicente; Penaloza, David; Phan, Thai; Lopez, Jessie; Bacerra, Phil; Hernandez, Johnathan; Mendoza, Nelida; Ridge, Kristine; Gomez, Daisy; !City Clerk Subject:Public comment Save Cypress Fire Station Dear Mayor, Councilmembers and city Manager, I am writing to join in the chorus of residents, community leaders and neighborhood association leaders who are opposed to the sale of the Cypress Fire Station, located at 625 S Cypress (Closed Session Item 3). As a resident of the Pacific Park neighborhood, where the Cypress Fire Station is located, and Director of Media Arts Santa Ana (MASA), I would love to strongly advocate turning the building into a community technology center. The pandemic made plain Santa Ana’s need to address the tremendous digital divide in our city, and currently there is a scarcity of locations where residents can access reliable internet to complete assistance forms, apply for jobs, learn new job skills, pay bills, and other actions necessary for functioning in today’s world. Turning the Cypress Fire Station into a community technology center is in alignment with the South Main Plan, as the building is also located in the footprint of that project. My organization, Media Arts Santa Ana (MASA) would be interested in holding bilingual media arts production and digital literacy classes in the building if it is turned into a community technology center. I am sure there are other organizations that could also fill the space with state-of-the-art programming that serves both the local youth and local adult population. A few years ago, we tried to court the coding organization SABIO to Santa Ana, to provide free coding classes to our underserved community. They searched and were unable find a technically suitable or affordable space in all of Santa Ana, and we lost the opportunity to Irvine. Let’s act today to make sure we st don’t lose more opportunities to provide 21 Century amenities and job training to our residents. We are all too familiar with the doleful regret in which the sale of the Santa Ana Fire Department discussed to this day. Please do not make the same mistake of losing a valuable resource forever, when there is such demand from the community to repurpose the building for modern community use. I’m sure you are profoundly aware of the historical significance of the building, as it has been the center of much of the discussion online, and that is reason enough to save the building. Developers can always find other properties to develop and flip for a profit. But, in all honesty, how many historic buildings can you find in Santa Ana that can be repurposed to community use? How many city-owned properties will be saved for community use? I encourage you to consider the cost of losing a historic building and community resource vs the amount of money the developer stands to make flipping the property. We must save public buildings for public benefit and public use. And we must save and safeguard Santa Ana’s history and historic buildings for future generations. 5