 Chair, it's nine o'clock and I believe we have all board members present. Okay, ready to go. Okay, good morning to the June 22nd, 2021 meeting of the Senate Breast County Board of Supervisors. Second day of budget hearings. This is Tuesday, June 22nd. Please. Supervisor Koenig. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. David. Here. McPherson. Here. Thank you, Chair. You have a quorum. Thank you. Item 28, consideration of late additions, revisions or invalisions for today. Are there any? Yes, Chair McPherson. There is one agenda on the regular agenda 34.1. We have an addendum. There's a closed session, conference with labor negotiator, agency negotiators, county administrative officer and director personnel. The employee organization is all bargaining units. That concludes the additions to the agenda. Okay. We will move to item number 29, budget manager's overview of land use and community services. Mr. Palacios. Item 29, is there any overview that you wanted to add today before we get to the agenda? Yes. Ms. Mallory will be giving the overview today on today's budget categories. I'm glad she's still with us for another day at least. Yeah, she's gonna stay till the end. Okay, thank you. I'm here. Good morning, Chair McPherson, members of the board. Christina Mallory, your county budget manager. So I believe Stephanie's gonna share the presentation. I'm gonna give you a brief overview of the land use and community services section of the county budget. Next slide. So here you can see a breakdown of the financing provided to the land use and community services section of the county budget. It's about $216 million. It represents about 24% of the county budget, providing funding for public works, ag commissioner parks, cultural services, planning and housing funds, library redevelopment agency funds and contributions to ag extension, the local agency formation commission, LAFCO, and the Monterey Bay Air Resources District. Next slide. Here you'll see a breakdown of the financing for each of them with a comparison to the prior year. The financing summary includes revenues primarily from the public works, charges for services under governmental revenues and other revenues totaling about 185 million, 22 million in fund balance and 9 million in a general fund contribution primarily for the parks and the planning department. Overall, the financing is reduced by almost 20% primarily from the reduction in intergovernmental revenues and charges for services within the public works department as we continue to complete projects related to the 2016-17 winter storms. Next slide. This chart shows a breakdown of the general fund changes for land use and community services. It's about increase of about $1.8 million, which is primarily related to the increases required within the planning department to offset the decline in overall permit revenues within the budget based on the prior year actual trends. Next slide. This chart shows the decrease in expenditures for land use and community services overall about $53 million, primarily due to the completed storm damage work within public works and includes eliminating two full-time equivalent positions due to the transfer of those positions to the information services department offset by the funding of about four positions as departments make minor adjustments and have some minor increases in their overall revenues and operations begin to resume pre-COVID levels. Public works comprises about 70% of the total expenditures. And that concludes our overview. And I'm available if you have any questions. Any questions from the board? Okay, we'll get to the budget later if necessary. Thank you. We will move to the action on the consent items that are on the agenda today. Items 35 to 40. Are there any public comment or let me see if there's any comments from the board. First on comments on the consent agenda. Mr. Chair, I'll make a couple of brief comments if that's acceptable. Yes, sir. Thank you. Just some brief comments first on the agricultural commissioner, obviously a lot of appreciation for Juan's work and his entire team's work as supervisor Caput and I work together a lot on the agricultural issues of the South County. Juan is a very public and very reliable face in regards to all the agricultural advocacy down there. And I've really appreciated having his ear and also having his advice on times that we've needed it. During this last year, I don't think, I mean the work with the agricultural community during COVID was a remarkable amount of work. And I think that your entire team down there deserves a lot of credit for that. Just a brief comment also with the change over some of the changes that have been occurring at LAFCO with new staff coming on. Joe and his team have done a remarkable job this year as they always do. And I just appreciate the work that LAFCO does for our community in general. In regards to the library fund, while I just wanted to thank our assistant County administrative officer Nicole Coburn for all of her work in regards to the libraries, both she and the entire team has been working overtime this year at scenes with some of the new libraries that are coming online, but also just ensuring during COVID that our numbers were in line. So appreciation for her. And the last is just on the Air Resources District that I serve on with Supervisor Coonerty and a lot of the work does go into Supervisor McPherson's district, but they've been doing a lot of work also during COVID with a lot more people being home and using things that are creating additional emissions from the home. I just appreciate the work of the Air District over the last year as well during COVID ensuring that the air within our area due to home-based emissions has been staying clean. So those are my brief comments on the Consent Agenda. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And again, the board member have some comments on the Consent Agenda. Well, if I may, I'll just, I won't repeat what Zach said, but basically I want to thank Juan Adalgo for his staff for all the hard work they do. And they also overlook weights and measures, which is going over and looking at different products that are being sold and whether or not the public is getting what they think they're paying for. Well, I won't bring up the Skippy peanut butter where they were chipping people for one ounce of peanut butter, but anyway, Juan Adalgo's on top of that. Thanks a lot. Very good, thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any other comments from board members? I'd like to make a comment on item 38 that the library budget, I think this is a great opportunity to highlight all of the tremendous work done by our library team in conjunction with public works and our library friends, groups throughout the county to build and or renovate our branches. The new Felton branch with the Jason Park, the new Capitola branch just opened last week, La Selva Beach and other renovation projects are going on as we speak in Boulder Creek. And I think they provide a very visible demonstration of how much the community's support for revenue measures can pay off. Measure S was passed in 2016 and just four and a half years later, we already have a lot to show for it. I wanna thank our library director, Susan Nemitz for her leadership. Another person who has announced that she is going to retire, she, we've made tremendous gains under her leadership over the last five years. And once again, I appreciate all of the community members who have helped to raise money and awareness of our branches and their terrific program. It's going to be a lot more opportunity for people to visit their libraries and throughout the county. And thank you, Mary, very much for everybody who participated in that endeavor. Any other members of the board have a comment on the consent agenda? Do we have comments from the public? I currently, yes, I do. And if I could just make a brief announcement before we start. Now's the time for public comment. This announcement will repeat in Spanish. Esta anunci se repetirá en español. If you would like to make your comment in Spanish, we have a translator available to assist. Speakers are limited to two minutes. At the end of your time, your microphone will automatically be muted. Members of the public may speak to an item on the consent agenda to comment on a regular agenda item. The public will have the opportunity to comment after the item is heard. Ahora es el tiempo que la Junta de Supervisores de la Secretaría de Comentario del Público. Si gustaría dar su comentario en español, tenemos un translator disponible para asistir. Los ordenadores están limitados a dos minutos. Al fin de este tiempo, su micrófono será silenciada automáticamente. Miembros del público pueden hablar sobre cualquier tema de la agenda de consentimiento o de temas que no aparecen en la agenda. El comentario sobre temas en la agenda regular se recibirá al fin de la presentación de esa tema. Thank you, Chair. And I have one speaker. Carol, your microphone is available. Good morning. So I wanted to talk to the board again about the face mask. So a lot of us are getting together to speak to the County Office of Education and the different school districts around town. There should be no face covering guidance of any kind for our kids this fall coming up on the school year coming up. So each of us has a lot of different experiences with this. A lot of the people who spoke last week at the County Office of Education meeting, some were chiropractors, some were psychotherapists. We all have a different perspective. We all have children in the public school system and private school system. There should be zero any kind of guidance from any governmental agency regarding any kind of face covering. It's very harmful for the children. Even last week, there was an article online on townhall.com. Some parents had sent in their kids a face mask to a lab to see what was in the face mask after their kids had worn these face masks for like six or seven hours. Pretty much there was everything in that mask except for viruses, interestingly. And then yesterday, we see that the who has now said, we don't think kids 12 and older should really be getting the COVID-19 vaccine. So this is just one indication of where these organizations that we look to for guidance backtrack. So I would really like for you all to think extremely clearly, extremely logically, look at the constitution of California and the US and let's get rid of all of these. It doesn't even make sense to have children wear a face mask. It restricts breathing. It's just keeping toxins close to their nose and mouth. So let's really get, let's get down to common sense here and let's get rid of all of these guidance that we're restricting the breathing of our kids. Please talk to Ferris Sabat and Gail Newell about this today. Caller 1999, your microphone is available. And this is to address items on the consent agenda, please. Good morning, this is James Ewing Whitman. It is June 24th, I'm pretty sure, 2021. Can I be heard? Yes. Okay, you know, Carol brought up so many excellent topics for discussion. Thank you, Carol. I'm wondering why we don't have three minutes. By observation, now we're in some kind of calm before the storm. People who are vaccinated cannot wear a mask, but how can you tell who's been vaccinated or not? Maybe you're gonna be able to tell who's been vaccinated in a couple of months and that's really quite sad. That's about all I have for now. Thank you very much for your time. There are no other speakers for public comment. Okay, return to the board. Mr. Chair, I'll move consent. I'll move the recommended actions to consent. Second. Koenig. Hi, Koenig. Please go on the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Sorry. Hi. Thank you. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Thank you. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. We go to item 31 to consider approval of the 2021-22 proposed budget of the parts open space and cultural services, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and is recommended by the county administrative officer. We have the 2021-22 proposed budget pages 233 to 244. The supplemental or the proposed budget pages 245 to 246. And a supplemental budget pages 267 and 68. I think our parks director, Jeff Gaffney, will be introducing this along with his administrative services manager, Kim Nami. Mr. Gaffney. Welcome. Chair McPherson and fellow board members and CAO's office, thank you for having us today and for the opportunity to present our budget to you. Looking forward to our new and exciting fiscal year, starting and wrapping up this one, it's time to put it in the books as far as I'm concerned. So anyway, I wanted to go next slide, please. Just quickly reference our agenda for the day, for I won't be here all day, I promise. We're gonna go over the budget proposal, our operational plan achievements, and then we're gonna go over some emerging issues. I wanted to see, we were trying to get Kim elevated. She is now elevated, so I will go to the next slide and Kim will be taking over. Kim's our admin services manager and she's been with the county for a very long time and we're lucky to have her here at Parks. Take it over, Kim. Thank you, good morning. So this is the first Parks dashboard shows all four of the Parks budgets, Parks operating budget, the CSA 11 budget, arts and public places, and the Recreation and Cultural Services budget. The combined budget is down 9.5% from last year, primarily in the Parks Department operating budget. Next slide. This slide shows just the Parks operating budget, Department 49, and the expenditures here and revenues are down almost 600,000 from last year, primarily due to the end of the coronavirus relief funds offset by some increased revenues for the coming year. On staffing, we are refunding one previously defunded FTE Recreation Supervisor, but we still have four unfunded positions or 8.33% of the total staffing. Next slide. So here are the Parks revenues in the Recreation Aquatics and Park Facility rental sections. The black line is for 1819, that was the last normal year followed by significant revenue losses in 1920 when COVID-19 pandemic began in 2021. We are estimating a recovery in 21-22 but not all the way to the pre-COVID levels. And especially in aquatics, the revenues for 21-22 are also lower due to the full closures for deferred maintenance that are coming this winter. Next slide. Parks continues to pursue grants. Our success rate over the last four years has been between 25 to 40% of the grant, all the grants we are applying for. And we have already applied for over 16 million in grants to be awarded in 21-22. Next slide. So Parks is expanding our program budgeting. Our departmental admin costs will be allocated proportionally to each section in the department in 21-22. And the Recreation section is also divided into specific programs. We've refined those, clarifying that the name summer recreation is really outdoor education. That's what it's been used for and adding special events and fitness and health. The recreation admin costs are also allocated proportionally to each of the recreation programs. Program budgeting improves tracking and accountability and is a step towards better performance measurement. And now I will turn it back over to Jeff who continue with the park's objectives of the operations plan. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Thank you very much for all the hard work you've done. This has been a very challenging year to budget in and especially given all the different funding sources that we often use in parks. And it's just a really lucky to have you. Thank you. So moving along, we actually, surprising even to me, we were able to accomplish a lot of our operational objectives. And one of those that was a highlight was way back when it did happen. We actually opened Leo's Haven which was part of Chanticleer's park phase one. We're actually working on phase two already and we have made it to the next round of a grant process for that. And that's a really good sign for us. We're keeping our fingers crossed. So the others, what we'll continue on is we moved towards a better forward-facing organization, more social media interaction. We didn't really have a presence. So we slowly developed a plan for how we can reach out to the community more through social media. And then we actually said we wanted to increase social media by 25%. We actually are in the mid-30s, probably closer to 40 that we've increased it. And I anticipate in the next year we may even have doubled the amount of social media presence. So we'll continue to do that. Next slide, please. We also took on a smart maintenance project which we completed. And the idea here was to allow our ops staff or our folks that are out in the field to be able to get around the most efficiently way they can back and forth through our parks. Obviously there's things like traffic and other types of obstacles for them to do that. So this was how we get the people to also do projects together, possibly work in the same vehicle. COVID did blow this up a little bit. So we still are working towards getting back in line with that smart maintenance project. But we did complete it before COVID started and we're looking towards improving on that. Some internships that in the past we had not been looking out for as many interns as I would normally expect to have in a parks department. And we were already moving towards this in our operational objectives when COVID hit which was one of the saving graces of COVID was there were a lot of people who didn't have internships suddenly. So we have had more interns than we've ever had before in our department this last year. And it's been a real benefit that we were ready for that. So next slide. And then youth rec camp, this has changed so many times and in direct consultation with our health officer and other park professionals across the state we were able to continue to create camps for children throughout our community despite COVID. So this actually fit in line with what we were already looking at especially the outdoor component. So that was very surprising that we were able to meet that objective, but we did. And Simkins pool maintenance, you'll probably be hearing about this over the next couple of times we meet but we are working towards massive improvements to the pool. We're over 20, we're pushing almost 25 years old for a lot of these facilities that were meant to last 20 years or less actually in some cases. So we are hoping to be done by December 20th of 22. We're gonna be shutting down parts of the pool and facilities come December of this year to complete a lot of that. So I look forward to that. We'll be communicating that in many different venues and sharing information. Next slide, please. So here are a couple of the emerging issues that are out there. I really am very aware your board has heard several times about some of them, one of which is our climate resiliency and of course being a parks agency and managing thousands of acres of parkland, forested parkland in most cases. This is a really deep concern for us and also natural resource management in general is not something that our county parks department has taken on in the past. And it's something that when I arrived I knew we would need to be looking at. So I'm really proud that we actually are now focusing more and more on both climate resiliency and natural resource management. Most recently a large scale project taking place at Anaheem Cummings and several smaller scale projects that we'll be looking at throughout the county park system. Outdoor recreation is something that I think everybody has seen the increase in use of outdoor recreation and getting into our parks, parks that are close to home, parks that are a little farther away and it's unprecedented actually in my 30 years the amount of use that's occurring. A lot of that does take some infrastructure and resources from the agency. So we just have to be thoughtful about that. Next slide. So some of the items we also want to be thinking about are our capital needs and those capital needs are highlighted here. The first four actually were in progress of working on as I mentioned Simpkins and we're also looking at taking care of Highlands and Hidden Beach and the Vets Hall and then the rest of them we're trying to program in and that'll be something I talk about as well in the next time we meet. So next slide please. I wanted to go over a little bit of the disaster response. It was humbling to see the amount of cooperation and collaboration between all of the staff and all of our different departments within the county and it truly was an honor to be a part of this organization and watch us work as closely as we did with each other. There is no higher calling in my mind for people then to serve others and public service. That is the absolute key goal to be serving the community and also at times they were serving other peers and coworkers and other folks from other agencies. So I know that the board has heard about this in the past both at our department level and other departments but again I want to commend our staff and the staff who worked with them to do some of the things you see highlighted here on the screen. And I was again just felt so lucky to be a part of this organization and the county as a whole as we went through all the different disasters and the responses that we shared. Next slide please. So as part of that we've come out with some longer term partnerships and we're gonna continue to strive to build those partnerships. Those were so important as part of the pandemic as part of our disaster response that we developed these partnerships and we relied on them strongly and I hope to continue to build them. There are so many partnerships that we built outside the agency that there were too many to list on the screen here but I look forward to working with them individually and collectively. Next slide please. So I know that the board is busy and has a lot on the agenda today so I tried to quickly go through things here and I would actually recommend that you approve the proposed budget and here are the reference pages as listed out and I'm also now going to have a stop sharing the screen and take questions or comments. I know that it's been a very challenging and interesting time for all of us and you may have a lot of questions. Thank you Mr. Gaffney for your tremendous leadership and to the whole parks team. Really you did step up and above everything that could have been expected of you. I just want to thank you and the entire team for all its hard work, not just running our tripping park system but for all your efforts during the COVID pandemic and the CZU fire and responding where you could to help people who are in need and there were many of hundreds, thousands of them and one important thing that COVID did remind us of is that parks and open space are not just nice to have around. They are essential for our health and well-being. Really the improvements to our park system in recent years has also been tremendous. I mentioned the Felton Library earlier which was made even more special with the adjacent Felton Discovery Park and interpretive park that is one of a few of its kind in the United States side by side with the library. That teamwork, working with the library system and the park system to make a tremendous facility it was really over the top and either one of those improvements was important on its own but to have two facilities side by side it's been so welcomed by the Santa Rosa Valley residents in my fifth district. I also want to thank the parks department for the work you did on behalf of the underserved youth in the Santa Rosa Valley specifically and you did that throughout the county. Worth highlighting all of the cultural services provided through the department support of our community and nonprofit organizations and I really applaud you for your aggressiveness and going out and getting grants and having the applications out there right now as we speak. I think we're going to be seeing some real good results from that. So thank you to you and the whole parks team for a tremendous year under some difficult times. Very much appreciated by the people of Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Friend, do you have a comment? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Director Gaffney and also to Ms. Ridley for all of her work over the last year. I think that to build a little bit on what the chair said over the last year we saw an explosion in the usage of parks and what we haven't seen as a subsequent commiserate amount of funding for parks for staffing. In fact, you have less staffing now than you did for the Great Recession appoint that was made yesterday by the CAO. And in fact, over the last nine years or so that I've been on the board, I know that we've added a couple of positions but over time as people retire those positions are held banked in order to deal with some of our financial issues but yet the parks continue to expand in both need from an equity perspective and programmatic need as well as an actual need for remodels and actual needed size. And in this last year, even during COVID while you were with very few maintenance workers trying to maintain what we had, you were also working with local nonprofits, funders and others to help improve things such as this hidden beach in my district which is getting a significant remodel and becoming accessible to more kids with some of the poor employee and other options that are being taken there. And then the work that'll be happening at Willowbrook Park. Thanks in part to you, Rebecca as well as the CAO for that as well as some of the improvements we saw down at Pinto Lake Park. I just don't think that people recognize how much really happened over the last 12 months. Time didn't stop for you in any way, shape or form and even with less money and less resources the need for the parks it became a real lifesaver for people to get outdoors as Supervisor McPherson was saying but you are investing in things even with very limited resources and finding ways and partnerships with the Coastal Conservancy with local funders and other nonprofits and the Friends Group which has been remarkable to maintain a sense of place. I mean the reason that people wanna live here is because in large part because of parks and open space. I mean access to the beaches, access to parks, green belts and other places and you and your very small team has been very nimble and very agilely doing exactly this. And as one of the parents on the board I have to say my six year old I mean his life surrounds it's basically around these parks. I mean the parks in my district are something that he spends a minimum of five days a week at and he's developing memories and a love for the outdoors and for parks in a way that you can't put a price on. So the work that your team does really does shape our youth provide equity and provide access and you should be commended for that. And I know that this is not the investment that we need in our local parks in this budget. I recognize that and I know that there will be an ask of us in terms of some of these additional fees. And I think that that's a reasonable discussion to have. I think that we need to find a stable mechanism for funding these parks moving forward. And I think what you're proposing is definitely one step but I don't think is the only step as Supervisor McPherson said last week in doing that. It's been an underinvested in department in my opinion and just based on the community desire to access it I think that we need to be sure that we commit to that investment moving forward. So I'm looking forward to the changes that are gonna happen this year and in all of our districts there's improvements occurring in parks that are exciting in some cases or once in a generation type improvements. So thank you to you and Ms. Hurley and for everybody else on team Kim for keeping the numbers going in a way that even us elected officials can understand. I appreciate the presentation both of you. Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Gaffney. I mean, yes, certainly I agree. We all appreciate our parks more than ever in the last year. And you of course chalked up some real wins with opening new facilities. Leo's Haven Park off of Chanticleer is very well up in the first district as is the new heart of Soquel Parkway, a really great way to experience nature in the heart of Soquel Village. And I'm excited to see some of the new investments particularly in the Simkin Swim Center. I think, you know, while both the boiler and the water slide and the decking all needed I'm sure the water slide will be most noticeable and appreciated by visitors there. And of course, also the new Live Oak Library Annex at the Simkin Swim Center. I think investment in that as a community center is really gonna pay off in the long run. You know, also to Supervisor Friend's point, I just wanna acknowledge how entrepreneurial enterprising you have to be as a department. And, you know, both of the fact that 40% of all the financing comes from use of money in charge for services, as well as all the grants that you have to go out and get and just, you know, commend you on that effort as well as say, you know, agree that we need to find more ways to increase your funding long-term. I was just curious looking through the budget. I know we, you know, of course, our last full meeting of the board we voted to increase development fees. Is that represented in this budget under revenues and taxes with the $48,000 increase or is it not yet accounted for? It's not yet accounted for. We'll be talking about that on the last day, the 29th. We will complete the action that we started we'll close the hearing hopefully successfully on that. And then after that, we will have any discussion that you want on the fees that we will suggest at that time. So there is no final answer on the fees and that's the determination you as a board get to take on the 29th. Okay, great. And then as I mentioned, and you're well aware, you know, essentially 40% of your revenues are coming from charge for service or use of money. Do you see other opportunities to expand those kinds of revenues or opportunities, you know, for new recreation services to the public that, you know, essentially would be offering at below market rate, but offer opportunity to earn some revenue for the department? We're always looking at creative new ways to develop revenue. We also have to worry about equity. And that's always a really big challenge for us in this community. And we have a very deep divide oftentimes between the haves and the have not have nots. And so for example, just who gets to visit the beach and how they get there. If we were to charge, you know, in some beach communities, they're charging $20 an hour literally for parking and or it's, you know, down in Southern California sometimes it can be $40 or $50 a day to park. We don't do that in Santa Cruz County and we we're proud of that. That's so that anybody can afford to drive to the beach and enjoy a day. And a lot of our access points that we have, we are working as part of our encroachment program to develop revenues to help, you know, build out the infrastructure and do some repairs and improve the access, but that doesn't cover the actual operational dollars. So I think there are opportunities for us to look at equitable charges that we can do. That is going to have to be hand in glove with the Coastal Commission and their staff in how we look at that. I think that's a conversation as well that may be needed to have had with Department of Public Works. I also think there's opportunities for us to do things with more events and activities in parks. This is a concern for me that as we come out of the pandemic, we are absolutely one of the most uniquely hit agencies in the County because of the pandemic. Because as you pointed out, we generate our revenue and have generated a lot of the money that we use from our events, like weddings, like birthday parties, activities that people were not allowed to do, the concerts, we did smaller concerts, you know, all those types of things. And so we're going to have to be more innovative and more creative. We are in this budget, we are looking towards how we can invest in those activities a little bit more and possibly things like community gardens, which can really be a huge benefit for the community and also can generate a modest amount of revenue. It's a whole cadre of things. In addition, we did make an investment last year and as part of this budget that we're finally implementing of hiring a supervisor over the events and activities and reservation section. And that's, we've never had that before. And that is a very strategic focused effort for us to try to generate more revenue in an equitable fashion. So I have a lot more thoughts as everybody usually knows when I talk, but I'm happy to talk more. I hope that answers a little bit of what you're asking. Yeah, definitely. I'm excited to see more weddings concerts and other social events. And it's great that we're making an investment, as you said, in a supervisor for those kinds of events. I also noticed that youth recreation programs are taking a major hit this year at the 71% drop. Is that just because they were one-time funding we saw for COVID for the outdoor youth recreation programs that is now going away or is this more of a long-term problem? Yeah, that is absolutely whether we can generate so based on this fiscal year that we're in currently, the amount of revenue we truly generated was very minimal because we were using CARES Act funding and ARP funding now. So the ARP funding will help us. We will use some of that to get through next this coming fiscal year as part of this budget. But again, that goes back to the revenue generation and the youth rec programs are one of those we bring in a dollar and we pay a dollar and that those are such on the thin line of being able to create enough revenue to keep them going that they often are the ones we look at first because it's exactly what we've been talking about. Are we gonna be able to generate the activities that we were not able to do under COVID enough to generate enough of that revenue to keep them going? It's sort of a closed loop on that one. And so yeah, good eye to catch that. That's exactly one of the areas that I'm most concerned about. Okay, yeah. Hopefully we can bring those back more in the future. I mean, it's so essential to connect kids and youth with the outdoors early to build that relationship. Well, and just we are partnered with County Park Friends and they are actually doing events for us for as a part of their service to us. So they've been doing outdoor education events and taking kids on coastal exploration courses and science classes. So I don't expect them to take over the load for us but they have augmented us and we'll continue to do that as we get back on our feet. Yeah, they've definitely been a great partner. And I also like the Parks Internship Program that you're developing. I'm just curious if those are paid or unpaid interns and kind of what next steps are for folks who go through that internship program. Oh yeah, thank you for highlighting this. They are both paid and unpaid actually where we have been able to afford it we can and we will. But we ended up having so many interns interested that we did do unpaid. And the interesting thing is we have all of the different facets of government work in addition to the normal outdoor natural resource management type function. So as an internship, this department offers anything you can imagine. You know, we have a planning arm, we have an operations arm. And of course, this is a great way for us to invite young professionals who are interested in maybe a different, they might even be never thought about government before but they come work for the Parks Department and suddenly they might be interested in working for government. Or they may be interested in some aspects of government and we have the opportunity to give them an understanding, a better understanding of what it's like to truly work in their organization. And it could be people that are just interested and you know, I wanna save the environment and we have an opportunity for them to do that and then they get a real life understanding of what it is to do the day-to-day operations that kind of activities that actually make a difference. So the internship program, something I've wanted to do as well, like I said from day one and having that energy also I think oftentimes invigorates our workforce and reminds them of part of who they used to be and why they came into the department. So it's just a tremendous benefit to have the organization. Yeah, it sounds like a fantastic program. Great, that's all my questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. A lot of my questions were covered by the previous supervisors. I wanna thank the Parks Department for developing the after-school programs, especially during distance learning. It was critical for socialization just to get parents to break as well. And really important, I will say on the REX programs, what I'm seeing anecdotally, at least around like the sports and theater leagues that sports leagues and theater programs that my kids are involved in is there's insane demand right now because everybody's ready to get out. So sort of airing on the side of offering more, even if there's a little risk there, I think it's a worthwhile opportunity because I do think people by the fall, especially are gonna be ready to have their kids engaged and back doing things, making up for lost time and in activities. And then finally, looking at the budget, I know we had to put on pause. We had the effort to really try to build some more inclusivity into our Parks and Rec programs through our funding structures and holding spots and other opportunities. We put it on hold because COVID sort of blew up everything, but I look forward over the next year to getting back to that conversation, working with the friends and figuring out how we can really make sure that our Parks programs are serving all kids and reducing all the barriers that might prevent them from signing up. I look forward to that as well. Right here, Professor Caput, any comments? Yeah, you bet. Thank you, Chairman McPherson. Yeah, how are you doing, Jeff? Good. Good. Yeah, I appreciate all the attention you've been given to South County and coming down here and we're thinking outside the box, we're trying to make things fit and it's nice to have all the attention. Let's see, I lost you on the screen here. Can you still hear me? Yes, sir, you're still visible and I can still hear you. Okay, okay. Anyway, one question was answered when Supervisor Koenig asked it so I won't go over too much on it, but equity and affordability go hand in hand if we have a facility and only people with money can afford to go there or take advantage of programs and then people without money can't. I think you get it and the county gets that. We understand that and I wanna thank you for that, especially for people in South County. I noticed with the lifeguard training in the summer, my son went three years to lifeguard training and there's three different programs because you have a state beach, you have a county beach and then you also have city beaches. So there are three different programs. They're wonderful programs and they do have scholarships if people can't afford them, which is really good. And public safety and parks in a lot of ways go hand in hand. I know with my son when he was doing the lifeguard training and he became a teenager and everything. After he was done on the Monday through Friday with all that training, he'd come home tired and all he wanted to do was really rest and stay at home. He wasn't going out and looking for trouble anywhere. So anyway, parks are really important, okay? And then homeless shelters, so what took over our basketball courts at the Veterans Memorial buildings and that's been a lot of work but losing an actual recreational facilities. Let's see, the other thing I'd like to mention is if we can get more collaboration between the schools and the parks. I know down here in South County, a lot of money was spent on putting up fences and basically locking people out of the school facilities, schoolyard, school playgrounds. So we need to actually open those up, especially during the summer or after school or on weekends. And how are we doing on that? Are we getting any cooperation from the schools? Yeah, that tends to be special districts or school districts as you recognize have their own jurisdiction and working with them is definitely individual to the different school districts, depending on what agency. So yeah, it's absolutely determinant on which district and what policies they've adopted. You're welcome. Okay, and I guess basically we're looking very closely and I'm sure everybody is at park land acquisition and open space, which when you start losing it, then you appreciate what you had, open space, parks and whatever. I noticed on reading a lot of things when they do surveys, what makes people really like their community that they live in? And they always mention, especially couples that have children. They mentioned the schools in the area and number two or three is always parks and open space. So that's really important. People don't talk too much about it, but whenever they do a survey, they indicate that they do like having a nice park in their neighborhood. So anyway, thanks a lot, Jeff. I'm looking forward to continue to work with you on different ideas that we have for South County and the rest of Santa Cruz County. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Do we have any comments from the public? There are no members of the public commenting on this item. Okay, again, I just wanna say how much I appreciate the extra effort that your department employees have put in to make life as easy as it can be under the conditions that's been easy for anybody, but you put in the extra effort and please sincerely thank them for their efforts because I think it helped a lot of people get through this COVID pandemic in the last year as well as the fires that we've had. Very important aspect of what we do in County government and thank you again for your aggressiveness when after grants and we'll try to, oh, there's, we'll try to do what we can to help out a little more as well into County. You have a motion to accept the parts budget. Yeah, I'll move the recommended actions. Second. That's second by Coonerty, I didn't see. Okay, friend, please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. MacPherson. Aye. Your motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you again, Mr. Gaffney. Thank you so much. We'll move to item number 32 to consider the approval of the 2021-22 proposed budgets for the planning department and housing funds, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. We have the 2021-22 proposed budget pages 247 to 254, also pages 255 to 258, and a supplemental budget pages 69 and 70, the last two in reference to housing. Mr. C, who we got? We're gonna have to do that. Kathy is going to be presenting on this. Kathy Malloy and Maya Levine, I believe. Kathy, probably with any. I'm here. Okay. I'm here. You can hear you. I don't know where the picture is. Well, maybe I'll just go ahead and get started. As you're aware, I'm retiring in August and so I'm gonna use this opportunity to just open up the budget presentation and then introduce other key members of the management team who will actually make the budget presentation. And before doing that, I want to extend my deep appreciation for the dedication and resilience of every single person on the planning department team over this past year, as they've met the challenges and continue to provide services. And so if someone is bringing up the PowerPoint, I'm not sure where. Our melody was going to be supporting our team with the power unit. So this is a good time melody to share your screen if you can. She should be rejoining shortly. Whose can is that? Is that, oh, it's mine, I guess. All right, thank you, Melody. All right, if you could advance to the first slide then, I'll be, in terms of the agenda, as I said, I'm gonna open it up and just present the budget dashboard. And then assistant director, Payah Levine, will review last year's activities. And then principal planner, Stephanie Hansen, who's with the sustainability and special project section, will review the operational plan achievements. Suzanne, you say the principal planner of housing will review some of the housing achievements. And then I'll be back to Payah to talk about next year's program focus of continuing operation of the recovery permit center. And of course, the special focus on the unified permit center and Primo permit processing improvements. And so if you could go to the next slide, this is the budget dashboard. You'll see that revenues are showing as fairly stable. The increase in general plan contribution looks pretty significant, because as of course it's showing restoration in these numbers of half the furlough. Obviously, we now know that we'll be restoring the entire furlough. What the fiscal year 2021 numbers do not reflect is just under a million dollars that actually did get amended into our budget to support the initiation of the Republic Recovery Center to assist the survivors of the CZU fire. The other notable aspects of our budget next year is we are able to fund two positions that had been unfunded due to early retirements last year. So those we're bringing back and filling the two building permit technicians and that should very much increase our capacity at the building counter. In terms of revenues, we base our revenue projections on the averages of what has occurred over the last three years, as well as known future more significant projects that are in the pipeline. And so with that, I think if we could advance to the next slide and Pyle Levine will take over from here. Thank you. Thank you, Kathy. I'd like to start by focusing on the operational aspect of the planning department and give you a brief description of the services that we provided in the last year out of the permit center. The context for those services is that the demand for our services has continued to increase. Here are just two examples, the building permit applications overall were up more than 15% and code compliance service requests were up more than 20% year over year. And the code compliance side of what we do is very important to the people who use it. So I wanted to just highlight that for you. Next slide, Melody. A hallmark of our work over the last year has been the continued switch to being fully electronic and using much less paper through our department. We do two kinds of electronic permits, what we call the online permits. Those are permits that don't require plans. So they're the smaller kinds of permits and the public can set up an account, make application, print their own permit card, pay their fees and be on their way without any interaction with planning staff. Those are very helpful to us. Not only is it convenient for the applicant but those smaller permits are taken out of the pathway of the other more complicated permits. And so then those other permits have fewer, there are fewer applications routing and we can give them kind of a clearer runway. Those permits that require plans, they come in through the E-Plan portal. That portal was a homegrown, it was written by ISD and it was tested mightily since the switch to complete electronic processing, it happened very suddenly after COVID and our team has focused on making incremental improvements to it as it was tested, we would respond by trying to make the portal function better for the public when they are uploading their plans. Next slide please. Remote services extended to more than just the building permits. I'd like to highlight for a moment the zoning information and the building information that we did via email last year. We essentially set up a virtual public counter and part of it, especially the zoning email which we call Zmail was very popular. We did about three times the amount of queries and interactions that we would have had at a face-to-face counter. I think that was partly the convenience but also the product of when you make a query to the Zmail, you receive a researched written response and I think the public really appreciates that and you get that response, they were pretty much holding to a couple of days, one or two business days. So we expect to maintain some level of that as we go back to business as normal or our hybrid business in the fall. And as you know, we were among the first in the state to have our planning commission and of the other hearing bodies we support be completely remote. So that was very much a focus of all of the staff over the last year. Kathy introduced Stephanie, the principal planner of sustainability and special projects. And I'm going to hand off to her to talk about the operational plan and more. Thank you. Morning board, thank you Paya. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Yes, thank you. We wanted to just take a minute to go over some of our operational and programmatic successes from the last year. By the end of 2019, 2021 operational plan cycle, the planning department had achieved nine of its 14 objectives, six are which are highlighted on this slide. Major inroads were made in housing financing and planning for all modes of transportation, including the development of the draft circulation element which the board will see coming forward in the sustainability update. Key developments this year included the Dominican hospital expansion, the capital and 17th mid pen project, the medical office building on Soquel Avenue which is currently out for public comment after release of the draft EIR, Pippin II and affordable housing development in South County of 80 units. And currently beginning processing is the East Lake Village redevelopment. There were 59 permits issued for ADUs last year and increased over 60% over baseline and 66 permanent housing units were legalized under that program. Next. Last year economic recovery during COVID and shelter in place orders was a huge focus for us last year after the board passed the urgency ordinance allowing the planning department to administer temporary permits on an expanded basis. We also then came back with a streamlined permit process and new ordinance to allow temporary uses to remain on site and those expansions to remain for three years and up to six years. 43 folks applied for temporary use permits, 39 were issued and our most popular permits for outdoor dining bar and dining uses and the second most popular was Jim. Next slide. Last year we also saw the limited density owner-built rural dwellings code come before you and this was the K code. This was alternate building code for rural developments. It would help property owners up in the more rural areas of the county, it was a three year pilot project and it allows for the use of alternate materials as well as fewer inspections. So we're looking forward to that as a program to help people rebuild after the fire. Next. So we also wanted to look ahead a little bit, talk about some of our programs and sustainability efforts, fire recovery, housing, the permit process improvements particularly related to the Unified Permits Center. Next. So this year we're coming back before the board shortly actually in August with a new accessory dwelling unit ordinance. This is in order to align ourselves a little bit better with the recent guidebook that's been released by the state HCD. So we'll be tweaking our regulations and addressing some of the standards including the numbers of ADUs that are allowed on a given site and reviewing the parking standards particularly in the coastal zone. Later in the year we'll also be working on the tiny homes ordinance as provided by the board including tiny home villages and tiny homes on wheels. This affordable solution will require changes to the county code but will also be associated with a robust public input process. Next. And we also have the sustainability update coming before the board. We are working feverishly on the draft EIR at this point and in finalizing the draft amendments to the general plan and county code. As you all are aware the purpose of this is twofold to implement the sustainable Santa Cruz County plan that was accepted by the board in 2014 and also to do a series of code modifications to help with streamlining the permit and development process. The timeline is that we're working with right now is to release the draft EIR and the draft amendments for public review by the end of the year to a series of again robust community meetings to help people understand what's in the amendments and that would be in the spring and then move forward into adoption by June of next year. So with that I'll go ahead and hand it off to Suzanne to talk about some of our housing initiatives. Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning chair and supervisors. As you may be aware, we have two major new affordable housing projects currently in various stages of development here in the county, one in North County, one in South County. The 17th and Capitola Road Project recently broke ground on their site work and the two clinics that are in the front of the project, the housing itself. We are currently partnering with the development partner Midpen Housing to help them complete their financing package working on obtaining tax credits for the development of the project and anticipating that they will begin construction in 2022. The Atkinson Lane Project, also known as PIPIN2 just outside of Watsonville is currently in the final stages of design and we expect to bring the final designs for board review. In several months. Next slide, please. We also have a home buyer project underway. As you may recall, we have a Habitat Humanity Project on Harper Street in Live Oak. And the first two homes are scheduled to close escrow to be sold to low-income buyers within the next several weeks. We're currently working with Habitat on that and also their efforts to market the homes and screen families for the remaining nine homes in the project. We are also working with Midpen Housing on a rehabilitation of property in South County which has 18 rental units which are primarily occupied by farm worker families. Next slide, please. Housing, another workload, major workload component in housing continuing into next year is grants management. Over the last 18 months or so, we have over $13 million in grant funds flowing through housing division. The majority of those funds are for COVID rent relief programs. Next slide, please. Going into next fiscal year, we anticipate additional opportunities arising for disaster relief, both related to the CCU fire recovery and also potentially further pandemic recovery funding opportunities. A staff will also be continuing to work with the Housing for Health Division on efforts to re-house folks who've been in the project room key hotels and other permanent supportive housing efforts. Farm worker housing is an ongoing effort that we're partnering with various folks on and also the final disposition of the final redevelopment property at Seventh and Bromer is another major project next year. And with that, I'll hand it back to Paya. Moving forward, I'd like to talk for just a moment about the Recovery Permit Center. As you know, the Recovery Permit Center is a key part of our efforts to get building permits to the fire survivors as quickly as we can. Our fire was in August and in September, we were initiating conversations with Forleaf, which is the consultant that has set up our Recovery Permit Center. We were in contract by November and then in business downstairs in the community room on December 1st of this year. The Recovery Permit Center model is based on kind of a personalized consultation service with attention paid to the front end of the process as much as possible. We devised a pre-application screening process so that we could solve problems before applications are in the system and applications once they're in do go through very quickly. Among other things, the staff in the RPC has a firm commitment to accepting only complete plans. And that also has been very helpful and is one of the several things that the planning department is looking at in the Recovery Permit Center's model as something that we might adopt in our regular permit process. As of about 10 days ago, the Recovery Permit Center had issued more than 250 fire-related building permits, has had more than 800 pre-application screenings and other informational appointments with the public. And of those permits, 25 are single-family dwellings either issued or in the status where they're close to being issued. And of the ones that are issued of that batch, the average turnaround time was 12 days. Next slide, please. Based on the experience of other communities that have been through this and the experience of Fourleaf having helped many of those communities, there's a three-year arc or timeframe to a community's recovery. And typically, most of the building permits are issued in the second year and in the third year. Fourleaf has assured us that we are in the place you would expect us to be at this point in time relative to that arc or cycle. We are neither ahead of where we should be nor behind. So we're in a typical spot relative to how a recovery unfolds. Two of the principles of the Recovery Permit Center, Marcus Johnson and Mike Renner are available for questions later should your board have any. Next slide, please. Importantly, the RPC is a model that is informing the Primo efforts of the department and really of all of the departments that have a part of the permit process. As you know, Primo is the county-wide continuous improvement process. In the planning department, Primo efforts did not stop during the time of COVID and the fire emergency. What did happen is we had to pivot and the projects that we thought would be the focus of our Primo efforts were not. We shifted to the ones that helped us do our shift to remote services. An example would be discretionary permits. We had making that process and that intake process electronic and paperless somewhere in the middle of the list of all of the Primo projects that we hope to accomplish. And after COVID, obviously that went right to the top. And so we accomplished that out of order, but nevertheless, Primo has been going apace. This is a preview of some of the practices that we think are most likely to be the ones that are priorities for implementing a more streamlined process in the Unified Permit Center. So to talk about the UPC as a project, it's a good time for me to introduce Carolyn Burke. You know Carolyn as our senior civil engineer, but Carolyn has a time-bound special assignment right now and that assignment is to manage the creation and the standing up of the Unified Permit Center that would involve public works, environmental health, ourselves, other associated agencies that have a hand in the process such as the fire districts. So let me give Carolyn the space for a couple of slides to explain her work. Thank you, Paya, for the introduction and for the opportunity to share more about this exciting venture. The Unified Permit Center consists of both the physical and organizational integration of county land use divisions to both align permit requirements and provide the public with a single location to obtain permit services and information from all county reviewing agencies. As a customer focused entity, creation of the UPC requires contributions of partners both within and outside the county organization. A physical remodel of the current planning department zoning and building counter will co-locate staff from the permitting divisions of the planning, public works and environmental health departments to create a full service public permit counter. Concurrently, staff from these divisions will be working to develop and improve permit review processes, web offerings and service models to better meet the needs of our customers. All staffing and process improvement plans will be developed in consultation with county fire and local fire agencies to also play an important role in the permit review process. While physical and organizational structures provide the framework for the UPC, we recognize that the participation and cooperation of the professional land use community and owner builders is imperative to realizing the benefits of any steps taken to streamline the permitting process. We look forward to engaging with the community in the coming months to gather suggestions and constructive feedback on improvements to the system. Next slide, please. During the next six months, our efforts will be focused on establishing the UPC infrastructure, including organization and staffing, service models, baseline metrics and identification of the highest priority process improvements. The UPC core team has already began meeting with the private architecture firm under contract to prepare plans for the physical counter remodel and anticipate that we will begin providing service in early 2022. That concludes my presentation and I'll pass it back to Paya. Thanks, Carolyn. You're welcome. So thank you to the board for hearing from us this morning. I do want to take a moment to thank the planning department staff, each and every one and their families for their dedication and their teamwork. That teamwork was an evidence both within the department but also very much working with the other departments as we all work to respond to the challenges that we had in the last year. Quite a bit of what we do is in the background and so I do welcome the opportunity to thank everybody for all of that work. Our recommended actions are to approve the proposed budget for the planning department as recommended by the CAO and these are the reference pages where you find the detail about our budget, the schedule and continuing improvements. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation and it's very impressive. It's been a very busy year for the planning department and related departments. I really want to thank the planning department for setting up the recovery permit center to help the fire victims in particular. Looking back, that work is being expedited in a way that would not have been possible really without bringing in outside help. Many of the lessons we're learning with four leaf will help the county's regular permitting process over the long haul. I also want to thank the planning for working with the Office of Recovery and Resiliency. Many of the most challenging recovery and rebuilding issues require really a close coordination with various offices and it's very much appreciated. I also think the general public and I've mentioned this before, should know that we and this recovery effort were so dependent on what some of the rules and regulations are with the state in particular and somewhat with the government as well. But the Department of Forestry, which I think is going to be issuing its report on how it's going to be today on its recovery center. I can tell you that about a month ago, Pyle Levine and David Reed of our recovery center, Chief Analyst spoke before the Department of Forestry, which was ready to put down some basic criteria of how you can rebuild in particular septics, but really in particular on road access. And the presentation that Pyle Levine and David Reed presented really just set them back and said, wow, one size doesn't fit all in these recoveries. If it's a fire in Fresno, it's different terrain to geology from what it is in Santa Cruz County in the mountains. So I am very hopeful they're going to come up with a reasonable recommendation on how we can have access to those facilities of those houses that were burned to the ground and they won't have to build 20 foot wide roads, but they can make adjustments in working with the fire departments and so forth. Very, very important. I think the general public should know how important it was that Santa Cruz County had very, very significant input in just letting the State Department of Forestry just hold back in its rules and regulations that are upcoming. And then looking forward, I'm really excited about the new ADU and the tiny home ordinances that are going to be coming before us and the sustainability plan that as was mentioned, was really brought up in 2014. We're really getting to it now. And I think something of significance is going to be done this year in 2021-22 in that regard. I think the, also as Carolyn Burke mentioned, the oversight, the establishment of the Unified Permit Center is going to be a real significant addition and well accepted by the general public so they can get through the permitting process more quickly and in essence that a one-stop shop that's going to be really significant in our future. The housing division to maintain our measure J, housing stock and work with the board offices and too many members on creative approaches to building more affordable housing with the examples which you showed us right now. It's really paying off now. And lastly, I just want to congratulate planning director Kathy Malloy on her impending retirement and appreciate all of the effort the assistant director Pylevi has had that the entire planning team for adjusting and addressing a crisis that was at hand after the pandemic and fires and now really getting ready to move ahead with some very significant planning policies that we have and we're going to see come into play in this next fiscal year. Are there any other, Mr. Koenig, some comments? Thank you, chair. And thank you everyone in the planning department for excellent presentations. I think that the amazing work you've done transitioning to online permits in the last year is really one of the unsung successes of how our county has weathered the pandemic and the CZU fire. I mean, just the numbers are very impressive going from zero online permits a couple of years ago to 500 and then over 1,000 in the last year as well as really almost tripling the number of electronic building permit services from about 694 to 1,887. That's a really big change and the way the department does work and it's very impressive. So congratulations. Of course, you also did a lot of great work with the temporary use ordinance, you know, those 39 permits you issued for people to be able to use the outdoor space or dining or outdoor gyms. And that really made a big difference to a lot of businesses. So that was fantastic. Hopefully you're able to roll out that program. And then, of course, all of the big projects that you're working on, seeing the breaking ground on 1500 Capitola Road, our recent review of the Dominican expansion. It's exciting here that the Habitat for the Humanity Project on Harper is we have two of those homes will be closing escrow the next two weeks. And of course, coming up with the Kaiser Building on Soquel Avenue, East Cliff Village redevelopment and the Seventh and Bromerside. Overall, I think that the investment that we're making in planning this year, the 40% increase in the budget overall is really smart. Ultimately, planning is what's going to drive the majority of future revenues for our county because our county's primary revenue source is property taxes. And so the more we enable our community to grow through a good functional planning department, ultimately, the more revenues the county will have to work with in the future and to be able to invest in things like parks and roads. So it's great that we're getting two new building keks to be able to speed up the process with which we can process applications. And I'm really excited to see all the work that Ms. Burke is doing on the Unified Permit Center with the customer focus and collaborative effort between departments. I just have a couple of questions. I noticed we're seeing a pretty significant increase in permit fees, largely from the Recovery Permit Center, about 43% increase. And that's obviously kind of good and bad because it just represents this huge size or a huge amount of work necessary to rebuild all these homes. I'm curious first, if that 43% increase in revenues corresponds to like a 43% increase in permit applications that will be processing. Are you thinking specifically about the Recovery Permit Center or the Planning Department as a whole? I think that a lot of it comes from the Permit Recovery Center, it's in the licenses and permits. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that, what you're thinking about. The Recovery Permit Center will be the recipient, if you will, of incoming revenue and that will ultimately be a high number because of the number of permits we expect to come through. On the other hand, that's offset by the expense of creating the center and keeping it running. And what we have estimated is that over the course of the contract, the three year contract, those two things are about going to balance out. So we're making an initial investment in the early year before the permits are coming in and that's partly to fund our advanced work with all of the individuals and do the pre-application work. And then when the permits start to come in, then that investment will be repaid. So we expect that to be kind of a net zero at the end of the day. I think the way the four layer contract is structured is great in that it basically scales very well because the revenues fund the cost. The question was if that 43% increase corresponds to roughly a 43% increase in the number of permits that we're processing with the Recovery Permit Center and through the planning department. Well, we estimated that the permit fees, the license and permit fees coming into the regular side of the department would be about flat, similar to last year. So the increase that you see to the extent it's about permits coming in, it's about fire related permits coming in. Okay. Then answering your question. Sort of, yeah. So I mean basically that 43% increase represents all of the additional permit applications for rebuilding. Mostly, yes. Okay. If someone doesn't have sufficient, if they didn't have sufficient insurance or experiencing hardships in other ways, is there a way for folks to apply for some kind of reduction in fees to rebuild? I'd say that's being attacked on two fronts. One is the board has previously waved certain fees. We've designed a process where certain reviews don't need to happen. So those typical fees are not charged and some fees have been decreased, basically halved and review fees for technical reports and that whole system have also don't approach what it costs to do that work. So the board's already taken those actions vis-a-vis the fees. And then really spearheaded by the OR-3 and the long-term recovery group, there's kind of an umbrella of programs that are being developed for fire survivors. And I don't know if direct fee relief is on the menu, but they are the group who are looking at what to fire survivors need most in terms of support. And if this is one of those things, then I'm sure that they've got it on the menu of what they're trying to meet. Great. Okay. I'm having this available. Awesome. Related question, the charge for services, I think was expected to go down about $450,000. And I believe in the comments because anticipating only a 50% restoration of the furlough with 100% restoration of the furlough and being more fully staffed, would we expect that charges for services would remain the same or even go up? The charges for services, I believe, are the revenues that come from our, what we call our ATCOS projects, where the planters time is being charged on an hourly basis. So that one, we do that for development review work and also for certain technical reviews. So that should reflect the demand for those services. Yeah, if that answers your question. Okay. And with more staff, will we be able to fulfill a greater amount of demand or do you think the demand is a little bit lower this year? Well, that's a good observation. We're always looking at the planters time because time that they're spending on other things or time that we could be billing that we aren't billing because we don't have the planters to be doing that work is always in our minds. And so that is really a balance. And it is the most of the development review staff that account for that kind of hourly revenue. And there is, as you know, there's always a, there's always a queue in development review and more time could always be spent. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah. And again, just excited about the increased investment particularly in the sustainability and special projects as well at 47.2% increase. And I really think this is going to pay dividends for our County and look forward to all the great work that is coming out of the planning department. Thank you, Matt. Comments. Mr. Chair, I'll just jump in here. And first of all, I want to thank Kathy for her excellent problem solving skills and commitment to public service. She'll be missed. And I want to thank her entire staff who really stepped up in this time of crisis to provide really needed resources to the community as well as the sort of ongoing continual permit applications that we see. I thought the department has done an excellent job and it's on a good trend going forward. I, when you talk about that arc of recovery in my anecdotal conversations, I know Supervisor McPherson goes to these community meetings as well. I believe that actually we would be ahead of on the arc were it not for the incredibly high cost of building materials and labor right now, people have found the process very easy. It's a difficult time. It's difficult for people to go through the process in regular times, but certainly after they've experienced the trauma of a fire, it's very difficult. And I think our staff and the four lead staff have been excellent about doing outreach and being there for them when they need the most. And I, like everyone, like others have said, I appreciate that we're learning lessons from this crisis that we can apply to our regular permitting process and the move towards more electronic conversations. And it's simplified permitting process, I think we'll pay dividends both for the county and the community going forward. But I just want to thank everyone who's stepped up and really served this community when they needed it the most. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Friend, any comments? Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I also would like to thank and commend Ms. Malloy for her work as the director for the West. Well, the entire time I've been on the board of supervisors and so I haven't known another director and I felt that you were an integral part of my understanding of the land use patterns within Santa Cruz County. You were always available to sit down with me and explain complex issues, especially when I was a new supervisor and we've had plenty of phone calls and conversations both late in the evening and on weekends and so your availability, especially in advance of board meetings was always appreciated. And there's a lot of work that's done behind the scenes to make sure that the board and staff really do understand the complexity of what makes up California land use law, which is really something else, very unique to hear. I'll say, and your work in helping modernize the planning department over the last nine or so years is not unnoticed. Your team that you've also put together, your executive team with Pia, Carolyn and others, they're an excellent team and I'm looking forward to seeing the next phase of the planning department as we modernize even more. It's some of this as Supervisor Coonerty has noted, had to come due to crisis, but some of it were things that were actually already in the planning process and this may be expediting it. It's a team that is interested in innovation and we as a board I know are interested in innovation. There's a lot of pressures within Santa Cruz County to ensure that we can provide additional housing, especially affordable housing, but we can also do it within the values and the environmental requirements that CEQA outlines. And I think that that's a very difficult task to do, but I think it's a task that your team does very well and I'm excited about some of the changes that are actually coming the next year or two that your team is helping to drive in this regard. But Kathy, just an acknowledgement for your work because you will be, not only will you be missed, but I think that a lot of my understanding at least on the planning side came from some of those early conversations where you really took a lot of time to ensure that each of the board members understood the nuances of what we needed to know. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Caput, Supervisor Caput in your comments. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I wanna thank your staff also for all the hard work you've been doing. I only have one question and basically that would be for the affordable housing with Midpen 78 Atkinson Lane. It's a project that I wanna be behind and actually work to get it done. The problem of what I'm trying to avoid is years ago when I was on the city council, when you open up one like Brewington or Rogers that'll connect to Atkinson Lane, the people in that whole community of Martin Ellie and Stanford and all these different streets down there, they're worried that it's gonna become a thoroughfare that'll be like Freedom Boulevard shooting through and it'll be a shortcut going through Atkinson Lane. I think we need to be very open on that. We have to have public comment on it and what kind of traffic mitigation we have for that project of adding affordable housing. I guess what I'm basically saying, I don't need a big battle going on now after we've been working with COVID and also the fire situation, the homeless shelters and all that. So I think this can be done right but we have to show the public what traffic mitigation we have that will prevent that from being a thoroughfare where people will take a shortcut and change the whole community. The Martin Ellie area and all that is about a mile and a half away and right now it dead ends and then it would be opened up. So we got to look at that real close. Have you got a schematic and everything we can work that out? I don't know if that's a question you're agreeing. To bring up Supervisor Caput, we will be sure and work with you and the community on that project as it moves forward. And so you can be assured we're gonna be very much in touch with you and working with you and the community to finalize the plans for that project. You remember how we got when we were both working with City at the time? Oh yeah, I remember. It was pretty bad. Yeah, I still have the scars for that. Okay, but I think it can be worked out. Yeah, yeah, okay. Thank you. Any questions from the public? Any comments from the public? There are no members from the public that would like to address this item. Entertain a motion to approve the line department budget. I'll move the recommended action. I second. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you again. Planning department. Now we will consider approval of the 2021-22 proposed budgets for the Department of Public Works including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and as recommended by the County Administrative Officer we have the 2021-22 proposed budget pages 259 to 288 supplemental budget pages 74, 71 to 74 on the ARPA and staffing changes and supplemental budget pages 75 and 76 an infrastructure request. Matt Machado our Assistant County Administrative Officer and Director of Public Works will be making the presentation. Thank you, Chair. I will share my screen here momentarily. Can you see my screen? Yes, we can hear you fine. All right. Thank you. Good morning Chair McPherson, Supervisors, CEO, Mr. Palacios. My name is Matt Machado I'm one of the Deputy CAOs and the Director of Public Works. I'd like to begin by thanking our CAO and his budget team for their leadership, guidance and support. I would like to also thank our Public Works leadership and budget team for managing hundreds of programs and efforts. Today, get over here. Today I will cover achievements, our budget proposal numbers and emerging issues. I would like to begin with some of our achievements which were also documented in the County Strategic Plan objectives. We had a record year in many ways. We began repair on 34 storm damage repair projects. We resurfaced more than 32 miles of roadway. We repaired or replaced nearly 27,000 feet of sewer pipe. We completed significant roadway repairs on 15 County roads and we mowed more than 300 lane miles of shoulder vegetation. We also secured significant grant funds to improve Soquel Drive. Additionally, we achieved multiple major milestones in the effort to deliver the Pajaro River flood control projects and we responded and adapted to two major disasters in our County. Public Works logged nearly 12,000 hours in direct response to the CZU fire. I'm very proud of our Public Works team and very grateful for their commitment, perseverance and dedication to serving our community. Moving into our proposed budget, our proposed budget as compared to our current year budget is before you. The primary reason for the significant change in the budget number is due to storm damage project delivery schedules. You heard this in the opening remarks this morning from Ms. Mallory. But I'll add a bit more to that. During this current fiscal year, Public Works repaired 34 sites including the restoration of access to roads that had been closed since the 2017 storm damage. At this point, all the roadways damaged during the 2017 event are open to traffic. In this coming year, we plan to deliver a significant number of projects that will restore two lanes of travel on those roadways that had lost partial lanes. After this coming fiscal year, we will continue to make final repairs to damaged shoulders and damaged storm drain facilities from the 2017 event. We believe that in the next two to three years, we will essentially complete all of the repair of the monumental damage from the 2017 storm season. And we expect our overall budget to fluctuate during this time significantly due to the storm damage project delivery schedule. Lastly, I would like to point out the near status quo of staffing level shown on this slide at a proposed level of 265.75 full-time equivalents. Here's our proposed budget by major division. In the transportation division, we have 78 full-time equivalents, which include 57 field staff and 21 engineering and support staff. The proposed budget of a little more than 58 million includes 23 million for general roadway projects, 24 million for 2017 storm damage repair projects, and approximately 10 million for road operations and maintenance. In the special services division, we have 131 full-time equivalents, which include 63 sanitation staff, eight drainage and flood control staff, 53 recycling and solid waste staff, and seven construction management staff members. The proposed budget of more than 37 million includes 21 million for recycling and solid waste, 12 million for drainage and flood control, and 4 million for sanitation, noting that this number excludes the large sanitation district, which has its own separate budget process. And then finally, our administration division, which is our centralized business office, providing support to all functions of public works. This division also includes our fleet budget and our CSA program administration budget. Before sharing some emerging issues, I'm going to shift into some highlights of our capital projects in real property division. This division continues to focus on support of RTC infrastructure efforts, including various segments of the NBSST rail trail project, various elements of highway one projects and pedestrian over crossings. They also will continue to support and project manage various facility site plans, and they are providing critical design and project management for our recycling and solid waste division. Moving now into emerging issues, I will begin in our transportation division. This group continues to focus, emerging issues continue to focus around funding, deferred maintenance and the pursuit of grant funding. I would like to point out that we continue to work with state and federal leaders to develop the future of roadway maintenance funding beyond the practical structure of the current gas tax program. We are also working closely with our regional partners at the RTC to ensure regional funding is prioritized and used to its fullest extent. Lastly, we seem to be in a constant natural disaster response and recovery mode, which is the nature of our natural environment here in Santa Cruz County. Next, I would like to share some of the emerging issues in our special services division. They include continual focus and more detail on the needs of a new transfer station at Buena Vista landfill and a new organics processing facility also proposed at the Buena Vista landfill. We will continue to provide updates on financial strategies and project options and analysis in this coming year. Other continued efforts and challenges include sewer water and drainage infrastructure needs. Lastly, we have accomplished multiple milestones with our Pajaro River flood control project and will continue to focus energy and resources to deliver this much needed project to our community in the southern part of our county. This leads me to recommended action of consideration of approval of the 2021-22 proposed budget for the Department of Public Works, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. I can address any questions you may have, noting that we also have key staff on the call today to help answer any questions. And I would like to thank you for your continued support. Thank you, Mr. Machado and thank you, my colleagues on the board for allowing me because I'm the chair and just to make some early statements on each of these subject matters. It's really hard to imagine a county department that has more breadth and its operations than public works, when you consider road maintenance, recycling and solid waste, sanitation, real property and on and on. But one of the biggest topics of members of the public contact the board about is road condition. And it's understandable that with 600 miles of roadway in the county, it takes considerable amount of time and funding to address the needs the best we can. As identified in this budget report, we face $300 million in deferred maintenance at $260 million, that's in brooms. And then we also have culverts and other issues that we have to face in transportation. And I really again, want to express my appreciation for voters approving measure D in 2016, I hear for the county and then the state legislature for approving the SV1 and the voters sustaining that financing bill that we, the state passed. And I'm hopeful that the infrastructure bill worked on now in a federal level with the Biden administration. I just hope and pray that infrastructure indeed gets, really gets the bulk of that. And I know there's quite a discussion back in Washington, DC. And I just want to thank public works for strengthening its resources as best it can and making it work as well as you have. It's been really outstanding. Specifically, I'd like to compliment and thank the road crews for greatly increasing the number of vegetation management miles to 300 miles. In my eight years in office, that's the most we have been able to accomplish. I think overall, it's certainly needed during this extreme drought and fire season that we have. I also want to thank public works for the close working relationship that's had with our library system, specifically on its management of the six construction projects that have resulted in the beautiful new branches and important renovation projects that we've mentioned earlier, whether it be up in the center of the valley or at Capitola, well, that's in the city, but LaSelma and other places. I'd like to really, I don't know how you can express the appreciation I have for the response that you had for the, after the season you fire. It was a gigantic effort to remove down trees and get roads open in particular. I want to acknowledge you, Ms. Machado and your team and other aspects of the fire recovery planning. It's truly a joint effort with many fire departments. There's one issue that I think in the years to come, we all want to see the greenhouse gas emissions reduced, which automobiles or traffic is responsible for about half of them, but with, I mentioned Measure D and SB1 and now we've been able to do more. We had addressed more road problems than we ever have, but with the addition of and concentration on my planes and pedestrian access, which we all want and electric vehicles, I can see that the revenues coming from the gas tax are going to be decreasing in the very near future, quite a bit that are applied to road maintenance. I haven't heard of any specific big legislation, state or federal that addresses that issue about how we can keep up with the revenue sources that might be coming in for road maintenance and for the access to transportation from pedestrians and bikes. Have you heard of anything in yourself that's really on the hopper under these sessions and just about ready to end? But this is going to be a real problem for financing our public works projects regarding roads in the future, I think. Yeah, it's a hot topic. I haven't heard of any solutions yet, but I'm happy to say that they're talking about it and that's the start of a solution, right? It is discussing it. So we will keep engaging and push for solutions, but you're right on. It's the gas tax is maybe at the end of its useful life and so we need to look for a new way to fund all the modes of transportation, something that can meet the needs, needs of our community. So you're right on there, Supervisor. Thank you. I think what the board members found is first I started the other end with Supervisor Caput. You have any questions or remarks for Mr. Michala? Hi, Matt, how are you doing? Well, thank you. Good to see you again. You've got to be in the head of public works and all that, you're involved in all kinds of issues and I want to thank you for all the time and attention you've been putting into it. So I know you're looking out for South County and we got Lakeview paved and it looks good. And of course, about a year or two ago, we got Highway 1, the numbers anyway, Riverside Drive connecting all the way to 101. Locals call it by the name Riverside or Hacker Pass or what do you call it? Anyway, rather than the numbers. So, and also the work that's been done on Highway 152 and Green Valley and Supervisor Friend and I share Green Valley Road and things have been going real well. Thank you. And we'll concentrate later on on Murphy Crossing and we'll have more discussion on that. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your comments, Mr. Supervisor Caput. Supervisor Coonerty. Sorry, I just want to take a moment. Just want to thank you for your work, your quick response to the fires you were all out there as the hillsides were still burning, making repairs. And I look forward to the investment that we're making in our essential infrastructure. I know as it's been raised, there aren't adequate resources right now, but I think we're making some targeted investments that will pay benefits for all the county residents. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just really briefly, I mean, because I work so closely with public works. I mean, you guys are really our rock stars with very limited resources on, and it isn't just about the roads and it isn't just about the fires but about the flood protection and everything else that you do. I just want to know that you to know with the recent storm damage we've even had in my district this last winter, even though it seemed like we didn't have any rains, we had a pretty significant project. And then the work that we're still building out of really just appreciate that attitude that you guys bring to the job every single day. And I look forward to working with you in the coming year. Thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Machado for all your amazing work this last year, both in the, of course, and your entire department, both in the response to the CZU fire and in making up so much ground on this, the storm damage repair. It's pretty remarkable the breadth of responsibilities that DPW has from roads and drainage to sanitation district and recycling and solid waste capital projects. So it's amazing how much you guys manage. I just want to reiterate what Supervisor McPherson said that road conditions are probably the thing we hear from constituents about the most. And it's really no surprise. I think roads are the one county service that every resident in the county uses every day. Even if you're not leaving your home, it's quite likely that you're getting an Amazon package delivery or somebody else is using roads to ensure that your electric lines or other services, utilities are reaching you successfully. So it's probably our most essential county infrastructure. And the fact that we have $300 million in deferred maintenance and that that's a hole that's getting deeper by to the tune of $24 million every year, I think is really a rallying cry for this board and for our entire county that we have to address this issue because we can't afford to let our roads continue to deteriorate year after year. So whether it's growing existing tax base, looking at new revenue measures or just fighting like hell to make sure we get our fair share from the RTC for of regional funding, we absolutely have to address this issue. And just to finish on a high note, it's been really exciting watching the pop-up on Portola go in. And I think it just reminds us that the work that happens with public works, I mean, it's our built environment and it has such an opportunity to change the way we think about our community to inspire us and really to change the way that we move around, which of course is integrally linked to our emissions and to how we address the climate crisis. So I think there's a ton of opportunity here if we do this right to inspire everyone who lives here, but we have to address the ongoing deficit. Thank you, thank you. And I think probably as enlightening as anything is when to miss the landfill, that landfill that will never die has another eight or 10 years left in it, but also to correct that it's, what is the $30 million project at least? Yeah, it's a big one. Yeah, that's one of the capital projects we're gonna have to really face up to very near future, really eight years. Okay, any other closing comments, Mr. Machado? Listen, any comments from the public? There are no members who would like to speak to this item. Yeah, I just wanted to mention too that Director Machado mentioned about the water infrastructure and public works really works on that, but the county itself is not the water purveyor. There's several water districts as people know. That is what you can do to improve that situation. I know that with a lot of building comparatively that's going on, people are concerned about running out of water or coming into a drought season. Our function is really to connect those resources from the various districts for the county. I think people need to have more clarity on that. I don't know if you wanna make any comments on that, but thank you for your efforts in helping that big concern in the county. Yeah, I think there's some great projects going on in those utilities such as water. And even though we don't manage much of it, we do coordinate with all of it, with the road use, with that connectivity, with the support of some of the very large projects, some of the recharge projects, some of the recycling projects. And so even though we don't manage it directly, we get to be a part of it in a partnership fashion. And it's critical, as you say, especially in this drought time and trying to make the best use of those resources that we have. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, Brian. Okay, hi. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Second, please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay, we will go to our last item on the regular agenda, 34, before we're going to close session. And that's to consider approval of the 2021-22 proposed budgets for the plan acquisition section of capital projects, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and recommended by the Canada Administrative Officer. We have the 2021-22 proposed budget on pages six, excuse me, 369 to 384 and a supplemental budget pages 95 to 100. And I think to address us in this, let's see here. I think Trish Daniels, is she going to be the senior analyst or Carlos? Are you going to be talking about that initially? I just wanted to introduce Trish Daniels from the County Administrative Officer's Office and she's going to be leading and starting off with our presentation. Thank you. Trish, I believe you're on mute. No, we still can't hear you. Sorry about that. Let me start over again and try this again. Okay, so my name is Trish Daniels. I am an analyst in the County Administrative Office and I'm here today to present the plan acquisition section of the capital projects budget. Also with me today are Parks Director Jeff Gaffney, General Services Director Michael Beaton and Director of Capital Projects in Public Works, Travis Carey. Our agenda today will consist of a general overview of capital projects along with a review of fiscal year 2021 and a preview of fiscal year 21-22. We will have a couple of slides on the numbers and then project presentations from Parks, General Services and Public Works. So we're going to start with just a general overview of capital projects. And so capital projects consists of both plan acquisition and infrastructure, plan acquisition, including government buildings, facilities, libraries, parks and beaches. Well, infrastructure projects are mainly streets, sewers, drainage facilities and other things of that type. The infrastructure projects are part of the public works budget, which we just heard their presentation. And so this budget presentation will focus only on the plant portion of capital projects. Lastly, as a reminder to the board and to the public, plant projects from prior years from fiscal year 2021 and even prior to that are fully budgeted and rebudgeted as part of the adopted budget process. Therefore, as we go through the numbers, you will see some significant drops in percentages, but that will change once the adopted budget is finalized. So just a quick 2021 year review. The facilities, a couple of facilities highlights, the Long Range Facility Plan was accepted by the board on February 2nd, 2021. The plan contains a number of recommendations, including consolidation of the real property portfolio, supporting housing development and supporting flexible remote work policies amongst a number of other recommendations. Staff will continue to implement those recommendations from the plan with the first step being the acquisition, the potential acquisition, if everything goes as planned of the West Ridge Facility in Watsonville as the location of the new South County Service Center. Also related to facilities, the Capital Projects Review Committee was officially launched in December, 2020. And this group consists of representatives from the County Administrative Office, the Auditor, Controller, Charger, Attacks Collector, General Services and Public Works. The group meets monthly to review and approve Capital Projects in fiscal year 21-22. The committee will develop and approve a scoring methodology that will continue to assist us as far as prioritizing and financing capital projects. When we get to deferred maintenance, unfortunately, aside from critical emergencies that required an immediate response, little progress was made on deferred maintenance, but that's mainly because General Services staff were reassigned to support pandemic shelter and care functions, and that really did take up a lot of their time. But we do expect that to turn around next year as we go into the next fiscal year and wind down the shelter operations. So next, we're gonna review the 21-22 proposed budget. And this is where we sort of get into the numbers. So just as a preview, we have $3 million in facilities and that is from the General Fund and it consists of 2.5 million for critical capital projects. And those were approved by the Capital Projects Review Committee. And so the two projects that were approved were funding for the Unified Permit Center that you heard about from the Planning Department. And that project was approved for $1.1 million and then additional funding of $1.4 million for the main jail control system to address electrical and any other infrastructure needs as that project gets underway in the next few months. The control system was originally funded for $2 million from the certs financing and is currently funded for 4.5 million, which we believe to be a sufficient budget to complete the project. General Fund dollars of $500,000 have been set aside to respond to deferred maintenance projects in 21-22. This includes responding to immediate needs, including replacing the roof of the facility at Highlands Park. Other financing sources includes $500,000 in American Rescue Plan funding and that's to clean the HVAC ducts at the main jail and also funding from Cal OES, both their Power Safety Shutoff Program and their Community Power Resilience Program. And we will be using that funding to also replace and or upgrade the generator at the main jail. Lastly, the 21-22 Capital Improvement Plan will be prepared by the Public Works Department in the fall for presentation to the board no later than November. Preparing the CIP after final budget adoption allows for more accurate budget information in the document. Okay, so now we're gonna get into the numbers. Plan acquisition consists of General Fund Plant, Fund 40, which is government facilities, Funds 42 through 49, which are various parks funding sources and Park Dedication District. So this chart shows the total funding for all of the funds combined. The $3 million that you see in the General Fund contribution is the same as part of the $3 million that you see on the revenues line. Administratively, the contribution is budgeted in General Fund Plant and then it's transferred to Fund 40 Plant as an operating transfer. So in reality, the total expenditures are really less by $3 million. And it's just because of the way we have to complete those budget actions. And then the next slide will provide a breakdown of the expenditures by division. So here again, we have the breakdown of the various divisions in Plant, the $3 million. Again, the $3 million that you see in Plant is the same $3 million that you see on the facilities line. Facilities is scheduled to decrease by 95.4%. Parks and Special Projects and the Redevelopment Successor Agency, sorry about that, have a total of 77,800 in funding or a 95.5% reduction from fiscal year 2021 and Park Dedication budgets are reduced by 11% to 1.65 million in 2021-22. For a total proposed budget of $7.7 million or an 88.8% reduction from the prior fiscal year. Although again, just as the last reminder, this number will substantially increase once prior year projects are rebudgeted as part of the adopted budget process. So next we'll have project presentations by Parks, General Services and Public Works. And first up will be Parks Director, Jeff Gaffney. Thank you, Trish. And hello again, Board and Chair McPherson and the rest of the Board. I appreciate some time to talk about some of the things we're moving on. I think people are aware and the Board is aware that we've been fundraising at Hidden Beach and to some degree, we've had a lot of success and this has also been an effort for a family who lost their son, their very young son, Jett. And it is a very special project that we've been able to work on getting the playground completed and making it actually accessible for all. We anticipate that'll be done by the end of this year. Something that we're looking forward to doing and potentially working on maybe even adding a regular permanent restroom out there. So that's a nice thing. We're replacing the roof at Highlands. Roof is, roofs in Parks are always so significant and so important and I'm glad we're able to get another roof in place. It's so important to the structure and integrity of the buildings that we have. We're doing the elevator replacement at Betts Hall in Santa Cruz, which is so very important in general for accessibility and it's had some issues in the past and hopefully try to keep from anybody getting stuck in the elevator. And then Simkins, the swim center, as we alluded to earlier, we're gonna be doing a lot of things out here, the age of the facilities, the infrastructure, the tremendous amount of infrastructure that goes into a facility of that size and all of the things underneath the working parts and pieces. We're gonna be redoing the plaster and piping and also working on the slide, as we mentioned. So looking forward to getting a lot of that done and redoing LED lights, which will be great for the power bill and also great for the length of time that it'll last. Out of Moran Lake, we are working on putting together the restoration and public access plan. This is our first step, as I mentioned, important components of our natural resource management efforts. This is the first step towards getting that in place for the Moran Lake Park and that will also be a critical step for us to apply for larger grant funding to do larger projects that need to be completed out there. Very sensitive resources that we're dealing with and a lot of scientific study involved. So I will be now turning it over to the Master of Disaster Response. Man, I've been waiting for all day. Mr. Michael Beaton, Director of General Services. Wow. I just gotta say, wow, thanks, Director Gaffney. Trish Daniels, board. I'm Michael Beaton, I'm the Director of General Services. I don't know about that opening right there, but in addition to, I'd like to thank Carlos Palacios, the County Budget Manager, Christina Mowry, the CEO's office, and the Board of Advisors for the past considerations and focus on improving county facilities and addressing some deferred maintenance throughout the various county buildings. The Capital Projects budget for your consideration today in combination with General Services budget is a great step forward. The budget does not only reflect the county's priorities for facilities in capital projects, but also adds staffing to support the numerous projects that are currently being managed. I would like to thank the General Services family for their dedication to the upkeep of the county facilities on a 24-7 basis. Since my time as a director, we have been battling keeping up the, with the failing components of our aging infrastructure. One of the examples I'll show today, and that is hopefully being addressed in this next year's budget, is a drain pipe from several on Ocean Street where we have to replace about four or five of these every single year, and we keep deferring the total replacement project. This is a copper pipe, as you could see, it's completely corroded through, if you can see my screen. And we can take it and replace one patch at a time, included in the budget, and identified on the slide on the bottom bullet point, is a set aside of about $500,000 to help us address some deferred maintenance items, such as the 701 drainage pipe replacement project, lighting control fix at 701 Ocean, and some light asphalt repair work at Emeline campus. Some of the other great projects within the Capital Projects budget includes addressing deferred maintenance at the Roundtree Correctional Facility, with a replacement of 225,000 gallon water well storage tanks, and piping with drainage issues for stormwater runoff. The current tanks at the site are beyond the useful life, and have begun to leak, and we run the risk of a catastrophe if those do fail and the pump system does not work anymore. This project is expected to be completed by the year end. The Capital Projects budget also includes emergency fuel tank replacements at two county fire stations that have failed, and our hope is to get them replaced before we have any significant fire, as it takes some time for our fire engines and fire apparatus to drive down the hills to get fuel and fueling stations. So this is a time essence issue. You've heard about the DNA lab, as well as on the Sheriff's Chanticleer campus as well. Next slide, please. One of the significant deferred maintenance items that I'm actually excited about is the 701 water proofing project that your board will consider for approval of the service agreement next week on June 29th, with work to be completed before year end. Every year for the past several years, General Services has strategically placed 40 to 60 buckets, just like the one I'm holding right here, throughout 701, because water comes through the cracks of the buildings and the seams of the building. So we have to strategically place buckets every single year to catch the water from entering in the building. This project that the board will hopefully approve next week will address those weeks and the deferred maintenance for the county building. Included our operational improvements, such as the first phase of the construction of the Unified Permit Center that you heard planning talk about earlier today, with estimated completion in early 2022, the main gel control systems that Trish Daniels so eloquently identified, spearheaded by the Sheriff's Department. The main gel replacement project, which is expected to be completed by January of 2022. And we are currently having plans and specs being developed and hope to bring that to your board. Sometime in August for approval to move forward on that project. The main gel HVAC ducting Trish Daniels identified, which is to clean the airflow and ventilation for requirements for the inmate population and safeguarding. And the last bullet point that we have identified here is the county wide generator study. The county has quite a few different buildings where we have generators that are undersized for the building. One example is the 701 Ocean Street. What this seed money does for us is it allows us to look at each individual county building, the current generation power that we have as far as the backup. And we'll give us plans and specs for potential consideration in future funding that might become available for us to actually power our critical infrastructure that the county has. Next slide, please. Some of the joint projects that the county of Santa Cruz has in partnership with General Services and Public Works. I'll talk about the first one, which is the sobering center replacing project. And then I'll toss it over to our director of capital projects with the public works department, Travis Carey. The general services, the sobering center is a project that we're looking at building on the main campus of the jail. That involves potential donation of a modular unit or two from the housing matters, nonprofit. And we're currently in design phase and we hope to bring a feasibility study and review that we've been doing in partnership with DPW. We hope to bring that to the board, I believe in the next few months for consideration. With that, I'll toss it over to Travis Carey for continuation of the slide. Thank you. Great, thank you, Mr. Beaton and good morning, Chair and members of the board and CEO Palacios. My name is Travis Carey, Director of Capital Projects, Department of Public Works. And I wanted to give a special thank you today to Trish Daniels for really leading the development of the couple of projects review committee and organizing all the departments that have been involved in that process. It's been a lot of work and we really appreciate your leadership in that area. It's been great to bring the departments together and start working together. So in terms of the South County service center, it's a big project that you're all aware of now. And it's a great project that demonstrates Public Works and GSD working together. So Public Works real property and capital projects taking a lead on the acquisition phase. And then we're working very closely now with GSD who's assisting us with the facility assessments and the inspections that are required for the facility. And then we'll be working together with GSD to really prioritize the improvements that need to happen at the facility. And all of that gearing up for really making sure the facility's in good shape to hand over to GSD for the long-term operations and maintenance of the facility. So it's been really great on this project and a couple others just starting to work closely together. And it's a lot of fun. Next slide. All right, so this slide here, it gives an example of some of the larger projects that we're working on out of Public Works. And it really demonstrates a pretty robust work plan and another really busy year for us in capital projects. And I think it also highlights the benefits of having dedicated project managers at the county and capital projects now fully staffed with our three full-time project managers. And I want to give a real quick thank you to the capital projects and real property team. So our project managers, Damon Adlow, Nicole Steele and Rob Tidmore working on all these projects and our real property team led by Kimberly Finley, our chief real property agent and our real property agent, Doug DeVoie and Jerry Vargas. So great team, a lot of work going on and great job everybody. Thank you so much. So Juvenile Hall, the first two projects here, they've been combined into one project that we're ready to go out to bid. We're just waiting for state review. And these two projects combined together are being managed by Nicole Steele, project manager. So again, we're all ready to go. We're waiting for state approval and final development of the ground lease. The project is funded and we're ready to go. So we're really looking forward to starting construction of this really critical facility. The animal shelter project, you'll see that coming to the board for approval to bid on June 29th. And this is the phase one project, which is a $1.8 million renovation of the main facility. And that's been project manager Rob Tidmore in Public Works. And we'll be looking forward to this project going out to bid and then continuing to develop for phase two and phase three out of the Alamo structure. And a couple of projects on here, the Highway 152 and also the South County Service Center being led by the real property section and capital projects, Kimberly Finley, two-fuel property agent. So assisting of course roads on that project and a couple of other smaller projects. Next slide. All right, libraries. So this is a $37 million construction and renovation program. So we have six active library projects. And these are all being managed by project manager Damon Adlow in Public Works. And Damon has just done a phenomenal job, really single-handedly project managing all six of these projects at one time. They're all in different locations of course in all different phases. And so we're really excited that we've now completed the feldsend and the Selva branches are now complete. We have Boulder Creek currently under construction. So we'll be looking forward to wrapping that one up as well. Live Oak Library is going out for construction this fall. And then two remaining really big projects, the Live Oak Annex, which is the addition at Simpkins Swim Center and then the Aptos Library, both currently in final design and permitting and hopefully we'll be getting started on construction in spring 2022. So that kind of outlines some of our larger projects. And I think I'm turning it back over to Trish at this point. Thank you, Travis. All right, well that just brings us to the end of our budget presentation. And so now the recommended actions are to approve the plan acquisition section of the capital project budget along with any supplemental materials. I do want to thank members of the review committee and other county department representatives. As Travis stated, it's been a long haul and a lot of work this past year to get this committee up and off the ground and running. And I appreciate both the members' patience and also the department's patience as they navigate this new journey as far as approving capital projects go. So that brings us to the end of our presentation and we are happy to answer any questions that the board or members of the public may have. Thank you. Thank you, Trish and Travis for those presentations. It's really an exciting time for the county to move onward and upward in many respects with the libraries and the facilities, the Morgan Center, especially in the South County in the future, it's gonna be a tremendous asset to serving people in the South County. I just want to thank you for your dedicated efforts. I think that we're gonna be seeing a lot of good things happening. The county has 300 facilities and we will be able to consolidate some and better serve the people of the South County. So we're very excited about the future of our capital projects and thank you for all your dedicated efforts to see us move forward. I think I'll start this time with Supervisor Coonerty to prize him. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair, for the wake-up calls. I want to appreciate the fact that I think we have not, as an institution, looked at our real estate and our facilities as an essential resource that we need to maintain. We looked at them as just ongoing costs and the multi-departmental team here who's worked so well together, I think is really treating our facilities the way they should be, which is as a fundamental resource in service delivery to our community and I'm supportive of the actions that they propose today. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Hey, Mr. Chair, I actually have to say how nice it was to have all of this in one place. I mean, the scope of projects, we hear about it during the year and those that are within our own districts were obviously intimately involved with, but I really appreciated the presentation just to see everything that not only was done this year, but what has been planned for the coming year and that the breadth is pretty exceptional. And from not just the South County Service Center, which is going to transform our engagement relationship with those constituents that have really been under-invested in for a long time in the South County, but also in some of these amazing parks partnerships to just the general needs, I mean, the library, the largest investment in libraries in the last 30 years and then just the general needs across the buildings. It's very impressive amount of work that's being done. And I think that we are making some transformational and intergenerational investments in our infrastructure and our community in ways that haven't been done and like I said, in about 30 years. So very impressive. Thank you, Ms. Daniels, by the way for the oversight of the overview of it, but everybody else that presented today, it was very helpful. And I think we could also useful to ensure that we communicate this even better. Just we tend to communicate about single projects as they come along, which I understand, but I think actually presenting this in a more macro perspective could be useful to show what it is that the County has done and what it didn't tend to do in the coming year. Thank you. Right, very good. Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. And yes, thank you to everyone who presented, Mr. Kerry, Ms. Daniels, Director Gaffney and of course, Master of Disaster Response, Director Beaton. A lot of exciting projects and investments here. It's great to see the investments in main jail, both HVAC upgrading the generator and the control system there. That'll all ultimately lead to a better environment for anyone who's there. The investments in 701 Ocean Street are much needed. Definitely, as I've said, I've seen the water leaking in through the walls and it'd be nice not to have too many buckets in the office this year. I thought I also heard mentioned that we might be addressing the lighting control system, which would also be most welcome. Of course, the investments in parks and particularly the Simkins Swim Center are fantastic. The Morrin Lake Restoration and Public Access Plan is not to be understated, given that with sea level rise and the climate crisis, wetland areas like this are really gonna be at the forefront of our response. And the library projects, both the Live Oak Library and Live Oak Annex updates are gonna be really exciting to see. The animal shelter renovation. And of course, last but not least, the South County Service Center. I mean, there's just so many great investments being made here, which will serve us for years to come. So thank you for all your good work. Thank you. Supervisor Caput, any comments? Thank you. I want to thank Trish, Michael Beaton, and Travis for all your work and for this presentation. It was really nice to see the Veterans Memorial Building and one of your on the screen here. It looked like 10 years ago that it might be knocked down. We were able to get it retrofitted and fixed and has a real emotional attachment to a lot of Veterans, especially while we've lost all of the World War I Veterans in the last few years. We're losing almost all of our World War II Veterans and we still have quite a few Korean War Veterans. So I don't know, Michael, if you're still there, I guess, was that your grandfather that was a Veteran? Was he the Korean War or was he World War II? Yeah, no, he was World War II tank commander. Yes. You still have all those letters that he wrote and everything. All 384 of them, yes, sir, I do. 384, wow. That's something to be proud of. So anyway, that Memorial Building was basically built for him and all the people that were Veterans before. So I'm glad we saved it. It's really nice to see. Thank you. Is Hulahann and Highway 152 looked like it's really going to happen? Do we have all the funding or were... I mean, we've been working on that probably about six, seven years, right? I don't know, anybody can answer that. That's my understanding. Yeah, I do believe the project is now fully funded and the department does intend to put the project out to bed within the next couple of months. That'll be a big deal for a lot of people in that area. It'll relieve traffic considerably. And I know it's been very complicated. We haven't been slow on going that because of our being slow. We face one complication after another. And I want to thank all of you for your work on that. And then real quick on West Ridge, wow. For South County, that's big. And it's really good to see. So thank you for all the work we've been doing on that. On the main jail, I know we're gonna have a lot of money that's gonna go into that. And the generator and the duct cleaning and all that. Is it gonna be actually when we're done and all the money we're putting into it, we're gonna actually preserve the jail where it is or we're gonna have to expand it into another building? Thank you, Supervisor. I'm not sure I can 100% address that question, but I do know the money that we're putting into the building includes the systems that I might need to defer to Carlos Palacio regarding the bigger discussion about maintaining the current jail at its current site. But I know that the control system will be replaced as well as the generator to be able to supply generator to that power to that building on 100%. We're currently, we'll only be able to apply 60%. That'll be a big deal too, because there was talk about that the current facility either fix it or we'll have to move it right at one time. Yeah, that I'd want to open up Pandora's box. Okay, anyway, thank you very much. Okay, any comments from the public? You're on mute. Do we have any comments from the public? We have a connection with Stephanie. Here we go, sorry about that. We had about the second kill switch. So there are no members of the public that would like to speak to this item. Okay, I'll return it to the board for recommendation. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. Person. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay, now we will move, we will recess to closed sessions. Are there any reportable items? There's nothing reportable today, Supervisor. Okay, and do we have a different link to get into that? Or should we just stay? Yes, a Teams link. Teams link, okay. Our next meeting, we will recess until Thursday at 9 a.m. You'll be able to reach us virtually by Zoom. We'll be discussing the District Attorney, Public Defender Probation and the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. This meeting, we will recess this meeting into closed session and see everyone at 9 a.m. Have a good day.