 The hour of three o'clock having arrived and the council having finished its business and closed session. We are now in regular session. Clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Newsom is absent. Council Member Brown. Here. Watkins. Here. Brunner. Present. Calentary Johnson. Present. Vice Mayor Golder. Here. And Mayor Keely. Here. We are on the second item on our agenda. This is a proclamation declaring August 22nd as Downtown Ambassadors Day and I would like to invite Council Member Calentary Johnson to make a presentation of the proclamation. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Ambassadors, for being here. So I serve on the Downtown Management Corporation Board. Yes, please step up. And when I heard the report of what you all have been doing over this last summer, I was so impressed. So I asked that our Mayor do this proclamation and he's given me the opportunity to present it to you. So I'm gonna read it and then I'll give you a moment to comment and I'll come and give this to you. All right, whereas Downtown Ambassadors work seven days a week to support a positive experience for visitors, employees, residents and others spending time in the Downtown District. And whereas Downtown Ambassadors are friendly on-street concierge for the Downtown community and address quality of life issues and provide assistance for those in need. And whereas Downtown Ambassadors are funded through an assessment of properties in Front Street, Cedar Street, Pacific Avenue and Side Streets, one block in either direction between Laurel Street and Water Street that is funded by the Downtown Management Corporation. And whereas Downtown Ambassadors, whose mission is to make public spaces friendly and vibrant for the communities they serve are managed by the Downtown Association of Santa Cruz are an extension of the businesses in the Downtown District. And whereas Downtown Ambassadors were closely with the many agencies who support the Downtown District on our both a valuable link for the business community and a welcoming face for visitors by extending the customer service of businesses out onto the sidewalks. And whereas in a nutshell, Downtown Ambassadors provide services for anything a city in Downtown District needs to be a more desired destination, cleaning, safety, beautification and hospitality. Now therefore, on behalf of Fred Keely, Mayor of Santa Cruz City Council, we hereby proclaim August 22nd, 2023 as Downtown Ambassadors Day in the City of Santa Cruz and encourage all citizens to join us in expressing heartfelt appreciation to the Downtown Ambassadors team for their hard work and dedication to help create a safe, clean and welcoming environment for everyone who lives, works in or visits Downtown Santa Cruz. Thank you so much for all that you do. And I will come up and give this to you and see if you have any words. Good afternoon, feel free to make some remarks. Good afternoon, my name is Alicia and I am the team lead for the Downtown Santa Cruz Ambassador team. And we just wanna say that we are honored to receive this mayoral proclamation and thank you for the recognition. God love you all, thank you. My name is Ismael, thank you for everything. Certainly, thank you, sir. My name is Hucho and I appreciate you, everything you do. Thank you, sir. My name's Ambassador Cody and I just wanna say that it's our privilege and pleasure to help make Downtown and Santa Cruz look better and brighter for all of us. So thank you. Thank you Ambassador. I'm Jorian Wilkins and I'm with the Downtown Association of Santa Cruz and on behalf of the over 500 businesses Downtown, we wanna say how much we appreciate your daily support, what an enormous difference you make in the clean, safe and welcoming experience that we all enjoy because you're there every day because you handle all the things that come up, all the surprises, all the things the rest of us don't know what to do. You guys handle with an incredible amount of flexibility, grace and compassion every day and we're just so proud to have you be part of our team. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now, here's the good news. You don't have to stay for this meeting. Nice to see you. Presiding officer announcements have none, statement of disqualification. Any member need to disqualify themselves on a vote? Seeing and hearing none. Additions or deletions? Do we have additions or deletions to the agenda? We have none. We have none. City Attorney report from closed session. Sure. The Councilman in closed session with its legal counsel to discuss three liability claims, the claim of Kerry McCormick, the claim of Nancy Ogle and the claim of AFNI and that concludes my report. Thank you. Madam City Clerk, any items you need to draw to our attention on the calendar? None. Very good. Thank you. We are on the consent agenda. For those of you unfamiliar with it, we will take up on a single vote, items four through 16 inclusive. We will take all of those on one vote. What we will do is give the opportunity to council members and members of the public to pull an item off of that consent agenda for further discussion or comment or question. Let me start with the city council. Let me ask if members have questions on and I will start with Ms. Brunner. Ms. Brunner. Ms. Elendore Johnson. 14. 14. What would you like to do on that one? So this is the West Cliff Drive, Bethany Curve Culver. I just want to first acknowledge staff for continuing your work on this. And I'm wondering if since the writing of this agenda, if there's been any updates on how it's going with the contractor and getting that bid going. Good afternoon, sir. Afternoon, Kevin Crossley, city engineer. So update on the infill walls. We have our first bid expected tomorrow from Granite Construction. We received a draft schedule from them that we're reviewing. So things are progressing on that front. And our hope is to get this package out to bid as soon as possible to start generating interest in the second phase of work. Thank you for the questions on that. Thank you so much. Other items? Ms. Caldary Johnson, the vice mayor is recognized. I just wanted to comment on item 14 and a comment on another one. I'll start with 14. And I just wanted to thank the staff for the tremendous work that's gone into making this happen. I know it's a huge undertaking and collaboration with multiple agencies and the community. So I just want to thank and acknowledge all the work that they've put in that's gone above and beyond. And then a comment on number nine. And eight is that I'm super glad to see those apparatuses being replaced and in a way that's keeping up with the demand. So thank you for making that happen, everybody. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. Council Member Watkins is recognized. Council Member Brown is recognized. Very good. On one item. Make sure I get the right item here. If the clerk could, when we get around to voting on this, if you would record me as abstaining on item six and so far as I did not attend the meeting, I was unable to be here. So I won't be voting on the minutes of that meeting. This is the opportunity for anyone who is with us who wishes to make a comment on an item on our consent agenda or request that it be pulled. You can tee up right over here. Ms. Matthews. Hi there. Welcome to the Council. Hi there, my friends. I wanted to comment very briefly on item 12, which is the downtown recovery authorization. It's hard to imagine. It's been 30 years since the mall was built. I mean, the time does fly. And it also is a good time for overall refresh. And so this is a very timely project. I'm delighted to see that you're doing it. And the city also is doing so much more than just these capital improvements. The ongoing graffiti removal, the litter cleanup, the sidewalk cleaning and so forth. And there are a whole lot of players, as you know. It's so appropriate that you acknowledge that the ambassadors just now. The city departments, the DTA, the DMC, individual businesses and organizations. And I want to thank you for appointing me to the downtown commission earlier this year. I will put on the agenda for the downtown commission that we do an in detail look at the downtown parking district facilities and see how they can, what they can do as well to support the effort that's before us. I think in addition to all that's happening here, there are some ongoing issues that kind of don't fall into anyone's department. And they tend to be what might seem kind of minor maintenance thing, but the weeds in the tree wells and pruning the trees so that they don't hitch in the face when you walk down the street. Little things like that. They're not critical. They're not a capital improvement, but they do contribute to the overall feeling of someone's really caring about the place. So I do acknowledge the limits of budget and staff. And these things are hard to fund on an ongoing basis, but it's something you all know this. You've heard my speech before, but I am interested in being part of the overall effort. It certainly were poised to make a big difference and a big leap for downtown. So thank you very much. Thank you for all you do for our city. Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Rachel Sodos. I'm a homeowner on the west side of Santa Cruz. I'd like to bring forth number six on the consent agenda. I've lived in Santa Cruz County over my life many times. I went to nursery school here at Redbell, lived in Ben Loman, in Boulder Creek, in Santa Cruz, many places. I have a special place in my heart for the west side because when I was a freshman in high school in Palo Alto, I won most likely to be found on Beach Street in Santa Cruz on a school day. So take it very, very seriously. I may have bought some nickel bags in the beach flats before it was legal. I was able to review some of the last meeting from last week, the special study session. And I'm so delighted that there's such serious work undertaken to restore and take into account the many community needs for the reconstruction. But as I reviewed for what I could tell from the Fairlawn agency report, it seemed like there might be some fine print that we want to go into. And in the report, there is the list of the agencies. And it would make sense that the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA would be there. But there's also the silver jackets. And I just spent an hour or two looking up online following the various links and that's basically 25 agencies under the auspices of the Department of Defense. So it's the Army, the military, the Navy, the NSA, intelligence, geospatial logistics, media threat reduction, and a lot of health agencies, military health agencies. That brings us to an item on the bottom of their website, which is usace.mil.silverjackets about silverjackets. And that's the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences. And they have a PDF that's available on Google. It's the research strategic plan. And this is interesting to me as an alumni of UC Santa Cruz because I know that UC Santa Cruz is now in process of transforming Santa Cruz into a global community health mecca, in a way. And I just want to suggest that there might be a discrepancy between the construction that is gonna happen on the west side and the 50 year plan, which invites many military agencies to be involved. And the thing that's most concerning to me is that there are so many lists of military medical research, interning partnership with academic and military labs, drug discovery, social and behavioral research, population health reaches, health policy, military women's health, radio, biology, and nuclear related research, military health and readiness challenges, discovery of cutting edge research alignment. And it just seems like maybe there's some fine print we need to look into and understand what is possibly happening. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, sir. Yeah, good afternoon. Those are some excellent notes the previous speaker said. There's a lot going on that's not being talked about. You do a little bit of research and you open it up and wow, that branches into 50 different people. So on the consent agenda, maybe I'll end with the consent agenda number four, which is extend the storm emergency. You know, I think it's fabulous that the city is buying two more ambulances. Thank goodness they're diesel, you know, until magnetic fuelless motors become mainstream and diesel DC electric becomes more mainstream. It's the way to go. You know, that's what is it, 455,000 for two vehicles. So the city's getting another 107 foot, I don't know when I wrote, but it's tractor driven for 1.8 million. I think that's great. You know, my understanding reading into that is that due to EPA standards, they're buying another one. You know, fire trucks have like triple reduction on them. You know, that's, diesels are great. You warm it up and you run it like you stole it. So at least with fire trucks, there's red lights and sirens. You're getting two for 690,000, a side loader garbage truck and then off road off roll off for about 700,000. That's a great investment. I'm assuming those are diesel. So back to the extended storm. You know, I spoke in the county council earlier, someone made note of the tragedy that happened in Maui. Hey, my timer says three minutes. That can't be right. Okay, I'll give myself 30 seconds. So I mean, I did have a really fun Jovio conversation with Sheriff Jim Hart. I mean, we communicate on a fair basis. I have a much greater understanding for how difficult his job is and other sheriff jobs are because they're being controlled by international organizations. But back to the extending the storm, a lot of people talk about climate change. I mean, it's really climate terrorism. I was a direct witness to the directed energy weapons fire three years ago. I have tons of photographs of that, including where I used to live. That got turned into foundry ash. I mean, you look at 9-11, you look at the fires all over the place that are all part of other agendas. And so when you look at the flooding and Hurricane Hillary over the weekend, what's happened to our food supply? Because my understanding is there's thousands of fires going on on the planet right now and over 360 just in British Columbia. I'm gonna directly say those are frequency weapons. So that's enough for now because there's a ton of information on that. It's a good thing I backed up my stuff because boy, have I been censored. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. Thank you. For the public comment, anyone online, Ms. Bush? Wishes to comment on that consent agenda? No one with their hand raised. No. Okay. Matters back before the council, a motion to approve the consent agenda. I'll move the consent. I'll move the consent. Okay. By council member Watkins and a second by the vice mayor to approve the council, excuse me, to approve the consent agenda items four through 16 inclusive with the note that I will be recorded as not voting on item six. Click will call the roll. Council member Brown. Aye. Watkins. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Vice mayor Golder. Aye. And Mariculee. Aye. Motion passes and subordered. We are on item 17. This is the regional early action plan 2.0 regional funding grant application. Mr. Van Wa or Mr. Butler, will you be presenting on this, sir? If needed. Okay. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, mayor and council. Lee Butler, planning director, planning and community development for the city. And Matt will be doing the presentation. I will give a brief introduction as it relates to the REAP 2.0 grant you saw at your last meeting. We applied for the guaranteed portion, which is $180,000 that will be applying towards our library affordable housing project in the downtown. And this application is a competitive grant process. And the minimum request is 500,000. As Matt will discuss, we are proposing to request a $750,000 grant to go towards the project that will meet the objectives identified, which are affirmatively furthering fair housing, promoting housing production and reducing vehicle miles traveled. And so we're looking at doing objective standards within our single families uning districts, something that moves us beyond what we currently have with the allowances under SB 9, which already allows for residential units on single family properties throughout the state. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Matt and he can talk about what we're proposing here. Mr. Van Waad, good afternoon, sir. Hey, good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council. Can you hear me okay? Great, we're here to talk about the Regional Early Action Plan 2.0 grant for inclusive infill housing. What's not being shared? If I share it from here? Okay, great, thanks. For our agenda today, we're gonna talk about the REAP 2.0 grant, planning context, and then affirmatively furthering fair housing, and then talking about our proposal itself in inclusive infill and missing middle housing, and then briefly next steps. So the REAP 2.0 grant, as Ali mentioned, it stands for Regional Early Action Planning grant. It's the second of the two programs. The first one came out a few years ago, so this is the 2.0 version, and it's administered by the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, HAMBAG. And they have three main goals in this grant, and those are to accelerate infill housing, supply choice and affordability, affirmatively furthering fair housing, which you'll sometimes see as AFFH throughout the presentation, and then reducing vehicle miles traveled, the BMT. And as Lee mentioned too, it's a competitive grant. There's about $6 million total available, and they're looking for applications above $500,000. So we've chosen to apply for $750,000 for this project. So just to give you some background on kind of why we thought this proposal was a good idea and some things aligned to make it a potentially really beneficial for the city. In the last few years, we did our objective standards process, and that was focused on multifamily development, housing development, and there's now a real opportunity to do additional objective standard work for single-family zoning, which still encompasses about 50% of our city. And as we've seen in terms of in the single-family area, we have mostly large houses that are being built now. There's teardowns and then there's new development. We see a lot of large house applications, and we would like more objective standards for those to streamline that development better, and also to provide more outcomes that everyone is aware of ahead of time. Sorry, thanks. And we also have a lot of a substandard sized lots that we're trying to deal with and figuring out better ways to put housing on them as well. And then in the last five years or so, we've also seen a lot of legislation around accessory dwelling units or ADUs, and we're seeing a lot more of those being built in the city. And those combined with Senate Bill 9, which was passed in 2021 and went into effect in January 2022, that allows for two units on any single-family lot, and it allows any single-family lot to lot split. And so a single-family lot can now have four units and anywhere that qualifies for SB 9 if it combines these units with ADUs as well. So we're looking at more standards around how those two are combined SB 9 and ADUs. And then one final thing as well, Senate Bill 10 was also passed on the same day as Senate Bill 9. And Senate Bill 10 is something that the state allows cities to choose to upzone. It's not a requirement, but the state is granting cities the opportunity to upzone properties near transit without triggering CEQA. And that's up to 10 units per parcel. So that is another opportunity that the city could potentially take advantage of through this process. So for some additional planning contacts as well, talk a bit about fair housing issues as these relate to, especially to affirmatively furthering fair housing. So there's a significant history of zoning for segregation. It was actually allowed in government code until 1917 and then informally through a number of ways through redlining and other types of discrimination for quite a while through the mid 1900s as well. And so since the mid 1900s, we did see racial integration declining, sorry, it was declining until the mid 1900s and has been somewhat improving since then, but economic segregation has actually increased since the 1970s. So we're still seeing significant disparity throughout our land use patterns today. And those really play out geographically as you'll see the state's housing and community development department as opportunity areas where they have looked at a number of economic education and health outcomes and have mapped those geographically throughout the state. And what you'll see on the right here are the HCD opportunity areas. In the city, the blue areas are the areas of high opportunity and the gray areas are the area of moderate opportunity. And you'll see these overlap quite substantially with single family zoning as these areas of higher opportunity. And so it's a really important thing to consider are there ways to add more housing in these areas of higher opportunity to support AFFH goals. And right here, the state has also recently passed the legislation focusing more attention on affirmatively furthering fair housing. Assembly Bill 686 was adopted in 2018 and it defines affirmatively furthering fair housing as taking meaningful actions in addition to combating discrimination that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities, free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protective characteristics. The duty to affirmatively further fair housing extends to all of the public agencies, activities and programs related to housing and community development. Do we see a real opportunity there to really affirmatively further fair housing through us looking more closely at our single family housing areas and figuring out ways to create more flexibility and affordability in those areas. And so with that, I wanted to talk also about our overall idea for this as well. In addition to the AFFH goals, what this is also meeting is missing middle housing goals. So missing middle housing is a fairly recent term and it refers to two things. So historically cities have long had a variety of housing types in their residential neighborhoods. If you look at the areas around downtown Santa Cruz, for instance, you see quite a mix of housing types from single family to smaller multifamily projects or large single family Victorian houses that eventually became several units. And it's a substantial variety of housing that really allows for a lot of a variety of incomes and naturally affordable housing. And as that suburbanization and segregation process happened in the 1900s and single family zoning spread out, that it became just single family zoning as a detached housing type in many neighborhoods and stopped allowing for this variety of housing that created more natural affordability and inclusion in the city. So this missing middle is essentially most cities in Santa Cruz largely included have a lot of detached single family housing and then they have larger multifamily housing that we know of. But very few of these more inclusive, smaller scale multifamily projects, four units, things like that that fit into neighborhoods in a way that's inclusive and fits into the context of the neighborhood itself. It's compatible, that's the word I was looking for. And then there's also the cost opportunities or the opportunity for the cost of these projects as well. I kind of referred to that a little bit in terms of the affordability of these projects. So many cities see single family houses and then there's larger multifamily projects and there's just a very large cost difference there and we don't see a lot of opportunities for people in between that, which is really common, moderate income, workforce, housing kind of incomes. There's just not enough of those. So missing middle housing, finding ways to have these smaller projects in more parts of the city tackles both increasing density in these areas of higher opportunity, but also adding to a variety and adding more potential for affordability of homes and chances to age in place or add units to a lot to have siblings or children, things like that live in a lot of them as well. And what we've seen, there's a few cities right now doing this. Portland adopted their residential infill project a couple of years ago and in 2022, they released a one year study on this process that would be very similar to ours. It was an astounding success. They've added hundreds of units in just the first year that this was adopted. Larger city, of course, but it's something that definitely took off and was popular and is adding housing in the right way in the right places in that city. Minneapolis as well has been in the news recently for their housing work. They adopted this as well and Berkeley more recently adopted one just this year a missing middle program similar to this and Sacramento is currently undergoing this as well and they're in the process right now. So it is something out there and there are cities we can draw a lot of best practices from in this work as well. Kind of speaking about Portland a little bit, not only did Portland allow for things like fourplexes, but they also provided an opportunity for people to add additional units, kind of in a density bonus kind of way. If you added two more affordable units, you could have six units on a property instead of four, for instance. And that's something the city could certainly explore as well in the way to do that would be combining that affordability with SB 10 and saying that properties that are close to high quality transit that meet the SB 10 requirements and choose to provide more affordability on the site could be allowed to have additional units on the site, for instance. So that's also something that we could explore through this process to both add more units closer to transit, which accomplishes a lot of VMT goals, but then also adds of course more affordability to the project as well and provides more affordable housing in the city. So the inclusive infill project scope, what we're looking to do with this project is create additional objective standards for single family housing and duplexes, create new objective standards for SB 9 combined with accessory dwelling units, allow for new triplexes and fourplexes and figuring out ways through those objective standards to make them more compatible with neighborhoods, and then new objective standards for affordable SB 10 units beyond four unit projects. And then also we heard from Yimbe, they commented, provided a comment letter a couple days ago and spoke about economic feasibility analysis for this as well, which we agreed with and we would like to add that to our scope as well. So we would be doing economic feasibility analysis as well. So just quickly, the project goals for this would be to address existing neighborhood compatibility concerns around single family houses currently and their objective standards that we would like more of, as well as SB 9 standards, and then provide for a greater variety of housing and improve affordability and then support more inclusion and equity throughout Santa Cruz. So next steps, council approves the resolution for us to apply for the grant. We would be applying for that, it's due next week on the 31st. And then we would receive a notification by November of that decision followed by grant execution by February of next year. And then the project would have to be complete by March, 2026. So soon after the grant execution, we would be getting a consultant on board and working on it over the next couple of years. Thank you, council. Thank you. May I ask if there are questions or comments by members of the council, council, the vice mayor is recognized. I don't know if you want to have somebody else go first. I have so many that maybe someone also asked on the line. All right. Okay, good. Okay, so thank you for applying for this. I really do like the idea of having some objective standards for single family residences. I think that's really important. I have a question because I've been to Portland and Berkeley. I haven't been to Minneapolis, but I don't think there are anything like Santa Cruz and they're much bigger. And I'm wondering if there's, have you looked at other cities that have like a more small city look and feel? I don't think that the majority of the residents of Santa Cruz would want our city to turn into Portland or Berkeley or the other ones. That's my first question. Yeah, speaking to Portland specifically, while there was a large increase in units, I mean, it's 200, I can't remember the exact number, but it's about 250 units, I think, sprinkled over a city probably 20 times our size, something like that. It's a very incremental change. It's actually not something that you're gonna see full scale adoption of immediately. Think of like SB nine as well. That passed a few years ago and we're just starting to see a few projects here and there come in, which is great. The way we think of this project is it's similar. We're gonna allow for a few more options and a little more flexibility, but it's not gonna be a large scale change. We expect it to be a very incremental and even if we're just adding a couple of units a year over time, that would really compound and not change the character feel of neighborhoods but add units where they can be really beneficial. Thank you, I appreciate that. And so I did thought I heard 10 units on a single family lot. So could that be on, I know there's some substandard lots on the west side that are less than 5,000 square feet, 10 units. Yeah, so SB 10 allows a city to up zone up to 10 units, but any city can choose a number less than that. So we currently allow SB nine allows for four units on any single family site right now. Regardless of its standard. Correct, yeah. So Portland, for instance, allowed six units if two units were affordable. So something like that, there's a different, there's a lot of different options. We maybe only allow one more unit or two or there's a lot of ways to explore that. And we would have to go through that process with this project, but... I think I hope that there'll be more community engagement throughout the process if we, and I hope we go through the process with or without the grant because I think there's a lot of people that aren't in the room that would have many things to say about this because I guess another thing that I hope gets brought up throughout the process would be some of the missing middle class. I didn't see like mobile home parks or condos or townhouses specifically on there. And I think those are also opportunities for affordable housing where people have more of a pathway to middle class like to home ownership and maybe first time home buyers or people that are downsizing. Those are then that creates opportunities for people that are moving around and I didn't see those on there. And recently I talked to a developer downtown and he was saying that developers kind of shy away from condos and townhouses at this point because of these lawyers that are in the state. Sorry, Cassie, but I don't know how to describe them. I don't want this offensive to lawyers but ambulance chaser type lawyers that go around at nine and a half years and sue condo developers and basically bankrupt them. And so that's why they'd rather build apartments. And so I think the more we're building just apartments and especially 100% affordable apartments, the more we're gonna continue to see social segregation because that's who's gonna live there but people that can qualify to live in those units. And so to me it's really a huge bummer and a missed opportunity to not have more of that kind of housing. And so I don't know if that's something that the department can explore. And yeah, that's kind of a question. Is that something that we can explore as an opportunity area also? Yeah, I think we can definitely look at rental and ownership for these projects. We've done a lot of rentals since my time on council and I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for home ownership. And one more thing too, sorry, Vice Mayor, you mentioned you brought up community engagement as well, which is really important. I forgot to mention in the presentation the fact that this really gives us a chance to look more closely at things like SB9, stuff that was essentially just given to us by the state and we didn't have this community process around it. And we're able to look more closely at SB9 and work with the community through this process to come up with more of a community driven standards around SB9 and other types of housing that we'd like to explore in this process. Thank you. I guess just my last question is as these developments go up, I know a lot of us have rooftop solar. If someone put in a four plex next door to me or a 10 plex next door to me, that would essentially eliminate my ability to produce electricity make me reliant on our friends at Central Coast Energy and PG&E completely. And so when you're thinking about that, I hope that that's something that we consider in our objective design work. And I just think like those of us that have made the sacrifice to buy a home or worked really hard to rent a home or buy a home because we wanted to live in a neighborhood with that kind of feel and have that kind of space. I know it'd be incremental, but I would hate to see the decisions we're making here completely destroy what the city looks like 30 years from now. I was mentioning we went to Belize a few Christmases ago and that's essentially what happened on one of the islands. There's people were buying up lots and then developing and it just turned into something completely different. The other thing, I think if there's any opportunity at the state level and federal level to advocate for, and I know this is gonna sound, maybe people are gonna think this sounds horrible, but I think what also drives up the cost of housing in this state in particular is foreign investors. I know New Zealand and I think maybe Vancouver, they stopped letting people from China or overseas that come in with huge bags of money buy up and turn houses into rental houses or whatever redevelop them because when I'm listening to this presentation and thinking yes, it will create more housing, but will it be affordable? I don't think so. The only people that are gonna make any money off this is gonna be the developers. Like will my kids be able to buy something or will her kids or will we be able to stay in town? I don't know. What I see is developers making a lot of money and I don't know, my theory is about the SB9. I think they're well intended, but I think that the lobbyists kind of, I don't know, brought us to this point. So that's my rant. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Brown is recognized. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Van Wa. Let's see, I'll start out just by saying I agree with the Vice Mayor's comments about the appetite in our community for this level of high density development and bringing density into neighborhoods. So I do think we need to proceed with caution and this is something I've talked about. Probably no surprise since you've heard me talking about this for the past seven years, this dais. But I do think that that community engagement piece is so critical. And with all due respect, I say this, Mr. Yanwai, you said, well, I forgot to mention the community engagement piece. I think it needs to absolutely be front and center and not kind of an afterthought. It really has to, if we move forward and get this money, it just feels like that is, it's in our interest for the good of our community and also for the city itself and the work we do. And so I just want to have, and I do have a question and it may sound like I'm being defensive or, I don't mean this to, I hope you take it in the spirit that it's offered. So you've mentioned in the report and the planning department is committed to trying to address this, bigger history of discrimination and segregation in housing. And so I'm curious as to how the goals that the city holds for moving through the infill housing policy and zoning process will be an antidote to that history and how given the current hyperinflation of housing costs for renters and people who are trying to purchase a home here, just off the charts inaccessible for everybody or almost everybody, how is this going to actually get us more affordable housing? I see the words, affordability, inclusion, equity sprinkled through this report and you've mentioned it and I don't doubt that those are shared values among all of us. But I don't see any, I've yet to see any evidence in this report or kind of otherwise in these broader conversations that this kind of infill will actually create affordable housing for us. There is no requirement for that with the exception possibly of, if we do wanna up zone near transit and really go for up to 10 units on any single family lot, there might be a couple of units required, one if we use our current standards, possibly more if we wanna go bigger. But that's very small portion. So how, and I'll just say one more thing, as the demographics in our community and the median income continue to rise as a result of what kind of housing gets built and who has attracted to our community, those numbers go up and so to qualify for affordable housing units, the very few that we may get in this process is gonna be very difficult. So just given all of that, those challenges, how do you see, like what evidence do we have that we're gonna get affordable housing? Because I don't think we should be asserting that if that's not what's gonna happen, what's really going on, thanks. Yeah, thank you, I'd first say two things. So the one is that there is an opportunity through this process to explore that SB9 approach where we get actual deed restricted affordable housing through this process. But the other way, if we're not doing that and we're still doing just a four plex, for instance, in a single family zone, there is a more natural affordability in that project. They are smaller units and they're typically projects that don't have the same level of amenities that a larger apartment building with a pool and lobby and everything have. So they are typically more affordable than even your average apartment building unit in the city. So those are two ways. Also mentioned too, Minneapolis, if you look up, it was in the news recently, Minneapolis's housing programs were in the news because Minneapolis had the lowest housing inflation in the entire nation this past year. Partially could be due to their missing middle program, could also be due to their larger housing production in general, I'd have to look more into that. But certainly at one case study has definitely shown that these type of units have improved housing inflation quite a bit for this one city. And there's one of only four cities that do have this missing middle program. So that was real exciting news. Mr. Butler. Thanks, Matt, and thank you, Mayor. A couple of additional points related to that. I can say that the Minneapolis mayor, for example, did attribute that lowest level of inflation in the country to both the fact that their housing did not have the same price increases and he contributed that to the increase in supply. I think an increase in supply is not a panacea. We need to do other things. We need to provide various protections like we have with the relocation assistance. But absent increased supply, we know that prices will increase and that they will increase faster and if we don't provide that supply. And so there are a lot of studies that speak to both the need for that increased supply and also the housing filtering effect that occurs when additional housing is provided and how that opens up other opportunities for people in the community to move within the area and not just from outside of the area. And so that's one of the other criticisms that we often hear is oh, when we're building new housing, it's just going to bring in people from elsewhere and that does happen but the majority of that, the studies show that the majority of that housing and the filtering that happens as people move out of housing to move into that happens at a local level. So all of that contributes and when we talk about the affirmatively furthering fair housing, when we look at those single family neighborhoods, aside from ADUs, there aren't many options for relatively affordable units. And so this would provide through an additional approach, a different approach to SB9, a compatible approach with SB9, options for units that aren't just the single family or aren't just the ADU. And so then that can then offer opportunities for more families to move into those areas of high opportunity with good schools, with good parks and so forth. I just wanna follow, appreciate the supply-demand theory and I've read some of those studies. I know there are some variations. We could talk about that offline. Thanks, Mr. Butler. Just a quick question that I would ask though is so can you remind us whoever may have this available or if not, could get it quickly. When we say, for example, ADUs are relatively more affordable, what's, I know we've had kind of different reports suggesting they're in the affordability category. No, they're not. It's mostly anecdotal. I know the city and I commend you, the staff for really trying to get a handle on that through the surveys. But what's just more affordable than the new units with the amenities? What's the app, sort of a ballpark for an ADU? I can only speak to our most recent ADU survey. Yeah, I can't remember what it was, but if you could remind us. Which was voluntary, but based on the, based on what we received back, it was 89% of the ADUs we received would have qualified for low income. Okay, so for those who responded to the survey. Correct, thanks. Thank you, council member. For the questions, council member. I think Lee might have a little more. I would just add, contributing to that, because I think it's an important component is that ADUs are oftentimes rented to family members or friends. And so that does, it still offers a level of affordability, but it also is just another lens by which to understand why some of those numbers are low, that are lower than what you might see on Craigslist, for example. So not necessarily so for any given unit. Yeah, absolutely, yes. Council member Watkins. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. And thanks to my colleagues for their questions. I really appreciate the intention behind this legislation. I think we briefly talked about it today, but it really is deeply rooted in racial segregation and history, and definitely our community has been impacted. And I've shared in the past that when my parents tried to move here as an interracial couple in the 80s, they couldn't find somebody to give them a loan or a real attorney to work with them. So it's not like it was that, that long ago that it has impacted our community and who is able to reside here. So the banks and the realtors and all other aspects of what goes into allowing a family to purchase a home is also a player in addition to some of the work that we're doing here in terms of land use. And I appreciate the missing middle approach to that. I think that's really important. I think some of the questions I've had have been asked. I think people in the community will naturally feel reaction to epsoning and by zoning or in ease in terms of that. So however we're thinking about that in terms of community engagement and what that means. I just wanted to confirm, I'm assuming that transit is bus essentially for our community, that's about it. Yeah, okay, it's okay. It's both by bus stops and by bus routes. Bus stops and routes, okay. I just assumed that was the case, but I just wanted to make sure. I guess my question is, in addition to what has already been asked in interest in home ownership, in terms of the mapping for the opportunity areas, so the light gray, just to make sure I'm following it correctly, that's already more or less zoned for higher density, is that right? In terms of why it's not a high, that's why it's labeled moderate resource? We'll put that back up. Thank you. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm looking at it on my computer. No problem, yeah. Thank you. Sure, okay, yeah, can you help me understand the map a little bit? I thought, I think I get it, but I just wanted to make sure I'm following. So there are two separate things. There's no direct relationship, only that for the opportunity map, it's the state studying economic health education outcomes for the residents in these areas, and then assigning that opportunity score essentially to those sites. And so what you can see is that there's much greater courses very general, but greater health education and economic outcomes for areas that are single family zoned. I see. That's kind of the overlap there. You can see there is some correlation between single family zoning and those higher opportunity areas. So the goal of the state is really to use these opportunity areas to help cities consider AFFH goals. And even in our housing element, for instance, we're using the opportunity map to, again, think of ways to add more units to these areas of opportunity. So we're getting these, somewhat more naturally affordable, moderate to workforce housing type of units in these areas of high opportunity. They're also more likely to attain those higher outcomes. And just to make sure I'm, high opportunity equals high resource in the map key, correct? Correct, yeah. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to make sure I was tracking it. I understand. Yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, thank you. I appreciate that. I guess also my question in regards to that map is that the areas that aren't as high in terms of opportunity are, as far as I can read, are also not as also transit oriented, correct? I mean, so I'm wondering where, when you start to like filter through, really where do these apply? And maybe that's the work to come potentially. I'm assuming I guess it is, but I kind of was doing that in my head thinking. Yeah, yeah, there's really two parts to this. One is the fact that SB9 allows for four units on single family right now already, but we wanna find more ways to allow those four units essentially. There's opportunity to create more flexibility and allow for that to be more easily used and more economical feasible for people to use than SB9 currently is. So that's one part of the project, kind of the main part of the project that we definitely want to do. And then the other part is exploring this SB9 idea where we tie additional units to these areas of quality transit. Sure. Okay, thank you. I would add, thank you for that question, Council Member Watkins. The GIS that we have on our website shows the existing and planned high quality transit corridors. And so members of the public can reference that. Just make sure you put both of those on because those are the areas that qualify as well as qualify for the zero parking under AB 2097. But to more directly answer your question about the location of those across the city, most of our corridors have locations that qualify and it's within a half mile. So the Bay Street corridor at Mission and Bay and then going up to the university and a half mile out from there would qualify. And if you look at that Northwest Quadrant where it shows the high opportunity areas, that's gonna cover a big chunk of that as well as some of the corridors to the east with Soquel, for example, having some of those. And so I think there's gonna be some overlap there on the east side with our high quality transit corridor. So there are some places where we can align the additional units that could be offered through SB 10 and utilize that state allowance to bring in additional units into these high opportunity areas. They don't always overlap but there are some opportunities there for sure. All right, thank you for the clarification. Of course. Yeah, just to reiterate what has already been said in regards to community engagement, I think that's gonna be really important. And I do think the objective standards are gonna, is an important component that we need to think about, especially as these bigger like units are going into neighborhoods to the compatibility point you brought up, we wanna be really mindful about how those standards are in place. So anyways, I appreciate the presentation and what's to ensue. Thank you, council member. Council member Brunner is recognized. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Van Hoa. Thank you, Lee Butler. I just had a couple of questions. You had mentioned that the project in applying for this application and the timeline, the project would be complete by March, 2026. What does the project complete look like that all the community engagement into what the objective standards are would then be in place? Is that what a complete project would look like? Correct, yes. Okay, it's really interesting that this grant is for the development of the objective standards, not, you know, when I read through it at first, I thought it was another housing opportunity grant to build housing, but it's for the objective standards for this category. So I echo the previous comments about really having a really good community engagement process and input. I think our community has shown that in the past as really a priority in these processes and having a say. And I'm really happy that you proactively worked with Yimby in this and the emails that they sent. I know that council was in our packet regarding the economic feasibility study. So thank you, that was one of my questions as well. And home ownership opportunities as well as rental being looked at in this process, I think would be something to really consider. And then my last question, how does it align with the housing or workforce report that was recently done? How does that, how do those two connect and how does it support? You're referring to the civil grand jury report? Yes. So I think broadly speaking that report recognized that there are challenges in our community with the amount of housing production that we have. And I think this project will give the opportunity for other options in terms of how to increase the number of housing units on properties as well as providing more certainty related to that. With those objective standards developer would know, all right, if I follow these rules, then I'll be able to proceed. Your prior statement with respect to the grant being focused on the production of housing is accurate. You read that correctly. We will need to make the case that by putting these in place, it will result in the production of additional units. And so that's part of what we'll be explaining through the grant is just that, which aligns with the housing or workforce report, meaning that we need to build more housing for our workforce and units like this have the potential to provide relatively more affordable housing options than many of the product types that we currently have on the market, which are in those buckets of single family detached, not affordable, multi-family with lots of amenities and brand new, some inclusionary components to that, but the units themselves are often not affordable. And then we've got the affordable housing projects which provide deeper levels of affordability. And so we're not always hitting that workforce housing that 80 to 120% or even up to 150% of area median income. And so I think there are opportunities here through that as Matt mentioned, I don't see this as an onslaught of units. It's oftentimes it'll be mom and pops that choose to redevelop their properties and they would have to choose to sell their property if they wanted to leave and have a developer come in and so it's not gonna be loads of units as we're seeing with SB nine, we've got a handful, a couple I think that have been approved and a few that are in the process and over time that builds additional housing supply. Great, thank you. That concludes my question. Council Member Cullentary-Johnson is recognized. Thank you, I don't have questions but if I may take just a couple of moments to comment, I really appreciate staff bringing this proposal before us. It is part of the larger housing element work that the staff is doing, the subcommittees working on. I see this as bold and innovative yet have shown success in other communities and I appreciate Vice Mayor Golder's comment on let's look at other like communities, you know, Minneapolis and Portland don't necessarily represent who we are so I think that would be great if that could be part of the process to see what other like communities have used these tools. I don't see this as committing us to 10 units on a lot, I know everybody's eyes are like, ah, some people may wanna see that but a lot of people will not so I see this as a tool for us to explore what's possible in addressing the missing middle and I'm so glad that Council Member Bruner, you brought that question of how do we define that, it's our teachers, it's our firefighters, it's our city employees and it's us, it's us, right, it's all of us in this room really and so it's important to I think really are explicitly articulate what we mean by missing middle and then I also appreciate all of my colleagues' comments but Council Member Brown, like how do we make sure we get to that, how do we actually make sure that these units will be serving them? Well I think this is an opportunity with this grant to explore that so I know I'm kinda repeating what everyone said but I'm excited about this grant, I think it's a great opportunity, it's these types of projects that have put us on the map in the state and have us recognize of one of six across the state to meet our regional housing goals so I commend staff for your vision and being bold and for bringing this before us and I will reiterate what's already been said that community engagement will be number one priority I think for all of us and I'm sure for staff that we get this right. Thank you. Thank you very much, thank you. Mr. Van Wa, thank you for your presentation, thank you Mr. Butler. Couple of thoughts on this, I'll be brief. First, I think this is a really good example of state legislation and what I mean by that is you have someone from rural Northeastern California representing 500,000 people spread across eight counties and then you have somebody in LA who represents 18 square blocks with the same number of 500,000 people so when you go to make state legislation you're asking for the vote of everybody and so you make state legislation and you end up with, and I don't mean this as a criticism, I mean it as an observation, you end up with this kind of bill that SB9, SB10, the other kinds of bills. I think the virtue of this particular application is that we get to say let's see how this applies to Santa Cruz and I associate myself with the other comments that have been made about some of the other examples. I think a couple of observations. If you are representing a community, let's say in the Central Valley where your community was 30, 40, 50,000 for a very long time and now it's 150,000 getting onto 200,000 because you have approved massive new subdivision development. The applicability of this is very different than if you're in a town that I don't know when the last time the city of Santa Cruz approved a 100-unit subdivision but cities do that regularly on Tuesdays. My guess is we haven't done it for decades and so what we approve are largely multi-family residential and single-family residential. That's what we approve and because that's the nature of our community and then we see this, I think it even gets more nuanced as we go literally neighborhood by neighborhood or even two or three blocks by two or three blocks, which is to say my colleagues who for example live on the west side, there is a somewhat different composition of neighborhoods than let's say I live in Midtown, it's different, it's different. So I like this idea of a very granular look at our objective standards because not only what might work in Santa Cruz or what might work in Portland or might work in Minneapolis, St. Paul might work on the West Glyver, might work in the Midtown area and might not work on the west side or might not work someplace else. I think this is a really good application because it lets us say the spirit of the state law wants us to head in this direction and we all swore to uphold the laws of the state of California so we're going to do that but how is it we do that in this town as distinguished from Watsonville or Capitola or Scotts Valley or the unincorporated area of our county which houses 50% of the population in the county? I think there's an exceptionally good and I think the path on this is take your damn time. I really mean this, take our time on this, get it right. The gentle lady to my right pointed out an extraordinary example of discrimination in her family's history and that was a stunning statement that you made and discrimination takes all kinds of forms. Hopefully some of what you were talking about is being torn out, root by branch as we move along in society and we get better about that but there are other I think more hidden forms of discrimination in the housing world that beg for this grant to be funded. Because I think what we will find is this is damn near surgical on what we're gonna need to do here. We're gonna need to be very careful about this to get it right. Not for fear of offending anybody and frankly that doesn't worry me too much. What worries me is when you write a law for LA and for Calusa County, how do we get it right in the city of Santa Cruz? That's the part I'm most interested in and I think we can do it. This council long before I ever got here proved that they can do it. I won't try to mess it up. I'll see if I can stay on track with it but there's an exceptionally good grant but let's take our time. Let's take our time. Let's take the time we need to do it right. My guess is we don't get a do over on this. We're going to adopt policies. If we do it right, they can have some traction and purchase to them. They can really work over time and so I understand that this grant, if we're successful, has a time frame to it. Let's use all the time available and get it right. Thank you very much for your presentations. Let me ask if there's anybody with us who wishes. Please come forward. Who wishes, comment on this item. Good afternoon. I'm Jane Heise. I have lived in Santa Cruz for decades. I am a member of Peace United Church which is interested in housing and I specifically have started working with the COPA housing team which has been working with the city and the county on the housing element. I particularly want to add COPA's support for moving in this direction, having a lot of housing but of many different kinds addressing many different situations makes for a more dynamic community. I want to add that I was able, as an elementary school teacher here in Santa Cruz, able to take advantage of a prior housing, workforce housing program in the 90s. I was able to move from being a renter, bouncing around as so many people have as a teacher. I was able to get a very small one bedroom condo south of Chestnut in Maydard Manson's development which enabled me to then move into Mobile Home Park and have a way to stay in this community. So I know these programs can work. They need to be thoughtful. I'm especially, as a retired teacher, thinking of ways that families as their economic circumstances change that they can stay in the same general school district in the neighborhood and having rentals, cheaper condos or townhouses, ADUs, and then maybe a home while the family is in that general area makes for a much better outcome for the children. So thank you for the direction it appears you're going in. Thank you and I'm going to use this opportunity to also thank Copa. Copa's persistent engagement on this issue is really helpful, but thank you so much. Good afternoon, sir. Yeah, good afternoon. Again, my name's James Ewing Whitman. Kind of like to quote, take our damn time. I'm sure with this group there's many people who are excellent grant writers who couldn't use an extra three quarters of a million dollars to do all kinds of stuff. There are aspects of this though that reminds me of the April 11th meeting, the Consent Agenda Item Number 16. I think I took two and a half pages of notes, AB 2097. So wow, if a single family dwelling has turned to 10 units, where are those people kind of park? Well, it may be funny, but it's not really that funny. So, you know, once again, I still have three minutes, but I won't take that much time. There seems to be a lot of information going around about smart cities and such, and what I'm learning is that they are going to change the property taxes. So let's say your single family home could have 10 units. So although you don't have 10 units, we're gonna charge you property taxes. So who knows what's gonna happen in the next, well, hey, I can back it up, I don't have it in my pocket though. So it's just interesting. I think this will probably be one of the shortest council meetings in a while. Congratulations, all sides, thanks. Thank you, sir. Anyone else with us today wish to comment on this agenda item? Do we have someone online? We do, yes. We'll go to the person online. Good afternoon. Okay, hi there. This is Garrett Phillip. Hey, this item represents so well the many vile destructive woke attacks on American culture, even exceeding the lizard brain, Emperor Newsom's decimation of single family home zoning and SB 9. The directive to facilitate deliberate action to explicitly address combat and relieve disparities resulting from past patterns of segregation to foster more inclusive communities is very much like the woke demonic reparations where people who are never slaves or awarded money from people who never owned slaves in a state that never was a slave state and was barely a state at all. It is similar to the odious bill AB 852 which seeks to relatively lower sentences of criminals if they are of a race to historically receive larger sentences than other races, perhaps relatively increasing sentences of white defendants for no reason other than their race. The state must believe in punishing people for other people's actions or their shortcomings. That's woke, judicial Marxism, that's pure any racist racism. Nobody is preventing anybody from living anywhere. No matter what the price is, if you don't have the jack, there's no living there. You don't just want more middle housing. You want to enable an evisceration of single family housing to achieve your cultural Marxist goals. Single family houses are better and more desirable places for families to raise children and their elimination as a planned target of woke nuclear family destruction. This item proposes to crush the liberty of those like-minded who can afford the most they can for their families. As typical of cultural Marxism, the equity mantra is in both which seeks to make everybody equal even though they are undeniably and will always be different. This is done not through fostering prosperity but by destroying those who perceive to have achieved more or have a perceived more successful status by trashing American values and ideals while assigning privilege to those who have achieved far less. Literally the American dream of a family home with a white picket fence is being squeezed out of existence and extinguished by workness. The state's plan to inject more poor people into successful neighborhoods every time a foster community thrives is not a positive and neither does a relentless push to increase density. Portland and Minneapolis are left as cesspools of crime and societal disintegration. How dare you emulate dysfunction? You want less privacy and open space. You want more control. You want more outside dollars lining city pockets whether it is contrary to the will of the local people or not. This is very much beyond not. You seek to expand the societal damage of SB9 with additional promotional variance and allow even six units per lot. Outrageous isn't the strongest word I'm thinking of. If you really believe SFR owning citizens on balance want four to six plexus on the SFR lot next door, try asking them instead of the woke selfish without means pleading to encode next as beyond SB9's malfeasance in the Munich code. Nope, you have the government knows best is these version of cultural Marxism wokeness. This grant is a bribe that activates salivating at the prospect of more fees and taxes. Feel free to resign if you don't shut down expanding density above SB9. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Phillip. Anyone else who's with us? We have anything on any other folks online? Two more. Good afternoon. Welcome to the person online. Three, two, one. We'll go to the next person online. Sorry, I didn't know who this was me. But anyway, thank you. My name is Fran Guerrero. I live in Santa Cruz for about 30 years now. And I'm a member of Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz as well as Copa. And so I just wanted to quickly just let you know that I'm in favor and I do have also been part of the housing strategy team in Copa that Jane had mentioned. But I do speak in favor and support of this opportunity to include and or provide the opportunity to include and provide for more affordable housing, also fair housing practices, and workforce housing, which also includes economic diversity and inclusivity. Also as one of our main priorities that we have spoken to in the past is tenant protections. So hopefully that at some point some thought can be put into tenant protections against harassment retaliation in the use of this grant funds. And so we support that. And just wanted to give that information to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ms. Guerrero, thank you very much. And thank you for your work at Copa. Ms. Bush, one more person online. Good afternoon. The person online, your opportunity has arrived. Three, two, one, matters back before the council. Ms. Contar Johnson is recognized. Thank you. I would like to move the resolution authorizing staff to apply for state of California REAP 2.0 competitive funding in the amount of 750,000 to plan for more inclusive residential infill housing options in neighborhoods. There is a motion. There is a second by Ms. Bruner under discussion. Ms. Brown. Thank you, Mayor. So I'm a little bit torn here about what to do. And I want to ask a question of my colleagues related to the issues we've heard. We just heard from somebody from Copa. And I know I appreciate you all as well, the work that you do and your advocacy for tenant protections, tenant rights, eviction prevention. Those are major issues for me. Obviously, I think the council is aware of the challenges that people are facing. So I'm wondering if there could be a more explicit, and I don't have necessarily an amendment, but a more explicit direction to incorporate attention to housing affordability. And when I say housing affordability, beyond naturally affordable, I just don't believe that exists in our community. So deed restricted, I guess, would be a way to say it, affordable housing units and tenant protections, ways of keeping people housed in this process. Just wanted to see how people feel about including that as an explicit direction. I think it's sort of like we gesture to it, and then it just gets lost. And I worry that that's going to happen here. If you, Council Member, if I might, Mr. Van Wa, the council member is suggesting something in the area of tenant protections. And I think the question would be, is that an eligible expenditure category in this grant? I'd have to look more closely, but I believe that would be outside of the scope of the grant, because it's really specifically related to housing production. I wonder what about producing deed restricted, affordable units? That seems to me to be a part of it. I mean, that would be part of it. Mr. Van Wa. Yeah, the deed restricted, affordable is something we would definitely be exploring through the grant. Council Member, is that a satisfactory answer? Would you like to add something into the motion on that regard, in that regard, rather? It looks like the maker of the motion may have something. I'll wait. Council Member Cohn, Tory Johnson. Thank you. I'm just looking at the project scope and the project goals as they're outlined in the report and in the presentation. And the fourth bullet in the project scope, new objective standards for affordable SB 10 units beyond for economic, I might have written this around wrong, but economic feasibility analysis. I wonder if that gets to it or if we can explicitly make that a little bit more explicit in this project scope, the fourth project scope? I don't want to hold this up. So I'll just say that that's much too limited for my taste, because that really does rely on the potential to get a couple more units on a major upzoning project. And I don't know that I would support that upzoning. And I don't know that the council would either. That's a very limited space or trajectory for getting actually affordable units. So I don't want to hang it up. I think I'll just, if I could, Mayor, I'll just make a comment. And I'm going to register a no vote on this. I think we do need to get a handle on objective standards. I want to see the community engagement. And I appreciate all and agree with much of what I've heard from my colleagues about the potential for the use of this funding. Unfortunately, my experience here has caused me to be quite cynical. And I don't see a lot of pathways for really focusing in on the issues that I care about related to affordable housing. If we're going to ask neighborhoods to take a significantly higher density, we should be explicit about demanding affordability in that. And I just don't see it here. I also want to say, again, I appreciate the work that our planning staff does. But I think the city has been perhaps too bold. I would call it bullish on infill development under SB9. And I want to just reference some feedback I've been hearing from community members, homeowners, who are trying to build ADUs. And I've heard this is three discrete examples now of people who are being pushed to build out the max allowable under SB9. And they come in with an ADU project and are pushed. And they're nervous about that. I don't know the details. And I'd like to follow up. But this has just been coming to my attention recently. I feel like in that context, this money will be a vehicle for getting even more bullish. And it just makes me very uncomfortable. And I think a lot of members of the public as well. So I'm going to vote no with the hopes that we actually get community engagement. Thank you. I'm taking your advice, Mayor, of taking our time. And I know we have another item and there are people here. But Councilmember Brown, it would be great if we had a unanimous support of this. If you have some recommended explicit friendly amendment language, I would love to hear it at this time. I guess the language would be direct staff to include attention to the production of deed restricted affordable housing opportunities. Attention to deed restricted affordable housing opportunities explicitly. And is that feasible? OK. Director Butler? Absolutely, yes. I think that's going to inherently be a part of, if we're exploring additional units beyond the four that would be required under SB 9, then, yes, we would be looking to see if there are opportunities. And I think the feasibility study goes directly to that and understanding where we may be able to require that and still have those units be produced. So if you'd like to make that friendly amendment, I would accept it. Ms. Brown? Did you get the language? OK. I'll go with it. My reservations remain, but I'll go with it for now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Contor Johnson. Council Member Brown? Council Member Brunner, did you ever? I'm we're good now. We're good. Thank you for addressing that. Thank you very much. Further debate or discussion on the motion? Seeing here, none. Clerk will call the roll. Council Member Brown? Aye. Watkins? Aye. Brunner? Aye. Calentary Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? Aye. And Mayor Keely? Aye. Motion passes and so ordered. We are on item 18, the state of child and youth well-being report for the 2022-23 year. Ms. Murphy, I believe, will be, maybe not, will be presenting on. I'll be introducing it. Say it again. I'll be introducing this. Please proceed. OK. Thank you, Mayor. All right. Thank you for your patience. Those of you who are here for this item. So this is on the child and youth well-being report. We're excited to bring you the first ever in our county and our city, the state of the child youth well-being report. So I'll just give a little bit of background and pass it on to my colleagues who I've been working with on this. So I hope we can all agree that all children, all youth in our community deserve healthy, fulfilling lives. And I hope that we can all agree that every single child in our community deserves that no matter where they're born, what they look like, what language they speak. And in order to do this, we need the right resources. We need to provide the right opportunities and the right experiences that allow them to reach their full potential. And I think many of us here and many of those listening agree to this and understand this. But we have a long way to go to make this an actual reality in our community. As you all know, children don't have voting rights until the age of 18. But the decisions that we make on programs and policies and budgets affect their everyday lives. So one of the ways that we wanted to address this is really focus on what the needs of the children and youth in our community are. And we did this by committing to a framework. So in 2021, December of 2021, this council passed the Children and Youth Bill of Rights unanimously because we recognize that in the absence of an accountable framework, it's easy to not prioritize children and youth in our decision making. We were the first in a county to pass the Bill of Rights. The county board of supervisors followed suit and the city of Capitola recently did the same. One of our commitments for the Bill of Rights is to establish this report every other year, to hear from our youth in the community, to hear from parents in the community, and then use this as a tool for our decision making. And Ms. Nicole Brown will talk about what that looks like, this report as a tool. We also committed to uplifting youth voice and giving youth opportunities to serve in leadership capacities. So we're excited that in the last six months, we've had a youth that we've been working with who's been serving in the youth liaison role, who will be presenting with us today. And I think with that, we're just we're excited to have you here. We're excited for this first report. I'm going to pass it on to my colleagues, Council Member Watkins and then Vice Mayor Golder. Well, thank you, and Council Member Kalantari-Johnson for that kickoff of an introduction. It's been a pleasure to work on this report with our, my colleagues here, as well as our community members and our youth and staff and consultant. You know, one of the things that I feel, one is somewhat interesting on the heels of our previous conversation around what mobility means for youth also relies on where they reside and what they have access to, their safety, how they feel, are they able to go to a good school and feel engaged? And so our decisions influence that in many ways, from land use decisions to prioritizing youth in this way. And one of the things that I feel really proud of is our commitment to supporting youth in funding through our dedicated children's fund, through the city's dedicated children's fund. The voters chose to have a portion of those dollars invested into youth in perpetuity. And that will help us actualize some of the ways that we want to see this plan move forward, not only this year, but for many years to come. And having a Bill of Rights is a wonderful thing, but actualizing the goals set forth in a Bill of Rights is something completely different. And to do that we need to have attention and focus and this is one way that we can do that. So I just want to thank my colleagues here as well as our community, our youth as well, for being part of the process to make sure that we're moving forward with the goals set forth in the Bill of Rights. And it's ongoing, it's iterative and it's about continuous improvement. And this is the first of many and it's foundational and I'm really proud to have been a part of it and really grateful to my colleagues and our community for that reason. So I'll hand it over to you. Thank you. So through this process we had our very first state of the youth community meeting and it was really exciting to see representatives from various groups from preschool all the way up through college and they gave a brief talk about what the experience is for children in this community at various ages and that we had breakout sessions and it was our first opportunity to have an event like this and staff worked really hard. Lisa and Nicole put together a great format where there was a lot of engagement and we got a lot of feedback from the participants, some of whom were parents, some of whom were kids and it was just an awesome opportunity to just take a little pulse and we know it was not a huge group and we hope to have more events like this as the years go on but it was an opportunity that got us some information that we're gonna share in this report tonight. So with that I think I'm gonna go ahead and introduce Nicole to come on up and she'll take it away from here. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I'm Nicole Young and I recognize several faces up there on the dais. For those of you that may not know me, I'm Nicole Young. I'm a local consultant. I work with a number of non-profit organizations, local public agencies, doing planning together and taking action together and so I'm really pleased to be here this afternoon as you launch and release this first ever state of child and youth wellbeing in the city of Santa Cruz. I feel really lucky to have been part of this project that was led by really some very passionate and knowledgeable council members who really held that vision and provided great feedback and really used their resources and relationships to make this a really good process. I loved the words that some of you used around it's iterative, it's taking the pulse, it's something to continue doing, it's ongoing and really I feel like you just gave the presentation for me so. But I do wanna say that what I'm gonna focus on today is not necessarily like walking you through specific data points. I'm gonna leave you to read through that in your spare time. But what I wanted to focus on today was how, what are some ways that you can use this report as a tool, as a policy making tool, as a living tool for action. So if you go to the next slide, you'll see as council member Calentari Johnson started off saying that really this report itself reflects multiple frameworks and models that you as a city, as a council already use, that you already have adopted. And so this report was just an opportunity to integrate those and align those and be really specific about how they relate to each other. So you have your tremendous trend setting bill of rights which really is your statement about what the city believes and what you stand for, what your goals are. And then this is layered with the core conditions for health and well-being, which is a model, a framework for defining and articulating vital conditions of well-being that needs to be in place for every child and youth and family to be able to thrive. And that takes investing in programs and policies and partnerships, the whole gamut to be able to create those conditions of well-being. So in this report, the bill of rights and the core conditions are married together and then paired with data, community level data, at a county level, state level, when it's available at a city specific level to really paint a picture of what does well-being look like for children and youth in your city right now. And so you'll see that when it's available, there are some symbols that indicate trends. So if you see a green plus sign, it means that the data is moving in the right direction compared to the previous time it was measured. If you see a red X, it means the data is not moving in the direction we would want it to. And so that raises questions about why might that be? What can be done about that? Is there a role? What kind of role is there for the city? You see just a blue circle, it just means it didn't change much since the last time that that data was collected. So together there's a lot of information, a lot of data in the report. There are many other data points that could be looked at, that could be interesting. This is a starting place to start to pull some of these again together as a cohesive framework. And it becomes especially powerful when you then combine that with the community insights that came out of the community meeting that Vice Mayor Golder was describing. So really that's what we mean by the framework, combining all of those in a very explicit and intentional way. Go to the next slide. And the report can also be used as a policy tool. So when you take that framework and you pair that with a look at your current city investments and programs in relation to each of the rights and the Bill of Rights in relation to the core conditions, in relation to the community insights, it starts to point to patterns and trends around strengths, gaps and challenges, and then opportunities for action. Opportunities for action for the city in terms of the kinds of partnerships that you develop or enhance, the kinds of programs you're investing in, either leading yourselves or in partnership with others, the kinds of practices or ways of doing business that you adopt as a city, the kinds of policies and budget decisions that you make as a council, as a city. So all of those could contain some opportunities for action. And then the real power, the next slide is when you think about this report as both a framework and a policy tool together. And Council Member Calentari Johnson quoted one of the quotes from the report that came from an article on reimagining children's rights in the United States that just says so clearly in the absence of an overarching and coherent framework and system of accountability to ensure every child achieves their optimal health and well-being. Children in the United States, in Santa Cruz County, City of Santa Cruz face increasing inequalities in health outcomes. And so that should be like our vision, right? Our North Star, our reason, our why, that we're creating this and articulating this coherent framework and system of accountability so that collectively, right? You have the tools, you have the resources to address those. Next slide. And this reports the tool, the data, it's just one of several levers of change that you have. And so if you think about moving gears, the well-being report, it's one piece of that along with the Children's Fund, along with the youth liaison position that you've created and the city's representation and the Youth Action Network, along with your health and all policies approach that you've adopted. Council Member Watkins actually brought to my attention that there's an international movement to adopt a children and all policies approach. So just saying. And so, you know, and then there are other county-wide initiatives that the city is either involved in or could directly influence. So things like the Children's Network, core investments, Thrive by Five, family first prevention. If you're hearing me say these things and you're like, I don't know what any of that is, just take that as a sign up. Ooh, there's something there that maybe would be helpful and good to look into further because these are all related. Next slide. And a few other things I wanted to highlight that were some really intentional choices in the report and the way that things were phrased to really highlight particular narratives or ways of thinking about things. I want to highlight just a few of those. So one of them, for example, is the way that we're looking at demographic data. So it's common to look at demographic data and in this case, race and ethnicity and look at when you look at the individual racial and ethnic background. So that's a really small percentage. It's a really small number and that can often lead to either directly or kind of an implied message of, well, that's too small to really warrant doing something. And it sends that message of either you're not seen or you don't matter or don't matter enough. And so really what we're trying to highlight here is that message of inclusion and belonging and that this, to me, it was actually striking to take a look at collectively the majority of children and youth under age 25 in the city of Santa Cruz are black, indigenous, Latino or Latine people of color. When you look at all those groups together, the majority of your children and youth. And so it's a way to acknowledge and really bring into the conversation that explicit acknowledgement of the disproportionate impact of structural inequities that have been based on race and ethnicity, not just in the city of Santa Cruz, but in all of our society. And so it's a way for this report to convey that message that the city sees you, right? We see you. Other intentional things in the report were to be real and to identify challenges and inequities that do exist, but to serve that reminder that we have to continually ask these questions like, well, what factors contribute to that? What factors contribute to those trends? And there, I'll tell you, there's always gonna be many answers to that. And so that's the key is right to ask the question to search out those multiple answers that lead to the next question and set of answers around what are the opportunities for action by the city of Santa Cruz. So the example I'm showing on the slide here is a particular data point from the report. That basically is saying when it comes to emotional wellness, that the percentage of students in Santa Cruz City Schools District, percentage of students who did not say that they experienced frequent or chronic sadness or hopeless feelings in the past 12 months, that percentage actually improved, meaning that fewer students are saying that. So that's why you see that green plus sign. But then if you take a closer look, you'll see that while the percentage of students who are saying they did not experience chronic or frequent sadness, it's lower as the age increases, as the grade level increases, right? So there could be many reasons for that. The key again is to ask ourselves continuously what factors contribute to that and then what are the opportunities for action by the city. Next slide. Similarly, it's also important to acknowledge and amplify strengths and assets. Sometimes it's really easy to get stuck in a problem mindset, a deficit-based mindset. And so we really sometimes have to exercise that muscle to really look for and amplify the strengths, the positive things. And so I've included some examples here, some excerpts from the report that came from the community meeting. The first one in that kind of yellowish text box was actually a comment from someone in the meeting who said, well, yes, it can be concerning that there's an increase in need for mental health services. And it could also mean that things are actually good because maybe there's less stigma around reaching out for support and services. So then again, the question becomes what factors have contributed to that? What are the opportunities for action? If you know things like there's now more willingness or maybe less hesitation to reach out for support when it's needed, so what are the opportunities for action around that? So again, I'm applying strengths and assets when you have that opportunity. And then finally, a single highlight in the last slide that the report provides a reminder of the importance of seeking out and explaining the interconnections or interconnectedness of the core conditions. So for example, on the slide, you'll see the right number three from the Bill of Rights highlighted. It speaks to safe and healthy environments, including homes and schools and neighborhoods and communities. And that really that in and of itself speaks to multiple core conditions. And the idea being that the presence or absence of well-being in one core condition is often caused by or then contributes to the presence or absence of well-being in another core condition. So they're very much connected. That's how we should be thinking about both challenges as well as solutions and the opportunities for action. So that's where I will stop and then I will turn it over to Jonah Kaczynski who is the city's youth liaison. I was very involved in planning the community meeting, recruiting other youth to attend. And so very lucky to have him here with us today. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Hello everybody, I'm Jonah Kaczynski and I'm a senior at Santa Cruz High School. And as you heard, I'm also serving as the youth liaison for the city. It's been awesome getting to work on especially this project, setting up the youth summit that we had last spring and eventually getting to speak here. It's great to see that we're actually taking action and just to see in the bill of rights to so much of our community relates to the youth. Yet, like Shabra said earlier, they can't vote and it's cool that the people who can vote were able to set up a list of things that actually relate to the youth, kind of gifting them some rights in the bill of rights that relates to them. So there are still a few things that I want to reiterate from the youth summit we had in spring and just some issues that are still going on that I'd like to highlight and it was cool seeing in the report what has improved. First off, mental health, that's a big issue amongst everybody, but especially in the youth we've seen a lot more issues come out during the pandemic and in COVID. We're lucky to live in such a beautiful place but obviously there are a number of issues. And a lot of this actually relates to school. So I want to bring up in school we see a lack of motivation often. It all kind of ties back to COVID and being schooled on our computers for two years. But yeah, so counseling in schools, I believe that that's something that I'd like to highlight a little more. One example of where we saw kind of a push on it is after the false school shooting in October, afterwards we really push forward counseling opportunities to help with kids mental health. And I think that that push that our school administration did is what we should do all year long. I feel like we need that mental support not just in times of crisis, but therapies expensive, not a lot of people want to do it. So I think having these little opportunities to just talk to someone in school is very helpful. And that leads to my next point that relates to academics is support and college help. So as a senior, I'm going through the whole exhausting process of applying to colleges and going through writing essays, et cetera. And I've noticed there's a lot of people that aren't really even aware of the process. And that's another way that I want our school to kind of step in more is like, actually set up meetings with students and say, hey, this is what's gonna happen next year. Here's what you need to do. I'm lucky enough to meet with a college counselor and figure out the process. But a lot of people don't have that support. And as we're setting up the support for children in their childhood, I also think it's important to set them up for a better future once they are of voting age and can use their own voices. Also physical health is a big thing. I saw in one of the reports, I don't know if it was on those slides we just had up, but a lot of, I didn't read the exact statistics, but I know that physical health hasn't been as highlighted in the past. And I believe that that is a big part of mental health. I'm a big surfer. I like doing jiu-jitsu and I see exercise as a fantastic thing for mental health. And I'd like it if we could kind of give more opportunities for people to get involved in exercise, whether it's in school, you know, a lot of people, we have PE classes, but it seems like they're not a very, I don't know how it works, but I don't see a lot of people. I don't know a lot of kids that take PE. And I feel like that's just another aspect of health that really goes into not just mental health, but physical health too. Another point is, and this actually kind of relates to the past topic we had about housing. And this really relates to what I have heard from my community and my friends, you know, living on the lower west side, one big part of our social life is the Circle Church. And hanging out there, we play willful ball there during the summer. We bike around there at night, go in there and play basketball. And, you know, it's been beautiful to see all the art that's going on there. I'm not exactly aware of what the plan is as to that area if we're turning into housing. But I just wanna say that, you know, this is one topic that at least just me and my friends, you know, really care about. And, you know, having that as a center of our community is, it's that place holds great value to us. You know, we all grew up there playing basketball there. We'd have birthday parties there. So I just wanna address that that is a, you know, it has a deep place in our hearts in the center of our neighborhood. And I know, I don't know how far we are into the plan of what's gonna happen with that place. But yeah, so that's about all the topics I wanted to cover. I just wanna say again, it's been fantastic serving as the youth liaison. And I look forward to what we continue to do. I wanna say a big thank you to Shabra for helping this and everybody on our meetings that we've had. Shabra, especially as we've had our check-ins couple of times a month and just setting an outline for what we are able to do and this community for the youth. And thank you. Jonah, if you would, Jonah, come back here. Thank you. That was terrifically well done. Thank you. It was a very, very good job. And I know this is part of a process. And thank you for being involved in it. Yeah, of course, thank you. In particular, young man, good work. Keep up that good work. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Good afternoon. Anyone else? That's the end of the presentation. End of the presentation. Questions or comments by council members? Vice mayors. Thank you. I would just like to follow up on a couple of the points that Jonah brought up where Santa Cruz City Schools is stepping up to address some of the things that you're concerned about. And so just so that you and the public are aware that there is social emotional counselors that are at all the secondary schools now that's in addition to the regular counselors. We have full-time counselors at all of our elementary schools. We have a social worker dedicated just to the elementary school and social work interns that have been instrumental in helping children and youth. I do agree that there is a deficit in this community about outside counseling for students outside of school. So I think having more access to that in the community, whether you have insurance or don't have insurance or you're on Medi-Cal, there's a real lack of that. I also wanna say that PE is only required till ninth grade, that's state law. Yeah, so that's where you are with that. And the Santa Cruz City Schools also added two directors to student services to take on this challenge and really considers student mental health just a foundational part of a student's experience in Santa Cruz City Schools. They've gone on to include positive behavior, intervention and support to the secondary. We've implemented that at the elementary school for about 10 years now. And second step, our social emotional learning program is also being started at the middle and high schools. And then they're piloting a new program where it's, and I forget the name of it, they use it up in Sacramento, where you're able to do check-ins on a more frequent basis with students asking some of those same questions that are on the Social Emotional Health Survey and you can customize them and change them and then you can immediately disaggregate the data based on socioeconomics, race, grade level, all sorts of things, and then target and intervene when needed. And so that's something that's really exciting and we're moving forward with. But I do thank you, Jonah, for those comments and questions. Thanks. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. Other questions, comments? The members, Ms. Brown. I'll just take the opportunity to say thank you to my colleagues for your work on this and to our staff for your work. This sounds, it's great to see some baseline information and so really the qualitative narrative around that really gives a picture of what the commitments are, what the needs are, and I just wanna say to Jonah, thank you for serving in this role and for stepping up to share your thoughts. Use that position and I'm sure you will in your future. Keep pushing us to do better. Keep pushing, because we say it and we have that commitment and then sometimes for a variety of reasons, things get lost, so keep pushing us. Keep coming, thank you. Further, Ms. Brunner is recognized. Just a brief comment that this report was really visually well done and easy to understand and read through and the data was very interesting and so receiving this report, this is a first time to, and this is what's exciting is that we can build from here and this is a great starting point so I know a lot of work went into this so thank you to everyone who has put the work into this and I just wanna really emphasize the importance of healthy children, well-being and their well-being. Parents and families need to also be healthy and well and supported in order for those children so when we're talking about action factors that contribute an opportunity for action that the city can contribute, it's really not just youth and children programs but also adult programs and funding and investment in any capacity that supports parents and housing, it ties back to housing too and housing stability and financial support, mental health as well so thank you for getting this look, you know, it's a snapshot, it's a start and I really like and appreciate what you said Council Member Watkins so thank you for this foundation. When it's time I'll have some wrap up comments, you want me to make them now? Sure. Okay. I just have one more quick comment and that is that I think that this also shows the community that it's a commitment to an upstream prevention of future homelessness and future, you know, societal problems in taking a big commitment into our youth so that's all. Might be why you dedicated your life to this, maybe. Thank you, that was part of my wrap up, no, that's perfect. Matter is back before the Council, the Mayor be glad to entertain a motion. Oh, do we, okay, so I'll make a motion to accept the report. There's motion. I'll second. By Ms. Watkins. And I'll just, oh, sorry. Please go ahead. I'm jumping ahead. Open on your motion. Just some wrap up comments. I also want to just thank everyone involved in this report and in the process and thank you specifically, Nicole and Jonah. You know, we heard a couple of things from you, Jonah, around mental health, physical activity, social connectivity, safe spaces to be that that's what I heard and you named it in the context of schools because that's your experience, that's your life. You spend most of your life there and I want to invite us to think about it in the context of the city and the role of the city because we do have a role in each of those things that were named by Jonah, that were highlighted by Nicole and that are in the report. You know, what are the opportunities for action? What other questions do we need to ask ourselves on these data points and the points that Jonah brought up? So I think just those were my closing comments on that. This is upstream, this is so that we can prevent folks from going a path that is not letting them reach their full potential and it's opportunities like this, hopefully, that will get more youth engaged and involved in coming up to the podium and speaking up and sharing your concerns and what you'd like to see with us. May I read my pages? Ms. Watkins. And I too will just add to my colleagues' comments and appreciation for the comments today as well as the comments by our presenters and our young folks, Jonah here as well. I just want to highlight what Nicole brought up in terms of the intersection between what this is, the health and all policies framework we have in place, the intersection between what that means in terms of a community that's rooted in a county, that's rooted in a state, that also has partners in education, partners in workforce development, all types of opportunities to say, how do we all play a role in supporting the success of our youth? And also to the comments that Council Member Bruna brought up in terms of having a healthy foundation for our young people, it starts with supporting our parents and guardians and one thing that we have in place because of the Children's Fund is relief for a parent looking for a scholarship, for example, to allow their child to participate in one of our Parks and Rec programs and that relief helps their anxiety around affordability, it helps with the affordability and balance that we see that plays out in housing. So it's all interconnected and how we remember that in terms of where we reside and our role in the solutions to the interconnectivity to support the wellbeing and the upstream investments of our youth that was brought up by my colleagues. So this is a big issue that we have a role and this is a great celebration of our place and our contributions and our commitment to what can be possible here. So thank you very much and thank you to all that made this point. Thank you. Let me see if there are other comments. Folks wish to make all debate have and cease. Clerk will call the roll. We do have someone online for public comments. I'm sorry, excuse me. Thank you for pointing that out. Person online, good afternoon. Yeah, thanks. I thought you were gonna skip us. Anyway, item 18 contains a youth report that indicates two to five percent of students in grade seven to nine identified their gender as transgender and similar numbers said they weren't very sure. That's a clanging warning bell that all is not well with too many children's process of developing their identity and they are confused. That amount of denial of biological reality is lunitons. The survey indication between 19 and 30% have a sexual orientation other than hetero or not so sure is another concern, especially since that age group has little to zero actual sexual discovery experience to preference. Both sound ridiculously high. Speaking of high trans suicide rates there's evidence of severe mental issues. I'm thinking these numbers indicate kids are being indoctrinated into thinking being queer as Kulo or it is also a manufactured easy group membership identity answer. Group identities are a valued piece of growing up but most all groups have earned membership and the associated reward status like ban, cheerleading, sports, all that stuff. The LGBT so-called community has few to no membership performance requirements but does have then these unearned rewards of being in an easy group membership which is assigned them by cultural Marxists unlike other groups even literally being rewarded in the council chambers which conserved to plaster over not resolved the growing pains or emotional struggles in normal child development and identity discovery in some people. I watched the self-admitted non-binary drag queen trashy indoctrinating children in public front and center on Pacific on Saturday, surrounded by it looked like queer activists with anti-fog like rainbow umbrellas, reality check it wasn't raining and the usual pride regalia talking fairies and explaining queer terms to five-year-olds. Real drag queens know their men. While what occurred was not as inappropriate as public school youth queer presiding indoctrination it did seem to be purposely to the maximum reach public display possible touching at times on queer ideologies displaying symbols and ideas directed at extremely young children. Mental health issues could be thought of as the complexity of life being too much for a person's mental model of reality to process a model which is under construction in children and can be overloaded and queer presiding offers easy non-answers to growing up difficulties. It makes me wonder about the health and wellness children's events and the parks and rec fall activity guides such as gender neutral kids and friends club or the LGBTQI or the teen hangout when gender affirming becomes trans presiding mentored by unqualified children no less instead of mental health counseling for those who need it. Yep, we have an overload of 10% of children with gender confusion. And lastly, what are your presenters gonna learn not just to read their slides? Thanks. Thank you, sir. Anyone else online? Person online, good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Sarah Emert. I'm the director of community impact with United Way of Santa Cruz County. I wanna acknowledge those and how to role to play in moving forward the city's Children and Youth Bill of Rights all that went into this report. I'm in some notable things that I wanted to name. I really appreciated council member Golder explicitly saying that this is about an upstream approach. When Nicole mentioned the levers for change piece the racial equity points highlighted in the report as well as all of your commitments to turning the bill of rights into action. Santa Cruz city's efforts are raising the bar for other jurisdictions in this county. As council member Calantari Johnson mentioned shortly after Santa Cruz city passed its Bill of Rights the county passed it and then most recently capital city. Over the past year, the children's network has prioritized three of the county's Children and Youth Bill of Rights and is doing a deeper dive into them exploring ways to operationalize them. We as well as the other jurisdictions can learn a lot from Santa Cruz city's process. We as in the Youth Action Network and the Children's Network are working with the other jurisdictions to pass the Bill of Rights as well. And in 2018 United Way published the county Youth Well-Being Spotlight Report. We are excited to dive deeper into your state of the child and Youth Well-Being data noting where positive change has occurred as well as well we can continue to do better as a community to ensure that all youth are thriving. United Way is committed to elevating the work of Santa Cruz city and working alongside you to increase youth well-being in our community. You can count on us including the Youth Action Network and the Children's Network to support the city and getting the word out about ways for young people to get involved in the community and to encourage other jurisdictions to learn from Santa Cruz city's efforts. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ms. Bush, anyone else online? Okay, very good. Sir, please come forward. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Hi. My name's Owen Lawson. I'm friends with Jonah Zhazinski. We'll overlook that. Yeah. I just wanted to add a couple comments. Namely, you were talking about parks and recreation and getting more kids involved. That made me think is when I did junior guards with the Santa Cruz city, the majority of the kids were white and the majority of them were from families that served and were already involved in the ocean, which is fine, but it does seem to be a little lopsided and it could be helpful to have the same type of training that they do in junior guards integrated into maybe like Bayview, like have a fire truck come by, teach them a bunch of things. I definitely learned so much from that and it was very helpful in my life now. Another thing is, I forgot what I was gonna say. That's it. Have a great day. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. I was obviously kidding Jonah, but thank you both so much for being here. If you remembered your comment, go ahead. I just did. I was also thinking about that Jonah and I, we have very specific issues that affect us as friends and as being in the same group, but the issues that affect us don't really affect all the kids in Santa Cruz. It's a very limited view into the issues of the kids of Santa Cruz and a lot of the kids don't even know this position exists. A lot of the kids don't know that they could contact Jonah and say, oh, this is an issue that I'd like to have resolved and it gives you guys and Jonah a very limited scope of what the youth needs. It gives us a very, it gives you some, but like Jonah goes to Santa Cruz High. I go to Santa Cruz High as well. What about Harbor High? What about PCS? There's a bunch of different schools. There's different organizations that are underrepresented and not made just because this is a new thing, but it can change, I'm sure. Yeah, that's what I had to say. Thank you. I'm glad you remembered your second point. It was quite good. Thank you so much for being here. Good afternoon, sir. Yeah, hello. You know, I'll be brief. I didn't read the report. Sure seems like quite the Cinderella story. Not really the Cinderella story I'm getting from my friends of high school kids about what's going on. So I'll read the report before I comment further. Good idea. Thanks. Thank you very much. Further matters back for the council. Motion's been made seconded. All debate haven't ceased the clerk will call the roll. Thank you, mayor. Councilmember Brown. Aye. Watkins. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Halentary Johnson. Aye. Vice Mayor Golder. Aye. And Mayor Keely. Aye. Motion passes and so ordered. Thank you all for your very fine work. Best wishes to you. We're on under oral communication. I'm gonna take the privilege of the chair to introduce Terence Concanon who just arrived here from Lake Havasu City. And it is now our brand new Visit Santa Cruz County executive director. Good afternoon. Welcome to the city. Thank you very much. I cannot tell you how excited I am. And it's not just because it's 79 here and it's 119 degrees when I left Lake Havasu City. No, I have had a history with Santa Cruz County. I discovered this county. I think in 1985 I was driving in my car in Southern California and I heard a band called Camper Van Beethoven on K-Rock. And I love the music so much that my buddies and I came up here. This is also the first place where I failed at surfing. I have failed at surfing three times and I've given it up after those. This is the first place I did it and the only place I've ever worn a wetsuit. But to be perfectly serious, I just want this body to know and the people that are here and watching us on TV that I'm super excited to be a part of this community. I moved here a week ago. It's been one of the best weeks of my life. I was able to get a place within walking distance of downtown. And for somebody who's lived out in the rural desert, it is so exciting to be able to walk and to walk to all these different conveniences. This is a fantastic county. It's a fantastic community. You guys should be very proud of all the things you've done. What I've heard here today is remarkable and I'm really, really proud to be a part of this community. I will let you know that under my leadership, Visit Santa Cruz County will pay attention to every part of this county, every community. Tourism is one of the most gratifying forms of economic development. It's something I have basically given my career to. It's something I'm proud to admit. I'm a total geek about tourism. I really believe in it and I really believe that it's good for this community. The last thing I'll leave you with is under my leadership, Visit Santa Cruz County, our number one customers, the ones that we care about the most are the citizens and residents of this county. We may reach out to bring people into this community and to maximize our tourism revenue, but at the end of the day, I'm a citizen. My staff are citizens and we believe in this county and we will do everything we can to make this not just a better place for people to visit but a better place for all of us to live. So thank you for having me. And Ken, thank you very much. Welcome to town. I know that you, a couple of you are my understanding correctly, board members are right here. Nice to meet you. Welcome. I'm very happy to see you and to hear your very positive comments. Thank you, sir. Wonderful. Thank you again. Certainly. Please come forward. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, council members and mayor. My name is Jennifer Zeider. I live at 403 C Bright Avenue. I believe it's council member Bruner's district if I'm not mistaken. I'm here to speak about the proposal to make permanent outdoor dining and or bar establishments in the city of Santa Cruz, Allah in the wake of COVID that have now been extended through March of 2024. I am a neighborhood representative. We have been working with Rebecca, I believe and Josephine in the economic development council regarding the expansion and community input. If I could ask someone to please distribute these. I don't know if I have enough. This is the plot map. If you would just walk over there and hand it to the clerk, she'll be glad to distribute. Thank you. This pertains to a particular local establishment named Brady's. I've been there many times. The nice little neighborhood bar. It was a nice compact neighborhood bar with limited noise until the advent of the expansion. And now what we have is I believe a health and safety matter in the neighborhood. Most of us that surround that are in fact, homeowners and reside there. I know it's been said that there were short-term rentals. And yes, there are some certainly error, but they are also entitled to peace and quiet during their stay to this lovely city because we know that tourism is an important aspect. What we have experienced since COVID is really a doubling, if not tripling of the occupancy of that particular establishment. The outdoor is a hodgepodge of kitchen tables and chairs that people have brought in. The amount of people that are frequenting that until 2 a.m. is strictly, it's appalling. We have, I'll show you pictures as well, regular puke on my fence, okay. If I could pass us around, regular drug baggies. This is on a regular basis in addition to whippets that are dropped into our yards. Broken fences, mine has been broken so many times. If I could ask for a couple minutes or two, I appreciate that, thank you very much. Broken fences, broken cars. The neighbor next door was actually, when he tried to go down and ask people to be quiet, was punched in the face and a few weeks later, a rock was thrown through his front glass window. We have regular beer cans and other paraphernalia. I've seen condoms, I've seen people having sex when they're walking through a gate, two doors down from Brady's. So, what we have here is becoming a public nuisance. Again, I've been here since 2001, so I know I bought into an area, but it was very contained at Brady's. It stayed within the perimeter. And we used to talk about the two o'clock drop when the people go home afterwards and we realized, they're getting to their cars, they're loud, the more you drink, the more anxious you are, loud you are now, they're on their cell phones, playing their radios, the cars peel off because they're inebriated. There was an accident about three weeks ago, two o'clock in the afternoon, a patron leaves Brady's, gets into his truck and goes down the street on a dome and crashes into a park sign in the middle of the day. These people are being over-served, it's an all cash business and I think you might wanna look into whether or not there's audits or actually reporting all the income. There are no receipts ever passed out at Brady's. So, I'm just imploring upon you, when you are considering expanding the outdoor ordinance, which again, we are all supportive during COVID, we wanted everybody to be able to have economic revenues during that difficult period of time, but it's not a one size fits all. When you're looking at bars and you're looking at restaurants, please look at the particular locations and we are in a neighborhood, predominately neighborhood. So, we'll be coming back where we're working with Rebecca and Josephine and thank you for listening on my handout, these pictures, I'd appreciate your taking a look at them. Well, thank you. This is just from last week. Thank you very much for being here. We appreciate your comments and your input. Good afternoon, sir. My name's James Ewing Whitman. Maybe the timer's gonna work, maybe it's not. Said this would be a short meeting. So, you know, I remember coming here on a Monday, it was kind of the end of March, 2020. Picked up something, said there was gonna be a live meeting, came on Tuesday, it was raining. That's the first time that I really saw Andy Mills, you know, really acting in an unfamiliar way. He seemed really like a panicked, frantic individual. I don't want to imitate him, but he seemed really panicked. That was the day of the pandemic, scammedemic. What do you want to call it? So, here it is August 22nd, 2023 and a lot of information saying there's gonna be another lockdown coming in September. And it's like people are, the organizations are just being so transparent about what they're doing. You know, I spoke, I guess it was two weeks ago. I felt that most of the Western nations, including the United States, were in free fall. So I guess I'm just kind of here to say congratulations to all you guys for being done by six, but if some supposedly serious shit hits the fan in a month or so, I'm calling bullshit on it. That's all, so thank you. Well, thank you. Do we have anyone online, Ms. Bush? I don't know where communications. Okay, first person online, good afternoon. Yes, hello again, this is Garrett. It's very clear to me that the people who cite equity as a reason for anything are either A, what Vladimir Lenin called a useful idiot, or B, are the enemy of American culture, economics and values. I've spoken before how the defective leftist equity concept ignores the basic realities that people are different. Potential is an abstract concept that cannot be measured or accurately predicted. So-called social determinants sure can be easily manipulated statistical correlations that don't necessarily prove any causation or possessed with any American principles. Yet leftist types apply this laughable but destructive version of social justice to everything which are then easily hijacked to unjustly discriminate or worse. Equity is a far-left concept of the woke that is at the core of the cultural Marxism threat that seeks a state-in-powered or mal-like cultural revolution using adopted and inflated American grievances that is slowly destroying for highly successful American values, culture, history and economics. Marx sucked to level economic disparity by destroying private property with a totalitarian state doing redistribution of those shares equally. Well, you hope anyway. Cultural Marxism secretly, similarly, seeks to destroy any part of property or culture deemed by the woke as in any way a personal possession they assign a superiority to or having a higher status or even an average or normal status compared to other cultural systems and group identities. This is the woke universal goal undertaking the grievance, wandering destruction of every bit of any far-left perceived difference by which they always use oppression or injustice, whether it is destroying natural maleness, natural womanhood and their very successful synergistic unity to denying natural differences, destroying the cultural norm of the heterosexual nuclear family, critical race theory, all the rest of the very successful Western Judeo-Christian culture and making all history into an oppression no matter how normal for the times those past events were, it all results in cultural destruction. Equity is an American culture. Equity is an American cultural and economic poison that continues to rot the city charter. You will be on the wrong side of history. Thank you very much, sir. Anyone else online? Last person online, good afternoon. Police are continuing to remove homeless communities through force and threats of force. They're driving them around the city night after night. So shelter accommodations are not available for the majority of those folks. Those outside struggle to survive while the city spends taxpayer dollars to make conditions as wretched as possible for those sheltering themselves. Denied are the right to rest and sleep, and that is to live. Now are these unlawful sweeps and seizures now Santa Cruz Police Department official policy or unofficial? Are these threats and confiscations the new norm? Leave your survival gear or go to jail, Moon Squad Police Policy reported by those outside at the library, that's the main library, on Thursday the 17th, and then again the next morning near the tannery. Demands to leave without notice or offer of altered shelter followed similar citations and arrests in the upper Pogonip some weeks back in violation of court orders. Witnesses to the tannery raid report seeing new tents slashed and no provision made to store homeless property in police chief Escalante's, how do we make them more uncomfortable policy? Are we facing our own version of the Antioch and Pittsburgh conspiracy to injure, corrupt, oppress and intimidate as it's being charged against that police department? I asked the community to help unhoused communities resist this since the council obviously is on the other side of this equation. Form a phone partnership with a homeless survivor. The shelters are full or unusable and outdoor survival is the straightforward issue and a basic human rights issue. Paul Huff, Homeless United for Friendship and Freedom at 423-4833 if you want to help out. Thank you, sir. Anyone else, Ms. Bush? For the business to come before the council and hearing none, a motion to adjourn would say it again. I have one thing to add. Please. There was a member of the public and I just wanted to share that the outdoor dining private property permanent program is in process and there will be community meetings with neighbors around areas of outdoor dining on private property across the city. And so those meetings with the neighbors and meetings with all of those businesses, I think there's 20 currently with temporary permits but kind of moving to permanent program. So stay tuned. That neighbor, thank you for sharing the information she wanted to share but I wanted to share for others who might also have more to say or want to give input that we will be reaching out. There is a subcommittee that will be holding meetings with neighbors so that we can really craft a program, a permanent program. The public property program is already done, the parklet program. Now we're working on private property outdoor dining. So thank you. Thank you, council member. Motion to adjourn and be in order. Ms. Brown moves, vice mayor seconds. I'll be fast. Non-debatable, those in favor signify by saying aye. Opposed? Motion to adjourn. We stand adjourned. Thank you.