 Good morning, everyone. Before we get started, just a quick reminder about face coverings. Please make sure your face is covered nose and mouth securely with the face covering and when you speak at the podium as well. Thank you. Thank you. Call to order. I will now call the August 11th, 2020 special meeting of the Board of Supervisors to order. Will the clerk please call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. Chairman Caput. Here. And if we can have a moment of silence and prayer and then followed by the Pledge of Allegiance, please join me. And I say it's up to you. And to the public where we just announced one nation under God, indivisible. Thank you. And Mr. Palacios, do we have revisions or late additions to today's agenda? We have no revisions to today's agenda. Okay. So the next thing is we would go into our overview of the public safety and justice budget. And I'd like to introduce Christina Maori to present that overview. Good morning, Chair Caput. Good morning. Good morning. How you doing? Good, good. Thank you. Okay. I believe the clerk will be bringing the present. I'm sorry, Christina. We were never given a PowerPoint for your presentation. Oh, we sent it. Take a moment. If you give us 30 seconds and we'll take a quick look. Okay. All right. I can share this with that person. Christina, why don't you go ahead and share your screen? That might be the easiest way to move forward. Okay. It's about. Okay. Can everybody see that all right? Yes. That looks great. Thank you. Okay. All right. So today is a quick speak. That's today. I'll be giving you a brief overview. So here you'll see that public students that presents about 165 million of the county budget. And it represents about 19% of the total county budget provides financing for the sheriff corner, district attorney, probation, public defender, emergency services, county fire protection and contributions to superior court, grand jury, animal services and the 911 Regional Communication Center. You can see here that the sheriff corner represents at least a little more than the majority of about 53%. Here's a listing of all the departments and their financing compared to the proposed budget 2021 compared to the revised and a breakdown of the revenues and the general fund contribution. This includes revenues of about 73.5 million dollars. There's a million five in other funds coming from fund balance for county fire and 90.4 million in the general fund contribution. Overall, this is reduced by three and a half percent primarily in the reduction of the available general funds. And here that you can see that this chart shows the net county cost reductions by department which represent approximately $6 million or 6% savings from the proposed budget. And here you'll see a summary of the expenditures for public safety and justice departments. Again, it's $165 million. There you'll see the reductions by each department or category, the sheriff's office making up the majority of about 3.8 million of the total 6 million. There's a total of 32 staff being recommended to be unfunded and or eliminated. And you'll see again that the sheriff represents about 50% of the expenditures for public safety. And here you'll see a breakdown by the expenditures by category for the changes. The majority of the changes were made of course in salaries and benefits of over $4 million. There are some reductions in services and supplies of a little over a million dollars and other charges of about just under a half a million dollars. Some of the reductions of course in services and supplies is a lot of our non-essential costs, memberships, travel, training, and supplies have all been reduced where possible. Here you'll see an overview of the public safety and justice operational impacts. More information will be found in the department narratives. The majority of the departments unfunded some vacancies that will have impacts on services and included elimination of 13 filled positions. Three departments will present more details today on the regular agenda, the district attorney, sheriff, coroner and probation. And there are representatives of the other departments here if you have any questions. And that concludes my presentation. Well, that worked pretty well. Good work, Ms. Mowry. Thank you. Okay. Is there any, there's just a presentation, right? Yes. And now you'd be on item five. Okay. Public comment, today's agenda item is, this item is an opportunity for members of the public to address the board on topics related to items on today's agenda. Revised county budgets for public safety and justice. There'll also be an opportunity for testimony during each regular agenda item. If you cannot stay to wait for a regular agenda item, you may address the board at this time. However, you can only speak once on each topic. So you'll have three minutes. Anybody here in the room that would like to speak? Hello there. Okay. Good morning. My name is Melissa Freebear and I'm a city of Santa Cruz resident and a local registered nurse. I'm here to speak on item number nine, the supplemental budget for the sheriff coroner. Item nine. Item number nine. You get closer to the microphone. Sorry, I didn't know how close I can be. Okay. I'm here to speak on item A, the supplemental budget, specifically the chopping of the position, the one full-time position, the unfunding of the vacant program coordinator for the sexual assault forensic examiner program. I think this is a huge mistake that you guys are going to delete this position when we are just now recently decided to bring sexual assault response team back to Santa Cruz. I feel like this is a huge injustice to women and children and victims of crime in this county that did we even try to fund this position? We're finally bringing SART back to Santa Cruz, back to Dominican hospital, trying to run a robust program. It's less than $100,000 to spend, to have a program coordinator, to make sure that victims of assault that we follow that process appropriately. And I just want to leave you with some staggering statistics to maybe implore you to make a better decision. Every 73 seconds in our country, a person is raped. One in five women are raped at some point in their lifetime in the United States, one in five. In contrast, one in 71 men report being raped in the United States. Most female victims experience their first rape before the age of 25. Over 79% of victims were raped before the age of 25. You can imagine the impact that has on their life and their future life prospect if they don't get the help and the care they need at the beginning of the process. Over 42% have experienced their first rape before the age of 18 years old. You know, that is super important. And I don't know if you guys understand what a SART program looks like or the history in this county, but Santa Cruz was ahead of the curve on this. We ran a model program and then it was taken away from Santa Cruz and it went over to Santa Clara. We do not need to keep making the same mistakes. We need to show women in this county and children and victims of assault that they are valued, that their lives matter, that they are followed through appropriately. And this one position, I think we can come up with the less than $100,000 to spend to show women in this town that we matter. So thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay, anybody downstairs? Anybody online? There's nobody downstairs and we have no web comments. We'll now go to item number six, action on the consent agenda. There's just one item on the consent item number seven. I would move the consent agenda. We have a motion. Any public? Okay, second. Any public comment on the, okay, none. We just did that. I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. We'll go now to item number eight. Consider the 2020-2021 supplemental budget for the district attorney's public administrator as outlined in the reference budget documents and the memorandum of the district attorney public administrator. And welcome. How you doing, Jeff? Good, thank you. Good. You holding up? Yes, we are. Okay. Oh, you're all the same. Oh, man. The support of public safety and your support today, Carlos Palacios, for his support of the DA's office, and Nicole Coburn and Sven Stafford from the CAO's office who have assisted us with this budget and many other areas. And I'd also like to thank the staff of the DA's office itself, the diligent, hardworking people that we have that literally make public safety possible in our office and for the community. So with that famous lawyer words, I will be brief today. I just wanna cover revisions to the proposed budget, some of the operational impacts for us by way of staffing changes, program changes and operational plan changes and talk a little bit about some of the uncertainties. I wanna acknowledge that the board has had a very challenging difficult time in terms of the health crisis, the financial crisis in terms of making decisions. And I want you to know that we have really tried to do our part to shoulder the burden. And I just wanna acknowledge that these are very, very difficult times, unprecedented for all of us and for the board in particular to make difficult decisions. So as we go through the slides, you can tell that we have unfunded for full-time equivalent positions that were existing positions. They were vacant, fortunately, when I can speak about the impacts of that in a minute. We have also deleted one full-time equivalent position that was essentially promised to us. It was an attorney to sort of work on the neighborhood court program and other things, as well as two support staff positions from the budget cycle. We have also had to, unfortunately, discontinue an extra help legal secretary position that was filled by one of our retired employees that came back and was really doing an excellent job for us. So in an effort to sort of explain how we have done our part in addition to those positions that I've spoken about, we have also tried to increase management fees where we can. And for the consumer protection unit, this is a unit that is self-generating with revenue. And as we've looked at them, we have really thought about how we can sort of charge certain management fees that we were doing for them anyway. So we've been able to sort of use some of those resources to offset some of the issues that we've had. We have also reduced operating costs where we can in terms of professional services, supplies, and those sort of things. So in terms of the operational impacts, as I've said, you can see the staffing changes on the left-hand side of this chart, the full-time positions that were vacant. And the fact that they were vacant actually allowed us to not really lay anyone off, which I know other departments have had to do. So these were unfunded positions, three of them that we had, we have unfunded those vacant, they were vacant positions. The one, as I have mentioned, that we were promised, essentially, to work on the neighborhood court and community outreach program. We understand that it was necessary at this point to eliminate that position as one of our budget positions. And we also understand that with respect to other positions, the support, IT support, a technical support position, legal secretary position, and the extra help, legal secretary position, that those were areas that we were able to reduce our costs significantly, which resulted really with the other cuts that we were able to do in not literally having to fire, lay people off, and have them out of a job. There are, however, some significant impacts, as I have said before this board on many occasions, we have always tried to do more with less, that we have always sort of tried to run a lean shop for a whole host of reasons. We just think it's the way to do business. But make no mistake, there are, because of the resources that are reduced and resources that are available for us, there have been some sort of, some impacts which we are trying to work around. And delays are unfortunately just going to occur. Those are going to occur because of the reduced staffing issues, but they're also occurring because of safety procedures put in place because of COVID-19. In terms of one of the impacts, I just wanna say, we are extremely proud that we really have started, the DA's office was a spearhead in starting the first child interview center in this county, a multidisciplinary interview center, which I know that all of you supported, as well as all of law enforcement in this county. We had a goal of trying to serve a hundred clients, but that goal because of various sort of safety precautions and all that, we are having to delay that goal. We are still utilizing the center, but we're utilizing it in a different way and frankly, achieving the goal of 100 clients is not going to take place in the immediate future. We're hoping to buy June, 2021. If we can get back on track, we can do that. The other impact that we wanted to talk about was one of the goals that we had was leveraging our technology to streamline discovery procedure. Discovery is the providing of reports and information to the other side. And the reason that we wanted to do that is, I used to tell you that the files were, when I first started this thick and then they got this thick with the advent of body cameras and all the other sort of storage that is required and all of the information that needs to get pushed to the other side, we have really started to think about better ways to do that, easier ways to do that, more automated ways to do that. And we have had success with that, but I will say that is also a goal that is going to be delayed to realize its full sort of implementation. And finally, one of the other things that we had talked about as one of our goals was to start a new sort of gang prevention unit. We've got a lot of folks that are out there on the streets in our gang unit that is multi-jurisdictional. And there was a real sort of need that they saw to sort of push out information to younger people. And we were working with the school board to try to get some of those things implemented. And I will say that because of distancing and at home learning that those goals are essentially slowing down and we have not been able to sort of implement that. Wanted to touch finally on just something that I had talked about. There are a lot of uncertainties. There's uncertainties for us, for our county and those uncertainties as you and everybody well knows are federal and state funding, how the budget is going to be affected ultimately when federal funding shakes out and state funding shakes out. What's gonna happen with the COVID-19 pandemic that we are experiencing and sort of the effect on court operations which is kind of a moving target and the court has adapted as appropriate. And we certainly need to respond to that as well as new legislation. I will tell you there's a lot of legislation coming out and when new legislation comes out invariably it puts more burdens on DA's offices and others inside the system. So we have found ourselves sort of having to realign and I know other agencies have as well to try to accommodate for the new law. So with that, I just wanna say thank you for having us, thank you for supporting us. And we would ask that you implement the budget that we have sort of laid out here. And with that, if there are any questions on anything I'm happy to answer those. Thank you very much. That was a lot to report in a very short time. I hope I was brief, I try. I know some big stuff there. And we'll open it up for the board. Any board members, Supervisor McPherson, you have any questions? Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. For some reason, I wanna thank District Attorney, Jeff Rosell and his whole team for their tireless efforts under the circumstances on behalf of our county residents. And I wish we were making, we were in a position to make some of those initiatives that were mentioned in the board rather than making cuts. But I was gonna ask him what these cuts mean, but he has answered that question in the Child Interview Center and the Gang Prevention Unit, which are very, very valuable, good preventative issues. And I look forward to the time when we can implement them. I just wanna thank the District Attorney's Office for all the work it's done. Very efficient and very professional, day in and day out. And thank you very much, Jeff, for your leadership and for everybody in your office. We truly appreciate it. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Significant changes associated with the epidemic. Just in advance of that, I did wanna highlight the work that your team had done outreach in particular in my district regarding crimes against seniors and fraud. The work that both you and your team did was really invaluable. And we had a significant amount of people showing up to these trainings. There was a lot of use and it goes to show what we can do when we have these programs as Supervisor McPherson was noting. These grander, it isn't just about the prosecution side. It's also about this educational side that really prevents a lot of crime from occurring in the first place when people have the knowledge that you and your team bring to the table. And every year, I do wanna also add a special thanks to your victim services team, really unsung heroes within your world about people that work with victims of crime throughout the entire process. Sylvia and others that do so much and they go quietly, but they mean so much in that world. So there's a lot of changes occurring within the general criminal justice system that has a lot of impacts on the work that you guys do, but you always have victims of crime in their best interests and heart. And I just wanted to be sure that it was acknowledged about the outreach that you do on the front end and that that's a really valuable component of the work that you do. So thank you, Mr. Rizal. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Coonerty Rizal. My only question really is, I know the courts have undergone some significant changes as a result in their operations as a result of COVID. What do you see in terms of some of those sticking around post COVID and sort of changing the way we do business? Say this, in terms of how the court conducts its business, it's really up to the court, but I can tell you, we have been advocates for a long time for video arraignments when appropriate for people in the jail so that they did not need to be transported and frankly create what some would view as an undue burden on the sheriff's office and undue burden on the court system and all that. So some of these video arraignments that are taking place, it is our hope and my hope that we can continue some of this and use technology to sort of reduce the workload and reduce the dangers involved to everybody. So I think that would be one area just off the top of my head. The second thing with respect to the courts is trying to eliminate delay. Delay is something that is sort of the way business needs to get conducted because it just takes so long to provide information from our, from the police to us and from us to the other side. And so a lot of the technology that we were looking at that we have been trying to leverage and this is especially true in light of body camera video now which is relatively new in the last several years. All of the information contained on electronic devices and all that. So I think that's another sort of area, Supervisor Coonerty that is here to stay and that we've seen sort of a push for all parties and the courts have recognized that, look, if we support this, we can get business done much more efficiently, less continuances. So those are two areas just off the top of my head that I think are here to stay. And I certainly hope so. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Okay. Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Rozel, thank you for the presentation. Thank you for the ongoing work that you and your staff do. I wanna especially recognize Ms. George who sits behind you. I had the great pleasure of working with her on the task force on justice and gender. She was an active and very useful participant. And I really appreciated the commitment that the district attorney's office made to make that a success. And as we have moving that into the commission, I hope that we will have the continued participation of your office. Because we found that by working together we can really make some good changes and hopefully break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration in Santa Cruz County. The choices that you've made with the budget, I know are all very difficult. One program that I just wanted to talk about was the Neighborhood Courts Program. I was very excited to see this program moving forward. I appreciate the commitment of your office to start this program. And as I understand it from your presentation, it's not going away that you hope to have a delayed start. And what do you think that would look like when you're able to start the program? So on a couple of points that you just made, I just wanna say this, Ms. George's contribution to our office and to the program that you mentioned and also to the Neighborhood Court Program which she has been spearheading are absolutely invaluable. I can tell you that we are continuing to work with the Conflict Resolution Center. We are continuing to work with probation. And as it stands right now, we're trying to sort of roll this out in December. That is sort of the projected timeline. It's not the timeline necessarily that we initially had. And we are able to, I think, start to accomplish some of the goals. I don't know that it's gonna be necessarily rolled out as fast and on as large a scale as it was going to be. But it is certainly our intention to push forward on this despite frankly losing an attorney that was supposed to be dedicated to this. So I don't, if the court, I mean, if the board has any more specific questions. Well, no, I'm glad to see that it's moving forward. I know a lot of work has been put into it. I thought that there was some Prop 47 funds that were also connected to this. I'm not sure if that's accurate or not. Yeah, I think that's a potential, but I don't know that that is a given at this point. Well, I just think that in our community, it should be one of the tools that we have in the judicial system to be able to deal with low level crimes that can be held, especially now as we look during this time of COVID where the sheriff's working to keep the census down in the jail to have other means to hold people accountable seems like that there's additional value than what we had before. And so I just appreciate the commitment and the ongoing work that your office has put into it. And I look forward to December when it starts forming. I appreciate that work. I appreciate the difficult choices that you had to make this year. And I hope that our funding bounced back quickly so we can fully fund the positions in your office. We appreciate your comments and thank you. And I just wanna say as an office, we are always committed to trying to look for better ways to do business. And we are always committed to trying to do work that will help people get back on track so that they are not continuing issues in terms of community safety problems. So thank you. Yeah, thank you for your work. Thank you very much for all the work you guys are doing. You're impacted like every department in the county and I'm just a little curious. I mean, with how do we handle, let's say this continues for a while, how do we handle a trial by jury and picking the jury and you pretty much have to do that in person. I will say this, you've really hit on one of the most challenging issues that face all of us in this community, the courts, the district attorneys and the public defenders and that is, how do you, people have the right to jury trials and how do you impanel a jury in these difficult times? And all I can say is it's a very difficult proposition. It's difficult for us as well as the other 57 counties in this state, we talk to them as well as across the country. And they're trying to take measures to sort of eliminate having everyone come at one time like we used to do. They're sending out questionnaires about who is in a position to come in, who feels comfortable coming in. So there are some procedures that are in place, but I will tell you this, in terms of efficient jury trials, it just is not the model of the old days. It's gonna be very, very few conducted at a time if not just one or two. And it's a laborious process to try to find jurors who aren't compromised, who feel comfortable, that can come in and then distancing them, it's a difficult proposition. We had one jury trial that was suspended when COVID started with existing jurors come back and that case was completed, but we had the benefit of existing jurors that already, they just took a break and then came back. But you hit the nail on the head with picking juries as an extremely difficult, challenging thing to do in these times. And even if they were, the jury would, if they had to do social distancing, you know. Yeah, the courtrooms are set up that way now, like they're not like the old days, if you go down, you will see just like you guys have set up this with chairs that are six feet plus apart. The court is doing the same sort of thing, but it make no mistake. It is challenging and difficult. Okay. Great. Thanks a lot. Thank you. And let's see a public comment on number eight. Each person would have three minutes to speak. Is there anybody in the chambers here like to speak? We might have somebody. Hi. Coffee's my guest. That's okay. Oh, wait for you. Good morning. We do want to, this is Olivia Martinez, the Region Two Director. We do want to thank the DA's office for working with our members and keeping them whole. We really appreciate that. The DA's office is very, very, very good. We really appreciate that there was no layoffs and that they took into consideration to make sure that our members continued to work. So we are glad that they figured out their budget in a way to keep our members whole. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I do just want to say if I could at this moment, if, and we understand other departments are having to perhaps lose people or lay them off. We, if we have positions that we are interviewing for, we're always happy to consider those people and try to do our part for the County family. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Any others done? Okay. Anyway, thanks for coming down here and wish you all the best. Thank you. And I wish you the best as well, all of you. And thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you. If, if we have a motion and a second, we'll call the roll. I'll make a check on our motion. Mr. Chair, if you approve this for your attorney's budget. Second. Call the roll. First and second, that was McPherson. Yes. And Leopold. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously and that takes us to number nine. Thank you. Thank you. Take care, Chair. Okay. Number nine, consider the 2020-2021 supplemental budgets for the share of coroner and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and memorandum of the share of coroner. We'll have a presentation. Is it gonna be online? Yes, Chair, this is- Hey, how you doing, Jim? Good, thank you for having us this morning. Before I get started, I do wanna thank the CAO, Carlos Palacios, and also our analyst, Melody Serino, for the work that they've done on helping us get to this point. It's been a challenging process. And I also wanna thank the board and the county family for all the support during after the murder of Sergeant Getz, whether it's been a real trying time in our office, but we couldn't have made it through if it wasn't for the support we received. So thank you very much for that. Moving on to the next slide, we're gonna be talking today a little bit about some good news on crime data and then also a little bit of concerning news. We're gonna talk about our budget and our revisions and the operational impacts. We can move forward. So I just wanted to share this with you because there is a lot of talk right now about crime increasing and we're just not seeing that in the unincorporated area of the county. On the box on the right is the violent crime rate per 1,000 residents. And so you can see the state is experiencing about 4.4 violent crimes per 1,000 state residents. And in unincorporated Santa Cruz, we're at about 1.8. So we're less than half of the state average on violent crimes. On property crimes, the state's running at about 23.6 per 1,000 residents and we're at about 11.4. So again, about half. And then our overall crime rate is at 13.5 where the state's at about 28.3. So we're less than half of the total crime rate, which is violent crime plus property crime is the total crime rate. Moving on to the next slide. I wanna share this with you in that the markers on this slide are prison realignment in 2011 and then Proposition 47, which both of those were very significant changes in the criminal justice system. And there was a lot of concern about those changes causing crime to go up. And as you can see in 2011, our overall crime rate was running at about 27 total crimes per 1,000 unincorporated residents. And then after realignment had we dropped down to about 17 crimes and we've been relatively flat now for the last eight years. And we're actually at a 10 year low today at 14.6 crimes per 1,000 county residents. So that's some good news. Moving on to homicides, which this is the bad news in that agencies and jurisdictions across the state and the country are seeing an uptick right now in homicides. And on this slide, what I think is significant is when you look from 2013 to 2017 that five year span, there was a total of two homicides in unincorporated Santa Cruz County. And now in the last two and a half years in 18, 19 and a half of 20, we've had 13 murders in unincorporated Santa Cruz County. And just this year alone, we've had five murders in the first six months of the year. And so this is an area that we're concerned about. There's no real pattern to this. We can't blame it on just domestic violence or just gangs. There's a lot of randomness to the cases that we've had and there's really no clear pattern on why this is occurring. Next slide please. And then another way of looking at the homicides is in five year increments. And you can see that the 35 year average is 19 over a five year period in unincorporated Santa Cruz County, we're in the last block there for four and a half years, we're at 14. And so again, that's a concerning number we are ticking up on our homicide rate. Next slide. Getting into the budget itself. Next slide please. The number that I'd like you to pay your attention to is that the second line with the green is we're looking at a 6.6% net County cost reduction on our revised compared to our recommended and overall reduction of 4.2%. We're losing 21 positions in this revised budget for a total staff reduction of about 6%. Next slide. So I'm just gonna briefly go over the revisions and then I'm gonna talk about the impacts of these revisions in the next slide, but we're deleting 13 positions. We're unfunding nine. And that's in addition to the 10 deputy sheriff positions we unfunded in June. We are, we have closed our recovery center. We closed that on June 30th without any additional revenues. We're gonna be disbanding our focused intervention team and also disbanding the enforcement side of the cannabis compliance unit. We're looking at suspending the construction and the accreditation of our DNA laboratory. We're looking at contracting a vendor for food services and corrections and deleting positions behind that. And we're looking at eliminating some inmate programming and also eliminating non-mandated training for our sworn staff. The impacts of those reductions are significant. And when we talk about eliminating all non-mandated training for sworn staff the state has a set level of training that every police officer has to go through but we go above and beyond that. And we've really focused our attention on de-escalation training. We brought in a program called ICAT which is Integrated Communications Assessment and Tactics Training that is scenario based training that has been very good. We've run two sessions a year. Now we were one of the first agencies in the country to adopt this. Now all agencies in the county are utilizing that training program. But it's expensive. It's expensive to pull people off the street and train. It's important, but it's expensive. And then we've also, we won't be doing any crisis intervention team training this year which is a 24 hour block of training that teaches our people how to work with persons who are experiencing mental health crisis. We have canceled all police academies. So when COVID hit in March we had 11 deputy sheriff trainees in police academies and we pulled them back. And then we ultimately demoted them to correctional officers and unfunded those 10 deputy sheriff positions. Because of COVID, we won't be sending people to academies until there is a vaccine, until it's safe. And then it takes about a year of training and I don't anticipate us sending people to academies for about another year. So through attrition, when people leave through retirements or injuries, we're gonna have a real vacancy problem just maintaining our minimum staffing numbers. And so you may remember, your board approved us to go out and offer hiring incentives to experience police officers in a lateral hiring program. And we were able to hire eight lateral police officers who are now working in our patrol division and we have two in background. So we will have reached our capacity of 10 and moving forward, this is the only way I see us attracting people to come here through when we have people retire or leave. And so I'll be working with the CAO's office and personnel and your board to try to authorize five positions this year for the lateral incentive hire program. Some good news is that your board approved our medical contracting corrections back in June and in that contract was a very robust medication assisted treatment program. Our corrections team has been working on that and we'll be implementing that program in the next week or two in corrections, which I think is gonna be very beneficial to some of the incarcerated people who are in custody, who are experiencing addiction issues. An area that I do wanna bring to your attention on the furlough side of it is our correction staff is furloughing 5% our law enforcement side is furloughing 5% and that our SCIU staff is furloughing 7.5% I believe. And so we're able to work with and accommodate the SCIU staff and also most of our patrol staff, but because we are only staffed in corrections to meet minimum staffing levels, every time for every hour we furlough somebody, we have to bring in another correction officer on overtime. And so there's really no true savings in furloughing corrections and this is gonna cause our overtime budget some concerns. In terms of disbanding the focused intervention team, this is a program that we presented to you, I think back in March, the first year's data, and it's a very viable program and involves two deputy sheriffs and a sergeant along with three mental health social workers who focus on a client list of 30 people who are really problematic in the community, they're raising fears in the community, they're acting out, they're refusing treatment and our FIT team really did a nice job of working with that group and trying to guide them towards services, but because of the extent of the reductions that we've been asked to come in at, without additional funding, we're gonna have to disband that team. You may recall back in June of 2015, I established a recovery center and that was for people who were arrested for DUI, public intoxication and being under the influence of drugs, and we began the funding of that program through a federal grant and we contracted with Janice of Santa Cruz and really turned those types of violations into a health concern rather than a criminal justice concern. Janice ran a really nice program, had a clean bed for these people and then tried to encourage them into treatment and we were able to divert about 2,000 people a year from the jail into the recovery center. But when the grant ran out, the county took on that $700,000 contract with Janice and because of these budget cuts, we've had to close it. The other advantage to this program was that it only took five minutes to drop somebody off at the recovery center and it takes about an hour to book somebody in the county jail. So because we've had to close it, we're back to booking people directly into the county jail for drug influence, DUI and public intoxication. The impacts of the cannabis compliance unit reductions are really significant and we've been paying for the law enforcement side of this includes two deputies and a manager. And so I'm really down to just essential services. So I can no longer afford paying fully for that. I think I'm able to pay for half of that cost. And so without further funding from the board, I'm gonna have to pull those staff out of the cannabis compliance unit, which is concerning because there's really not gonna be any incentive for people to follow the rules and go through licensing and curtail the black market that we see here in Santa Cruz County. And so I'm hoping that we can find a way of continuing that program. I think it's very valuable to the county and it also encourages the good actors to keep doing what they're doing and work with the county. And then lastly, these revisions have caused us to suspend the construction and the accreditation of our DNA lab. And this was gonna be a game changer for law enforcement in the district attorney's office here in Santa Cruz County. DNA evidence is extremely valuable, primarily in sexual assault cases and in homicide and violent crime cases. And we can turn around evidence in our own lab within 48 hours, whereas when we submit evidence to the state, it takes six to 12 months to get that information back. And so we were on year three of a five year cycle to accreditation and construction. We were really close to starting construction when COVID hit, but because of COVID and these budget reductions, we've had to suspend our DNA lab, which is unfortunate for local law enforcement and also for survivors of some of these really horrific crimes that occur. Next slide, please. So I just wanna touch on some uncertainties. This is my third cycle of furlough. I've been with the county for 32 years, been on furlough for I think a quarter of that time. And I've also seen a number of economic downturns and during those 32 years. And I know that oftentimes year two and even year three can be worse than year one. I'm hoping that's not the case. I'm hoping that the economy bounces back and our budgets get restored, but we have to plan for the worst. And so when I look at and I have staff working on this in terms of year two, what does future reductions look like? And we're really down, we've cut out a lot of the non-essential stuff out of our budget. And so we're really down to closing correctional facilities if year two is bad. And the unfortunate thing about that is that we will always need a maximum security jail and that's our main jail. And so that would include closing down possibly Blaine Street or the roundtree facilities which really focus on treatment, education, programming and getting people back on their feet. We would potentially be looking at disbanding our investigations division if we lose more deputy sheriff staff. And those people work, we have a full-time sexual assault unit. In fact, it's the only full-time sexual assault unit in the county with three detectives and a sergeant. We have a homicide unit that has been very busy in the last 30 months. And then we also have a property crimes division that works on residential burglaries and identity theft and that type of stuff. But those people have extra training and they have the ability to work with the DA's office and the courts on obtaining search warrants and doing all the follow-up that it takes to investigate these cases. Our deputies on the street don't have that level of training in order they have the time to follow up on some of these major cases. And then also we'd be looking at disbanding our community policing teams. We're already pulling staff out of community policing. We're gonna keep our substations but we're gonna pull staff out of the Watsonville substation as well as the Felton substation. So only Live Oak, Aptos and Boulder Creek will be staffed. But if we get into a further budget crisis, we'll be looking at removing those staff and possibly closing down some or all of those substations. And then we're, like I mentioned before, we're really just gonna be down to providing mandated services to the public and that's court security to make sure that there's judicial protection in the courts, keeping our coroner's office open, our civil section open, our jails open and then having enough deputies on the street to answer calls for service. Next slide. And so with that information, I'm requesting that the board approve this supplemental budget for the sheriff's office including any additional materials and take related actions as recommended by me, the Sheriff Corps. And I'm happy to answer any questions or listening to comments. Thank you very much, Sheriff Hart. And we'll open it up for supervisors, staff questions now and Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you. That's a super important report, Jim. And I wanna thank you for your work. And I guess the first question I'd have was we had a comment about the SART team and eliminating the SART coordinator position. Can you talk about the status of the SART team and what that position coordinator would add to that team? Yeah, so as far as the status of the SART program, we have the nurses higher through Valley Medical Center to work out of Dominican hospital. We have all the infrastructure in place and now we're just waiting on the hospital to get a couple areas cleaned up on labs and medication. And I talked to leadership over at Dominican last week and we're looking at a starting date of August 24th for local exams to take place. The program coordinator position was gonna be 50% funded by the county and then 50% funded by the other agencies. Because we lost or have suspended our DNA accreditation that has allowed Dr. Zephyro a little more time. And so we were just gonna assign her to be the be the manager of the SART program until funding came back and we restarted the DNA program. I do think the best case scenario for the SART program is like that community member said is to have a full time program coordinator assigned to it to coordinate the local agencies response along with Valley Med response to keep the room stocked and to keep us surprised of all the information that it takes to run a SART program. So I think in the best case scenario, a program coordinator is completely appropriate and it's only a 50% cost to the county but we're not in a best case scenario right now. We're in a really, really tough budget cycle and we're trying to keep as many employees employed as possible and so that's why we chose to pull that out and assign Dr. Zephyro to the program. And do we have a sense as to whether the other agencies are gonna be able to commit their share to that funding? Yes, we've had meetings about this and all agencies are committed to it. We have a trust that my fiscal manager, Kathy Sams administers there's money in the trust to pay for the other agencies, 50% from monies that they have put in there in previous years. And so we have all agencies on board and in support of the program coordinator position. Okay, and then my next question was about the fit team which was both I think a really effective program and also something that we went out and you know you and I among many others talk to the community about around measure G and the sales tax as one of the benefits they would get. Do you, I understand right now operationally it's not gonna, it doesn't work for at least your side if the health department has continued to fund their outreach workers. But once we get past a pandemic how long would it take you to staff up to reestablish that team? Do you have a sense? Yeah, so if we are able, let's say that somehow we managed to get a grasp on COVID by the spring or late winter and we don't see any more reductions in our deputy sheriff staff and we're able to close down the quarantine and isolation units in the main jail and then use one of those units for the fit program. I could, if I don't have reductions I could reassign staff immediately. If we have additional reductions and then I'm allocated some positions it's gonna take a while to rehire people and do some things. But if we stay status quo going into the late winter early spring we'll be able to seamlessly move people back into the fit program. Okay, great. Thank you, I think that concludes my questions. I'll tell the board that I am interested in funding that are the county share of the SAR coordinator and as well looking at allocating the funds contingent upon operational capabilities of the sheriff's department for maybe a February through June fit team restart or funding. And so I think we made a commitment to the community. I think these are two really valuable programs that we've all talked about a lot and we need to try to fund going forward. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you for the presentation Sheriff Hart. I'm in agreement with Supervisor Coonerty in particular on the SART cost. It seems like it's a very small investment or something that has outsized outcomes for somebody that's been a victim and a survivor of such a horrific incident. So I think that the board absolutely should reinvest in that I recognize that you have been presented as every department has with making choices that you never want to make. And we are here to try and ease some of that where possible. And I think that within that program that's an important one. You know, I wanted to just ask you a question and just given a lot of the context and discussion within the country at least right now even with a lot of these cuts I know that you have implemented a lot of programs that people may not be that aware of. And if you had a second, if you could just maybe talk about some of the work that you've done on the 21st century policing program. I mean, even I could stand to have a refresher. I think that that would be useful. Yeah, thank you for that question. A lot of people talk about the funding and they don't really define what that means. And we did a lot of reform work back in 2015 and 2016 and we've taken the chokehold or the carotid restraint out of our policy book. We banned no knock warrants back in 2016. We have a policy against shooting at moving vehicles. Our surveillance technology policy includes working from a guideline that the ACLU put out about how police should implement technology and it includes transparency and accountability and oversight before using technology. We don't use facial recognition, predictive policing or license plate readers. We did use license plate readers under very special circumstance, but that was after we had a community input and community meetings about that. We have a policy on officer intervention where deputy sheriffs are required to intervene if they see a police officer using too much force. We were the first agency in the area and one of the first in the country to work on scenario based de-escalation training. We're currently putting our two canine animals through a re-certification so that they are a find and alert dog and not a find and bite, which is significant for the use of canines. We track all of our stops and detentions and post that information on our website and we've been doing that since 2016. We provided our staff with implicit bias training, fair and impartial policing training. We have comprehensive reporting policies on use of force that involve supervisors and also review by executive managers. It also includes body work camera review. And then we post all of our use of force information on our website. And then moving forward, some things that I support that is gonna take either state or national or federal legislation is re-examining the role of police and addressing homeless and mental health and creating law enforcement accreditation standard based on President Obama's 21st century policing report, prohibiting the transfer of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, prohibiting local and state law enforcement agencies from enforcing federal immigration laws, decertifying police officers for serious misconduct, creating a national database to prevent problem officers who are fired or leave an agency from getting rehired in other jurisdictions. And then lastly, educating and training civil service commissions on police misconduct cases so that chiefs and sheriffs who have identified problem officers have the ability to terminate their employment. Well, thank you, Sheriff. I mean, it's extensive. And I recollect a couple of years ago that I was chair of it. I believe that you were the first agency in that definitely maybe in the country to fully implement the 21st century policing program and I recognize there's more work to be done beyond that, but that was under your leadership and I appreciate you being the progressive sheriff that really does fit the values here in this county. I wanted to add an additional point to what you had mentioned regarding the cannabis enforcement, you know that we had gone to the voters and told them as part of this taxation that there would be enforcement. So I think that we have a commitment to reestablish those positions within the cannabis office. I mean, for that matter, it doesn't actually cost the county at the end of the day anything. It would cost us a lot more to not do it in regards to the fire protection work that they do in regards to the public safety work they do and just the fact that again, we made a commitment to the voters very specifically that this would do that. So I would like to say to the board that that's something I'm also interested in in regards to that. I think that they serve a very important function for the community. I definitely in my district receive a lot of requests for their services and I'm sure that you do as well, Sheriff Hart. So thank you. I'd like to turn it back to you, Chair, thanks for the opportunity. Thank you. Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Sheriff Hart. Thank you for the presentation. Thanks for your leadership during this COVID crisis and when we look at those crime statistics, there is good news and there is some disturbing news but I appreciate your efforts to contextualized all this information. And also for the ongoing work that you and the officers play every day and keeping our community safe. It makes a huge difference and it's made a big difference, especially this year. In thinking about the budget, there's a couple of things I just want to talk about. I share the interest of my colleagues about the SART program. I know that this has been an issue of great discussion in the community and trying to figure out how we meet the needs of victims of assault here and getting that program staffed at the level that's necessary is very important to me. The second thing I want to talk to about is the question of training. You know, to hear that we're going to be stopping training on issues such as de-escalation is concerning. And it was in the information that we received, there were a bunch of things that were put together that showed about $455,000 for training and travel and everything like that. But is there a smaller number of things like the de-escalation and the other important parts to continue on with the question of ensuring that our officers are guardians instead of warriors? I mean, is there some part of that that would work? Yeah, I don't have the number in front of me where we took that $455,000 down to, but I know we cut it significantly. But it costs about, depending on how we do it, but it costs about $50,000 to put on a full training day for both sides of the week for all of the patrol deputies, because it does involve significant overtime. And so I'm looking at our training plan for the year and I'm trying to figure out how we can plug in at least one de-escalation training. But in terms of the money that we have in our training budget, I'm just, I'm doubtful that we can pull that off and stay within budget. This is important. I don't know. I mean, I think it's important to continue on with trainings. I'm assuming that everybody who's on our force now has gone through this training, but it's the kind of thing that you wanna keep reaching out to officers to ensure that we're using the best practices possible. And if there's a way for us to take a look at that, especially as the year goes on, to come back to ensure that we have that money for training seems very important. I also just wanted to add my voice to the question of the cannabis officers. In my conversations with our CLO office, it seems as though the investment that we make in officers pays back in terms of the fine revenue and other financial benefits we get from having a well-run and well-regulated cannabis business practices. And so I would be supportive of putting those, having you pick up that 50% to, and having the county pick up that 50%. So we could continue that and earn that money. And I think it would pay us ourselves back. And as we look at our funding sources, they're limited these years. And the idea that we can continue to earn revenue from our CBT and other related cannabis related practices seems to me to make a lot of sense for us because it's one of the few places that we can actually earn money these days. Lastly, I just wanna talk about the jail meal program. So it's always disturbing when we talk about contracting out. I understand in talking with SEIU that there is a meeting on Thursday to talk about this issue. And I'm not exactly sure what comes out of that meeting, but I think that for us to take a very close look as to whether that is something that we should be engaging in right now and what the consequences are for the employees that are there, it seems to be very important because right now it's hard to let anyone go and letting people go in this environment is very hard. And especially for a service that is clearly needed, we obviously can't go without meal service at the jail. And so I hope that you will engage well with the union to try to see if there's any way to make this work and keep it within a county service. I think it would serve the community well and it would definitely serve the employees well. So I look forward to hearing about what happened to that discussions and it may require action on the last day if there can come to some kind of agreement. I appreciate the work that you do. Thanks for being there. Thank you. Yes. And Supervisor McPherson. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair. And I know this has been an extremely difficult year for the Sheriff's Department, both with the loss of Sergeant Damon Gotzweiler and the response to the COVID-19. In addition to your significant, the significant impact of losing a colleague you've had to face the challenges and responsibility of enforcing our public health orders too. And I think that's nothing to be overlooked as an extra assignment for your office. I just can't, I think it needs to be repeated about how proud this community should be of our Sheriff's Office for being as forward looking as it was five years ago and implementing, being at the front end and being recognized when the Barack Obama administration about the 21st century policing effort that you've put forth today more than ever that is invaluable for our public to know how you implemented those programs and really the complexity of them all. Just, you can't, I can't overstate the impressive actions that you took to put this in place before some of these crises we're facing today are upon us. And I really wanna thank you for your hard work to the challenges and the nexus that you have in that department with behavioral health outside of law enforcement and our jail and our court system. And I wish our cuts weren't necessary on these programs that you've mentioned. And I think that it's correct for us to take another look at them, those four programs of FIT and SART and the Recovery Center and so forth. We all know how valuable they are. And again, it's a forward looking program for proposals and programs that you have put together. So I'm really impressed by all of that. I do wanna repeat or chime in on the cannabis licensing office generation of revenue. I think that we should take some action and I plan to make a motion to that effect to keep that in place of the citations that were issued last year, I believe, or this last fiscal year, over a million dollars. And we realized I think $640,000 or so in revenue as a result. Aside from the other programs that were mentioned that were being reduced or cut, this is a revenue generating program for our county. And I think it's one that we should keep in place. And I think that in addition to the citations, I think the potential loss if the licensing revenue, according to our cannabis licensing officer, would be over $200,000. So I think that unless we wanna just eliminate the program overall, I think we just really have to move in this direction. And it's for, in this budget session, it's for financial reasons that I wanna pinpoint that program. So when it comes to the time after public comment to make any motion, I'm ready to, I'll be ready to ask that the sheriff share the cost with the CAO's office in restoring that is not just the sheriff's office itself, but with cannabis enforcement, we come at a really important time, the extreme fire danger we have throughout the county, especially in my fifth district, where nearly half of the notices of violation occurred this last fiscal year. I know the chief Ian Larkin of County Fire has expressed to my office he's deeply concerned about the impact of losing those enforcement positions in the sheriff's office because of the number of illegal cannabis operations that will go unchecked. So for financial reasons in this budget session, as well as public safety reasons, I think that we should make sure that that office keeps open with the cooperation to share those, it's my understanding you're willing to share those costs with the CAO's office or some other budget factor if possible. So I'll be ready to make a motion to that effect when we come to that point. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. And yeah, you know, Sheriff Hart, it's a very difficult time right now to be a sheriff or a police officer. In the last four or five months, things have been very difficult. We appreciate everything you're doing. And also with the budget constraints and pressure from all different kinds of areas of public safety. I saw the DNA lab, I guess, we can do some of the testing here, but then now it's gonna have to all be done by the state or did we always send it to the state labs? We've always sent it to the state labs. And a couple of months ago, we had a return on a sexual assault case that took two years to get the information back to identify the person that was responsible. And so the real advantage of having a local lab for all agencies is that quick turnaround time. And we're talking about blood evidence and other types of evidence that is left behind it at serious scenes. And to be able to collect that evidence, get it to the lab and get information back within 48 hours would be hugely valuable to our community and to our local law enforcement. And I saw the suspension, I guess, of the police academies. If you feel like reminiscing a little bit, I don't know, how did you feel and when and where did you go to the police academy? I went to the Evergreen Academy at the Evergreen Junior College in South San Jose back in 1988. And things have changed a lot since then and there's more training now. But my concern is to have, there's some academies that are open, but to put one of our employees into that kind of environment and expose them or potentially expose them to those fires, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me right now. And so there are some agencies sending people to the academies but I'm just not gonna do it until we get a handle on this fires. You bet. Thank you. And thanks to all the deputies out there and everybody that works with your office. Okay. And I think we have a motion from supervisor. Oh, I have to open it up to public comment. Do we have anybody here who would like to comment on the item public statement? Good morning, Olivia Martinez, Region Two Director. We are asking you that you not approve this budget. We have serious concerns with the share of contracting out the food services. There's a history of him, of the department contracting out services that are not, have not been well accepted by the community. When he contracted out the medical services, what we notice is the increase of deaths in his jail. We are asking you that you not approve this until we have a proper meet and come for a process. If you approve it, it means that then the meeting come for a process goes to the side because you have approved it. And you're saying it's okay for him to go ahead and contract out services. He would be laying off 10 of our members that work at the food services. These members have worked for many, many years. They have dedicated their lives to making sure and working with the sheriff on any changes that he's asked them to do without any complaint. So we're asking you to please consider and not approve the budget until we have sat down and discuss this contracting out of the food services. Thank you. Hi, good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board, Sheriff Hart, Jim Heaney, Chief Steward for the County of Santa Cruz General Representation Unit. And I just wanna mention my wife required me to wear this glove today to touch that microphone, okay? She's very concerned about me being here. So, Sheriff Hart, what I wanna share with you is our incredible disappointment that this is how we learned about the potential that the food services could be contracted out. I have been a Chief Steward at this county for nearly 20 years. Many times I've worked with you over many personnel issues and to have to read it in a budget and not have the courtesy of you reaching out to us and saying, hey, we've got this serious budget concern. Let's talk about if there's another way to do this. As Olivia mentioned, and as Supervisor Leopold has mentioned, we do have a scheduled appointment Thursday to discuss this, but I feel like if you support this budget today, that ship has kind of sailed. So we really wanna encourage you to do something unusual and put this over until next Tuesday. Finally, you know, when it comes to contracting out, I mean, it's one thing and this is a hard time. It's one thing when we have positions deleted and people end up with a potential of layoff and they have to go through this long stressful experience about how they deal with, am I gonna be laid off? Am I gonna have healthcare for my family? All the things that go with that. They go through a process with personnel to try to get placed. They may get placed, they may not. It's very stressful, but it's entirely a different thing when you tell an employee, well, we're gonna delete your position, but your work's not going away and we're gonna give it to another company. And one of the things we've fought for for decades as a union is the quality of these jobs, not just the jobs. The fact that people who work here at the county all share the fact that we have access to healthcare and quality healthcare. We have access to retirement and a quality retirement. And for that, if you look at our salaries versus the public, we tend to work for less. So we're willing to do that because we see the end game here. And that's exactly why people come to work here and that's why I really wanna encourage the sheriff to think about a different way to do this. Thank you for the comments about the cannabis unit. As you know, we have another relationship with that, which is our code compliance investigator in the CAO's office. I know that's not in the sheriff's budget, but obviously if the cannabis unit came back, there would be a need to continue to have that investigator here. So we appreciate your time and Sheriff Hart, please work with us to resolve this. Thank you. Well, thank you. Anybody else? We have one web comment. It is from Adam Novak. I think you should reduce funding for the county sheriff and spend the money on services for the homeless instead, because it will be more effective. And that's it. And nobody else down there will bring it back to the board. Mr. Chair, I'd like to make a motion to approve the recommended action with the additional direction to direct the CO to work with the sheriff's office to share equally the costs of restoring the two detective positions assigned to the cannabis compliance units. That would be my recommended motion. I'll second that. I have a couple of additions that I hope Supervisor McPherson will find friendly. So I would also add that I'll bring back on last day funding for the SART coordinator that we bring back if operationally possible funding for the fit team starting in February through June and that we explore using risk management funding to pay for the costs of de-escalation training. Okay. You know, I have a quick question from the last comment on the contract to gout. On an average, Sheriff Hart, how many men and women are in the county jail on an average given day? So pre-COVID, it varies depending on the time of year. Today, we have in the main jail, we have 225 people and 311 beds. And that's because we have isolation and quarantine units for COVID that we have to keep fairly empty. We have 10 women at Blaine Street for 32 beds and we have 85 men out at Roundtree with 150 beds. So we're running at about 58% capacity right now, which is highly unusual. We're usually between 500 and 600 total incarcerated people between all four facilities in non-COVID times. Okay, and the way it goes, I guess the cooks were cooking for the regular county jail and also Roundtree, the same group of cooks. So it was contracted out, it would be for both. Yes, and Blaine Street as well. So it's today, our census, 320 people, three meals a day, so it's roughly 1,000 meals today will be cooked. Thank you. Chair, I have a question. So I know that the sheriff, everybody has talked, there's a meeting on Thursday to talk about this question about the Meals program. Just looking to our CAO or County Council, we could, if there were agreement that was reached in that it could come back here during last day to make changes if we wanted to, is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay, so again, I encourage the sheriff and SEIU to work closely and the board will work towards the agreement that if it can be reached. I wanna say that I support the motion. I appreciate both my colleagues for the additions that they are adding to this. I think it's very worthwhile. You know, the sheriff has taken a leadership position on the kind of police forces that we want in this country. And so it is difficult to see some of these things cut back and trying to find a way to put some of these programs back in place is our commitment to the very things that we hear the community asking us for. I'll be supporting the motion. Okay, so yeah. To be clear, I would maybe the second would want to say first, but I would be willing to accept the amendments mentioned by Supervisor Coonerty. I know that we're gonna have to look at the time about the funding, that what position we are in the budget with these well-deserved and great programs that we have put into place that the sheriff has put into place. So I'm willing to accept that the amendments to the motion, I think, well, I'll defer to the second as well. We need to read the motion plus the amendments. Amendment. Mr. Chair, before we do that, this is Zach. I have one additional question. Okay. I'll make her the motion. Supervisor McPherson, you had said in your motion, during your commentary, you had talked about sharing the cost 50-50, your motion specifically just refers to two of the three positions though. So I want to clarify, because there's a manager position in there, there's two deputies and then there's a sergeant or actually a higher level, I believe. But either way, that's what our motion is and what you said earlier is not actually the same thing. Are we directing for a 50-50 cost split as the charge? Okay. 50-50, I just mentioned that specifically there were two detectives included in that, I'm sorry. Yeah. That's okay. So just to be clear than the motion would be for the 50-50 split that was discussed both by you and by Sheriff Hart. Correct. Okay, so the motion that I have is Supervisor McPherson moved recommended actions plus additional direction to share cost 50-50 with the CAO's office to restore the cannabis program. Compliance unit. Compliance unit, thank you. And the seconder, seconded and Supervisor Coonerty and a more additional direction, bring back funding for SART coordinator. Was that correct? Yes. Yes. And if operationally feasible, the fit funding through June. February. From June. From February through June. February through June and risk management funds potentially for de-escalation training. Yes. Okay. Expand the use of the funds for de-escalation training. Okay. Okay, we'll call for a vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. And let's see here. We can go to the next item or we can take a 10 minute break. 10 minute break. Okay. We'll take a 10 minute break. And when we come back, we'll be at item number 10, the probation department. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We'll now consider item number 10, the 2020-2021 supplemental budgets for the probation department as outlined in the reference, the budget documents and memorandum of the chief probation officer. And you're on. Yeah. Good morning, Chair Caput and supervisors. Fernando Geraldo, chief probation officer. With me today is Valerie Thompson, my assistant chief probation officer. It's a pleasure to be before you to present our revised fiscal year 2021 supplemental budget. We appreciate the opportunity to highlight our operational impacts and the uncertainties that exist for my department during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before I begin, I want to thank the CAO's office, Carlos Palacios and Stafford Nicole Coburn for their support and also the support of the Board of Supervisors. And I, you know, thank you for your help allowing us to fulfill our vision and mission, which is driven by my innovative and passionate staff. And I really want to take a moment to thank my dedicated staff who come to work at each and every day to promote public safety in the most unique and meaningful ways and how they have shifted and adapted to using innovative methods to carry out our vision and mission, which is to promote public safety, reduce recidivism and support victim and all those impacted by crime in partnership with our community. Our department was fully operational during the pandemic, albeit with key modifications in several areas. We adapted quickly, kept our offices open, served clients, kept our staff and young people safe in juvenile hall and served a critical function with pretrial services in the courts. Probation and its central role in a criminal justice system stepped up to the task of carrying a significant burden during the COVID-19 pandemic. From greatly expanded pretrial releases, zero bail and observing early prison releases, keeping young people safe and healthy in detention and everything in between, we've once again shown our worth in our criminal justice system. This photo here shows our Prop 47 team, which is some of our probation staff, a deputy probation officer, supervisor or manager and community partners from sobriety works and encompass working together in the benchlands, conducting critical outreach for Prop 47 services. A presentation today will include a review of the supplemental budget, revisions to the proposed budget, operational impacts and uncertainties. And I want to just take a moment to talk about who this, what I think they call nowadays a hipster in this picture, right? Given the look that I don't have a person. Each year probation services week commemorates the work of probation professionals. From July 19th to the 25th, we celebrated the work of our staff in a proclamation commemorating probation services week. Governor Newsom said this, probation departments have a profound impact on the safety and health of our communities by working to reduce recidivism through evidence-based programming and supervision. Probation success ensures that all Californians and communities are safer and the environment is safer for all Californians to live and prosper. During our state celebration of probation services week, one of our very own staff who's here, Andrew Martinez in that photo was recognized by the chief probation officers of California. He was honored for his work in conducting curbside wellness checks. Here's a snippet of what the chief probation officers of California released in their press release. Through these check-ins, probation officers learn about the needs of their clients and families during the pandemic where they can. Santa Cruz probation is attempting to fill those needs by delivering bags of groceries, supporting housing stability, providing snacks, diapers, art supplies, Chromebooks, homework packets, and many other items to assist clients get through these very difficult times. And I just really want to thank Andrew Martinez for leading the effort to start these curbside wellness checks. So here's our budget summary. So the 2021 supplemental budget revises the proposed budgets for the probation department to the amount of 27,700,000 and supports three divisions, adult services, juvenile services, and the juvenile hall, with staffing of 119.5 funded full-time equivalent positions and nine unfunded positions, which were already vacant. The supplemental budget for our department reflects a decrease from the proposed budget of 836,000 or a 10% reduction of general fund contribution. We've had numerous impacts to our budget related to COVID-19 and have had to leave multiple key positions vacant resulting in a total of nine vacant unfunded positions, which includes carrying over three from prior years and six this year. These are the unfunded positions. They are six deputy probation officers unfunded and vacant in our budget this year, four in this year's budget and two from last year. And there's three split between the two divisions, three in adult and three in their juvenile services. We also have vacant and unfunded an accountant position, a program coordinator for our service center and one juvenile hall group supervisor. So as you can understand unfunding six deputy probation officer positions reduces our overall ability to conduct community supervision, particularly for those who are moderate to high risk to reoffend. The ability to serve vulnerable populations is an impacted. Jail and attention alternative programs will be impacted, which could result in increased incarceration for our clients, increased attention out of home placement and state commitments for youth clients. Our critical loss of revenues is also related to the 2011 realignment 22% reduction for 2021 in our base allocation and the fact that we won't receive any growth dollars and our funding and many of our state allocations is tied to general tax revenues in the state, vehicle license fees and so on. So that's suffering and not helping us out at this moment. I want to start with some of the operational impacts and we'll start with our juvenile hall, which requires 24 seven and 365 day a week staffing. And it's as COVID hits, it's a little difficult and challenging for the hiring process. It's slowed down. Hiring peace officers, which our group supervisors are in juvenile hall and probation officers is a very lengthy process. And we have and will continue to make mid course corrections to safety protocols and staff training as we adapt and respond to COVID-19 in our community. You know, the pandemic has also caused youth to suffer the adverse impact of the loss of face to face engagement with families, providers and their natural supports as results in anxiety for youth and detention, lowliness and lack of engagement with programs and providers. Those relationships are real key. I mean, we're providing the methods in terms of electronic video and phone calls and so that, but I don't think that really comes close to really having families come and visit, but we're not able to do that. Hopefully we will in the near future. We'll talk a little bit about our gym project. If you remember that, our renovation project, also our multi-purpose gym. Right now we're waiting on the state department of finance to approve a couple of final things before then we go out to bed. But our hope is that by next spring, 2021 that we start doing those projects and actually we've combined them together to move them forward. So I wanna take, thank public works and capital projects for really helping us move along quickly in the last year. There's many uncertainties as we consult with our medical staff and plan for hopefully in the future for resume visiting in face to face visiting school. We're doing school, but again, it's distance learning and in programming, but it's difficult in the space we have and we're gonna have to use our imaginations once conditions allow for that to happen. One other big uncertainty for us is DJJ realignment. DJJ is the division of juvenile justice, which is the state commitment facility, which the governor has proposed to realign back to the county. So basically shut down a facility where we currently have eight youth and these are youth who have committed the most serious of offenses. And on average, they're committed there about two years. So the legislature has a counter proposal to the governor's proposal. So we'll learn more about where this lands. But I seems pretty likely that it will shut down. It's just a matter of when and who will oversee, who will have the authority over the new structure of these types of commitments. Just wanna show you the average length, average daily population in juvenile hall and across the nation, the use of detention has dropped considerably, but never before have we seen such a drop as we've had during this pandemic. We already had low numbers in juvenile hall. For instance, today we have this morning, we had 11 youth. We are averaging around 15, but you can see the significant drop in April through June, April being, you know, what can pandemic was in steaming, steaming through the world. But now we've actually starting to see a slow increase up, which is a little concerning, but really the stakes have never been higher to ensure that no youth is detained for even an hour longer than necessary. As we, the well-known harms of secured detention are now compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. So we're using our core partners working very closely with all of them to really ensure that we only the most serious youth, high needs, high risk youth are detained. We'll talk about juvenile field services. Here are some of our revisions. We have three probation officer vacancies in that division, which are two placement officers and one wraparound officers and intensive caseload. Really any vacancies you're aware means less service for youth and families and increased workload for other staff. We have to make up for this. And this, these vacancies across our divisions are compounded by staff limited ability to be at work because of childcare issues and even medical issues in some cases. There's quite a few client wellness impacts we have prior to the pandemic, you know, our youth and families were already struggling with so many things such as again, housing, employment, educational issues, healthcare, childcare, food insecurity. And as we know, there is a over representation of Latinx youth in our juvenile justice system. There are families have been often marginalized in this social isolation caused by shelter in place and slash marks. We're seeing it taking a toll on our youth and families. Community supervision has allowed us to really make many changes in the way we interact with youth and families and our community partners and the majority of these contacts have been by phone and video conferencing. And we created the process called work curbside wellness checks which allows us to meet youth and families in the community but being mindful of social distancing. So we've really shifted our strategies to do community supervision largely with success. Of course, the concern is are those families that don't have the technology or the internet access. And so we've also purchased those kinds of items for them to be able to connect with us. Prior to the pandemic, our Luna evening center in Watsonville was operating five days a week Monday through Friday, providing really a safe place and programming for South County youth. We had to shut down that program temporarily but in the last couple of months, we started what we call the virtual evening center, shifting our service delivery and reaching out to families via phone, text, video and so on and doing the curbside wellness checks. Really some great news during the pandemic is that together with community action board is the lead. We recently received a $1.2 million grant to support our evening center in South County. So that was great news. So even actually it's probably one of the last times that many of us were together in the room was putting that grant together in February and we're got the great news last month. So it'll support our evening center and Cab will be doing a lot of exciting work there. We'll talk a little bit about our adult services. Really during this great health crisis, our adult division has really accepted the challenge to ease jail, crowding and prison crowding because really there's no space to socially distance and it's become our responsibility to supervise those released to us to protect the health of those individuals and the health and safety of the community. Additionally, in effort to assist Custodial facilities in the burden on courts, temporary zero bail orders were put in place, which required a lot of time and collaboration between pre-trial of the court's corrections and the district attorney's office. But before me, you heard the sheriff talk about that we are at 58% of the jail capacity. So many of those individuals are supervised by us in the community on pre-trial. The staffing changes for us again, there's three vacant unfunded positions in the adult division, which are two general supervision case loads and one domestic violence probation officer. And really what happens when we have vacancies, which we have historically and as we run to try to hire is that some of these, we have to prioritize our case loads. So we, some of these folks, we've combined some of the mid-level risk to reoffend case loads into large case loads with one officer and then moved other officers to our high end sex offender programs of severely mental like the most team. And of course the realignment AB 109 case loads, but these are hard decisions that we've had to make in order to prioritize operational impacts. Pre-trial numbers have continued to rise each year with a notable spike of when we saw over 200, 200 individuals on supervised pre-trial during this pandemic, it was an increase from quarter one of this year to quarter two, a 20% increase. And when we look at the increase from a year ago, it's a 41% increase. And I just wanna point out that these increases have taken place without more staffing, but we've allocated and shifting staff from other areas to do this. The start of the pandemic, when court really was suspended, not suspended entirely, but there was a lot of timelines that were shifted. We had some officers that were normally in court every day writing pre-sense investigations and we moved them to cover pre-trial, but now his court has started up again and they're processing cases. We're getting busy and not unable to do that. As you are aware, there have been quite a few early releases from prison to date. In our community, we've probably had nearly 60 releases. These are individuals that were released because they've earned credits through Prop 57 and of course, they're at their high risk for COVID. So they've come back to the communities that the governor's decided that they would come back to probation instead of parole. So it's been an additional burden and my staff have been working around the clock to secure housing, food for those folks and the right type of housing or if they need to be quarantined. And you know, San Quentin had quite a outbreak on COVID. So it's worrisome, but my staff are doing an amazing job. I'll show you just a slide of the pre-trial population. You can see how much it's really continues to increase, particularly in the first half of 2020. We're hoping that, you know, with our other programs, that's we talked about the district attorney talked about the neighborhood courts program through Prop 47 and there's a number of other programs that may be able to help divert more cases actually from even having to come into the jail. So we're hoping that we can reduce these numbers but in keeping our community safe and jail population low. In this photo, you see our juvenile court judge, Denene Guy, Casa director, Jimmy Cook and our juvenile hall superintendent, Sarah Ryan and assistant superintendent, Hugo Calderon. And it was taken to commemorate the delivery of supplies that were delivered by Casa for youth attain in the juvenile hall and really impacted by the isolation. In this picture, you'll see the items, if you can see those are board games, snacks, reading materials are just some of the items there. And I just wanna thank you, Casa, for helping us to fill in these gaps and lessen the effect of the youth that we serve that are isolated. So talk about a couple of the impacts on the operational plan, number 166, which is a school outreach, which is to collaborate with school partners to implement social-emotional responses to student behaviors or absences. And we've met our objective to work with three new school partners, which is Parro Valley High School, Renaissance High School and New School. But we've had to shift to a virtual platform clearly during the pandemic. But even doing that, we've still seen a 17% increase in credit, school credit accrual over one year ago. So that's one of the goals. Goal number 169, youth resilience, enhancing juvenile hall education by sustaining the use of tablets. We've made tablets available to 100% of the youth and it's particularly important during the pandemic. So we'll talk about our operational impacts. As you know, our service center opened up in the summer of 2019, just a little over a year ago, and we quickly ramped up. This photo was taken on February 25th, 2020. I think it might've been the last time I was actually here on these chambers. It was showing, recognizing in the probation team as the recipients of the County Employee Recognition Program Gold Award in the justice category. We're just so very proud of the work and how they too has shifted and adapted during COVID-19. So one of our goals was to, by June 2020, probation will serve 10% of all clients at the service center. We've done that because we quickly ramped up, but our population has been reduced. The numbers served about by 50% because we did close through June and we've opened up in a phased safe model that we're operating now by appointment only and running a few classes out of the service center. But we were serving 300 a month and I hope to get there. Do wanna let you know we're also working on opening, even in these times, a service center in South County working with one of our community partners to design a model because we do have a number of individuals in Watsonville that really could benefit from these same services. So wrapping it up, just talk a little bit about the uncertainties, but this picture captures where we're at in the moment at probation, really. One thing for sure that our work in the field continues but with a lot of modifications, this is a photo of Belfarez, one of our deputy probation officers on our placement unit and she's leaving the office with what we call go bags, which are staff are also applied with PPE, sanitizing supplies for themselves and for the clients that we serve, including face coverings. We do handle a lot of those out. As I've mentioned, the division of juvenile justice, something that we know certainty it's gonna close but how that looks, we don't know quite yet and what the cost will be and implications for us locally will be. So we also really seeing an increase in the behavioral health needs of youth and substance use. And of course, some of the challenges, we have many contracts with our service providers, probably $2 million in community contracts, which is so important, but they've had to shift. They're tied to outcomes, they're tied to service delivery model and everything's really shifted. So my analyst team has worked really, really hard to make sure they're in compliance and we've modified contract language so they can get paid for their services. And for the most part, it's working out pretty well. There's some challenges in some areas, but it's been working out. You know, I also want to acknowledge the management team for being the first of our staff to resume field activities and conducting curbside wellness checks. This photo was taken in May and shows managers, Natalie Burns and Jose Flores initiating the checks and designing plans for staff and to safely conduct them. So going really back out in the field was a big step last in May, but we've since done that and we have all supplies necessary and are conducting transports and doing visits when necessary. But there's certain uncertainties on the adult side, particularly with bail reform, as you know that Governor Brown signed that in legislation two years ago, but there's a referendum on that and that's now on the ballot in 2020. That could change things quite dramatically, whichever way it goes for us if bail, cash bail continues or if it's eliminated, there'll be a significant more work for probation departments in the system. SB 678 funding in the original January budget, it was proposed that that funding would be stable and at the highest three-year average that we had and that again with pandemic that was eliminated that would have really helped us, it would have been a half a million dollar increase. And then of course, the AB 109 funding is uncertain, it relies so much on tax revenues and so of course the number of folks that will continue to be released from prisons to us is kind of uncertain and the role of parole in the future is actually uncertain and that would be a significant impact or workload shift to probation moving forward. The photo you see here is PRB, our mascot for our newsletter and you can see this is, that was from the spring quarantine edition and he's got a little bottle of spray there and a badge is ready to safely go out and do the work. So I'd like in the last edition, actually of this was in 2011, a couple of years into the last recession that we had but it's been resurrected and I really want to acknowledge probation supervisor Julia Feldman for taking the lead on reviving this newsletter. As most of us has done, we have looked at the silver lining during the pandemic. I would say the pandemic really brought our department together as we shifted and adapted to this new world. COVID-19 coupled with a tragic loss of Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller and the rational reckoning as a result of the killing of George Floyd shook us all to the core. As a department, we remain committed to adapting to meeting the needs of those we served to the COVID-19 pandemic and equally committed to providing equitable opportunities to all through our efforts. I'm proud of my management team and staff for the resilience and creativities we continue to navigate challenging times. My vision for the coming years that we maintain and adopt many of the innovative practices that we've discovered that were highly successful during the pandemic. We realized that we could do virtual family meetings and folks living room without having them, you know, drive through the traffic that have drive and hour one way for a 20 minute appointment and turn around. There's a lot that we can do. And so for us, it's really finding out those who we really do need to see in person, which are many and others that perhaps we can just do virtual check-ins and save folks time. So that's what we're hoping to do. We've learned a lot and I think we can do things a lot better. Unfortunately, it took a pandemic to have that occur. So now I will ask that you approve the supplemental budget for the probation department and take any additional materials and take related actions as recommended by the county administrator of officer. So that's the conclusion of my presentation and I have time for questions. Thank you. Well, I'll open it up to you. Thank you. Thank you for both of you for your presentation. And we'll open it up to the board for questions. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. Chief, thank you for the thorough presentation. I don't have any questions. I just have a very brief comment which is I appreciated your commentary about an expansion of services into the South County and did wanna comment on just how valuable your team has been at the new Aftos service center and the fact of how much you use that space. I've had some very good conversations with them. They're very active within the community there and just to have that presence and to be able to serve the mid and South County residents that way is invaluable. I think that that level of expansion toward the South is very important in our community. And I appreciate the fact that you spoke to that briefly but that you spoke to that as part of your presentation today. So thank you again for your participation in that center and also that energy toward the mid and South County. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation and for your ongoing work. These are challenging times to do what we ask probation to do which is to be in contact, to see people and as we've experienced in lots of other places that you have to do things differently and it sounds like the creativity of the department still shines and trying to do things like the curbside wellness checks and other pieces is very helpful to meeting the needs of the individual but also meeting the important needs of the community. So thank you for that creativity. Had a couple of questions. I appreciate that you shared the information that pre-trial has gone up and with less people being held in the jail, are they being assessed through the pre-trial and then put under supervision or are they being released on their own recognizant? How is that working? It's a combination of that zero bail that doesn't mean no bail and there's exceptions to that so a lot fewer folks are actually being brought into custody because they could be cited and released but we're still doing the assessments on those that actually are booked into custody and if they don't get out with bail although that structure has changed and then we get to them and we'll review and bring those recommendations from our report to the courts and let them make the determination of release and the level of release whether it's just some type of supervision up through intensive supervision which was with equipment, electronic monitoring maybe alcohol monitoring, GPS, house arrest. And have we found a greater acceptance by the judiciary? It's always a question of. It's about, we're talking about the concurrence rate with the recommendation that we provide so generally concurrence with released recommendations is on the lower side. It's about hovering around 60% of the time and concurrence with detain recommendations as often they concur with that 85% of the time but I believe the judges have really, we've seen a change in our court the entire system really recognizing the urgency to not have anyone come into jail to for the safety of the jail staff, the others in jail. So I think just a lot more people are being released and they're using our tool utilizing all the tools that they have and relying on probation. So I bet you, I don't have the numbers but I think concurrence rates probably gonna be a lot higher the last quarter, starting the second quarter of this year just because of our situation. So judges are utilizing, I think are following that more than in the past. That's good to hear. I mean, one of the things that we've seen with the COVID pandemic is that incarceration doesn't make as necessarily any safer. We looked at the sheriff's crime statistics. There hasn't been a major crime wave even as we've reduced the jail population by over 45%. The state prison release is of some concern. I think you said 60 people. So far at least, since that began in April where they were going through different tiers. There was first the 90 day releases. So individuals who had 90 days left, they were being released and there was qualifications. They had to be non-serious, non-violent, non-serious sex offenders and then they went to 180 days. Those with 180 days left and same criteria to determine that. But at first it was really, it was messy, not on our end but at the state end because we did have individuals that were being released. We weren't notified that they thought maybe we're COVID positive that weren't and went back and forth. That's getting a little better. But I really think my staff, they've worked on weekends on the 4th of July. One of our challenging releases going to Valley Medical Center to connect with CDCR who is basically dropping them off. And that was up to us to figure out housing, transportation and so my staff are just doing incredible work to meet the needs of these individuals who are coming out rapidly from CDCR. Yeah, I mean the state prison system has done a spectacularly bad job in terms of managing the population in regards to COVID. And here you are responsible for taking care of the problems that they've had in terms of keeping people safe and COVID free. And now you have to do these rapid turnarounds. Do people coming back from staying prison, do you have a sense of the percentages of those who have housing or don't have housing? Oh, are there family? The percentage, I know there's quite a few that don't have housing because we're using a lot of hotel vouchers right now to anywhere that we can find for housing. So it might be even half of those that really housing or they thought they had housing and then they come back and find that so-and-so is not gonna let them live with them. So there are a lot of the motels that we have here. And we're going and paying for that. And then moving around when they have to be moved and so on. Well, I appreciate the work the community counts on probation in these areas. And I appreciate you guys stepping up to help out, especially in this critical thing because we have a low commitment right to state prison system. And so the people who go there need to be there. And when they come back with not a lot of preparation that creates a lot of challenges for everybody involved. I wanna just move on to the probation center. You said that we're down about 50%. In terms of participation, is that set up for people to be able to still use the work, the computers and everything? Just the volume, we've intentionally slowed the volume down to allow for social distancing because pre COVID, last February, you would have gone in there and it might have had 12 individuals in a classroom, one of the classrooms we have there doing a anger management class. And we just can't have that now. So what we do is we'll have three individuals in there doing a class. Just so, but the computer lab, County Office of Education has, they're still there. So, and we're doing the most popular continues to be employment services really clearly right now. It's really necessary. So that person program is very, very busy with folks but we're doing it by appointment only. We know we could, if we were able to just say, it's open, don't worry, it's all good. It would fill right back up again. We're looking forward to that day. But staff are doing lots of things remotely. We're letting folks use that facility and then we give them a device to connect with someone else who may be in South County who's facilitating a class. So that's how we're using the space as well. And clothing, we have a lot of clothing that's been donated. So a lot of folks are coming in there and we're providing just basic needs, hygiene kits and clothing. Thank you for that work. And I'm glad that that center, which was such a great addition to our community is still being used during this time of the COVID pandemic. You brought up anger management training and I was gonna ask you about domestic violence training. I know that because of changes in state law proposed by Assemblymember Mark Stone that we get to do our domestic violence trainings differently for offenders. How is that looking in? It's, well, it's looking good. We have, we've actually lost, unfortunately during the pandemic, two providers now as a result of lower numbers that they're referrals they're receiving. But some of that has to do because we have a new program that's online only streets to schools, which is doing a 16 week, 26 week and 52. So those three models are totally different. It used to be 52 weeks and that was it. So now we're able to, so I think we had about 30 individuals enrolled. So we've lost some capacity, but now we have the online course going. But unfortunately we, we also lost the free class that was at the service center as a result of decreasing numbers of program providers couldn't justify having, you know, full-time staff, such low numbers. But we have a new model that we, that we're happy with so far cause it's online and it has the revised curriculum. And what does that cost? Streets to school. Oh, you know, I'm sorry. I don't know the cost to that. Maybe you can tell me later. I'd appreciate that. I just have a couple more questions. The DA was in here earlier talking about the neighborhood course program, a delay, but starting to take steps in December. I'm wondering how that looks like for probation. And I know you'll play a big role. Yeah, we're, you know, we're there to support, you know, the, both the DA's office and the conflict resolution center. We're, we were the lead in the grant prop 47 grant that brought in the funding for that. So we're there, you know, to, to, to provide support to make this happen. And, and, you know, we're, we're, we are well aware of the, you know, best practices and that. So, so it's working with both with the conflict resolution center there. They're the ones that are funded from prop 47 for a coordinator. I heard you ask the DA that question. So prop 47 is funding conflict resolution center to coordinate the program coordinator for the DA. No, it's not. No, and is it, you know, we apply for grants now and the, you, you get points for not funding probation officers or any, you know, unfortunately now. So it's a lot of the money that we get ghost. It's good for the community, but prop 47, for instance, I think 67% of those dollars have gone to the community based agencies. The last thing I'll just ask you about is this change in the DJJ and what that's going to look like here. We do have a low commitment rate to the state system, but do you envision using juvenile hall and there's obviously capacity there. We're going to be doing this big infrastructure investment there. Could that be a place? Yeah, I think we can. We've had over the last 10 years, we've averaged two commitments per year. And though the average length of those commitments are about two years. And then looking at the number of youth we have in the space and what the upgrades that we're going to do, we think we can do that if we have the resources. I know the state is in this realignment has proposed a certain amount of dollars that would be allocated to us to, because we know we need, you know, a different type of programming for someone who's going to be staying there somewhere for a longer time than usual. Post-secondary education will be important. So I think we can do it in the facility. We've talked, you know, really examining how we have it set up. We have an older facility. We don't have all these different wings that we could reopen like some counties, you know, built new juvenile halls, but they're empty now. We still have our hall, but it's linear, only two wings, but I think we could do it. I think we can make it work. And I know we have great partners here that will help guide us. Don't we pay when we put some in the DJJ system? We pay $24,000 per youth, but the rest is funded by the state. And they say it's about a $250,000 cost per youth for a per year for a commitment. And you expect that whatever they come up with, that there'll be money coming to the county? That's what they're determining, how much would come to the counties and who it goes to. That's the big argument at the legislature. So the legislature has been listening to a lot of the community advocates and families and youths saying, you know, the money should go entirely to the community and let us, and so we're trying to find a balance. We, you know, we probation and state needs an oversight role and, but we think we could do a good job. We have the wraparound program that's done a great job that the courts have relied on for cases that maybe might have gone to DJJ, but we're able to work with them at home in the community and done pretty good. So I think those kinds of programs we need to ramp up as well. Yeah. Well, I appreciate the work. I know that the loss of these probation officers places us at slightly greater risk as we're asking you to take on more responsibility, but with less staff. And it's something that we may have to come back and take a look at in the future to ensure that you have the staffing necessary to be able to manage the responsibility that you have because this doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. And so we'll probably be keeping that census down in the jail. And as a result, the probation will be an important part of that successful public safety system. Thank you for recognizing that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah. Much of the comments that I was gonna ask have already been made, but I just want to really say congratulations to the probation department for its professional efforts to reduce recidivism and improve the overall community safety of Santa Cruz County. You've been very innovative for years and years in the probation department and you've got a gold award that you mentioned as well-deserved and I'm sure you're gonna be stepping at the front of the line to get another one or two in the near future. So my, I just was gonna say congratulations on all that you've accomplished before and then staying with the programs that we do have in this very difficult time. And I don't know how I think it's been asked about just in general about specific estimates based on workload of your current officers. I guess that's hard to really put in place when orders from the state are continually, really they're changing, but do you have any more specific estimates based on the workload of your current officers? Do you see a 10, 20% increase in workload that they're gonna have to oversee at this time? The percentage of the vacancies amounts to 10% of the staffing and that coupled with folks just not being able to come to work for a variety of reasons has made it challenging. I think one thing that maybe it's not always recognized in addition to supervision, we provide support to the courts. We do court coverage. Our officers are in the three felony courts, also in juvenile court. So we have to be prepared to be in those courts. We're in the specialty courts in the domestic violence court as well as the behavioral health court. So that takes up a lot of staff time too. So the courts really, they want us everywhere. They love our officers for good reasons because we have a lot of information on how the individuals are doing, but we get pulled in a lot of directions and they're relying us more during this time. So the workload definitely is probably increased minimally 10% if not 15 to 20%. So it's a strain on my staff. I hear them and I understand and I'm just hoping that we come out of this at some point and go back to where we were February where we were about to make four job officers that we actually postpone that given our situation. Well, thank you again for your ongoing efforts to make this a better place and better opportunities for those who need it the most at a young age. Thank you very much. Welcome, thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Chief. I'll be brief. I think it's clear that more and more responsibility can be put on you and your team and the state resources don't seem to be coming with that responsibility. I think hopefully as our budget improves, I hope you'll come back, whether it's mid-year or in next year's budget cycle and try to get, figure out, we got to develop a strategy to have better oversight and reduce caseloads because we're gonna just have more people out in the community and it's incumbent upon us to make sure that there's appropriate oversight and your caseloads are manageable. So I appreciate all that you're doing with the minimal resources, but I don't think it's sustainable over the long term. So I look forward to having that conversation as things normalize a little bit and hopefully our revenues come back. Thank you for the support. Thank you. Yeah, I have a little comment. I guess with the visiting at, let's say, Juvenile Hall, the family can still meet in person and they can't. Not physically, no, they cannot. We have a waiver from the state. In fact, almost every single county in California has had a waiver since the start of the pandemic, just because it's too much of a risk to the health of the children, youth in Juvenile Hall and core staff. So they, unfortunately, it's just something to risk that we don't think would be the right decision right now. And so they can see them video as much as we can do that video phone calls. We have devices that they can do that, but the youth that have been in there have not, once they're in there, have not physically seen their families or some of the service providers. So it's a tough, it's a tough, it's a tough time. But I tell you what, you know, the division of Juvenile Justice State Commitment Facility for a time there, they suspended all intakes and they had zero cases of COVID. And just about a month ago, they started intakes again and now they have, as of yesterday, 66 cases of COVID. So we're just not gonna take that risk at this time. But we understand the hardships on the kids, but it's a life-dead decision. I think that's really rough. Is there any counseling or somebody that's helping out? Because they need that social contact. Yeah, telehealth and remote, things like that, those supports are definitely available and they need that more. And just kind of, you know, what we see is, you know, the youth are worried about their families. That's what they're most worried, not necessarily their wellbeing, but how are their families doing, their siblings and so on. And so, as we know, they already come from really vulnerable places. We're housing, food and so on was already scarce and now it's, they're far more concerned today than they were just a few months ago. So they couldn't even, the mom or dad or whoever, Cardi and they couldn't come down like we are and talk to them? Not, no, they can't. They can't go into the facility and go through those doors. But we're looking for ways. I think that's coming up, you know, there's a couple counties that have started that or have begun, we've begun exploring how we would do that, where that would occur, you know, perhaps outside in the courtyard, you know, in open space to do that. So we're also working with our other counties just to, and really determine right now the best practice is not to do that. And it's supported by the state that regulates what we do. And you're following like state protocol? Absolutely. Title 15, Board of State Community Correctional Standards. It just seems like the punishment enough for being arrested for whatever is being in juvenile hall and then to then be excluded from the visiting is an added burden, which is very, very tough and probably psychologically damaging, maybe if we're not careful. I agree, and we're doing our best with our behavioral health partners and other folks to address those issues to the best we can. And if a mom or dad brought down a box of cookies, they can't, you can't. I don't believe we're allowing that just because given the risk of, you know, something contaminated or that materials, those kinds of things. Yeah, so there's a lot of risks involved to the, you know, health and, you know, we haven't had a COVID case yet in our institution. So that's pretty good. That's on a lot of other facilities. If you read and around the state that's already happened, they've had outbreaks. We have not, and that's really because of our staff, the leadership and our staff taking all the precautions and doing what we're doing. Well, hopefully that, you know, changes with the state because, yeah, I think it's really tough. The only other thing I had was prevention and things like that were, you know, parks pretty much, the playgrounds and everything that are closed. We're talking, I'm talking about mostly juvenile probation now. And I know in Watsonville, you know, they took down at some of the city parks, well, they closed off all the playground equipment. And at least you can walk around, they can run around on the grass area. But the kids really need to get out and burn off some energy. The thing that concerns me is with the school grounds, what they've done is built fences all around the schools where the neighborhood kids used to be able to go and run around and shoot baskets. And whatever they wanted to play with some baseball or kickball or soccer. Now there's the big fence with everything's been locked up. Not because of COVID-19, it was happening before about two years ago. So what happens is when the school is closed and maybe just go back four or five years ago, it never was, it was always open. Kids in the neighborhood would go there, right? So now when the schools are closed, they're having to walk across town to get to a city park or an unincorporated, you know, park. And making it actually more dangerous for them to walk two miles instead of walking two blocks. So I'd like to see us work with the schools and get them to open up at least on the weekends. I can see during the school time and all that, maybe not. But after five o'clock or when the kids aren't there, just so we have an outlet, we have some activity and recreation going on. Anyway, we'll work on that from our end, but I don't know, do you agree with that? Yeah, well, thank you for really expressing your concerns about, you know, the wellbeing of the kids. You know, I have three young children. I run a soccer league in Aptos. It's, it's, we're not doing it. And it's been severely increasing for, I know my own children and they're okay. But imagine the children that you're talking about and some of those in South County that really don't have access to a lot and it's already limited. So when we're seeing the signs and the struggles that the kids are having, we've seen it right since March, you know, with shelter in place and so on. So I agree with you. We took for them to be able to have some form of recreation, fresh air and being run around, whether it's whatever it is soccer or school, doesn't have like sports. That would be, that would be helpful. A healthy outlet. So we're, you know, we're trying to figure out ways to do that. And there's some, there's some camps, you know, that are, that are operating and some soccer, the ISTECH is our soccer program that we sponsor has been able to do training. You can do training sessions, you know, with a stable group, but no physical contact, no scrimmaging. So those are the things that we're exploring and some of our kids are actively involved in that and it's, it's good for them. Okay. You bet. And thank you for all your work and the compassion you show for the, you know, everybody you work with. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll bring it back to, we'll open up for public comment. Do we have anybody here? We do. Hello. Welcome. Good after morning, late morning, Chair Caput, members of the board, Chief Heraldo. My name is Jim Heaney. I'm the, what the heck am I? Chief shop steward for SEIU local 521 and the County employees here. I've come up to talk about an item that isn't exactly a budget item, but it's directly budget related. And that is the furloughs we're currently experiencing. As the supervisor Learpole, the only member of the board who was here in the last major recession may recall, when we went through furloughs last time, the first year everybody did furloughs. And after that we learned from that. And what we learned that furloughs don't necessarily save budget money because it depends on an operation. As you know, through the complexity of this budget, when you tell a department, they've got to have a 20% cut in general fund, makes a big difference on how they're funded. For somebody who's 100% general funded, that's a huge problem. For somebody who's 80% fee based and only 20% general funded, that's a much smaller problem. Well, furloughs kind of track along the same line. And the problem was saying everybody needs to take the same furlough in a bargaining unit. It doesn't have enough consideration for the actual work. What I'm speaking specifically to is juvenile hall. And what I'm speaking specific to them, what we learned from the last furlough and we eventually took juvenile hall out of the furlough, is that when our group supervisors and other staff are furloughed, somebody has to cover that shift. Who generally covers that shift in juvenile hall it is extra help. Covering a budgeted position with extra help is in our opinion, a contract violation. But that's not our major concern. Our major concern is it's not an effective use of county money because you take it money out of an employee's pocket and having to pay someone else. The chief's other alternative is he could cover it with overtime, with other permanent staff. That, again, is going to cost you more money in your budget. So we will be re-entering conversation with personnel around the furlough. When we made our furlough agreement, we put in a reopen agreement. And part of it was to see what happened here in these budget hearings. We get through these budget hearings. We're going to be meeting with personnel again. Chief, we ask you for your support in taking those folks out of furlough. We ask you for the data to show that you're actually spending more money during furlough having those staff members furloughed than not furloughed. So I thank you for your time for listening. You know, we are committed to working together to having a smart furlough that saves the county money. Furloughs that don't save the county money are ridiculous. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? No, we don't have anyone else. I'll close public comment and we'll bring it back to the board for action or comment. I would move the recommended actions for the probation department. Thank you. I'll call. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Brenda. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. The board will now recess and reconvene at 6 p.m. for continued public hearing on the 2021 revised county budgets. If people show up here tonight at 6 p.m. they'll be able to come in. The rest of the board and most of the staff will be doing it online. But people in the public will be able to come here in person and talk just like the last gentleman did and comment. Is that about correct? I guess staff is going to be here. I was under the impression it was going to be completely virtual meeting. But if they're saying they're going to open the chambers then I guess that's the case. So the chambers will be open for people to come in and testify in person. The board and staff, the other staff will be attending virtually. Virtually. Yes. Okay. And the board. Yes. Okay. But we will hear the public here or down downstairs or no, it'll be upstairs. Fifth floor county building Santa Cruz. If you want to come in person. If you want to be online, do we have information for how they can get online though? On the clerk of the board's website there are directions for people how to make web comments and if they make them during the meeting they will be read into the record if they make them before or after they get attached to our minutes. Okay. Thank you. So 6 p.m. Okay. Chair Caput, this is Carlos Palacios from the County Administrative Officer. And with your permission we'll go ahead and call our continued public hearing in the budget to order. And we'll start. Are we going to start with roll? Sure. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Supervisor Friend, are you here? I see him. Supervisor Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. Chair Caput. Here. One more time. I'll ask is Supervisor Friend. Nope. Okay. Okay. You can go ahead. Okay. So with that, Chair Caput, if your permission, I'll go ahead and start with our, my brief overview presentation and then we'll open it up to comment. Okay. Mr. Palacios. Mr. Palacios. Yeah. How do you make additional changes? There are none. And. We'll introduce the next slide. Overview of public safety. Okay. Yeah. So we're going to be doing an overview of the budget and then we'll just be taking public comment here from the chambers and then from any written comment on the web. So with that, I'll go ahead and start with my brief presentation. I already gave this presentation on Monday, so I'll make it much shorter. This is budget hearings that are taking place from August 10th through 14th that are revising the budget we approved on June 30th. And the revisions are due to take account of the revenue losses and other impacts we have had due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019-20, we ended up seeing a loss of 12.4 million dollars. Now originally we had projected a loss of up to 20 million. So it was better than we had feared, but it was still bad. And we solved that budget problem both from using fund balance through some savings we achieved through freezing of positions. And then we're also going to use 4.5 million dollars of reserves. Now in the current fiscal year, that's fiscal year 2021. We are estimating a loss of 23.1 million dollars. This is less than we had feared. Again, we had thought we may see losses as big as 40 million dollars. And what we in fact are projecting now is about a 23.1 million dollar loss. Now again, this is better than what we projected originally, but it's still a bad and it's still very severe. And so to solve that budget problem, the deficit, we have asked our employees and they have been very helpful in agreeing to furloughs that range from 5% to 10% with the great majority of our employees taking seven and a half percent. And our department heads and other appointed officials including the board taking a 10% furlough. We're achieving 11.4 million dollars of savings due to those furloughs. Furthermore, we are departments have recommended 12.6 million dollars in cuts and those department reductions are in all areas of the county. And in particular, some of our public safety programs, some of our general government programs have all been impacted by this. Nevertheless, with those cuts, we will be able to achieve a balanced budget assuming that we also use about 9.7 million dollars of reserves in the current fiscal year. So altogether, we will be using 14.2 million dollars of reserves. And that is part of the good news in that we entered this crisis in a very strong financial position due to strong and conservative fiscal management by our board. We have been able over the last decade to triple our reserves to 56 million dollars, 10% of our revenues. We are proposing to use between last fiscal year and this fiscal year 14.2 million. That will bring us to about 7.5% reserves down from the 10%. And that will allow us to hopefully write out this fiscal year in time for the economy, hopefully to improve by the following year. So there's a lot of uncertainties, a lot of unknowns. We have received 28 million dollars, approximately federal funds for the CARES Act. We have proposed a budget to the board of that. The great majority of that being spent, recommended to be being spent on our public health response such as testing, isolation and quarantine. And also, we're also having a fair amount of that money being recommended to be spent on our response to those, help those experiencing homeless remain safe and protected during this time. So that is another thing that the board will be able to consider. Unfortunately, we are not able to use those funds to backfill any of our lost revenues. So it's a difficult year. We presented to you a balanced budget with some very difficult decisions. I know that the board is considering the recommendation has already provided us some direction to make some modifications to our submittal. We have two more days of budget hearing, Wednesday and Thursday. And then next Tuesday the 18th we'll take final action on the budget as well as the CARES Act distribution of funds. With that, I'll end my presentation and then Chair Caput will go ahead and I'm assuming that we'll just open it up to comments. There's a few people here in the chambers and then we'll see any written comments we've received over the web. Is that acceptable to Chair Caput? You're on mute, Chair Caput. We can't hear you. Okay. The opportunity for members of the public to address the board on topics related to items on today's agenda, revised county budgets for public safety and justice. There will also be an opportunity for testimony during regular agenda items. If you cannot stay or wait for a regular agenda item, you may address the board at this time. However, you may only speak once on a particular topic. You'll have three minutes. Anybody from the public? Okay. Do we have anybody in the chambers there? Yes, we have a few people here and they're going to speak right now. Hi, my name is Shelley Seaweld and I'm here on a representation of MHKN. And I would like to say that I'd like none of the budget to I'd like to not to lose any money out of this budget. I was on the streets not too long ago, a couple of years ago, and the MHKN helped me gain employment and that value of militarism and through that employment, I now have opportunities to work at the homeless shelter and with people, staff that have helped me, you know, get myself from bearings and present myself back into a life of nurturing myself. And they helped me with the loss of losing the discrimination and stigma I felt that I had because I had become homeless. The money I think that the MHKN receives and as long as they don't lose anymore and if there's anything that can be given to them would help and I'd hate to see them lose any of it because it's so beneficial to my life. And I mean, I have an existence and a persona now that I can represent, you know, myself again because of MHKN. And so I think that and so I'd like to make sure that that is there's other women and people who also can benefit like I did. So that's fine, but I'm here to say something. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. My name is Helen Bradley. Everybody in Santa Cruz called me Miss Helen because I'm older now. I came here in 2001 from Santa, from Nashville, Tennessee in hopes to be with my family and things didn't turn out like I thought it was going to turn out. So I ended up going to the shelter, which was fine. No problem with that. The shelter gave me the life that I have. Also MHKN has done a great, great wonders for me. I'm 75 years old now. I didn't think I would make it to 75. But just being at MHKN has helped me a lot. And I'm asking, please do not, you know, take the funds from us because we need it because myself, I don't have anything to do. And what I mean by I don't have anything to do, I don't get out like I used to because of the epidemic. And with my age, you know, they say, we got to be careful. And I understand that because I don't want to hurt myself. And I definitely don't want to hurt nobody else. God has created a good part of my life. And the groups that MHKN has, it's really enlightened me to a new life. You know, I don't have to pretend and this and that and I have friends there. And I've been homeless before. I've really been homeless. I had never experienced homelessness. And what's going on now. And I'm 75 years old. And I can remember when I was three years old all up until now. And this life is going on now. It's a little too much. You know, we have to stay together and do things for each other. And MHKN is just a place that I, myself, can go to. And I can get answers to things. I learn new things. And I guess that's my time. Give one more minute. Okay. I got to hurry. But all I want to say is thank God, and I mean that for every place that I've been here in Santa Cruz that has given me a new life. And I mean that, especially MHKN. I have no problem. And my director is very, very good to me. And I appreciate that. And thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Chair Caput, that's all the people here in the chambers. We have any comments on the web or internet? We have not received any web comments. Thank you all. Thank you. Okay. Then we'll go to just one item on the consent agenda. Item number seven. Do we have any comments? Chair Caput, we, Chair Caput, we don't, we're not doing that agenda again. We're just doing public comment on the, the budget. And that's done now. It's item number 11, which is the continued public hearing. So that's all we had was to hear public comment, but another opportunity, but there's no action needed by the board. Okay. Mr. Chair, I think we are just going to listen to public comment. We've heard what is there at the chamber and any written comments. I guess we didn't have any. So I, if I'm right, Mr. Plosius would be correct for us to recess until tomorrow. Public hearing or starts on the budget at nine o'clock tomorrow. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. So I think that we recessed not to tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. Okay. Tomorrow morning at nine o'clock in the board chambers in Santa Cruz. Yes. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Vice chair. That was painless.