 the column you need to order then. Eileen, do you want to do the public statement stuff for us? Eileen, can you read the public participation stuff? Do you have it? I think we can just keep moving and I think we have a quorum between myself and Victoria. Let's just go on to our first item. Okay, Eileen dropped off. She's just getting back on. Sorry, there is a lot of technical difficulties today. I think we have to read. I just have to find it because I was not prepared. The statement for public participation. So let me just find that really quickly. And I can do that. I think this is it. It's maybe abbreviated. Okay, so due to the provisions of the governor's COVID related executive orders, which has spented certain requirements of the Brown Act, the Economic Development Committee is conducting today's meeting virtual in a virtual setting. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted in the city's website as well as on today's agenda. Members of the public wishing to speak during agenda items or public comment will be able to do so by using the raise hand feature or pressing star nine on their phone when called upon they will be given ability to address the committee. And Eileen, can you call the roll please? Okay, absolutely. I am Mayor Rogers. I see you're acknowledging you're here, Council Member Fleming. Let the record reflect that Council Member Sawyer is not able to attend this meeting today. Okay, and then we're going to go ahead and start with with three items on the agenda. And we are going to I have Angie Dylan Shore on with us today. But before she starts, I just wanted to give just a little bit of a background on this. So an overarching background on the theme of today's agenda. The things we're talking about today are all funded through the city's one time funds either from the ARPA money or the PG&E settlement. And both the Guaranteed Basic Income Program and the Child and Child Care Support Program are funded out of the ARPA allocation and then the third item that enhanced infrastructure finance district is is a PG&E funded program. But specific to the first item, which is Guaranteed Basic Income. So getting into this program, both this and the Child Child Care Support Programs, we either have or will be entering into a professional service agreement with first five for the delivery of those programs. And if you recall, we were specific to the Guaranteed Basic Income, which I have to say is also often called Universal Basic Income. We're calling it Guaranteed Basic Income. We were originally going to partner with the county office of human services to contract with them for the participation, selection and delivery of the service. But the county ARPA allocation process took much longer than it did for those cities within the county to do their ARPA allocations. And since I think it's Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Petalum and Hilsburg, since we already acted on our allocations, we ended up meeting over the course of a number of months to come up with what I think is really a better, more coordinated program between the cities and the service providers so that we can have better leverage the funds and just have a better swath of service providers included. And Angie's going to go into that in more detail as well as the timeline. So, I think, can you pull up the slides for us? Yes. And then Angie, I'm just going to hand it over to you. And then I have, before we get into the Child Care one, I was just going to say a couple words on that one as well. Great. Thanks so much, Tracea. And good morning, Mayor and Councilwoman Fleming. First Five is so honored to be the lead agency on a countywide pilot of guaranteed income that will increase economic stability and mobility of families with young children that are disproportionately and adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm going to offer an update about the project and how we'll roll it out in the city of Santa Rosa, but in the context of the broader countywide effort because it's really through the leveraging of ARPA funds across the cities of Santa Rosa, Healdsburg and Petaluma and the county of Sonoma that we're going to be able to not only reach more families, but also evaluate the effort and uplift those findings to shift policy at the state and federal level as well. Next slide. Can you say it was Healdsburg Petaluma County of Sonoma and what's the other jurisdiction? Santa Rosa. Oh, right. So the total cost of the project comes to a little more than 5.1 million. We'll be able to reach 305 families, at least 100 of those within the QCTs in Santa Rosa, who will receive an unconditional payment of $500 every month for two years, starting in January. Selected applicants will need to be at least 18, be pregnant and or parenting, at least one child under six, have a household income of 250% federal poverty level or less, and have experienced a negative economic impact related to the pandemic. We'll be prioritizing applicants that live in the qualified census tracts. Here are the total costs related to the pilot, the guaranteed income payments to families, as well as some incentives for participating in the evaluation. Surveys and interviews is a total of 4 million, almost 80% of the budget. I'll say more about the activities and the roles on the next slide, but the cost of staffing, the outreach effort, the payment disbursement, and the evaluation of the pilot is about $1.5 million, and the cost for project management, fiscal administration over the two and a half years is around $600,000. As I mentioned, one of the major strengths of this project is that, first five, as an independent public agency with strong administrative capacity, we're well positioned to be the fiscal and programmatic lead on the project, and to leverage ARPA funds with that capacity, and a small amount of Prop 10 tobacco tax to fill in some holes that aren't in the county budget or coming from the cities. So here are the breakdowns of funding from each jurisdiction. The ARPA funds from the cities is almost 100% dedicated to supporting the direct payments to families, while the county funding not only expands the number of families that we can involve, but also will cover the cost of an external evaluator, the cost of the payment disbursement platform, the outreach staffing for our non-profit partners, and some of first five's administrative staffing costs. Next slide. This gives you a sense of the roles of each of the partners. First five's role is oversight, coordination of all the moving parts and communications, as well as the fiscal administration and all important reporting back to the county and the cities so that ARPA expenditures can be reported up to the federal government. We're collaborating with eight different, actually I think nine now, community-based organizations across the county, several in Santa Rosa, to develop culturally responsive multilingual outreach approaches and an application process, and then each of those organizations will be participating in intensive outreach to ensure access to and assistance to families to complete the application, especially really emphasizing reaching the most marginalized families who would be least likely to participate or to even fill out the application. Then once the participants for the pilot are selected, our partners will make sure that they understand any impact of the additional income on their eligibility for certain public benefits. Families will also have access to services across the coalition that promote financial stability, healthy development, nurturing parenting, and school readiness. The role of the cities again is to dedicate ARPA funds to support the guaranteed income payments for families that live within their jurisdictions. The county, in addition to the funding, is assisting us with securing waivers to allow participants to have an exemption from having those guaranteed income payments count toward their eligibility for public benefits. So CalWorks, CalFresh, MediCal, guaranteed income is supposed to raise the income floor, not replace public benefits. The county will also be working with us directly to outreach to eligible families on their caseloads. Next slide. Two key subcontractors are Social Policy Research Associates and Fund for Guaranteed Income. Social Policy Research will conduct a robust mixed methods evaluation so that we're able to elevate the experiences of families and impacts of stable income on their family functioning, on child development, parental mental health, and other factors. A Fund for Guaranteed Income is an organization whose mission is to make traditional financial institutions and mechanisms more accessible to individuals that are at the margin. So such as previously incarcerated individuals, immigrants, and other folks, they administer payments for the Compton Pledge, which is a guaranteed income program in Southern California, as well as several other guaranteed income pilots around the country. Their platform is extremely user-friendly, they provide direct customer service to the participants, and they provide the payments in various options. So a family might choose to have a debit card as opposed to a direct deposit into their bank account. Next slide. We do intend to outreach to families living in all of the QCTs throughout the county, as well as Santa Rosa, through multilingual flyers, posters, presentations, radio, even door-to-door by leveraging the trusted messengers that already provide services and supports in these neighborhoods. We plan to go directly to Head Start Families and families with kids in subsidized childcare and preschool, as well as working through the federally qualified health centers as well. The QCTs in Santa Rosa are really closely aligned with the zip codes, where most Medi-Cal eligible births are concentrated in Southwest. So those zip codes would be 95407, the Southwest 95401, and 95403. And those three zip codes last year those were the residence addresses of the vast majority of Medi-Cal births that happened in Santa Rosa. Next slide. So here's a timeline. We're pretty close to executing our contract with the county and working on contracts with the cities. In July, we'll focus on the subcontracts with the community-based organizations, Fund for Guaranteed Income and the Evaluation Firm, and we'll also have a formal launch meeting. I talked to Mayor Rogers yesterday, asked him to speak at that meeting as a strong champion for guaranteed income and a member of the National Mayors for Guaranteed Income. Coinciding with that, we'd love to do a joint press release with the cities in the county. We'll also be meeting with the evaluator next month to develop the research questions that will guide their evaluation over the next two and a half years. Later this summer, we'll work with the CBOs to develop the outreach plan and then that will be implemented in September and October. And we hope to have also secured the waivers for income eligibility for participants that receive public benefits, which we're assuming is going to be the majority of participants. And then in November, we'll select the participants from geographic pools of applicants. So one of those will be Santa Rosa, the QCTs in Santa Rosa, and we'll be able to identify those applicants through addresses. And Fund for Guaranteed Income has a really great way of being able to download that information out of the application so that we can sort it and then set it up for tracking for the evaluation piece. Once we have the participants selected, we'll work with the community-based organizations and Fund for Guaranteed Income to have all the participants onboarded to the system. And then payments will begin in January and continue through December 2024. It'll be very hands-off. This is completely unconditional guaranteed income. There's no requirement to participate in any services, although resources will be on the platform for families. And again, they'll have connected with the community-based organizations at kind of the front end of the project, letting them know what resources are available to them, but it's not part of the project. Really, the intervention is literally the cash itself. SPRA will conduct several point-in-time surveys throughout the two years that the families are receiving the income, as well as interviews with a sample of participants in the second half of the second year, I think, is when that happens. So I will stop there. And if you have questions, happy to answer those. Council Member, any questions? Thank you. Thank you. First of all, how do you guys do it? It would be the first question. But going from there, I saw a $5.1 million budget. Did I get that right? Maybe my math is off. When I added up the payments to families, the outreach and the project management, I got $6.1 million. I got $4.4 million in direct payments, $1.5 in outreach and $600 in project management. It's $6.1 million then. And like I said, whatever costs are not covered through the contributions of the county and the cities, those will be leveraged through our... And we really have a nice position to be able to do this because we have this core Prop 10 funding stream. It's flexible to a very large degree as long as we're supporting families with young children. Even though it's a declining revenue source, it's fairly discretionary. So we can use it to plug holes that the other funders aren't able to cover. Okay. And then I'm just curious about the messaging because it is a pretty good chunk that will be an administrative and not direct. I consider the outreach and the payments actually... I know you're saying the intervention is the money and I know that's what we're measuring for, for like research purposes. But I think the outreach is also another awesome opportunity that we have and not to be undervalued. But if you look at the $600,000 is about 10%, we look at that as a little high for administration. But I get that it's a really complex thing to administer. It's not a really simple, straightforward program. So I'm wondering how we will be messaging that to the community in case we have any fiscal hots or eagle eyes coming after us on that. Yeah. It is two and a half years of administering an oversight to the program. Also the data collection and working with multiple at this point, 10 maybe now 11 subcontractors requires quite a bit of staff time. We want to make sure that all of the record keeping is really thorough, really accurate, so that the cities and the county can report those ARPA expenditures with absolutely no issues or concerns around compliance with federal laws around ARPA. So, you know, we'll actually be putting in a fair amount of our Prop 10 funds for that staffing. So, you know, yeah, I mean, I think it is a lot of moving parts. It is a complex program. And the outreach piece is really only the first six months of the program are the community based organizations are directly involved with the guaranteed income piece, right? It's really about making sure that there's an equitable opportunity for I mean, ideally every eligible family applies to participate in this program. But that will only happen if we do a really robust outreach effort. And so we've asked all of our partners to meet some pretty clear expectations around dedicating staffing for that period of time, you know, literally the number of hours per week that we're seeing is going to be necessary to make sure that we do that outreach. So, thank you for your response. Yeah, I don't really have any questions for Angie. It looks like a really good policy design. And I think that the rollout of it is going to be, I think it's going to be really interesting for the city and for the county to see the impacts that we can have, particularly on children. I did want to thank you for mentioning the mayors for a guaranteed basic income. It's a group that has a ton of knowledge and a ton of experience. And of course, Michael Tubbs, the former mayor in Fresno Stockton, excuse me, Stockton, has been leading that charge. And so I hope you've hooked up with that group. And if not, I can send over a contact to you because I think that they'll be invaluable as we do this. Great. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Yeah, we're definitely hooked into that resource as well as there's a nationwide community of practice for guaranteed basic income and just such deep, rich resources, language messaging, framing to help us kind of move forward with, I think the tricky part for us and the very new part is having money be the intervention. And then how do you talk about that? And that's one of the reasons why it was so important to get a very good experienced evaluator that understands what the purpose of doing this is and really is mission-driven and can help us to elevate our findings. So to ask the right families, or sorry, the right questions of families to frame those in the right way, to be culturally responsive, and then to be able to lift up those findings to add to the national research around policy change. Yeah. I also want to thank Raisa really fast. And I think I've mentioned this before, but when we were first looking at ARPA, Raisa and I were texting back and forth, what do you want to do with the money? And we both kind of agreed let's go after poverty and started looking at different ways to support children and go after poverty. And so, Raisa, you've done a great job of sort of working the city through this process and helping to design policies that I think are going to be extremely impactful. And I'll mention I was just at a conference with a whole bunch of mayors and we were asked about rebounding out of disasters. And obviously with ARPA funding, that's an opportunity for people to do that. And we were going around the room talking about what our communities are using the dollars for. And after I mentioned guaranteed basic income and childcare and baby bonds and some of the other things we're doing, I had a mayor walk up to me and said, what utopia do you work in? And we're pretty great being able to invest like that in the community even though we know that there's a lot of need. Let's go to the public comment and see if there's any questions or comments that folks would like to make. And Mayor Rogers, we also, before we go to the next item, have to do a public comment for items not on the agenda. We forgot to call that at the very beginning. Yeah, I think we're having our technical difficulties, so we'll go on back to it after this. Okay. Okay. We have no rate chance at this time nor were there any voicemails or emails for this meeting. Okay. Councilmember, anything else? This is really great. I'm, and I think what will be particularly interesting about it beyond the, it being the right thing to do is going to be the research. And I'm really looking forward to seeing the controls versus the intervention and hoping that that informs future policy decisions in a big way. All right. Angie, Risa, anything else on this item? All right. Let's do public comment then for non-agenda items. If you'd like to provide comment, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. We show no raise hands at this time. All right. Risa, do you want to go into the next item? Yeah. So the next one is the child and childcare support program. So we used to call it the child care support pilot program when we started this back in 2020. But we're adding child because to your point, we do live in some sort of utopia and we're getting funding for these things. So for the delivery of these programs, the contract with first five did go to council already. It's been approved. So we're pretty much ready to roll. And before I give it back to Angie, I just want to remind you that this is the progression of program we started back in 2020. It has been funded wholly with one time funds, which is amazing, but we're figuring out ways to leverage the money repeatedly. So the first phase of the program, well, firstly, I should say what we're always trying to do as it relates to childcare is the three legs of the stool. And I say it over and over so that everybody knows it, wages and resources, affordability and access for parents and facilities and infrastructure. So we're looking constantly for ways to address those three elements to have a really stable, supported childcare industry. So again, I am amazed through partnerships that we've been able to do this. The first phase of this program was the stabilization grants. We helped all over 6,000 kids stay enrolled throughout the pandemic. And now the child's college savings program, account program, that is a limited term ARPA funded program. So Angie will get into that. But the other piece of it is the facility fund. And I want to stress that though part of the fund is funded through ARPA, and it is going to be a finite grant program for the terms of ARPA, the other element, this is just sort of kickstarting the other element of it, which is a longer term revolving loan fund. So Angie, I'm going to hand it back over to you for your slides. Great. Thank you. So I think this slide slides again. Sorry. Yes, just one moment. I'll pull that up. Okay. Okay. You can forward through those. Keep going. Yeah, you can stop there for a second. So this slide actually I just put in there just I'm sure you're familiar with the demographics in your city, but just as a refresher as far as children birth to five that are living within the city of Santa Rosa, these are approximate numbers looking just over the last few years because the birth rate is declining. About 1600 births annually in about half of those births and that this is countywide as well are Medi-Cal eligible. Santa Rosa has somewhere between 11 and 12,000 children under age six. We are finding through our school readiness assessment that we've now done for five years in collaboration with the human services department that less than 50% of our kids are coming into kindergarten ready to succeed as per a screening tool that that we use in a pretty representative sample of districts across the county. And that percentage is declining. So a lot of concerns about what's happening for kids in those first five years because many, many things contribute to school readiness. 50% of households with kids zero to five struggle just to meet basic needs to put food on the table to pay their rent. And 70% of single parent households struggle as well. So not surprising data, but just to create a context there. Next slide. So the facilities piece of the child care and early learning fund, you know, the purpose of this really around expanding access to child care options for working families, right, by establishing a sustainable funding source for our facility development and improvements and rehab of facilities. We have a real shortage of facilities in Sonoma County and a lot of the facilities that we have are in severe need of some rehabilitation. You've seen over the last few years, two facilities in Santa Rosa had to close one temporarily, but one permanently because of mold issues and the high cost to abate mold issue, right. And they just don't have that kind of cash flow to be able to address an issue like that. So we're hoping that this will really stabilize the system by injecting an investment into facilities. So the funds can be used for construction, new construction or enhancement construction to increase quality fixtures, equipment or fixtures finishes and equipment also referred to as FOV in that sector. Fees for permitting inspections, required inspections, the cost of design, engineering and site development costs in the case of new construction and then mechanical electric and plumbing for new and existing facilities. Those tiny toilets are extremely costly. I was shocked when I first found out. Eligible applicants are local education, so districts, school districts, 501c3 non-profit orgs that provide child care and early learning, private ECE and child care operators, licensed family child care owners and licensed exempt providers. As long as they're hooked into the resource and referral network, licensed exempt providers will also be eligible. So really anyone that provides child care in our county will be eligible to apply for these funds. Next slide. Logistics and timeline. So we plan on pushing out an RFP in late summer, looking at probably August or September and this will be the first round. It's a chunk of money and folks have different capacities and time of year when it works for them to put together a proposal. So we do plan on doing multiple rounds of opportunities to apply for the grant piece. And so for this first round selecting projects in November and then the second round we'll do in 2023. All the funds will be obligated by December 31, 24, that ARPA deadline and then be expended by grantees by the end of 2026. The award for the grant element can cover up to 70%, 75% of the total cost. The facility has to be located within the city of Santa Rosa. We're going to give priority points on the proposals for facilities that care for infants and toddlers because we know that that is an extreme need, severe shortage of care for infants and toddlers, and priority for points for facilities that are actually located in the QCTs. We know that families access child care not necessarily where they live could be more convenient to be near where they work or where they go to school. Lots of different reasons why families choose the location of child care. So we don't want to be too restrictive about that. Grantees will, and this is something that First Five has done in the past when we've done facilities grants which we have quite a bit of experience doing that over the years. We ask for an annual use of funds report from folks that have received facilities money. So once a year they're required to submit how many kids are you serving, all the demographics of the children served so that we can have a sense of how those funds are currently are now being used in the future. So we'll ask all of the grantees from these rounds. They'll be reporting that to us through 2030. Next slide. And then also we'll be setting up a revolving loan program. This is something we've been wanting to do for a really long time in part to be able to address some of these issues that come up like mold or you know emergency facility issues that there just is no kind of option to find funds to actually address these problems. And we've had you know loss of hundreds of seats, hundreds of childcare slots because of these. So this will be a segregated revolving fund. It'll be a separate account from First Five's other funds. It'll be interest earning. We'll do an application to coincide with the loan. So if folks want to borrow the 25 percent to go with to leverage for their 75 percent grant, that'll be an option. 20,000 to 200,000. They have to also be in the city of Santa Rosa and they'll have 10 years to repay. These loans will be zero interest priority points for applications that again located in QCTs. And they'll also be required to submit an annual use of funds report through 2030. And with the number of kids and the demographics served. I think that's it. Next slide, let's see. I think that's it for the funds, for the facilities funds. So if you have questions there on that, we can stop. Victoria? Yeah, so one question I have is if you go back to the last slide for just a moment, you say that we're going to have zero interest, which I think is fantastic for the borrowers. How will we sustain the program as the value of the money that we put into it declines over time due to inflation and lack of interest on the money borrowed? That's a really great question. I mean hopefully this is the seed of a revolving fund account that we can find other ways to also inject some dollars into there. We tried this in the past at Community Foundation and it just really never quite took off. We weren't able to attract the kind of donors to that. So we're hoping to be able to build this up as something more sustainable. So not just with these dollars from the city, but potentially prop $10, potentially other revenue sources that may happen in the future. Okay, one thing that might be interesting. Oh, sorry, Ray. So did it mean to cut you off? Oh, no, that's okay. I just wanted to add to that. Something else that we're looking at. So the grants also by is time to be able to flesh this out a little bit more as well and to try the program without over obligating the $1.4 million of the other funds. But something that we had talked about as well that it also buys us time to do is to see if we can partner with some of our banks or one or two of our banks or credit unions. Because what would be interesting is to take 100% of whatever that loan would be, zero interest loan, and to have it matched by a bank. So again, we could further the funds by doing a match, but having the fees for the bank loan come out of this so that it would again stretch it. So I mean, we're looking at creative ways to bring in additional partners in particular with our banks. And I have to say I've met with two, but one really where we want a little bit more in depth. And there is an interest because they do have that their community, I forget what it's called, but some kind of community involvement obligation. And the idea is very interesting, but we decided to find which credit unit banks would be the right fit for the interest emission of this program. Yeah, I really like that because specifically one of I love credit unions because they offer more options to people who otherwise struggle to get banked. But one of the things that's problematic with them is that unlike traditional banks, they don't pay taxes. So I think reminding them of their obligations and trying to see if they can at least make up for the delta between the money that's going out and the loss and the value of interest and inflation would be at least a good step and perhaps partnering with them to help get folks qualified for that 20% loan match would also be really helpful. Right, that was part of the conversation with the one bank that I had met with is very hard, especially for those small businesses that are generally owned by minority women, generally are not working within this space. So the benefit also is not just getting access to funds, but actually understanding and building a relationship within institutions that we've found typically are not working with. Awesome, thanks. And just a question for the providers that are going to utilize either the construction loans or once they're evolving loan fund is up. How are you finding those people? How are they finding you, I guess, is the better question is do we already have an assessment of the backlog on the investments that we need to make to be able to stand up additional resources? Yeah, great question. So we will be partnering with, as we already do, with foresees and river to coast children's and Capsanoma who are really kind of our core key partners around the ECE side of the work that First Five does. They're very much, especially foresees, in touch with kind of the big center-based facility needs. They're usually the first to hear about if there's a big need. And then when we actually push out an RFP and the loan opportunity, we'll definitely engage them. I mean, they have all the childcare providers in the whole county in their database. They have all that contact information. We've worked with them many times in the past, both for facilities, RFPs, and for mini grants. We do mini grants for childcare providers twice a year. This last mini grant cycle, actually, my staff did an amazing job of really refining our outreach process to be much more culturally responsive, linguistically accessible. And we had the highest percentage of Spanish-speaking providers apply for those grants than we ever have in the past because of how hard they worked to make sure that folks had whatever it was that they needed to address the barriers to applying, whether that was literally sitting down with them to complete the application. Everything's available in Spanish. We're really trying to move towards total, bilingual, all of First Five materials. So yeah, I would say we've got a good handle on making sure that our outreach process is good. And then in addition to that, we do have two known development, one in particular where they're waiting for this to go forward. And it's in ground-up development that the funds would only be used for the Shell Buildout within the facility of the new development. And Angie, you mentioned at the outset that the first part of our childcare program, the stabilization grants, kept 6,000 slots open. And what was the timeframe for that 6,000? Was that from March 2020 to present? You know, it's such a moving target, and I don't get regular updates from that. But from what I understand from the last time, we've revisited the open centers and open family childcare providers with 4Cs. I mean, they track that, but they just don't have the capacity to sharing the data all the time. But the vast majority of those are still open from my understanding, like that we have had continuing to reopen closed centers. There have been some that never reopened, but I don't think those were any if not a small number of the ones that did receive the stabilization money. Yeah, I was just wondering if you had some of the data off the top of your head of how many childcare providers and how many slots we've lost since the start of the pandemic. Because I know it's pretty impactful. Yeah, we need to update that data actually, because I've gotten a lot of requests for that recently. Now that we're sort of in this new phase of the pandemic where there's enough normalcy that we can assume that providers can, they don't have the restrictions that they had in the really tough parts of the pandemic. So I think it is time for a for a relook at what what does that landscape look like? I mean, you know, one of the big, big issues that we're seeing now is workforce, right? Like the ones that are opening that are larger centers that need more staff that had to lay off staff, it's finding those folks like people have moved on to other higher wage paying jobs, or even left left the county. So, you know, all of our larger childcare providers are having a really tough time, whether that's Head Start or Four Seas or North Bay Children's Center, they're all having a hard time finding workers. So that's another kind of side of the equation that we're working on closely actually with the junior college designing an apprenticeship program with paid apprenticeships for folks going through the JC program. All right. Right. So were you going to say something? No, just on the data. I know that that Four Seas had done something, but I think I think even that data that they had last I saw was a little bit dated. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Any other questions, Council Member? I think that if I asked all my questions, I could talk about this all day. It's just fascinating. But I think for now, it's just really exciting. I'll be interested to see how it gets deployed and to hear back about how effective it is. All right. Do you want to keep rolling through the presentation then, Angie? Yeah. Yeah. We can bring them back up again. Ready to talk about child savings accounts, Trisa? Yeah. And I just want to give a shout out to Sakura on this one because it was she who brought this up and was like, I don't know what is it? And so, yeah, just a little shout out to Sakura for that. Yeah. So college savings accounts, child savings accounts, college savings accounts is kind of interchangeable term, CSA, same acronym. We're talking about 529 accounts. So research is showing that children from families who save even a dollar up to $499, for education, for post-secondary education, are three times more likely to attend college, four times more likely to graduate from college compared with kids with no college savings, particularly when we're talking about low income families. So when families save and invest now, the money that they save can grow and be worth much more when their child reaches college age, especially if we start at birth or in the first five years. So we're so excited to have Santa Rosa partner with us on our first five futures program. We just launched that this year was our first year doing college savings accounts. We got an initial grant from the California Student Aid Commission, and we've been doing this working with our community partners in Santa Rosa, Healdsburg and Sonoma Valley to establish child savings accounts. So we have a little bit of traction on this now. We've learned a lot. So we're really excited to actually grow this more and scale it within the city of Santa Rosa. So the logistics for this will be, we're going to start next month, go through December 24th. We'll have expended all of the dollars because there are a few dollars. We'll partner with community-based organizations in Santa Rosa schools, particularly those with child care and ECE preschools on their campuses, child care providers to outreach to, and we're going to establish at minimum 2,000 Scholar Share 529 accounts for Santa Rosa children ages birth to age five. Household income has to be 75,000 or less. We're going to prioritize outreach and enrollment of children, again, living in those qualified census tracts. The initial seed deposit will be $700, and there'll be incentives to participate in programs at family resource center programs. So, for example, the Esperanza, the FRC, the Community Action Runs, they provide financial coaching, they call it mobility coaching, they have financial education programs, they have Pasitos, which is really a great pairing with this program, because it's all around how are you, your child's first teacher and first advocate, what are your expectations for your child, your vision for your child's future. And so those incentive deposits will be $50 for participating in one of these programs, and then we'll deposit that on their behalf in their child's account, and they can earn up to two of those per child. Families can enroll all the children they have that are within that age group, so there's no limit to that. City of Santa Rosa funding for this is $1,575,000, and we're leveraging that with Prop 10 and California Student Aid Commission funding, which we have continued for this upcoming fiscal year, starting July 1. Next slide. So the impacts that we really want to see, and that, you know, we hope to mirror what the research is showing about college savings accounts, particularly for young children, really inspires parents to see college in their child's future, to see post-secondary, whether it's training, community college, four-year college, but that is something that feels possible, accessible, and, you know, part of their child's trajectory, to create a culture of building assets for our low and moderate income families. Reducing financial stressors through pairing that coaching and financial supports offered through the FRCs, and then overall increasing racial and economic equity by expanding that pipeline of post-secondary education-bound students. Families can use, these are actually the child, once they turn 18, they can use it for a pretty broad variety of post-secondary options. They can use it for books, tuition, housing, anything that's related to post-secondary education, so it's relatively flexible from that point of view. Family can also transfer it to another child in their family for the same use. They can also withdraw the money, but there are tax implications for that. But, you know, when we first started this, we've got a lot of questions about, well, what happens if they don't use the money? The research doesn't bear out that people are not using the money, that it's actually, as long as there's, you know, communication on the front end so that families have the information that it does get utilized when the child goes to college. And those of you that have kids know how fast those 18 years go. I think that's the last slide. Let's see. Try the next one. Yeah, that's it. So any questions on child savings accounts? Victoria? I do have some questions around the parameters of transfer. I know this is not one that has, was in the scope of our 529 rule. Does the child, when, is it, do they have to become an adult before they agree to the transfer? Yeah, they have to be 18 to access the money. No, but to transfer, because my concern is, in particular, around gender, around parents transferring, you know, I mean, you see it all the time that parents prioritize the education of one child over another based on gender. And I want to make sure that in order, I know it's not within our control, but that they can't do that before the person's 18. I don't think they can do it until the child is 18. Okay. Yeah. I'm happy to follow up with that. Council Member, if you'd like me to, because I've not thought about that. And, you know, in terms of gender preference, priority kind of bias from the family's partner. Okay. And it might be, you know, something that we can layer on and just say, you know, this funds that we disburse, you know, if they're going to switch from one family member to another, that their original family member has to agree as an adult to those, to that transfer. And then another issue on the same line would be that we had talked about before, that making sure that things are fair for siblings, were we able to address that issue to make sure to, because before we had, you know, we'd said children under six. And I'd said, you know, if I was seven and my little brother was four, God, and I didn't, you know, how is that really right? So I'd like to see, we're able to make it so that if you have one child under six, you can do it for the other ones in your family. They may be up to 12 or something. We hadn't discussed that, but I don't see an issue with that. You know, this, since this isn't prop 10 money, there's not as much of a tie, you know, to like our requirements that we have to report up to First Five California. So I don't see a problem with if a family has older children and they want to start one for an older child, as long as they have a child under six, I don't see a problem with doing that. So we can expand. It could be that they, I mean, we can check that they weren't participating in the program prior to the city allocating it as well. So I mean, my hope is that people understand and know this. This is an extension of an existing program that's now localized. So yeah, I think we can make that work. And then the last thing to just make sure that things are equal for children is that I'd like to see us consider a potential requirement that if you enroll one of your children under six, that you enroll all of your children under six. Yeah, we can definitely do that. I mean, unless they have some compelling reason. Sure. Like, you know, if a child has got a severe disability, perhaps an older, you know, can get a letter from the North Bay Regional Center or something like that. But I'd like it to be the case that this is pretty blanketly applied across households. Our experience so far this year has been, I mean, we message it like all your children, in this age group and families have taken advantage of that so far. But we can certainly kind of tighten that. Hopefully my concerns are not relevant. Well, I think there are really important thoughts about it. And we want to be equitable. We want to make sure that all kids have access to this. So we'll just, you know, and part of it for us too is that we're working with multiple organizations to do the communication to families to sit down with parents and talk to them about this. So it's on us to make sure that those talking points are consistent, that the messaging and framing of the program is consistent. And, you know, in light of your coming around gender equity, that actually we incorporate some things around your expectations of your female kids to go to college should be the same as your boys. And, you know, and this is something that, you know, is is independent of, you know, class as well. I mean, this comes from my personal experience of my family, my dad in particular, putting my brother through law school. And when I went to grad school, he was like, Have fun kid. So, you know, it's just, I think parents can have a blind spot when it comes to that, as much as they met, you know, love their kids equally, they treat them differently. Yep. Yeah, definitely. Thank you for all those thoughts. So then my question for you, Angie, is just a little bit of clarification on what qualifies as post secondary education. Yes, it's anything that is occupational training has to be, you know, some kind of certified program can be community college can be for your college can pay for related expenses so it doesn't have to be for tuition or fees. You know, if a child has like grant to cover all their tuition fees, they can use it for housing, books, food while they're in school, anything that's education related. Okay, so technical education would qualify. Technical education absolutely qualifies. Yes. And then that requirement. So for, I'm very aware that some of the families that I know are interested in this program actually don't have a savings account of their own. And so I don't anticipate that people will use this as their savings account. But if somebody puts in a couple thousand dollars and then their family ends up needing it for some form of an emergency, would that couple thousand that they put in even over the initial seed money from us, they still would not be able to touch until that's right. I mean, they can withdraw it from a 529 but then they just have to pay the tax on it, right? The 529 is a it's sheltered from tax. You can put it in there. Families can make deposits and we will actually match deposits up to I think $100. So, you know, that's also part of the talking points, right? Part of the onboarding is that you can withdraw this money early, but there will be a tax penalty for that. But there are two different accounts. So one of them is the account that first five does. And the other one is if you were going to put additional funds in, that's a separate account that they can open. So that access might be a little bit different. And I have to say, I think, I can't remember if you asked if Natalie, where she was saying that they haven't seen people adequately take advantage of the matching funds for that separate account. So that likelihood for this, the people who are participating is probably low, but it is definitely noted. And we made changes so that people will actually start their own separate account. So they started with $25 as a $100 match. And so it is encouraging people, even if that's small increment, it used to be a $5 increment for three months. So we changed it one time, $25. So that's really what we're talking about. We're not talking about thousands of dollars. Yeah, no understood. Okay, let's go to public comment and see if anybody wants to provide input on this item. Will I pull up the screen and the first public comment will be from Amy Holzer. Hi there. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great. Hi. This is just so exciting. Everything you've talked about today is really exciting to hear. I just wanted to let you know I'm the director of financial stability and crisis response at Catholic Charities and was curious if there was a best contact for us to be involved in the 529 accounts process because we have HUD certified housing counselors and financial stability coaches who would love to be involved in. We would not be asking for any funding or anything. We're fully funded to do that work. And we have a, we also have a financial incentive right now of a, a Visa gift card for folks who are coming in for financial education. So we would love to be involved. So thank you. Yeah, Amy, you can contact Natalie Wright here at first five. I'm going to put her email address in the chat. She's our ARPA program manager for the next two and a half years. So she can totally connect with you on that. And that's, that would be great to coordinate that for her families. Wonderful. Thank you. And we have no additional hands raised at this time. Okay. I do see Angie put the contact information in the chat, which I think all, all folks can see. Great. I just want to say thank you again to Angie. It's a good partnership between first five and the city of Santa Rosa and I'm really excited by the things that we're doing. And council member, any last thoughts? No, I'm, I'm, I share your, your sentiments pretty, pretty good stuff. Thank you both so much. And thank you, Risa. It's just been a tremendous experience to just be part of our relationship and our partnership growing and expanding and to have the city so out in front around how the importance of investing early. Just a model for, for the whole country. So thank you so much. Yeah. The one requirement that we have is that you go and talk to all of your counterparts across the state and just brag about the partnerships. I will definitely do that. I do all the time. I always telling my first five colleagues across the state and all the other first five commissions and they're like, wow, your city did that. Yeah. Well, I love it. Thank you for the, for the partnership. We're, we're pretty excited. Risa, let's go on to our last item for the day. Sure. You know, I just want to say we do have been receiving more interest from our Bay Area counterparts and to try to see what we're doing and how we're doing it. And it is pretty exciting. So the last thing is Enhanced Infrastructure Finance Districts. I just want to give you, by Angie, thank you so much. I just want to give you a, just an introductory update, I guess, just to tell you that we're moving forward on it. So EIFDs, Enhanced Infrastructure Finance District, just a reminder, it's a tax increment financing tool. It basically replaces what was redevelopment, the redevelopment agencies of old. We had been working on this in fits and starts since 2018, really, after the fires. Put it aside for a little bit, had, and they're picking it up again. So the timing is good because the sooner we get, if we, if Council chooses to do any EIFD create districts, the timing is good based on where we are with our development. So the sooner you get it in with fewer development, though we've got a number of things, you know, coming down the pike, the better off you are in terms of your, your tax increment and the more projects you can fund. So I want to say back in 2019-2020, early 2020 pre-pandemic, we had met with Council at the time to gauge interest in pursuing this. It had been one of the side projects or elements in addition to the Renewal Enterprise District that we would pursue this. Renewal Enterprise Districts, I'm still working with Michelle on it. She is a partner in helping navigate the waters of moving forward on this. We also met with the Board of Supervisors at that time to see if they would not specifically at what level they would participate, but would they participate in doing this? There was a general yes on that, but they wanted to understand the infrastructure finance plan. So the, the thing about EIFDs is that if you don't partner with the county, it's really, you may as well does not do it. You know, so much of the property tax goes to the county. So you really need their participation. Unlike redevelopment, the participating entities have the right to decide at what level they don't have to go in at 100% of the tax increment. They can come in or at participation, they can come in at whatever level they choose. So that is part of the ongoing negotiation once we get to that point. What we did was we got, what spurred this forward is the $80,000 that we got from the PG&E settlement to get to the next step. So we received a grant from the Renewal Enterprise District for $15,000 to bring our a consultant on to help guide us through the process. And that's Bob Gamble. He used to be with PFN. So he's on board. We had some previous one-time funds that just a small allocation from the general fund to put towards this. That is ending up going to our bond council and legal advisor, Chris Lynch. And the benefit of bringing Chris Lynch on is that he actually is one of the legal advisors who actually helped write the legislation for this. So we already work with them. He's on board. And then the $80,000 from the PG&E grant is going to go towards, in part, a consultant to do the infrastructure finance plan. And part of the infrastructure finance plan is the fiscal impact report. And it's that that the county wants to be able to understand at what level it makes sense for them to participate. So that will be process guidance, feasibility analysis, that includes the boundaries, development of the infrastructure finance plan, and then support and guidance to the public process is what we're hiring for. I'm in the process of writing the request for proposals for that. I'm hoping to get that out by July at the latest. And then we'll select and get a consultant on board later summer. Into the fall, we'll start the feasibility analysis. And so all things told, you have to go through a formal process, notice of intention, etc. I'm hoping that we can get this done or get to decision points so that we would be able to implement a district or districts by July 2023. So within a year. The RFP is being written so that it's not just one district that we hold open the opportunity for two. Just by way of history, what we've looked at was the downtown and Roseland area. So the basically the qualified opportunity zone districts of both areas, which happens to be the downtown station, a specific plan for downtown, I'm pretty sure. And then Roseland, but we can do non contiguous. They could be two separate districts. And even within those districts, they could be non contiguous so that if we had an interest, we could also include the Heron Avenue area. And that is the if if counseling decides those areas they want to pursue. So that's my update on what that is. And I can take questions because we will be bringing this forward through this body in the future. Yeah, I really appreciate what you said. Talk to me a little bit about the partnership with the DAO and the idea of a working group around the enhanced infrastructure finance districts. Are they at the table helping because I know that they there's an interest there. I've heard it from them. I've heard it from Railroad Square area. I've heard it from the Santa Rosa Avenue area folks. Right. So so we have had, I would say one and a half meetings really just one meeting. One was to say, okay, let me understand what you guys are interested in back in 2016. Hugh Futrell, who's part of the DAO, his company, Futrell Corp, did a ton of research and put a lot of money into the analysis. It's not enough to come up with. And it was, you know, too specific. It's not open enough of a process to call it the infrastructure finance plan, but they did that cursory look to see if it if it's advisable or feasible. So with that has become sort of baseline of really valuable information to go forward with. And so members of the downtown action organization are again, we've had one meeting are at the table. They have that document and are helping sort of talk through some of the issues and our resource. The at the meeting that we had the interest is in adding a representative actually we have a representative in the River Square Association. But what was interesting is we're not there yet. Both Courthouse Square and River Square have community benefit districts, and we're really putting in the legwork and by we I mean really Rafael is putting in the legwork to see if we can get a community benefit district together and better more organized representation from Roseland. So even though we have an interest in going forward with both of them, we will probably go forward with both of them. They may split into two districts. So that we have the time to develop the relationships in Roseland, but they all will be at the table, both in the development of it before we get to council, as well as obviously when we will have to put together a board, I forget what they're called, but there's an advisory board and they would they would be representatives from the districts as well. Great, thank you. I know there's a high interest in this from folks. I'm looking for us to try to speed it along to the extent that we can because it has been lingering for a couple of years. Yeah, I was just wondering if you could say anything about where the county is because you said it's kind of useless if they won't partner with us. Right, so when we talked to them back in early 2020, I mean again it was just before the pandemic or late 2019, there was a general interest there. The degree at which they would be at that time were interested in participating, you know, ranged quite a bit. I think some were less interested in going in at 100%. So we're going to be giving options probably 80, you know, 80, 90, 100% to go in, but they were all of them wanted to understand, better understand what would be included in the infrastructure finance plan. And they really, they have generally, there was a general fear of replicating the issues that they saw was not benefiting the county specific to redevelopment. And the laws of EIFDs are just so different that I think that they're protected a number one. But to, you know, the, the, I think we'll be better able to show the economic impacts, regardless of whether they, they lose the increment. There was some concern and it was not, there was no 100%, everybody felt this way or that way. But there was some concern about being able to fund their ongoing, you know, costs at the county if they, if there were too many districts developed. And so we gave some assurance that we're really only looking at these two areas, because we thought they would be the best fit. And that seemed to alleviate some, some qualms. To that point, you mentioned they don't need to the districts themselves don't need to be contiguous. Are they forever once they're formed forever, those district lines, or can they be amended as future needs arise? They can be amended. It might be better though. I mean, the life of the district is generally like 35, 45 years. I can't read the full terms of it. But it is, it may be better depending on the circumstances to actually create a new district. So for downtown, I mean, we are interested in doing it. Again, within the stationary specific crime, which goes all the way to Highway 12. So it considers some of our bigger areas. And the other thing to consider is what, you know, what are, what's the community involvement or sort of what are the, for lack of a better word, the politics of a certain area. So, you know, again, it's very different in Roseland than it is in downtown. Project readiness is very different. You know, timing is very different. So those would be the considerations if we'd look to modify. Thank you. I'm looking to see if we have any hands from the public who'd like to provide comment on this item. I don't believe we have any public. Looks like it's pretty much the staff. Yeah. Okay, let's move on to department reports then. As we have it, I have no prior reports. So you have a good 15 minutes back in your life. Council member Fleming. Yeah, that through the mayor or through the chair, the chair mayor, I was wondering, there's no item for a future agenda. So I don't know how to probably move this forward, but I'm hoping that at some point we could might have a conversation about the economic development subcommittee reaching out to some of our existing businesses across sectors, and maybe doing some site visits and, you know, some education for the members of this, of this body to bring back to the council and the community about the existing and emerging needs of our various business sectors. And then also what sectors economic development is trying to attract and retain and how we as a council can implement policies that support those actions. I don't know if this is the appropriate place to bring it up, but so under staff reports under this item, I can report out that we have been doing after a long pause, we have been doing site visits. And it's really focused predominantly thus far on many factoring. And we've been we used to bring used to be much more formal. And then there was a lot of pressure on the business and, you know, a lot of cats to herd, where we had a broad spectrum of representation, mostly it was elected and executive staff are really the city manager. And what we've been doing what lately is actually bringing in planning, especially because we're focused on manufacturing right now, because we want to help them understand the value of manufacturing related land uses and the new form of manufacturing, non noxious, you know, types of job opportunities as it relates to the housing because we in our last general plan update took a ton of our industrial lands and made it into housing only, and it wasn't even very high density housing. So we're looking from an economic development perspective to kind of revisit that. An example I give is that you have a high wealth area like Fountain Grove, and you do have manufacturing in Fountain Grove, so they can live together. What does that look like? And can we replicate things like that the opportunities for that in the Southwest, we have the most opportunity for for manufacturing, new manufacturing development. And then we're meeting with the Bay Area Urban Manufacturers, which is the the nine county region initiative, looking at urban manufacturing questions and issues to see if we can come up with something akin to Maxwell Court, where we sort of looked at historic industrial and their desire to actually live and work where they are despite, you know, the the industrial kind of uses that they have there. What are the new kind of standards? So that's the background of what we're doing now. But what I can do is when we have these things coming up as an invite council to do those tours, they are purposefully less formal than what we had done previously. Because again, we wanted, we want the businesses to talk about their issues and how we can help and think forward versus a presentation, they almost became sort of like sales kinds of things and we were losing the opportunity to understand the core issues. So I will I will include you guys if you're interested as you are on when we do those those tours. It's great that you're focused on that you're doing that that you're analyzing the industries that we want here and why we want them here. And then further, you know, my my interest, like you said, is not I don't, you know, I believe in our businesses, I just really want to understand if we're doing anything to get in the way or if there's more that we could do to help retain and attract the right kinds of sectors and right locations. So they don't need to put on a dog and pony show they need to tell us what we need. Right. I mean, and to be honest with you, a lot of that need is what is our land availability? What is the what are the tiger salamander mitigation things? What do we do? Because we as we run out of land within our urban growth boundaries, or even within the areas that we may be annexing, how are we considering that lands for best use, specific to the industries that we have here, and to the job opportunities for the people that we have here. So I mean, it's cursory. Now, the other thing that I can announce, I don't know why I said I don't have anything to tell you. But the other thing that we're looking at doing is is probably after mid year budget is doing a business, a business audit, I couldn't remember the name, but we need to do a business audit because we do, we send out monthly, you know, thanks for doing business here letters for those who renew or new businesses through the business tax certificate. And we do see, you know, have a general understanding of NAICS codes and stuff like that. But what we don't have in this relates to our economic development strategic plan is a really good understanding beyond sort of the general coding of what our businesses are. And we absolutely do not have an understanding of our minority businesses and the opportunities that they have. And again, if you look at our South Southwest area, it is the densest area of most diversity. And generally, it is immigrants who have the most, you know, who are entrepreneur entrepreneurial in a sort of greater rate than non minorities. So we're looking at these things, but we're, we're at the place where we need to do sort of like baseline foundational understandings and analysis. So some of it may be a little slow, again, it's myself and Rafael, but we believe with these kind of partnerships that you're seeing center into with the DAO with the chambers, not just the one chamber, but all chambers. And first five and that type of thing, that's how we're able to spread the wealth of the plethora of work there is to do in this area. And last question, sorry to hold you guys, I know you were looking at early adjournment, hopefully we still will get out a few minutes early is when you're having these conversations in particular around land use and planning, are you, is this something that we're working on in anticipation of getting to these elements in the general plan? Yes, yes. So what I've been told by the advanced planning team, so we took them along. The first time was to getting the name of it, but they, they ship worldwide. It's a local company. And they make the things that fast food companies need to make massive amounts of food. So like the Taco Bell meat and stuff like that, the beans, the whatever it is, they make that that machinery and it goes all over the world. And it's in an industrial part of the city down in the southwest. And it's interesting because it was like, I really sort of saw these light bulbs go off where they're like, okay, you know, we can take the theory of what we learned in our, you know, through our degrees and where we sit here and talk about these and have sort of public comments, but to actually see the application of what our decisions are, these theories that we have in action. And then hear them say, this is what our frustration is, is why we could not at all expand. They were looking to expand here. They had to go to Idaho. You know, what did we over prioritize or what did we make difficult in their process to buy additional lands right next to them to expand their facility? What does the workforce look like? It was really fascinating to see that and to have different conversations about the value of manufacturing. Again, this idea of manufacturing that's non-noxious, maybe some of that might be noisy, but manufacturing can even be like 3D printing in your living room and you're jamming out a bunch of stuff. So it's those kinds of conversations that are now that have facilitated us reaching out to Bayer Urban Manufacturers Bomb to actually come up with new land uses. There was an acknowledgement also that I appreciated for the planning division where they acknowledged sort of dated concepts of land use. So are land use designations like just housing or just this or just that that is progressed and they're looking at that for the general plan of state? Thank you. And thank you both and everybody who's supporting this operation for indulging this little tangent here. Well, if there's nothing else, let's see. Yep. Nothing else on the agenda. Let's go ahead and adjourn. Thank you so much.