 I will now call the April 14th, 2020 regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors to order. Will the clerk please call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Supervisor Friend. Here. Supervisor Coonerty. Here. Supervisor McPherson. Here. And Chairperson Caput. Here. Thank you. We'll have a moment of silence and silent prayer and then it'll be followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join me right now. We'll pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic from which it stands, one nation under government, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Mr. Palacios, do we have any changes or deletions? Yes, we have, first we have a late addition to the agenda. This would be item 3.1. It's to consider a request to add a late item. ID number 8890 to the regular agenda, COVID-19 executive order 2020-01 as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. This is a request by our local business community, which is being impacted by the counter shelter and order in different plates, shelter and police order in different ways. After the agenda was published, it came to staff's attention that certain local restaurants struggling with the prohibition on dining service are being negatively impacted by excessive delivery fees imposed by third party platforms. After the agenda was published, the Cities of San Francisco and Santa Cruz took executive action to address this issue for certain non-franchised restaurants by limiting delivery fees to 15% of the total cost of online delivery orders. On April 13th, the County's Emergency Services Director, which is the County Administrative Officer, issued a similar order, which is executive order 2020-01 that requires that such an order be brought to the board for confirmation as soon as it's reasonably practicable in order to remain effective. Accordingly, staff requests that your board add this item to the agenda to ratify executive order 2020-01. This will take a three-fourths, two-thirds action of the board to put it on the agenda. So I'd ask that you do that at this point, and then we will go on with the other corrections. I'll move approval. Second. We have a vote for approval, and we have a second. And at this point, it's just to put it on the agenda. We're gonna do a roll call vote, right? Yes. Are there any comments or questions from board members? I hear none. So, any comments from the public on whether the board should add the late item to its agenda? Anybody, is there somebody in another room? No, we have no one queued up to speak on this. Okay, that'll be fine. We'll do a roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Supervisor Friend. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Okay, I'll go on with the other additions. And that item will be 7.1. So that is added as 7.1 to the regular agenda. Now going on to other corrections to the agenda, on item seven on the regular agenda, there's additional materials related correspondence received by the planning department. On the consent agenda, the item 19, there's a correction. The item should read adopt resolution supporting Assembly Bill 2782 related to Mobile Home Park Change of Use and authorize the chairman of the board to send a letter of support to Assembly Member Mark Stone as recommended by Supervisor Leopold. There's also an additional materials on that item. There's a revised memo. On item 49, there's additional materials, revised attachment D, packet page 624. And on item 50, there's additional materials, revised attachment G, packet page 659. On item 55, there's authorized the chairman of the board to send a letter to the governor advocating and urging him and the California State Legislature to establish support for undocumented immigrants who are out of work due to the coronavirus pandemic as recommended by Supervisor Leopold. On item 56, approve emergency contract with Reber Construction for emergency repairs on Bear Creek Road, PM 1.71, and the not to exceed amount of $780,601, except the notice of exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act, direct the public works to return with a report at each meeting on the progress of the emergency work through its completion and take related actions as recommended by the Deputy CAO Director of Public Works. That concludes the corrections and the denda to the agenda. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any board members who wish to pull any consent items and put them to the regular agenda? Excuse me, Mr. Chair. Carlos, were you gonna do your report too, or was that? Yes, we had scheduled a brief presentation from the CAO regarding the public health emergency or ender, so if we could do that now. So they'll be fine. Thank you, I'm sorry about that. Okay, we'll go ahead and start. I've asked a number of our department heads to give brief updates on the COVID-19 emergency help, public health emergency, and starting with our Health Services Agency Director Mimi Hall and our Health Director, Health Officer, Gail Newell. They'll start with their presentation. How are you doing? I wasn't up. We supported during this pandemic and our local response. So I wanna thank the supervisors and staff. Thank you very much. So I'm gonna give you an update as of today with our number of cases. Our total known cases today are 91, total deaths, one. Age breakdown is zero to 17 years old, two cases. 35, I'm sorry, 18 to 34 years old, 17 cases, 35 to 49, 29 cases, 50 to 64 is 26. Cases and 65 years old and up 16 cases. 42 are male, 49 are female. The method of exposure to the virus, 27 of these are from a close contact that is known. 26 are community acquired, so from the general community. 18 are travel related and 20 are still under investigation. Cases continue to be spread throughout the county with 32 cases in North County, 30 in Mid County and 20 in South County with nine still under investigation. Our PPE status remains in the contingency category which is the middle of three categories defined by the CDC. So we're not yet in crisis category with our PPE and hope that we will never be there but we certainly don't have conventional supplies. We've tested close to 2,500 patients that we know of so far. We expect that there are 1,000 or more commercial test labs still pending and we're expecting point of care testing which means testing can be done on site with immediate results or very quick results, same day. Here in the county that is happening this week. At our county clinic it's happening at Dominican hospital and in the dignity health outpatient centers. So that's a big exciting new development. 37 of our 91 cases have recovered. Our hospital census continues to be lower than daily average. Our EMS response is mild with fluctuating upticks but overall mild impact. As you know my shelter current shelter in place order went in effect on March 31st and extends through May 3. I'm working with regional and state health officers to draft a less restricted shelter in place to start on May 4th. So we'll see how the next two weeks go but we're looking at lifting some of the restrictions. There is a governor's press conference today and he will be outlining the criteria for lifting restrictions and which restrictions he's considering lifting at this time. As you know I closed beaches and parks for a week around the holiday weekend, this last weekend. I anticipate allowing this order to lapse and resuming use of parks and beaches by our community beginning on Thursday. And I wanna thank the community in advance for their cooperation so that they continue to have this privilege of using our beautiful community parks and beaches. Thank you again all for your support and I'm gonna turn this over now to Mimi Hall, HSA director and incident commander for an operational report. Hi Mimi, how you doing? Good morning, I'm doing well, thank you. I'm glad to be here. So, okay, the top one. Okay, thank you. So I'd like to provide an operational update of the incident so far and provide some good information that the county has worked on in partnership with the CAO's office, the public health department operation center and particularly ISD and I wanna thank all the partners for their help on some of our work in the past week to make more public information available. Nothing's happening. Okay, there we go. If you go to our website, SantaCruiseHealth.org slash coronavirus, you'll now find an updated dashboard that gives a lot more information than case counts and this dashboard will be updated at 10 a.m. every morning with our official case counts so you can see the numbers that Dr. Newell provided. The other information that we'll provide is a little bit more demographic information on cases by gender, disseminated by age. A lot of people have been worried about what proportion of people are impacted so severely that they need to be hospitalized. So this also provides, on the right hand side, you'll see cases by hospitalization and underlying health condition. So the first bar, those folks with no underlying health conditions that have been hospitalized, the second one is people with one underlying health condition and the third bar is two or more. So you can see that having an underlying health condition is definitely a factor and whether or not someone will be impacted severely enough to be hospitalized. Here's some other information that should be helpful for Santa Cruz County residents. A lot of folks have been asking, where are the cases? The general answer is the cases are everywhere. So we have divided reporting by North County, Mid County and South County. But I will say that nearly every community in Santa Cruz County has been impacted. So it's not as if we have a particular area that doesn't have cases and other areas that do. And this is as expected with community spread. You can see other information here as well, including our curve, which is much flatter than we had predicted about a month ago and even three weeks ago. This is of the people who are hospitalized. The number of them are in ICU. And it's really hard to see because the total number of cases is really three or four at a time. This graph here shows a three week rolling average of the percentage of people who have come in with flu-like symptoms. So this is called syndromic surveillance and without the widespread capacity to test, which actually is increasing dramatically. One of the things that we follow is are the people coming into outpatient clinics or any healthcare setting with flu-like symptoms. Is it any different than any other year? And you can see that the black line is this year's and it's really, although it's higher than other years of ILL, it's not really that much different from a usual curve. I'd also like to let the public know that California is now providing information as well, real-time information. The public may go to covid19.ca.gov and you can see the statewide daily spread. You can also search Santa Cruz County or any county that you would like and get real-time hospitalization data and also case count data. I do wanna say that the case counts are delayed to the state, so it's more accurate to come to our county website, but the state also provides hospitalization data. So in terms of reported lab results, as of April 12th, we had 2,340 negative lab results. So I wanna point out that just 12 days ago we had 794, so you can see the amount of lab testing that has ramped up. So from the beginning of the epidemic until April 1st, we had 794 total negative lab tests and now we have over 2,000. And as Dr. Newell mentioned, we have 91 positive lab results. A lot of talk has been made about alternate care sites and alternate care sites are something that every local jurisdiction is doing to plan for a surge in our hospital capacity. And so we have identified 1440 Multiversity as the primary ACS location. You may recall that we also had a site identified at Sinkins Swim Center. Surge capacity was originally projected actually to start this week. We had previously had an order from the state for volunteer staff to arrive this past Monday and we canceled that order a week before last because the actual disease curve that we're seeing in the actual number of cases has flattened dramatically since we started our shelter in place order. A Sinkins Swim Center, it's possible that Sinkins Swim Center for the time being will be repurposed for another need. There are many other needs that include sheltering because the data now shows us that when we start rising that curve will look more like mid-May. And we don't want to waste the use of that site if there are current needs, but we're hoping that if that happens it can be transitioned back into an alternate care site if needed. So additional system reports, we still have a low hospital census and that's because of the decisive action of all hospitals to cancel elective surgeries. Any kind of non-urgent or emergent issues are being delayed and that's because hospitals are readying to surge. And in the EMS system, we've still had just a mild impact to the EMS system and these two things are indicators to us of absent widespread testing, the amount of cases that we have in the community. So our Communicable Disease Unit is still focusing on contact tracing and mitigation planning for high risk populations. We've been working, we have a congregate care division that has started under the Department Operations Center and they are focusing on the jails and the shelters and the skilled nursing facilities. There are quite a few folks specifically working with skilled nursing facilities because they are a very high risk setting for COVID which usually comes in through staff. So we have an extra focus on those facilities. One of the things that I wanna make sure that everyone knows is people wonder how do we make these decisions about what we deploy, particularly alternate care sites and those decisions are made by the disease modeling data that we have. So this is a very important slide. It was updated with our latest data. Prior to the shelter in place order, we had a disease curve with the data that we had to date of doubling every six days. And you can see that that's the top red line and where that would have put us at this date is far more than the cases that we have now. The orange line is the new disease curve that's been calculated and actually if we refined it again today, I think it would be even longer than the doubling time of eight days. It's looking like we're more, we're reaching a doubling time of nine days but that will be confirmed when our epidemiologist puts in our latest data. You can see that the blue dots are the actual cases and there's a leveling that's happened in the last few days. I do believe that this is a result of the majority of our community members doing exactly what they need to do to protect the entire community and others in themselves. This is a comparison of Santa Cruz County doubling time. So the lines further to the left are fewer days doubling time and then the doubling time increases as you get to the straight lines that kind of fan out to the right. And you can see that Santa Cruz County shows a much higher doubling time compared to a lot of other California counties. And again, I think it's because we have taken some measures that are really challenging but we have to remember that at the end of the day, the reason that we're taking the actions that we are are to save lives. And when we don't impact our hospital system beyond its capacity, we are saving lives. So these are the hospital projections that we now have. This data was run on April 11th. The last time I reported to the board in closed session, we provided data that was run on April 5th. We will continue running periodic data based on actual. And prior, we had thought that we, again, that we would be in a place of needing surge capacity right now, but what the actual data loaded on April 11th, the worst case scenario shows that our hospitalized projections would be at the top of that curve at about 40 at the end of May. The best case scenario is that it extends even further than that. These are the California projections which they have extended. Originally, this was California thought that they would see their peak resources on April 14th. Now it's April 17th and I believe that they did modeling yesterday that now extends this through out into the month of May. So as you can see, a model that you provided at any point in time changes based on how the community behaves and the shelter in place orders again are probably impacting the extension of this curve. This is an example of the California public dashboard. If you go to the covid19.ca.gov, you can see the total hospitalizations there for Santa Cruz County and you can choose any other county that you like. And I think that's the end of my presentation. So what we have done for the last week or two is work really, really hard to make public information as transparent as possible, provide tools for the public. So they'll be more informed about the prevalence and the incidence of disease in their own community. And we've also provided a lot of public information in Spanish and in English on measures that people can take to protect themselves, their workplace and their families. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'd like to now ask Sheriff Hart to give a brief report on enforcement and on other issues that he would like to cover. There's obviously, and I want to touch on related to local, our job during health emergency is to support the public health officer during this crisis and to keep the peace and force the laws and to take care of people who are incarcerated in our jail system. And then keeping our staff healthy has got to be a top priority so that we can keep our jails open and answer our calls for service. I've been receiving a lot of inquiries and phone calls and emails about our county jail system. And as some of you may have read, jails and prisons across the country are reporting high rates of virus spread. In fact, one of the largest outbreaks in the country right now is in the Cook County jail in Chicago, where over 500 staff and incarcerated people have been confirmed to have the virus and there's many more that are being tested. And the good news locally is that as of this morning, we have not had a single case of the virus in our jail system. And the reason why this is important to the community is that if one housing unit were to get this virus, we could easily exhaust local hospital resources. And we've taken a lot of precautionary measures to keep the jail safe. We've increased our medical staff, we're medically screening all of our personnel, our vendors and our attorneys who enter the jail. We've established 14 day quarantine units for all people who are newly housed. And we're increasing the frequency of cleaning in all the housing units in the intake areas. The presiding judge and the public health officer have issued early release orders. I'm getting inquiries from some community members about why certain people are out of jail or why we're not holding onto them. And it's really about trying to reduce the jail population to a manageable level. And we've been able to do that through the public health officers order as well as the presiding judges order. Early this week, the state judicial council handed down a statewide order that reduced the bail to zero for most non-violent crimes in order to keep jails across the state to keep their populations down. In terms of law enforcement in the county, we've established the county-wide law enforcement operations center to make sure that all local law enforcement agencies are communicating on a daily basis. It also allows us to watch county-wide crime trends and also to move resources, not based on jurisdiction, but based on need. And then lastly, it's allowing us to make sure that our first responders, our frontline police officers and deputy sharers have the appropriate PPE to go to the calls for services that are being asked to go to. And I just wanna end with that I'm really proud of our community members for stepping up and taking this crisis so seriously. We're asking people to do some really hard things. And, but what we're doing as a community is working and that's evident of the low spread rate. And I just wanna encourage people to be vigilant and listen to our health experts. Dr. Newell and Mimi have done a great job on managing this so far. And we just wanted to continue supporting that effort, keeping this virus to the low level that it's at in our community. Thank you. Alisa Benson, the Assistant County Administrative Officer for a report on our response to this crisis and the homeless population. Thank you. And do my obligatory hand sanitizer. Good to see all of you. As Carlos mentioned, I'm Alisa Benson, Assistant CAO and Co-Deputy of the Sheltering Care Homeless Task Force that we've rolled out. The purpose of the briefing is to give you an update on our efforts to support people experiencing homelessness, to shelter in place and to activate facilities and operational support to take care of folks who are confirmed with COVID-19 sick and requiring isolation or people who are exposed but not symptomatic and those who are highly vulnerable. We take this work on indirect alignment with the overall objectives set forth by Dr. Newell. And I'll just a quick summary of those again, minimize deaths in the community, prevent, contain and mitigate the spread through social or physical distancing. I've changed my language while providing essential safety net services and then of course providing accurate and timely information to all providers, public and people experiencing homelessness themselves. As I mentioned at the meeting, gosh, I think it was about three weeks ago. We have stood up a department operational center within HSD and that's where this homelessness work resides. We've called it in sort of general media a task force because a doc is a little bit of an inside baseball reference to our management structure. That doc is expanding in scope. We are still really in the planning and standup phase and we hope to get all these different facilities. I'll talk, give you an update about today online as quickly as possible and then move more into an operational phase. So again, we are really focused on addressing the risk of spread within the homeless community generally with specific focus on sub populations including elders and the medically vulnerable. And then as Mimi mentioned earlier, addressing the inherent risk in congregate living situations like shelters. So this is a multi-layered approach. The first is really building that supportive infrastructure for our highest risk groups, COVID positive, that are symptomatic, COVID exposed that need to quarantine and then our vulnerable elders, 65 and older are those folks with a significant medical vulnerability. So to that end, we did open up on April 6th, our first as we're calling it IQV, isolation, quarantine and vulnerable shelter. So with about 28 room capacity, two thirds of that capacity is being used for vulnerable people experiencing homelessness. So again, either elders or folks who are medically vulnerable and we're retaining about 10 of those rooms for isolation or quarantine needs. We also have an isolation quarantine space at the housing matters complet campus in that we need that. So far we have not had to do that as that flattening the curve is incurring in the general population and it's in the homeless population as well. So we're very happy to say we have not had any kind of significant demonstration of COVID within our homeless population. In this current week, we're focusing on expanding that IQV capacity for another 100 beds. We have an expedited request for information out to hotels in the community who have expressed interest in participating with the goal of another master lease to secure those facilities by the end of the week. It'll take us some time to staff up to open those additional beds. Again, we'll be focusing on getting vulnerable homeless people out of shelter and out of the field and into those spaces and still reserving some for isolation and quarantine needs. The second rung of our four part strategy has been really main supporting in the existing shelter and service system. So to stabilize that, we've been focusing on helping them convert to a shelter in place 24 seven model. So frequently that means helping provide additional meals and staff and even facilities because not of all our shelter facilities are available 24 seven. So we're working on that. We're also looking at ensuring that they're able to implement physical distancing within the shelter environment. Most of our shelters have been able to accommodate that within their existing facilities, but two in particular, we're not able to handle the population that they have within the current space. And that's the Salvation Army shelter here in the city of Santa Cruz at Laurel Street and the Salvation Army and in Watsonville. So that's really led to our next rung of our strategy, which is expanded shelter sites. Many of you have heard that on April 3rd, about a week and a half ago, we were able to open up the Santa Cruz Vets Hall and it relieved congestion at the Laurel Street site. We moved about 25 of those clients over to Santa to the Vets Hall and so we've been continuing that operation. We have some additional capacity there that we will make available as soon as we're able to provide adequate staffing for it. Tomorrow we are planning to open up the Watsonville Vets Hall to relieve congestion at the Salvation Army site there in the city. Similarly to the Santa Cruz Vets Hall approach will be first transitioning folks from the Watsonville Vets Hall and then we'll have additional capacity that will make available through the referral system to other community members who are experiencing homelessness. The third element is that we are expanding operations at the Armory site at De La Viega Park. We were provided by the state a large barracks tent that is adjacent to the Armory itself. We will be initially using that for day services for the few shelters that do not have day services on site and we're working through the programming to be able to also add additional overnight shelter at that site. Since we spoke about this in late March we have another sort of population group we're doing a specialized shelter in place a pop-up shelter for and that's Transition Aged Youth. Some of you will remember from our point in time count of Transition Aged Youth so that's youth from 18 to 25 is one of our largest unsheltered homeless groups so we're focusing on developing a particular strategy for that group. The fourth element of our strategy is around outreach and engagement. As we spoke at the last meeting we do not have adequate shelter space to bring our sizable unsheltered population all inside and through the CDC guidance there's actually some advice that if people can shelter in place safely in encampments or their vehicles that the guidance is to address their needs and support on site. So that's our fourth part of our strategy. So what that has translated into is providing extra support and information to our community providers who generally are doing outreach and engagement with that folks who are living outside. And that's everything from health information, tents and sleeping bags, access to additional water and food. So we're doing that's what we're calling our fixed site outreach. We're also doing something that we're calling the homeless outreach services sites, HOS, which are pop-up outreach sites at places where we tend to have more homeless people coming for service or are there tend to be. So we started a soft roll out of that at our Emeline campus last week. We'll be looking at the Coral Street corridor. Near Housing Matters is the next place for that. Tomorrow we're doing a outreach, mobile outreach at the Pajaro Levy in South County again trying to provide information and access to services to folks who are living outside around COVID-19. And we'll also be looking at doing a similar site here at this building, given the increased activity in the bench lands. The next element is we are opening on Monday a direct point of contact for shelter referral. Currently in our system, folks who are experiencing homelessness have had to go shelter by shelter to get access to shelter services. So we'll be doing a rapid deployment of a single point of contact for shelter referral and we'll be publicizing that early next week. The last element of that outreach and engagement is we have worked with one of our community partners to make sure the Stepping Up Santa Cruz resource directory, which is online, which basically provides an up-to-date information about, I'm just gonna read some of the categories, food, shelter, safe parking, advocacy, bathrooms and hand washing, showers, storage, laundry, clothing, mailboxes, day programs, youth, medical, dental services, mental health, and a variety of other services and how folks can access those. So we've been working to make sure that's also available to people experiencing homelessness. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much. I'd like to now ask our human services director, Randy Morris, to give a brief update on our safety net programs. Randy is new to the county, he's been here a few months and stepped into this emergency and he's done a great job filling in for very big shoes left by Ellen Timberlake. Thank you, Randy, for your service and Randy's gonna give us an update on what's going on with all of our various human services department programs. Yes. Good to see you. Good morning. Thank you, Chair Caput, as far as community. Yes, this has been remarkable. Am I coming through? Yes, good morning, supervisors. And as Carlos mentioned, I've been here less than three months and this has been quite an entree into the Santa Cruz County, but I would remiss if I did not say crisis brings out the worst or best and I have to say I'm quite honored to be working in a location where the spirit of team is infectious and it's been a lot of amazing work. In particular, thanks to the human service department employees who have been quite heroic and stepping up and doing a lot of work that I'll speak to now. We have three responsibilities during a disaster. One of them, Elisa Benson just discussed human service agencies in California are responsible to provide mass care and shelter during a disaster. And in this disaster, those who are unsheltered are the ones who need our support. So we have a number of managers in the human service department working with Elisa and her staff on what she just outlined. The other two are what I will present and that is what we formally call in the disaster continuity of operations. And that's keeping our services going to the community which is quite complicated. During this crisis which is quickly devolving into an economic crisis, some of our community members need our services more than ever. And that's a complicated space to navigate when our staff are under the health order to shelter in place and physically distance. So I'm gonna speak a little bit to that. And then the last, which I'll also touch briefly at the end of my presentation is we just have a mission to serve the most vulnerable in our community. So we work in close partnership in a disaster with community members about emerging issues and the one I'll speak to is food insecurity. And so there's some work happening with our partners in the community around that. Okay, so continuity of operations. We have three divisions who provide direct service to the community, all of whom are functioning today. And I'll touch a little bit on each of them and share some data trends. We have our adult and long-term care services division. That's our adult protective services program, our in-home supportive services program and our veteran service office. The family and children services division or child welfare or foster care often referred to still has a responsibility to respond to allegations of abuse and neglect even now and provide service to those children who are under our care and custody under the juvenile court. And then lastly, the employment and benefit services division often referred to as public assistance or welfare services is very often the program that gets most highlighted because in an economic crisis, that's when people need a public assistance. So I'll speak a little bit to each of these. There's a lot of information up here. I'll just kind of highlight them quickly. Under the adult and long-term care services division, the adult protective services program, and this is a statewide trend, it saw a immediate decrease in referrals when COVID-19 hit. And then now we're starting to see an uptick. The decrease is somewhat understandable because mandated reporters are not seeing people in the community to make calls to us, but we are now starting to see an increase because people are quite concerned about older adults and vulnerable people with disability who are either not sheltering in place or might be being mistreated during the moment. So we're starting to see an uptick. The in-home supportive services program is a Medi-Cal program and that's for people who are age blind and disabled and they are receiving in-home care from caregivers. This is a very complicated program to navigate in COVID-19 because many of the caregivers are concerned about going into the home or the recipients are concerned about their caregivers coming to the home. And these are people who by definition, being in the program, would otherwise be an institutional care. So it's critical we keep them in the home, but that's something that we are trying to navigate. We have the benefit of Governor Newsom's executive order in the in-home supportive services program that for 90 days allows the program to do no renewals. That means all clients continue to receive their services and we can put all our staff at the front end of the system and do things what is listed here, wellness checks and respond to new applications for the services in that program. A branch of in-home supportive services by state statute is called the public authority and amongst many things it does, it manages a registry and that is for IHSS clients who do not have family or friends who can provide care so they can refer to a registry to ask someone to provide care to them. So we are working actively in our public authority to try to enroll people in that registry to provide help given that some of the workforce is unable to provide help. And then finally, our veteran services office, we actually close the lobby, it's a small program, but we are actively reaching out to veterans and in particular those who are staying in shelters. The trend slide on the bottom was just to give the public and you a quick window to the actual referrals to the IHSS and APS program. The child welfare department are family and children services. We still have an active hotline. We are still responding to referrals of abuse and neglect and we are doing what we can to very, very carefully navigate the direction we get from our health experts on how to manage social distancing and sheltering in place when there are critical allegations of abuse and neglect that we need to respond to. We also have children who are in care and sometimes there are concerns about placement disruption because foster families are concerned about maintaining a child. So there's an awful lot of work around placement prevention to try to keep them family stable. Child welfare throughout the country is a program that works under the oversight of the juvenile court system. So we have a jurisdiction of the judicial office who has just issued some mandates that despite the shelter in place orders throughout the country and state, we are still mandated to comply with visitation requirements. For those who don't know the child welfare system, these are children who often under a very tight time clock or under family reunification services where we're responsible to provide visit with their families. So we have judicial order that we have to continue that work. And then of course, not a surprise, the families that are in our system are reaching out to us for help that's not specifically tied to the child welfare services and our staff are doing a great job of trying to connect them to services where they exist. The point of the slide on the bottom I wanna point out and this is a statewide issue that's of deep concern to our state association and a lot of advocates in the community around children is in Santa Cruz County, there was a 47% decrease in the number of referrals to our hotline. This is consistent with the state average that is somewhere in the 40 plus percent range. The speculation is that because there are no mandated reporters and children are not in school. And so how to navigate that is an issue that's being discussed across the state and across the region so that we can make sure that we can respond where necessary and make sure the community is responding to us and calling our hotline where necessary. Have we seen, you saw it with seniors, you saw it, you said you saw a downtick and an uptick. Have we seen the same thing happen with children or is it still maintaining that drop? The drop maintains and you were correct in good tracking that for the adult protective services we started to see the increase. I think a lot of the mainstream media and Governor Newsom's comments about the vulnerable elders we believe has sort of calibrated why we weren't getting mandated reporter calls but of concern which I think is what your point is there is still a dramatic drop in referrals to child abuse hotlines throughout the state and country because children are just not being seen. And I think as probably the sheriff and other would know things like domestic violence and issues with families under stress is very serious right now. So there's a lot of concern there and a lot of discussion happening how to make sure referrals are made so we can respond as appropriate. And then the last of our divisions is the Employment and Benefit Services Division, this nexus between what is happening across the country with the economic crisis and who is eligible for the services we provide which I will highlight CalFresh, Medi-Cal and CalWorks is no surprise. There's a dramatic increase in applications for our services. I'm gonna speak to and I'm just gonna start with the slide on the bottom. It's a dense slide but if I can take a minute to explain it and even if the public can't see this I'll just highlight the numbers. On the left it does a year by year comparison looking over the last six weeks. So it kind of shows you the trend from early March to present in 2019 and it bumps it against current 2020. So if you look at the CalWorks program the important number to see is this last week when you look a year ago to date it's been a 115 plus percent increase in applications. When you look at the CalFresh program and you look at the same numbers you will see that there was a 168% increase in referrals to CalFresh from a year ago to this past week. And then in the Medi-Cal program there has been an increase of 30 to 36% over the last few weeks. We speculate only that that is going to surge quite a bit because people who have lost jobs and had employment based health coverage might become newly eligible for Medi-Cal but they keep that coverage for 30 days so we are bracing ourselves for an uptick in Medi-Cal applications. To walk through a little bit of what's happening we have partially closed our lobbies as a safety net system. We know that there are some people who do not have ability to go on an internet or to make a phone call to our call center. So we have worked very closely with health and walked through how to have social distancing. We have plexiglass divide, we have greeters, we have security up front and for those who don't have symptoms they can pick up their EBT cards, that's the CalFresh cards or they can come in use the phone if they need to call the unemployment line or need to get some papers or get a paper application. Like the IHSS program we have the same state executive order that put on stay for 90 days that all these benefit programs do not have to have a renewal. And that means two things. Number one, it means those who are receiving benefits today will not have a disruption in benefits but number two, it frees up all of our staff or benefit reps and clerks from having to process renewals to be able to respond to the surge in intake. Today we are not behind. I just wanna underline that today we are not behind in processing applications and that is because we've been able to redeploy our staff who would otherwise be redoing renewals but what we are all tracking in humor service systems is what to do if this continues to rise because we want to get the services to the community but we only have so many staff. And then the last one is CalFresh has been such an important issue. There's been a lot of law being done by our state association with the feds and state to make sure certain waivers can be put in place to make it easier for people who are eligible services to apply. So this speaks to the fact that there are certain waivers for in-person interviews and live signatures just to help expedite processing of CalFresh. This next slide is quite profound. We do not as a county human service agency process unemployment claims but there's a nexus between the work we do in county human services and the state EdD office in a couple of ways. Number one is in our Watsonville office. We actually have a career center where EdD has a presence and we like I mentioned with our lobbies people can come in and call and apply. So we have a little bit of a barometer in what's happening in the Watsonville office and we are hearing that those who choose to come into the office to make the call and across the state the wait times have been as high as four hours. More recently a drop to two hours just to submit an application and it's taking up to three weeks to actually have that processed. The second point is that while people are applying and they're unemployed they might be eligible for some of our services. So we're getting some applications and for some who get unemployment if the amount they are getting is not too high they could also be concurrently eligible for some of our services. So there's a lot of discussion going on between state EdD and our local residents and getting them enrolled in services to which they're eligible. And I'm just gonna highlight the numbers at the bottom and then I see there might be a question. If you look back in late February there was week by week 137 and then 141 Santa Cruz residents who applied for unemployment. And then if you look the week of March 28 there was 8,395. That is just staggering and profound. And so you know this is the economic crisis in practice when you just look to see these numbers. But I think I see maybe a question, Chair Caput. Yes. I do, you know, thank you for all the work we're doing on this. The one on 18 West Beach are they just, if somebody goes down there is there somebody to help them in person because everything was done by telephone before and they were having a hard time with the EdD being able to work at 18 West Beach because of disability entrance and something like that. So they wanted to use my office and I told them yes, of course they could. But are they're in place still at 18 West Beach? So in person. My understanding is state EdD employees are not in person but the phone lines that are a direct line to them are for all the reasons you described. You're very familiar with the dynamic just to broadly speak to those who don't know this is that because of some issues the state EdD office had concerns about the ADA laws and accessibility in the actual building itself. The state EdD employees were not in the 18 West Beach building themselves but we do have in place today as we help people who want to apply via a phone call not with a state EdD employee, we can do the social distancing, see if they have symptoms and we can allow them in to use the phone but you're correct, they're not physically present and that's still a work in progress. They could still use my office if they wanted to because it's accessible for people with disabilities and there are a lot of people when they apply for unemployment, especially for the first time they need somebody in person to really help them rather than trying to get on the phone and sometimes waiting like four hours, pretty rough. Yes, and we can follow up with your office out after this about the offer on the table. But yes, it's a work in progress and obviously COVID-19 kind of stalled the efforts to resolve the issue in terms of having them in person. And do you have any idea, maybe that's a question for EdD. There's normally a one week waiting period before your benefits start. They were talking about suspending that and letting people actually get it right away. So Supervisor, these updates are being done as part of public comment. This isn't an agendized item, so perhaps you could pass those questions on and we could have staff address them to you later on this morning, if that would be okay. That would be fine. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Okay, and then the last item I mentioned of the three responsibilities we have and that is just the mission of our agency is to help the most vulnerable in the community. I actually would like to recognize the leadership of Second Harvest Food Bank and Willie, their director, who is the chair of the state association of food banks who very early on called our department specifically in partnership with the local community foundation and said we have a crisis in front of us in terms of food insecurity. So I wanna recognize that that was lifted up by our local food bank. We immediately got together on a phone and we immediately started to figure out like what can we do together? We'll do better together because even though there are a lot of COVID-19 specific activities around food like getting food to the shelters that Elisa talked about, there's also a growing crisis and that there are these pickups, South County, North County, but there's also just a growing issue of food insecurity that's very serious for all populations. So I just wanted to take a minute to highlight some of the work we're doing in our department, but also in partnership. So first, these are little issues on the fringe just to recognize the work of our department. So number one, our adult and long-term care division had a grant with a teen kitchen that was doing sort of training for in-home caregivers to learn how to cook healthy food. We immediately in partnership changed and adjusted the scope of that work to turn those around into home delivered meals for some of our most vulnerable seniors. The IHSS social worker staff that I mentioned that because they don't have to do renewals have been focusing on doing food security assessments over the phone and then trying to connect with the community to get food to them. And our adult protective services program because they receive phone calls and there's a new set of type of issues being raised to our attention and some is just straight up food insecurity worries that older adults can't get food. We have been assembling emergency grocery bags and making sure they get delivered to them. My next reference is what I just said about the partnership with the food bank and a number of other community-based organizations who are doing all sorts of work that I don't have time to go through and they deserve the credit for what they're doing but we're doing it in collaboration and our department is in the process of doing a survey. The survey results are actually gonna be in later this week and we have a meeting with community partners to try to identify what those issues are to see what we can do to develop some short, mid and long-term interventions because we are trying to brace ourselves for a long-term human crisis coming with the amount of economic challenge that our community is gonna face and the need to get them food with resource challenges. So I just wanted to highlight that we're doing a lot of work. We don't have solutions but it's in motion and that is the end of my presentation. Thank you very much. I really do appreciate the updates from all of our department heads that are doing great work. I would like to conclude my presentation by thanking our county staff. I'm very proud of working for the county and I'm very proud of the performance of our staff during this crisis and this emergency. Many of our staff are working from home and they continue to work productively. Many of our staff are coming in to the office or coming into the field because their jobs require them to. And also we have many employees working as disaster service workers, employees doing work outside of their normal scope of work, working in homeless shelters, delivering food to the homeless shelters, working in our call center which is operating six days a week. And so our employees are just doing outstanding work all across the county and I'm very proud of them and I wanna acknowledge them and their performance during this emergency. That concludes my remarks on our presentation, Chair Caput, you can now go on to item four which is the announcement by board members of items removed from the consent agenda. Thank you very much. Okay, board members, are there any items to be removed from the consent agenda to regular agenda? I hear none. Okay, we'll have public comment. We'll go down to number five. Any person may address the board during this public comment period. Speakers must please not exceed three minutes in length and you can speak only once during the public comment. All public comments must be directed to an item listed on today's consent agenda, closed session agenda, and yet to be heard on the regular agenda or a topic not on the agenda. So we'll open it up to the public, how are you doing? Hi, good morning. My name is Drew Lewis. I am speaking here with you, be a little older, scared maybe with a sense of new possibility. In elementary school, I learned that finding the truth, you have to look at both sides. There seems to be a major conflict of interest between government officials and others in the World Health Organization who have investments in partnerships and corporations that are profiting from this fear-driven campaign of COVID-19 disinformation. There is no longer scientific consensus on COVID-19. I have two examples here, one of many. This is a virologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and he says, quote, there is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time. For example, ski parties in Austria. He could find no, he could not find any evidence of quote, living viruses on surfaces. Quote, when we took samples from door handles, phones or toilets, it was not possible to cultivate the virus in the laboratory on the basis of these swabs, unquote. There's also another doctor who has very credulously stepped forward to contradict a official narrative of the White House and other corporation-backed organizations. Dr. Anna Berkacek from Montana, quote her, and she says, the real number of COVID-19 deaths are not what most people are told and what they then think. How many people actually died from COVID-19 as anyone's guest? Based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fear mongers into relinquishing freedoms. He also says, but if you're not too scared to seek out the evidence, you can get an utterly different picture of what is taking place. Lies and disinformation lead to bad government policy. Massive crop losses are happening. Farmers are plowing under food. They can't sell to closed restaurants. Unnecessary lockdown of non-immune suppressed population is causing a rise in suicides, rise in domestic violence, rise in unemployment, rise in poverty, and rise in bankruptcies. I think the reason for this pandemic fear porn is to divert blame from the already collapsing economy before it happened, blaming on COVID-19 and take the spotlight off the crimes and scandals of the global elite. It's interesting that before this happened, we saw the spotlight shining on people. They're involved in corruption in government and social scandals, and now all that is gone. Thank you. Good morning, good morning chair, supervisors, Carlos Palacios and staff. My name is Jenny Sarmiento, and I live in Watsonville. I'm here today as your constituent, a retired executive director of a nonprofit agency that provided mental health services to youth and families, and children of course, in partnership with the county's Children Mental Health and Probation Department. But most importantly, I'm here today as a foster grandparent who is extremely concerned about the physical and emotional well-being of children in foster care. I realize and fully support that family reunification must be the first option whenever possible, and always keeping in mind what is best for the child or the youth. County Public Health Administrators, and you've had lots of presentations today, have issued the Shelter in Place mandate. In addition, the County of Santa Cruz Human Services Department sent out a notice to all resource parents dated April 2nd, which we received as foster families on April 10th to reinforce the Shelter in Place. The purpose of the letter as stated is, quote, keep children safe, unquote, and maintain the Shelter at home order. It also states that rather than conducting in-person visits with birth parents, they could use the visitation through video options, which a lot of resource parents are willing to do in our family as well. I don't know if this is an isolated case or if the department is handling all cases of children under the age of three in this manner, and this is a personal experience. Our child close to turning one next week who has not had any overnight or weekend visits with a biological parent and only four unsupervised visits, absolutely no overnight or weekend visits, has now and has not seen the biological parent since the Shelter in Place. Now he is being mandated to go for a month trial basis. As the social worker put it, quote, let's see if something goes horribly wrong, unquote. This is unspeakable. This is not something that we should be doing to protect our youngest population. Is this the best interest? Whose best interest is this? This child's medical doctor has written a letter on his behalf, which I will turn over to the board. And stating that CPS is doing the wrong protocol, that they should transition the child, a child who doesn't have a relationship established with the biological parent is trauma, it's just waiting to be traumatized. And I would request that you seriously consider this and put a pause on the practices and protocol that is happening right now. There's weekend wait. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Carol Wohlberg. I'm a close personal friend of the foster family from the person who just spoke. I also have 30 years of experience working in social services. I have a degree in developmental psychology and educational counseling. I worked for 15 years for the employment and benefits services division of HSD. And in normal circumstances, I have much respect for the work that the CPS or Child Protective Services social workers are doing. However, in this case, I'm appalled at the decision that a 12 month old child who does not know his biological father well, he's met him three times, has been referred for a month long family reunification visit in the middle of a pandemic. And I just cannot understand. I know that family reunification can be very successful if there's lots of social work resources that are put in place to protect the family and the child. And I don't know how this is possible in this time of social distancing. So I'm very, very concerned. I love this child very much. I love this family very much. It's the child I'm most concerned about. Hi there, Monica McGuire. How you doing? Well, thank you. Nice to see you again. Living in Coralitas and wanting to remind everyone that we should look up the word iatrogenesis because the numbers will be down this year, but that's usually 400,000 plus people who die every year because of mistakes in the medical industry at hospitals especially, but among all typical Western medical practices. That number so far exceeds anything that people have paid attention to or put time and care into all these decades growing and growing. And it will be down because hospitals are empty now, but we want to just take some time to notice that there are many other things that require our attention and some are being brought up today and that's great. But the fact that we're worried about tens of thousands dying from something that is questionable at best at this point in many ways. And clearly a harbinger of other changes to come because we've allowed viruses to get super strong and viruses are going to be with us. They are part of our DNA. They are an aspect of human life that we have to deal with. And the complimentary and alternative practitioners, the CAM it's recognized nationally are the ones who know how to handle viruses. Plants and herbs have handled viruses forever and the norm of a rise in the number of cases and then a leveling off and falling off is going to continue with more than this virus. And the most important things we can do are help people to boost their immune system so that when we do have any aspect we can handle it and overcome it and become stronger. I brought this up a month ago and Mr. Lewis brought up the vitamin C use in China and then we heard from County Health that they said they didn't know anything about that. It's actually very readily available. Most complimentary and alternative practitioners are openly saying they're not concerned personally and they're helping their clients to overcome with immune boosting. And most people in Santa Cruz know this and I wish that we would act like Santa Cruz and actually take a lead role the way that all of California really could to push what we do know does work, which is to boost. Also, it's come to many people's attention that there are installations happening at schools and if 5G is being installed as they can't answer what they're doing, they say they're putting in cable or internet which makes no sense because we know that those already exist at all the schools. So whatever's being installed at schools with the trucks showing up, we want to alert everyone. 5G like Wi-Fi is a huge immune boost suppression, immune suppression and that kind of immune suppression should not be happening anywhere in this county, period. People should be turning off their Wi-Fi at home in order to have a greater chance of overcoming anything. These are really basic known items by plenty of people here. We would like to hear them from you, our government. Okay. Good morning, Supervisor Caput. 5G at 60 gigahertz presents the human body, stops the human body from absorbing oxygen. We have to have oxygen and this is a huge problem. And I heard a talk where David Ike was interviewed on London Real TV and he said all over the world as people are in shutdown, 5G is being installed. And he says, life as we know it will end if this 5G insulation continues and it's in satellites as well. This is irrefutable. The coronavirus was engineered by scientists in a lab using well-documented genetic engineering vectors that leave behind a fingerprint. And you can see that on Dr. Klinghard's website. He has protocols for treating this virus and also points out that if you take a map of where 5G has been installed and the high number of deaths from this virus it fits over pretty clearly. That's a big problem. And I want to read a little bit from Arthur Fürstenberg. What is this? 5GSpaceappeal.org, he wrote in articles The Sky Really Falling. As I write this, the world or a very large part of it is effectively under martial law to protect against a proposed enemy named coronavirus COVID-19. Schools have been closed, airline flights scrapped, theaters and restaurants shut down, churches shuttered, curfews put in place, public gatherings prohibited, national borders closed, people told not to touch or go near each other every surface, door knob and human hand smothered with toxic disinfectant and the population ordered to put shelter in place in their homes. And the people from the USA to Norway to Bolivia to Australia to Egypt to Indonesia have obeyed not only without much protest but with enthusiasm. And then he goes into what caused the 1918 epidemic and it had to be when the communication system for the war was switched on. It wasn't a virus. I'll leave you that article. Thank you. Thanks, thank you. Okay, does nobody in the community room? We do have some web comments to read into the record and Christine will read those into the record. Good morning supervisors. Thank you. The first comment is, Susan, if I could ask you to mute because we're getting feedback. Thank you. Okay, the first comment is from Jim Reed with the city of Scots Valley. He would like to applaud the opening of parks and wants the board to know that Santa Clara County has been very cautious about closing parks only closing those where folks were not practicing social distancing. He thinks the health officer, he thinks the health officer and her intent to reopen Santa Cruz parks. The second public comment is from Stephanie Weingarden. Her comment is, I have been told that the planning department patrols neighborhoods looking for work being done. Does the board support this? It seems this money would be better spent elsewhere where enough funds budgeted to the disaster plan. What was the county's level of preparedness for this pandemic? Were the right resources in the right place? I would like the board to analyze and provide up a report to the public on the county's deployment of this disaster plan. And the last public comment we have is from Douglas Deitch. To repeat again, please, from my two recent previous messages to you regarding the life and death issue of temperature monitoring and screening. It's just simple common sense, isn't it? Dear board of supervisors, what is missing in our coronavirus prevention protocol? Notwithstanding a very large population of apparently a systematic coronavirus patients, may I please respectfully suggest one more measure that we all can and should consider taking for every day or for ourselves and every dependent member of our family in addition to washing our hands, masking ourselves, distancing ourselves and any and all other measures either required or suggested. Each one of us should take our and our dependent's temperatures daily, maybe even twice and perhaps even record them during this crisis. It is very easy to do with the new and various non-expensive, simple and even non-touch versions online and elsewhere. Additionally, while we wait in line, safely separate it from the first in time arrival before us at any store or any other similar situation being minded over someone while waiting, perhaps that person-minder might also be equipped with a remote non-contact thermometer by which every aspiring entrant temperature could be taken very safely, easily and non-invasively screened and monitored as well for the safety of us all during this very difficult time, hopefully soon ending. Douglas Steich, Deech, and that is all for this item. Number five, public comment. The next item is action on the consent agenda. Item number six, I'll ask each member of the board for comments on the consent agenda items. Let's start with members on the telephone first, Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Supervisor Caput and for the tremendous reports that we received today. I would like to comment on several items on the consent agenda. I do not want to pull any of them. Number one, item number 15, the election certification. I want to thank our County Clerk, Deil Pellerin and her staff for managing the March primary election during this COVID-19 pandemic. I also want to congratulate my colleague, Supervisor Friend Leopold, respectfully for being re-elected and finished first in their respective second and first district Supervisorial elections. I'd like to acknowledge also the Santa Mons Valley Schools bond measure that passed with just 55.1% of the vote. It needed 55%. And if you think that every vote doesn't count, you just have to look at results like this. It happens just about every election. This was a margin probably of 20 votes or less that it's succeeded. So much has been said about the COVID-19 pandemic response. I think each and every one of us want to just recognize the complexity and the diversity of the areas that needed to be addressed. It's overwhelming. And I first and foremost want to thank the community at large. There have been some orders that have been put into place that are not understandable or not well received, but the results are what counts. And we've had one death, one too many, but only 91 cases reported. I think that's absolutely phenomenal as it can be recognized when we compare ourselves to the other 57 counties in California. Our community has responded to this crisis in herculean efforts. And I want to just thank them for everything that they have done. And especially to our health services officer, Dr. Gale Newell, our public health officer, and Nemi Hall of our Human Health Services Agency. I know that some of the decisions, as I said, have been controversial, but they have been necessary. And I think we just have to look at the results to say they are positive in comparison to whatever I've seen elsewhere in the state of California. And I want to thank them very much for everything that they have done. And for all the county departments that have played a distinguished part in this and working to increase services and resources that we never could envision before this all took place, the shelter in place order in the social distancing, they have worked. And we just have to keep on doing them for a little longer, I hope. And we're going to be seeing that this is going to be a success for Santa Cruz County amongst all the disaster related issues that we have heard about. And from unemployment, primary to health services that have been needed and really we've directed much of our attention to those. And to the economy itself, it's really becoming taxing, not only on the economy as it relates to our businesses, but the education departments that we have throughout the county, they've had to face some real tough issues and they're responding very well. I just want to thank each and every one of them. And I'm sure every board member wants to do the same. On the item number 30 on the downtown streets team syringe litter contract, I want to thank the health services agency for bringing this contract to syringe litter. We know we have a serious litter problem in hotspots throughout the county and we have a public responsibility to act. I don't know that it's necessary to answer a question right now, but I understand the downtown streets team are not cleaning up during the shelter in place order. And I just hope that we are able to address the needle litter when this downtown streets team gets back on. And I wonder how we can address this issue when they're not out helping us in this regard. Aside from the COVID-19 issues and there's a half a dozen of them on our consent agenda today, we have several on road improvements and storm damage repair. A special thanks goes out to our public works department and especially our director and deputy CAO, Matt Machado for making significant progress on repairing roads from both the 2016 and 17 winter storms as well as county roads that have yet that have had years of deferred maintenance to make up in the process. I especially appreciate Mr. Machado's efforts to streamline the construction management process for delivering road projects. The process to get these project delivered needs to be more predictable and transparent and the construction award contract, contract award streamlining will accomplish those goals. And I know that there are many people saying why? I mean, on a subject that's not COVID-19 focus, roads are always something that people talk about a lot in my district and I'm sure every one of yours. And so regarding the 2016, 17 storm projects, I think it's important to remember if you look on page 588 of our packet, 85% or nearly 85% of the funding to complete these repairs comes from the federal or state government FEMA and the federal highway authority in particular. And we just don't have the resources normally to address these issues in such an immense fashion that we've had to do since those storms but we're getting at it and we've had to wait because we needed to get the allocations from them. And as I said, when you see that 85% of the money that is going into those road repairs are from the federal government in particular, we just have to wait it out, but it's starting to get done. And we also have some funding from our general fund and the state Senate bill one revenue and a loan to ourselves. So with that in mind, I want to just thank the, Mr. Machado and his staff, what they've had to go through an incredible amount of work with FEMA, the federal highway authority, the state office of emergency services and Caltrans to get us to the point that we all owe them a great deal of gratitude and a schedule of when those projects throughout the county might be addressed and there's $100 million of projects that need to be done and they're not gonna be able to be done in only a couple of months, but we have a schedule for those that are going we're going to address the public works department. And again, I want to thank them for sticking with it and for looking forward to making it easier for us to do these projects. And finally, this item is not on the agenda, but I hope it's something that I think needs to be addressed because of the situation that we maybe have forgotten about the wildfires and so forth, not so long ago in this state. I'd like to mention that the California State Association of Counties were identified in a call late last week of their top priorities. Of course, it was COVID-19 response and homelessness, which had been on top of the list, but number three is fire resiliency. We have discussed one or two this morning in depth, but I also want to mention that the California Public Utilities Commission is in the process of reviewing wildfire management plans by PG&E and other utilities in the state. Our planning department has submitted the letter outlining some concerns, but I also want to thank Supervisor Coonerty and joining me to request more time from the California Public Utilities Commission to extend its initial April 7th deadline for input as a result of the COVID-19 response disaster. The CPUC declined that request, but we understand that we will have other opportunities to provide input in May and June before these plans are finalized. We understand that PG&E and the CPUC need to complete these plans as quickly as possible to protect our community from wildfires, especially those caused by utility equipment, but the content and transparency of the plans are also vitally important. So we need to share more information and ask for questions. I know this is not at the top of the list, but it is a high priority throughout the state of California and I think the people of Santa Cruz County should know that we are keeping our eye on this ball as well as we move through this response to COVID-19. That's all I have to say, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much. Okay, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. I just have a couple of brief comments. I'd just like to also thank Public Works and remind the community that work is still being done by a lot of departments within, or all the departments within the county. A number of these storm damage repairs are occurring within the second district and I appreciate the fact that this is continuing to do work and in fact, they've continued to do some other safety work, including crosswalk improvements and other things during this time. So our main focus is clearly on the health and safety associated with the current pandemic. I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that so many departments are doing so much to continue a continuity of services in general. I appreciated Supervisor McPherson's comments and also the item he has on the agenda to work with our federal partners regarding an ex-stimulus plan to ensure that there's additional funding for local governments. I know that we're doing individually, we're all doing our outreach to the federal delegation, but I think as collectively as a board, it's important to make those statements that this is something very important to us. An item 16 regarding the update on the financial assistance for local businesses, I appreciated the work by both economic development and the CAO, I would like to maybe see whether there's ways that we can help support or amplify the work at Cabrillo's SBDC since so many local businesses are turning to them. They do have a contract with the county through our current allocations of contract services. So if there's a need there, I think it's something that we could look at, something that we could do that isn't a significant financial outlier in our part, but would really help these businesses through the application process in general. And that's all I have. Okay. Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. And I just want to start off and just thank our staff from top to bottom. I believe we have very good leadership in our CAO's office and the heads of our departments as we've heard this morning about responding to this unprecedented health crisis. I feel very confident in the work that's being done and the planning that has gone in to helping us prepare to be able to take care of people during this difficult time. It's really quite amazing to hear of all the work and it's sobering when you see the information that we're sharing today about the number of people who've applied for unemployment and the increased needs for just food out in our community. I appreciate the work that's going on to help make that happen. And I know we're going to need more of that in the coming weeks. I also want to express my appreciation to all of our staff, some of whom are still working at their offices, others who are working at home and those who have been reassigned to help with disaster service work. I know that's taking people outside their level of comfort at times, but if we can adequately train them and provide them with the material, they're providing a critical service to our community and I want to acknowledge them for doing more than what is normally in their job description. I'm just going to comment on a couple of different items on the consent agenda that have to do with this crisis. There are a number of items that you could talk about, but on item 16, which was my colleague just referred to, which is financial assistance for local business, I think we're going to have to see who is going to qualify for the CARES Act funding and whether they add additional funding to that. I fear that there's going to be people left out of this funding and we're going to need to figure out a way to support our local business community to make sure that they're all still there when we get to the other side of this crisis. I appreciate the work of our Economic Development Office to hold regular webinars and I support the idea of providing support either through the SBDC or others who can help local businesses apply for these federal funding. That's where the money is and we should do everything we can to make sure that our local business community can access those funds. On item number 20, I ask the support of our board on temporary suspending the rules for our rent adjustment procedures at mobile home parks. There's a time limit for when you can challenge these rent adjustments and it's important during this time where we don't want this person to person contact that we suspend the rules. I hope we'll have the support of that. Lastly on item number 55, I ask the support of my colleagues in trying to get the governor and the state legislature to provide some funds for the large number of people in our community who are undocumented but perform essential services and are just part of the fabric of our community. In the work that I've been doing in the first district I've run into a lot of parents who are really scared about being able to make it to provide for their families and they don't have access to the normal programs. Our state has taken some great leaps forward in providing healthcare to undocumented individuals and now we need to also provide the same kind of care when they've lost their job due to the shelter in place orders. So I hope you'll have the support of that. Lastly, I just wanna share with you all and anybody listening that I'll be holding a telephone town hall this Wednesday at six o'clock with Dr. David Galladucci who's our emergency management services medical director to talk about the planning that's going on around hospitals and surges and everything else. And you can get information on our county website or my Facebook page about how to dial into that. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, and then back here in the chambers, Supervisor Coonerty. Sure. Thank you. Just a couple of brief comments on item number 16 as was mentioned, we're gonna have to look for new ways to partner with our small business community which are the primary job generators and in our community, get people back to work. We're gonna have to figure out new ways to partner and help them. Item number 22, asking for the state or state insurance commissioner to have insurance companies live up to their promise on business people who had business and eruption insurance to have this be covered as obviously businesses have been interrupted by something that's out of their control. And then a thank you to the county council and to the CAO's office for the quick turnaround on the restaurant delivery fees which will make a big difference to local restaurants who are struggling to survive. I'm also happy to see on item number 32 an expansion of the telecare contract. This is a more important than ever to provide these services. And finally on item 54, which is the downport water project. I just wanna send a special thanks to Ken Eaton who's been doing a really terrific job managing this project for our community. I wanna thank the staff and everybody who works with the county. And a lot of them are being asked to do jobs that are not related to the employment that they do have because of the current crisis. And so they're being asked to do and cover a lot of things that puts them in contact with the frontline problem. And I wanna also, I think what's amazing to me is how the public is responding on their own. We're talking about a lot of things that are going on and it's really hard. It's difficult, especially we have a lot of people that have always been kind of like shelter in place. And in my opinion, loneliness kills people too. So you have a lot of people that really don't have much contact in the outside world and they're even more sheltered right now. So it's a good idea to reach out to them, give them a phone call or if they're your neighbor, check in on them and help them out. I think what I've seen in the Watsonville area and I'm sure it's going on throughout the county is how you have groups, church groups that are helping out, that are going out and delivering groceries and also medical supplies, picking things up for people at the pharmacy or whatever they need. I wanna thank Barbie Gomez and Dee Dee Vargas and the pastor of the Church of the Nazarene in Watsonville as one example. They went out on their own and they started buying groceries and also bathroom tissue, napkins and towels and everything and delivering it for free to people in homes. They're up to over 800 homes that they're delivering to right now, which is really awesome. And the other churches are responding to, I'm just, this is one that I saw first and I think it's wonderful. And real quick announcement, the National Day of Prayer we normally have is the first Thursday of May and it's normally in the Plaza in Watsonville but this year it is for all denominations instead of at the Plaza where it's a social gathering, it'll be the first Thursday in May from 12 noon to 1 p.m. at home or wherever you would like to participate. We'll be sending out letters to all the pastors and the different churches that it will not be at the Plaza as a gathering but it'll be done privately at home and between 12 and 1. Yeah, we have shelter in place, social distancing. We have no social gatherings during the holiday weekend, Easter break. I think that that was a good idea but I know it's really difficult for families that especially have young kids. I don't know about the rest but in my house it's very loud and they're full of energy and they wanna get out there and so hopefully we're gonna be able to open up the parks and at least get people out there. I don't wanna see us causing problems with other health problems that people may have. Exercise is considered good, all the exercise places are closed, getting out swimming, getting out moving, it's good for people that have heart conditions, it's good for people that have diabetes, it's good for people with, so what I'm getting at here is we're trying to combat one thing and hopefully we're getting a good handle on it. We take it very seriously but at the same time really we realize there are other health issues out there that we hopefully are not contributing to. Item number 33, that's $261,000 for Montesino Manor, which is a residential care facility in Watsonville. I called Advocacy Inc and Ombudsman to see whether or not they have a good track record and they do have a good track record. They've only had six fairly minor complaints in the last five years and so there is a difference between skilled nursing homes and long-term nursing homes and some are considered residential care homes. I just will check later with the health department for the county to make sure that the money we're giving to a residential care facility and whether or not it should be a skilled nursing facility. So I'll clear that up later at a different time and later on I think we're talking about we've suspended the charge for reusable bags and also reusable cups during this pandemic and so there's no charge now and that will be until further notice until this clears up. If there was a problem there for a while and hopefully we'll start addressing some people are missing their mortgage payments and I'm not sure how that's related to the rent payments and everything else with the landlord and tenants but some people are having a very hard time meeting their mortgage payment and I think, are we addressing that? Does anybody have a quick answer for me? Just do the best you can. I don't mean to put you on the spot. We don't specifically have any program for that but I know individual companies and banks are making arrangements with the folks who can't make their payments so I know that individual banks are doing that. Right, okay, so. And Supervisor, I'll just add to that that there's various things happening at the federal and the state level and in addition the courts have mandated that no judicial foreclosure actions will continue during this period of time but things are constantly moving and changing to address these exact kind of issues that you're talking about. Okay, I'm glad to hear that. I'm very glad to hear it. In one real quick note, I know we have people in the county that are asked to do and go and help out with a different job that's different from their employment. I actually volunteered to help out and with like the shelter they're building in Watsonville at the Veterans Memorial Hall and I was basically told that I'm in that age group that's vulnerable and kind of like I'm too old to help out. I guess what I'm getting at is Supervisor McPherson, you can probably relate to this. I still think I'm 39 years old but anyway, I'm willing to help and so if they have a spot for me somewhere I'll go ahead and help out with the other county workers. Okay, so thank you and we'll have a vote. I guess we have to have a roll call vote, correct? And we have nothing pulled on the agenda agenda. Second. And I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. And that takes us to item number seven. Okay, public hearing to consider application 151255, a proposal to allow for an increase in the number of overnight guests and other associated improvements at the Mission Spring Camp Conference Center, a planned unit development, including consideration of mitigation monitoring and reporting program and negative declaration per requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act and to take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. And how are you? Good morning, I'm very well and I hope that you here in the room and those of you at home are all very well too. So the Mission Springs Camps and Conference Center is approximately 10 miles north of Santa Cruz and one mile west of Scots Valley. It's in a heavily wooded area that's bounded by Lockhart Gulch Creek, which is on the west and ruins Creek on the east. The primary access is from Lockhart Gulch Road with the secondary access from Nelson Road and the surrounding area is mostly rural parcels with single family dwellings. Mission Springs itself was established back in 1926. Today it includes 62 parcels and those are the ones that are colored mustard yellow or orange, that together total approximately 178 acres. This is the master plan area. And within this, there are 114 private homes on 119 locks and those are the ones colored green. They're individually leased from the church and they're not part of the master plan. So back in 1975, permit 751060U authorized the ongoing use of Mission Springs and permitted the expansion of amenities and other improvements. It also established a maximum occupancy of 500 persons for overnight stays and 1,000 persons for day use. So this project amends that master plan that was approved by 751060U to allow for multi-phased improvements that are based on the addition of three parcels which would then allow for an associated increase in the number of overnight occupancy for 500 to 704 people. But that would be just during the summer months. There'd be no change to the current limit of 1,000 people for day use. So Mission Springs holds year round church retreats. It also has non-summer midweek outdoor school programs and week long summer youth programs. These occur in three primary geographic areas. There's the main conference center, the frontier ranch and Wild Oak. So the conference center lies close to Lockhart Gulch and is comprised of three sub areas. There's the conference center core, the Mission Woods and Spring Creek areas. Mission Woods is directly north of the core and Spring Creek is across Lockhart Gulch Road and has an RV camp. There's Frontier Ranch which is uphill and northwest of the conference center and is accessed by a steep, narrow road. It's developed with tent cabins and associated facilities. And then there's Wild Oak which was originally a horse ranch back in the 75 permit and it's accessed from Nelson Road and it has residents and several tent cabins and other facilities. Master permit 751060-U included 59 parcels that are now zoned SU. That's the blue color. A designation that allows organized camps and conference center uses. The proposed master plan amendment is a conditionally permitted use in that zone district and the zoning is consistent with the site's underlying, there's three different general plan, open space, recreation, rural residential and mountain residential general plan designations. The existing camp and conference center although it is permitted is assumed to be non-conforming to density standards. In other words, more people than would be allowed if you were to calculate the number today. Therefore, the expansion of the camp requires the addition of new parcels and then the maximum allowed density of the new or expanded facilities would then be calculated based on the additional parcels based on the rural matrix system which determines a number of points. The three added parcels APNs 07011, 20, 16 and 35. I like that you can see those have come up there. They are in the agricultural zone district or A zone and have a total combined area of 61.5 acres. As proposed, all of the new development allowed by the addition of this land would be located in the existing camp. There'd be no development on those three ag parcels. They would be just kept for passive recreational uses such as nature observation and hiking. And so the proposed use of these parcels is consistent with county code in that recreational activities with no permanent structures or paving are conditionally permitted uses in the A zone district. So to calculate how many additional people use the rural density matrix system, and that gives you the potential number overnight and day use only guess based on the number of matrix points that can be assigned. We did a matrix for the proposed amendment and it showed that the three added parcels would support a total of 5.6 matrix points, which is based on a required minimum of 10 acres per matrix unit. And there's a net developable area of those three parcels of 56 acres. 10 beds or occupants are allowed for each of those matrix points for unlimited or year round occupancy, which with the 5.6 matrix points would be 56 additional beds. For this proposed amendment, the additional occupancy would be limited to a maximum of 100 days a year in the summer months. County code provides a specific formula, which is shown here for calculating the temporary occupancy. And so based on this, there's a total of 204 additional beds or guests would be allowed, which will be limited to the summer months. And then for the remainder of the year, the count would continue having a maximum of 359 overnight guests, which is consistent with the 500 people that are approved by the original use permit. So to accommodate the increase in the number of guests, the amended master plan allows for construction over time, of additional accommodations, as well as upgrades to existing buildings and infrastructure. In the core area, the proposed improvements include a new dining hall, a replacement fireside lounge, a bell tower, which doesn't have a bell, a new lodge for 40 guests, as well as conversion of the original dining room to a cafe, bookstore, and offices, and other architectural upgrades to several of the original buildings. The project also includes separation of guests and delivery traffic, and creation of a pedestrian oriented core. In the Mission Woods and Spring Creek areas, the improvements include demolition of two existing lodges and construction of a new guest lodge for 88 people, changing the use of another building from lodging to being a meeting area and construction of a minor addition to a chapel. And then in the Spring Creek area, improvements include demolition of four existing cabins and construction of a seasonal lodge for 24 staff members, as well as a redesign of the RV park, which reduces the number of RVs allowed. The Frontier Ranch, the work includes recognizing the increase in the number of tent cabins that were permitted by the permit in 75, from 15 to 27 cabins, and then permitting of the additional 12. Permits are also required for other unpermitted structures that include a zipline platform with a rock climbing wall. There are some cabins that will also be retrofitted and there'll be accessibility improvements to the restrooms. The Wild Oak area, which will be recognized to be a separate activity area, and the work will include recognition of the conversion of a tack room to a staff room and a few other unpermitted facilities, as well as ongoing remodeling of other existing structures. So most of the existing development at Smission Springs is non-conforming to current development standards, particularly in the conference center core, where many original buildings have zero setbacks and some encroach over property lines. There are some that also exceed the 28 foot height limit. So the proposed PUD addresses this by allowing for reduced setbacks and increased height as appropriate so that the new development will be consistent with the existing historic character, and it also allows for the existing structures to be considered conforming, which then allows them to be repaired without any restrictions. But despite the lack of setbacks to interior property boundaries, there will be a minimum of 30 foot setback to the boundary of the site, the outer boundary of the site, and also to both Lockhart Gulch Road and Nelson Road. So over time, the project would create a small increase in traffic, which would primarily be on Scotts Valley Drive, Mount Hermann Road, and Lockhart Gulch Road. The traffic study was prepared for the project, which showed that the increase in guests would generate the equivalent of roughly two vehicles every three minutes on the Friday PM peak time and one vehicle a minute on Sunday afternoons. Monday and through Thursday and also on Saturday, the traffic would be significantly lower than that. To meet the fire department safety requirements, I feel like we've missed a slide here. I think I missed the PUD slide. The fire department visited the site and they have required as a condition of approval that the southern half of Cathedral Drive would be converted to be one way only, and it would have new signage to indicate that traffic flow and additional parking control to prevent obstruction of the roadways. And then also Tabernacle Drive in the Conference Center core will also be pedestrianized and accessible to only emergency vehicles. Master plan amendment will not decrease the existing level of emergency access in that the gated road that runs through the site between Frontier Ranch and Wild Oak will be retained. And this road provides a connection between Nelson Road and Lockhart Gulch and has been used in the past during community-wide emergency situations provide access both to Mission Springs as well as for the surrounding area residents. Parking is provided throughout the facility and includes several paid parking lots as well as overflow parking for short-term demands. Because of traffic management strategies that include extensive use of car pooling and buses, the parking demand in Mission Springs is typically low and they have conducted parking demand surveys and it shows that there are 362 available spaces which will provide excess capacity of 68 spaces in the off-season and 77 spaces during the summer. Because of the surrounding woodland, the size of the property and the size of the property, most of Mission Springs actually is not clearly visible from any public street. Internally, the existing appearance of the site is a rustic forest camp and the new facilities have all been designed and landscaped to fit into that setting. The proposed project will enhance the character and the historic quality of the site by remodeling and upgrading the existing buildings as well as by landscaping and other improvements. Proposed structures will be consistent with the rustic architectural style and will be in scale with the existing buildings and the surrounding trees. There was a historic evaluation of the property which concluded that there's a potential historic district that encompasses Mission Springs and even though this has not been designated to ensure that the aesthetic and historic sense of the area will be maintained, all of the final designs will be reviewed by the county's historic resources planner to ensure consistency with the existing camp. So we did obviously look at the feasibility of all of the proposals. There was a preliminary geological assessment prepared which concluded that all of the proposed sites were buildable, although additional geological and potentially, and also geotechnical or soils reports will be required in association with future permit applications for each of the proposed structures. We did a biotic report to document existing conditions and identify a sensitive habitat. Accordingly, the project's been conditioned to require that all construction be carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the project biologist. Civil plans, drainage calculations, feasibility, drainage feasibility assessment were done to show that the project drainage design is feasible and the adequate mitigations can be incorporated into proposed development to meet county design criteria, stormwater requirements. And finally, there was an analysis of the water and wastewater systems which determined that sufficient capacity would be available for the increased demand both in fire emergency needs as well as additional capacity needs associated with the proposed project. Environmental review was required by the California Environmental Quality Act and the preliminary determination to issue a negative declaration has been made. The environmental review process generated mitigation measures that will reduce and adequately address all of the potential impacts from the proposed development and these are all included as conditions of approval of the permit. Therefore, no significant impacts are anticipated and as proposed and conditioned, the project is consistent with all of the applicable codes and policies of the zoning ordinance and the general plan. Therefore, staff recommends that the Board of Supervisors adopt the CEQA Mitigated Negative Declaration and Mitigation Measures and Reporting Program related to the proposed project certifying the Mitigated Negative Declaration for the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act, adopt the ordinance establishing a planned unit development and approve application number 151255 based upon the findings and conditions of approval as recommended by the Planning Commission. Thank you, that concludes my report. Okay, thank you. Do we have questions for many board members or the public first? Mr. Chair? Mr. Supervisor, Mr. Chair? Yes. This is Supervisor McPherson. I appreciate the thorough presentation. As I think everyone knows, the Mission Springs-Campson Conference Center is in the Fifth District. I really want to thank the Planning Staff and Commission for doing that thorough job of analyzing this proposed project and adding appropriate mitigations to the environmental impacts. COVID-19. Conditions. Over an hour. Conditions for approving this permit. So I appreciate that and would like to be in the position to make the motion when the time is correct to do so. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Chair, this is John Leopold. I just had one question. As part of our PUD requirements, it requires a specific community benefit. I was wondering if staff could say what that specific community benefit is. There will be a list of benefits that range from maintaining and improving the emergency access to the region, visual and aesthetic benefits in upgrading the existing camp. I'm trying to remember, I did not have, I don't have those right in front of me, additional landscaping and improvements to the area of access improvements. Those were the main catch-all phrases. Yeah, I think that should be made clearer in the information that we receive. And I consider a specific community benefit to be improvement of an access road for emergency. That is a specific community benefit. Improving the look of the buildings and the landscaping while important isn't really a specific community benefit in my estimation. And so I just think staff needs to work hard to make sure that there are clear, specific community benefits when PUDs are brought before the board. Okay, any other supervisors? Okay, we'll bring it back for a vote, right? Or no, public comment, I'm sorry. Yeah, the taxpayers that pay everybody's salary and build all our buildings, thank you. My name is Chuck Weissan. I'm the executive director of Mission Springs, Camps and Conference Center. And we have reviewed the staff reporting the staff so much for their thoughtfulness and thoroughness and their great communication throughout this entire process. Mission Springs is now 94 years old. A group got together in the 1920s and wanted to start a Christian camp in Santa Cruz region. That first year they spent that week at New Brighton Beach in Capitola. They had an opportunity to buy beachfront property, but they thought there were too many bugs and there was too much fog. So they turned down that opportunity and I'm still bitter to this day. The next year, they'd learned of 40 acres of land, one mile up Lockhart Gulch Road, from Mount Hermann and they purchased the property. Mission Springs has been the owner of the property now for 94 years. And for 94 years, we're proud to say we've been good stewards of our land. And on our land, we've been able to develop programs that have been extremely effective. We host all sorts of churches and community groups that come to the Santa Cruz mountains for retreat and conferences each summer. We start in June, hopefully, ending the second week in August. We provide a youth summer camp called Frontier Ranch. That serves close to 2,000 students ranging from fourth grade to eighth grade. We also host 5,000 public school and private school students with our outdoor education science camps, teaching students about our environment and being good stewards of it. Outdoor education happens the beginning of September through May of each year. We host for two weeks in the summer, Johnny and friends, an agency that helps mentally and physically challenge men and women and children to pull away for a week of fun and meaningful times as a family. We host Me One, which is a cancer camp. It's free of charge to any family that is experiencing cancer. They can have a vacation from cancer for that weekend. We host a foster care week in August and we wanna continue to provide these meaningful programs and the approval of this permit will allow us to do just that. By improving our facility, we will be able to provide even greater accessibility for everyone to enjoy Mission Springs. Not only we've been good stewards, but we've been good neighbors. In 2017, when Nelson Road was washed out, Mission Springs opened up our property to give access to all of our Nelson Road neighbors. And for weeks, we served our community and we continue and want to be that good neighbor. We've been in a capital campaign program since 2015 and we've been able to renovate our tabernacle, our sports court and now our pool. But our next phase is develop our dining hall and other lodges. We've reviewed and we've accepted the conditions in the report and we hope you will approve this project and help us move forward in implementing this master plan to help extend our services to even more people and generations to come. Thank you. Very welcome. Any other comments? And I don't see anybody in the community room. No, but we do have some web comments. Okay. Christine will read them. We have one gentleman, sir. Okay. We always have one. We'll wait on Christine then, hold on. Sorry. Good morning. I'm Dave Erickson. I'm a resident Mission Springs. My wife and I retired there a few years ago and we live at 230 Framie Circle. We trust that the supervisors will give their affirmative vote on this to develop Mission Springs. I've been going there since a child as my parents brought me and then attended the camps from fourth grade through high school and been going to conferences there ever since and really love the place. And now we're fortunate enough to live there. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. And comments from online. Christine. Hello. The first comment we have is from the username Nelson Road resident. We are conflicted how the expansion fits into the inclusive nature of Santa Cruz County being a community resource that strives to teach nature conservation to school-aged children. The Evangelical Covenant Church, the ECC, is also a radical, pietistic denomination in the evangelical Christian tradition that quote, believes abortion to be wrong and grieves whenever an abortion takes place, unquote, and officially opposes same-sex marriage. They have removed pastors for their pro-stands on women's right to choose gay marriage and the LGBT inclusion. The second comment I have is from Eden Cassidy. Greetings, Supervisor. I speak in opposition to Mission Springs expansion proposal. A tax exempt business that relies on the same infrastructure and emergency service that all of us private property owners pay so dearly to support through our property taxes should be held to a different standard when proposing to expand their business by 40% when there is no accompanying TOT or revenue provided by existing or expanded businesses to fund emergency service, transportation, fire protection, et cetera. In addition, this facility generates significant audible noise throughout our valley, reaching several dozen homes. When we first purchased off of Nelson Road in 2008, it was somewhat amusing, it no longer is, and definitely will be less so when 40% more, with 40% more noise. Any approval should require the noise mitigation plan also include one restriction of any future use of amplification and two restriction of audible noise to end no later than 3 p.m. And that is all we have for web comments. Those two, there's no more comments, right? Supervisor on the phone. You're ready for a motion at this point. We're ready, yeah. I think we had a motion. Mr. Chair, this is Supervisor McPherson. I support the proposal and want to thank Mission Springs Neighbors for contacting my office. I move the recommended actions. Okay, do we have a second? All second, I can second that, right? I'll do it. Okay. And then we'll call for a vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Your end? Aye. Coonerty? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Chair Caput? Aye. Thank you very much. So that passes unanimously. We have one more item, Chair Caput. The what? We have one more item. Right, right. I just want to thank the gentleman in the press room for helping us. We have some technical difficulty every now and then and he's been helping out quite a bit, so that's good. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so item 7.1 is the late addition to the agenda. This is recommended action as to adopt a resolution ratifying executive order number 2020-01, limiting restaurant delivery fees payable to third-party platforms. With the shelter-in-place order in effect, local restaurants are under severe restrictions that prohibit dine-in service and will only allow for takeout service or delivery. Many county residents utilize third-party platforms for takeout and delivery. Certain local restaurants are small businesses with few locations and, as such, have limited bargaining power to negotiate lower fees with these third-party platforms. As reflected in the attached executive order, restaurants are struggling to survive given the restrictions in place prohibiting dine-in service. Therefore, it was necessary to place an immediate cap on third-party platform delivery charges at 15% of the total amount of any online order. Staff believes that this will have a positive result in reducing the financial burden on the already struggling restaurant industry and it is consistent with action recently taken by the cities of San Francisco and Santa Cruz. This order will take effect at 11.59 p.m. on April 14th, 2020 and will be in effect until the shelter-in-place order is lifted. That concludes the staff report and County Council, Jason Heath and myself are available for any questions from the board. Sure. Do we have any questions from the board? I just have a comment. This is Zach and I just wanted to thank both County Council and the CAO as Supervisor Coonerty had mentioned for the very quick turnaround when you receive the outreach. Local businesses, especially the restaurant industry have been significantly impacted and these rates, the 30% rates that these delivery services, which functionally these local businesses are being forced to use is really impacting their bottom line and ability to stay afloat. So I think that this is an essential way to protect our small businesses and it's unfortunate that some of these companies are not partnering with these small businesses the way they should be. So I'm fully supportive of this and appreciate the work of County Council and the CAO to do it so quickly. This is John Leopold and I appreciate the work on this. It is amazing to me that during a time of crisis that some of these services will be seeking to to stick it to these restaurants who are just trying to make it. I'm glad we're able to take some action and I'll support this when we vote on it. Comments, anyone from the public? There's no one downstairs to speak and there are no web comments on this item. None. None. Okay. I guess we need a motion and a second, right? I'll make the motion. Second. Second. Second. I think, well, John, I think Supervisor Coonerty will speech out by about a second for the second. Okay, so we have a motion and a second. So we'll roll, call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Thank you. Do we have anything in closed session? We do have a closed session, but nothing reportable. Okay, but we do have a closed session. Yes. Okay. Nothing reportable. Our next meeting will be, gotta look it up here. April 28th. Next public meeting will be April 28th, 2020, which is the Tuesday at 9 a.m. right here. And also on the telephone. Thank you.