 Good morning. I will now call to order the regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. It is 9 a.m., March 22nd, 2022. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. Ferson. Here. Koenig. Here. Thank you, Terry. Have a quorum. Thank you. We'll now have a moment of silence and a pledge of allegiance. Are there any members of the board that would like to dedicate this moment to anyone or anything? Seeing none. Moment of silence. Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all issues. We'll move to item three, consideration of late additions to the agenda. CAO Palacios, are there any late additions? We have no late additions or corrections to the agenda today. All right, thank you. We'll move to item four, announcement by board members of items to be removed from the consent agenda to the regular agenda. Any board members wishing to remove an item from consent? Seeing none, we'll move to item five, public comment. Any person may address the board during its public comment period. Speakers may not exceed two minutes in length or the time limit established by the chair, which will be two minutes. And individuals may speak only once during public comment. All public comments must be directed to an item listed on today's consent agenda, closed session agenda, yet to be heard on regular agenda or a topic not on the agenda that is within the jurisdiction of the board. Board members will not take actions or respond immediately to any public communication presented regarding topics not on the agenda, but may choose to follow up later either individually or a subsequent board of supervisors agenda. Public comments will normally be received by the board for a period, not to exceed 30 minutes. And we do have a very packed agenda today, so we're going to try to keep to that this morning. And if at the end of this period, additional persons wish to address the board, the public comment period may be continued to the last item on the agenda. We'll begin, please approach the podium. Good morning to the five supervisors that are here, Heath, Carlos. Well, you know, I'm still not going to stand for a pledge of allegiance to a corporate flag. You know, the next building over has the US flag and the American flag that don't have a gold fringe around it. And you still have the LGBT plus pedophile flag? Why? You know, there's a couple of items on the agenda that have to on the consent agenda that have to do with different frequency technologies. Number 35, number 32, number 29, and number 42. It seems on the consent agenda number 22 that you guys are going to rubber stamp having these virtual meetings. I mean, how many of you supervisors actually live in this county? You know, that's an open question. I was just introduced to a really cool corporate report on March 19th, number 416. He went out and laid out what the globalist Justin Trudeau who was following the UN agenda 2030, the seven different areas where they're outlining the culling and changing of the population on earth. And then, you know, he was trying to be funny. Vattemar Putans has the same seven agenda points. So I'm not seeing much different in this group that you guys are not promoting this globalist agenda. You know, there's a lot of things that I would rather talk about in this room than some of the dark subjects put on here showing up. I wish more members of the public were. Thank you, Mr. Whitman. I have coffee for all. Hello, supervisor. Thank you for having me. I'm here in reference to case 2100427 child abduction in Poland for my three kids coming up on two years. We should supervisor Manu help with initially. I was here twice already in June and August, 2021. To plead my case last year. Here's your problem. My case is still stuck for Santa Cruz DA. After going through two lawyers and based on my conversation with the federal government that are ready to help me out, but they cannot because Santa Cruz DA office has not yet submitted affidavit. After multiple communication with the DA office, all the data point that I'm getting around around. I got word that my wife got a strong network in same this town. Mr. Supervisor, as my witness and the entity who can help me to get my kids back, I'm pleading you for a third time. As a father of three children, I haven't seen my children for almost two years. I'm being told the DA is talking with Natalia in Poland. But here has a fact. It's been two years already. She will not come back. In fact, with the civil route Poland with all the justification Poland protected her and she's still in Poland. And the DA seems to miss a point. If it's about the children, they can come back tomorrow with a war in Ukraine getting closer to Polish border. Who knows what can happen? Now I'm being told to be patient and stay quiet. Seriously. Two years when one believe that this is racism at play, if you're in my shoes, would you remain silent or quiet? All I want is my children back. And the only blocker right now is Afi David from a district attorney office that's being held for a reason I know nothing about. I want this to go in public records and for you to be my witness. These are three American children. We say one nation under God for justice for all. That's all I'm asking. Thank you, Mr. Angkorba. Thank you. Gary Richard Arnold, chairman, board of supervisors. I see that the county government is becoming more fascist by the week. The doors were not open to the public until five minutes before this. And the old days would be a few minutes after eight o'clock. The podium people would have three minutes. We were promised by the chairman right here that he'd be different than the Panetta puppets that occupy the board of supervisors presently. They have not reported of their parallel government ambag which was actually a part of the program of the British Fabian Socialist Society on regional government. You haven't reported it. You're not reporting who are members of that. They're calling for the abolition of cities and counties. You're not even representing your constituents for their sovereignty. You're literally lying about it. It includes healthcare, it includes police departments and sheriff's departments. This is the plan, no different than 2030. The Socialist Party, the Labor Party in England has a emblem here with a sheep and wolf's clothing. That's our Ryan Coonerty went to the London School of Economics where they preached this stuff and he's practiced it here, including the support of every communist front or agent throughout this area. In fact, you maintain two plaques for red Chinese and Soviet Chinese espionage agent belonging to four different spy rings. It says their ultimate goal of the parties of the Socialist and Communist International is nothing less than world government. Membership of the United Nations must be made universal. That's exactly what you're doing and be trained in the United States. Thank you, Mr. Arnold. Anyone else here in the chambers who would like to address the board? Seeing none, is there anyone on Zoom or the telephone? Yeah, multiple. Jeffrey Ellis, your microphone is available. Hi, this is Jeffrey Ellis and I had a comment about item 17 on today's agenda. The board has got a lot of pushback from the folks living on your Park Avenue in Soquel regarding this homeless project. And the pushback is deservedly so and what I would have hoped the Board of Supervisors takeaway was is that you need some neighborhood outreach and engagement and buy-in before you go ahead with a homeless project like this which did not happen in Soquel. And yet looking at item 17, it says that you wanna develop 600 beds of shelter and transitional housing that three locations have been identified but not named in the documents. And there's no information in there that says you're gonna do outreach and engagement of the people who live in these places where you're proposing to put in a homeless shelter. You need to do that. I mean, at the risk of being outrageous let me remind you who you are. You are elected officials, local officials. You are not state bureaucrats. And your job is to do what we elected you to do and not the state trying to ramp up these shelters. Thank you. Mr. Ellis. Colin, user one, your microphone is available. This is Marilyn Garrett at your last meeting you referred to the Ukraine and what was going on. And of course our tax dollars pay about half our tax dollars for military. So I'd like to refer to globalresearch.ca that's from Canada and the research of Michelle Chafudovsky. This is an update, authors note an update and the title is nuclear war is quote on the table, unquote. And then it says build awareness, say no to Joe Biden's 1.2 trillion nuclear weapons program. He states, today the dangers of military escalation are beyond description. What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a world war three scenario. Vladimir Putin's statement on February 21st, 2022 what then responds to you as threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia. Despite Joe Biden's reassurance that the US would not be resorting to a first strike nuclear attack against an enemy of America. The article below first published in February 2006 addresses US military doctrine focusing on the integration of nuclear and conventional warfare. The results of this research were subsequently integrated into my book entitled towards the world war three scenario, the dangers of nuclear war, global research publishers 2011. Having carefully reviewed US military for more than 20 years, I can confirm that under the Biden administration, preemptive nuclear war against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea's quote on the table. Check out global research.ca, thank you. Lenise Gutierrez, your microphone is available. Great, good morning. Lenise Gutierrez with Comcast, happy women's history month. I just wanted to take the opportunity to say hello to the board of supervisors and to give a quick update on digital equity on behalf of Comcast. We've had our internet essentials program for over 11 years, a low cost internet program for families to qualify. And it's been at 995 and because of that affordable connectivity program, this is a huge opportunity to get more families connected to wanted to mention that. Also wanted to mention we have lift zones where we provide free community Wi-Fi to different community centers and we do have a couple launched in the County of Santa Cruz, one of which is at the Nueva Vista Family Resource Center. And also wanted to mention our Comcast Rise program. It's an opportunity for us to support small businesses, specifically Black, Indigenous, Latinx, people of color on businesses. And now we've opened up this opportunity of women-owned businesses. It's a way for either a technology makeover or advertising assistance through a grant process. And so we have applications are open up until June 17th for this round and would love to see more people apply, more businesses apply from the County of Santa Cruz. And just wanted to say, we're here to support the County and you're not profits in your small businesses. And last but not least on broadband infrastructure, we've invested over $15 billion since 2017 in our infrastructure. And we already offer gig services to residential business customers within our footprint with a road to 10G. So thank you so much for the opportunity and hope to see you soon. Thanks. Thank you, Ms. Gutierrez. Peter Galblum, your microphone is available. Thank you. At this point, I will talk later on the sheriffs and military equipment inventory. But for now, I just wanted to say something that I just discovered yesterday, that it's impossible to get through on the telephone to any of you gentlemen called the main office but nobody answered, I could leave a voicemail but could not get to any of your offices, your specific offices. I called back to leave another message and the operator answered and I asked to be transferred to one of your offices and she said, that doesn't happen. There is nobody and I could not leave a voicemail for anybody. She had to take down the message. That's obviously not optimum. It's obviously a very poor public relations systems for you guys. I don't know what she's taking down. I don't know if she's taking down accurately without the ability to leave a voicemail. There's no guarantee that your offices will get the message clearly, directly and fully. So I really urge you to create some kind of system where the public can get hold of you and leave you, at least leave you a voicemail if not talk to you directly. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Galblum. Ratchmat, your microphone is available. Have you heard now? Yes. Thank you. There's so much going on. I'm one of the people in this county who has to spend a lot of time working in the outside world and I miss a lot of things that are really going on in the county. And I couldn't agree more with all of the speakers so far, especially related to Assembly Bill 481. This county should stand against that. And I agree that the entire board members are not taking enough time to reach out to the community to really hear what everyone has to say. We need to have more meetings and the idea of limiting the speaker's time to only two minutes is not acceptable to me. I mean, three minutes was barely enough. And I'm one of those who occasionally had the time to attend an in-person session in the room when the room would be crowded side by side and all board members would be present and we'd have to stare us in the face and we can look them in the face. And there needs to be some coherence between the elected people to this community and those of us who care about things. So the military issue is a big topic and it should be removed for further study and comment with the community. And it's certainly against item 35. This county should be spending more money on addressing our homeless situation and those that are facing various addiction issues. So I appreciate some consideration and thought going in that direction but I'll yield to the next speaker. Thank you, Rockman. Yep, Douglas Deitch, your microphone is available. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes, you'll need to meet the second device so that there's not an echo. Okay. How about now? Yes. Good morning, Douglas Deitch, Aptos, California. In 1987, Gary Patton passed our well ordinance. Our well ordinance requires that the Board of Supervisors hold a public hearing any time that there is an overdraft of our groundwater basins. Of course, all of our groundwater basins are in overdraft now. The last public hearing that was held, this is for you, Supervisor Chairman, because you set the agenda. The last public hearing, the last time it dealt with by the Board of Supervisors, I think it was in 2009. I have a plan by which we're gonna solve all of our water problems here and it involves state intervention by the State Water Resources Control Board of all water management. County Santa Cruz is the only jurisdiction I'm aware of that hasn't declared actually a groundwater emergency. Please follow the law, Gary Patton, 1987 law, agendize consideration of holding a public hearing to declare a groundwater emergency and let's move forward with this so we can deal with our water problems here and people will be following their oath of office and our laws. The late supervisor, Judge Almquist, at this website, Pogonip.org forward slash ALM.htm wrote a very extensive memo in this Supervisor McPherson in 1998 that I suggested you all please review and bring this before the Board. Let's declare an emergency and I can secure us $2.1 billion of Build Back Better Federal Infrastructure funding and create the 21,000 acre Monterey Bay Estuarine National Monument, which will include all the water from the Castor Real Reclamation Plant, 33,000 acre feet a year of recycled water to be used regionally, all with what's called OPM. It's other people's money. Thank you, good morning. Thanks, Mr. Ditch. Roller 1401, your microphone is available. Hi, good morning, Board of Supervisors. This is Diane Nichols and I'm calling concerning, in part, item 29 on this consent agenda, but also the overall issue of wireless radiation in this county. I just wanna inform you and the public that the U.S. Court of Appeals, the DC Circuit, so that affects the entire country, published its decision on August 13th of 2021. The court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission failed to consider the non-cancer evidence regarding adverse health effects of wireless technology when it decided that its 1996 Radio Frequency Emission Guidelines protect the public health. The court further stated, this is just last year, the FCC completely failed to acknowledge, let alone respond to comments concerning the impact of RF radiation on the environment. The record contains substantive evidence of potential environmental harms, potential environmental harms, that's from the court's mouth. You just passed last month, or several weeks ago, to put 5G wireless transmitters on a number, I think over 20 public buildings. And 5G, first of all, we don't even have proper regulations yet that protect the public, even for 4G. 5G is the worst. There's a study that just came out from the Radiation Protection Foundation, published in the journal, it's Swedish, meds, I can't pronounce it, excuse me, on 1, 2022. And it found that measurements before and after the installation of 5G on the roof showed that 5G caused a massive increase in radiation in the apartment. And... Thank you, Ms. Nickel. There are no other speakers on Zoom. Thank you, then we'll proceed to item six, action on the consent agenda. Is there any member of the board which should speak to the consent agenda? Yes, Mr. Chair, Supervisor Friend, please. Thank you. I'll get started. First, I'd just like to speak on item 29, which is the broadband item, some appreciation for the new director on this report back. I do have some just general concerns on the timeline, which I've already had an opportunity to share with him, but I'd just like to make sure my colleagues are aware. I mean, as we already, as already stands, we've had some slippage with the deployment timeline of what we had anticipated for it is now the Crucio contract. I would have come to the board last year, I had an outline that we would already have started so about four or five months behind when the original deployment strategy was planned for that. I'm just concerned about the continued timeline on the actual Crucio deployment regarding that. But on the additional direction that the board had provided in regards to having an actual timeline and plan regarding the either the ILJ or the ARPA more broadly speaking funding, it's good to hear that the funding coming from the state is gonna equate to almost $11 million. We could know about that as soon as next month from the CPUC. My concern is just that is, even though I'm fully supportive of executing and updating the broadband master plan, which is, for those of you that have been on the board for a while, it recognizes an item that I brought forward some years back to have us be competitive for this kind of funding. I'm just concerned about how long it'll take to execute that. If we're sitting on this 10 or 11 million dollars, we know that there's a number of locations that have already been identified as having a need and what it'll take to deploy that. So that's one of my main concerns. I support it, I'm concerned about applying for state funding and how long it'll take to learn that we get the award from that point, how long it would take to do an RFP, how long it'll take to award an RFP beyond that, how long it'll take to complete the plan and then at the point of the end of that, finally deploying the actual funding. I just don't wanna get our process in the way of actually serving people's needs in regards to this internet funding or broadband funding that's coming down the pike. And so what I'm gonna ask is just for some additional direction that under our April meeting since the April 12th meeting, since that appears to be the timeline of when we would know more about when A, we've received the funding from the state and B what the requirements are for the technical assistance grant. A, I just wanna know, the additional direction for that meeting would be to come back with more information about this for one because I'm just concerned about the slippage in the timeline. How can we expedite the deployment of this to the community now that we're finally getting state and federal funding for it would be part number one. Part number two is what would the plan be if we don't receive any of the funding from the state on the technical assistance grant? I think the county should be, if this is an essential thing to update the broadband master plan in order to show underserved or unserved locations for this funding, then it's something that the county should just be funding. I'm just concerned about, it could be months, post-star, July breaks that we would actually learn that we've received the funding. But then we do an RFP, that's 30, 60, 90 days. Then we work an RFP, then we actually fund it and then we go and do the plan and we're talking mid-2023 or at some point before we're actually able to deploy those funds. So it's a pretty broad additional direction. It's just really to come back and on the April 12th meeting with an additional understanding of what this means and to have a plan be because I just don't feel like the current timeline is expeditious enough for what the board's interests are. So I think we're going to move on items 32 and 35 which are related that I brought forward on virtual currency. I really think that this is an opportunity for not just the state, but the county once the state puts these guardrails in place to really look at how we improve blockchain technologies at the local level, as well as quite frankly, use virtual currency options here for payment. I think that, I mean, it's undeniable that technology and the virtual currencies across the country and across the world tend to be those that are either underbanked, unbanked or they're having to sort of financial, have been left out of the financial system. I think that these two state bills will help provide those guardrails that are understandably of concern for accepting virtual currencies in particular around volatility issues. But one of them helps establish that the money can be converted immediately upon the point of transaction. And I think that should these state bills go forward, I think that this board needs to very seriously consider moving forward with having this as an option for some of our local payments because I think there's a large swath of the population in our community that is left out of the traditional financial service system that this would help smooth over. On the second part of that, I think we need to explore more blockchain related technologies and everything from what the planning department does and purchasing and procurement down to marriage licenses. And I think that this board should take a leadership role in looking at that moving forward so I'd appreciate your support on items 32 and 35 that can help start that process at the state level. Item 36, in regards to the health district, I have to say I was just absolutely, I was blown away by the high quality and caliber of applicants that applied to serve on this district. This board has shown its commitment to health equity and access across not just this county, but Monterey County and the people that are being proposed that came from the subcommittee that supervisor Caput and I served on, I really believe are a remarkable cross section of our community. They have health and financial backgrounds. There's a large, there's a geographic diversity element. There's a individual diversity element. I think that it's a group of individuals and community members, both in our community and Monterey County for that matter, since both counties are represented that will really help transition this district and put it on the right footing. It just was an absolutely amazing group of people that applied and it was very difficult to actually make the decision down to these five, but these five are a great starting point. So I appreciate the board support on that. And the last is appreciation to supervisor Caput for his leadership on item 38. His office had reached out to me in regards to this veterans home that's trying, that Monterey County is working to get established. Supervisor Caput has been very steadfast in his support for regional veterans and I just wanted to make sure that it was acknowledged that he is continuing to advocate throughout the region for this work. And I was very pleased to be able to join with him on support of this item. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Caput. Thank you. I should have brought this up right before the moment of silence, but I just want to note that Steve Bankhead of Watsonville passed away about two weeks ago and Diane Porter-Cooley of the Pogrow Valley passed away also. Those are two wonderful people that I knew and I just wanted to acknowledge that. On item number 38, it was already mentioned by Supervisor Friend that is our support for building a, in the Monterey area, a hospital and housing for veterans. There are five different locations in California. All of them have like a two to three year waiting list for veterans to get into. And one in the Monterey County, but be wonderful. There's one in Youndsville, California, up north. There's also one in Fresno, one in Los Angeles and one in the San Diego area. So it would be a wonderful asset for the people in our area. And then item number 68, share that with Supervisor Friend also. That's the Hazeldale Road. And it's good to see that that's finally gonna be fixed, hopefully allowing people to get in and out of that wild area kind of, it's been neglected for a lot of years. And especially after a storm or something like that, the roads are closed. So this should be a great improvement in that area. And that's about it. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have no comments on the consent agenda today. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. On the item number 26, the Voters Choice Act, I wanna thank our County Clerk, Trisha Weber and her staff for bringing this item today. And all the work that this team has done to implement the Voters Choice Act as the former Secretary of State of California. I'm always applaud efforts to make voting easier and more accessible. And people should also rest assured that our voting system is secure and not just to Santa Cruz County, but in California as well. And it's important that folks have confidence that they can securely exercise their right to vote. Thank you very much to the Elections Department. In addition to just a few comments on the, item number 29, the broadband plan that Supervisor Friend mentioned, I think expanding broadband in the underserved areas is critical. It's a long-standing strategic goal of the county as well as the 58 counties of the California State Association of Counties, which I'm a member. And I'm pleased to see that we are positioned so well to receive the funding. And I do hope that we can make this happen as quickly as possible and take Supervisor Friend's suggestions to heart. On item 49, the Federal Health Provider Relief Grant. I'm glad to see the county is going to have some additional coverage on this. Santa Cruz County and our partners do provide a great deal of housing, food and health services to those most vulnerable to the COVID pandemic. We're proud of these efforts in Santa Cruz County and I appreciate that we are receiving this federal support to cover some costs. Our whole, especially our health services and human services departments really deserve a big round of applause. On item 56, related to the mental health services, I want to thank our health services agency for this excellent report. We're doing more to address mental health than most people realize. I especially appreciate the mobile outreach that we're doing as well as having mental health liaisons with our law enforcement teams. But I do, I want to ask maybe a question of our CEO. I support these efforts, but I wonder how we might continue them after the grant funding is exhausted. Is that just to be determined at this point or what's the situation there? Yeah, I think we're going to have to take a really hard look about the sustainability of these positions, but we're certainly working on it and it's a great concern to me and the budget manager as well. So we will definitely be looking at what the sustainable options are for the future. Okay, good, because I think it's really critical. And item 62, 3, 7, and 71, 2, the storm repairs. I just want to offer my ongoing thanks to our county's continuous work on repairing roads after the winter storms, and not just the storms from the several years ago, but more recently as well. I mean, we're repairing roads. Now that we have some additional funding, dating back to the 2016, 17 storms. And it's just not in my district, as was mentioned, it's in the others impacted areas. And I want to thank our public works team again. They've done a fantastic job with the amount of funding that they have. And when they have a little more money to do something about it, they get right on it. And it's much appreciated by everybody throughout the county, but especially the people in our mountainous areas, like my fifth district. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I have just a few comments. On item 28, the memorandum of understanding between county fire and central fire. I'm glad both sides have agreed to continue this contract and hope we continue to see more collaboration between fire agencies in our county to improve the delivery of services. On item 29, the broadband infrastructure plan, I'm supportive of the additional direction by Supervisor Friend, and expediting that process as much as possible. On item 34, supporting the designation of US bike route 95. This is a route that would go all the way from the Mexico border in California, all the way up to the Canadian border. And by supporting this designation, we'll continue to build on our county's reputation for being a great place to ride a bike. And I want to thank also the cities of Capitola and Santa Cruz for already signing on. And then on item 60, the agreement with Camino for a web-based permitting guide. I'm really excited to see this move forward, getting our permitting process more streamlined and simplifying our workflows is really gonna be necessary to build the housing we need. And we're gonna talk a lot more about on items later on this agenda. So excited to see this moving forward. That's all my comments and emotion would be appropriate at this time. I'd move the consent agenda with the additional direction of Supervisor Friend included. Second. Motion by Supervisor McPherson, seconded by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk, please call the roll. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Capit. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. We'll now move on to item seven, to consider approval and concept of ordinance amending Santa Cruz County code, sections 4.24.020, 4.24.080, 4.24.110, and 4.24.130, and adding a new section, 4.24.105. And schedule the ordinance for final adoption on April 12th, 2022, is outlined by the Auditor, Controller, Treasurer, Tax Collector. And for a report on this item, we have our Auditor, Controller, Treasurer, Tax Collector, Edith Driscoll. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Koenig and members of the board. Edith Driscoll, Auditor, Controller, Treasurer, Tax Collector. Also with me today is Laura Bowers, the Chief Auditor, Controller. The Auditor, Controller, Treasurer, Tax Collector's Office, is requesting an amendment, to chapter 4.24 of the county ordinance, regarding transient occupancy tax. As background, the unincorporated area of the County of Santa Cruz has 19 businesses, classified as a hotel, motel, or inn. We also have over a thousand, different properties listed as vacation rentals on platforms, such as Airbnb and VRBO. It is the Tax Collector's responsibility to collect transient occupancy tax from each of these owners and operators. This TOT, as it's known, is collected currently on a monthly basis. With the growth in the number of vacation rental listings over the past several years, transient occupancy taxes have become an important revenue source for the County's general fund. And the need to collect all taxes due to the County is critical. The ability for the Tax Collector to enforce the transient occupancy tax collection requirements will benefit from revisions to the ordinance as proposed. We are requesting the following revisions to the transient occupancy tax ordinance, to address these matters, as well as to add additional clarity to the ordinance. We are alphabetizing the definitions and updating the definition of transient occupancy facility, as well as adding a definition for vacation rental property and hotel rental in order to distinguish this type of facility from a standard hotel. We are requesting a change in the required reporting frequency of TOT from monthly to quarterly. This will reduce the reporting burden for owners and operators, and will be in line with many other counties similar to the County of Monterey, our neighbor. The tax administrator would have the option of requiring monthly reporting for various and specific vacation rental operators if necessary. We are removing the requirement for recreational housing units to submit a return statement. We are adding a section that allows the County to collect fees if unpaid taxes are discovered after the performance of an audit. These fees include cost recovery for the audit and attorney fees in the event of litigation. We are adding a section that allows the tax administrator to record a lien on real property owned by the vacation rental operator that has not remitted tax penalties and interest due within three years after the performance of the audit. This provision is used by several counties as well as the city of Santa Cruz to ensure that unpaid taxes are recovered in the event of a transfer of ownership. We are requesting a threshold of $10,000 for which appeals, meaning that only assessed amounts of taxes, interest and penalties exceeding 10,000 may be appealed to the Board of Supervisors. Finally, we are also adding the authority for the tax administrator to waive penalties on delinquent tax, transient occupancy tax. Sometimes situations arise in which it would be beneficial for myself as the tax administrator to have the option to waive these penalties if the owner or the operator wishes to pay off their delinquent taxes and is acting in good faith. This concludes my presentation and both Laura and myself are welcome available for any questions. Thank you. Are there any questions for members of the Board? I just had one which was the $10,000 limit for an appeal. What percentage of appeals would that basically come to today in terms of the appeals you're currently seeing? Well, I can give you this as history in my number of years in this position. We have had one appeal that has come forth all the way to your Board and it was for amount of a few hundred dollars. And so what we are trying to do is streamline the time that your Board would spend on an appeal to making it to a higher level. I meet with many property owners in an informal matter, in an informal way, but we have only so far had one that has come all the way to the Board. Okay, thank you. Seeing no questions from the Board, are there any comments from members of the public? I just have a question here. So you're welcome to approach the podium. Do I need to use this? That would be helpful, yes. We have an online audience. Can you all hear me? Yes, sir. I apologize if I am not following the proper protocol. I just walked in. I didn't know what your particular procedure was in terms of being a public commentation, but I wanted to speak on the consent agenda regarding the selection of the Board of Directors of the new Barrow Valley Health Care District. So is that okay at this time? I'm sorry, sir, unfortunately not. Okay. But you're welcome to submit a comment. And why is that? We've passed the time. At this public comment period is strictly for the Atom of Forest, which is item seven, and changes to the tier. So I did not arrive early enough to do that. Is that correct? I'm sorry. Yeah, you missed the open public comment period for the consent agenda and other public comments. Okay. And then what other avenue would I have? You're welcome to submit comment to us via email or to call the office. Okay. I'm not happy with that, but I understand the protocol. Okay, gentlemen. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Seeing no one else here in the chambers, is there anyone in our online or telephone audience that would like to make a comment on item seven? There are no speakers to this item. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. I move the recommended actions. Second. Motion by Supervisor Friend, second by Supervisor McPherson. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Supervisor Caput. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you. Motion passes four zero. Aye. Yeah. Okay, thank you. That ordinance passing, we'll see that again on our next regular agenda for final read. We'll now move to item eight, to consider approval and concept of ordinance amending County Code chapter 5.60 related to tobacco retailing licenses and schedule the ordinance for final adoption on April 12th, 2022. As outlined in the memorandum of the director of health services. And for a report on this item, we have our director of health services, Monica Morales. How's that? Hi, good morning all. I wanted just to kind of provide a little bit of context. Today we wanted to share some updates per the memo that you have in front of you pertaining to our tobacco retail licensing. And so part of it for us as a team, we've been thinking over the past couple of months on ways that we can continue to really curb the use of tobacco products in our community in our County. Specifically, we know that for the past 10 years we've seen a decrease of tobacco use. However, we've also seen an increase in e-cigarettes and from that lens, the department has taken multiple strategies. The strategy of prevention, thinking about community education, thinking about outreach, pushing our media campaigns. But we also know that the strategy around licensing of tobacco retailers and also education of retailers works. And so what you'll see here in front of you this morning is thinking about ways for us to come up to par when it comes to the state and federal updates around tobacco retail licensing and also ways that we can continue to decrease the sell for underage youth. The memo highlights a couple of strategies that we want to share with you in terms of clarifying the current code language, specifically for code chapter 5.60. And also thinking about specific, we get a lot of phone calls to clarify the language of who does it apply to, exactly what are the length of days and also license revocation and what does that mean? So we want to kind of clear some of that language. And finally thinking about fee increases in lieu of hearings for the actual retailers that we have found have sold tobacco products to underage youth. So I want to hand it off now to our division director Marilyn Underwood to really kind of dive in into some of those details with you this morning. I have a little button on the base of the microphone. Yeah, there you go. There we go. Good morning, Chairman Koenig and board. Thank you to the director as she started to outline what we're looking for today to amend ordinance 5.6. I'm joined here with Andrew Strayer who is our consumer protection manager who's in charge of this program within our office. Also on the teams or Zoom is Dr. Gail Newell, the health officer as the authority for this is under her authority and she's worked with us as well as our partners in public health division and the sheriff who all have parts to play in this tobacco retail license ordinance. We're focused primarily on the issues around enforcement and this comes to light as we've had since 2018 the sheriff has had a grant to run a decoy operations and this is to go into our 105 different retail operations that's our license to sell tobacco and have decoys attempt to buy tobacco and they are underaged. Many do not sell to the decoy but we have had 19 violations during that time for 17 facilities. Two of them have had multiple times when they've sold to a decoy. And what has resulted is in that unfortunately on the enforcement side is that it's very complicated. We did offer something called a stipulated fine and what we're proposing is to change that stipulated fine. So for those entities they could choose that it would be a stiffer stipulated fine and also avoid some along appeal process that has been very difficult to run for our division very administratively heavy. Along with that we have some other things that I could go through here and we're modifying section 5.6.6 to specify that a spouse, domestic partner or a business partner of a violator cannot apply for licensing. When a violator's license has been suspended violating modifying section 5.6.1 to clarify calls for suspension or revocation of a license. Also within that same section we're wanna clarify the suspension times that are to be consecutive. We wanna remove the requirement that the appeal hearing take place within 20 days. We wanna increase again the fines and amounts of during the for the stipulated fine. And lastly to align ourselves with federal law this is a cleanup part. We do wanna eliminate the language throughout military personnel age and years and older being allowed to be enter a tobacco only facility. So with that today we're asking you to consider the approval and concept of the attached ordinance amending county code 5.6 related to tobacco retail licensing and schedule the ordinance for second reading and final adoption April 12th, 2022. I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you to the entire HSA team here. Any questions from members of the board? Seeing none, any comments from members of the public? There are no speakers to this item. All right, then I'll return to the board for action. I'll move the recommended action. Thank you for your efforts in the past and now into the future. And I'll second with appreciation for all the work on this. All right, motion by Supervisor McPherson, second by Supervisor Friend. I'll just add that I know we've had some bad actors in the first district and I appreciate these changes. Definitely curbing tobacco youth among youths among youths is essential. And so I thank you for your work on this. If there are no further comments or discussion then clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes 5-0. Did you get my aye on number seven? We did, Supervisor Caput, thank you. Yeah, we had a little disruption here at the office. All right, thank you again to the HSA team. That ordinance will return for a second read at our April 12th meeting. It will now proceed to item nine to consider an approval to consider approval and concept of uncodified ordinance to adopt military equipment use policy pursuant to assembly bill 481, adding military equipment to the county's policies and procedures manual as military equipment use policy and add section 1600 under title seven of the county's policies and procedures manual pursuant to assembly bill AB 481 to increase the county's transparency to the public and schedule the uncodified ordinance for a final adoption on April 12th, 2022 and direct staff to return to the board on or before May 10th, 2023 to provide an annual report required by AB 481 as outlined in the memorandum of the Sheriff's Corner. And for presentation, we have Sheriff Jim Hart. Morning, Chair Koenig. Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner, morning board. Today we're gonna just give you a brief overview of what assembly bill 481 is and then talk about some of the equipment that we're using and then at the end, we're gonna ask for your consent to continue using the existing equipment that we have. So the purpose, we're gonna talk a little bit about the purpose of AB 481. And this was a series of police reform bills that came through the legislature and the governor signed off in September. And we're gonna talk a little bit about funding, what the definition of military equipment is. We do have a policy that we've put together over the last couple of months, policy 706, that is attached to our policy book and posted on our website. And then we're gonna talk about the citizen complaint process. If somebody has a concern about the type of equipment that we're using and then also reporting requirements and community engagement. We've done some substantial community engagement and we've had very little interest in this item, less than 10 people attended our community meeting. So as I stated before, this bill was signed in September, took effect on January one and it establishes the requirements for acquisition and use of military equipment. And at the end of the day with this law in place, your board of supervisors is now the oversight group for what kind of equipment that we use at the sheriff's office. The local police departments are in the same position as we are. However, they're reporting to their city councils in terms of what kind of equipment that they use. And then as I stated, we've already had our policy and our public hearing and if we go to our second reading in April, then we will meet the requirements of having this put in play by May 1st of 2022. And if there's something that, if there's some sort of equipment that your board does not approve, then we're required to seize using that equipment within 180 days of your guys' order on that. So we're gonna talk about the current equipment here in a moment and also how we fund it. But we generally fund through, as you well know, the general fund and then also some federal grants. I wanna be super clear on this. We do not participate in the federal 1033 program where the military gifts surplus equipment to local police agencies. We have not participated that. We don't have any equipment from the 1033 program. And then I've checked with the local police departments and none of them participate in the federal 1033 program as well. The reason why we wanna talk about that is that this assembly bill doesn't distinguish how the items are purchased, whether they're given through the 1033 program or purchased with county general fund dollars. And so here's a listing of some of the military equipment that we're gonna talk about today. A lot of it's not military equipment. For example, our drones we buy on Amazon, are some of the vehicles are simply patrol cars with what we use as command posts. So they're not the traditional sense of what we believe to be military equipment. However, it's what the legislature asked for in this bill. And then this is just what our policy includes. Policy 706 and for this board, the policy talks about the approval process for the equipment and then also the community engagement and annual report aspect of it. And so today I have Sergeant Dan Robbins from my administration bureau who did a lot of work on this project. And he's gonna talk to you about the equipment that we have in our inventory as of today. Yeah. I hit that button. Thank you, sir. So as you'll see as we go through our inventory, most of these items are less lethal items. So we'll starting with category one, we have three different robots assigned at our office. One's assigned to our SWAT team and two are assigned to our bomb team. Both of those items are typically used to get a view of dangerous situations, whether that be someone barricaded inside a home or suspicious devices. We additionally have several drones, 26 to be exact. Those are primarily used for search and rescue, suspicious person, I should say, persons involved in violent crimes that are maybe out in the community that have fled from us and also crime scene documentation. We already submit an annual report regarding the use of our drones as well. Never gonna thank you, Sheriff. Additionally, another interesting thing about this bill is that we do have to list equipment that we anticipate using from outside agencies. After numerous talks with our other law enforcement partners in the community, we determined that the Santa Cruz Police Department's Bayer Cat would be an item that should be listed because it's a regional asset. They got it through a grant several years ago. Our personnel don't maintain it. They don't drive it. They simply sit inside of it during officer rescue situations such as what we saw with Sergeant Gutswiller, as well as critical incidents involving the mention of weapons. Additionally, we have a sheriff's office armored van that's a white sprinter van outfitted with armor. That is not something that goes out on routine patrol. It's used for the same circumstances as mentioned below for those rescue missions and other critical incidents with mentions of weapons. Also, as part of this assembly bill, we do have to list vehicles that are used to direct law enforcement during critical incidents. So you can see a couple of these that we have here. Those vehicles really serve a variety of purposes, whether that be search and rescue, drone vehicles, bomb squad, our crisis negotiation teams, or just a command post by our lieutenants out in the field. These vehicles are clearly marked to belong to sheriff's office vehicles. And not only do we use them, but commonly other agencies within the county that don't have a bomb team or a search and rescue team or a drone team will rely on us to provide those services. We do have three firearms that we believe qualified under this, which are the AR-10 precision rifles. These are used by our SWAT team members and they train with these on a monthly basis. And additionally, they have different types of ammunition with those rifles as well. As you can see a training round, a round design for glass and then their standard issued round. Additionally, we have several firearms accessories and launching projectiles. These items are strictly maintained by our SWAT team and they're used for the deployment of chemical agents or as you can see with our 40 millimeter launcher used to port windows so we can get fresh air inside a home that we may have deployed chemical agents. Additionally, we have numerous diversionary devices and chemical agents. For our diversionary devices, those are only carried by our SWAT team as well. Those could be used in a variety of high-risk situations such as hostage rescue. And additionally, typically what we've seen with the use of our SWAT team is that these will be deployed on the exterior of the house after we've tried negotiating with the persons inside, given commands, and we've been met with no response. Our robots aren't able to make contact with them. They will deploy a diversionary device on the exterior just as a loud noise to get their attention and it's been very successful in getting people to surrender as opposed to us having to make an injury or send a dog in. Additionally, we have steam balls that are maintained by our SWAT team and our SIRT team which is our Jail's response team. Those are used for close quarters. And additionally, we have several chemical agents as you see here, both canisters and projectiles. We do not use these items during peaceful protests. These items are maintained by our SWAT team that primarily used for barricaded persons. And as I'm sure you're aware during 2020, during all the protests that we saw in Santa Cruz County, these were not used whatsoever. And then lastly, at the very bottom, you'll see large OC canisters. Those are carried by jail personnel in case of a riot in the jail in one of the units. And then lastly, there are several less lethal devices. We have our less lethal shotguns which go out on patrol. They deploy a beanbag, they're painted orange, they're very distinct and we don't allow any other shotgun ammo at our office so there's no chance of mixing those up. Additionally, we have something called the Bola Wrap 100. We actually got some national attention regarding the use of this item. Essentially what it is is it's a yellow, kind of looks like a taser and it shoots out a Kevlar core that wraps around a person. It's similar to like a lasso. And lastly, we have pepper ball launchers. Those are very similar to a paintball gun. Those deploy a small amount of OC and those allow us greater distance but because of Santa Cruz unique rural nature, there's sometimes where we're only able to be up close where a less lethal shotgun may be more appropriate but if we're able to create distance, the pepper ball launcher is the preferred method. In the provision or the provision, there's an assembly bill for where you want to how to handle comic pages, queries. Sheriff Hart, I believe your microphone is off. Thank you, Supervisor. Sorry about that. And then also I can initiate a internal investigation at any time. We do have a process for reviewing use of force cases. Every time force is used, the supervisor will review that and then monthly every use of force case gets reviewed by an executive team where body camera is viewed and reports are written and sometimes people are asked questions about what exactly happened and then some recommendations are made in order to improve outcomes if needed. The end of reporting requirements, I already talked about that but those are the categories that we're gonna report back on in May of 2023 and then any other information that your board deems important or something that you wanna know about, we're happy to report back on that in 2023. And then in terms of community engagement, I just wanna make sure that you guys were aware that this is the level of community engagement that we put out. We initially facilitated a discussion with my advisory team made up of 20 community members. We posted our policy on our website and on our social media. We posted the announcement for the virtual meeting on February 10th and did the same thing on March 11th. We held a virtual meeting on March 14th and now we're presenting to your board on the 22nd with a second reading on the 12th. And so in terms of impact, so it's obvious with approval, we'll continue doing what we're doing. And I think we use this level of force very judiciously. We'll continue keeping the community safe and also increase transparency with these type of presentations. Without approval, if we don't have access to say our bomb team doesn't have access to their bomb robots or their truck, there's not a possibility that they're gonna respond, same with the SWAT team. So we could impact how we respond to mutual aid and also to critical incidents. And so we're hoping that based on what you're hearing that you will approve the existing equipment that we have. And so we believe that after completing this presentation we've fulfilled all of our requirements of Assembly Bill 481 and we're requesting to continue to use the equipment outlined in this report. And we will report back in May of 2023 with the data points that are requested. And then we're also requesting for the second reading on April 12th. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Sheriff Hart and Sergeant Robbins. Are there questions from members of the board? Yeah. Supervisor Caput. Yeah, hi. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. And I guess the only question I have is basically when you're using non-lethal projectiles, I guess, is there any possibility like with the shotguns that something like would happen like happened in Hollywood where they were filming a movie and live rounds were put into a pistol rather than blanks. When you mentioned the shotguns, is there, there's no way that there would be a mix-up where you're gonna use it for a non-lethal and somehow it could get mixed up? Yeah, that's a good question, Supervisor. And we don't allow shotgun rounds in our vehicles on our campus in our locker room. There's no shotgun rounds in our armory. And so the only similar shot, a round of the shotgun round is the bean bag round. So I'm confident that as long as people follow policy and procedure and no shotgun rounds are brought from the outside onto our campus, there's no way that there can be any type of mix-up or confusion on that. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Other questions from the board? Seeing none, we'll take it to public comment. Beginning here with folks in the chamber, please approach the podium. My name is Lee Broca. I came for public comment. I respectfully request three minutes because I'd like to rebut a number of the things that the sheriff has already said. Sheriff Hart, is that all right? Sorry, you've got two minutes. Please go ahead Mr. Broca. Three. Two. All right, well, not so fast. There were more people interested in this March 14th than 10 people. We repeatedly asked the sheriff to publicize it and never showed up in coastlines. He had it on his webpage. Nobody reads the sheriff's webpage routinely. There was no outreach to the community for this. There is a lot of interest in this. The sheriff told me at the March 14th meeting that he would keep the AR-15s on the list. He has 83 of them. He is mistaken in his assumption that they are not included because they are less than 50 caliber. They are covered by the civilian assault weapon ban and only exceptions in 481 or standard issued weapons, but 481 does not define what 481 is. If the Russians had landed in Monterey, I would want Sheriff Hart's army, but the Russians haven't. And he is armed to the teeth without any civilian oversight. And the AR-14 is an incredibly AR-15, I'm sorry, the AR-15 is an incredibly dangerous weapon. The small caliber slug that it shoots, tumbles and ricochets, it sends a huge, all of this is in writing in our packet. If you would please read it. We have URL references where you can see the damage that this particular round does and it's unnecessarily damaging. The round goes in the size of a pencil, quarter inch, and it can come out the backside of a body the size of a bowling ball or a basketball because of the way it ricochets and tumbles inside the body. Thank you, Mr. Brokaw. My name's Steve Bear. Thanks for the opportunity to speak. I'm a retired public school educator. I've lived in Santa Cruz for almost 40 years. My wife and I raised our three children here. I'm a long-time peace and social justice advocate and I served in Vietnam in 1969 with the first cavalry. So I know more than I'd like to know about weapons, death, fear, so I believe I'm qualified to speak in defense of law enforcement, in defense of our community and its citizens on the topic of reducing military-style weaponry for local law enforcement. Recently, the Sentinel published a letter I submitted. I'll read that to you and say no more. My letter reads, I'm no defund a police advocate. In the 40 years I've lived in Santa Cruz, I've never had a bad encounter with our law enforcement. They seem well-trained and professional. Their work is appreciated by most, but I and others, including members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 11, Santa Cruz have an urgent concern about weaponizing local law enforcement with military-style weapons and vehicles. These weapons and vehicles are obviously expensive, rarely necessary, and highly destructive when used. It appears the more military-style weaponry our police possess, the more weaponized criminals become. Perhaps more importantly, the more we weaponize our law enforcement, the longer we perpetuate the unending cycle that increases our fear and feeds the idea that we need these killing tools. These are fearful times, and there are bad actors out there, but arming police with military weaponry only increases the fear and further endangers our police and our citizens. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Baer. Is there anyone on Zoom or the telephone? Yes, there are multiple on Zoom. Caller 1401, your microphone is available. To Steve Baer and Mr. Brokoff for their comments, I'm totally opposed to militarizing the police. And in your packet, it said that you didn't want this to be appearing as a military, additional military occupation, but that is what it is. In fact, as I see it, and this is also microwave weaponry. Additionally, drones work by microwaves. You need additional cell towers for them that are being put in all over. There are health hazards, as well as the hazards of getting injured with these weapons. They aren't safe, less lethal means lethal. Scientists at the School of Public Health of Harvard University say that the radiation from cell phone towers is a serious health hazard. Studies have shown that low levels of radiation cause brain tumor, cancer, depression, miscarriages, insomnia, Alzheimer's disease, apart from damaging cell tissue and DNA. That's a partial lift. And regulation of this, regulation is a system of permitting and perpetuating corporate harm. In this case, military industrial corporate harm. They have so much military equipment and gotta dump it on communities and harm them. I feel we're already living in what's like a police state. And then with constant state of emergency, any requirements for meetings or public input, which clearly hasn't been mapped up until it's time, that goes out the window. So I don't feel military equipment keeps the community safe. It's the opposite. They know, thank you. So, Lindsay Poland. Good morning. I work for the American Friends Service Committee with, which worked with the authors of AB 481. We have an analysis of this in your packet. First point is that, although the sheriff has framed this as approving equipment, you are not approving equipment, you're approving use policies. And those use policies are deficient. You have 180 days after these were presented to approve them before there's an impact on their use. In other words, until August. But these use policies are not in compliance with AB 481 in a number of respects. The procedures governing use, which is required by AB 41 are not spelled out for a number of types of equipment. A new piece of legislation, AB 48 limits the use of tear gas and impact rounds for crowd control. That is not referenced at all in these policies for tear gas and impact rounds. Authorized uses as opposed to users or the training required is not spelled out for a number of types of equipment. And none of them spell out the compliance mechanisms if there is some kind of violation of the approved policies. Those are all requirements of AB 41 that are clearly spelled out, the things that you need to approve, as well as the criteria by which to approve them. If you pass something, if you approve something that is not in compliance with AB 41, the county could face litigation. It would be much better to remedy these deficiencies and have the sheriff's office come back to you in April with an amended set of use policies that actually do conform to AB 41. Thanks so much. This is such an important issue. You shouldn't just pass it over. It's complex for sure. And all the more reason why you need to dedicate more attention to it and have the sheriff come back next month. Thank you, Mr. Pollan. Peter Geldlum, your microphone is available. Thank you very much. Second, what's been said so far, please, please, please do not rubber stamp this. Take a look what's in the packet. What the last speaker said is absolutely true. The policy submitted do not comply with AB 481 in several respects. One is that this body must, before it approves a policy and equipment use policy, it must make two determinations, that the military equipment is necessary because there's no reasonable alternative and the proposed military equipment use policy will safeguard the public's welfare, safety, civil rights and civil liberties. You must make this body, not staff, not the sheriff, the board of directors must make those two determinations before approving a use policy under the statute. Secondly, you have plenty of time to do this. As the last speaker said, it is not a deadline by May 1 to get these approved. The sheriff was wrong about that. All he had to do by May 1 is something he's done, which is to start the approval process. We then have 180 days after that to do it. So please put the brakes on this, take a look, let it go back and let the sheriff go back and fix up the policies. In other ways that the policies are insufficient, they do not include at least two elements, three elements, expressly required by AB 41. They're codified in government code section 70, 70, a D6 and 70, 70, D7 and 70, 70, D2 and D4. They're very, very clear that these policy submitted, you do not comply. So I really urge you take a breath. There's no harm in going and waiting in a month, come back, have the sheriff fix the policy so they're compliant and go forward from there because you guys have to make these two express determinations. You can't just represent this. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Gelblum. There are no other speakers on Zoom. All right, I think we had a couple of members of the public here in the chambers that also want to speak on this item. Go ahead. Hello, my name is James Ewing Whitman. I read this over on Saturday. So I really like the presentation. I mean, it certainly is a start. I didn't read every word of number nine. I was basically looking for a frequency weapons. And there is some stuff. There's something called L-R-A-Ds that's long range acoustic devices. So I suppose that's on the table, whether the any local law enforcement is working with these weapons or not. So what I'm holding in my hand is my cell phone. You know, assuming this just has one watt and I believe it has more, that'll travel 25 miles. We have cell towers all over this county that are just the wires, 300,000 watts. Who knows what they're stepping up up in the towers. So I myself have talked to literally dozens of law enforcement in this county and I like to engage with them about what kind of wireless they're wearing. The average is two. Some of these individuals wear four pieces of information. This wireless stuff is designed, if you're not protected from it, to kill you before you retire. So all this stuff is linked together. And I spoke briefly last three weeks ago, I guess it was, about the bio weapons release. So all these mandates have been lifted because the bio weapon that people inoculated are now spreading it. It seems that Santa Cruz County has less individuals that are severely harmed. What the reason I'm bringing it up is it has to do with the wireless and the frequencies in how people can be affected through the frequencies. And at some point, this is going to start affecting more people. And I just wanted to talk about it publicly. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wettman. Gary Richard Arnold, chairman, supervisors. The office of sheriff is one of the most important in the division of powers. They should be as independent as possible. I know because of various threats, some of them that were caused by the state, this county and the city offering sanctuary cities, the drugs that prime the costs really go up. So a lot of the crime and so forth can be taken care of. The more dangerous contributions by the state, and of course the Supreme Court rule that when local agencies receive federal funds that the feds have control over much of their policies. I don't wanna see that done. I know there needs to be fusion, exercises and such things for national emergencies. But I do wanna totally disagree with the sheriff about his complaint forms and his openness and transparency before this very board I've must've mentioned at least a dozen times. My complaint against two board of supervisor members that threaten the persons and the property of a couple of granges. There was a speaker by Freedom Forum that had already spoke at the Resource Center here. He has refused and protected these Panetta machine people there and I find that collusion, that's why his office should be totally separate. You shouldn't be totally controlling what he needs to do nor should he be jumping to the tune of the Leon Panetta machine whose co-partner in California forward, member of the Committee for Economic Development, just like Willie Brown wants to get rid of the cities and counties, the CED wants to get rid of 80% of them. You're cutting people's access off and you're telling that man to call. People like called yesterday couldn't get through. You have one phone number for five people. You should be independent and make your assistance available. Thank you, Mr. Arnold. Seeing no further public comment, then I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, I'll just make some additional comments to this and I appreciate the presentation by the sheriff and Sergeant Robbins on this. You know, over the last year, I mean, as you know, I'm the chair of the Criminal Justice Council and one of the things that we looked at were regional use of force policies. And it was important because it was in the presence of a national discussion about how law enforcement agencies interact with the community and in particular how use of force policies are either in existence or not in existence at the local and regional level. And what we found is that all agencies within our county as was presented to the board and you had made some additional recommendations in regards to a inspector general oversight function in regards to sheriff's office, but all of our regional agencies were really at the forefront of how their policies had been enacted that in fact, in the case of the sheriff's office, some of these policies have been enacted five, six or seven years in advance of this nationwide discussion. And one of the things that I caution about is when there's state or federal legislation that creates blanket policies across the state, we have a tendency to believe that it applies to every agency equally because the need is equal. And in the case I think of Santa Cruz County, I think that our local law enforcement agencies are ahead of the curve in a lot of the issues regarding transparency, use of force and policy related issues. And I think that that's the case here. I think that I'm supportive of what the sheriff has brought forward. And I'm happy to move the recommended actions, which I'll do in a second. But I just wanna say that just even today's presentation that Sergeant Robbins did outlined each, and I recognize this is a requirement of the assembly bill, but outlined exactly what is within the inventory and specifically how it's used. And we have some pretty significant life experiences over the last few years, including the tragedy of Sergeant Gutzweiler that shows when and where these are used, as well as a number of examples of when they weren't used, which I think is equally of important. I think that the materials that the sheriff's office has are necessary and proper for them to provide the adequate public safety to our community. I think that the policies that they have in place are robust and transparent. And I have confidence that this yearly reporting requirement, I'm supportive of the assembly bill for this purpose, will continue to have that transparency moving forward. And as such, I'll move the recommended actions. I'm on Mr. Chair, I'll second that. And I appreciate having the opportunity to review this proposed policy and inventory to the public and what tools are available under the office of the sheriff. And I think it's a good time and a good opportunity to remind everybody too about Santa Cruz County's early commitment to adopting the community policing model. We were one of the first in the nation to do that and be recognized as such. I'm grateful for our sheriff's deputies and as well as how well you're training them. I think that these tools, so to speak, are reactive. We're not initiating any action at all and I don't want to imply, I don't think anybody should imply that. I mean, I think that restraint was really exhibited during the 2020 protests that we had. I hope it's never necessary that the sheriff has to use these. But I think we have seen some instances that they could have been, they probably prohibited much greater danger. So I'm supportive of what you have presented. And I want to congratulate you and the sheriff's department for really being at the front of the line in the community policy agenda that we have. All right, we have a motion by Supervisor Friend and a second by Supervisor McPherson. Any further discussion? At just a point of information for our county council, we heard from one member of the public that seems to have studied this bill pretty significantly some concerns about deficiencies in the policy being proposed to us today. Just wondering if you had an opportunity to study the proposed ordinance and other materials and if there's any reason to believe that what's before us today is deficient under the law. No, I don't believe there's any reason to believe that what's before you today is deficient. Okay, thank you. One more time, I'll call for any further discussion. Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Pappett. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Thank you, that ordinance being approved in concept will return for a second read at our April 12th meeting. Thanks again to Supervisor or Sheriff Hart and Sergeant Robbins. We'll now proceed to item 10, to conduct a public hearing on the proposed acquisitions by condemnation across a portion of real property located at APNs 036-274-69, 036-511-18, and 036-522-29036, 522-30, 038-311-40, 038-331-07, 038-531-19. So I will open the public hearing on this. It's also proposed that we adopt a resolution of necessity authorizing County Council to institute eminent domain proceedings to obtain possession of the required real property interest to support the Highway 1, Bay Porter to State Park Auxiliary and Overcrossings Project, as outlined in the memorandum of the Deputy CAO, Director of Community Development and Infrastructure. And for a report on this item, we have Kimberly Finley with real property. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board. My name is Kimberly Finley. I'm the Chief Rural Property Agent with the Community Development and Infrastructure Department. I appear before you today to request that the Board conduct a public hearing on the proposed acquisition by condemnation across real property owned by Capitol and Oles HOA and Sea Breeze HOA. And to request that the Board adopt two resolutions of necessity authorizing County Council to institute eminent domain proceedings to obtain possession of the temporary and permanent real property interest necessary to complete the Highway 1, Bay Avenue, Porter Street to State Park Drive and Pedestrian Overcrossing Project. With respect to the Capitol and Oles HOA property, the Highway 1 project requires acquisition of 1,624 square feet of fee and 3,754 square feet of temporary construction easement over APN Assessor Parcel Number, 03627469, 15,396 square feet of fee and 1,610 square feet of temporary construction easement over APN 03652230, 1,502 square feet of fee and 738 square feet of TC over APN 03652229, and 2,324 square feet of temporary construction easement over APN 03651118. These real property interests are needed to construct a sound wall for the benefit of Capitol and Oles HOA. With respect to the Sea Breeze HOA property, the project requires 320 square feet of permanent easement and 417 square feet of temporary construction easement over APN 03833107, 1,037 square feet of permanent easement and 1,327 square feet of temporary construction easement over APN 03853119, and 1,314 square feet of permanent easement and 1,403 square feet of temporary construction easement over APN 03831140. These real property interests are needed to construct the Mar Vista Bicycle and Pedestrian Overcrossing. The county and partnership with the Santa Cruz Regional Transportation Commission has coordinated with both Seabreeze HOA and Capitolan Oles HOA for months regarding the proposed project contracts and acquisition. Substantial efforts and county resources have been extended and attempted to negotiate terms of the acquisition. However, due to the respective HOA's CCRs, the minimal amount of board hearings that they hold and the numerous parties involved in the negotiations, there has been minimal progress in those negotiations. Both HOAs are in the process of obtaining independent appraisal reports which will delay substantive negotiations for several months. Given the strict funding construction deadlines associated with the Highway 1 project and a continued delay to the project caused by pending negotiations, could results in delay of construction and escalation of cost. In order to comply with the Caltrans right-of-way certification requirements and meet funding and construction deadlines of the projects, the county must move forward with the resolutions of necessity. Adopting these resolutions of necessity will not impair the ability of county and the HOA to continue negotiations and resolve acquisition of the required property interests without the need for litigation. The county remains committed to continuing those negotiations in parallel with the eminent domain process. The county has met the necessary requirements under California Code of Civil Procedure section 1245.230 to proceed with eminent domain. The public hearing today is intended to address these statutory requirements. Specifically, that public interest and necessity required the construction and completion of the project. The project is planned and located in the manner that will be the most compatible with the greatest public good and least private injury. The real property interests are necessary for the project and an offer of just compensation for the property has been made. Based on the offer mentioned, the Department of Community Development and Infrastructure recommends the board take the following actions. Conduct a public hearing on the proposed acquisition by condemnation across real properties located at APNs 03627469, 03651118, 03652229, 03652230, 03831140, 03833107, and 03853119, and adopt the resolutions of necessity authorizing county council to institute eminent domain proceedings to obtain the required real property interests. Thank you very much. That concludes my presentation and I'm available for any questions. Thank you, Ms. Finley. Other questions from members of the board? Seeing none, are there any members of the public who wish to speak to this item? Anyone on Zoom or the telephone? There are no members on Zoom. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. Also, appreciation for that presentation is outstanding and informative presentation, so I appreciate that. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. I'll second. All right, go ahead. All right, we've got a motion by Supervisor Friend and a second by Supervisor Coonerty. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Pardon me, Chair, a member of the public has raised their hand on Zoom. We have closed public comment, I'm afraid, on this. Mr. Chair, I'd be open to reopening, moving to reopen public comment on this item as we haven't taken a vote. All right, very well, then we'll go ahead and reopen public comment and a lot of speaker on Zoom. Caller 14-01, your microphone is available. I, having lived in the county for 40 years and driven often on Highway 1, it is very disturbing to me how the trees, the destruction of the nature escape that we had is taking place and enlargement of the freeway just brings more traffic. So I am very much questioned this. This is in the public interest and necessity. And also it seems backwards that the, let's see what word did you use on the minimal progress in negotiations that this is being pushed through by the board before those who are affected most profoundly by the eminent domain proceedings, just seems backwards to me. I used to think eminent domain was for the public good, but having over the years as a scene what's gone on, it seems to me to be an interest of big development or highways, but not really in the interest of the general public. So I, and I also noticed every single thing that the staff reports and recommends this board approve even when there is much testimony from the public to urge different action like in the previous agenda item. So I am not in favor of this. I know you'll vote for it. Those are my comments. Thank you. Mr. Garrett, any other members of the public wishing to comment? Seeing none, I will return it to the board for action. We do have a motion on the floor by supervisor friend with a second by supervisor, Coonerty. Any further discussion? Seeing none clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Abbott. Aye. Fersen. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. All right, thank you very much. I'll now close the public hearing. We do have two scheduled items at 1045 and do not want to rush the presentations on items 11 or 12. So I'll now recess the board of supervisors meeting. We'll take a five minute break and then the zone five and zone seven flood control district meetings will take place at 1045. So meeting recessed. Rise of Bruce McPherson, chair of zone five, the Santa Cruz County board of directors flood control and water conservation district. Clerk, I'd like to call this to order and please call the roll. Director Koenig. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Abbott. Here. Dave. Bertrand. Here. Peterson. McPherson. Here. Thank you, chair. You have a quorum. Thank you. We will consider additions and deletions to the consent and regular agendas. Are there any additions to either of those? No addition. No, we'll move to oral communications. This is the time for oral communications. Persons that want to speak to directors of zone five of the water, flood control and water conservation district. Do we have any oral communications? Seeing none, we will move on to item number four, approval of the zone five meeting minutes, the flood control and water conservation district, zone five, December 7th, 2021 meeting. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes? I approve. Moved by director Bertrand, seconded by supervisor friend. Call the roll, please. Director Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. Hapitz. Hi. Bertrand. I agree. First. Hi. Thank you. Motion passes with the attendance. Okay. Now we will move to the regular agenda. The program managers report. First of all, I think we should like. Point of order chair. I believe we have to approve the consent agenda. Item six was not this consent agenda. We did the minutes, we approved the minutes. Oh, excuse me. I moved you or consider this consent agenda. Thank you. If there is no comment from the public, I'll move the consent agenda. Very good. Thank you. I'll second. Second. Thank you very much, friend. Any? No. Thank you. Many public comments. There are no speakers to this item. Okay, that really, well, we have a regular agenda of the program managers report. Yes, we'll go to item number seven. Pardon me, chair. We do need to take the roll call vote for action on the consent agenda. Okay. Director Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. Hapitz. Hi. Bertrand. I agree. McPherson. Hi. Thank you. Okay. We'll go to item number seven, the program managers report. Consider your election and chairperson, vice chairman, chairperson of the zone five board for 2022 as outlined in the memorandum of the district engineer. Do you push that button, please? There's a green button right there at the mic. Yeah. Go ahead. Good morning. This is Rachel Fatui, senior civil engineer and storm water management section. This item is for electing the chair and vice chair for the 2022 calendar year. Currently for the 2021, you're the board member, you're the board chair, and we'll vote to elect the new board chair and vice chair for 2022. Do we have nominations for chair and vice chair of district five for 2022? You know, Mr. Chair, I'd like to add something to this. I mean, we traditionally on zone five done the chair and vice chair of the board is the chair and vice chair of zone five. However, everybody seems to forget that at every zone five meeting. And I was thinking that maybe what, now in this coming year, that happens to actually be supervisor Koenig and myself. But when I think about it, it actually makes sense to make it permanently the first district chair and the second district chair as chair and vice chair. So if the board is amenable to it, this would I think need to come back as, I mean, we can vote today to establish the chair and vice chair, and then we have a future board item on this. But I think that the zone five board should permanently establish the first district chair, excuse me, the first district representative as chair because it's mainly in the first district and the second district chair, the second district supervisor as the vice chair moving forward. It just would make life a lot easier, I think. But I will nominate supervisor Manu Koenig as the chair and if there's a nomination for, I don't know if that needs to be done separately or as a slate because I just realized that I'd be nominating myself for vice chair, which is a little bit awkward. So, but I think that moving forward, I think that we should have just the first district representative to be the chair and the second district be the vice chair moving forward and that way we don't have this deal where we're always wondering who the chair and vice chair are. I agree and I think if you feel more comfortable, somebody else can make the motion for that. I mean. Yes, let me withdraw my nomination for supervisor Koenig. I apologize supervisor Koenig when I recognize the awkwardness of it. I'll defer to one of my colleagues on this. Anybody on the, I want to make a nomination, please. I think, Mr. Chair, I think that's a good idea and I will make the nomination that it's the first and second district chair this year for service chair and vice chair respectively and then we'll rotate as amongst those chairs going forward. Grab a second to that. Paul Sarton, and I think that's a great idea to streamline the process here for zone five. Very good, thank you. Okay, are there any comments from the public? Yes. I have one member via Zoom, calling user three or microphone is available. This is Marilyn Garrett. I think it's more democratic to have more options and what these two zones affect actually affects the whole county. It's not exclusively for these specific zones. So I think you do your nominations for today but I don't think it should be constricted and limited that way. When I hear the word streamline, what I've observed is that streamline the public out more and more and limit any kind of public comment or participation or decision-making. Those are my comments. I'm for a democratic, more open, more discussion process. That's what I think democracy is supposed to be all about. Thank you. There are no other speakers. Okay, I'll return it to the board. You've heard the nominations. Please call the roll. Director Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Unity. Aye. Caput. Aye. Ertrend. I approve. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes with the attendance. Okay, I will pass it over. I think to Supervisor Koenig, the chair. Thank you, outgoing chair, Supervisor McPherson. We'll now proceed to item eight to consider adopting a resolution accepting grant of easement of a drainage maintenance vehicle, access easement and drainage easement at Rodeo Creek Court and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the district engineer. Do you have a report on this? Yes, please. Yes. As you stated, it's to adopt the resolution for accepting both access easement as well as the drainage easement itself along the easterly side of the property and authorize the real property section of public works to record the resolution in the official records of Santa Cruz County. Okay, thank you. Are there any questions from members of the board? Seeing none, are there any members of the public that wish to speak to this item? There are no members. All right, then I'll return to the board for action. I'll move the recommended actions. Second, motion by Supervisor or board member, Director Friend, second by Director McPherson. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Director Friend. Aye. Community. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Bertrand. Aye. Green. Onig. Aye. Thank you, Mr. Passel of the Tenda. I will now proceed to item nine, to adopt resolution making findings and ordering the continued use of teleconference meetings of the board directors due to COVID-19, pursuant to their requirements of Assembly Bill 361, direct the district engineer to return within 30 days and at least every 30 days thereafter with a new resolution containing recommended findings supporting the need to continue holding teleconference meetings, consistent with the requirements of Assembly Bill 361 until the governor has lifted the current state of emergency or until the board directs otherwise is outlined in the memorandum of the district engineer. Maybe 361 initial resolution five. Do we have a report on this, Mr. Fatui? Nothing to add more than what you read is to allow the virtual and in-person meeting for your board to continue in this fashion to allow you to have quorum. Okay, thank you. Any questions from members of the board? Seeing none, any comments from members of the public? There are no members of the public questions speak to this item. All right, I will return to the board for action. Move the recommended action. Second. A motion by director McPherson, second by director Bertrand. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk, roll call vote please. Director Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. A person. Aye. Bertrand. I agree. Koenig. Aye. And passes with attendance. All right, we've reached the end of our regular agenda, so I'll now adjourn the zone five meeting. And Supervisor Friend, I believe you are still the chair of four zone seven. Yes, I'm going to give an opportunity for the clerk to promote anybody that needs to be promoted. And Madam clerk, just let me know whenever you feel that you've had enough time for that and I'll start the meeting. We've heard they've been moved over. Thank you, Madam clerk. All right, we'll call to order the Santa Cruz County Board of Directors, Flood Control and Water Conservation District for zone seven for our March 22nd, 2022 scheduled meeting at 10.45 a.m. If we could have a roll call, please. Director Koenig. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. Caput. Here. Billicich. We said yes. Nancy, you're ready. Oh, here. Holpertson. Lucas. Gonzalez. Parker. Friend. Here. Thank you, Chair. You have a quorum. Thank you. All right, Dr. Strudley, do we have any late additions or changes to today's agenda? No, Chair Friend, we do not. Thank you. We'll move on to oral communications. It's an opportunity for members of the community to address those items that are not on today's agenda or within the purview of zone seven. Is there any member of the community that would like to address us? I'm Bob Colberton. I am here. I didn't get it unmuted in time to answer when I got promoted. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. Welcome. Is there any member of the community that would like to address this on oral communications? I don't see any in the chambers. Is there any member on Zoom or on the phone? There are no members via Zoom. All right, we'll move on to item four, which is an approval of the seven board meeting minutes. Are there any changes or comments on the minutes? Chair Friend, I have a correction for the minutes. Okay, please. On page two of the minutes, which is page five of the agenda packet, the recommended action to elect Nancy Bilsich as the vice chair, Nancy's name is misspelled. So we just need to correct that. Thank you. Are there any other changes to the minutes? Are there any members of the community that would like to address this on the minutes? Are there any online or on the phone, Madam Clerk? There are no members online. All right, so we would entertain a motion on the minutes, but it would need to be amended. Dr. Bilsich, you got a comment? Well, I just know that I would heard that Vi Lucas is on this meeting again, but not here. I don't know if she called and said she was on, but she couldn't get on, I guess. So that's just FYI. The application has been located. All right, we're promoting. I'll make an approval of the minutes with corrections. Second. We have a motion from Director Koenig and a second from Director Coonerty if we could have the roll call, please. Director Koenig. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Caput. Aye. Bilsich. Yes. Colfordston. Coonerty in progress. Aye. Friend. Aye. Thank you, motion passes with attendance. Thank you. We'll move on to the consent agenda, which are items eight to 11 on today's agenda. Are there any comments from any board members on the items on the consent agenda? On the consent, I would like to discuss item five. I just wanted to know about who Pearson Brewstad is and why we canceled that contract or what happened? Yeah, thank you, Vice Chair Bilsich. Peterson Brewstad, Incorporated was the consulting firm that we selected to lead us through program management activities related to governance and finance and implementation of the Levy Reconstruction Project. That contract was secured approximately two years ago. Just very recently, the principals and key staff at Pearson Brewstad splintered off and formed their own company, Rossiter and Fritz Engineering. And so this item pertains to cancelling the existing contract with PBI and securing separate independent contracts with this new engineering firm, which maintains continuity and consultant personnel acting on behalf of the district on this project, as well as the sub-consultants that were originally hired under the umbrella of Peterson Brewstad, we're now seeking to hire them independently of Rossiter and Fritz under new contracts to keep the momentum moving forward for the project. Thank you, appreciate the clarification. Are there any other directors with any comments or questions on the Consent Agenda? And Ms. Lucas just wanted you to know that you do have mic access if need be, if you have any comments or questions on this. Seeing no directors, is there any member of the community that'd like to address this on the side of Madam Clerk? Anybody on Zoom or on the phone? Who's known in chambers or on city? We'll move it back to the board for action on the Consent Agenda. I'll make a motion to approve the Consent Agenda. I'll second. A motion from Director Bilicic and a second from Director Caput, if we could have a roll call please. Director Koenig. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Caput. Aye. Bilicic. Aye. Holbertson. Aye. Friend. Aye. I think your motion passes with the tendon. Thank you. We'll move on to item six, which is the regular Agenda Zone 7, which is a consider accepting and filing status report on the Papua River Flood Risk Management Project as outlined in the memo of the district engineer. And we also have the personal letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Conor, if we could have this report, Dr. Strudley. Thank you, Chair Friend and members of the board. The staff of Zone 7 continue to work extremely hard with the Army Corps to secure ongoing investment on the Levy Reconstruction Project. As we've reported to the board previously, we remain engaged with a certain group within the Army Corps called the Engineering with Nature Group. And that group has actually signed a cooperative agreement with the State of California Department of Water Resources who has been heavily supportive of our project through our Subventions Agreement, through various grant agreements as well. And we were originally discussing with the Engineering with Nature Group how we can further describe the multi-benefit aspects of our project through some sidebar studies that would be done under their authority. It turns out that Department of Water Resources at the State of California has been very interested in actually granting us financial support through their contracting with consulting firms to look at the multi-benefit aspects of the project, specifically groundwater recharge and fisheries habitat associated with the proposed setback levies on the Pajar River that the Army Corps is proposing. And so that nexus between the Engineering with Nature Group and the Department of Water Resources has worked very well in our favor. This information will be developed over the next several years and will continue to inform implementation of the project funding direction. And additionally, the analysis that DWR is actually proposing to support for the district would actually go beyond the boundaries of the Levy Reconstruction Project, potentially addressing other needs further abroad in the Pajaro Valley. So not only will it address the benefits described by the proposed project, but it will inform potentially feasibility work on other flood risk reduction needs that will be under the purview of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency as that agency ramps up and assumes authority for flood risk reduction efforts in the Pajaro Valley. So that's a very positive step in the right direction for us. We continue to, like I said, seek infrastructure investment. I understand that the Army Corps will very most likely be debuting additional funding information this coming Monday at the earliest. So we're hopeful that Pajaro will be listed in there with a lot of zeros next to its name. And we continue to appreciate the board support and particularly Chair Friend, both as the chair of this board and as well as the chair of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency. And I have attached, as Chair Friends mentioned, his letter to the ASA's office requesting additional and ongoing support for the Pajaro project, but we remain very hopeful that Pajaro remains a priority of this administration, in particular under environmental justice and infrastructure investment related to that topic. We continue to work with the Department of Water Resources to secure our Subventions Agreement. I know I've been bringing this topic up many times over and over again, but it is a very long road because the agreement and like I said, the zeros behind the dollar sign are very large. So DWR is being very careful as are we in describing the negotiated terms of this agreement. But I think we're rounding third plate and coming towards home on both the Subventions Agreement as well as our Coastal Watershed Flood Risk Reduction Grant Agreement. I'm hoping that we can get those agreements executed within the next month or so because I feel like we're getting to a point now where our negotiations are beginning to close and we're reaching agreement on a number of topics. Project Finance remains now under the authority of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency. Staff for that agency have identified a shortfall in the operations funding of approximately $1.2 million to oversee long-term operations and maintenance of the flood control and the pertinence facilities. So those include the levies that are in the ground now as well as the levies that would presumably be built by the Army Corps moving into the future. And so staff has been bringing a proposal to the board of directors of that agency proposing a special benefit assessment. I brought this to this board's attention previously but that proposal remains on the table. We expect that proposal to be brought by staff in an official manner for the board's consideration at their April meeting and that will secure a authority to move forward with a balloting procedure for a special benefit assessment for the beneficiaries of the project and to serve as long-term operations and maintenance funding. With that, I am available for any questions you may have and again, the recommended action for this item is just an acceptance file for the status report on the Flood Risk Reduction Project. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Strudling. This is a matter of point of clarification. We hope that there's a number larger than zero in front of all those other zeros that you're referencing. Otherwise, this is a lot of zeros coming from the federal government. So I'd like to open up to the board. Are there any questions or comments in regards to this item? I'd just like to say congratulations. Moving this along, very critical. We know and great work by the board members and especially to Supervisors Friend and Capit. Thank you very much. Thank you, Director McPherson. Is there any member of the community that would like to address this on this item? Madam Clerk, is there anybody on Zoom or on the phone? Yeah, if there's not anyone on Zoom or on the phone. Okay, we'll bring it back to the board for action. It's an acceptance file, so it would just be an emotion for that. We'll make a motion to accept in file. We'll second. We have a motion from Director Billisich and a second from Director McPherson. If we've got a roll call vote, please. Director Koenig. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Capit. Aye. Billisich. Aye. Holt-Pherson. Aye. Friend. Aye. You have some passes with the attendance. Thank you. We'll move on to item seven. I just need to bring it up real quick. All right, which is to consider adopting a resolution confirming benefit assessment rates for FY 2223 and adopting resolution setting a public hearing on June 7th, 2022, beginning at 10.45 a.m. or thereafter to consider the FY 2223 benefit assessment rate report and take related actions as recommended by the district engineer. We have the resolution adopting benefit assessment rates of resolution setting the public hearing and the notice of public hearing. Dr. Stradley. Thank you, Chair Friend, members of the board and pursuant to the 1991 zone seven flood control and water conservation districts engineers report the district must annually compute benefit assessment rates. Additionally, district engineer must submit a report describing each parcel of real property receiving the special benefit and the amount of the charge for each parcel for upcoming fiscal year to the zone seven board of directors. The 2022-23 rates for all land use categories will be increased by 4%. The 1991 district engineers report previously approved by your board allows for an annual CPI adjustment of the benefit assessment up to a maximum of 4%. The calculated 2021 annual consumer price index is 4.2%. The rate for a single family resident should be increased from $87.62 to $91.12. Agricultural unimproved commercial industrial parcels, churches and schools are charged by acreage and their rates are increased by the 4% rate increase. And there's an attachment that outlines these proposed rate increases. As part of the annual proceedings, the board must also set a public hearing, notice the hearing, consider objections and protests if any to the data included in the benefit assessment rate report. Once today's actions have been approved by the board, the district will place the benefit assessment rate report on file with the clerk of the board. This report containing the assessor's parcel number, use code, the owner's name and the amount of the assessment will be available on or before April 22nd, 2022, which will allow for public review six weeks prior to the proposed June 7th, 2022 public hearing. As in previous years, the rate report must be approved by the board and forwarded to the auditor controller by August 10th, 2022 in order to be included on the 2022-23 property tax assessment role. So the recommended actions and summary are to adopt the resolution confirming the previously established zone seven benefit assessment rates for the 2022-23 fiscal year. To adopt the resolution setting Tuesday, June 7th, 2022 at 10.45 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for public hearing on the 2022-23 benefit assessment rate report. And finally to direct the clerk of the board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week for two weeks prior to the hearing in a newspaper of general circulation. Thank you, Dr. Strudler. Are there any questions or comments from the board on this item? Dr. Bilsich. This is just an annual thing that happens every year, correct? We just increase every year. Is that right, Dr. Strudler? That is correct. Are there any other questions or comments from board members on this item? You know, I have a question. Yeah. Please. The people that are affected the map for zone seven is that overlap on the people that are in the flood plain or is it only include the people in the flood plain? It overlaps, but it's a different, it's a type of assessment that relates to drainage impact. So it includes parcel owners within the watershed of the Pahar River in Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Thank you, Director Caput. Any other board members before we open it up to the community? Okay, seeing none, with no one in chambers on this issue, it appears I'll ask Madam Clerk whether there's anybody online or on the phone. Yes, there is one speaker. Marilyn Garrett, your microphone is available. Hi, Marilyn Garrett. I'm not for increased taxes and I instead of calling it benefit assessment, it should be increased taxes just to be candid about it. And also, people's incomes, the average person are not going up. Many people have lost their jobs during this pandemic and are really suffering. And then with the gas prices profiting the oil corporations and drying being caught up, everything related, people are really suffering. So I am opposed to this. Thank you. There are no other speakers. Thank you, Madam Clerk. We'll move it back to the board. This is an action item. So there would need to be a motion for the recommended actions. I'll move the recommended actions. I'll second. I'll jump on that at once. Motion from Director Koenig and the second from Director Billisich if we could have a roll call, please. Director Koenig. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Caput. Hi. Billisich. Hi. Holbertson. Hi. Friend. Hi. Emotion passes. Thank you. Thank you for those that attended zone seven. This will close the zone seven. We'll move it back to the board of supervisors. I'll turn it over to Chair Koenig. Thank you, Chair Friend. Thank you. I will now resume the regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. It's Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022 at 11.16 a.m. And Clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. Koenig. Here. Thank you and have a quorum. Thank you. I would like to move the item 11 to consider a report and presentation on Senate Bill 129, funding and formation of new pre-trial services division in the probation department, approved memorandum of understanding with the Superior Court for SB 129 funding, adopt resolution accepting unanticipated SB 129 revenue in the amount of $494,797 for probation staffing and program expenses, approved the funding of two full-time equivalent deputy probation officer, one and two positions and addition of one full-time equivalent division director and one FDE alternatively staffed departmental administrative analyst, senior departmental positions as outlined in the memorandum of the Chief Probation Officer. And for report on this item, we have Chief Probation Officer Fernando Geraldo. Take it away. Check your mic there. Thank you. There you go. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Fernando Geraldo, Chief of Probation. And I'm here this morning with Sarah Fletcher, who is our adult services director to update you on our pre-trial services program, particularly our SB 129 pre-trial expansion and partnerships with the court that have been very important. We have new resources that are coming into the courts and to the probation department to enhance services, please. I just like this quote because it's really what drives the work of pre-trial each and every day. In our society, liberty is the norm and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception. We are fortunate as a county in Santa Cruz to already have a longstanding pre-trial services program. It's not necessarily the case across the other 58 counties. And so we've had a lot of great success in helping to reduce the jail population, particularly important during the pandemic for the health and safety of of course the inmates and as well as the staff and the number of individuals and other departments that enter the jail. So it's been critical during COVID. Pre-trial first and foremost is a public safety program and it provides a really good jail alternative that's safe for the community. And again, I think of particular importance during the pandemic when our numbers nearly doubled in terms of who we were supervising but it was a critical function and I just wanna give a big shout out to our pre-trial unit that was probably the busiest unit in our department. They work seven days a week coverage, weekends, long hours and have a big, big responsibility keeping our community safe. What impacts public safety in our department as many other departments is changing legislation. So for example, SB 129, which is bringing new resources to our community, but new requirements and I'll go in a little bit detail in just a moment with that. The ongoing issues that we've had with jail overcrowding that are particularly important to all of us, although we've had, we've seen a great decreases in the jail population over the last two years attributed to really incarcerating really only those that really pose a serious safety risk and finding alternatives for others. And then lastly, what impacts public safety is really our efforts of continuous quality improvement, really to look at what are outcomes, how good are we doing? Can we reach more people? Can we collaborate better? Can we have our better data integration with all our partners? So those are the things that we're looking at. And our outcomes are also tied to our county strategic plan and operational plan. So it's very, you'll see some of those outcomes if you look at the operational plan. So the purpose of SB 129, it's really it's a new opportunity to expand our collaboration with the courts. And we're just, we're looking at ways to enhance pre-trial, not just do more of the same thing for us, but really the system-wide improvements are data sharing. The workflow process is a lot of steps to release someone from the jail to get authorization from the courts and so on. So we're looking at the process that goes into that and how we can do expedite releases at the earliest point. Those are just some of the things that we're looking at. But I'm gonna read what the purpose of the funding is as specified in SB 129, which came into effect this fiscal year, 2021, 2022. But it's to provide every superior court with information and resources to support judicial officers in making pre-trial release decisions that impose the least restrictive conditions to address public safety and return to court and to implement appropriate monitoring practices and provision of services for released individuals. And I wanna know one thing it's important to know that SB 129 cannot be used to supplant ongoing pre-trial services. So it has to be used to enhance and grow your program, but not just covered in the cost that we already have. Just a little bit about just jail overcrowding. Although we've seen, as I mentioned earlier, the jail population decrease significantly. Bookings for 2021 were about 7,200. I remember we did a jail utilization study with the sheriff in 2016 and bookings were at 10,000. So we've seen a decrease, which is really, really great for us and not jeopardize public safety at the same time. But as you can see, this is our pre-trial monitoring trends just from 2017 to 2021 where they were an average daily population of 100 where I know just last Friday we get alerts from our pre-trial team. We were at 222 cases. We keep breaking records of the numbers of individuals that we're supervising and we're doing it very effectively. One of the two most important outcomes that we track are that they do not re-offend while they're in the community awaiting trial and also that they return to court. And I'll show you those numbers in just a moment. But we know we can do more for sure. That's what we're gonna show you next one. Go to the next one, please. Let me just talk to you a little bit about what these outcomes mean before you. And these are, this is based on 786 case closures in 2021. So those are the numbers that were off pre-trial. The overall number of cases that made it to court were 77% of the case, excuse me, 87% of the cases made it to court. So that's the FDA rate. So 13% failed to appear. Obviously we strive for 100% but 87% is really good that made it back to court. The other important measure is the new criminal activity which is 7% re-offended. Anyone that re-offends obviously is a harm to others. That 7% is I believe about 51 cases that re-offended. Most of those were misdemeanors. Very few, I think it's 1% were just violent felonies. So just wanted to share that. So we had a really 93% of those 786 individuals did not commit a new crime while on pre-trial services. And again, that's due to the supervision and monitoring of my team, the constant court reminders, using technology to communicate with them. And just really, and also referring to services that are appropriate for those individuals. Next slide, thank you. Well, this is a lot, but this shows what we envision and why we're here today is the new pre-trial division. So the column on the left that you see is what we envision. Now this column with a little fewer staff actually currently sits underneath the adult services division underneath Sarah, ledger to my right and a couple other managers. But the volume has increased so drastically in recent years. We have not necessarily been right size. And what's happened is that we've pulled staff from the other divisions, from the realignment divisions from the sex offender caseloads investigations to cover this unit. We feel that we need a division instead of a unit. We need a leader, a director that has the authority to work directly with the courts to create policy, to manage the new legislative requirements through AB 109. And a few additional staff should go to the next slide, please. So this is what we envision exactly how we're gonna grow our pre-trial services division. What we see is we would like to fill two previously unfunded deputy probation officer positions to in this unit. We also wanna add a manager that would oversee the program that I just mentioned in an analyst capacity. Real key really to have the analyst because data for SB 129 is gonna be critical. We have to do quarterly progress reports to the judicial council. Not only that, we would like that individual to coordinate with the other departments and so and figure out the data sharing flow. Perhaps there are other products or technology out there that'll help us expedite that. And the director that oversees that would have the authority to then manage the schedule. It's really challenging to do a cover seven days per week and we intend to extend the hours of operations. So being able to do releases because people don't just come into the jail from eight to five, it's 24 seven. So every minute counts with folks that are in jail. So that is our goal with that. So the enhancements of the additional staff are really tied to outcomes. We want to see increased collaboration or we want them to laze on with the courts and other stakeholders. And really all of this is based on operational need. Next slide, please. Just wanna show you what the funding looks like. What's in the funding technically actually started was available July 1st, 2021. So we have ongoing pre-child funding which hopefully continues well into the future. And it's our hope that it increases. But the County of Santa Cruz receives ongoing 706,000. 30% of that goes directly to the courts and we partner with the courts for 70% of that ongoing allocation to nearly $500,000 annually. There's also one time pre-trial funding that we received almost 1.3 million. The court's allocation again is 30% of that and probation's allocation is nearly a million dollars. But this is our plan to sustain this. Obviously it's critical not to lift this division up but it's to sustain it well into the future. So that's how we plan to do that with other funding. And it's our hope that the state has obviously recognized the importance of pre-child but they'll support it with more funding. It's essential. This is just our funding for year one which obviously we're almost at the end of this fiscal year but the total operating expenses with salaries and benefits and so on is $500,000. And that would be for the remaining several months that we have for the staffing of the two POs, a director and analyst. We've also moved, we've made some organizational changes and added existing moved probation aid positions into the pre-trial unit to assist that. And the others are operating expenses that are critical to the work that we do. And I think is there a next, I think that that might be the end of my presentation. So are there any questions? Thank you Chief Gerardo and Director Fletcher. Are there questions from members of the board? I'd just like to compliment the probation department and finally under the leadership of Mr. Gerardo. It's our probation department of Santa Cruz County has been known to be ahead of the curve for years and years and you've continued that from the day that you took over this as the director of the probation department. I'm just really glad that we have some resources now for these pre-trial services that we plan to tap state funds in the future as well but very well planned. Your, the record of achievement is really impressive. And I just want to say thank you and I'm glad we're able to enhance our efforts there. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Supervisor McPherson. Any further questions or comments? Supervisor Caput, do you want to, no? Okay, I want to thank you for your report also and your predecessors before you were outstanding and I want to thank you for being outstanding also. The whole 11 years I've been on the board, the probation department has just been awesome. I want to thank you. Well, thank you very much. And I really, again, this goes out to the whole probation department. It would not be possible without all the work that they do in each and every day, particularly during the pandemic. I was, they were, they showed up and through the most challenging times. Thank you. Yeah, there was one McDonald, where is he now? Well, he failed the retirement. He's been a consultant since the day he retired. He has a, just solved and he sometimes works with us and has been very helpful. So he's local, doing a lot of, still, still in the business. If he's around locally, I'd like to say hi to him. I'll share that with him. He'd appreciate it. Thank you. All right, thank you, Supervisor Caput. Are there any members of the public that would like to address us on this item? Anyone on Zoom or the phone? There's no one on Zoom. All right, I'll return to the board for action. Chair, I do have one request, which I forgot, to say we are starting a pre-trial stakeholder advisory group that's real essential to this. We have the representatives from the sheriff, the DA's office, the public defender probation. And if there is a, and not at this moment, you don't have to decide now, well, we'd love to have a board member participate in that as well, just some food for thought. So I'd like to put that out there. Thank you. Okay. All right, is there a motion from a member of the board? Yeah, let me just make a comment that I'll make a motion, which is I wanna appreciate the chief and his team's work to really be outcome and data driven. I like the addition of the analysts so we could get further depth and analysis of what's going on in criminal justice system. We've undergone a major shift in this state over the last five, six, seven years. It's been bumpy to say the least. It's nice that the state is finally providing some resources so that there's effective monitoring going on, and we're able to implement the criminal justice reforms in ways that address safety concerns, as well as better outcomes for the people in the system. But with all that, I will move the recommended action. I'll second the amendment. Okay, motion by Supervisor Coonerty, second by Supervisor McPherson. Any further discussion? Clerk, roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Good to meet you. Hi. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. We're already called for public comment. Thank you. Caput. Good. Hi. McPherson. Hi. And Koenig. Hi. Thank you, motion passes 5-0. Great, those positions being funded, a resolution adopted, and memorandum of understanding approved. Thank you again for your work. And we'll now proceed to item 12, which is a public hearing to consider the 2021 general plan annual report, accepting file two related annual reports and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the interim director of planning. I'll officially open the public hearing. And for a report on this item, we have our resource planner. Mr. David Carlson. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, David Carlson with the planning department. State law and county code require that each year we prepare a general plan annual report and a housing element annual report for public hearing and review by the planning commission and the Board of Supervisors. The reports is submitted April 1st of each year to the governor's office of planning and research and the State Department of Housing and Community Development. State law also requires the county to report on housing assets and activities of the housing successor agency, resulting from the disillusionment of the former redevelopment agency. The general plan annual report summarizes the number and status of general plan amendments processed in 2021, which there were none. The reports on the status of major programs in the general plan and the report also lists potential future general plan amendments and updates. Currently, these include the medical office building proposed on Soquel Avenue in Live Oak, which requires a general plan amendment and rezone to allow professional and administrative office uses. That's currently in the environmental review process and the sustainability policy and regulatory update which has recently started a public outreach phase following publication of documents containing the draft policy and code amendments. The sustainability policy and regulatory update project is a comprehensive update to the county's general plan and local coastal program and modernization of the county code. The goals of the update are to reflect the vision and guiding principles developed in the sustainable Santa Cruz County plan. The project documents are available on the planning department website at sccoplanning.com, sustainability update, along with the schedule of community meetings covering the major components of the project. The links to attend those virtual meetings are available on the website, along with links to the recordings of meetings that have already taken place. The general plan annual report also includes the housing element annual progress report, which presents data and information on the county's progress in meeting our share of regional housing needs and housing element programs. The report summarizes applications and permits for net new housing units in 2021. Table A and table A2 containing the detailed permit data are large and difficult to reproduce as attachments to this report that the information relevant to progress meeting our housing goals is included in other tables. Overall progress in meeting our regional housing needs allocation or arena is summarized in table B. Information on the status and progress of housing element programs and policy implementation intended to meet our housing goals is summarized in table D. And the summary tables include information on discretionary applications for new housing units received in 2021. Taking a closer look at table B places the 100 new housing units into affordability categories to demonstrate the county's progress in meeting our arena share. Under California law, all local governments are required to adequately plan to meet the housing needs of everyone in the community. Our housing element must ensure land is zoned and available to accommodate our share of the projected regional housing need. Ambag, the association of moderate area governments develops the arena for this area and the current arena plan for our region was adopted in 2014. It allocates a goal of 1,314 new housing units to the unincorporated area of the county for the planning period ending December 31st, 2023. These units are distributed between four income categories, very low, low, moderate and above moderate. And thus far during the current planning period shown in table B, the county has permitted a total of 744 housing units distributed at the following affordability levels, 72 very low, 119 low, 269 moderate and 284 above moderate income. A total of 599 units remain for this arena cycle. So after the dissolution of the redevelopment agency in 2011, the state passed SB 341 requiring revenues generated from redevelopment agency housing investments to be deposited into a designated fund. The county, which is the designated housing successor for the former RDA is required to report annually on activities associated with the low and moderate income housing asset fund. The report in attachment to meets the requirements of SB 341 and it will be submitted to HCD concurrent with the housing element annual progress report by April 1st. The report describes the funds revenues and expenditures and the value of assets owned by the housing successor agency based on an independent audit. The report describes how the funds were used in the 2020-2021 fiscal year for development of affordable housing and monitoring and administration of housing programs. Additionally, $250,000 the maximum allowed by law was used for homelessness prevention services. Highlights of activities in 2021 included groundbreaking of the mixed use project at 17th and Capitola Road, a former RDA property which includes 57 units of affordable rental housing and completion of pre-development work for the 80 unit Pippin 2 project in South County. Both projects include units affordable to extremely low and very low income households. And both of those will housing portions of those projects will begin construction in the next couple of months. Following this overview of the 2021 general plan annual report staff recommends that the board conducted public hearing on the 2021 general plan annual report and accept in file the 2021 general plan annual report and the housing successor agency annual report and direct staff to submit these annual reports to the governor's office of planning and research and the state department of housing and community development. Thank you. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you, Mr. Carlson. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? I have a couple Supervisor McPherson, please. Thank you for the report. And then the code modernization process and update to the general plan has been really underway for many years, as you've mentioned. And I don't know what's the specific timeline in 2022 this year to put the proposed revisions before the board was that April 4th? I mean, did you, I wasn't sure when that might be coming this year. Well, I did you want to... And believe me, before we go into further discussion, me and the Rena numbers that are put together are put forward by the state is really difficult in this high cost housing county of ours. So I get it and I sympathize with everybody that's involved in this for trying to make this goal. Go ahead, please. The code modernization is part of the sustainability update package and we expect to be at the planning commission with that in the July timeframe and to your board before the end of the calendar year. Okay, thank you. And the report states that I think it was 744 or 57%. Load of moderate Rena numbers have been allocated since 2015 and with two more years to go or 47%. There are some good programs that are outlined in the housing element, but the county has not historically been able to reach the schools. What other programs can be added to the housing element to improve that outcome? Is there Ms. Levine, Acting Planning Director? Thank you. We will be preparing our next housing element in 2023. So over the course of that year, we're going to be doing the research, developing those new programs. We do think there are some more innovative things that we can do in addition to what we already do and it's necessary to do some new and different things and we'll be developing that and putting it into the proposed next housing element. Thank you. And this might be hard to say, but to answer about how does the county's progress, as I said, it's very difficult in this high cost area that we have in meeting its arena obligations or allocation. How do we compare with other counties in our region or throughout the state or like size counties? I think it's fair to say that most communities struggle to meet their targets and communities generally do not meet their targets. So in some ways they're aspirational, especially in this next cycle. Having said that, HCD is going to be quite rigorous with all of us about making sure that we have capacity for larger numbers and programs that will incentivize larger numbers. So with all of that, I think we'll do better than we've managed as a community so far, as far as providing housing. So some communities are a further percentage of the way toward meeting their goals. Some lesser, it depends on such a mix of things, including market forces over which a community has no control. So we all work on the part of it that we can affect and then part of it we just simply can't affect as a governmental agency. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I'm Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thank you. I want to thank you for all the work you're doing with the planning department and quick question. I hear the categories for income, extremely low, very low, low. And when I, it's extremely low and an actual category where the state of California has actually got that, because when I'm talking with AMBAG, they have very low, low, but they don't have extremely low. So I get a little confused between that when I'm working with AMBAG and our county. Thank you. Yes, Supervisor Caput and it's Susie Anise. I'm the principal planner for the housing section. So yes, we understand people do get confused about the RENA requirements related to extremely low income. So this is an official income level that the state publishes an income limit for. And it is part of our objectives in the housing element. However, for the purposes of the RENA tables, extremely low is included within the overall very low income target. And at least past guidance from the state has been that we should assume that half of the very low units that we are assigned are supposed to be extremely low. Having said that, they understand that it is very difficult to finance extremely low income units. The main way that this is done generally is by building units where you have a project-based voucher commitment. So those commitments come from HUD and the local housing authority. So where we do have those project-based vouchers, that's where it makes development of extremely low income units financially feasible. Without that, it's pretty difficult and pretty rare to be able to restrict a property or units to that income level, but they are in the allocation goals. Okay, and then maybe while you're there too, when we're talking about actually living in a place, let's say somebody very low income, especially in Santa Cruz County, we're talking about low rent. Is there any possibility that they can actually buy a home now? That's a real tough one. You know, the American dream of owning a home for somebody with a low income. Is that gone? It's not gone entirely. We do currently have a Habitat for Humanity project and we're currently actually closing escrow on some of those homes. And some of the buyers in those projects, generally speaking, tend to be very low income. The current project that Habitat is building out is not restricted at the very low income level. It's restricted at the low level. However, a lot of the buyers that we're seeing qualify and be approved to buy those units are actually in the very low income level. Historically in the past, it was much easier than it is today to get very low income units in a for sale project. Even then they were mostly in subsidized 100% affordable projects. But today, even for those nonprofit builders, it is very difficult to make it pencil at the very low income level. But the approach that I think most communities take is you try to provide as much rental housing as you can that's affordable at the very low income level. And then you provide those home ownership opportunities at low and moderate and work with those families to hopefully help them sort of be able to move from the rental housing into a for sale unit as their income grows. If you can work with them on career development, job development, things like that, then hopefully they can get up to that next level and buy a home at some point. And then I've been pushing for years for more low income housing and all that. With the state mandate, the state expects so many units to be built county wide. And I guess what I've been arguing for years is if South County were to build 100 units and the rest of the county doesn't, all the state sees as the 100 units for Santa Cruz County. So when the state has a mandate, if all of the affordable housing is in one district, the whole county gets credit for it. Is that correct? I suppose theoretically, yes. Although if you look at our past projects, I think historically they haven't had districts. I agree. I'm not criticizing the other districts right now. I'm just trying to clarify the credit for the county. It doesn't matter if it's all in one district or it's spread out, right? Well, there's different places where the state reviews our performance. When we come to a new housing element update process, they're reviewing our performance at a variety of stages in the housing development cycle. So it's not only about the units you actually complete, but it's also about what our zoning allows and what our general plan allows. So they would be reviewing something that is in the housing element called the sites inventory. And that's a listing of all the properties throughout the county that have any kind of residential zoning or residential development capacity on them. And I think when the state's reviewing those that sites inventory, they would certainly probably bring it to our attention if they found that all the residential zoning was clustered in one geographic area of the county. Fortunately, that's not currently the case. So I don't think we'll have a problem there, but if it was, I think they would probably raise some fair housing concerns. Yeah, it's better right now than it was in the past. We still need to get more. If we're gonna have 100 units down here in South County, we need to have 100 units in the Santa Cruz and north part of the county also. But anyway, it is better right now than it was in the past. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any further questions or comments from members of the board? I've just a few questions myself. I noticed that we built 31 low income, non-dead restricted affordable units. I'm just curious, are these affordable by design units? Are there other elements in place to ensure affordability? Just kind of curious about our toolbox here. If not using de-districtions, how do we maintain affordable units? Those are mostly ADUs. Okay. And we categorize those into either the low or the moderate income categories based on a survey of what kind of rents we're seeing out there and how those compare to the affordability limits. Okay, so is it based on- It's a square footage. Yeah, we look at square footage in a number of bedrooms and do a little comparison and look at what rents are out there on the market and then compare those and put those in those non-dead restricted categories. And then I was surprised to see so few applications for this progressionary permits this last year. I mean, if I read it right, seven applications for a total of 19 units. Why do you think there are so few housing applications for these discretionary permits in 2021? Is this a column before us to the storm or is it an odd year? Or is this just that difficult as an environment to build? Right, in the past, we had been reporting in that table in that category, the number of building permit applications received, but we received clarification from the state this year that all they wanna see in that table is just the number of discretionary permits application received for the creation of new units. And so those are the number of discretionary permit applications for the creation of a new unit above what would be allowed on the property today. So that varies from year to year and those are the numbers from this year. You might see that go up and down from year to year because it kind of takes several years for some of those projects to make their way through the permit process. I would just add that I think the pandemic also threw people for a loop a little bit. We got contacted by quite a few developers who are exploring this or that type of development. Maybe it made it a little more challenging for them to do their due diligence or the financial scenarios were a little bit more confusing particularly if you're looking at mixed use project development because all of a sudden, okay, are all the restaurants closed? Nobody wants to finance a project with new restaurant space, for example. So we know that there's a lot of applicants sort of waiting in the wings and actually or who have actually moved forward into that discretionary process as of 2022 but these numbers are reflecting 2021. So I do think that was part of it. Okay, thank you. Let's just read how the R Combining District actually has kind of streamlined process as well. And so with the Nye Pro Tiva site, roughly five acres in Live Oak, you know, the fact that that has the R Combining District and has for many years now and housing hasn't been built there. I mean, is it fair to say that that's not a desirable site for housing after all? What I have heard from housing developers is a couple of things. Hey, there are some questions about how desirable it is just given it's kind of a sort of quasi industrial location right along the highway. But also, you know, at least in the past, I think the prior property owner wasn't particularly receptive to inquiries about buying it. I think it's transitioned to a new owner since that time. So I'm not sure about this owner, but in the past, I think maybe they were hoping to develop it themselves. It's always a little hard, you know, when you have, particularly if you have a large family that owns a property and there's multiple family members who have to agree to a sale, that can be the case with some of these larger sites. So that can slow down the process of, for example, an experienced housing developer being able to acquire that site. Mr. Thank you. And my final question is, you know, I understand our arena goals are aspirational and indeed we have a ways to go through we're going to meet the cycle five goals. I mean, I think, you know, with about 600 units left to build in two years, I would have to be the 300 units per year, which is basically more than double we've met in any of the years so far. You know, if we were, if this board were actually to say, you know, we're going to get this done, what would it take to actually meet these renails? I mean, what kind of, what would we have to put in place to theoretically make that happen? Do you mean the rest of our cycle five goal? Yeah. We took some, we made substantial progress on policies in the last couple of years. And I think part of it is that we now need to give those policies some time to be utilized by individual developers. So the framework is in place from that point of view. I don't know whether there would be, well, our sustainability update plan identifies some parcels that would make good mixed use, zoning, higher density option parcels. And if those were to get through the process, then we would have more inventory of property that's zoned for more housing. And that I think would be a very helpful step toward making those renail numbers. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Caput, did you have an additional question? One quick, one more question. What is the salary range or income range for moderate income right now? The word moderate sounds like, well, middle class, right? But I'm wondering how many people actually fit in that category. So the current upper limit for moderate income for a household of four is just under 135,000 per year. Keep in mind that's the gross pre-tax income. So people's actual take-home pay would be slightly less than that, but that's the gross household income limit for moderate. The median for a household of four currently is just under 112,000 for a household of four. Okay, so the moderate and the median are, they're different. Yes, moderate is 120% of the median. Okay, yeah, what I'm getting at is that in South County, the average income is lower than, you know, the other parts of the county. So that's the categories are very important. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. All right, are there any members of the public that wish to address us on this item? Seeing none here in the chambers, does anyone on Zoom or the telephone? Yes, we have one caller on Zoom. Marilyn, your microphone is available. I appreciate the staff report. I know a lot of work goes into it. However, we have more unhoused people than ever given by the last two years policies of putting over a million small businesses out, destroying them, shifting the wealth upward, driving people out of their homes who can't, don't have work anymore. This is deliberate policy plans and it's a basic human right to have food and shelter and employment and this system isn't meeting those rights. I remember in high school, studying history and reading about the depression of this year and the recession of this year. All the time and I was struck in 1966 when I visited this former Soviet Union and my second cousin who was living there when she said, they paid 5% of their income. It was adequate pleasant housing, 5% of their income for rent. So, Habitat for Humanity is doing something but it's a drop in the bucket of the needs. We need a different structure of a system that provides for everyone. And I'm reminded of this bumper sticker I had when I was teaching. It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber. That goes for providing for other needs in the community like housing and parks, et cetera. When money is siphoned out for all this, trillions of dollars into nuclear and military budgets. Mathematically, you don't have that money left for real needs in our community. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. We need a different structure of a system that provides for everyone. Additionally, you approved all this. All right, I'll now return it to the board for action. Unless there's a, sorry, was there anyone else on? There are none. Okay, now I'll return it to the board for action. I'll move the recommended actions. Okay. Okay, we have a motion by Supervisor Friend and a second by Supervisor McPherson. There are any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Supervisor Caput. Go back. McPherson. Aye. Supervisor, thank you. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. All right, thank you. Then the general plan annual report being accepted in file and staff will submit that to the governor's office. That concludes item 12 and our morning agenda. I will officially close the public hearing on that item. And the board will now go into closed session. County council, are there any reportable items from closed session? No. All right, then we will now move into closed session. We'll be back here in the chambers and on Zoom at 1.30 PM for our afternoon session. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It is 1.30 PM, March 22nd, 2022. And we will resume the regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Caput. McPherson. Here. Koenig. Here. Thank you, Chair. Supervisor Caput is online. Okay, thank you. And please make a note when Supervisor Coonerty joins us. We'll do. All right, we will proceed with item 16 to consider a report by the Human Services Department in partnership with other county departments and local jurisdictions to take urgent actions to reduce the risk of evictions and homelessness among county residents after the end of the COVID-19 statewide eviction moratorium on March 31st, 2022 and direct the Human Services Department to report back on number four, August 23rd, 2022 as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Human Services. And for a report on this item, our Director of Human Services, Randy Morris. Yes, hi, good afternoon. Chair Koenig and board members into everyone watching and a few people in chambers, pleased to see here to have comment about this. I'm here with Dr. Robert Ratner, who's the Director of our Housing for Health Division. Both for this item and next item, a broader report in on homelessness. I'm gonna make some introductory comments and then turn it over to Robert who will go through a formal PowerPoint presentation. I wanna underline that as the Director of the Human Services Department, as you said in your comments, Chair Koenig, this is truly a collaboration amongst many county partners. I wanna highlight our CAO's office, but I also wanna recognize the presentation this morning from planning and their role and their important role in partnership on dealing with housing and the rena goal discussion this morning. But also the funding that is in front of the board is a shared funding streams that we have with our healthcare agency. But we made a decision to present this because of the link to the second item today on homelessness that we're managing in the Housing for Health Division. I also wanna recognize we have other public partners that are only referenced broadly in the materials that we have at least three of the four cities who are formally interested in participating in this, at least programmatically, if not financially. So some of them have items tonight on their council meeting. So we are in conversation with city partners. And then we also have a number of local service providers and advocates who have been sharing a meeting with you, sending materials to you, sending materials to us. And we appreciate them lifting up as service providers and advocates what they're seeing, which is the challenge in front of us is what to do. As complicated as it has been to enter COVID, exiting COVID is creating a new set of challenges, which is protections that have been placed for some vulnerable members of our community. And that's the topic today, is what can we do as a local county government given some of the complexities of state and federal laws and funding streams that are winding down. I also wanna highlight for your board and anybody in the community watching that we coincidentally have a meeting scheduled tomorrow with a number of local service providers and advocates and city partners pending your board's approval of the action today to immediately begin discussions about executing a contract to get services in the community to help the population who are concerned about that might lose their housing if they don't have supports that we think should be put in place. So we are planning to immediately begin conversations about potential contracting. I do wanna share, I think it's my responsibility not only as a human service director, given everything we do is to serve vulnerable populations, but the housing for health report that's coming up next, that there's a balance for trying to strike here, which is recognizing some immediate help that we think we can offer should your board approve this action does not change the horizon issue that the distance between people's ability to afford housing in this community and particularly the impacts of the pandemic and challenges with people finding enough income to pay for housing. We have to be practical about everything we're trying to do cannot just be a short-term intervention. We have a much larger issue to deal with in this community and everywhere, which is the lack of affordable housing. So wanna be pragmatic about the action in front of you we think is a nice bridge, necessary bridge to help avoid a bigger cliff, but we still have a larger issue beyond the cliff, which is what to do with anybody we can help what to do if they can't afford the housing they have is still an ongoing issue. So we're gonna talk about that. We hope this presentation is helpful. We hope members of the community here in chambers or on live can please chime in. There's a lot of advocacy. We wanna hear their voices. We did our best to integrate their ideas and recommendations into the actions today. So this is our best effort to be partners with the community who've been doing some good thinking as well. So I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Ratner now who's gonna go through a couple of PowerPoint slides and give a little more specificity than what I just shared in my introductory comments. So take it away, Robert. Thank you, Randy. Thank you members of the board and thank you members of the public for joining us for this session today. These are really challenging times given the pandemic and the housing crisis and appreciate that a lot of county departments and stakeholders in the community have come together to come forward to the board with some recommendations on what we can do in the context that we're all living through now. I'm gonna go through a few slides and then wanna save time for public comment and questions from the board. You got it. So one of the key things that I wanted to share with those that are tuned in is that housing is key program is a statewide program that we at the county level agreed to participate in. The U.S. Department of Treasury had made funds available at both the state level and the county level and the board had approved of two of our Santa Cruz County specific allocations being transferred up to the state to support the housing is key program. One of the benefits of us transitioning some of our locally allocated funding to help with people falling behind in the rents is that we're taking advantage of the state funds. So combined, our funding that was allocated to us is around 18.8 million. And then we're getting additional state funds to help cover some of the back rent that people in our community owe. That particular program known as housing is key and there's a link in the slide deck is tied to a statewide eviction moratorium that was established through California policy and legislation that allowed for people who are struggling with their rent in California and including Santa Cruz County to get support to cover some of that back debt before landlords and property managers could move forward with eviction proceedings. So that eviction moratorium ends March 31st. So there's still a window of time between the presentation today and the end of this month for people to get their applications in and getting their application in is really key to making sure that if people do end up needing to go to court because of an inability to pay rent, if they've submitted an application and that application is still pending, there's an opportunity for that to come up in the court proceedings for people to be able to make the case they're waiting for that payment. So getting the application in right away is critical. I wanted to highlight a few of the things on this slide. This is a data snapshot in our County like how many people from our community have applied for assistance and these numbers get updated on a weekly basis by the entities that are managing the program at the state level. But as the beginning of March, we had over 3,500 applications to put in that in the contact if we think every application represents one renter household, that's close to 10% of the renter households in the County as a whole. We're asking for financial assistance to pay back rent and over $55.6 million were being requested for back rent, utilities, et cetera. The state program at the time that we took the snapshot here, 22 point million of that was approved for funding and the state had issued $15.1 million in payments. So there is a backlog of requests and payments that the state is working to process as quickly as possible. And one of the things that we're recommending is that we at the local level really make sure we're partnering with landlords and tenants to make sure they access the funds for applications that have been approved and we support them in getting that check cut to cover some of that back rent. As you can see only 13, well close to 1,400 of the applications have been actually paid out to date. So I wanted to highlight that we've had tremendous efforts from a group of organizations at the local level. The state refers to them as the local partner network and that's state term for contracts that the California Housing and Community Development Department established with local organizations to help tenants who are struggling to pay their rents and utilities to get access to support. So we have three major entities that got funding from the state through the US Treasury and State Resources, California Rural Legal Assistance, the Santa Cruz County Local Network Partnership which is a consortium of multiple organizations, community bridges help bring together to help address the challenges faced by tenants and then 2-1-1. So they all have independent contracts with the state currently and some of them have gotten extensions of those contracts to support people at the local level. State law and consultation with County Council, we really looked at are there things we can do locally related to the end of the eviction moratorium and the California moratorium made it very difficult for local communities that didn't already have tenant protections and moratoriums in place to continue to extend those. So we've concluded that's not a real viable option for us to recommend a given the input we have from County Council. So what can we do to help address this tremendous need in the community for people who struggle to keep their homes and jobs have been lost and people are struggling with childcare and rents are going up. So one recommendation we have is let's treat this as part of a COVID emergency. So we have in the Health and Human Service Agency authority to move forward with executing contracts quickly to address emergency situations related to the pandemic. This has really floated up for us in our department as something is directly related to the impacts of the pandemic. So we wanna be able to get into a contract quickly to expand our local resources to support the tenants who've applied. We wanna use the wisdom of other entities around the country that have done research on what really helps people who are at risk of eviction and what really helps people who are struggling to maintain housing. So elevating those best practices in the contracts that we would establish and then really working to avoid people actually going through a process where they get a formal eviction that will show up on their credit report. If you end up with a formal eviction, finding housing in a tight housing market gets even more challenging. So can we set up our resources to prevent people from getting to that place with mediation, conflict resolution, legal assistance to prevent a formal eviction. So what we're proposing is bringing together funds from actually three different county agencies. The planning department has some emergency rental assistance funds. We have some administrative funds in the same category and then the health service agency has some public health infrastructure funds that they feel like could be applied to this situation because the loss of housing could have tremendous public negative public health impacts. So we're seeking approval from the board to move forward with getting that $500,000 that as quickly as possible to help meet the community needs and support that local partner network to help all those applicants who've applied for funding but have yet to receive it. And then after they get the funding, many of the households are gonna need support to be able to keep that housing. Randy alluded to this in his introduction. The big picture is that the housing affordability gaps, gaps between people's incomes and the cost of housing is a major issue nationally. It's really significant here in Santa Cruz County and the shortage of housing production and inflation that's impacting all of us and COVID-19 are all contributing to that gap between what people can afford and the cost of housing. So I think we need to keep in mind, state and federal advocacy on those issues is gonna be important coupled with local support for creating more affordable housing to address this issue over the long term. And then helping people keep their housing as a really wise investment. We're gonna talk later about our six month update on our housing for a healthy Santa Cruz plan but one of our four pillars is prevention that we collectively agree is really critical and it's a lot easier and more effective to help families and individuals to keep their homes than once they lose it to help them get back into housing. So if we can make this investment now and reduce the number of people who are getting displaced or lose their housing, I think it's a really wise investment. So some of the principles we wanted to propose for this $500,000 investment is really focusing on those applicants that we're seeking funding from the state, the 3,500 plus individuals and making sure there's good follow-up with the state officials and the households at the local level. Trying to build upon the collaborative structures that have developed during the pandemic and fund them in a way that can keep them going beyond this moment that we're in. Minimize the amount of the money we spend on general administration so we can get money to direct services and financial assistance to the households that need it. Make sure we're documenting our efforts to reach out to people who applied for the money and the success of our outreach efforts. Try to make it as easy as possible for people to know where to go to get help because it can be really complicated to understand the funding and the rules. Try to maximize our impact in the community by avoiding duplication of efforts and making sure that we're all working in a concerted way and then documenting the impacts of our investments on helping people to keep their housing. And priority areas for helping households these tie into the best practices around eviction. Let's make sure we get those funds that are available at the state level to our landlords and our tenants here. So we as department staff wanna work with our local network providers to really tighten our communication with the state and get those dollars coming out here as quickly as possible. We wanna focus not just on getting that money but we want people to be able to sustain their housing. So if you have $10,000 back on the first slide of back rent and utilities you've gotta make sure you can sustain that housing over time. So people may need help with applying for employment or public benefits. So I think our services really need to be geared towards helping people sustain the housing not just paying the back rent. And then like I mentioned earlier avoiding those formal evictions through mediation, illegal assistance. And we're a very unique county in that we still have a self-help port that can help people who are looking for assistance before they get to that formal eviction. So building on that network that we have in the court system I think is also really critical. And I think that's it. And I'll just close out by repeating something I said at the beginning. We as county can't commit to any city action but I do wanna underline there are three cities two who have as a matter of public record materials for their city council that they're exploring augmenting these funds and considering braiding their funds with us in one city who doesn't have a city council action but is prepared to invest in it. So I mentioned we have a meeting tomorrow. You just wanna queue up that if your board approves this action we have all those players ready to be at the meeting tomorrow to really try to turn this round as quickly as possible. And we're open to any questions you have or public comment or whatever the right order is. All right, thank you, director Morris and thank you, Dr. Ratner. Are there questions from members of the board? Yes, Supervisor McPherson. Just thank you for the county staff and the nonprofit agencies that have worked together these past two years to help identify housing and employment needs and so forth and the services especially during the pandemic. We know that everybody's facing really tough times as the state ends at this eviction moratorium. One question I had is there a particular reason we're not getting a report back sooner than August? If we were to provide additional direction to come back sooner or say in a month or so is that feasible or I know these timelines and things have changed and they've got deadlines too but is there any way we can, what we could do? Is there anything we can do to get that report back sooner? Well, ultimately my job as department heads say I'm here to be of service to you and ultimately what you decide, I think in all candor there's a couple of factors in play. One is the ability to turn around a report with metrics and deliverables and the impact of something. The time it'll take the contract in place, the community organization to get the services, report back to us and get a report to you really ends up bumping up into then this is my candor we're then in budget season preparing to give our full budget to you and then it bumps into our next six month report which is where we hit on the six month report and that said if it is meaningful given this is a lot of money and it's an urgent issue to come back sooner we can we just saw it as tied right to finishing the budget season. We'd have a reasonable amount of time to have a meaningful report and we could fold it right into the next six month report on the overall effort to prevent homelessness in the second item today. So that was our thinking. Yes. You just have a fuller, a more complete report of if it stays at August then that right? I think based on the volume and the numbers and the time it'll take to turn this around and getting a report in an analysis and a meaningful feedback. I think you will have a richer and more robust report on what the impact was. If you ask us to come sooner, we'll certainly comply. I just think it'll be a little bit early on in the cycle and that's why we sort of timed it to that thinking. Okay, thank you supervisor McPherson. Further questions or comments from members of the board? I'm just interested in hearing the community feedback on this item. I appreciate it. Okay, I had a couple of questions. First, I seem to remember, I think at first we received about $16 million from the state for this. I mean, it's good to see that that number has gone up and that nearly $19 million has already been allocated and 21 million approved, but with 55 million requested, I guess how much more can we reasonably expect to come into our community? I mean, 30 million, 25 million, what? Yeah, that's a great question. So looking at the local allocation we've received from the US Treasury plus the state funds that they set aside for our community, we could get up to 36.4 million. And if the US Treasury and the federal government decided to deploy more of the resources because not all states have been utilizing all of their treasury funds, in theory, the state could have more available. So it's one reason why I think people who need the support should get their applications in. The 36.4 million's already written down in contracts we have for our community. And if we can support the state and getting the money out, I think we'll have a good case to make with the federal government that we could use some more funds to close that gap even further. That's encouraging. I mean, that looks like roughly half of the application or half of the funds requested could be paid out. So that's great. My other question is I know you looked at along with County Council opportunities to try to extend a local eviction moratorium, but because state law precludes that, we are not recommending that we move forward at this time with that. However, would there be other opportunities to create a general ordinance around evictions that could provide some greater protections or relief for people in this case? Not for this population of folks, unfortunately. If you're directing your attention to folks that owe rent from March 20th, 2020 through March 31st, 2022 that field has been occupied by the state. Your board does have the opportunity to adopt additional just cause eviction prohibitions for other reasons and for other populations of individuals, but not this population that we're discussing today. So if our board adopted a general ordinance that increased the payer quit notice from three days to 15 days, would that apply to everyone except for the population that owes background between this period or because it's a universally applicable, would it be okay? Yes, but I would have other concerns about adopting an ordinance to change payer quit days from three to 15 because there's a state statute directly on point on that. And so we would have to do another preemption analysis. We don't just have the ability to operate on our own completely in this area because there's a robust state statutory scheme that covers landlord tenant relationships. And so we're able to operate where the legislature gives us leave to do. And according to our police powers in areas that are left over, but unfortunately with regard to this group of folks, the legislature has taken over the program for these folks. Okay. And as you said, we're further restricted by other acts of the legislature in general in this area of the law. Yes. That's all my questions. So we will now move to public comment. The member of the public who wants to address us on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you, everybody. It's good to see you all in person. Thanks for the time today. We just first wanted to thank the staff for their support and the recommendation of this $500,000. It's gonna be a meaningful impact to help us, both in the local partner network, but also the other project we've been working on, which is the eviction defense collaborative that we started in November with funding from Packard and sunlight giving that provides eviction defense support to many different families already impacting 54 families as of today. We at no fault of us board supervisors here or providers are in this kind of predicament where we have the eviction moratorium ending on the 31st and we have 2000 families that are still anxiously waiting for the funding to be allocated for them. And I think that we have a moral obligation as a community to look at different solutions that will help prevent and or deter evictions moving forward. Some of the items have already been addressed in what the difficulty is, but I think there's other opportunities to implement mandatory at least notification of mediated services prior to submittal of unlawful detainers that could be presented to our local self health court as well as our courts locally. And I think there would be a lot of support around just letting people know that there's an option outside of civil litigation or outside of filing an unlawful detainer. I think secondly, I know that the legislator was going to caucus and this was gonna be an item that we requested to be placed. But I think moving the chair to submit a letter both to the governor and to the legislator to provide a legislative solution would help every local official not have to be in this hot seat, which is knowing that there's gonna be people in their communities that will be potentially at risk of eviction. And will allow us the time that's needed as local partner networks to get the money out to make sure that people's applications are filled and to make sure that we have all the information that the state needs to report back to the US Treasury. So with those recommendations, I hope that you consider that in today's action. Yeah, for those who don't know that's Ray Consino from Community Bridges who's been phenomenal and helping us with this. Ray, you didn't identify yourself, come on. Save in five minutes or five seconds. Hi there, my name is Tonya Switzer and I'm Community Bridges family resource collective operations manager and also the program manager for the local partner network that you spoke about earlier. We welcome the staff recommendation to support eviction prevention work that we are engaged with alongside the work that we're doing with the housing is key program. We know as you also do that the best prevention to houselessness is supporting people to stay in their homes. Community Bridges has been the lead organization for managing the housing is key local partner network for Santa Cruz County. March 31st will end the state eviction protections for applicants to the housing is key program. As of March 15th, 3433 Santa Cruz County residents have submitted applications and only around 41% or 1,424 applicants have been funded. The majority of applications come from female lead households, 58% and Latin families, 43%. Without significant investment in policy intervention, many of these homes will face eviction. The goal of the program, the housing is key program is that all eligible applicants that have active applications in the system by March 31st of 2022 will be funded. From an eviction prevention standpoint, the issue is related to the following. Once we enter into April, landlords can legally evict tenants for nonpayment of rent, even if funding to pay that rent is pending in the system. So we are likely to see tenants being evicted while landlords will still in retrospect receive rents that the tenants were evicted for. For these reasons, we urge the board to take action to support extended eviction protections for any county resident that has an active housing is key application in the system by the application portal closure of the end of this month. The applications we work with are our county's most vulnerable. They seek. Thank you, ma'am. Is that it? You're out of time. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Anyone else in the chambers that would like to address us on this item? Is there anyone on Zoom or the phone that would like to address us? Yes, there are multiple. Jacqueline Tuttle, your microphone is available. Hi, I'm Jackie Tuttle. I'm representing from Temple Bethel. I live in the city and I'm here speaking for COPA leaders as well. We're a broad-based organization. We have 23 member institutions across our county and Monterey County. I want to appreciate the two speakers before me. You've said many of the things I was going to say. We want to thank our county leaders for engaging together with people throughout the county. I'm very excited to hear that you have a meeting tomorrow because just as the speaker before me said, it is the immediate need of these people in our community who even if they may get their back rent to pay will be evicted. And we are very concerned about people losing their homes. As people have said and we know, it is much harder to get back into a home once it is gone. We commend you to work on these contracts quickly, support the idea that prevention is the best practice. We want to avoid formal convictions and commend our local service providers for doing very much with not so much. We are concerned that the money that you are looking at sounds like a lot of money, but we are not convinced that it is going to be enough. And we like you are concerned that the state has not held up their end of this bargain by putting the money out there and not getting it out to all of our constituents with enough time. We appreciate the county and city partnerships and we hope that you will continue to recognize this emergency. We've met with a number of supervisors and city council people and we really appreciate your attention to this very pressing problem. Thank you. Ms. Tuttle. Vav Hirschfield. Hello supervisors, thank you for time to speak. My name is Vav Hirschfield. I'm the program coordinator for an organization called Tenant Sanctuary where a renters rights education organization based in the city of Santa Cruz. And I believe the COVID pandemic layered some crises, layered crises on top of other crises, the severe lack of affordable housing to low income renters was present before the pandemic and it continues to today. And though we're in a different phase of the pandemic, the BA2 Omicron variant, which is more transmissible than the original Omicron variant now makes up nearly a quarter of cases in the US, the danger of infection is not over and renters in Santa Cruz County are still struggling with the economic impacts of the past two years. So in this context, funding for eviction prevention services is welcome. It's also long overdue. Services like a guaranteed lawyer make an enormous difference in eviction case outcomes. And I'd encourage the board to look into studies out of Boston, examining the impact of guaranteed representation for tenants and eviction proceedings. Many tenants cannot take advantage of rights granted to them under the law because they're unaware of those rights and lack support to assert those rights in or before court. However, I have to be frank in saying that services are not enough. Lawyers, rights counselors and mediators can do a great deal to change outcomes for tenants, but laws protecting tenants in this county leave much to be desired. I recently spoke with a renter who's being asked to move out of their home with only 60 days notice and is receiving only one month's worth of rent and relocation assistance. Most people I speak to about looking for new housing mentioned that their searches take four to six months. Additionally, one month's worth of rent is vastly insufficient to pay for moving costs, hotel stays and security deposits. Frankly, Supervisor Koenig's idea of expanding just cause protections beyond what state law currently provides would make a truly massive difference in the lives of renters as we continue to grapple with the housing crisis and COVID pandemic. The board has an enormous opportunity here to increase the impact of investments and services by providing powerful tools for service providers to better support community members accessing those services. Thank you, Mr. Hirschfeld. There are no other speakers on Zoom. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. Supervisor Caput, you're on mute. Got it, I'm muted. Okay, you know, this is a very stressful topic we're dealing with. All of us are going through a lot of stress but what I'm looking at is can you imagine all the stress that maybe a mental income family has when you're facing eviction? We're talking about, you know, a life changing events taking place in the midst of everything else. How many of those do we know are single moms with kids that are possibly facing eviction? I don't know if he's going to harm us to get there. We have any idea. This is Randy. I want to make a general comment that I realized upon reflection and I was thinking about some of the public comments. We didn't say the following. Robert and his formal presentation and Supervisor Caput, I'll get back to your question in a minute. It takes time and energy and resources to document everything that's going on right now. And I want to take a minute to parse out the difference between those matters that make it to these service providers where they can start speaking to your question Supervisor Caput who is needing help, who has contacted you and then to the issue of quarks. We know the number of formal evictions in process are low but the issue that I hope we can purchase with our network partners is getting answers to your question Supervisor Caput really understanding who these 3,500 people are and the big issue I see in human services is how often people informally without knowing they have rights end up agreeing to leaving their housing not knowing they have rights that the court would give them or these service providers could help them. So I'm hoping that part of what we will be able to do by putting some money into this effort is documenting what's going on, having concrete answers to what your questions are and really being able to track how the formal evictions happen and never make it to the court numbers that we can see that are small because I do think a lot of people feel pressured out not realizing they have services and supports available. So I'm hoping that helps us Supervisor Caput have a more detailed answer to your question back to the report back so we can share more about who these people are and what we were doing, what their issues were. I think it will tell us an important story looking forward. You're right, I realize that money is not going to be there and it's a big stress on the landlords too if they have to pay for all the upkeep, maybe they have to put a new roof on or whatever, they don't have any money coming in. But do we know also how many are in South County? A general percentage of Ballpark figure. Supervisor Caput, thank you for the question. I actually don't have the number committed in my mind but I do know that the vast majority of the applications are coming from the unincorporated in Southern parts of the county. So the city of Watsonville has the largest number of applications that have come in to the housing is key program. And as Randy alluded, that's only the people that know they can ask for help. So we don't have a way of knowing how many other households but the data seems to indicate there's a significant need in the Southern part of the county in your district. You bet. And again, we're back to the money. Let's say I'm in a home and I'm paying my rent and I'm working and I can barely make it. There's no way when you're living in a place to then call up section eight. I've been on my own, I've been paying everything and then now I call section eight. There's only so much money from section eight. Can they step in and pay the rent? I don't know. I'm asking tough questions because I don't have the answers and I don't expect you to have a specific answer but do you have any idea how that might work or section eight could actually step up and again, money, pay for the rent. That's a great question. About one in five households that are eligible for section eight in Santa Cruz County actually have it and there's a very long waiting list that's been closed for many years for people who are trying to get it. So I think that's an area where several speakers alluded to the opportunity for state and federal advocacy. I think expanding rental assistance at the state level in a directed way and continuing to support what candidate Joe Biden was pitching expansion of the section eight program is another place where we can make a difference but that level of resources I think would require federal and state investment to really close that gap. Yeah, and I realized there's only so much money again, section eight, if they had a pot full of money, they could step in but they have a limited amount they can actually pay. And then again, in Watsonville, we have the problem of undocumented, you know, where do they go for help? That's always been a tough one. And then of course the blended family where half of them are citizens and some are undocumented. So there's a fear factor also, they go forward, they're afraid they'll get deported or something or half the family get deported. So it's a tremendous amount of stress. We do offer counseling, I believe, at the mental health facility on Freedom Boulevard. Can we ever refer them, you know, families to that facility for counseling for especially the kids, right? If they need it. And that last question, Supervisor Caput, I think our community partners do a really excellent job of linking people with resources. The state has invested in something called Cal Hope, which is a COVID related emotional mental health support line that then links people to local levels. So I appreciate your question. I think getting the word out to the public about those resources is helpful. And anything we can do to reduce the mental health is often related to any health issues are often related to the level of stress that people are experiencing. And the housing stress that you've raised and we're talking about today is a contributor to health problems. So anything we can do to reduce housing stress will have a positive impact on health. So having those health resources available is great. And I think moving forward with trying to get as much as we can do in terms of local community resources to support people would also be useful. Especially, yeah, I know, sum it up, you know, we're all under a lot of stress from different issues that I just, with an eviction and everything like that, we could push people to the breaking point where they just can't handle it. And that's a sad commentary on what we're facing today in our society. Thank you, Supervisor Cabot. Yeah, yeah, so I just want to first, I want to take a moment and appreciate staff for their work on this and figuring out how to address this impending crisis in our community. I want to thank the community organizations that have done the hard work on the ground for the past two years to reduce the impacts in our community to the most vulnerable and also to the community advocates who have been active and reaching out to us and making sure that this issue gets the attention and resources it needs. It's a frustrating situation because we're spending $500,000 that can otherwise be spent to further assist vulnerable populations on a problem that was sort of self-inflicted by the state not running this program as effectively as possible and making sure that they got the money out before the deadline ran. So I'm supportive of the recommendation. I do want to make sure because it is money that could be spent for people who are currently experiencing homelessness or other vulnerable populations that all the factors that Dr. Ratner laid out and the criteria and priorities are addressed to make sure it's spent as effectively as possible and gets to the people who need it in the most effective way but spending money to prevent people from becoming unhoused versus trying to then have them unhoused and then trying to solve it on the backend. It's a smart investment for us. It's an even better impact on that family and the overall community. So I'll move the recommended actions. Second. We have a motion by Supervisor Coonerty and a second by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Second. I had another question for County Council regarding this request from Mr. Cansino about mandatory notification of the option for mediation. Is that something that's within, something that we could include in our local just cause ordinance? I mean, I understand we don't have an ordinance before us today and we're gonna have to put one together or rather amend the existing one. Yeah, if there are ideas I'm happy to work with you, I would wanna take a look in more detail around that and not answer from the dais about whether or not it would be an effective tool or whether it would be available but totally can work with you or Mr. Cansino to figure out whether or not that would be something that would be doable. All right, thank you. Yeah, I understand that the city of San Cruz just cause eviction ordinance is a little bit more robust than ours here in the County. So that's something we can look at as well. And also just wanna make sure I understand correctly. I mean, if someone actually follows, if an eviction proceeding all the way to the courts, as you said, they would be able to demonstrate that they had a pending application with the housing is key program and that the judge may look at that favorably and not move to evict immediately. Yeah, thanks. I think to make that real Supervisor Cooner, we gotta work the relationships here with the courts and the self-help laws there to make sure that we have that awareness among all the key players and that we've got the local partner network to really help people to access those funds. I think Supervisor Caput mentioned this is an impact on property owners, small property owners are also really struggling. They've got their own bills to pay and if the checks aren't getting cut. So it's kind of how do we mediate and balance that reality and avoid getting a formal eviction? I think we often portray property owners in a negative light, but many of them are also struggling. So I think that the local partner network and our staff are really committed to trying to get that reality to happen. And I think our self-help center and the judge who oversees a lot of the evictions here are really committed to making sure we're not evicting people just for this delay and state payment. All right, thank you. I mean, it seems like this is the action that we can definitively take today. And that is an entire community. We should continue to get the word out about due process when it comes to eviction so that everyone understands that. And I'd be happy to work with County Council looking at our just cause eviction ordinance going forward. So if there's no further discussion, Burke, roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. What's happened? I'm a person. Hi. Koenig. Hi. Thank you, Mr. President, unanimously. I might say that I think we can hear some background noise from Supervisor Cap. All right. Well, thank you. Good news for those funds. And we'll now proceed to item 17. And we have once again, Director Morris and Dr. Ratner to report on this. Item 17 is to conduct a study session on housing for a healthy Santa Cruz as strategic framework for addressing homelessness in Santa Cruz County, six month plan implementation and related updates, accept and file progress reports on policy goals and program updates, authorize the Human Services Department to apply for a California Interagency Council on Homelessness, Family Homelessness Challenge Grant and direct the Human Services Department to report back in August of 2022 on the next housing for a healthy Santa Cruz six month framework implementation cycle and related program updates as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Human Services. Director Morris. Okay, round two, very related. So here too, I'm going to make a few other introductory comments and turn it over to Robert to give a formal presentation from the PowerPoint. Just to say a touch more about the comments you made, Chair Koenig, introducing this topic as a reminder, probably not to your board, but to the community listening, we are operating under a three year strategic plan that your board approved and all four city councils approved. It is the collective impact framework we're operating under and we believe it has been a reason why we have been successful in competing for and receiving a number of grants because we actually have this framework and we can show the federal and state funders that we are working together and we have a plan. This is the second six month report under that framework, which means we're at the one year mark and pivoting into year two of the three year strategic plan. I do want to recognize as was your introductory comment, Supervisor Koenig, quite a bit of words and the materials are quite a bit more. So I do want to invite to the community and anybody who's watching that the materials are very intentionally put together because we made a promise when we stood this division up and committed to moving this plan forward that we would do everything we can to be as transparent as possible with this community, with our elected officials. And having spent over three decades in human services, a referral to the issue of housing and homelessness. This is my first opportunity at the stage of my career to be an administrator directly over the issue of homelessness. Unlike Dr. Ratner who's been working in the field for many decades directly. And I have to say, I've learned quite a bit about how complex this ecosystem is and how difficult it is to explain in sound bites and short sound bites in a public hearing the true complexity of the issue. So I just want to recognize that we have done our best to put in full transparency in the materials that the public can read. Quite a detailed report, outlining what is in front of you today. Robert's presentation will be even a more distilled version of that, but please for those who are really interested in engaging this topic, we hope that you find the materials meaningful because they do really delineate what we're looking at, what we feel like we can manage and what the outstanding issues are. I want to share that, you know, I mentioned earlier three decades, I have seen a number of public policy challenges and this is one of the most severe humanitarian crises I think California, the country and certainly this community Santa Cruz County is facing. It's visible, it's extreme. The previous presentation spoke to just one moment that things could get worse. And for those who don't know, these are some things that strike me. California as a state has the number one per capita rate of people experiencing homelessness in the entire country. Santa Cruz County as a community, who when you look at city data across the state of California, the city of Santa Cruz has the fourth highest per capita rate of people experiencing homelessness. And as you will hear in Dr. Ratner's presentation, it links to the previous report we just gave and the planning department's discussion in your board's really good conversation with planning about rena goals. A recent report highlights that the County of Santa Cruz is the number one least affordable County in California for renters. So there is some complex set of issues in front of us. And I want to say one thing that really jumps out at me. The word homeless gets used and it almost gets thrown out as if it is the aggregate describing every single person in a community that is struggling with housing. And what usually comes forward is an image that is named with the word homeless. And that is what people see in encampments with people struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues. I wanna make sure everyone is aware that is less than one fourth where the actual number of people are experiencing homelessness in any given community in Santa Cruz County. So I think we have a lot of work to do to explain better what we are talking about rather than just using the blanket word homelessness. And as a matter of public policy, I really wanna highlight something that strikes me when the questions come now that human services department is managing this division under Dr. Ratner's leadership. What can we do? Government can make an impact on populations who experience homelessness. And I just wanna highlight two. One is mentioned in the materials, veterans. If you go back to the 1970s and look at how many people who were veterans were homeless and today, public policy at the federal and state level has enacted that made it much easier to minimize the possibility that someone who served this country and is a veteran would be homeless. And the second, developmental disability. There is public policy when you look back over the last 30 years and you see what happened with people experiencing mental health issues and substance use issues versus somebody who has a developmental disability. And there are public policy reasons why there are not people with developmental disability who are homeless, yet there are people with serious substance abuse and mental health challenges. So public policy can address these issues, but it requires the federal and state government to intervene as they have on veteran issues and developmental disability. So my final comments I wanna share is I have the opportunity and the privilege and I would even say the responsibility to look at what I manage in human services and compare the work we are doing in the housing for health division that Robert will report on with all the other mandatory programs we run. We are organized and funded by mostly federal and state funding to address poverty in our public assistance programs, unemployment and our workforce development board and welfare to work programs, abuse and neglect in our foster care system and adult protective services system. And all of these programs require interactions with federal government and state government but there are three things I wanna end my comments on that strike me that are profound and meaningful and worth more dialogue that are different from all the other human services programs. The first is the role of a county. There is no federal or state mandate that says a county has to have an office and before our CAO Carlos Palacios was appointed and said, well, I wanna do something about this. This county did not lean into this as much as it has and then moved it to human services and counties throughout California are struggling who should run this? Is it the CAO? Is it health? Is it human? Is it planning? So it is confusing when you don't even know what county entity and there's no regulations that drive us. The second city, I have never in my three decades experienced something where the role confusion between the role of a city and a county is pronounced as it is on this issue of homelessness. I came here as a new member to this community and it is truly a tale of two cities. The South County Watsonville probably in large part thanks to our CAO Carlos being two decades as city manager there is really good relationships and communication with Watsonville on homelessness even though the issues are still difficult. But in the city of Santa Cruz in my first year here was very, very strained and the community watched a fight playing out between the city and the county and I'm very pleased to report we've turned that relationship around and the county and city are working really well together but boy was it a lot of work to get there. So the role of city and county is very profound and pronounced and not very well defined if at all by the state and federal government it leads it to the local to figure out. But the last comment I wanna make and then I will turn this over to Robert is I in my career have never seen a public policy crisis that requires us to have another member of the team more so than ever and that is our community. We cannot solve this issue if we do not have a relationship with the community and I think the rush to have to pull together pull solutions and plans and the funding and the pressure to sort of move ideas forward without enough staff and without enough opportunity to engage and under the crisis of COVID has certainly highlighted the community's understandable frustration that to address an issue like homelessness rushing things through we have to do where we miss funding opportunities but the community understandably is frustrated that we don't have find or make the time to engage the community. We are not gonna solve this issue unless this community and us can work together as government and community to figure out the citing issues. There is a long history of three decades here of finding reasons to block citing issues for shelters and affordable housing. I think that played out in your arena discussion this morning and we look forward in the second year of the three year plan figuring out a way to invest more deeply in community conversations because if we don't figure that out I think we're just always gonna be polarized and frustrated and chasing our tail. So I hope that in this next year we can have a more proactive relationship with our community and we take our role in that and we understand some of the issues that have played out in the last six months that pushed us to rush some applications forward. So we hope that materials Robert will present today will highlight where we are. And I just wanted to share those introductory comments from what I'm seeing. So I'll turn it over to Robert to walk through the formal presentation now. Thank you, Randy. So what's hoping to do with the formal presentation is give an overview of the materials that were submitted with this board item which included kind of an overall landscape view of how we're doing on the goals articulated in the framework and then six separate attachments and the slide presentation has six areas where I'm gonna go through really quickly that relate to those attachments. One is the update on where we are in the six month period that we're reporting on July through December of 2021. How are we doing on the goals we articulated in the framework and what's the data that we have available telling us? How are we doing with reaching our shelter goals, our COVID related sheltering programming and our efforts to help people who are in those COVID related shelters to get into permanent housing? We've talked to Fairmount this afternoon about housing affordability gap and homelessness and there's some few slides that talk about that and how those connections wanted to try to create greater transparency around the funding landscape related to housing and homelessness and the complexities associated with it and the gaps between what we propose doing in our framework and the funds that are actually available. And then there has been a request from the board and others in the public to learn from one example of funding that we've had in this community homeless emergency aid program, which is state funding and how do we use those dollars? What lessons did we learn? Brandy alluded to this a little bit on the quote at the bottom of the slide. One of the things that's not clearly articulated in our framework, we talk about hope but I think one of the major challenges and thinking about how do we address this issue is the sense of belonging that we as human beings need. We need to feel like we're connected with others and welcomed in our community. And we can fund shelter and housing but if people don't feel like they're welcomed and they belong in a community, that's a major contributor to people not being able to land in a stable situation having home. So for me personally, one of the big challenges I think over for our team over the next six months is how to help all of us understand the humanity of people who have lost their housing and their individual stories and that the basic human need to be connected with others. And that's a huge part of recovery and getting back into housing. So I'm personally really committed to working on that over the next six months. So in terms of what did we accomplish over the last six month period? We had reported at our last update on 11 key milestones that we wanted to accomplish. And I believe we partially or completely hit nine of those 11 milestones. A few of the things that I think are worth highlighting as accomplishments because of the work of the county leadership and our partners we've been able to secure state and federal grants that we weren't able to compete for, I think very well. So we've secured over $7.7 million in competitive grants over the last six months period with our rehousing wave effort for folks who are in our COVID shelters. We've helped 107 households get into permanent homes and hopefully can get over at least 160. I'd love to get us to 300 before the end of the fiscal year. We partnered with the health services agency and I think they presented to the board about their Healing the Streets program. And we're really working closely with them on helping to build out that outreach team that includes housing, health, behavioral health supports. With support from the board, we submitted for project home key applications to create more supportive housing distributed throughout the county. And then the prior round of home keep funding from the state of California, we didn't submit any applications. So I'm really proud of the work that multiple departments did to get those home key applications submitted. And we should hear by the end of the month from the status of those applications. And I'm also hopeful we have a lot of great partners who are exploring other future home key applications. The governor's budget included another round of home keep funding to create more shelter and affordable housing. And as we go through the presentation, I think it'll become clear that as staff, we feel like we need more of both. We need more shelter and more affordable housing. We've made a lot of progress and we have room to grow in terms of data collection, just being able to get regular reporting and understand what services are being provided and their impacts. And we also helped to pull together a point in time count, which is the basis we're using for monitoring how we're doing on our framework goals. So we had a count end of February and we'll have the reports on that point in time count in the summer. So at our next report back to the board, we'll have the full report then on the status of that point in time count. And then we made some significant changes in terms of how we organize our coalition and our governance. The federal government has an entity they call the Cochum of Care. And there's a lot of rights and responsibilities that this Cochum of Care body has in relationship to federal and state funding related to homelessness. So we've actually formally shifted from calling our Cochum of Care the Homeless Action Partnership to the Housing for Health Partnership to be in sync with the name of our new division and to reflect that we've really tried to change how that board is structured. Supervisor Koenig and Supervisor Coonerty are now on the policy board and we've got a great array of leaders who are really committed to addressing this issue. So I'm hoping that will help us have a bigger impact. And we recently updated our website as well. So now there's a Housing for Health Partnership website where we're trying to be more transparent and consistent with our communication. This next slide is a view on how we're doing on our goals and these are from our original framework that the cities and the county have adopted. So in terms of temporary housing that includes shelter and transitional housing, our goal was to have 600 beds available and currently we're over that amount but a large portion of that, a significant portion of that shelter capacity is because of the one-time COVID resources. So we'll get to this later in the presentation concerned about when those resources dry up, how are we gonna sustain that capacity? Rapid rehousing is a kind of intervention where you provide temporary rental assistance with services to help people who are homeless get into housing and support their rent for a period of time and then hopefully they can sustain that rent over the long term. We're behind in our capacity with rapid rehousing. The state California Department of Social Services has put out some additional money that will lift our capacity a little bit over the next six months but we're not gonna be close to the 490. So we would need significant more resources to get there. Permit supportive housing, we've actually made a lot of progress due to the pandemic resources that have gone to the housing authority and our partnership with the housing authority. We've got a lot of new housing vouchers and with the board's approval of our rehousing wave, the vouchers plus the services is how we create supportive housing. Our challenge as has been talked about before here is with vouchers, you still need housing where people can use the vouchers. And so that's continuing to be a struggle for our service partners to fully utilize those vouchers. And then the work that I do, there's two kinds of supportive housing refer to scattered site where you're using subsidies in the private market and you're really dependent on the private markets availability and willingness to have tenants who have these vouchers come into your unit and rent those units with services versus built units, which is project home key type projects, supportive housing where you're building with an intention, a project that is under construction now and Capitola Road is helping create more housing with a clinic space with Santa Cruz Community Health and Los Tiantas. That's an example of there's some supportive housing unit. So those are built units. And I think we could use more of those built units. And then the last part of the framework, we set a conservative goal of meeting our arena targets for very low income affordable housing. Most people experiencing homelessness are an income level below very low income housing. So I think it's particularly conservative to set our target around the very low income. And we're struggling as a community to get to those goals that goal of 734 new very low income units is an eight year goal. And we have till the end of 2023 to get to that target and we're at 105. On a positive front in that area, I think a lot of projects that are in the pipeline that have been approved and are trying to secure final funds, maybe we'll actually start construction and get building permits in the next couple of years so that we can get closer to that 734 goal. Another part of our framework is not just building capacity but how can we make our programs more effective? And the two areas that we are looking at in the framework are reducing lengths of stay but not just reducing the lengths of stay and having people return to homelessness but reducing lengths of stay and increasing the number of people who exit to permanent housing. And globally, this slide shows you a general trend is that we're off target where people are staying longer. We've seen slight increases in the number of people exiting to permanent housing from shelter and our transitional housing and rapid rehousing exits have gone down a little bit or stayed mostly the same but people are staying longer and programmed largely because I think there's fewer options in the housing market for folks. I still believe there's things we can do to improve our outcomes in this area and we're gonna keep working with our provider community to do what we can to help reduce lengths of stay and increase the number of people who are exiting to permanent housing. And then our overarching goal, the green arrow here shows that our framework called for just under just over a thousand households and January 2024 would be experiencing homelessness. And that's a data from a point in time count a single day and the blue arrow shows where we are in the given month according to our HMIS data. So according to that data, we have over 2,500 households experiencing homelessness in a month and in the summer, we'll know more about where the point in time count is in general, the trend is in the wrong direction. It's hard to see with this scrap but in the summer of 2021, we started to see an uptick in our HMIS data among people experiencing homelessness coming in for services from agencies that use the data system. And particularly concerning to me is seeing uptick in seniors, people 50 and older as well as households with children during that period of time. So I think we need to look at this prevention issue we talked about earlier and making sure we're really focusing in those populations. Looted to this earlier, the shelter capacity over time. So our framework goal is 600 before we started implementation of the framework. We had a baseline of four and 40 beds. The maximum we had was over a thousand during COVID with our one-time resources. We've been scaling back as our COVID resources are in decline that capacity. And in the absence of any interventions and finding new locations and identifying operators for sites we may drop below our framework baseline. If we don't take action and our team is really working on that with other people in the community so we can get to our goal, the 600. And we've been budgeting resources, one-time resources from the state to try to fund that but it's really about location and operator where we're struggling with shelter programming. And then this is a slide about how we're doing with our COVID rehousing wave efforts. We've got three amazing teams with wonderful people who are doing care management and housing navigation. So we have a county team, a boat services and housing matters. Over 259 households have been served by those programs with 309 people. We have a real estate partnership program with the boat where we're working to use those housing subsidies in partnership with private real estate market owners. We have a relationship with the community action board where we have centralized flexible funding to help people with security deposits and furniture. We have this amazing partnership with the housing authority and the Vets Hall Board of Trustees has also contributed to the whole effort. And as I mentioned, we have over 100 households that moved into housing. A lot of people have gotten subsidies. So there's actually a significant process to apply for and secure the subsidies. And now we're in the phase of the work where people have gone through that process, they've been approved and now they've got to find units where those subsidies can be used. Housing affordability gap, Randy alluded to this earlier and I read a report every year that comes out from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and it looked more closely than I normally do at some of the data. And I focused on the Santa Cruz County data and I was really struck by and wanted to share with the board and the public what came out for me in reviewing that. So there's one statistic that they report on on an annual basis. And if you look at the community of renters in the county and their average wage as a renter household, how many jobs at that average wage are needed to afford a two bedroom apartment? So in 2021, it was 3.4 full-time jobs. That's the highest in the state. And that went up from 2020 where it was 3.1 jobs. So the trend line is in the wrong direction for addressing homelessness. We wanna see that gap closing. And the ways to do that are increasing people's incomes or reducing the cost of housing at the local level. So we really need to address this issue collectively if we're gonna make progress on homelessness, particularly people who have been in this community for a while and are at risk of losing their housing because of this gap. And the earlier presentation, we talked about the connection between housing stress and the housing affordability. And this is a little graphic that we put together to try to explain the connections between the lack of affordable housing and people living on fixed incomes, renter protections. And then an event in one's life, a housing stressor where most of the money to address homelessness is in this blue category of addressing housing stressors. And not enough money and resources and time is going to the precipitating factors. But we need both. We need to address those housing stressors, but we need to address the underlying precipitating factors that make housing a real challenge. But when people have housing stress, they are displaced from our communities. They're living in unsafe overcrowded situations. The stress of not knowing if you can afford to live where you're staying the night really impacts people's health. And then when folks lose shelter altogether and often lose a sense of belonging and connection, the health impacts are pretty well documented. So we really want to try to address the green issue more than we have been so that we have fewer of those kind of health impacts over the long term. This is a slide just comparing how we're doing as a county compared to other central coast counties with our arena housing goals. And a colleague in the planning department wanted me to encourage members of the public to participate in conversations around how do we really design our general plan to encourage more multifamily affordable housing development? So a lot of folks who are in, just in the issue of homelessness don't realize that the general plan of how we build up our community really impacts the ability of developers to create more affordable housing. So I agree and encourage people to participate in that effort to really weigh in on the general plan and how housing fits into our overall plans for our community. Essentially what this slide shows is that Santa Cruz and our very low income is ahead of San Benito. According to this report, this is through December of 2020. Had not produced any very low income housing permits. Santa Cruz 105, but Monterey and San Luis Obispo have hit a higher level. And one of the things that I learned from some of my mentors is well, go and find someone who's doing it better and find out what they're doing and see if you can apply that here. And so this for me, this exercise is okay, what can we learn from our neighbors? What can we learn from other communities around the state that could be applied here to help us get closer to those targets? Cause there is, if you look at the data statewide, there's significant differences in terms of how communities are doing relative to those goals. So I think we can learn from places that are further along than we are. Wanted to provide a basic overview of how much things cost. I think I have heard in the year and a half that I've been here like, where did all that $10 million go? And I think people don't often realize because housing is so expensive, our interventions to address homelessness are pretty expensive. So this is a slide comparing the different kinds of interventions we often think about when addressing homelessness and how many people would be served. So comparing a hundred slots across each of these interventions, $720,000 for outreach that doesn't necessarily have, that's to connect people to resources and services. Shelter beds actually cost more because we're providing food and there's more staffing often needed to run a shelter than the other two interventions which are getting people into permanent housing and subsidizing them. The difference between rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing is how long we fund the services. And the rapid rehousing is typically six months to 24 months and permanent supportive housing is intended to be ongoing levels of support for people with disabilities and seniors that need that level of care and support to keep their housing. Nope, that's just it. Thank you. And so this slide attempts to look at what are our framework goals and how are we doing in terms of funding? So we estimate the need for around $77 million a year to reach all the goals in the framework. What we have currently available is around 37 million and of that 22 million mostly state funds is one time money. So we have a big gap in terms of resources needed to fully implement the plan and the materials we submitted with the board item show that we've got a lot of different funding sources to manage. And I think at the federal and state level the ways in which dollars are getting committed to this issue are incredibly inefficient and require us to spend a lot of administrative and staff time managing complexity for multiple funding sources. We have over 40 different sources we're managing in our division. Almost done. So one of those funding sources that we had managed was the Homeless Emergency Aid Program. It was funding that this was the first time the state across the entire state committed to addressing homelessness. And I think a big reason that happened is the 14 largest cities in the state were feeling deep frustration around the lack of state response to the visible levels of homelessness in their communities. And it was framed as an emergency need with a level of unsheltered people and communities. And because it was an emergency the money got put out in a rapid fashion. And I think the state has learned and counties and local communities have all learned from the experience of this funding. Most of the money, sorry, not most of the money. The money got distributed to two entities, large cities which we do not have any in Santa Cruz County that met the criteria for large city allocation and the COC is the Kinchum of Care. And the Kinchum of Care is a separate entity from the county. So I think one of the areas where there was some confusion and struggle was how are we deciding under the Kinchum of Care how this money gets invested? Those decisions were made and with interest we had close to $10 million available and where did that money go? Most of it went to funding shelter before HEAP was available. The publicly funded shelter in Santa Cruz County was mostly winter only shelter. The HEAP funding allowed that shelter to be year round capacity. And that's something I hope we can sustain. The funding didn't include the kind of housing related navigation or case management that a lot of staff had hoped for. And I think that shows up in the outcome. So just shelter only without those services to help people get into permanent housing means that people will stay in shelter or may end up back on the streets. And the HEAP funds served over 3,100 people but of that group only 342, I shouldn't say only it's a success to have 342 people move into permanent housing but we want that number to be bigger over time. We want our investments to have as big an impact as possible. So monitoring collectively our investment strategies relate to outcomes is something that I'm really committed to and trying to move money in ways that get us the best outcomes for people in our community. So lessons learned from the HEAP funds a lot of new innovative programs got set up infrastructure needs, accessible shower facilities and buildings got created as a result. We helped smaller organizations build up their capacity and mobilize their volunteer and small staff resources. We helped meet some emergency health and safety needs for people in the community. We've got a pattern going of year round funding for shelter that I hope we can sustain. And then we expanded use services for people between the ages of 18 and 24 who are struggling with housing. Areas where I think we can improve we need to have services linked with the shelter to have an housing exit focus and keep them as low barriers possible so people can come into shelter. We need to link together our investments. So we have to make sure that we can thread together if we're investing in outreach how does outreach link to shelter and how does shelter link to helping people get permanent housing? I think we had a tendency with the HEAP funds to give a little bit of money to a lot of different organizations. So the lack of a deep investment in particular programs I think made it difficult for organizations to really get to stable staffing and outcomes. So I think we need to look at deeper investments in organizations over the longer term for them to build their capacity. And then our data, our HMIS data we can do a better job of collecting information on what's happening, what the needs are and what the outcomes are from our investments. Next six months we're gonna get the point in time count data. This is a list of some of the priority areas we're launching our new consumer care structure. We're gonna follow up on those home key applications and hopefully submit some more. Street outreach efforts have launched. We just talked about the eviction and homelessness prevention network that we're hoping to build with our community partners improving data, wrapping up our COVID shelters and getting us to a stable baseline shelter capacity. Working with our partners in managed care Central California Alliance there's major opportunities for us to partner and get services resources for people experiencing homelessness who are on Medi-Cal. And then centralizing our funding for flexible housing assistance to help people return to home if it's outside the area help with security deposits, application fees those things can be real barriers to people getting back into housing and we can make that effort more efficient. And that's our update. Sorry, I went a little longer but happy to take questions and open up for discussion. All right, thank you, Dr. Ratner and Director Morris questions from members of the board. Sure, Mr. Chair. Yes, Supervisor Coonerty. Yeah, so thank you for the report and as always sobering. Can I ask, so the board set as a goal to end children, local children being homeless and the numbers as you pointed out are going in the wrong direction. What are the short-term and intermediate steps we can take to at the very least reverse this trend and then get it going in the right direction? Yeah, thanks for their question, Supervisor Coonerty. One of the things that we're contemplating to staff and absolutely open to ideas is I think that our work has not partnered well with the school districts. And I think we have data from the school districts that indicate households that are struggling where there are children who may be doubled up and back up a little bit. The definition of homelessness from a school district reporting perspective is different than one we typically use when we're reporting on homelessness. So people who are doubled up or in situations where they're struggling. So I think there's opportunities for us to go a little bit more upstream and tighten our partnership with the school districts to identify children who are unstable and safe housing situations and who are frankly literally homeless as well. So with our challenge grant we're seeking board approval to submit an application. My hope is that we will be able to partner with our school districts where we see the most number of students experiencing homelessness. I think the other area where I feel like we can make some progress is the state has put some more funding through the Department of Social Services into addressing family homelessness so we can expand those programs. And we also are now able to work with some special vouchers for homeless families that the housing authority has set aside to help connect people to resources. And then I think more broadly we just gotta keep working on the housing affordability issue particularly for families. So when we're looking at affordable housing development are we building two-bedroom and three-bedroom units that can accommodate families as well as single adults or smaller households? And then related to the shelter conversation I think finding an operator in a location and prioritizing which populations we wanna serve. When I last presented I on the topic of ending children's homelessness I shared what it would take to build out a new family shelter so that there were no children on shelter. And it's a significant investment of funds but it's also the location and finding an operator who are willing to operate the program. So as we reflect on the money we have available and prioritizing what kinds of shelter capacity we wanna have for what populations I think that's an area where under the consumer of care we can really look at where do children and families fit into that grander scheme of things. Okay, I appreciate that. I've been, yeah, hopefully there's an urgency because as we know that any traumatic events that happen in childhood and especially early childhood have lifelong impacts. And so getting, as you say, getting upstream and be preventative is always important being preventative especially with that vulnerable population I think is essential. My second question is, I mean it, as you mentioned that the churn of our shelter beds and our other beds is essential if we have 400 shelter beds and people stay there a year we have 400 shelter beds if they go every, if they're only there for two months before they find more permanent shelter then we have what 2600 or 2400 shelter beds. And, but as you mentioned, one of the challenges is finding places for those folks to go and finding places in Santa Cruz County is gonna be extremely difficult even if we were meeting our arena numbers it would still be a very, very challenging environment. And when we convince landlords take section eight tenants usually that's taking workforce housing off the market and people who are just one economic rung above being at risk of homelessness. So it creates an additional challenge. And so, I often talk about this but helping people find places where the jobs housing balance is more resilient and sustainable is key. How are you finding working as other shelters to do especially ones in the Bay Area that I've visited where they actively talk about finding people places outside the Bay Area to establish, to find more permanent housing? How is that effort going here? Yeah, I think it's a common struggle across the state. There's a general migration of people with lower incomes to cheaper parts of the state. And now I recently listened to a program about Fresno County feeling like we've got all these people coming from other parts of California here with lower incomes and taking up our housing market. So it's a statewide issue and there's the general migration because of the cost of housing and other factors. People are leaving the state and as a long-time California resident I hope we can do better. And there's the reality of the moment we're in right now. And I think that a lot of our shelter programs and our rehousing wave staff are talking to people about we've been, I'll just give an anecdote for example, of a conversation I heard, we've been waiting for this, you've been looking for six months for a place here are you willing to look in Santa Clara County or Monterey County for a housing unit with your voucher? One of the benefits of the particular vouchers we got from the housing authorities that they are portable and typically a traditional Section 8 voucher you have to use it for at least a year in the community where it's issued. So that flexibility has allowed a staff to really work with people to find locations outside of the area. We're in the process of reevaluating our coordinated entry system for assessing people's needs and their histories around housing. And part of that process is finding out where do people have housing before? Where do they have connections? Can we get people connected back with family or friends or area where they're support? And historically we didn't, we used another assessment called the VI Spadat that weren't directed at those kinds of issues. So we're trying to shift towards questions that lead to action and really support people. And then I alluded to a goal we have to centralize our flexible funding. I think we've made it really difficult for our providers to access funding to help people to relocate out of county or to pay for deposits or application fees. So I'm hoping if we centralize that money get more transparent about how people can access it that we'll be able to help more people. And I think it's an ongoing training and conversation area. There are definitely providers that have developed more knowledge and skills of what's going on in other communities around the country in California. I think we can share that locally and have some more impacts there. Supervisor Coonerty, I'd like to connect the dot and from my introductory comments to your two questions. Just my observation, mindfully you've been here a lot longer than I have. I think that in my introductory comments I spoke to how absent information and communication with the community, the default image community has when they hear the word homeless is an image that is not a child in their family doubled up at risk of losing their housing and somewhere. So I think one of the answers to your questions are communication, education. I have a feeling we will have less struggles with citing issues when and if we can be more proactive in communication about target populations because usually community are not as concerned about helping children and family keep housing and having affordable housing available. So that's one comment I wanna make, very mindful, absent those details, people rush to the conclusion that it's the most severe image they see and that's what they're worried is gonna come to their community. And the second comment I wanna make, I've only been in one other jurisdiction, I got to see a little bit of how much money was put into shelters and the secondary gain of having a shelter system funded adequately to be successful in what you often call churn but actually help people get services and get support to move on is then that community sees and the broader community experiences a shelter resourced well being a value added and an asset as opposed to a place they just worry about where people come and just leave and come and go and the struggles that play out in that community. So I think there's a secondary gain of deeper investment and a successful and effective shelter system. I think it potentially will change the image of what a shelter is but we haven't invested deeply enough. So I hope that that's a connection point as well if looking for we can be successful. Yeah, and let me just say, I mean, I think the resources for family shelters is a real challenge. In my time on various boards, I think every, dare to say, I think it would be a unanimous vote among the Board of Supervisors or most city councils to cite a family shelter in any neighborhood in Santa Cruz County because we all see the need and can differentiate between it. I think what we need is the resources to both build it and then operate it going forward but I don't think, I think we could mobilize to get support for family shelters and overcome any opposition. As we've seen in frankly, in the Salinas of Alley where that's proposed Project Homekeep project is getting solid support from people because they wanna help that particular vulnerable population. The final thing I'll say is, I think in the list of things that are driving homelessness, as you say, it's not driving all homelessness or even a majority of homelessness but the impact of methamphetamine and opioids and especially impacting the most visible and impactful parts of homelessness in our community has to be called out as a major driver for that specific sub-population and needs a coordinated response from our other health divisions that focus on substance use because that is, you know, the people I know who I grew up with, who I see visibly homeless and experiencing homelessness in Santa Cruz County are the drugs where the primary driver in that homelessness and continued homelessness and until we reckon with that as a community and then provide services and also do what we can to get methamphetamine off our streets, we're gonna continue to see very visible impacts on people's lives and families and the community as a whole. And I just wanna, and I'm almost 100% sure you're aware of the supervisor community, but for the whole anybody listening to this, the former mayor of San Francisco are now governor, experienced this long ago and it is no surprise that he and his health and human service secretary Dr. Galli have put forward this proposal to address the very issue that's plaguing the entire state called CARES courts. So whether or not that makes it through the process, it's a very vexing issue, but I just wanna recognize that that issue is known all the way up to our governor who has shown to bypass legislature and just say this is a priority as a governor to find some way to intervene on this issue that's getting worse. So just wanna appreciate the state understands and our governor understands is trying to push forward legislation to sort of move that needle on the issue that is most visible and most disturbing to many people. Absolutely and let me just say, I think there's a government certainly role to play in this on both the enforcement side as well as on the treatment side and we have to play that, but it's also as you mentioned, this is also part of a broader community challenge. We need families and schools and teachers and churches and nonprofits and everything else to really address what the leniency around drugs that Santa Cruz has that has created a real problem in our community that we need to culturally and address if we're gonna get serious about helping people in need. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thank you. Is this just for questions right now or can I make a statement? You're welcome to make a statement. Okay. Yeah, Supervisor Coonerty asked a lot of questions that he was really hitting on very important parts of what's going on. And what I'm getting at is we all know, or most of us know, very good people. We see them at church, we see them at school or we see them at the grocery store. And they ask, what are you doing about the homeless? I've got somebody sleeping on my property and I've got somebody, what are you doing about the ones on the riverbed? What are you doing about this or that? And there seems to be a lack of compassion. And what I wanna thank the Human Services Department for is they have a lot of compassion. I wanna thank you guys for all of that. My response to people that say, I get them out of here, it's almost like they expect them to disappear and never appear again. We don't send them off to Siberia here in this country. We don't send them off to Gulags. And okay, what are we doing? And we're offering them beds. We're offering them food and shelter and clothing. We offer them showers, laundry, counseling. And we refer them also to the rescue mission down here. The women's shelter that just opened up in Watsonville, which is a wonderful facility. The Salvation Army now was running a great program, but they're talking about maybe pulling out or for lack of funding, which you can't be at a worse time. So the whole thing about this compassion part is most of us are one big push from ending up in the curve, ending up in the street. It could be a bad health issue or illness. It could be a bad marriage. It could be a death of a loved one or more. It could be addiction like supervisor or community talked about. It could be bankruptcy and various other reasons that were also susceptible of ending up being homeless. So we're not totally looking at this from the outside. We're also looking at it. What are we gonna have if something happens to us? And the thing that I worry about and what I really care about are safety nets that we offer to the homeless is I've got five kids, right? And maybe I'm gonna be able to last and somehow survive everything and my wife and I won't end up homeless, right? But how about all five of my kids? So are they gonna all have a perfect marriage or are they gonna have an Aussie and Harriet family when they grow up, which is finding it's very hard to find. So this safety nets that we're talking about and the compassion we're showing is actually gonna help our children or our grandchildren for that matter. So just keep doing up the great work you guys are doing with human services and keep showing that we do care and we're trying our best and we're trying to handle it. We need more help from the churches. We need more help from the nonprofits and everybody, we're in this together and we're not only talking about the present time but we're talking about the future and the next generation. So that's it. Sorry for the lecture. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Are there questions or comments from? I don't know if that must speak. Yeah, I'd like to make a couple of comments too. I can say that in my eight plus years on the County Board of Supervisors, I have never seen such a detailed and comprehensive description of what we're facing and the scope of this issue, which is humongous as you have stated. It's far fetched and it's gonna take a community wide effort to resolve it or surely help get to some solutions and many in this community are really frustrated as we know with the lack of progress that's been made and I think that's probably insane by every community in California and probably throughout the nation. We're not the only ones, but for decades, the solutions put forward have been well-intentioned and provided safety net services, but yet there's more people than ever that are falling before the cracks and are homeless. And what's different about what you're presenting is that it's clearly defines the core contributing factors which were how we're linked but the distinct and complicated one that we have to fit for each one of them to make this whole thing work. It's really the first time in my memory that the resource issue has been addressed so clearly. As you might have remembered a couple of years ago, Director Morris, I said, let's get real of what we really can do with what we have. And we just have seen their need is in the estimates of $77 million and we've only got $47 million. So we've got what, 2,500 homeless that are identified. And then there's a great number more that are just about ready to get there if we don't do something and keep them in a house. So I just think that this approach of what we're talking about, what you're talking about and presenting is right on target. We've got to do what we can do to keep as many people that are just ready to get, lose their house, to keep them there and then go from there to get more people in their houses. We have a very, very complicated situation here. As was mentioned, we have the highest house prices comparatively in the state and what it forth highest in the nation. It makes it very difficult but to take this comprehensive community wide approach is the right way to go. And I really applaud you for giving us to where we need to go and get us in that right direction but also to give us a reality check that we're not going to be able to serve each and every person that's homeless. We would do whatever we can with what we have and we will because we have this good plan of attack. So I want to compliment you on presenting this and getting a new path forward of how we're going to address this issue of housing in Santa Cruz County. I just want to take the minute mindful I'm speaking to a statesman who spent a lot more of your career in elected office. I'm at a point 30 years in my career I have a couple of lessons learned that I hope apply to this moment that I want to share. Human services and I'd say health as well have a mandate to try to serve very vulnerable people in local communities. And I've seen this story play out many times and I'm hoping it plays out here with this issue. The community is rightly so very, very frustrated and 30 years in government I've come to realize it's really hard for even somebody who's really plugged in to understand where do I point the finger? Is this the federal government's fault? Is this the state? Is this the county? Is this the city? I hope the materials for those who have time to read them illuminates it's actually all of it. But what my hope is is when I look back at where public policy reform and government actually did a good job and intervened and moved a humanitarian crisis to significantly less. It often was because like what we're doing here and this is where my hope is we actually have some good data we're teasing things out we're being realistic about expectation. I think taxpayers are willing to invest if they know it works. But right now most communities don't have any confidence if they invest taxpayers money it's gonna do anything because everyone is just pointing fingers. So I hope that this framework with detailed reports we're giving the honesty and the transparency begin to show federal officials, state officials as you as our elected officials our city councils. There is a pathway to solve this. Here's the resources needed. Here's what we can do as a county and here's what we need the federal and state governments do then we can get better organized where to apply pressure. Right now nobody knows where to and just everyone's yelling. So I am hopeful that we're at the beginnings of being more clear on what the issues are and what we need to do solve them and then we can work together on advocating where we need to advocate. I don't think many communities are in that place right now but we're getting closer. So I hope those materials highlight we're trying to be very honest and transparent about what we see as staff. The renewed focus and it's good to see it. So thank you again. Thank you Supervisor McPherson. Any other questions or comments from the board? I see none will open it to the public. If you'd like to address us on this item please approach the podium. Hello, my name is Alexia Martinez and I'm one of the community members for a proposed new bill transition project in Aptos on Park Avenue. We as affordable housing advocates feel it would be a travesty if the property owner developer at this time, Novan would be able to bypass the normal development review processes and bypass the normal environmental review processes by paying a fine to opt out a public funding requirements of AB 140 which was introduced in 2021 to provide timely and permanent transitional housing. If there are no significant liquidated damages to prevent construction or delays and there is not a significant penalty to opt out of the proposed transitional housing project which is in favor, seems to be in favor of a market value project. The property owner and developer Novan would stand to make millions of dollars at taxpayer's expense and this seems to be a predatory development. We've looked forward to your timely response to our concerns and these additional concerns and we continue to wait for you and home key to build an honest relationship with your community. However, as of today, the most pressing concern and question we do have is during this review process that's happening actively right now, there is little to no history referring to the past EIRs and reasons for unapproved development over the past 20 to 30 years because since my meeting with them, the development department, Sheila and Joyce Drake from your principal for recent DRGs. February 28th at 9 a.m. I was confused about how the APN numbers lined up and was working with them to try and decipher how to read that. As of today, if you go on your GIS website, the numbers have been changed again and the history from all those previous APN numbers are not readily available to say Sacramento office or anyone else around here who wants to look up those APN number histories, they are not available now and it seems oddly convenient during the time when we're approving this process that that pertinent information is not available. Why is that? Thank you, Ms. Martinez. Hello. My name is Chris Tafiar. I'm also in district one. I understand and I respect what you guys are doing is a huge challenge. And you talk about our empathy and stuff, we have had a front row seat to seeing what homelessness is about and we are educated on it. That really is what my concern is. I'm hearing about this and hearing about the affordable housing and stuff like that, but and it is a huge challenge. We live in a very expensive area to live here. Our area in particular is kind of semi rural and a nice area and we like it. There's a reason we chose to live there, not down here in Santa Cruz. Now that being said, it appears like, for example, this project home key with Novan development has got really pushed through really quick. Now I'm a property owner, I'm a homeowner and I guess the bad word landlord as well in this area. And homelessness is kind of a bad word now. So unhoused is the new word, I guess, or whatever, but we don't think it's right what happened. There were numerous other concerns, environmental concerns, endangered species concerns, infrastructure concerns, the water. How the heck did they get access to water? Anybody that's tried to build in this county, anybody that's tried to just improve their own property, the people even just trying to rebuild their homes from the CZU fire, they've gone through nightmares. And I'm talking, I went two years just to build an ADU unit and still headache. How did this guy, Novan, get pushed through so fast? Because you write homeless and COVID on an application and all of a sudden boom and now all the churches in our neighborhoods and anybody with any large property or businesses are getting approached with these developers because they found a green light ticket just to produce low income, high density housing in our neighborhood. And you say you don't think that affects our property values or the crime rate and all that really does. And that is not my concern, I'm not classist. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm just letting you know, you need to look out for us too, the people that actually live here and pay the taxes here and vote it because it does matter. And you know what, I wake up at 330 in the morning and find my wife crying in the living room upset because she's worried about what's happening in our neighborhood, sir. And I didn't get a chance to address you at the last one because she's formed out upset crying. Sir, I'm happy to talk to you later. Thank you. Is there anyone else here in the audience who would like to address us? Seeing none, is there anyone on the phones or Zoom? Yes, we have two speakers, Sir Cagno, your microphone is available. Hi, good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, my name's Sir Cagno. I'm gonna talk from a few of the different hats that I wear. I'm on the mental health advisory board and we present to you every once in a while. I'm a director of a local nonprofit recovery cafe, Santa Cruz, a consultant that helped with setting up the Vets Hall shelters and also I helped run the winter shelter a few years ago for AFC in the Salvation Army. I wanna applaud the work done by Randy and Robert's staffs creating this presentation and report. I support the framework moving forward and I'm proud of the services that Santa Cruz offers, the compassion mixed with fiscal responsibility to deal with a human crisis in our community. In moving forward, I wanna point out one aspect of any strategy that we use. With the engagement, I find that there's a challenge with the engagement of those who are actually experiencing homelessness. A lot of them don't wanna stay in shelters. We've modified things to go closer to a low barrier idea, but I think we have a definite struggle in our shelter populations, in keeping people safe and providing professional services to them. I worry as somebody from the Mental Health Advisory Board, the number of people getting kicked out of shelters for behaviors which are based on behavioral health challenges. We had very strong equity values within the core framework, but within our shelters, there is no grievance policy as of yet that actually goes and moves through the shelter and moves towards the county if the grievance wanted to go high enough, even though there are county contracts. When I was running the shelter for AFC and Salvation Army, I was helping run it. We had 550 people come through one winter and I had to kick out 50 people because our staff couldn't manage it. We never... Suzanne Thomas, your microphone is available. Thank you. My name's Suzanne Thomas. I live adjacent to the proposed property that is under review for Home Key Funding on Park Avenue in Soquel. I just want to express my concerns about the project, not that I am against providing affordable housing and providing homes for those who are challenged in finding affordable housing. That is not my concern. My concern is the project as it is proposed and the location of it. And they effects upon the fragile environment that it is going to be built upon, including the runoff from the impervious surfaces into the riparian area. And also the lack of disability access, if we're providing housing for veterans and others who maybe have mobility challenges, they're egress and ingress into the property because of the slope and also the sidewalks are not accessible to them to get to the convenience store which is quoted in the project itself and also to end this up. Also the speed and the lack of transparency that the County went in submitting this application to Home Key, even though you aren't mandated by law to involve the community, I think as a matter of trust and as a resident and a voter in this community, we all had a right to be involved in this and perhaps a better project may have come out of this whole situation. Thank you, Thomas. There are no other speakers. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. Motion would be in order. I'll move for approval. Second. I'm motion by Supervisor Caput, second by Supervisor Coonerty. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Coonerty unanimously. Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of our regular agenda for today. Our next, the next regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will be April 12th, 2022 at 9 a.m. in these chambers and via Zoom. Meeting adjourned.