 Good afternoon everybody, welcome to our 4 p.m. session of the April 16th 2019 special meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I would like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you Mayor, Council Member, it's Crone. Here. Glover. Here. Myers. Here. Brown is absent. Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here. So I just have a few announcements and then we will move on to our presentations. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and is streaming on the city's website at cityofsantacruz.com. Lynn Dutton is our technician for today's presentation. And thank you Lynn for your work and your time here with us today. The purpose of today's meeting is to hear from public works and the parks and recreation department heads. And this is all ahead of our budget hearing for the 2020 fiscal year. What we'll have is representatives from each department that will be providing a update and presentation and that will be followed by questions from the council. We'll then open it up to public comment and at which time we'll return back to the council for any follow-up questions. I want to remind the council and the community that there will be no action taking place tonight as this is an informational session. So we'll go ahead and just go ahead and jump right in. We'll start here with our public works department presentation and we have Mark Dettle from Public Works, our director of Public Works. Thanks Mark. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. It's my pleasure to present you an overview of public works and I will start off the presentation. We are a very large department and I'll have representatives, division managers will be presenting their portion of what they do to inform you and give you an overview. It is a fairly lengthy presentation, so if you'd allow us to finish the presentation and then we'd be happy to answer any questions at the end of that. So if that works for you, that would be great. So we'll save our questions till the end. So starting off, Public Works is the largest city department, six divisions, 251 employees and a combined budget of almost $66 million. Major function areas, traffic engineering, which includes all parking related functions. Engineering, which provides the engineering services for design, building, repair and replacement of city assets. Administrative services, which serve the entire department. Resource recovery, which provides refuse, green waste recycling and recycling pick up, street sweeping and landfill administration. Operations, which provides streets, traffic services and repair, fleet maintenance, facility maintenance. And then the wastewater division, which provides wastewater collection treatment and stormwater collection, as well as many other environmental services for the city. Who provides these services? You can see by the bar graph how the employees are distributed in our FTEs. The largest division is the resource recovery division. We're fairly unique in that we collect our own refuse and recycling with our own drivers. We don't contract that service, we provide it in house. We also have a landfill and you'll hear more about that. Wastewater is second with 57. Then parking services, 45 FTEs, operations 33, engineering 25 and admin and seven. Resources by fund, it's about $63 million of revenue that comes in each year. About a third of that, almost 22 million is the wastewater fund. Another third is refuse fund. Parking is about one ninth of that, another 7 million. And the rest is spread over different funds, gas tax, stormwater, wharf parking, measure E, traffic impact and such. And operations is an internal service fund. If we look at how we expend that fund, not surprising wastewater and refuse again are about the same expenditures, those are balanced funds. Parking brings in about 8.3 million. We have fleet internal service that's about 4 million. Streets and traffic, again around 3.7. Stormwater, about 2 million and admin and engineering is about 2.6 and facilities is 1.7 million. So a lot of different services, a lot of different funds that we provide. How's our budget broken down by FTEs or supplies? Almost 48% is personnel and 45 is supplies and services, 45%. Another 5% in capital outlay and only 2% of debt, so that's broken out. How does the public works department compare with the overall city general fund? Our slice of the general fund is almost $10 million. But we bring in an additional 4.2 million, so our really net cost of the general fund is about $5.7 million. This is an American Public Works Association Public Works Week poster from a couple of years ago. But I think this poster really conveys an importance of our essential functions and services to our customers, our residents, businesses, and visitors. Whether they realize it or not, we truly are always there. And I think you'll see that in the presentation. To that end, we're going to take you on a tour into each of the divisions, sharing some of the key highlights of our programs. Our essential functions and services, workload indicators, those will be a component of the 2020 budget book coming to you shortly. A few of the highlights and achievements of the past year, and lastly a few key challenges. So we'll begin with resource recovery and for that we'll have Bob come on up and provide the start. Bob Nelson, Public Works, Operations Manager for Resource Recovery Division. So our resource recovery division is a diverse and complex operation that does much more than just pick up trash. Resource recovery is organized under three main sections, collections operations, the resource recovery facility at Demiolane, and waste reduction. I'll begin with the collections section. The collections section of resource recovery is responsible for collection of all refuse, recycling, and organics containers city-wide. We also collect roll-off commercial containers. Those are the debris boxes you see out there for construction sites. We service the street trash cans throughout the downtown. We administer the mechanical street sweeping program and we're collecting organics for food waste from some of the city's larger food waste producers. Some of our workload indicators in the past year, collections emptied more than 2.6 million refuse, recycling, and organics containers over the last 12 months. We transported more than 50,000 tons of refuse and recycling to the resource recovery facility. We swept more than 15,000 miles of city streets, removing 839 tons of debris from the city streets and bike lanes. We processed 13,000 tons of recyclable material, which were diverted out of the city landfill. We cleaned up about 190 tons of illegally dumped material from our streets. So in the resource recovery facility, the resource recovery facility is a city-owned sanitary landfill. We were established in 1926 and the facility is located at the end of Demiolane, about 2.5 miles west of the city limits. Facility is home to many critical services including non-recyclable landfill operations for the public in the city, the recycling processing center, construction materials recycling, and household hazardous waste drop-off program. And if you look up at that little graphic, really most of the operation for recycling, it all happens in that little tiny little corner there where you can see the buildings. That's where all our recycling operations take place. A lot of material goes through that little section. Some of the workload indicators, the landfill is a pretty busy place. The city refuse and recycling as well as the public come and go all day for six days a week. In the last year alone, we processed and sold 12,700 tons of recyclables, generating about $1.9 million of revenue for the Refuse Fund. Compact and disposed 47,000 tons of refuse. We diverted more than 31,000 tons of organic and construction materials from disposal on the landfill and sold some of that material to market. Landfill gas is created during the anaerobic decomposition of organic substances and is a valuable renewable energy source. You can see there's a little black thing sticking out of the ground there in the background. That's one of our gas collection wells, which extracts gas from the landfill for reuse and prevents greenhouse gas from escaping into the atmosphere. As you can see there, we generated 10 million kilowatt hours worth of energy. The resource recovery utilizes many methods to divert material out of the landfill, but perhaps one of the most enjoyable is the recycled art program. I'd like to share a video of the city produced about the program. Scrub for me as an artist was fascinating. When I visited the dump, I realized that it was insurmountable. There's too much trash. It was shocking. I'm here at the Santa Cruz Resource Recovery Facility and this is a giant pile of scrap metal. This pile, if you could believe it or not, only took a couple weeks to build up and in a couple weeks more, it'll be as tall as a three-story building. That program was inspired by a similar program that started over 25 years ago in San Francisco called Recology. Since then, many other cities have started similar programs, especially as artists have continued to request access to materials like this that they can only get at the dump. Scrub is encouraging people to think outside the box and to think differently about what they've passed along as trash. I travel. I see in other countries where they take things and they rebuild them and they repurpose them and they paint them or they decorate them or they make them into something that it used to be and it works and I think it's really beautiful. I've been deeply passionate about recycling and perhaps more about upcycling for as long as I can remember. The premise for a lot of my art is around scraps. I think there's a tremendous potential for artists to create beautiful and extremely diverse art from trash. I can't help but think that one day this will help to diminish our landfill. And that takes us to our final section of resource recovery, which is the waste reduction operation. Waste reduction operations include customer and community outreach related to recycling and refuse and provide several education and environmental programs, many of which I'll detail here. First development I'd like to highlight is the interactive what goes where search engine on the waste reduction homepage. You can enter any item into the search bar and information about recycling that item will be provided. This is much more useful than the cumbersome and lengthy PDFs that we used to typically use to try and convey considerable and ever-changing information. This interactive guide also adds tips for source reduction and more environmentally friendly product alternatives. Education is about recycling and reuse and refuse and is the most important component of waste reduction operations. To this end the department has produced nine recycle right videos to help the community understand what can and cannot be recycled. The following is just one of those videos focusing on the common problems and questions related to recycling glass material. For recycling glass is really simple. If it's a glass bottle or a glass jar, it can be recycled. No other type of glass is allowed in the recycling bin. No mirrors, drinking glasses, vases, window glass or light bulbs. No ceramics like coffee mugs or dinner plates and no Pyrex cookware in the recycling bin. Again it's simple. Only bottles and jars go into your recycling bin. The glass bottles and jars do need to be empty and lightly rinsed whenever possible and paper labels are just fine. If the bottle or jar is broken, it can still be recycled. Just be careful when placing it in the bin. Be sure to remove the metal lids and caps and recycle them separately. A great tip if you're passionate is to place the metal lids and bottle caps in an empty can with the top pinched in. Place the can in your recycling bin. This way the small caps and lids have a better chance of being picked up by our magnetic sorting equipment. Do not belong in our blue bins, so please remove wine corks. Again, to recycle right, remember glass bottles and glass jars. No other glass at all. So we have nine of those online doing different materials. We published our annual Refuse and Recycling Guide, our most well read and most popular publication, perhaps in part because the newsletter includes customers free bulky item pickup and extra bag server stags. We amended and enhanced the environmentally acceptable food packaging ordinance, which added straws, lids, and cutleries that are only available upon request by the customer and suggested both a takeout fee and a credit for people bringing their own reusable containers. Tours of our resource recovery facility for adults and student groups are not only extremely popular, but also a key component of our education programming. We have found that seeing the recycling and disposal process firsthand gives the community a sense of understanding and ownership that cannot be achieved in any other method. This year we hosted 46 facility tours for 538 students and 349 adults. Engaged local youth through our annual Heart Submission Contest last year 136 Santa Cruz school children submitted artwork in the annual Santa Cruz Recycles poster contest for both the truck and the big belly can signs. In February and March of this year we completed our second annual master recyclers program classes. This program educates and empowers community members as champions of waste reduction and recycling. Participants complete this training over seven evening classes and two Saturday morning field trips. Master recyclers also then volunteer 20 hours of community service with the city to educate and empower their neighbors, friends, schools, businesses and special events to waste less and recycle right. This year we certified 28 master recyclers through this popular and pioneering program. Waste reduction also operates the green business program in partnership with Monterey Bay Green Business. Last year we certified 20 new green businesses and re-certified 23 of the existing ones. This brings the total of green businesses within the city to 175. We organized two bulky item pickup days, two garage sale weekends, and one community Earth Day which is coming up this Saturday, April 20th. So some of the accomplishments I'd like to just touch on. The daily residential refuse and recycling collection routes were optimized and consolidated, reducing the number of routes in the city by 10. This creates a more effective daily travel time, reduces emission and allows expansion into other operations such as food waste collection. We estimate that eliminating these 10 routes avoids about 52 tons of CO2 equivalent. The waste reduction team completely revised outreach materials for recycling and green waste programs, including digitizing recycling information online. Increased illegal dumping mitigation activities citywide, ranging from discarded furniture and appliances to illegal campsite cleanups. The program collected 190 tons of material, almost double of what was collected last year. We started the commercial food waste program at the end of November in 2017. We currently have 25 larger commercial customers right now and we're collecting about 12 tons a week. This material is currently going over the hill to Santa Clara to a facility where it's made into animal feed. We also reached agreement with the Santa Cruz Metro to fuel our compressed natural gas refuse vehicles at their facility, saving the rate payers over 1.5 million by not having to build our own fueling station. Everybody's heard about the China of a green wall and the green fence and the recycling markets. Well, during the bottom of the paper market, we scoured national and international markets to find a home for 1,500 bales of recycled paper, while many programs discontinued or disposed of that material. So looking ahead, some of the upcoming projects and initiatives for fiscal year 2020, we'll continue to fully implement AB 1383, which is the short live climate pollutants act or it's also known as the Organics Management Act. This will include monitoring, auditing and documentation of all aspects of our organics collection and processing, including a new requirement to monitor and document all food recovery and distribution activities within the city limits. We plan to complete the installation of our food discard processing equipment at the resource recovery facility by the end of the summer beginning of the fall, reducing our transportation time and expense and allowing for required expansion of the program. Currently, this mandated program services 25 of our largest customers are really required to expand this to hall commercial and residential accounts by 2022. Excuse me. We'll begin preliminary steps for construction of the next landfill cell, cell 3B. Work includes excavation and storage of approximately 423,000 cubic yards of dirt to allow for cell liner construction as well as extension of the landfill access road. We'll return to City Council with a comprehensive update to the environmentally acceptable food packaging ordinance and look to expand our ordinance to include other single-use plastic items. And finally, we'll continue to work to find answers for the collapse of the recycling materials market. The market currently only desires the cleanest grade of recyclables, especially as related to paper and plastics, making our recycle right efforts all the more critical. With that, turn it over to operations. Good afternoon, Mayor Watkins, Council members. I'm Mike Hopper, Public Works Operations Manager. I'm going to acquaint you with our duties out at the corporation yard on River Street. The operations division does more than we're able to cover today, but we'll touch on a few of the activities of all of our sections, which comprise streets and traffic maintenance, mechanical maintenance, facilities maintenance, and general operations. Streets and traffic team has just eight filled positions out of 14 due to retirements and movement of workers to other city departments and to the private sector. They're responsible for a vast and diverse array of critical responsibilities, including small sidewalk, curb, gutter, and catch basin installation and repairs, repairing and replacing street lights city-wide, managing vegetation along our sidewalks, roadways, bike lanes, and other areas to enhance traffic and fire safety. Vegetation, sediment, and debris removal from our creeks and rivers to maintain flood control. We assist the police and parks department on encampment cleanups and debris removal. We provide design critical project coordination and logistical supports to city projects, such as creation and decommissioning of the River Street Camp. We repair, replace, and install street hardware such as signs, fencing, guardrails, and produce signage in-house and for other city departments. And just as a side note, we recently acquired a laser jet printer that'll enable us to possibly expand our sign-making capabilities outside the city for other jurisdictions. Painting, including street markings such as curbs, striping, and sidewalks, and critical logistical support for special events such as First Night on New Year's Halloween street fairs, and more. Some of streets and traffic's workload indicators in the past year include over 600 potholes repaired. We also keep a supply of sandbags on hand at the corporation yard for city departments and the public in the event of flooding or threatened flooding. We also clean up landslides and mud and debris flows, including downed trees from areas citywide. We responded to more than two dozen road and pathway failures, again typically brought on by winter storms. And our streets and traffic crew created, repaired, or installed in excess of 500 street signs and completed hundreds of work orders for roadway repairs, sidewalks, traffic and street lights, striping, and signage. Our second major section is the mechanical maintenance department at the city garage. This group is responsible for the city's vehicle and equipment fleet. We purchase new assets emphasizing durability and fuel efficiency and repair and maintain current assets. We dispose of assets that are obsolete or at the end of their life cycle on government surplus sites. And we provide fueling services for the city's fleet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And we provide emergency roadside service for city vehicles. The fleet also handles most of air board and water board regulatory reporting related to the city's fleet and equipment assets, most notably our diesel emissions from our diesel vehicles and also the safety of our underground fuel storage tanks at the corporation yard. The division balances a never-ending high demand for maintenance and repair of vehicles through prioritization of sanitation and public safety assets. Garbage equipment and police and fire get our first attention when they're in need. Our workload indicators demonstrate that, for example, we completed more than 3,000 maintenance, repair, and other work orders. And in this photo, we have an employee who is actually now the garage supervisor repairing the exhaust system on a police vehicle. Facilities maintenance section, our third group is a small group of just four employees plus a temp and is responsible for complete routine maintenance and repair of City Hall, City Hall Annex, police headquarters, and the corporation yard. And for significant maintenance needs of other city buildings, including the fire administration and fire stations, parks and recreation buildings, including the Civic Auditorium, Loudoun Nelson Community Center, Museum of Natural History, Delaviega Golf Lodge, and some municipal wharf buildings. Typically, on those buildings, we're responsible for the exterior of the building, and the department is responsible for the interior, or tenants are responsible. And we occasionally work at the water department administration building. As well as collaboration on maintenance and remodeling needs at other city facilities. This section also supervises the work of outside contractors to perform these services. And we schedule and conduct routine safety inspections of city facilities such as fire sprinkler inspections and fire extinguisher inspections and updates. In recent years, other city departments have cut their facility maintenance budgets and transferred responsibility to facilities maintenance. Despite this, the section is not added a full-time position in many years, at least eight that I'm aware of. At the same time, operating budgets and capital improvement projects have not kept paced with the deterioration of aging buildings. This increases the number of work orders dealing with emergency situations such as plumbing and roof leaks, clogged drains, electrical outages, fire sprinkler failures, and HVAC issues, and decreases the time available for preventive maintenance and safety inspections and repairs. Staffing is frankly not sufficient to address deferred maintenance and keep paced with current preventive maintenance needs. And as a result, we outsource more and more of our work to outside contractors. Facilities team stays busy each day completing maintenance and repair projects. We also have an on-call person 24 hours a day to respond to emergencies such as water line breaks, roof leaks, vandalism, power failures, and just about anything else you can imagine. During the past year, crews completed more than 5,000 work orders for repairs, routine maintenance, inspections, and more. In 2013, the city hired a consultant, Alpha Building Systems and Aircon Energy, and they prepared a facilities assessment report covering 24 major city buildings encompassing around 240,000 square feet of floor area. At the time, the study indicated a $12 million backlog in immediate maintenance and repair needs. And a projected these costs would increase to $19 million by 2018, which was the extent of their forward-looking projections. And inflation has probably brought that up another 5% to the current year. While some items were addressed during recently completed energy upgrades and current projects at the City Hall, Annex, and DeLaviego Golf Lodge, significant deficiencies, most notably at the Civic Auditorium, have not been funded or addressed to date. In addition to the ongoing tasks at city facilities, the operations section supports the city's climate action plan through implementation and supervision of many energy efficiency projects. This year we completed 35 separate projects funded by a California Energy Commission loan. Energy cost savings pay for the costs for new lighting and HVAC equipment as well as financing costs. Other projects are funded by PG&E on-bill financing in which energy savings pay the financing costs while the bills remain the same but are paid off well within the lifespan of the equipment. Operations also secured and is implementing a California Energy Commission grant to upgrade control mechanisms to get the most out of the HVAC and lighting equipment that we have in our buildings that allows us to fine-tune the operation and elimination of these buildings to minimize energy costs. And they have saved the city money already and have reduced our carbon footprint. Ongoing projects include expansion of the solar photovoltaic system at the corporation yard as well as a PG&E-sponsored project to provide infrastructure at the corporation yard for 16 electric vehicle charging stations. General operations is the administrative and project management separate, pardon me, section of the operations division. General operations provides construction project management and coordination for public works and other city departments such as the solar installations you see here. We source and implement the large general energy efficiency projects throughout the city and we provide oversight and coordination for other operations sections as well as administrative and financial support for the entire division. Some of our accomplishments include we completed $1.4 million in energy efficiency projects under the CEC loan. We successfully applied for a no-cost PG&E program to provide electric vehicle and trolley charging capabilities at the corporation yard. At this point, God and PG&E willing, those will come online at the end of 2019. They're in design right now. In progress, grant funded advanced building system control upgrades and we secured $400,000 in financing for lighting efficiency upgrades and received $40,000 in utility rebates, mostly involving lighting projects under the PG&E on-bill financing program. The fleet replaced 21 vehicles under the adopted budget amount. We upgraded our hazardous material collection and disposal protocols and we updated environmental reporting to reflect reduced diesel emissions due to the fact that we switched to Tier 4 engines in our diesel equipment per current California law and Streets and Traffic Division met the current needs with the reduced workforce. We mentor and train our new workers, our younger workers to fill vacancies when they're qualified to do so and we provide substantial report to other city departments in a variety of roles. Looking ahead, we are working to address chronic staff turnover mainly in the Streets and Traffic Division. It's difficult for the city to compete with private industry. Basically, we're competing with the Granite Rocks and Don Chapins and Granite Constructions of the world for talent. We are going to complete the Corporation Yard Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan implementation and we're well on our way to doing that. We're going to expand our solar capability to try to provide 80% of our electrical needs of the Corporation Yard using solar power. We're going to continue to look for opportunities to reduce our carbon footprint in our fleet purchases and we're going to integrate the Streets section into our computerized maintenance management system which allows us to enhance our reporting capabilities on what that section is doing and we hope to, and we will, we will complete the City Hall Annex Space Reorganization Project in which the Planning Department is going to be moved down to the first floor so that all planning services will be in one floor. We'll continue to apply for PG&E rebates as well as add to and draw from the Carbon Fund and we will continue to address our backlog of deferred maintenance using contracted services. I'll turn it now over to Anne Hogan. This is gender diversity. Good afternoon Council. Anne Hogan, Wastewater Systems Manager. The City's Wastewater Division is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the wastewater treatment and disposal facility. The City's stormwater and wastewater collection systems. We have 24 pump stations and the Leachate Facility and Pipeline from the Resource Recovery Facility. The Division also provides inspection, sampling, public education, and monitoring of businesses and industrial establishments to limit discharge of harmful constituents that might harm the sewer system or the treatment facility. We serve where a regional facility, in addition to serving within the city limits, we treat wastewater from the Santa Cruz County Sanitation District that's composed of Live Oak, City of Capitola, Parts of Soquel, and Aptos, and some other unincorporated county areas. The Wastewater Division has three major sections. Wastewater and stormwater collections. The Wastewater Treatment Facility itself and the Environmental Compliance and Laboratory functions. I'd like to share with you an excellent overview of our operations and facilities with this video that the department created. A people in Santa Cruz generate about 7 million gallons of wastewater from sinks, showers, toilets, washing machines, and dishwashers. It flows from our homes and businesses to the sewer. What happens with our wastewater from here is often misunderstood and taken for granted. At the Santa Cruz Wastewater Treatment Facility, an all-natural treatment process helps to protect our environment while providing customers with an essential quality of life service. The process includes the reuse of biosolids and reclaimed water plus energy recovery that saves customers money. First, the wastewater is collected through an extensive underground maze of pipe, over 150 miles long transporting it to the city's treatment facility. City crews maintain almost a million feet of city pipeline and 18 lift stations, allowing the wastewater to travel effectively to the treatment facility. Up to 5,000 feet of old pipe is replaced each year. Upon arriving at the treatment facility, the wastewater undergoes biological processes that are environmentally friendly. It's cleaned much like a running stream purifies water using sophisticated engineering and all natural biological techniques. The liquid is first cleaned aerobically, moving through plastic media where bacteria and microorganisms transform organic waste. Clarifiers further clean the liquid, which is then disinfected by ultraviolet rays. Solid waste is separated and reduced by an aerobic process that works much like the human stomach. The digestible content is converted into fuel that generates electricity. This, plus our solar energy system, allows us to produce 70% of the energy the facility uses, saving our customers a lot of money. Centrifuges remove water before the solids are transported to the central valley for use as a soil amendment on non-food crops or as top cover for landfill. The daily plant flow of over 7 million gallons is enough to fill 11 Olympic pools that's approximately 3 billion gallons annually. About 60 million gallons of this water is further treated and recycled for use inside the facility. The clean water that is not reused on site is released to an outfall location 110 feet below the ocean surface and approximately one mile offshore of Natural Bridges State Beach. The facility's environmentally friendly state-of-the-art treatment ensures that the water entering Monterey Bay is safe and clean for all life in our community. This environmental stewardship, including energy efficiency, the reuse of biosolids and reclaimed water, has helped us win recognition as best-in-class facility in all of California. The facility has won numerous other awards and is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency top green power partner for on-site production of the energy it uses. Our wastewater treatment facility helps to reduce the city's carbon footprint while providing quality of life service to the community and protecting the environment we live in. Now that you know more about our divisions, I'll share some additional information in some of our workload indicators. With the treatment facility in 2018 at an average flow of 7.3 million gallons per day, we treated almost 3 billion gallons of wastewater for the calendar year. We reclaimed 49 million gallons of effluent for reuse as process water throughout the plant. In addition, we furthered project development to expand our current water reuse equipment to produce Title 22 reclaimed water for off-site use. And we have been in active discussion with Soquel Creek Water District, as well as with the city department on how recycled water will participate as a future water supply. So these 49 million gallons that we reused would have been provided by the city drinking water supply if we didn't recycle them. We generated 7.9 million kilowatt hours of electricity to operate the facility with captured digester gas and photovoltaic solar panels. The cogeneration saved ratepayers $100,000 a month in electricity costs. The treatment plant now produces 69% of the power required to operate the facility. We use an energy management system to decrease our energy consumption and cost, and we perform energy audits periodically to monitor the program's effectiveness. Program features include load shedding to reduce electricity use during peak periods when electricity is more expensive. Another example is that we install energy efficient variable frequency drives on our equipment that cuts our energy costs. Finally, with our use of purchasing green power from Monterey Bay Community Power, 91% of the energy we use now is green power. So we've reached a 91% green power partnership with the EPA. We've completed phase one of our infrastructure and major equipment study, which prepared condition assessment and risk graphs and preliminary cost development for the wastewater facilities 15-year capital improvement needs. The study analyzed over 2,000 assets and ranked them based on risk on probability of failure or consequence of failure. Most of our assets fell in the medium risk category, which we attribute to the staff proactive approach towards maintenance activities. We celebrated the dedication of a beautiful new public art mural by Elijah Fotenhauer, which is located throughout the facility. We hosted 20 public tours of the facility, taking in students and residents year round. Just last Saturday, we hosted a special open house for our neighboring residents who live adjacent to the facility. More than 80 people attended Saturday's event, which included facility tours, lab demonstrations, engineering presentations, and the opportunity to drive a CCTV camera through a pipe to complete a system inspection. Next, I'll discuss our collections section. The collections field crews provide preventative and emergency sewer and storm line hydro flushing and annual cleaning of 160 miles of public sanitary sewer pipelines. Construction crews construct and repair sewer and storm piping systems and manholes, and they perform the closed-circuit TV inspections to determine the maintenance needs and to help inform our capital improvement projects. One of the critical functions of wastewater collections is maintenance and operations of our 24 pump stations. Here you see Jim Locatelli, field crew leader, clearing trash and debris in a stormwater pump station. Field crews inspect and repair the station's assets, including the river flood control slide gates and the discharge valves. Pump crews operate and maintain storm and sewer pump stations, including the sanitary landfill leachate pumping facility and 2.5 miles of leachate main. One of the critical functions of wastewater collections is responding to sanitary sewer spills or overflows. Our crews are on call 24-7 to respond to and clean up any sewage or other harmful spill to present toxins from reaching our waterways and environment at large. Our next section is the environmental compliance and lab section. The environmental compliance section provides inspection, water quality sampling, and monitoring of business and industrial establishments to limit discharges of harmful constituents into the sanitary system and the storm drain system. Environmental compliance issues wastewater discharge permits to industrial dischargers and issues citations and levees fines for code violations. The program's a requirement of the State of California and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Slide ahead to you. Environmental compliance inspectors collect water quality samples to support pretreatment programs, collection systems and wastewater treatment plant processes. The lab compiles reviews and reports data in compliance with our NPDES permit. The lab also does analysis to support regional partners like the city of Scotts Valley and the county of Santa Cruz in assessing water quality of ocean discharges, the San Lorenzo River, Branciforte Creek and Cowell Beach. We certified 283 clean ocean businesses. The Clean Ocean Business Program reduces water pollution by recognizing auto repair shops and food service facilities and vehicle service facilities that have adopted the best management practices to keep pollutants out of the sewer and storm drain system. Clean Ocean Business Awards are presented at the Pollution Prevention Awards Dinner hosted by the Environmental Compliance Different Division. That is in the fall. So we've had a lot of accomplishments this year with our wastewater division. We furthered the project development to expand our current water reuse equipment. Our goal is to produce title 22 reclaim water for offsite use. We've completed phase one of the infrastructure and major equipment study with the condition assessment, risk graphs and budgetary replacement costs. We've connected a SCADA system at the collection and stormwater pumping facilities to enhance the pump station monitoring and alarm capabilities. We've rehabilitated sanitary sewer and storm drain pipelines using no-dig technology and pipe patch. We've installed fiber connectivity to the front gate at the treatment facility and the leachate pond at the landfill. And we have kept up to date with submitting all monthly quarterly semi-annual and annual reports to the State Water Board. We also received this year the CWEA statewide second place plan of the year and the Monterey Bay Section Engineering Award for work that we did with Pure Water Soquel. Looking ahead, we're going to continue developing the expansion of our water reuse equipment project in support of Pure Water Soquel. We're going to implement the UV disinfection equipment replacement project that will save us a lot in energy costs and continue our ability to disinfect our ocean discharge. We're going to continue our staff development. Our staff is certified through CWEA or through the State Water Board. And we will increase their training in CMMS, which is our work order and maintenance database for our equipment. And then with sanitary spill overflow, spill estimation training. We are moving ahead with the implementation of phase two of the infrastructure study. This will take the high-risk assets identified in phase one and help us lay out a long-term CIP program to replace or rehabilitate any wastewater facility equipment that is in need of repair. Next is our engineering and traffic engineering division and Jim Burr will lead. Good afternoon. The transportation division encompasses both transportation engineering section and all of parking operations. The parking operations is a vital component of the city's services. Our dedicated and friendly staff maintain a surprising array of programs and services to our community. We have over 90 positions, excuse me, we have over 90 personnel filling about 40 FTEs. So we have about 60 regular employees and 30 temporary employees when we're fully staffed. Between the multiple shifts over the time, we cover about 17 hours a day, seven days a week. Each day, the staff attends to all four parking structures, all the surface lots, 100 on-demand blockers, 1,900 parking meters, the activity at the wharf gate, two sets of public restrooms, the downtown Pacific Avenue Garbage and Recycling Program, the sidewalk and alley scrubbing, the citywide residential and all the downtown parking permit programs, the wharf locals program, the warriors and other special event parking programs. We have validation programs and park cards and of course we enforce citywide and do all the citation review and collection as well. That's each and every day. We strive to make parking friendlier, next slide please, as we touch so many people in our community through the roll-out of programs such as park cards, the pay-by-phone, the digital displays and all the structures which are just starting to roll out and the pilot of the new credit card meters on Pacific Avenue and of course the popular parking for whole holiday program. On the transportation engineering side, we have a staff of six. We manage all of the parking capital improvement program, any of the multitude of problems that rise up from having 90 people out there working and touching the community on issues of parking and then a portion of the transportation capital improvement program. We perform all the grant writing, the planning, design, permitting, bidding and construction management and association with this and we do all the forecasting, the rates analysis, all the policy work. We respond to the citizen requests and complaints, hazard reports and functionally report to two different commissions and of course city council. Slide, we've had a year. We've begun a multitude of projects. We've also acquired more than $21 million and I know you've heard that number before in transportation grants since 2011. Of this, we have about $16.5 million still to spend. Just in my little division, we have probably two major projects in pre-design, another one ready to go out the door and then two more waiting in the wings. We are again, full up until 2021 with capital projects. We continue at the same time to invest in upgrades and modernization of our existing equipment. This year, we were able to replace the controllers and the video detection at 11 intersections on Laurel Street and Front Street. Then at the end of the project, we retimed and coordinated those corridors for maximum efficiency. In the same vein, we repaired and performed preventative maintenance at the riverfront parking structure and this will extend the life of this pretty valuable resource. We continue to educate and encourage through the Street Smarts campaign and through many other community partners following as an example of one of our Street Smarts videos and these were both in English and Spanish. When driving, watch out for people on bikes and check that attitude factor. Bicyclists are just as entitled to the roadway as drivers. When passing, allow three feet between you and the cyclist. Before turning, use your signals and check for cyclists in front and behind and look for cyclists before opening your car door. Be considerate of people on bikes. It's a Street Smarts thing to do. Brought to you by KION and the City of Santa Cruz. We continue to fund, in this coming budget year, we fund ongoing Street Smarts campaign as well as we've upped the dollar value through Measure D for the education component that we partner with through Ecology Action and Bike Santa Cruz County. They reach out to second graders and fifth graders for safe walking, safe biking programs and our community partner. We're happy to say this year we received recognition as having the second highest mode split in the nation. 13.2% of our trips are by bicycle. And we also launched and expanded the Jump Bike Share Program. I think you recently had a full load of that. I won't go into any more detail. High-level estimates for 2020. Just to point out that parking does bring in revenue. We have probably a $3.2 million ask in the general fund versus 4.8 in revenue. These are projections, by the way. And 6.1 million requests for the parking fund with estimated 7.1 in revenues. Looking at, excuse me, this year's accomplishments. We're really happy that the Tressa-Widening Project is underway and will be completed hopefully by fiscal year end. Chris and his team have worked, actually did most of that project. The Bay Street sidewalk and green lanes, that's part of that $21 million grant number. And we've long needed a sidewalk on that important arterial. We applied for $35 million in transportation, safety and infrastructure grants. Unfortunately, we weren't as successful this year. We were looking for money for segments eight and nine for construction money. That was the big item. And we were also tried to fund segment seven phase two. And we did not achieve any of that funding. But we have ideas and we'll keep on with that. We, through our rate strategy, finally are going to see the sunset of the downtown parking deficiency fee. 2020 will be the second year of that program. And also, with that, we are able to have regular funding for expanded transportation demand management. And we'll begin rolling that program out. And then, of course, as I mentioned, we finished the deck restoration project at the two city garages. Looking ahead, phase one, segment seven, is just about ready to, very close to go out the door. We're going to be looking for a new funding source for construction on segment seven phase two. We have the design and environmental money. That's part of the $21 million for the segment eight and nine work. And that's a partnership with the county. That goes all the way out to 17th Avenue. And we will be implementing the downtown transportation demand management, along with the eco pass, which you, this body approved. We'll continue to implement the act of transportation plan. And then, really, we'll start, we're already thinking about what we're going to do beyond 2021. And you really have to plan ahead with the grant money. So we'll be looking for that. Well, Christian Eiter will be up next. Good afternoon. Christian Eiter, Assistant Director of Public Work, City Engineer. I and the engineering division are responsible for implementing a good portion of the Capital Improvement Program and developing it. We're very closely with traffic engineering staff and operations staff, Mike, Bob, and you've seen them all. We have particular staff that are dedicated to those different functions of wastewater, stormwater, refuse, et cetera. One of the things that Mike brought up in his presentation on operations is the lack of staffing. We're down about 20% in our staffing. We have 25 FTE in engineering and traffic. And what's really been happening lately is that we're not able to keep up and our younger engineers are moving to less expensive places to live. So while we already contract out a lot, we'll probably be looking to do that some more. We've lost six people in the last, I would say, eight months. And so we continue to recruit and try to hire. We train them really well. And then after a couple of years, they go somewhere else. We have actually been successful in promoting internally as people have retired and moved on to other jobs. So we have a really good homegrown team of engineers here. Engineers and planners. The engineering division is also responsible for reviewing private development projects and work in the public right away. And that's really an important function. This is a construction of a hotel that is actually open for business. We review it for how they connect to the sewer, the storm drains, how they provide for trash collection, street lights, impacts on traffic, et cetera. This past 12 months, we've reviewed 759 development and building permits. Most of the time development permit goes to a building permit, requires additional review. And it's a cycle of review, provide comments, make sure they do it, and then when they get under construction, we review the work that takes place in the public right away. We also issued over 1,000 permits in the public right away for utilities, people fixing their sewer lateral, water lines, and things like that. These require that not only we issue and review them, but we're reviewing their traffic control so that anything they do in the street is done safely and it's done properly. So we're reviewing traffic control and inspection and making sure they build it to our standards. We do occasionally host events in the engineering division, along with our other divisions, and public works week is coming up in May. We last year did some construction site tours, and we'll be doing some again this year, the Terrestle Bridge under construction walkway. There's work on East Cliff, and there's paving going on on Cedar Street. There may also be a couple other projects under construction at that time. We also have project development, and during that four capital projects where we also have public meetings. For instance, we did some significant meetings around the rail trail development and concept plans or the active transportation program and things like that. We do environmental restoration projects. Neri Lagoon is a prime example where every two years we spend about a half a million dollars at the wastewater fund to make sure that there continues to be free water in Neri Lagoon by removing toolies and sediment. This past year or through this fiscal year we'll have completed 28 capital improvement projects and developed six, actually I think six, new or enhanced programs, some of which you've already heard. These projects are projects operations done, engineering, traffic engineering. The programs and projects include like the jump bikes, traffic and speed survey, the enhanced TDM program, the sewer lateral ordinance, the rate, wastewater rate increases, annual traffic report, and the equipment and replacement study that Ann spoke about for the treatment plan. We pave streets on a regular basis, and thankfully we have measure H, measure D, and SB1 to help us do that. We are spending actually, this should say 3.9 million this fiscal year on arterial collector and residential streets, in particular the biggest project that's going on right now is Cedar Street being a concrete and in asphalt streets very expensive and taking quite a bit of time, and then we'll be doing residential capes seal projects in the very near future. Even with those three funds, SB1, measure H and measure D, we're still sure what we need to maintain our streets in a good condition. We do actually have the best, now after spending a lot of money, we do have the best pavement condition index in the county, and hopefully with this continued effort we'll get even better at it. We rely and repair and replace storm drain sanitary sewers every year, and had mentioned I think over about 5,000 lineal feet of sanitary sewer. We also do storm drains. This last project we did 4,000, over 4,000 feet of sanitary sewer and 2,000 feet of storm drain line. And then we also do repairs of existing storm drain and sewer projects that you'll see from time to time. Again, SB1 has been another piece of the funding puzzle that has helped us improve the street drainage systems, and we're applying that. At the last council meeting you approved the SB1 list for this coming year, as well as measure D, so you saw some of those projects on that list. Constructed. We construct a lot of things. I said 28 different projects. This is just one landfill cell access road, which was just recently completed. And that's getting us ready for the next landfill cell 3B. So our accomplishments. Completed design and construction of quite a few sanitary sewer wastewater treatment rehab projects. Implemented the sanitary sewer lateral program, which is an ordinance and wastewater rate study. Developed phase two of the equipment, wastewater treatment facility equipment replacement study. Completed storm bearing repair and catch base and replacement projects. Went out to bid and will be starting shortly. A very important storm drain and sewer project on Lidera. Some of these others completed food, commercial food waste. We're working on that at the resource recovery facility. And we're completing, and we have completed several of the storm damage projects. There's still a couple more to go. One's under construction on east cliff. The one on west cliff is being designed. Hopefully we'll be out to construction next fall. And bid and constructed paving projects. And as you know, we started initiating the right of way acquisition for highway one and nine. Another critical project. We're looking forward to doing lots more projects. And there are quite a few in the capital improvement program. Implementing solar photovoltaic projects at the corporation yard and at the resource recovery facility. The ones at the corporation yard are replacing the system that was there on the building that was retrofitted and also enhancing it. Complete right of way acquisition for not only one and nine, but the Marie street bridge and hopefully get those projects under construction. Continue to implement the paving programs. As I've noted, evaluate and design various intersection improvement projects downtown in the beach area. And those are in the capital improvement program. A lot of them are development driven based on build out of the general plan and when projects are occurring, when development projects are occurring. That starts to put emphasis on where we're applying our resources through the traffic impact fee program. Implement the storm damage projects on West Cliff and Bay. Implement various wastewater collection treatment projects and assist with interagency projects. It should be intraagency projects and interagency projects and programs. We work closely with the regional transportation commission and all the rail trail projects. Working on the reclaim water projects. And for instance on the West Cliff drive, master plan project that's just kicking off. Next slide's go through some of the capital improvement program. And I'll just touch on it very briefly. We're running out of time and there's a lot that could be talked about. Essentially our division budget is 2.2 million and we manage capital projects of 75.5 million. And where do we get that money? A lot of the money that we get is through enterprise funds, grants, measure D, measure age, gas tax fund, traffic impact fee program. So we use a lot of those funds, local funds to match grant programs. This is just the map of somewhere the capital projects are for the next five year of CIP. Wastewater fund, there are 14 existing and new projects. Almost 10 million estimated cost for fiscal year 20, including some of the carryover that carry into the fiscal year 20. What happens here is that we often, most projects are not just an annual project, they take time to do environmental review, design, and go out to bid. And some of them are very complex and take multiple years to construct. So every year we're carrying forward projects from the previous year. Stormwater funds, these are six existing and new projects, a little less than a million dollars. The refuse fund, seven existing new projects, 4.8 million of projects estimated cost. General and city wide funds, these are 18 existing projects and new projects. It's a $31 million projected estimated cost, but really the net cost to the public works and city wide is a million. That's because it's funded through grants, significantly through grants, traffic impact fees, gas tax, measure D, and mostly those funds. Sometimes development fund, developer fees as well. Gas tax, there's 16 existing and new projects, $23.8 million worth of projects plus including the carryover. Again, net to the gas tax is $3.2 million because we are, again, getting a lot of grants and using other funding sources. Material streets and roads, this is measure H primarily. $3 million is what we're proposing to do next year, allocation will probably have been spent. The net fund to measure H is a million dollars. We're getting gas tax and measure D to supplement as well as some state funds, state grants. The parking fund, Jim already spoke to you about those, the different projects that are happening there and what they've accomplished. The infamous unfunded project list. So there will always be an unfunded project list. As things continue to deteriorate and new ideas come up for new projects within the city. You know that I've been here a long time, and projects do get off the unfunded list and get funded. Depending on the grants that come up, the allocations, and we will continue to look at that list for the future, to populate future funded projects. I think the biggest, I think if we go to the challenges, probably the next one, which, so we have like 309 million dollars on that list. And those are long term, I mean that's a 20 year, at least a 20 year list if not longer, go to the challenges. So the challenges, I think that really highlights more why certain things are on the unfunded list. The challenges we have are some of our one in nine intersection construction, which is funded through grant and traffic impact fees. Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail, we're under construction on one, but we're going out to bid on segment seven phase one. We're looking for permits and it's certification in the environmental review at the planning commission on Thursday. And then looking for funds for phase two. Murray Street Bridge Construction that's been going on forever. We are working with the county closely on the design of their sanitary sewer. And I really anticipate seeing a lot happening in this coming year on that project. San Lorenzo River Mouth Project, one that Scott's been working on quite a bit. Grant that's coming before you to approve it and we'll see more on the design and construction in the near future. Levy certification, downtown parking needs you've heard about. Aging infrastructure, storm drains and facilities are the biggest. I think the two biggest things that are on the unfunded list. Mostly because they are not generally, grants are not generally available for them. We've been able to get energy grants to pay for energy savings for some of the facilities. But you can't find a grant to replace a roof or replace windows or other things like that. Storm drains also, most of that is not grant fundable and both are general fund expenses. And that's why they tend to be on this list the most. Commercial food waste, you've heard about increasing storm water mandates and static funding. There's a lot of issues related to trash capture that we're developing a new program. Less and less can be allowed into the storm drain system that will create some additional pressure and cost that we're going to need to implement. Recycled water expansion, I'm sure you know about. And then the issue of broadband and small cell implementation. Particularly the small cell implementation that you've heard about that that is getting to be bigger and bigger issue all the time. And is requiring more and more of our time to permit and to review and to issue permits so that the work can happen in the public right away. That concludes my part of the presentation. So in summary, this concludes our state of the department presentation. While much has been accomplished, many challenges still lie ahead. And the passion and talent of your public workforce is ready to meet those challenges. We take great pride in our service to the community and we look forward to continuing to serve and improve our city in the next fiscal year. I hope you've enjoyed this tour and learned a lot about what we do. Historically, we've tried to be the ninjas of the public service. We do things at night and do it in quiet and try not to get attention. And if we're doing our job right, nobody notices. And when something messes up, then all of a sudden there's a lot of attention. We've changed that. We're trying to tell the public what we do. And I think you've seen some of the videos. That's a new touch. Some of the tours. That's a new touch. We do a lot of amazing things and we want to share that with the public. And we hope we've shared that a little bit with you and you understand. You've enjoyed that opportunity. I'd like to thank you and every single employee in my department for their dedication and professionalism. Without their hard work, we wouldn't be able to deliver the services to our residents, customers, and our businesses and visitors. And I'm proud to serve you and proud to work with them. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have or my excellent staff will be able to answer it if I cannot. Thanks. Thank you so much for your presentation. And thank you all for being here as well and presenting on your areas of expertise and to the folks that work with you in the functions of our city that are really critical. As you mentioned, this is a great opportunity for us to learn about all the incredible things that are happening within public works. Especially for some of the newer council members who haven't had this type of orientation yet. And then also just in preparation for our budget hearings, which will be coming up right around the corner. I'm going to go ahead and do questions a little bit differently this time. We'll go ahead and start to my left since I see a hand up. We'll go ahead and circle through and see if there's any questions. I'll then move to my right and then reserve my questions till the end. So Council Member Brown. Thank you. Give me. Thank you so much for the presentation, everyone. Whoever compiled the photos, the images, that was great. It's a real sense of what's happening on the streets out in the world. So I have a few questions, some more general and some a little bit more specific. I've received some communication. And I believe one of our downtown commissioners is here or excuse me. No, downtown commissioners here. Transportation and public works though has now voted to recommend that we hire an additional senior engineer on projects to help with some of that backlog and help us manage some of the grant funded project. I'm wondering if we'll see that in the budget. How will we, is that coming? Or asking the city manager. Okay, with respect to that's a general fund impact, as I understand. So with respect to the, we're putting together the budget right now, as you know, we've got a growing deficit. So it'll be before the council, but the recommended budget will have really no add additions to the general fund with respect to positions. That's the initial budget that'll be coming forward. So the council obviously could consider that, but you'll have to sort of wade along with the other challenges of balancing the budget when it comes before you. And yeah, my apologies. I haven't had a chance to go into the look at the draft, but I'm looking forward to reading. Well, that's okay. It just came out. But the proposed budget will be out officially April 22nd. So that's coming up. Monday. Not Friday. Great. With respect to Warrior's event parking. It looks like that covering those events is in-house. We do that in-house. It is in-house. Yeah, we have actually our parking staff, special events, parking staff take some of that. And where does that money go? Is it just generally into the parking fund? Separate fund. The Warriors collect some of it, et cetera. That parking is all downtown. And so it's managed through the parking fund, as is the staffing. And it's at a break-even point. So no cost. And one other question. So with respect to traffic control and inspection, when private development happens and there's encroachment in the right-of-way, that issue was raised. And I know the Public Works Department does a great job of that. I'm just wondering how those costs are projected and covered. I understand that some projects require more encroachment than others. Some of it's traffic. Some of it's loss of parking meters. So I am just interested in hearing a little bit more about that. We get constituent requests for information in particular at certain intersections that are significantly affected. The Public Works Department recovers the cost of development through the issuance of permits. So any development would have multiple permits, encroachment permits, street opening permits, concrete permits, et cetera. And so we charge for those that covers the staff time to review and inspect those projects. Parking meters, when they're bagged, the developer or the contractor pays for the use of those meters. The same rate that would be required if someone were parking there all day long. So just if I could, just because I'm just trying to get a sense because, so is it a flat rate that's charged? I mean, I understand with the meters you can calculate out the number of meters that are missing for X amount of time. But where some projects require, I guess, encroach a little bit more than others might, is how is that calculated? I guess that's what I'm wondering. It's based on the number of permits that are issued. The larger developments pay actually a percentage of the cost of the public improvements. So their engineers require to give us an estimate that we review and then we apply the, I think it's 6.5% to that. Which they pay to the public works department that covers the costs associated with that. And we try to coordinate it such that we're not removing travel lanes, that we're trying not to block sidewalks. But inevitably it's the front of the building that's affected. And we work the best to try to get logical detours in place and adequate notices and those sort of things. One last question if I could. So, and this question is about contracting in general within the public works department and the work that's done on city, on public facilities. So my understanding is we have prevailing wage rules related to our contractors. How is that monitored and enforced? I'm specifically asking this now because I've had some constituent communications about failure to pay prevailing wage in the contract work that's happening up at the golf course, which we've talked about as you know many times. So that may be a question for Mark, I'm not sure. No, well, the contracts we bid are most almost all required prevailing wage. And the contractors required to submit their payroll every two weeks for our review. We check the categories. Our inspectors are also required to do some interviews, et cetera, of employees, spot checks, and things like that. There's a process to submit complaints to the public works department as well as the Department of Industrial Relations. How are those complaints responded to, followed up on, I can- You can send it to me if you have any. I can make the complaint right here right now, but I can send you the information for follow-up. Thank you. Okay, Council Member Matthews. Such a fan of public works. And I've sat through a lot of these, learned something new all the time. I really just have one minor question right now. The storm sewer increasing costs of maintaining and meeting the requirements for storm sewer runoff increases in expense and demands. Is there any progress on the ability to establish storm sewer assessment districts or fees? I know we talk about this every year. Any progress at the state level on that? You know that there has been a law change that allows, trying to change 218 sewer to allow it for storm sewer. But the league is really being very cautious for any city to do that because they know they'll get sued. So they want to have the first case that goes forward. They're waiting for a test case on that. I think I'm hoping in the future, the next three to four years, I think we should be able to be able to have a fee for storm sewer like we do for sanitary. It's getting to the point with now the trash capture. You're almost in a collection treatment, semi-treatment process. So it'll be interesting to see how this evolves. You're right, that's one thank goodness for measure E that we have the water quality that we're able to use a little bit there. But as this gets closer and closer to a treatment type system, it's harder and harder to support with the current funding. Yeah, it's a massively unfunded state mandate. Anything we could do to weigh in on this? Or just monitoring where that goes. I think they're really waiting for a test case and I'm not sure what city's going to go forward. But they know they'll be sued by Howard Jarvis group or whatever. So they just don't want to lose the whole 218 on that, so. Okay, Vice Mayor, do you have a question? Yeah, thank you all for the presentations. Those were very informative and helpful. One of the questions I had was around waste management. So, not sure who would either us. Yeah, sure, so the question, I'm just curious about what's been the impact of increasing the efficiency of waste management with all the different recycling programs that have been going on? As far as diversion rates and that kind of thing? Yeah, so really trying to get at how much is going into our landfills and if we've been able to actually decrease that amount with the growing population. So the state actually, we have a compliance report that we do every year and we look at diversion. So diversion has a lot of different factors to calculate it out, population, businesses, that type of thing. I think one of the real calculations that we look at is how much we actually do put it in the landfill. And we've seen over a 50% decrease from when we started back in 1995. Looking at those, it fluctuates each year. We've gone up a little bit the last couple of years and that's mostly because the economy's been better. There's more construction, so that just generates a little bit more waste. But we're actually doing really well in that. We still have, I think we have a pretty long projection on our landfill life. I think we're out to 2055, I think is our number now. Much greater than anybody else in the county or actually in the area too. Thanks. The next question I had was, it appeared to me that there's an effort to reduce costs around energy consumption, so with the implementation of solar. And I was just wondering how much the city is saving and whether or not that can be, the funds that they used to pay for that can be utilized for some of the deferred maintenance that we have. You want to talk to me? The main solar projects that we have on the books right now are expansion of the corporation yard solar array. Expanding out to the landfill, which currently doesn't have solar. Obviously, there's no capital funds available to do that. And so we're looking at a power purchase agreement type of mechanism. Where the company that we buy the equipment from owns the equipment, maintains the equipment, and we buy power from them. And in the case of the corporation yard, we are still under a net electric metering agreement from the Public Utilities Commission. That we're trying to preserve by getting this project off the ground. It needs to be substantially under way by June. In which we buy power at a rate that's about 75% of what we would pay PG&E. So that's really where the savings are realized. The savings will be to help pay for the equipment in a shorter time period, but not necessarily enough to fund all the maintenance that's needed. I think it's in a different source that we're going to need for that, all the deferred maintenance. Most of our energy efficiency projects are based on the amount of time it takes to pay back the amount of the loan or the financing that we've arranged. And CEC and the PG&E on bill financing have a limit on how many years out we can do that. So it all has to be paid for within a certain number of years, and that's how they evaluate the project. Thanks. Council Member Cron, do you have any questions at this time? I think we're going this way, okay. Yeah, a lot to chew on, eyes glazing over. When I look at the budget, I only see 50, I'm trying to think of bike related things and how you put that in your department summary. Where does it appear? I just see $50,000, it's almost like a placeholder for bicycles. High school pedestrian system, and there's a, I'm looking at this page right here. They're not numbered, so I don't know what page to say, what it's on. Yeah, I don't know, how does that page either? But we have multiple multi-million dollar capital improvement programs that relate to bike and pedestrian access, the rail trail projects, and the trustful walkway that's under construction now, or bikeway. And a variety of other projects. We implement, when we pave streets, we're typically upgrading pedestrian access with ramps and crosswalks as well as adding green lanes and things like that. So you may not see all the costs outlined as pedestrian and bike facilities, but they're there. But in the capital improvement program is primarily where you're going to see those projects, in the gas tax and the general capital improvement. And this $50,000 is just a placeholder for something, or do you know what it is? I'm not sure what budget item you're looking at, maybe Jim knows. What under traffic maintenance? It's in 422, what's the activity number? 4227. Okay, that is traffic maintenance. Mike, do you want to speak? I believe it's a striping, and it's funded probably by TDA that we get from the Regional Transportation Commission. Well, it's like the green lanes that we're seeing, or just- All bicycle striping, but certainly green lanes as well. And Mark, you mentioned that $10 million comes out of the general fund. $4.3 million gets put back. Where does that come from? Could be parking citations. It could be parking collection in the beach area and other areas. We generate, those are the main sources. The wharf revenue also generates general fund revenue. And as far as a senior engineer project that was recommended by Public Works and Transportation, isn't, couldn't some of that money be paying towards the staff member? If we are backed up in $17 million in grants, I'm assuming a lot of that has to do with bike projects as well. That would benefit bicyclists for 13.2%, and I hope we want to get higher than that even in commuter bicycling. But what would be the main obstacle to that hire? Well, I think as a general, you have to look at the whole general fund, and if you take on a permanent position where you're based on grants, it may not be, as the economy slows down, it may not be the right additional resource, best use of the resource. So we'll have to look at that as how, is there a different way to move those projects ahead? Maybe not with an in-house staff, but maybe outside support and something like that. So I get that the commission really wants to move those more projects quicker, and I understand that. But it's resource driven from our side, so we'll have to look at other options to move those projects. When we talk about a bike pedestrian subcommittee of the Public Works and Transportation, what's entailed in that as far as costs of staff time? Because you told me you probably wouldn't recommend something like that. Right, yeah, it's really just taking away the existing engineers working on the bicycle projects and the grant funds that we already have. So we have an adopted active transportation program, which we spent two years putting together, getting public input. We have a list of 99 projects. I think we're working on implementing those projects right now. It seems like more effective to use our staff time for implementing projects. Agree, but we have a great amount of expertise in our population and people want to participate. And it was, I think, a very effective, I guess it got cut in 2008 when we did have the cuts. Going to the highway one bridge over San Lorenzo. Tell me where that's at and how much this year is looking into furthering that project. How much are we spending? We're not spending any additional funding on that project at this point. We do have a project study report from Caltrans to move that project forward. But we're not putting any staff time in at this point. We are concerned both on the transportation issue of that bridge, and the limitation of access for vehicles. It's two lanes on each side. We've seen in the last storms when the debris piled up against that. So it appeared that Caltrans had to close the lane to actually get equipment in and reach and remove that debris. That's a traffic safety issue. We've had a huge vehicle 21 car accident. It was a huge issue in that location. We are concerned about it. We think that's a bottleneck for 100,000 vehicles a day coming through that, over that bridge, and it's starting to back up traffic in the morning at least, and potentially in the evening. But definitely in the morning commute backs up past the fish hook. So I think it's a real concern. Are you saying that if it was wider that 21 car pile up wouldn't have happened? I don't know, but there'd be places for people to move or that truck to move to the side. And it's just such a constriction. There's nowhere to go. I think folks who are opposed to this and there's a good number in our community wonder what else is in getting done rather than focusing on the widening of that highway. Other question I had was about the, you mentioned something about the King Street bike lane, but what I understand is there is no bike lane there. I mean there was bike, you said there was bike improvements. But I think this has been an ongoing issue that people want to see a bike lane, what do we need to move on that obstacle? Well what is the main obstacle? Is it folks don't want their parking taken away? Is that- That's one of the issues. So when we repaved most of King Street in the last couple of years, we still have a portion down by Lederra that we're doing the storm brain and sewer that we haven't paved yet because we're going to tear the street up. But mostly it's either, it was a combination when we had a public process was either removing parking, fixing some drainage inlets that are an issue. And then also potentially widening the street into the landscape strip next to the sidewalk. So there was a combination of those things that occurred and we didn't get any consensus from residents and the public on what to do. Since then we've done the shadows and obviously we have speed bombs, etc. It's a fairly slow moving traffic. So for us to move it back into that process is going to be pretty time extensive as far as staff resources. And as Marcus told you, trying to implement these other bike and pedestrian projects. Would you be the best person to talk about the bay in high roundabout? I'm one of them, yeah, Jim or myself. So what I'm getting from folks, at least the transportation person on campus, he's saying that why are we doing two lanes? One would be sufficient and with two lanes in that roundabout, it's going to be really tough on, it's going to be tougher on bicyclists and pedestrians to be crossing that intersection. This is right in front of the university, right, based at UCSC? Yeah, we, yes, I know. No, I'm just letting people know. We've developed a concept plan a few years ago based on the traffic projections in the general plan and for the university. We revised it because of some reductions. We still need to get back to it. We've got this concept plan and working with the university closely in the public. In the future is what we're going to have to do to move the project forward. We think it's the better project of the two. The other one is to modify the intersection significantly to make the traffic signal work and be safer. You probably don't know, there was a pad put up there for I assume for jump bikes, but it's been there now for six months and nothing's happened to it. It's just sitting there. It's at the base of campus as well across the street from the sign of where it says UCSC. Yeah, hi, Claire Flesler, transportation planner. That pad was installed for a jump bike station. The original plan was to electrify that location. So the locations that we were going to install charging stations at, we held off on installing the station infrastructure. At this point we're on hold with the charging infrastructure because the new generation of jump bikes has swappable batteries. So they're able to swap out the batteries in field, reducing the need for in field charging. So moving forward with then likely installing a regular station at that location. So we're looking for that soon, I guess, right? Bikes will be coming, yes. And we don't know when the university is going to move on jump bikes. Correct, at this time, don't know. Thank you. A few questions for resource recovery. I don't know if it's Bob or Mark. But I appreciate Bob you talking about the heap of trouble we're in. With the closing off of the markets in China. I mean, this is for me, if you just Google, just recycling, 20 articles on the crisis America's facing. How are we going to get through this? And I mean, the thing at UCSC, they went from 68% or something, 65% to 51% overnight because they realized they're throwing all, they're going to put all their recycling now in the landfill face and not recycle it. I guess I'm asking, how can we help you move more aggressively in recycling effort? Do we have to eliminate stuff? I mean, I'm kind of tired of hearing about the consumers that have to do something with it. It's the producers. I mean, we have to focus, I think, on the producers, but what's your take on it? Yes, absolutely. I think that's one of the big things. We're working with California Product Stewardships Council to look at producer responsibility. That's really going to be where the rubber hits the road. I mean, we're doing all we can at this point. We try to take materials that we know we can market. And we've kind of done that all along. So in the big scheme, when you look at other places, they take more materials. But those are the problematic materials that people are having problems with now, clamshells, things like that, aseptic packaging. Those are items that we have never really accepted in our program. So getting our source reduction, waste reduction people out there, educating the people and making sure our material is really as clean as we can get it, I mean, that's really going to be the. What about elimination? Like Concorde, Massachusetts eliminated plastic bottles. And I was in a meeting with you and we talked a little bit about it in the integrated waste management meeting. What would it take for Santa Cruz to eliminate plastic bottles? Is that just political will or? It's political will. I think it's kind of a bigger issue statewide. And I think you're really going to start seeing some pushback from the manufacturers when we start doing that, just like we do with plastic bags. But I think we've seen the governor's actually this last time with the sodas. He's actually did a backdoor deal that really eliminated some of our options for that. I loved it, yeah. Well, that was a backdoor, but they're coming back with something now, a statewide soda tax I heard. Yeah, well, that's because the cities can't do that at this point. Right, no, I know, I know, I know. So I thought you were like going ahead, but yeah, that was bad for our revenue stream. Organics, you have said there's 25 business involved right now. Curbside, when can we see curbside? And curbside is going to be the last thing that goes in. Just because there's just no market that we have to take that material to. Right now, the yard waste material that we get, we have a good market for that with an organic farmer. Essentially, if we add food to that, that eliminates that market. He would not be able to take that material. So that would effectively kill about 8,000 tons a year of material that we're doing right now. We're working still with the county, the county is still trying to put something in place. But that will be residential, the options are not really good. Is it a fourth card at the curb? That may be what we have to do. So we're looking at all those options, but still, you still need a place to take it. Are you familiar with the person who does it now in Santa Cruz? She goes around and she's got a whole bunch of different things. She's actually out of business right now. Well, it's coming back because I just heard, it's back because I just got a brochure about it. But I'm just wondering how much could the city work with a group like that? And we could employ lots of people to do that, because they train people and they're very discriminating on what they take and stuff. Is that an option that you would work with someone? That's an option we're looking at. One of the things that's a little bit of an obstacle there is the new AB 1383. They're very prescriptive in what they're telling cities that they have to do. And it's really probably the biggest bill of, I think, overreach that CalRecycle's ever put together. There's a lot of things in there and it's going to have some significant impacts to rates when we go through there. So some of those things that the community composting, those are great options. And we'd like to look at those, but they may not actually pencil out for 1383. So that's something, they're still writing the regulations right now. We're supposedly in the final phase of that at this point. So we'll see where that goes. And I don't mean to dwell on things that we're not doing because, but we're in a heap of trouble. But I do want to remind folks, and I want to thank you for saying that our landfill is 2055. I think that's what you said, right, 2055. When I got here in 98, do you remember what the landfill life was at that time? I think it was, well, when I first came in 91, it was, I think it was 98, it was when we were supposed to close it. So it was, I can't remember exactly what it was. We were getting close to the 10 years where you have to start looking for another site. And I think we were at that in 98 or 99. So I mean, we have come a long way, which is amazing. My last question might be for Mark is you talked about 6% of a project goes toward improvements locally. Like, I know the Boardwalk, they kicked in a million bucks to, was it a million to improve the third street bridge in that whole area leading into the Boardwalk? That was the undergrounding and sidewalk improvements that were coming in. That project, unfortunately, the bids came in too high, so we're re-looking it. How do we package that? PG&E was okay with their share, but AT&T and Comcast were not. So we're having to re-look at how we underground that. But that would include the undergrounding, the sidewalk improvements, along from the bridge all the way to the Boardwalk. Is that 6% of the project, what the Boardwalk is kicking in? That was just a contribution that they felt that they wanted to contribute to make that project go. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Councilor Glever, do you have any questions? Thank you, so thank you for the great presentation for everyone in the Public Works Department. I wanted to start by appreciating not only the digital presentation but also this printout presentation, which is a beautiful, full-color, double-sided, 55 pages. Well, I was just curious if you multiply that by the seven council members that comes out to 385 sheets of full-color printing. And I also noticed that this is something that's rather consistent with the city manager's office when they come and do presentations with us. So for this presentation specifically, whose budget or supply did this come out of? Public Works or the city manager's office? Public Works. And do you have an annual printing budget available for us to review? We did this in-house, but we do pay for printing out of our in-house budget admin. And do you know approximately how much of a percent that is of your admin budget? It's a small amount. I don't have that number in front of me. Okay, cool, thank you. And I was just, maybe I could direct this to the city manager. Do you know why we go with this route and print as well as present and in full color? Primarily to assist the city council with having documents before you that you can look at that are clear. But it's up to the city council if you don't want copies of the presentations, you don't have to have them. I think the staff just does it for the council's convenience and assistance. Great, yeah, yeah, just wondering about norms and uses of materials because ink is very expensive as well as paper and wanting to not have more refuse to have to get rid of. So, also I really loved the videos and the representation of being able to educate people. Do you know the budget that goes into making those videos? I don't have the number directly, but they're very inexpensive to make. We worked with, I don't know if Janice is here. We have our public information person. She works with either UC studios or we have a small contract. They're under $3,000 to $5,000 per video, something like that, if not, if that. And I think the education value in a major program, a $20 million program, I think if we can convince people to recycle right and not contaminate our recycling, I think it's well worth the investment. Absolutely, the next thing I would just question about was the makeup of the department. Because in the parks and rec presentation, they provided kind of like an org chart of how the department is broken down. But I was just wondering, how do you emphasize diversity in your department? I noticed that the people that came up to speak were all very homogeneous as well as the representation in the videos or in the pictures where the majority of the people that were doing the hard labor or the physical work were brown. So I was just wondering, do you have directors that are people of color in the public works department? These are my division managers right here, so that's what I have. We're a very diverse department, that's all I'd say. We participate in the EEOC program and I'll put my department up against any other department. So that's probably the city why I think the one you'd be looking at. Do you think I could get a copy of the org chart for your department? That would be super awesome. Perfect, thank you. So now on to resource and recovery. Really impressive statistics, especially the street sweeper, sweeping 15,000 plus miles, that's really, really impressive. Is that sweeper gas or electric? It's diesel. Diesel, and have you looked into the potential nature of finding an electric street sweeper, so you wouldn't have to use diesel gas. No, electric is, it's an evolving technology and I anticipate, we've been looking at electric refuse trucks. I have not seen an electric street sweeper at this point, but we are paying attention to that technology as it comes out. Great, something that I noticed whenever it's trash day is that the trash collectors who are doing an amazing job and have one of the hardest jobs I think in the city, sometimes miss the truck when they're dumping the trash into the truck and it ends up on the street specifically and usually in the gutter. But then when the street sweeper comes by, since there's cars parked along the street, it just sweeps the middle of the street and then all of the trash is left in the gutter. Are there things that we could do to help make the street sweeping more effective? Well, first of all, if the trash, if the refuse driver does not hit the truck with the can, it's just fairly rare if they're supposed to get out of the truck and make sure that they pick that up. Or call a hand sweeper to come out and clean that up. As far as the most effective way to do street sweeping is to not have vehicles against the curb. And we probably with the storm drain, stormwater regs coming up, we're going to be moving in that direction. Most likely, we're going to have to have a mandatory parking removal for street sweeping. I see that within the next three to five years. We've tried to get volunteer neighborhoods areas where the permit program is in place. Typically is easier, but we are very over parked in a lot of our areas. And it's unless you have a location for people to put their vehicles, there's a lot of resistance to have mandatory street sweeping. In fact, we took it to the Public Works Commission probably about eight years ago and they did not want to take it on. Thank you. So a slide that I found really interesting in there was the 47,000 tons of refuse that was compacted and disposed of, can you explain what that means to be compacted and disposed of? When the refuse goes into the landfill, they put it in lifts and then they'll go ahead and run a compactor over it and compress it. And then they'll tarp it at night and when they finish a certain level of the lift and they'll put a soil level over it, but that's the compression is that compactor. Okay. You get a certain density of that material. And then the disposed of is? That's in the landfill. We really measure the airspace. That's really what we try to conserve. Airspace in the landfill is really valuable to us and once we started looking at that way, we started extending the life of that landfill. Absolutely. Okay, thank you. And could you just give me a quick update because it was mentioned a couple times in the presentation, but where you're at with the plastics utensils ordinance for foods? Because I mean, I still go and get food when I go out and then they give me plastic and bags. You should be asking, you should have to ask for it for them to give it to you. Yeah, I was never asked. But if they're not, let us know, we're happy to educate that. You're welcome. Thank you. We actually got a chance to speak a month or two ago about the issue of recycling downtown and the issue of the collection process. By your calculations when we spoke, about 30% of the material that's collected in the downtown cans is potentially recyclable. But because the collectors just dump the recyclables that are placed in the upper recycling area, just down into the garbage, which then makes it contaminated, and they take them to the dump, a community member actually recorded the actions of some downtown collectors and posted online. It's been shared over 490 times and viewed over 35,000 times, which is pretty intense. But with 30% seeming like a rather high number, what can we do to deal with that moving forward to be more effective in the recycling of downtown refuse? Typically, the recycling in the downtown cans that was designed in a Berkeley model basically set up so that people could scavenge out of that. Unfortunately, what we see is people put coffee cups and other things in there. It contaminates that, hope services, when they come by, they'll take the recyclables out of that at the end. They'll do that midday, at the end of the day, our parking folks come down. They're supposed to look at that too. A lot of times it is contaminated, if it is, they'll drop it into the waste stream. If you saw in that video, if you looked in the back of that garbage truck where they dropped that material, there may have been a few cans. The majority of that was coffee cups and contaminated material. It's unfortunate it's not as better recyclable. If those were to weigh into the recyclable system, it'd be contamination. We'd have to sort it out, it's just not a great source. I think having educated, we get our best material from the residential collection because they do it all the time, they know what to do, they care about it, what it is. Unfortunately, our visitors are from all over, they don't always understand how to do that, right? So. Totally, thank you. And then I think just one last one, which is more for transportation. We had a study session recently, and one of the things that was covered was looking at the price of permits for parking and how we could be, whether intentionally or inadvertently subsidizing wealthy tech companies with the prices and amounts of permits that we're giving out to specific companies. What is being done to look into and address that possible increased source of revenue that we could be generating? We're looking at the permit program. I think that's, it's phased right now, there's a five-year increase in that cost that went through the Downtown Commission and they approved that rate structure as the phasing out of the deficiency fees, the permit fees were increased. Ultimately, you want the permit fee to be at least more than the bus fee. And we're actually looking at alternative types of permits, whether they're a per-use cost or a residential cost and trying to optimize what we have in our, utilize the structures that we do have. But our permits are way underpriced, no doubt. I don't disagree with you more, but and it's always a balance. And we take that pricing to the Downtown Commission and that's what they approve and that's where we're at at this point. Great, well thank you to your team and thank you for such a great job with Public Works. Councilor Mayes? I'd also just want to compliment the department, especially your work in environmental quality. As somebody who's been concerned about clean water for a long time, I'm just always impressed with how much our little city does with regards to keeping our oceans and creeks clean. And also just Bob, your crew up at the resource recovery facility is impressive with what you are able to process up there. So thank you for everyone's work in the department. I just have a couple of questions. Mark, the trash amendments I know, so State Water Resource Control Board now is mandating trash control for all urban areas and cities and counties. Is that something we can fund out of Measure E? Is that primarily the targeted funding source for that? That is our plan. We have a study that we're working on how to deal with that trash amendment. But yeah, that is, I don't know if we'll be able to fund all the improvements out of Measure E, but at least we'll get close, hopefully there'll be grants or something like that. And do you anticipate issues with localized flooding increasing from that if we have to go with controls versus sort of the other option, just documentation and reporting? Yeah, the design would have to have some sort of overflow so that we don't, that we catch the low flow and the debris with that. But at a high flow, you're just going to have to have an overflow, so you reduce the flooding. Okay, and then on the levy certification, I'm just curious, as we move forward with that, which I know has a lot of importance in terms of folks who are in the insurance program. I'm also interested sort of timing on that and just also, I know with the state board, a lot of jurisdictions are now having to update their flood management programs at the same time. So sort of the maintenance that we do in the river. Do you anticipate possibly having to do that in this fiscal year or is that another year out? We are, we're currently working with a consultant to prepare our plans and the project specs for FEMA certification. And we're working with the core of engineers as they transition this project to us and they transition out of it. We are, anything that we need to upgrade as far as documentation or so that we can get that certification. I think we have three years to get that certification before the flood insurance rates. FEMA then does not recognize the existing levies as there and so the rates go as if the levies weren't there, so it'll double our flood insurance rates for our residents. So we have three years to get that certified. We are working with the resource agencies on the operations manual, that the core is preparing to turn over to us to make sure it's implementable. And if there's any issues on as far as our maintenance that the agencies can't support, we're involving them early to get those changed. Okay, and then the last question, again, echoing Council Member Crohn's comments around the material, all the recycling materials and the lack of market now. I was recently at a meeting down in Southern California and it sounded like there was some effort through state legislation as well as discussion amongst other cities about looking into actually sort of creating our own market here in California. Sort of as an option for that, I was just curious if you guys have been following that and if we can do anything with regards to that in terms of keeping those materials here and generating both the jobs and revenues from that. That would be very helpful. I think we are seeing actually a reduction of our local markets, which is hurting because they can't get rid of the material. So we're not getting the competition for our material that we, even though we have very clean material, if they don't have a place to send it to, then it's very difficult for us to get rid of it. So yeah, we have seen a dramatic drop in our revenue for our recyclables. And I wouldn't be surprised if it comes in, half a million dollars less than what we're budgeting at this point. Well, I was encouraged to hear some creative thinking about that. So it would be interesting to see especially where there's land available to actually potentially look at putting together an actual manufacturing sector right here in California on how we can use those materials. So thanks for your work. I just have one quick question. In regards to some of the workforce development and needs, do you work with the HR department or how are you creatively sort of problem solving around that? Yeah, we actually work very closely with HR. One of the things we have, what we've seen with our, we have a lot of entry level positions. And so we actually bring people in, get them trained and they actually promote sometimes other departments, but sometimes other positions within the department. So there is constant kind of grow your own situation that we have on a citywide perspective. Streets has been hit hard recently as far as retirements and that type of thing. And it's a general fund position, so people will like to go to an enterprise, a little more secure at that point. So it's a challenge, it's always a challenge. We see that our refuse will take them in at the landfill, train them, and they'll move to a driver position or somewhere else in the city too, so. It seems like there could be some potential around CTE and workforce development working with the workforce investment board or something like that. Thank you. So at this time we'll go ahead and see if any folks in the audience here are learning along with us, but also want to take a moment for public comment. We'll have up to two minutes, and if you're interested, please come forward on my left. Good evening, Madam Mayor and Council Members. My name is Andy Hartman. I am the President of the Building Trades and also Business Manager for the Electrical Workers Union, also a city of Santa Cruz resident. So yesterday we had a Building Trades meeting where all the construction trade unions from the area met and we discussed various things going on. One of the union reps had gone up to the De La Viega job site to observe the construction up there. So there is construction underway. The contractor's representative on site was not aware of prevailing wage. Didn't know anything about subcontractors. So those are two concerning issues. I tried looking for an advertisement on the project. Doesn't look like it was ever properly advertised or it's not readily transparent that the project was advertised. So there's concern over whether apprentices are going to be put to work on this project, whether prevailing wages are being paid. So I guess I'll be putting in a public records request to try to get that information and determine what's happening with that project. So thanks very much. Is there any other member of the community who would like to address the council at this time? Okay, seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back. This is information item. It's a study session. If there's additional questions from council members, we can go ahead and allow time at a future time and or work with our department heads or city manager's office to get some of those questions answered. In regards to the question that was raised by the community member, I believe that probably had something to do with the original question raised by council member Brown. So we'll look into that specific example. But this time I'd like to get a report back on that as well. Council member Crone, I think that should be appropriate. Okay, I was just wondering, have commissioners been invited to this? Do we know if public works and transportation commissioners were invited to this study session? I don't believe we did specific invitations or direct invitations. Okay, and then I'll just remind the council members if you're interested in speaking to please go through me for acknowledgement and my ability to run the meeting that way. We'll go ahead and move on to the next agenda item, which is a study session information item on parks and recreation. And we have Tony Elliott, who will come forward. While we transition, we'll have about a five minute break and we'll go ahead and reconvene it about 10 after. This was originally scheduled to go till six. And I think the May 8th meetings are really for that core budget discussion. We'll provide an overview, some of the opportunities, some of the challenges that we see moving forward. Again, probably not fully comprehensive of everything, but what we can do here in an hour to give the council a good snapshot. So really an overview toward the end, obviously we'll open it up to questions to the city council. And I just wanted to acknowledge as well, a council member, Crone, sent me a couple emails today with probably 12 or 15 questions or so. A lot of those have a level of detail that council member Crone was seeking that we're going to follow up on if that's acceptable. A couple of those we can address tonight about the parks master plan, QMB funds and some of those, for example. But a lot of those will need a little bit of a deep dive into some metrics and so forth. So we'll follow up to this meeting with some more information based on this question. So all right, so I'll go ahead and get started. So really kind of gave an introduction there and wanted to kick off here. With a video similar to the public works department on what parks and recreation is all about. This isn't about a beach. It isn't about a town. It's about our tribe. We didn't settle here because it was easy, because it was a good career move. Hope you find your way there. Okay, so I love that video, super intense in a way, but great. And I think a great summary of the Parks and Recreation Department. Quick description and mission just to provide a really high level context of who we are and what we do. Parks and Recreation Department provides parks, community facilities, open spaces, innovative programs for children, teens, adults, and seniors. And we're committed to providing the community with safe, healthy, and exciting programs and facilities. The way that I kind of interpret this is that parks and recreation really helps bring a city to life. We have parks, we have these amenities, but the recreation staff and our people range from sort of the spirit of a teacher to the spirit of a cheerleader to the spirit of educators in a variety of ways. So bringing opportunities to people, bringing the city of life and driving that vibrancy and that quality of life I think is a summary of that. Parks and Recreation Department's primary objective is to provide environments, experiences, and programs that enrich lives and build a healthy community. So again, just a summary in our mission statement there. I've got this moniker up here, this hashtag Parks and Recreation City. So as a new transplant to Santa Cruz and as the representative of the department, this has really struck me a lot. We really, truly have a world-class parks system here in Santa Cruz. We're known globally as Surf City, but I would argue that our Parks and Rec City, we can put a hashtag in front of it, is equally as important and equally deserving of recognition as Surf City. We are a Parks and Rec City, and I want to talk about that just a little bit to provide some context on what a world-class park system we have here. So just by a few metrics, and this is just kind of a quick summary, we have in the city tripled the national average of parkland per capita compared to comparison cities across the country. We have among the best resident to park ratio. The national standard is about 2,200 residents per park, and we're about half that. So if you think about ratios in a school where twice is good in terms of the ratios of residents per park, we've got a top ranked, probably top two or three disc golf course at De La Viega in the world. Tree City, USA, obviously under that Surf City designation, obviously the best and most iconic surf breaks in the world. We have the longest wooden wharf in the United States in ocean waters. In terms of dog parks, this was something that I just sort of discovered a few months ago that per capita we have the most dog parks of any city in the country. So we are a dog-friendly community. But I think the thing that really speaks volumes to me is just the diversity of our amenities. We've got beaches, we've got our open spaces, playgrounds, the golf course, a variety of community gardens, a historic, new deal performing arts venue. Our team center, our community center, our wharf, lawn bowling. We've got our Shakespeare venue up at De La Viega. We've got an unbelievable archery course, I would call it. It's just an incredible diversity of amenities that I think lend to all sorts of interests, abilities, and backgrounds in our community. And I think it's that diversity that really lends to this being a parks and rec city and really a world-class park system. So I want to talk a little bit about our work and kind of put this in a little bit of context. So a few weeks ago, I sent an email to the city council about NRPA. NRPA is the National Recreation and Parks Association. And they have three pillars, sort of guiding principles for parks agencies around the country and that's social equity, that's conservation and health and wellness. And we don't subscribe to that specifically in a really hard way. In other words, they don't necessarily hold us accountable to that. But I think broadly those are great principles that guide us and guide every parks department around the country. NRPA, NCPRS, California Parks and Recreation Society are really two of our big trade agencies. So it's an opportunity for us to network with other peers. They provide a lot of guidance for us, a lot of those principles. So again, wanted to kind of frame that in terms of what guides us on the highest levels in terms of the field of parks and recreation. Other guiding documents, we have the city's general plan of course. We've got the Parks and Recreation Master Plan and then we've got a whole variety of parks maintenance and management plan. So the Wharf Master Plan, San Lorenzo Urban River Plan, Beach Management Plan, Jesse Street Marsh, Pogonip, so on and so forth. So we have a whole variety of master plans and management plans. So the work really, I guess the point I want to make with this slide is that the work that we do is not random. It's not just sort of ad hoc in some way. But it's really driven and guided by the general plan all the way down to very specific and really landscaping plans and so forth. So some of these plans interestingly go back to the 1960s. And so there's a lot of discussion about when to update these. Do we need to update them and really modernize them with current trends and demands and so forth. So again, wanted to give a little bit of context in terms of the guiding documents that really drive our day to day. All the way up to the big picture in terms of what we do. The City Council work plan is on there as well, certainly. The two-year work plan that Council puts together. And then broadly as well, things like the Climate Action Plan, Adaptation Plan, Mayor Watkins Health and all policies, things like that will certainly guide the decisions that we make and how we think about policies in action for the department. So as a department overview, just wanted to really give a snapshot here. So our 2020 budget request, 2020 fiscal year budget request is a little over $17 million. Our 2020 anticipated revenue is just shy of $5 million. I put 28.5% cost recovery here and really that's a ratio of the anticipated revenue versus our overall budget of $17 million. The national average here for Parks and Recreation Departments is 27%. So we're right in line with essentially national averages in terms of cost recovery. I do think we have opportunities to increase that a lot. It gets to some policy type discussions on do we raise fees? In what areas do we raise fees? And to what degree do we subsidize things? To what degree do we not? So a lot of questions there in terms of that cost recovery. But the net, just quick math, I think the net impact to the general fund to the city's budget is about $12 million or so. Total personnel, we have 87.25 FTEs, full time staff. Just a breakdown of our budget, so this is the approximately $17 million total budget that we have proposed for 2020. Just really basic how we've broken that down, 10.5 million of that is on personnel. So we're a department of people, much like many of the departments in the city. So the vast majority of our budget is just personnel to take care of the parks, provide recreation programs, and so forth. Services, supplies, and other just shy of $7 million within that piece of the overall budget. In terms of FTEs, so full time staffing, here's how we've trended. This is one of Council Member Crohn's questions that he sent via email in terms of staffing. So you can kind of see pre-recession back to 2002, where we had about 120 full time staff or FTEs. Fast forward to this coming, to this current year and then the coming year at 87.25 FTEs. So happy to get into that later with questions. We can dive into that, but I think one of the key points on that is that, frankly, it's a big challenge. It's a big challenge for us to keep up, to maintain parks, to provide the services that we did pre-recession. And as we've talked about with the public works budget, obviously we're not requesting staff for keeping this flat going into the 2020 budget, but this is a tough one. This is a tough one, and we can talk about this a little bit more toward the end of the presentation in terms of staff and providing the levels of service that we do with 30 or more less people than what we had in 2002. So at a glance, again, scope of our operations. We have 51 parks and open spaces, 1,700 acres of land, a little bit over 1,700 acres that we maintain, 33 acres of beaches. In terms of calculated valuation of assets, so we kind of thought about this from a bit of a business perspective. In a way, and what we have calculated is $153 million in assets that we maintain and manage. That does not include actually a lot of our assets and amenities, and does not include any land. So the valuation of all of our land really, and we're having a discussion with economic development, is that a commercial value, is that a park open space value, how do we really value that? But likely it's, we think it's near a billion dollars in assets that we maintain. Again, with a staff of 87 and a quarter and on an annual budget of about $16 or $17 million. So a huge, huge asset that we own, and how do we take care of that? How do we be stewards of that to pass it on to future generations in excellent condition? 175,000 square feet of facilities maintained and operated from a waste standpoint, 400 tons of general refuse, and 100 tons of green waste that we handle each year. Just a snapshot from our recreation side, a program and class participants. We hosted 119,000, or will host 119,000 in 2019. Almost 6,500 facility field and court reservations in our facilities. Two and a half million wore from beach attendants, 50,000 rounds of golf, and 1,000 of those are to the schools at no cost. And we've got numbers on how many free rounds of golf that we give to non-profits to use for fundraisers so that they can, Boys and Girls Club and things like that. So that they can auction them off and raise money for fundraisers and so forth. Adult softball, this just struck me almost 200 teams and almost 4,000 players. It's just remarkable and unbelievable. I can't imagine that amount of softball players. Volleyball tournaments, we had 40 at main beach. We could go on and on about these metrics, but just our parks are extremely busy. A lot of people using them and just beloved places to be. Wanted to share a little bit, this information came from visit Santa Cruz County, but a little bit of perspective on the economic impact and what that means for parks and recreation. So economic impact in Santa Cruz County is almost a billion dollar industry per year. In the area attractions and the venues that are visited, you can see here 40% of the people that visited Santa Cruz made the beach part of their trip and nearly a third made the wharf a part of their trip. But you can also see outdoor recreation was huge, special events are huge, museums and galleries are a big part of that. So really what we offer in parks and recreation is for the resident. But we also recognize that a lot of people that are coming to town are not from here and so there's an impact on our parks far beyond certainly just our residents and so something for us to kind of keep in context and think about kind of big picture how we handle that, manage it and make that successful. Here's our org chart. This is extremely difficult for me to read, probably for you all as well. But really wanted to just kind of break down the department a little bit. So within the recreation division, so Rachel Kaufman or recreation superintendent oversees we have our sports and beaches, division, youth programs and teen programs. The Civic Auditorium, Loudoun Nelson Community Center, which includes the teen center and then events and classes. Events and classes also includes our promotions, marketing, advertising, so on and so forth. Administration division really is our front office but that group is an unbelievable group that really accomplishes a lot. So they support Friends of Parks and Recreation. They do all of the phones, public reception, a shout out to that group for example, just this past Saturday was Super Saturday, so our summer registration opened up. They were at the office at 7 AM on Saturday and dealt with hundreds and hundreds of reservations coming in on Saturday to the tune of almost $400,000 in revenue just on Saturday morning of summer programs booking up. So very busy, they are really the front lines, the faces, the customer service experts in Parks and Rec. And in the parks division, again very diverse across the board in terms of what they do. Though we've got the golf course group, our urban forestry program which includes medians. Parks planning and ironic gulch has kind of grouped into that. The wharf, our parks open space ranger program. The west zone, central zone, and east zone parks maintenance which I'll get into in a little bit more detail in just a moment. So each of those is sort of its own operation all under the leadership of our park superintendent Travis Beck. So covered a little bit of this already the admin division, again public reception, community engagement, reservations, special event permits, advisory body functions, Parks and Recreation Commission, banner program, friends of Parks and Recreation support, sister cities, so a really wide range of functions. The recreation division, again I kind of hit on this, youth and teens, events and classes, sports and beaches, the civic and then Loudon. And here's a little bit more about what they actually do. So Loudon, obviously the community center, a number of classes and opportunities, the teen center, city sponsored special events, camps, Harvey West pool, natural history museum, surfing museum, junior guard, sports, beaches, events and box office at the civic facility maintenance to some degree at the civic concessions, leases, events classes, and so on and so forth. So the last part I mentioned briefly but marketing, the activity guide, social media sponsorships, so really the rec team owns all of that as well. So any outreach, banners, advertising, marketing, all that social media is done in-house with the rec team that does a remarkable job. And I'm always impressed about their level of graphic design ability and so forth. It's sort of out of their wheelhouse but they do a really great job. Within the parks division, again three zones, I broke this down in the org chart already so I'll kind of move through that. But want to look at the zone specifically, our west zone includes a number of parks, very recognizable of course, Depot, Neary Lagoon, Garfield, University Terrace, Lighthouse Point, Sergeant Derby, Arroyo Seco, Moore Creek, kind of so on and so forth. So I wanted to provide a little bit of context when we say these zones, what all does that include? So it's really a wide range of responsibilities that they have in each of the zones. Central, some of the key ones, Harvey West Park, Pogonip, the city hall area, the gardens, the town clock, Pacific Avenue, beach flats, the police department headquarters, the civic auditorium. So again, just a very large scope. And in the east zone, I think it's actually probably the largest scope of the three. I'm going to make them all compete with each other now. But De La Viega, the disc golf course, the Riverwalk, San Lorenzo, Frederick Street, Oceanview, Grant Street, Jesse Street, and kind of going down the list. So a huge scope of operations. Again, very, very busy, very impacted, very used and beloved by the community, but a heavy, heavy impact certainly in all of these parks. So wanted to share a little bit. So this is kind of a high level overview of what we do. But wanted to share a little bit of almost the human side, if you will, of what each of these divisions do. So the administration division, I just wanted to share, this is just a simple example from this weekend. But there's a family that has been part of our summer camp programs for a long time. I won't mention their last name, but it's a single mom, two kids. Mom is working during the summertime. Our summer camps are a huge opportunity for her kids. Get out of the house, socialize. We work with that family and with friends of Parks and Recreation on scholarship. So they have received scholarships the past few years. But this is just one of many, many stories. I think this family, again, mom is working, single mom, and kids are able to go to this camp funded by our Parks Foundation, FOPAR. Again, to have these connections, to build these memories, and something that they wouldn't necessarily find elsewhere without the support of the Parks Department and especially FOPAR. So I think admin, again, we could go through a number of those stories just from this past weekend, but that one I thought really stood out from this past weekend. On the recreation side, again, just a couple that I wanted to share. There is a lady named Teresa Wallace, who is originally from Poland. And Teresa is a young 83 years old. And she's been coming to Loudon Nelson for 22 years after reading about it in the Parks and Rec Bulletin. She, I'm just going to read through this here. Teresa started walking to the center from her Water Street home on a weekly basis to attend English as a second language and exercise classes at the center. Although Teresa now drives rather than walks to the center, she currently attends the Meals on Wheels Senior Lunch daily. Has gone on over 20 senior trips and still attends exercise three days a week. Teresa benefits most from the positive social interaction. And she says, quoting, the Loudon Nelson Community Center is very important. Lots of exclamation points. It is my life. It is like a second home to me. So this is a core function for Teresa for 22 years and a huge part of her connection to the city and to friends and more or less family at Loudon Nelson. Another gentleman I wanted to mention his name is Ray. Ray has been attending narcotics anonymous meetings at the Loudon Nelson Community Center for 20 years. He first learned that NA meetings were offered at Loudon Nelson through the NA referral hotline. And although there are NA meetings held throughout the city and county at a variety of times and locations, Ray attends Loudon Nelson several times a week. He enjoys the continuity and familiarity he feels at the center. And he says, quote, that he's extremely grateful the Loudon Nelson Center is here. The staff are friendly and kind and he feels at home. So again, this is just a very, very brief snapshot of I think just some of the lives, the human beings that are impacted and really sort of, again, brought to life and connected through Parks and Recreation programs. So it could go on and on on these. On the Parks Division, I wanted to share one more and I've snuck Donna into, I'm sorry, Council Member Myers into a picture up here. And so this one, again, just a remarkable effort between the Parks and Recreation team, the City's Urban Forester, City Council member, Parks and Recreation Commission member, Jane Mio, who's also in the photograph. On the left is our Downtown Streets team, the stewardship training program. So connecting with this group and providing opportunities to the Downtown Streets team, just in terms of education and so forth. On the right is Commissioner Jane Mio with a group from AmeriCorps. So this was just a week or two ago, but Jane really fostered this effort with AmeriCorps with the Valley Women's Club in Santa Cruz County, worked with our Parks team and just did remarkable work at the River Levy. So again, even on the Park side, and I would say even especially the Park side, just tons of opportunities where we connect with the community, engage our Council, engage the Commission and everybody from youth to seniors to women's groups to the Downtown Streets team. It's just constantly that human element, that social connection that we're trying to make. So just wanted to share a couple of those sort of human interest anecdotes or examples of what we do in Parks and Recreation. So continuing on, some of the highlights from 2019. So you will see these in the upcoming 2020 budget proposal in terms of some of these highlights. So this is just a brief snapshot, but we framed these within the Council's two-year work plan in some of those categories. So wanted to just kind of mention these here relatively quickly. So the tar plant recovery program at Erotic Gulch, 267 plants in 2019. Which is just a huge number and we've got a partnership with UCSC to help cultivate and grow that number even more. We really just started in earnest the Adopt a Park program about a year ago and we have six new Adopt a Park agreements in process or in place just in 2019. So this is a huge aspect and help us maintain our parks and just again get the community involved. We will have planted over 500 trees by the end of this year as well. Under community safety and well-being, free and subsidized transportation for seniors, a whole number of free community events, small bites around the world, Juneteenth, Halloween, and many, many more that we've created and serving the community. A lot of major park cleanup efforts this year by the park rangers at Sycamore Grove at Neary, De La Viega, and much more. So a lot of efforts in cleaning up, keeping the parks safe, but providing services to the community as well. Financial sustainability, again, just a couple, kind of a snapshot. We increased our class offerings from 2018 to 2019 by 15% and revenues by 20%. So again, going back to that revenue side, I think we have opportunities to increase revenue and reduce that net impact to the city's general fund into the budget. Again, it's just a lot of discussions, I think, with our parks commission and internally and potentially with the council on to what degree do we do that? Do we ramp things up and charge or so on and so forth. Women's soccer, 30 teams, 250 players, 13,000 in revenue. Junior guards had 950 participants with almost a quarter million dollars in revenue from 2019 as well. Under the engaged and informed community, a couple just highlights here, we improved our web track. This is our registration software. We drastically improved the online experience for residents and just streamlined that to make that much easier. Our put a bow on it campaign. You probably saw that around the holidays with a giant red bow on the front of our parks and recreation office. But that was our holiday gift card campaign, which is the best gift you can buy to buy essentially the gift of recreation. So that was a big success in getting the community connected. We placed an emphasis on neighborhood engagement and adopt a park, as I mentioned. Organizational health, we created a parks and recreation promotions team internally. So I mentioned all these different divisions and especially in recreation, the wharf, events and classes, beaches and sports. So we have a variety of different functions. And so a question that we had functionally was how do we market these? How do we advertise these and do it in a very strategic and streamlined way? So Rachel Kaufman created and team really created the parks and recreation promotions team internally to make sure that we're on the same page. We're coordinated together in terms of what we're promoting best practices. So there's some internal kind of professional development and training that happened with that. But it keeps us very consistent in terms of the message that we're sending out to the community as well. We automated services for reservations and online cancellations. And we hired these folks behind me, Travis and Rachel, Park Superintendent and Recreation Superintendent. Reliable forward-looking infrastructure and facilities, $96,000 state outdoor education grant for the Pogonip nature loop. We completed the Miramar demolition project at the wharf. So that's kind of a big vacant spot at the moment. And we installed ADA access paths in parks and picnic areas, which will continue to be a big focus for us moving into 2020. All right, I'm flying through this. So we'll get to questions here pretty soon. So by the numbers, I just wanted to get into this in a little bit more detail here. So this is the budget and summary that we have submitted to the city manager and to the city council for 2020. So really, I want to use this slide and the next one to just really kind of give graphically a representation of where we spend money but sort of juxtaposing this against the next slide. You can see a lot of our areas of largest expenditure within the Parks and Recreation Department. Golf course, the wharf, some of those, really are the sources of greatest revenue. So on this other slide, you'll see, yeah, the wharf, the golf course. So where we're spending money, we're also bringing in a lot of money in terms of that balance of revenue. The one here in gray is an aggregate of our park maintenance budget between the three zones, East Central and West Zones, that 5.6 million. Unfortunately, on that one, we have very little cost recovery in terms of park maintenance. There's not a whole lot of revenue coming in on the park maintenance side. But really wanted to present these two slides as a really high level just sort of glimpse of what we've submitted for 2020 and how the expenditures really compare with the revenues in a few of these, I'll call them enterprise functions within the department. So continuing with some of the numbers. So in the budget, the City Council will see an unfunded capital improvement, essentially deferred maintenance item of approximately $15 million. And so that's really what we have specifically identified as deferred maintenance, is unfunded capital improvement projects within the department. Beyond that though, and what we really don't have in the budget, but I wanted to be sure to communicate to the City Councils that we have what I'm calling just additional unfunded capital improvement. So this $45 million really represents a variety of things. So this could be upgrades to the Civic Auditor, essentially the Civic Auditoring Master Plan, the Worf Master Plan, the Pogonip Clubhouse. This could also include some of the other maintenance and management plans that I mentioned. So if we were to implement the Jesse Street Marsh Plan, that's really not captured in our unfunded capital improvement budget of $15 million, but really is sort of a greater bucket, if you will, of $45 million or more to really upgrade. A lot of these things that we talk about, we have plans for, but we haven't really identified where that money would come from. So definitely something that we keep on our radar. Going back to this slide at the very beginning, again, just wanted to share a couple examples here toward the end of the presentation, again on a high level in terms of budget. So this is the slide that we looked at. Our overall budget, approximately $17 million proposed for this 2020 budget. Personnel in blue, $10.5 million, and then supplies and services in orange at about $7 million. So I've broken that out. So the orange part from this graph as represented here is the full pie. And so wanted to share this number, because this is an impactful one to us, but it's one that I do think we have some opportunities here to reduce this, but wanted to just share a little bit of context on this specific number. So of our approximately $7 million that we spend on supplies and services, about a quarter of that, one and a half million is for water, sewer, and refuse. So this is from irrigation. This is from the golf course, certainly. And so a lot of strategies on how we can address this, we can water things less. We can brown out sections at the golf course. We can find more sustainable sources of water. Wells, for example, recycled water. We've talked with the water department up at the golf course, but water is a big impact. So I wanted to just sort of give a little bit of that context in terms of when you see this whole pie, almost 10% of our entire budget goes toward water, toward watering our parks, our fields, so on and so forth. So a lot of ways we can reduce that, but wanted to provide a little bit of insight on that particular fact. On homelessness, this one really, I wanted to include the slide in here, and this is a little bit of a nuanced one, because this report came from 2017. So this is a dated report, and this is one that the former Parks and Recreation Director put together as an estimate. And I put this in here really just to say that this is something that we are tracking very closely that really has not been tracked well, I think historically. So how much time are we putting in to clean ups and so forth? What is that staff time? And so we've started to track that just over the past four or five months or so. Also in terms of our expenditure, we came to the City Council a few months ago, with a mid-year budget adjustment, and that was around $85,000 based on the unbudgeted monies that we had spent geared toward clean ups and so forth. And so we have pieces of that, but over a year's time, we've not really tracked these expenditures. But I put this up here to say, this is something that we're working on to better track for the Council so that we can inform, you all inform the City Manager and ultimately inform the community on what this impact is. The other piece of this I think is, excuse me, that's important is that these expenditures, as we discussed in the mid-year budget adjustment, are not budgeted. So what we are spending on camp clean ups, on environmental restoration, so on and so forth, these are not budgeted as of now. And so I think that's just something to discuss kind of moving forward, how we do that. Do we budget for this? Do we come back as a mid-year budget adjustment, or how do we handle this based on the support that we're trying to provide to the community and these impacts? So I recognize too, this is not just Parks and Recreation. This is really many departments within the City, but just from the Parks and Recreation side, I wanted to be sure to mention this in this presentation. Streets and Medians, again, kind of by the numbers here, I wanted to share another sort of challenge for us. So we mentioned back at the beginning, the FTEs are full-time staff. And one of the impacts that we've really had from pre-recession to downsizing our department to our operations now. So Streets and Medians, we maintain in Parks and Recreation. The Medians, the sidewalks in terms of the landscaping, the roundabouts, the plantings and so forth. So we managed 10 miles of Medians and sidewalks, trash weeding planting. We have 128 chokers or traffic calming devices that are landscaped as well. And to cover all of that, we have one urban forester who has a variety of other duties and responsibilities as well. One Parks maintenance worker and essentially two Temps. One Temp works part of the year, the other Temp works the other part of the year. So as you're driving into the community, our gateways, our Medians are right of ways. If they look kind of weedy right now, it'll look kind of overgrown. Partly due to the springtime in all the rain and so forth. But it's partly due to, it's an area where we're just severely understaffed in terms of maintaining those areas, which are really again sort of the gateways into the community. These are the right of ways. These are what our residents are seeing and using, but also visitors to our community. This is their experience coming into the city. That it's just very difficult for us to keep up on. One thing that we have kind of a big discussion with the city council and parks commission is on our integrated pest management program as well. So we're not using glyphosate. We're not using Roundup. And it looks like we will probably not be using that. And so with that, that's a tool that we've used historically to really help kind of tame the jungle on our medians and roadways. We're not doing that now. And so it really comes down to staff. And so there's a public safety element to it of staff kind of hanging off into the road, pulling weeds. But it's a big question right now about fundamentally, how do we keep this city really looking beautiful and welcoming as you come in and these roadways and medians with very, very few staff in a sustainable way. So kind of a big challenge and question that we're grappling with. And again, I use these examples. These are not all encompassing, but I just wanted to pull a few of these out. The type of things that we're thinking about, conversations I think that we need to have with our parks commission, and then conversations ultimately to have with the city council on how we address some of these. So looking forward to Parks and Recreation 2020. So again, using the same categories where I articulated the different successes from 2019, we have the same categories under the goals for 2020. And this is in the budget that you all will see very shortly. It's actually included in your packet today as this sort of a preview of the budget that you'll see the full budget on the 22nd. But wanted to highlight a couple of these quickly. Environmental sustainability and well managed resources. A couple of our key goals here. One is the implementation of the parks master plan. And it can talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment, but establishing an annual work and project plan. So all of those plans that I mentioned, they sort of guide our department. I think one key aspect for us is reconciling all of those goals and objectives and prioritizing those. We have a lot of different directives. How do we prioritize that? But it really starts with the parks and rec master plan. Under organizational health, continue to implement quality assurance standards for reservations and program registration. To enhance efficiency and customer service. Under community safety and well being, continue to enhance safety throughout the city's parks, facilities and open spaces. And increase partnerships with local organizations to maximize service delivery and supplement resources. So that one really lends to the adopt a park programs partnerships that we have with groups like mountain bikers of Santa Cruz with coastal watershed, a variety of partnerships that we can have and help grow to help serve our trails and parks. Reliable and forward looking infrastructure and facilities. We have aggressively seek grants and alternative funding for capital improvement program projects. And I'll talk about this one here a little bit more in just a moment. Under the engaged and informed community, in 2020 we aimed to strengthen our communication and programming and outreach with our underserved populations of our community. That's part of the social equity element that we talked about. Continue to enhance marketing, branding and public relations to further highlight our parks facilities and programs and expand volunteer recruitment and volunteer opportunities. So you guys will see that in the budget here in just about a week, a little under a week. All right, so getting back to this parks and rec city a lot again of what we do this park system that we have is truly, truly world class and one to continue to invest in. And how we do that is a challenge. But I think looking at diversity of revenue streams, looking at engaging our community, our volunteer bases, different nonprofit organizations, how we invest in this, it's sort of an effort sort of for the community, but by the community as well. And I think that's how we see parks and recreation is from a very engaging perspective. But I think it's worth recognizing that we're surf city, but we are arguably parks and rec city as well across the country. I think this is something that we can all be very proud about. And I might even like make t-shirts so you can all wear them around town or something like that. Don has given or council member Myers has given me a thumbs up. Sorry. So a couple of the questions that we again, big picture questions and really wanted to leave with this today on the types of things that we are considering and hope to consider with the city council and with our parks and recreation commission. But how can we best diversify our revenue streams? We realize that we are a big impact on the general fund. We realize also that public works draws off the general fund, the police department, the fire department. And so how can we diversify our revenue streams uniquely as a parks department, parks and rec department to lessen that burden on police and fire to create more opportunities for them. But also resolve some of the issues and challenges that we're facing. So we go into this and I'm giving this presentation today on behalf of parks and recreation, but recognizing that we're part of a broader team. And so the more we can diversify these revenues, I think the better for parks and rec, but the better for the city and the city's general fund as well. What this means, I think, in a glimpse of, I think, where we could go growing our parks foundation, friends of parks and recreation. How can we grow that into something more robust? The Central Park Conservancy in New York City run Central Park. And they have an annual budget of $80 million to run Central Park. So there are their public-private partnerships that we can engage in with the parks foundation, for example, to bring in more dollars to invest in our parks and do some of these things. Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks, I think you all know well. In many ways, it really helps run state parks in this area. So are there ways like that? Those are big, giant undertakings, but are there ways that we can explore engaging our foundation, engaging nonprofits to help diversify our revenues, but support what we do in parks and recreation? Another big question, what strategies are viable to improve park safety? And again, this is kind of a loaded question. There are a lot of aspects to this. This is public safety from a police standpoint, vandalism standpoint. But this is also things like our ADA accessibility. A lot of our parks may not be safe because they're not accessible. There's trip hazards. There are areas that we haven't fully been able to keep up with from a maintenance perspective that may create hazards. So like a playground, for example, where, again, deferred maintenance or whatever the situation might be may lend to a situation where a playground or a path may not be safe. So what strategies, again, on the capital side, on the accessibility side, ADA side, but also public safety, vandalism, what can we do in that realm to improve park safety? And this component is really guided by the Parks and Recreation Master Plan, but it's also in the Council's two-year work plan as well in terms of infrastructure and park safety. And this is a big question, especially with our new park superintendent, Travis Beck and I. We've had this question a lot, is how can we improve investment into our natural environment and into our open spaces? So right now we have our open space ranger program, and our rangers are asked to do an awful lot from law enforcement to cleanups to trail maintenance to interpretation, environmental education to some degree. That's an insane workload in terms of responsibilities. And so our question, you know, knowing that we've got this brilliantly conceived green belt around the city, how do we invest more into that? How do we mitigate the impact of invasive species and non-natives? How do we mitigate for risks for fire? And how do we handle just sort of abuse or, you know, different sort of misuse, people cutting down trees or whatever it might be in some of our open spaces? So how can we improve this? Our investment, but it ranges from safety to habitat to the environment. And even within, I think, neighborhood parks to some degree, with the use in our neighborhood parks and the impacts in our neighborhood parks, how do we invest in those environments to make them more drought tolerant? For example, drought tolerant plants reduce that use of water, make them, you know, create more community gardens for community or pollinator gardens for our natural environment. You know, so I think there are a lot of ways in the environment that we talk about the environment, but what are we really doing to invest in it? And especially the open space moving forward. So a lot of big questions that we hope to engage the council and the Parks and Recreation Commission. I've got many more questions, but we'll leave those for another day. So really wanted to say thank you to you all for this opportunity. Would like to open it up to questions to the city council, but want to recognize really quickly the Parks and Recreation team, again Travis and Rachel, our Parks and Recreation Commission members, Chairman Brown, Don, and really the whole commission. This is an unbelievable team. It's an unbelievable team with a can-do spirit. The answer is always yes. We'll figure it out. We'll do it, but I'll be blunt and honest. I think we feel pinched. We feel pinched on how do we keep up because it is a world-class park system. And we want it to be world-class for our kids and grandkids. So where does that investment come from? How do we do that? And how can we work with the council, the commission to get there? Because it's truly, truly remarkable, and that's kudos to the Parks and Rec team that manages this and serves the community. So just wanted to give them a thanks and a shout out. So with that, I'll open it up to any questions that you all have. Thank you, Tony. I appreciate the presentation and to the entire Parks and Rec team and Parks and Rec commissioners that were here today. Thank you for being here and for your work. Similar to the other department, it's always great to celebrate the accomplishments and have a broader understanding of some of the challenges that we have forthcoming as we move forward for the future in terms of our next budget decisions, but also in terms of our long term strategies, as you just mentioned. I'm going to deviate a little bit from the process that was originally outlined as the council could, is probably aware, we are one hour over the allotted time for this. And so what we'll go ahead and do is ask if there's any member of the community who would like to address the council on this topic, then we'll return back for questions at that time and we'll have council member questions. I'm going to suggest keeping the council member questions broad up to perhaps five minutes per council member. Given that I think every individual council member could probably sit down with you Tony and go into this in a real detail. And so in the interest of that, we'll go ahead and do that for the broadest kind of concepts and questions at this time and then return if we have additional questions to directly talk to you, either city manager Martine Bernal or you Tony in terms of follow up questions, which I know you're always very accessible for. So at this time we'll go ahead and open it up to see if there's any member of the community who would like to address us on this item. This is a study session item. We will not be taking any action. If you're interested in speaking to us, you're welcome to do so. Sir, you're welcome. You'll have up to two minutes. Good evening. I'm Scott Graham. A number of years ago there was a push to make the golf course organic. And I don't know if that ever happened or not. If we are currently running an organic golf course, but if we're not, it would be a good idea, I think. And not only the golf course, but all the parks. Let's make all the parks organic instead of using chemicals, fertilizers or whatnot. Let's go as organic as possible with all the parks. One of the issues that I wanted to bring up is I live across from Loudon Nelson Park. And the park crew, when they come in and do the cleanup, they clean up the stuff on their side of the street. But people that use the park and use Loudon Nelson Center also leave trash on our side of the street, the house sides of the streets there that surround the center. And it would be really nice if the park's people would clean up the messes that are caused by people using the park. And so that would be cleaning up both sides of the street. And I'm sure that the same thing happens at every other park site around town, that it's not just the side of the street the park's on that gets trash left by park users, but also the other side of the street, because people park on both sides of the street to use the parks. So I think it would be really nice if that could happen that the park's department, I realize they're strapped, but it would be just a little bit extra time to clean up the trash, the litter that's left behind by park users. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who'd like to address the Council? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back to Council for questions. We'll go ahead and start to my right this time with Council Member Cron. And if you could keep your questions at the highest level, we'll have about five minutes. We'll rotate through to Council Member Myers and then go back to Council Member Brown and through and I'll reserve my questions till the end. Feel free. For the record, I do not appreciate the Mayor trying to silence Council members and questioning. In the previous presentation, there was a very relevant issue raised by a member of the public about a possible violation on the part of the city concerning prevailing wage and we could have heard from our Public Works Director, but that was shut down. I'm turning to the city attorney. I'm wondering, Tony, is there something in our rules, our decorum rules that we do study sessions differently than we do Council meetings? Is there anything? I mean, as far as I'm concerned, from a legal perspective, a study session is a Council meeting, so there's no difference. You know, I'd prefer not to just have to call a vote just to get a question answered. So I would really appreciate if folks can get their questions answered because it's a really important subject we're dealing with here. And I spent a lot of time looking over the budget that was given to us and formulating some questions. And I appreciate, Tony Ellis, you answered, you responded to one of the questions and not really, you know, with 30 more parks workers in 2002 than we have today. I'd be interested in knowing a little bit more about that maybe not now, but also about the percentage of the budget and how that's either increased or not, you know, given that 30 parks workers is probably about 25% of the workforce at that time. And I know the Rangers now have been taken out of Parks and Rec as well. I want to go back to the golf course fee study and talk a little bit about that and how that was done. And I gave you a few of these questions beforehand, but I'm trying to understand to maybe combine a couple of questions how the golf fund went from an enterprise fund into the general fund and what would it take to make it back to an enterprise fund where it would essentially be paying for itself? How would we go about doing that? Yeah, I think that's a good question. That's one that we talked about internally today and just to be very honest, I think being new and with a new recreation superintendent I don't think we've got the history on that. That's one of the questions that through your email I wanted to follow up on in more detail. That question will factor in our operators of the golf course as well. Tim and Jamie lost a lot. So they'll have some input into that as well. I do think it gets to this question though broadly in terms of our different operations. And I kind of referenced the golf course. You could say the wharf, maybe the pool, some different operations that I think a big picture from kind of a policy standpoint, should we have very specific targets in terms of cost recovery on those? So that was a question when I came in and joined the city six months ago or so. And so I think within our operation, the golf course and some of these, we don't currently have cost recovery mandates. Last year, for example, I think our subsidy, if you will, on approximately a $2 million budget to the golf course, it was about a $300,000 subsidy. So it was relatively small. And I do think that we're very optimistic in terms of where we can be in terms of recovering those costs. But I think ultimately what I would like to get to, and again, this is a bit of a departure from your question, is defining within parks and recreation, what is it that we want to subsidize and what is it that we don't want to subsidize? And how do we balance that within the budget? And that gives us very clear targets, I think within any of those aspects to really go after additional funds, revenues, whatever that might be. So kind of a big picture conversation, I think, to have with the commission and council. So no information really about the fee study and what we're recovering now, as opposed to before that happened, because I understood they raised golf fees, but I don't know if they're recovering any additional backfilling like the $300,000. We have information on it. I just don't have it. Our team here does not have it with us tonight. Just to add, but in general, the golf course, as Tony mentioned, as I understand, there's about a $300,000 difference between the revenue that it generates and the costs that are incurred, which has been declining over the years, and there's a path or a plan to eliminate it. And historically, the golf course... I'm sorry, eliminate the deficit? Or eliminate what? The subsidy. Oh, okay. The subsidy. The golf course is not... There's a difference between legally required enterprise funds like the Refis Fund and the Wishwater Fund and the Water Fund, for example. With the golf course, for many years, the city was able to operate it actually at a profit because it generated enough revenues to pay for itself, plus it generated admissions tax on top of that, that actually provided additional general fund revenues. When the recession hit and golf play was impacted, not just here, but throughout the whole country, it became obviously very, very difficult for that to happen. And so it just didn't make sense from an accounting perspective to operate it as an enterprise fund because it just wasn't operating that way, and so it just didn't make sense to do it from a, again, accounting perspective. However, the city has always wanted to the extent that we can not subsidize any programs if we can. And if it's technically possible to do that, whether it's the golf course or whether it's any other program, so long as it's meeting the needs of the community and providing the service, that if it can operate by itself, that would be a great thing to try to accomplish. And with the golf course, it does have that opportunity to do that in the sense that with the plans to increase play and with the plans with the increased use of the lodge or the restaurant, as well as some of the debt service that's going to be finished and completed there, there is an opportunity for that fund to be able to be self-supporting to the extent possible. The other thing that you have to also think about too is that even if you were to eliminate the golf course it doesn't mean that you'll save money because even with the $300,000 deficit, if you eliminated it, you would lose the revenue that comes with it. However, you still have to maintain that property. And so you still would have to incur some costs to maintain it. So it might actually not save any money, it might actually cost money to eliminate the golf course because we would have to invest money and maintain it or doing something else with it. So unless it was sort of revenue producing or something. So it's not that straightforward of a question. Yeah, for the record, I'm not for eliminating the golf course but I do think there are issues that you just raised, Tony. We have to decide what do we want to subsidize and what we don't want to subsidize and all due respect, $300,000. We're talking about people, we have organizations here, Meals on Wheels, Child Care Center, Beach Flats Community Garden. These are all vying for that $300,000 and it would make those programs quite well off if we could shift that general fund money to those programs and not be subsidizing the golf course. Go ahead and interrupt here at this time. Council Member Cromer, we're approaching the additional time that we've allotted. I'll say for the record, the mayor's responsibility is to run the meetings in a way that allows for city business to be conducted. And that's my responsibility as the mayor and has the ability to also make adjustments based on that. We have a lot of city business to do. There is also the potential of filler bustering with one Council Member being able to ask numerous questions for a significant amount of time. So it is my job to ensure that we have an opportunity for all Council Members to have questions asked as well as to run meetings that lead to city business getting completed. This will allow for any follow-up questions at certain times that may be raised. Also allow for Council Members to have any follow-up questions after particularly this study session or in advance of a study session to get their questions asked. At this point, we'll go ahead and move over to Council Member Glover and we'll rotate through. And if there is additional time, we can go ahead and see if there's an interest or motion to have a Council Member have additional time. Council Member Cron. I'm going to make a motion to ask three more questions for additional time. Second. So there's a motion by Council Member Cron, seconded by Council Member Brown for additional three questions in time at this time. Is that the motion you would have your questions at this? And just for the record too, filler bustering does not have to do with asking legitimate questions to a department head. Filler bustering is what happens in the Senate when people get on the Senate floor reading the Bible or reading a novel in order to stop a decision from being made and there is no motion in front of us tonight to be made. So filler bustering would not be happening right now. Okay. There's a motion in a second by Council Member Cron, Council Member Brown, second the motion. Any further discussion? All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. No. So that fails with Council Member Cron, Glover and Brown in support. Council Member Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings, myself and Council Member Myers voting against. Council Member Glover, you'll have approximately five minutes for your questions. Well, I must say that that is an incredibly disappointing outcome to that vote, especially because I find it strange that we are in a study session where we were hearing two department heads give presentations. One of the department presentations is approximately 110 slides. So the fact that there's only two hours that were allocated to this meeting really makes it confusing for me to be able to understand the logic and timeliness of the structuring of the meeting. That also seems strange to me that we're only allowed to ask broad surface questions instead of asking specifics. I'm especially confused because while we can ask these questions on the record, which is a fantastic opportunity for us all to be here, it also makes it so that we can ask questions that community members that don't have direct access to Director Elliott or to the City Manager's Office may be interested in hearing. So I think that it's important that we allow for us to ask questions. And if there wasn't enough time allocated to the meeting because of the planning process, then we should not be penalized for a lack of planning. With that and my remaining allocated time to ask you questions there, Tony, social equity. I really appreciated that was one of the topics of things that you were focusing on and as a guiding principle. I was wondering your thoughts on the allocation here for the 2020 budget suggestions that had the DeLaviga Golf Course at $2.3 million and the Beach Flats Community Center at $13,000. Do you feel that that is equitable? That's a good question. I mean, I look at it as completely different operations. That's a question to some degree. I'd like to talk to my staff about what is adequate? What are the needs in those operations? I think what we have presented in the budget is the request, a request. To operate those functions. So is that adequate? I don't know. And are those fair comparisons? I think it's hard to compare the two. But I do think if you look at the golf course, for example, are there ways to take this approach of social equity toward the golf course? Are there members of our community, the team center who have never thought about golf as an option? Are there people who could get into the world of golf from an agronomy standpoint and lead that to a path toward college or something like that? So there are opportunities for both education but experience through recreation as well. And that, I think, is the priority of the department to find those social equity opportunities in anything. It could be the golf course. It could be the wharf. It could be anything. But how do we open those doors to more people? Thank you. Do you know about the data or demographic collected around mountain biking in Santa Cruz? Do you know if there's any analysis on demographic backgrounds? That's a good question. I don't know offhand. I suspect that there is through MBOSC. But I don't know any specifics offhand. Maybe you could help me attain that. That would be fantastic. And then do you have any parks usage with regards to data or demographics? If who uses the parks? So we don't. That's a great question. I think that's kind of an industry question of how do you track the number of people in parks? You can do it through surveys, certainly, of the sort of representative. But who's going to our parks? When are they going? What assets are they using? What amenities? So it's sort of an economic piece of that, but also just kind of an attendance piece of that as well. So my knowledge, I've not seen any studies that we've done historically that have studied that. But that is a metric. If we can come up with a way to track who's using our parks and better serve, our public in that way with that information. I think you would solve a problem, a national problem on that front. Let's work on it together. And then what grants are being explored about parks in underserved communities currently at the Parks and Rec Department? Yeah, so the biggest one is Proposition 68 that we're going through. So we are in partnership with the Economic Development Department with our team here to identify underserved areas of our city. What are the needs? What are those assets that we need? And how do we leverage this quarter billion dollar offering from the state to leverage funds to invest in our community, especially to underserved populations? Wonderful. And then do you have any cost projections for the alternatives? It was wonderful to hear that you're not using Roundup anymore and that we'll probably not return to that practice, which we were using in 2017. So have you done any preliminary analysis of alternative weed abatement or management material? Because I noticed, and I know that you said that there was concern about safety in the medians and other kinds of stuff like that, but there are things like Avenger and weeds. Yeah, we handed it over to Travis. Thank you. Hi, Travis, Park Superintendent. Just quickly, I'd say we are in the midst of launching an IPM policy review and we'll be coming to the council an upcoming date with sort of a more developed proposal for how we can better implement that program. And a big piece of the question is what are the alternative approaches that we can use, whether that's chemical, mechanical, et cetera, et cetera. So stay tuned. Love to stay up to date on that process because that's especially interesting. Thank you. Council Member Myers. I just have a couple of comments and maybe just a few leads, but happy to just wrap it up very quickly. With regards to, I'm glad to hear that Prop 68 is a potential that you guys are looking into and just would encourage that Prop 68 provides a lot of funding for open space areas. And you just need to, we need to think about our open spaces as different vehicles. They need to be maintained for fire safety and other things. So kind of looking more broadly might be open up some avenues. On kind of your first question, how do we diversify our revenue streams. The Bay Area Open Space Council is a nine county council well worth the $1,000 membership. They're probably the biggest cutting edge group in California right now on looking at new revenue streams. So I would highly encourage Santa Cruz County as part of the nine counties that can be eligible for membership. So that would be an excellent place. And the Golden Gates Park Conservancy has probably done the most on park diversity of any park conservancy in the nation, including collecting some of the demographics that Council Member Glover was speaking about. So I would encourage, you know, reaching outside to some of our larger urban areas. They're doing a lot of cutting edge work on that. And then finally, in keeping with the mayor's excellent work on the wellness component to how we look at our policies at the city. A lot of great work has been done on the value of parks and open spaces in actual wellness and health. And a lot of the major health care providers, including Kaiser and others, have been investing in parks actually as a prescription for obesity, diabetes, mental health, various things, kids. So there's a lot of opportunity there, a lot of creative thinking, and that might be one of those revenue stream possibilities. And then I'll follow up with you within meeting privately on some other just specifics. Thanks, Tony. Great work. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Myers. Council Member Brown. I have lots of questions. The presentation was great. Thank you for reminding us and, you know, elaborating on some of the wonderful work Parks and Rec does with very little. And I will look forward to following up on some of those thoughts, you know, and other more specific questions another time. Right now I don't have any big picture questions. So I'm happy to cede my time to other Council Members if they have other questions. Council Member Mathews. Brief. Thank you. Wonderful presentation. I particularly enjoyed your putting your own vision on this presentation, framing it in terms of our strategic goals. And there's obviously a fresh new team and a lot of great energy. I have some issues we've talked about that I'd like to pursue further plugs into these, particularly building partnerships and volunteers. But I just want to approach this whole topic. Obviously there's more in the way of needs and possibilities than resources right at the moment. But appreciation to everyone who makes it happen. Thank you. Just going to say that was a great presentation and definitely got me super jazzed about parks in Santa Cruz. And similar to what Council Member Mathews just said, wanted to follow up to discuss with you more about like volunteer opportunities because I think that there are certain areas that depending on what is already available, there might be some ways to get more folks in the community involved because I feel like, you know, a big part of what people care about in this community is protecting the environment and our parks. So I just want to put that out there. And it was a great presentation. I look forward to... I have a bunch of questions, but I think that it would be better that we have them offline. Okay, thank you. Thank you. My question is around technology. Is there any research around how to use technology to really support the work of the Parks and Rec Department in terms of meeting some of the unmet needs with sort of human power? Is there any... Have you thought of that? I just... I mean, it's something to sort of think about, I guess, if not a question. Yeah, I could open that up to Rachel and Travis as well. I mean, I think it really ranges, I think, from kind of a customer service module and reporting. What are people seeing in the parks, kind of that adopt-a-park lens? Different mobile apps and things that we could use in terms of parks, lighting, security, you know, different things like that, a variety of different technologies for park safety and so forth. In terms of maintenance, I mean, I've seen essentially the equivalent of Roomba vacuums for mowers for turf fields, real turf fields. So, I mean, there's a variety of applications, I think, in our fleet as well. Over time, I think there will be more automation, of course. So, I mean, can we program that in? GPS coordinates on fields and so forth to automate equipment. So, I mean, that may be a few years away, but those are a few kind of random things that pop into my mind, certainly. But I think, yeah, communication, I think is a big one against social media and how we interact with people. I think it's interesting, too, with people's phones. And I've always wondered how, when you're looking on Google to go to a restaurant, how it knows how busy that restaurant is. In my understanding, there's pinging your phone to know how many people are in a restaurant. So, there are analytics that Google has that can kind of tell you when a park is busy. So, right now, for example, at San Lorenzo Park, I think conceptually, phones could be pinged to inform us on is it busy, is it not busy? And what does that mean from, again, everything from a safety standpoint to a maintenance standpoint? So, a lot of different ways that technology is really encroaching into our industry. And I could probably go on and on, but it's all sort of hypothetical. Yeah, just sort of an interesting thought in terms of the time that we're in. Also, in terms of, well, I had the quote, there was a question about the alternative to the pesticides. And then the last question was around, I'm interested in learning more, and I know it's probably going to be forthcoming, but the role that the health and all policies could fit within the work, it seems to me when you were explaining the three pillars of the guiding kind of organizations, the NRA and the CPRS, those also fallen to kind of that same sort of standard around public health and the equity and sustainability. So I'm interested in learning more about that. We can talk more offline as well, or you can kind of fill us in when the time comes. And then at some point, it'd be great to know if there's any gaps in the faux pas scholarships and how we can take that into consideration, especially in terms of the budget, and making sure that students and families who want to access our parks and rec programs are able to access faux pas potentially for support for that work. And then, I guess lastly, I guess would be in terms of just clarity for the budget summary on the homeless expenses, and I'm sorry if I didn't hear it. Was that that was a personnel and other costs? Yes, the majority of that budget again from 2017, and we can go back and recirculate that study among the council. Maro Garcia, the previous director, I think did that study, and it was, I don't think it was a scientific study or in a great deal of depth, but really I think it represented an estimate from the Parks and Recreation Department on what that expenditure was, but I believe that was primarily based on the park ranger budget, which includes, obviously personnel, but a lot of cleanups and things like that. So I think that was the core of it, but I'll send that around just to be sure. And then one final question, in terms of environmental design and public safety, is that something that you were alluding to when you were talking a little bit about that role and partnership? That's exactly right. I mean, I think the idea in any of our parks, and again, it gets to the ADA side of it, to, again, environmental design, I mean, how we lay out parks. San Lorenzo Park is ripe for a redesign. We'll have redesign funds for San Lorenzo very soon. So as we go into that process, I think that some of the things that we'll consider are, again, a variety of things. Seating and public spaces for events, more recreation areas, playgrounds, things like that. How do we balance those? How do we incorporate built structures, like a playground, with natural structures, trees, shrubs, flowers, pollinator gardens, whatever it might be? How do we balance those things for maximum safety, visibility, accessibility, and so forth? So yeah, it's a big part of that process. Well, I think you'll probably be getting a lot of additional follow-up questions from Councilmembers. So thank you again for your presentation. We really appreciate understanding more about what you're all doing in the work that you do and how we can be really informed as we move forward into our budget hearings. Again, Councilmembers will likely be following up with you for their specific follow-up questions in regards to what they'd like to have available for them as they make decisions moving forward. I'll go ahead and say City Manager Martin Bernal and myself, we can extend the invitation to our commissioners to ensure that they're aware that this is happening if they aren't already, but that's something we can definitely check back in on. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, we'll go ahead at this point. That's the end of our city business. We'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting.