 Can you hear me okay? Good afternoon. Welcome to our 1 p.m. session of the November 23, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I have a few announcements. And then we will move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsantacruz.com. If you are attending this meeting virtually and wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in at the beginning of the item you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a streaming, a delay in streaming so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for public comment press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented on your item of interest. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Watkins is absent. Calentary Johnson. How's it? Brown. Here. Cummings. Yeah. Council Member Golder is currently absent. Vice Mayor Brunner. Present. And Mayor Myers. Present. Okay. First off, excuse me, first item is a mayoral proclamation declaring Saturday, November 27, 2021 as small business Saturday day. And Bonnie, I believe you have the proclamation. That's what Suzanne told me. Do you have that? Did I put, is it in the drawer? She said she was going to leave it with you. I was going to take it with me and then she said she would leave it with you. I can put it up on screen share if you would like. Okay, let's go ahead and do that. That would be great, Bonnie. Thank you. Actually, just a second. Do you need screen sharing ability, Bonnie? Yeah. Sorry, I'm having trouble finding it. I had it a few minutes ago. Let's see. Here it is. Okay. Thank you. So this is for the public. We're on item number four, which is a mayoral proclamation declaring Saturday, November 27, 2021 as small business Saturday day. Sorry. That's perfect. Thank you, Bonnie. Whereas since its inception in 2010, small business Saturday, following between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, has illuminated the significance of supporting small independently owned businesses across the country. And whereas small business Saturday is a day dedicated to supporting the diverse range of local businesses that help create jobs, boost the economy and keep communities thriving across the country. And whereas the City of Santa Cruz celebrates our small businesses and the contributions that they make to our local economy and community. And whereas small businesses continue to recover from the impacts of the pandemic and rely on the holiday shopping season for much of their revenue and the support of local shoppers to their businesses each year to survive. And whereas 85% of Santa Cruz businesses are small businesses, employing nine people or less. And whereas there are over 500 retail businesses in Santa Cruz, providing nearly 4,800 jobs. And whereas purchasing goods and services from local small businesses keeps those dollars local and contributes to a more vibrant and sustainable economy. And whereas the City of Santa Cruz Economic Development Department has contributed to the Shop Santa Cruz Local, excuse me Shop Santa Cruz Holiday Shopping Campaign to produce signage and advertising and advertising encouraging local shopping and dining and promoting the impact that we can make when we support small local businesses. And whereas retail businesses across the country will be celebrating small business Saturday and encouraging shoppers to shop local. Now therefore I, Donna Myers, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz do hereby proclaim Saturday, November 27, 2021 as Small Business Saturday Day in the City of Santa Cruz and encourage all citizens to join me in shopping local today and throughout the year. Thank you Bonnie for your staff for getting that together for us and reminding us of all the value of our local businesses and let's all get out and celebrate and shop there on Friday. So thank you Bonnie for putting that together and thanks Rebecca for working on that. We appreciate it. Thank you. Next up is item number five on our agenda today and that is John Laird. And Senator Laird is here today to provide the Council and our community a legislative update presentation. Good afternoon, Senator. Welcome. We're just learning how to do this, Senator. So Bonnie, can you, so is John, is that the spot where he'll speak from? Okay, great. Pardon? Okay. So this is a different city council chambers than you've probably seen, right, John? In any of a number of ways. We had a big zoning map on the wall behind there. 30 years from a TV screen, I think. That's great. Well, welcome John. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And I think this is either the 16th or 17th city hall I've been to in the break. I have 21 cities. I can't believe they give me this long. Get to my home city council. And it's interesting because we are over halfway through the legislative break. We were timing a lot of time talking about what we did this last session. And now it's starting to be also, what does the next one look like? And the budget this year was phenomenal. I was budget chair in my assembly run 15 years ago. And we always had about a $10 billion deficit and we're on defense the whole time. And to have $75 billion above projected revenues was unbelievable. And basically, we put half of it in reserves or returned it to people that were struggling under COVID. And then we'll use the other half to move way ahead on things that were issues we want to invest in. The Medicaid age was lowered to 50. There were billions to broadband, billions to homelessness. We added childcare slots and added to childcare rates and childcare wages. There was obviously homelessness, stuff on fire and water, major investments across the state. And obviously I was able to get together with Mark Stone, the 14 and a half million that comes to this city to really try to do a shot in the arm to get ahead of the whole cycle of homelessness. And if you look ahead, the legislative analyst just released his forecast for the next budget year a few days ago. And he's estimating there'll be $51 billion above projected revenues this next year. $20 billion will go right off the top to schools under Proposition 98 and there will be a certain amount that has to go to reserves. And we might have to, for the first time in history, truly return money based on the GAN limit and we'll have a debate about that. But it means that we will have probably at least in the neighborhood of $20 billion to invest in new ways. And I think that one thing I'm talking about is dealing with the whole issue of affordable housing in the sense that we didn't have grants the way we have bonds and it would be good to invest and to do that going forward. We have an issue because the building trades really want prevailing wage and that blows up some of the financing for nonprofits. But I think we can try to figure out how to negotiate a deal, try to figure out how to make that investment. That's something that we have to do. The other major sort of off the top issue is the governor when he announced the surplus said he'd like to spend it paying down the retirement funds, purse and stirs. And while I think we support that, we'd really look for some of these other investments as well that wouldn't go just to that. And so I had a Zoom yesterday with city staff members here. I sort of said, don't count that before it happens because that's one that I think will be negotiated and really will be changed. And I also just attended the climate conference in Glasgow and it was very significant for any of the numbers because we're ahead of a lot of the other states in the country. But this last year was not a good year for climate policy in the legislature. It was good for climate budget investments but not for climate policy. The Senate president has appointed a working group in the Senate to try to find common ground and I'm going to lead it and we're going to just see if we can't get somewhere this next year in climate policy. And then on bills this year, for myself, great bill locally by doing the Pajaro River levy project which buys out the local share from the state. I was working very closely with the person that's about to become your city manager on it. It was very interested for the city of Watsonville. And it also had a bill that was a fun bill because the governor appointed the first woman ever to be the head of the highway patrol and all the code sections referred to he and him. We did a bill that had gender neutral the code sections and then once I was rolling Cal Fire said we have firemen so I added all that. And the conservation core said we have core men and I added all that and the general of the National Guard says ours is just rife so I couldn't even get that in one bill. I might have to do another bill to do that just next year. We also did a major bill on fire because our fire prevention efforts are only what we budget in a year. And while their plans they're not anywhere in statute and really high author to build it says we will have five year goals for controlled fire for fuels management for force management. We will have it adaptively managed to see if it's actually meeting the goals are doing enough and we will have transparent reporting won't be up to the reporters to tell us what's being done. It will be reported out of the agencies in the state. And one of the biggest problems we had this year was with Edd and I am the Senate lead on the joint audit committee and one of the audit recommendations was that there is no plan for recession. And Edd so I did the bill on a bipartisan measure that says they will update and maintain all the time. A recession plan that the minute we head into recession Edd will kick in they won't cut surprise they won't have 800,000 people waiting in line their system won't crash how ready so that this just doesn't happen again. And so it was and on the budget is chair of the education budget subcommittee. We really restored by the end of the budget schools pay through 12 CSU UCs community colleges, not just to where they were before the pandemic but a 5% increase means a lot to this community and what will come to UC. And we hope there's also a major fund for investing in housing. They have housing projects. The state would directly invest. So we are hoping that that is a link that we can benefit from here. And and also the the UC cooperative ag extension has not been has been just dying on the vine financially for 15 years or more. We got them a 55% increase to restore where they have historically been. It makes a big difference in agricultural counties. It will make a big difference to Santa Cruz and Monterey and San Diego and I was really pleased to be instrumental in that. And then on my own bills one last one because I got an award from the League of Cities. The organic diversion bill really gave a year's holiday enforcement as long as cities and counties move ahead. But it was designed to leverage money and we added $70 million for grants to cities and counties to try to implement the organic waste diversion. And that is in the budget so hopefully you will. Can you repeat that? I'm having a hard time. Yeah, John, I think maybe a little bit. A little bit closer. That microphone be pulled closer? Yeah. Okay. Sorry John. That's okay. I'm always told to lean in. Yeah. Usually about the time. Lean in. Yeah, so basically organic waste diversion there will be $70 million of grants to cities and counties. And hopefully here you will be eligible and we'll be able to help the landfill here. And then the last issue I wanted to mention. I think the most controversial issues we had this year were the two housing bills SB 9 and SB 10 with regard to local zoning and housing affordability. And SB 10 was amended to make it more optional. But there was a major in there that said that a two thirds vote of a city council or two thirds vote of a board of supervisors could overrule a locally approved ballot major. That was a bridge too far for me. I voted against SB 10. SB 9, which would allow extra ADUs on single family lots was amended heavily to allow councils to come in for historic preservation or health and safety required owner occupancy. And in the end I voted for it. And that's what Mark Stone cast the exact same votes. And yet each one got through the Senate with 28 yes votes. So two thirds of the Senators voted for either of those bills. And I have found that that's been a major concern going to every city council that I have addressed since we have been in the break. With that, I was trying to do as brief a presentation as I could and talk about the budget and the bills and the biggest issues this year. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have on anything that was in the legislative session or you want to see in the next legislative session. Thanks, John, and thank you. You've been traveling. I know where you've got a big district. So thank you for making the time and I hope council members might have some questions for John and please signal to me if you've got any questions right now. Sandy, go ahead. Thank you for being here earlier. I appreciate your interest in focusing on resources from the state for affordable housing. And you've heard and have referenced the concerns that are coming out of local jurisdictions related to in this year, the two Senate bills. But there have been others over the past few years that have put us in a position of kind of losing some of our local authority about what we approve and under what conditions. And one of the concerns that I've had with those bills is that because of the way that our city had previously established inclusionary or an inclusionary ordinance and kind of had a framework for getting a certain number of units in those development projects in market rate units, low income units and or in Luffy's or alternative support for affordable housing, that these bills are actually causing a reduction in the percentage of the overall units that are coming out of those new projects that will be affordable, right? The fact that developers are allowed to what I would consider double dip and use the local inclusionary requirements to fulfill their commitment for an entire project, often with 50% more units. So I'm just wondering if in your conversations around affordable housing resources, if that is in the mix in terms of how it would work with market rate development projects or if that is something that would be more left to local jurisdictions and we can apply for competitive grants the way we do with the pots of money that are currently available. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on how we deal with that because wanting to use this legislation to actually induce additional affordable housing is the goal and we just haven't seemed to find a way to do that given the way the legislation has been adopted and operationalized. I'm in general where you are and when SB 10 first came up this year on the floor of the Senate I stood up and said there's sort of this theory behind it that if we build more housing that over time will lower housing prices and create affordability. And if we are really 3 million units short in California and we're building at the rate of 200 or 250,000 a year that's not going to happen in the lifetime of a lot of us and the issue of affordability is now. So I actually said I was going to be hesitant to vote for anything like this in the future unless there was a measure of affordability with it. And the issue that you started out with was one that I got into some trouble for. One of the rare issues I got into trouble for when I was campaigning for the Senate because I thought it should be up to local jurisdictions to decide whether the inclusionary for the affordable requirements were additive to the existing requirements. And you know I had the misfortune of being sitting where you were are now after the earthquake and when the St. George was rebuilt the developer approached us and said he wanted to do. I think the initial proposal was 24% affordable housing and we said that wasn't enough and we pushed and pushed. I think we got to 45% before it was done because that's what we should be doing. And yet at the time there were federal streams of money that don't exist in the same form that allowed that developer to go and fill in behind and get to the 55%. Now we have state streams of money that might say okay you have this and it doesn't seem fair to accept the state stream of money and you're supposed to provide a certain amount of affordable housing but you provide it totally under local ordinances before that money arrives. And so there's got to be a way to see if there can't be some flexibility for councils like you to leverage as much affordable housing as possible when that happens. And Morgan Hill is in the senate district and the one bill that I think is going to be in front of you later today. Invalidated their voter approved growth management and they're providing a little more housing as a result and less affordable housing within it. I have gotten the director of the housing and community development department involved with the city of Morgan Hill to see if they can figure out a way that they're not being disadvantaged by these state laws. And it will be a real issue going forward. I just don't see doing an additional thing like that. I don't see voting to overrode like local zoning in the rest of the time I'm in the senate. However long that is but I really think that no matter what you do there has to be a measure of affordability that comes with everything you do. Thank you. Thank you Senator Laird for being here today and for allowing us this opportunity to ask you questions. As the city's representative on handbag one of the things we've been discussing is the methodology around Rena numbers. And one of the things that's kind of come to surface is when cities are unable to meet their goals around very low and low. For example SB 35 allows for certain housing projects to come in and you know not go to the planning commission or the city council. You know there's the option that staff can provide ministerial approval on those projects and we're dealing we're going to be discussing one of those today. One of the questions I had was is there and there's been some rumors floating around that maybe redevelopment is coming back maybe. Or there might be some form of funding. I was wondering if there's any discussions around providing cities with fundings to reduce affordable housing because I feel like when we're setting these goals around Rena and housing production. If cities don't have money to actually support the production of affordable housing then we're kind of left with not many options. We're going to have things like SB 35 come in and it further takes away from local control. So I'm just wondering if there's any discussions around allocating funding to cities to help support the production. Well I believe as I sort of said earlier that I would love to see direct allocations from the monies available for affordable housing. But one of the largest revenue streams to cities for affordable housing was redevelopment before it was ended. And I support a limited revival of redevelopment solely for the purpose of affordable housing. There was a bill by Senator Bell that attempted to do this a couple of years ago and it was vetoed by the governor. And so the question is whether we can figure out that there's a way to bring administration along. But one way or another we it's not enough to just say do this and there's no tools to do it. And so that's the challenge and I don't know if anybody's going to reintroduce that bill. I don't know if the governor has moved in any way but it's like somehow money has to come to local jurisdictions to help them. And the RENA process we just authorized on the audit committee an audit of the last RENA numbers to see how it worked how transparent it is. And that hopefully will be out before the process begins. But one of the last RENA processes I was in the assembly and I was a representative from this council to Ambed and was president of Ambed when I was on the city council. But when I was in the assembly the Ambed decided Santa Cruz would get half the housing units and Monterey would get the other half even though the population was distributed something like 60-40. And as a result under measure O and measure J there weren't enough units to accommodate what was assigned by Ambed and for a number of years there was no county housing element. They couldn't approve one and the county went without it for a number of years and so one of the threshold issues would be how Ambed divides the number of units between each locality and gets there. Completely separate from the issue you're asking about and everybody else is whether there's some funding stream from the state that will help you with the affordable part of it. One other thing as I was with the director of housing and community development and the secretary visiting farm labor camps. And they have considered possibly looping in university housing units because right now the RENA numbers do not take into account dorm rooms. And so the fact that there's 5,000 dorm rooms up there is an integral part of what the city does. And if they're building hundreds of new dorm rooms even though that's not going to satisfy everything we need it's going to be progress but it doesn't count in the whole RENA system. And that's something that I've encouraged them to think about. The problem is that if they do then UC has to provide a measure of those units to be affordable. And I spoke to the board of regents last week and have spoken to the president and at least the president know that when we have that housing fund that is there $2 billion in this budget to have higher education with housing that if RENA required dorm rooms to be in it and some measure of affordability that that state money could be used to help them with the affordability. More than you asked for. Any other questions? Thank you so much Senator Laird for being here. And thank you for your advocacy, the work that you've done to address the homelessness issue here in Santa Cruz. I wonder if you could touch on as you know a lot of our street homelessness has been impacted by behavioral health issues. I wonder if you can touch on the efforts at the state level to address behavioral health and how that would kind of funnel into our local community. Well for the first time I think in the last budget thing we were trying to make behavior health be a part of a lot of different things. I mean for the first time some grants to higher education to deal with it as part of homelessness. And my experience because I had the misfortune of being mayor at the time of sort of the modern homeless movement. People were arrested standing where I'm standing right now for a number of months when I was mayor. And we really did the first River Street shelter and some of the other things at the time. And it just seemed like it was such a confluence of so many different things. Of economics, of substance abuse, of mental health issues. And with every person it might just be one of them, it might be a dual diagnosis. And so you have to bring all these resources to each of those different issues to truly impact it. In addition to the housing that we were talking about earlier. So we have put some money to it this year. But the question is how does that go? How does it work? I am confident that we're going to hear it wasn't anywhere near enough to begin to address it. And I think it's going to be important to get that feedback so that if we have extra money we can continue down the path. John, I just was curious about you mentioned climate policy, future climate policy coming out. And just sort of what are those areas of policy that the state is still looking to sort of accomplish? Well, the problem is that climate change is preceding a pace. So while we need to do things on the emissions side that are dramatic, which is electrification, battery storage, many things that are away from fossil fuels. It's too late to stop some of the impact. So now we have these wild swings in precipitation. So trying to figure out about water. And I worked with your interim city manager when she was water director. And we have a package in there that I hope to get accelerated out of next year to try to deal with certain issues. Fire is another one. That is a big one. We passed a bill on ocean collaboratives regionally to start to on a regional basis address sea level rise and what the impacts are going to be and start to understand where we're going to have to guide resources. Because it's already evident in the North San Francisco Bay area with Highway 37 and highways along Marin County and certain places. And so while on the policy level, it's electrification and reducing emissions. It's also on the mitigation and the adaptation. That even if we did outstanding things to limit emissions starting today, we're still going to have to do. Still have those issues. As we know with the fire burden, you know, close to the city limits and the reservoir being laid down and other things. We're feeling the impacts of those. Yeah, I definitely appreciate that. And I think, you know, the one thing that's really sort of hit home with the climate change with at least neighborhoods and community people is is that fire fire safety and preparedness. You know, and so that I think we have four fire wise groups now in the city. And I think there's two more, you know, that are coming online. So which is a good thing to have neighborhoods really not only thinking about how to reduce vegetation and other issues like that, but that also to actually plan for evacuating together. You know, and knowing who lives alone and who has animals and all the things that go around with go along with fire wise neighborhood. And I know that's one thing I get a lot of communications about from neighborhoods is, you know, can the city help us do this? Does the city have any resources? So as you're thinking through, you know, I know that the there's money that comes through the county and I think it also goes to the fire safe council. But I don't know if there's, you know, and I know we've gotten we've gotten a grant recently, but that kind of neighborhood input is really important. Just not not just for the physical sort of needs for, you know, getting their neighborhood more fire safe, but also just that collective effort of having a good, you know, communication system. You know, being able to understand who has what in their house, you know, who's cat needs to get picked up all of those things that we've learned from other neighborhoods who have had catastrophic fires that, you know, those things just didn't get talked about. So any resources that, you know, could be used. There were, you know, I asked in the budget process, I was given one of the first questions because of schools, but I stepped out of line and asked how much of the fire money was going to be available locally to people, not to state agents. Right. And it was going to be over four fifths of it. And so we're trying to test to make sure that that happened. Okay. Okay. I was resources secretary at the time of the paradise fire. And it's hard to believe that they had a complete evacuation drill four or five years before in paradise. And they thought a fire would move in a way that they could evacuate by sectors. And so they had this complete drill citywide. They knew they were in a high hazard area. And yet when the fire came, it was burning at the rate of 60 acres a minute. It crossed the entire city in 60 minutes. And it, all their planning didn't anticipate that. And so that's the tough thing is you would think even in a, I never thought I would have to pack and be ready to go in a temperate climate along the coast. And we were the summer before. And I could only think of that, that a big wind comes in and it's really hazardous. This isn't a gradual thing. And so in the planning, you have to take that into account. It's awful because you don't want to overly scare people if you want a realistic view of what could happen and how people need to be ready. And the things you just said, you know, whether it's defensible space, having a plan, knowing where you'd meet people, having the basics, knowing what you need to do right away. All those things are real. And people need to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I appreciate, yeah. And I think that local, that local, you know, hopefully that will sift down to the locals and, you know, we can continue to have these neighborhoods be really proactive, which is great, I think. Any other questions for Senator Laird? Hi. Thank you so much for coming and thank you for allocating and helping allocate all that additional funding to schools. It's greatly appreciated. A question that keeps coming to me from people around town is in regards to street drugs and crime and things like that that are just really impacting members of the community. And as a parent of two teenagers, something that's super terrifying is the fentanyl that's out there. And there was an unfortunate incident that happened two weeks ago where a young high school student died. And just recently in the county. And so it's just like, is there any talk about how we can address this as a state, this epidemic? Well, frankly, there's plenty of talk. The question is, is how to translate it into real meaningful action. And it's on so many different levels. It's on prevention. It's on treatment. It's on saving people's lives in the moment. It's all those things. And we're prepared to really support it from our level. And I know that I keep reading about San Francisco where they're agitating for a public health emergency to be declared. And it's, I like to tell the story that when I was in the assembly, a friend of mine was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And I see him on TV when he's elected. And he says, the number one issue in my district is meth. And so when I saw him the next time I said, you know, when I was elected to the Santa Cruz City Council, it was potholes. It was traffic. It was all these neighborhood issues. How did you get to that? And he said, when I went door to door, that was the number one issue that people raised. And so in these breaks, I'll meet with the health director and the social services director and the sheriff. And I was meeting with them all and I said, do we have a meth problem? And it was like the number one cofactor for admissions to the jail. And it was the number one cofactor for calls to child protective services. And it was overwhelming certain treatment. And it was like, when were you going to tell me because we went back and did things in the legislature to try to help. Locals hope. And I believe that we need to do that now. And there was lots of discussion about it. And there were appropriations made this year. But I think they're out of proportion to the scale of the issue. And we're going to have to go back and make sure we get there. And I'm feeling it from different parts around the district. Thanks for bringing it on. Thanks, Senator. Any other questions? Okay. Well, thank you so much, Senator. Again, thank you for all your work this year. You've made a huge impact in the city already first year out of the gate. So we're just so thankful. And we learn from you every day. So thanks so much. Thank you. I commonly say, I know I don't have to ask you to stay in touch. So I look forward to continuing to hear from you. Thanks for having me here today. You bet. Thanks so much, John. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, really quick. We deterred some feedback. If council members can make sure to speak close to the mics and loud, the face coverings are kind of blocking some sound. And then anytime somebody come to the podium. I'll make that announcement. Have them get really close and speak up. Okay. Okay. I have a few announcements. And then we will move on to our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsantacruz.com. Our rules of decorum are on the window ledge to my left. It's my job to keep the meeting running without disruption. And we ask that you respect your fellow citizens when you are inside or outside of our chambers. Please note, if you attend the council meeting in person, face coverings are required to be worn throughout the meeting. You will be directed to enter only through the main entrance and exit through the side door. Upon entering, please check your temperature at the digital thermometer at the door. I ask that you are mindful and maintain at least three feet distance from others around you. For the consideration of our community, please stay home if you have any symptoms of cold or flu, or are feeling unwell in any way. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be open for public comment today during today's meeting, excuse me, are numbers nine through 21 on your agenda. I'd like to ask the council members if there are any statements of disqualification for today. Seeing none, I would now like to ask the city clerk to announce any additions or deletions to our agenda today. There are none. Great. I want to make an announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda item number 21 today. If you are participating virtually and wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in towards the end of item 21. I'd like to call on the city attorney to provide a report on close, on the closed session, please. Yes, good afternoon, Mayor Myers, members of the city council. This morning, the city council met in closed session at 10 a.m. virtually via zoom to discuss the following matters. Item one was a conference with labor negotiators involving the following employee organizations, FIRE IAF local 1716, fire management, OE-3 mid managers and supervisors, SEIU local 521 and unrepresented employees, a city council met with its negotiator, chief personnel director Lisa Murphy and gave instructions. Item two was a conference with legal council involving anticipated litigation. The council consulted with the city attorney's office regarding potential initiation of litigation. Item three was a conference with legal council also involving anticipated litigation. The council received a report on one item of significant exposure to litigation. There was no reportable action. Thank you, Mr. Kandadi. We'll move on to item number six, our city manager report, and I'll ask our interim city manager, Rosemary Minnard, to make that. Thank you. Good afternoon, mayor, council. Today, I'm just going to give you some brief report. Actually, staff are going to provide a brief report on some business-related issues. First is on the hygiene bay at the housing matters campus, and for that, we will have Ho Yee, who is the project manager from our public works department to give you a brief update. And I hope she's online. I do see Ho, yeah. Hello there. Good afternoon, mayor Meyers and members of the council. So the hygiene bay remodel project is located at the housing matters homeless shelter day service building at 115 call street. The remodel area consists of two floors. The ground floor work will include some demolition work for the installation of new walls, moisture barriers, doors, partitions, and fixtures to accommodate six showers, four toilets, one urinal, and eight sinks in the shower and toilet area. A new boiler, hot water expansion tank, and hot water pump will be installed in the existing mechanical room. A new reception desk, cabinets, and tall blockers will also be installed in the new reception area at the entryway. New electrical work includes new lighting, power supplies for the new boiler, hot water pump, and bottle filling station. USB outlets for the lockers and reception area, faucet sensors, and a new electrical panel. The new HVAC work will include new ducts and exhaust fans installation. Two storage rooms on the second floor will be renovated into mechanical rooms to accommodate new HVAC systems and controls. So the project plans and technical specs already and a building permit has been issued. Once the funding source is secured, the front-end specifications can be completed and the project can be brought to the city council floor. Great. Thank you. Questions? Are there questions about the hygiene? I had a hard time hearing and standing everything, so I can certainly get a report later. All right. We can provide a little written summary. I know that we have one of those. So we'll provide that in writing. I have one quick question on that one, Rosemary. So my understanding was we had about a half a million dollars that was, I believe, designated towards that. Sounds like probably the bid probably came in higher than that. And so do we have to close that gap when Ho mentioned the funding and would that come back to the council in terms of before that bid was accepted and a contract set up? Yes. Okay. Yes, so there will be a formalized action that council will take to authorize the issuance of the bid and then it will operate under a sort of standard public works construction project, which will allow you to take the low bid that's in the responsive, responsible bidder. The, it may be that we'll only get one bid, but under that process, the sort of standard construction project, if we only get one bid, that's fine. So we're working now to sort of finalize the bid documents and have identified sort of an interim funding source. We like that word interim these days. So the idea is to bring you back a budget amendment that would, a budget adjustment that would allow us to use some of the ARPA funds that would give us some money to work with on a variety of different actions and then to do the work that we're planning to do with the county on the 14 million and then sort of, you know, balance things up after we get down with that process. So I'm hoping that will come to you next weeks or at the meeting on the 14th. So we need to move that along. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for talking to folks over at Housing Matters and they're excited to get rolling on that. Super important. So thank you for making that happen. Questions? Other questions on that one? Okay. Okay. So our housing, our homelessness response manager, Larry Amale is going to give you update on some contracting and also some news on what the current plan is with 1220 River Street. Larry, before you start, we're just learning how to do a lot of things. We're just going to start with the first one. And then we're going to start with the second one. It's going to be a little bit of a surprise hearing for our public that may be watching. If you could speak pretty loud in your also through your computer, because I think what's happening is just the room is not projecting very well. So it's very muffled. So, okay. I will work on my volume. Perfect. That's much better. And Larry, if you're in your office with the door closed, I'm going to start with the second one. Okay. Nice to hear from you. So, All right. Good afternoon. Mayor Myers and members of the council. I'm here to provide two, as Rosemary mentioned, two quick updates regarding efforts that we're moving forward to expand the shelter capacity for unhoused persons in the city. That was part of the direction of council in relation to the campaign and standard services ordinance approved in June. So the first is that staff is in the process of providing the shelter capacity for unhoused persons in the city. So we are currently in the central community camp at 1220 river. This location has been used previously as a managed campsite by the city. The model that we're pursuing this time is a bit different. And that all members of the camp will be vetted for their ability and willingness to comply with the set of agreements and ensure that the safe and healthy functioning of the camp. That's the agreement part of the transition camp. And that's the agreement part of the plan. And that's the agreement part of the plan. And that agreement is about half the number compared to the previous program that was established at 1220 river. And with this model, city staff will provide daily oversight and will also be providing case management and connection services. Presently, we're in the process of acquiring the requisite infrastructure to establish the camp, meaning tents, hygiene and sanitation services, refuse services infrastructure for cooking kitchen. That's the process being acquired. We're also the process of developing the initial code of conduct for the camp, the agreement principles, as well as potential camp participants are being identified by the city staff that is the stewards in the benchlands. And we've also started outreach to the community around 1220 river, both residents and businesses to inform them what our plans are in establishing this camp in that neighborhood. And our goal is to have this camp operational in the next few weeks. The second effort to expand shelter capacity is the establishment of a 24-7 program at the Armory Building on the south lawn to be operated by the Salvation Army. And the plans here is to establish a 75-bed shelter that will be 24-7. And we'll provide transportation to and from the site for participants and there will also be storage for their belongings on site. As part of the 75 beds will have 10 spots reserved for overnight and or emergency shelter. In addition to this, the 24-7 for the majority of the program. Staff has been meeting with the Salvation Army and has developed a scope of services and budgets. We're finalizing the draft contract that we plan to submit to the Salvation Army for review tomorrow. And we're expecting turnaround from their review in about three weeks. So our goal is to bring the contract to council for approval at the December 14th meeting. And those are my updates. Great job on the volume. Questions? Have a question. Justin? Go ahead. I'll go Justin and then Chevra. Sorry, I got to get used to it. I'm like looking on Zoom. Yeah. Justin and then Chevra. Thank you for that presentation, Larry. I had a couple of questions. I was wondering if you could just explain why the number of beds that were previously occupied were about, it looks like 70 at 1220 River Street, the rationale and why are we kind of cutting that number in half knowing that we need to try to maximize the number of beds. We've done it and it's been successful there before. Yeah. I think the answer is in looking at our overall planning and expanding the shelter capacity, which we detailed in more detail with the informational memo that was distributed at the November 9th meeting. But this strategy is a different model of encampment that it's not just aimed at trying to maximize our capacity, but really working towards outcomes and connections to permanent housing. And the best practices indicate that smaller encampment, smaller camps are going to yield better outcomes. And so what we're trying to balance here is expanding shelter capacity, but doing so in a way that is intentional and is hopefully going to improve outcomes towards permanent housing. So this first effort is this model is a smaller number, less concentration, but we're also proposing down the line to have a second transition on encampment. Can I just add one comment to that, which I think is one of the strategies of a little bit smaller is that you get to create a stronger, more functional community. And that also seems to be an element of better success. Yeah. And I think that makes sense and has worked on a number of different scenarios. So I appreciate that explanation for the community. And I just had one more question and a comment. Because around the code of conduct, I'm just curious like what type of outreach process that is in terms of like our providers being consulted, our people from the homeless community being consulted, because that's been something that's come up before in conversation is, you know, if we're going to have codes of conduct and the people who are going to be staying in these camps may need to have some ability to provide input on what is a good code of conduct. And also working with the residents once they've had to kind of, you know, further formalize that code of conduct. So I'm just wondering if you can speak to that at all. Yes, that is part of the model, right? That there's a basic code of conduct. But part of the process is again, you know, it's they're establishing and creating this community. So there'll be agreements that they help develop as well. Again, part of it too is, you know, requirements around volunteering, attending regular camp meetings, establishing, you know, their individual goals towards stability, working with the case coordination from city staff. So that is part of the process and playing that active role and creating their community there. Great. Thank you. And then the last comment I had was a member of the public had reached out to me earlier this year. And one of the things that came up is that they'd mentioned that in the Salvation Army contract, there currently is no unemployment insurance. And they were saying that that's really critical to include in that contract so that if people get laid off or what have you that they can there's unemployment that they can then turn to as far as resources for them to live off of. So I think it would be important that we before that contract comes to us that it be reviewed and if there is no unemployment insurance that we try to include that in the contract as well with the workers. Thank you. Those are all my comments. Thanks, Council Member. And then I'm going to get Council Member Boulder and then Council Member Brown. All right. I'm going to try to speak more clearly. Is that better? Okay. Thank you for the presentation, Larry. And for all the work you've just kind of jumped in right to the cold end of the poll. I had a couple of questions. Let me look at my notes. So what do we have smart path assessors at these transitional encampments and at the Armory? And how are we tracking our efforts to connect folks to a pathway of housing? So that's my first question. Yeah. So the plan that we have for Salvation Armory, Salvation Army operating the Armory built into the scope is requiring entry of information to the HMS system that works at the county and that the various service providers are also connected to. So the intent here is to make sure that we're tracking and documenting doing those assessments and in fact making sure that the smart path assessment is done within 30 days is one of the things that we're looking at in terms of the reporting requirements assisted with this contract. So that is built in there as well. For the connection we're generally looking at the transitional camps, we'll have the city staff who are providing oversight and that coordination will be working to make those connections to service providers as well. Okay, great. That was sort of the second part of my question is how are we linking to county staff and service providers because of the scope and the need is probably much broader than what we can provide with city staff. So is there, so I guess is there, do we have a mechanism by which that we'll do that? Yeah, that is presently the work that city staff, the stewards are doing in Benchland is already establishing those connections as part of their work and so that will be the staff that is also working with the transitional camp. So the plan is to continue that practice of connecting to services whether it be HPHP or whatever the service provider and what the needs are of the residents of those encampments. So case management is part of this process, articulating goals and then working to connect them to those services. Great, and I hope that in future reports when we've done the work for some months we'll be able to kind of bring that dashboard back of the progress we've made. Thank you so much for the work. Councilmember Golder. I just wanted to say thank you to Larry for moving so quickly it's very impressive to see as some of the COVID shelters are being closed down that you already have plans to get I was estimating 110 beds up and running and so that's only about 40 short of what our goal is and so I just wanted to say thank you for that. My one question is in regards to having those beds turn over is there a length of time or is it case by case or what's the thought around long-term or short-term situations for people? Yeah, the hope and the goal is to really kind of create turnover, if you will, a positive turnover in terms of what the length of stay is so that the idea with all this is to try to create pathways and pipelines towards permanent housing so explicitly with the transitional camp what we're proposing up front and this is the first time we've done this model but as part of the case planning to have an initial six month period and then to have a formal process to extend three months and another three months as needed and to contingent upon how the case plan is being worked so we're looking at this as well as the armory of trying to create that positive turnover, if you will through this process rather than simply just being a shelter with no trajectory towards housing. Thank you so much. And Council Member Brown and then Vice Mayor Bruner also has a question there. Thank you for the update. Most of my questions have been answered for now. I have a question though about given that these two locations are require folks to be shuttled in and out, from my understanding that's the way they've been operated in the past and so the hours of entry and exit can be restrictive for folks who have schedules for work shifts, appointments, etc. And I know that this has been handled sort of on a case-by-case basis in the recent past and I want to appreciate Megan Bunch from the City Manager's Office for really helping to try to manage those and so I'm wondering if you have plans for how that might be handled kind of on a more institutional level with the sites. Connected to that in the touring of the shelters that I did during COVID and it was great to see all of this capacity that emerged and we had the opportunity to really make a difference and give people some a little stability during that time. The Salvation Army staff were having serious issues with their ability to provide transportation because of their vehicles or lack of operational vehicles let's say so I'm just wondering if that's part of the conversation with potential contractors and also what the city might do to help facilitate that. Yes, thank you for that question. As part of our conversations and developing the scope of services and budget with the Salvation Army we've been discussing about augmenting the transportation. We're actually working on two tracks. The county still has transportation service that they're providing up into the Armory and back. One approach would be to try to augment that and add another vehicle, additional drivers but not knowing whether that's possible we've also engaged in conversations with Salvation Army to see if they can operate that program and they've indicated a willingness to do that and provided a staffing model and a budget to be able to support that. So we're working on making sure that transportation is available and fully accessible as part of this effort. With respect to the New Camp at 1220 River as mentioned it's a different model it's a much smaller encampment and the approach here is that the residents of the encampment are going to be able to come and go as they please. So transportation has not been factored into the operation of that camp. Thank you. Thanks Mayor Brunner. Thank you. My question was regarding both locations and the levels of entry that were needed so I think I understand somewhat from your earlier responses with 1220 River Street to a smaller size and a kind of open come and go with no restrictions is this how are how are people prioritized I'm just curious is that through city staff? Yeah so for 1220 River and for this model where as mentioned we'll be vetting potential participants so that is city staff that are having conversations with persons that are in the existing encampments to see engage their interests and ability to work under that set of agreement principles so that is the process we're identifying potential candidates right now to be part of that first transitional community camp so that'll be the mechanism for that so we'll tend to be if you will higher functioning more ready to be able to connect to services. Thank you and the city staff is that the outreach workers that are working okay I was just curious how are we responding to families with children and are we connecting them to the family shelter housing matters are we connecting them with county efforts to house families so what are we doing when we come across families with children yeah I was just curious Chris and Jeremy how are we connecting families with children yeah I can't speak to a specific case but generally again it's the work of our our outreach workers is to understand the needs of each of the members in the encampment and determine what the best what the best effort placement is and what the right step is to connect them to services that they need in the case it would be trying to find an appropriate family shelter when possible and assessing where their needs are at and what an appropriate placement is. Thank you councilmember Cummings. One follow-up question regarding the locations where people would be able to come and go I don't know if I'd caught this correctly is that going to be at the armory or just 12-20 or both? Just 12-20 transportation to and from the armory. Great well I think that does it on the comments yeah I would just like to thank you Larry for jumping in so quickly also thank Lee, Megan, Jeremy, Chris your whole team we actually have an actual department team now which is wonderful and just really good news and thank you for your efforts to sort of you know move us to a level where hopefully people are getting the services and our get starting to get into the system and then also hopefully we can see as councilmember Coulentary Johnson mentioned you know some of the hopefully some of the data that shows you know beyond just having people sleep at night what are the other things that hopefully we can get going so that people might be able to find their way you know into just some success around housing and other important needs and medical care and things like that so thanks for moving so quickly appreciate it anything else I just have one one additional item which should be obvious which is that the there are new indoor masking requirements by the health officer and she has established this requirement and there is no end date or triage pointed in the future because I think we're all sort of wondering what's going to happen next and this seems like it's a way for us to minimize the risk to the extent we can so this indoor masking requirement there you go I don't remember what the thing said but we determined we changed the location of the 30th to virtual only I don't remember if the calendar said hybrid or not but as far as I know that's the only difference so for members of the public the notice meeting for November 30th will be a virtual meeting not a hybrid meeting okay I will now go to item number 8 which is the council member opportunity to report on actions at external boards committees and joint powers authorities meetings for future meetings please come prepared to provide on any meetings and actions that occurred since the last council meeting so the council and public can be informed so I will just I'm going to start down on my left here and just go all the way through and start with council member coming thank you mayor I'll start I did want to highlight one thing which is I noticed that I know that we had changed the opposition of the revenue committee and so I think that would be good to have that updated on the the membership of groups just want to put that out there to start there's still been a lot of discussion around arena methodology and based on public input that came before that meeting it sounds like we didn't adopt our local or regional methodology at this meeting and they're going to come back likely at a special meeting in December so that we can formalize that and I do believe that we're going to be having a special study session on arena the city so that'll be great for us and is that the meeting on the 30th? right so yeah so for members of the public we will be having a special meeting on arena numbers on November 30th and it'll be great to get people to come so that they can learn more about that process and so that can help inform you know it'll help for me to understand what the community is at when going back to AMBAG for that special meeting when we finalize our methodology LAFCO there were 6 parcels that were annexed totaling 4 acres into county service area 10 we passed a similar resolution to the city council to continue with remote meetings or hybrid meetings in accordance with AB 361 and I think the most important action that came out of that meeting was that for years the LAFCO has been using county council as their legal council and at that meeting we decided to move forward and approve two contract agreements to hire Bess Bess and Krieger as LAFCO's legal council and Halon Tuono, High Smith and Wally as LAFCO's special legal council the reason why we moved in that direction especially knowing that there are a lot of potentials for LAFCO to weigh in on legal actions around land use within our community we thought that it was really important that we have legal council that specializes in LAFCO rather than just having general legal council and so the two groups that we have hired our specialist on LAFCO specific law and so that will really help us especially if we end up in any legal battles around LAFCO and land use the climate action task force is still working towards its 2030 climate action plan I know that many members of the city council had an opportunity to meet with Tiffany Wiseweiss to get an update on that during that meeting we discussed a lot of the statewide greenhouse gas mission forecasts and targets and had a discussion around where we should be in terms of how we want to address climate action and what our goals should be we really had a discussion around whether we should tally a bold, hard approach to trying to reach these emissions more quickly we take a more kind of loose approach at setting our goals pretty low with the objective of trying to go beyond them and so that discussion is still ongoing and we'll likely come back to this at our next meeting in terms of where we want to set our goals for our group on goal setting lastly I'm not the representative of the criminal justice council but I did attend the meeting and one of the goals for this year was to evaluate and assess and I should preface this in the response to the murder of George Floyd a lot of local agencies and municipalities began reviewing laws around use of force and accountability and earlier in the year Chairman Friend of the criminal justice council agreed to work with all the agencies to see where there was alignment in our policies and where when there was an alignment just to try to indicate why there's not alignment and then to create this report and bring it back to all the agencies Chairman Friend on this effort and at the last meeting the criminal justice council unanimously approved the report and there was a recommendation that this report go back to each of the cities so that they can have their councils get an update on that and review the various policies that are in place and that are not so that councils can provide any further direction on whether or not they want to adopt certain policies or if they want to leave the policies as they currently are and so that concludes my report thank you I attended the downtown management corporation meeting on November 18th with Vice Mayor Bruder and Mayor Myers and I'll just briefly highlight that they're gearing up for downtown holiday shopping and starting with an increased CSO presence starting December 21st and they were excited police departments excited to announce there's 10 officers in training and we'll hopefully be hitting the streets soon there was a number of notable events that happened in the last month downtown including some fairs a roller skating party restaurant week and Halloween working together they created a safety plan to ensure that during the first in person Halloween celebration I don't I guess last year I guess just last year but either way it was a successful month and people are really excited to get out and start their holiday shopping locally great Vice Mayor let's see the last visit Santa Cruz board was the meeting time was changed to the same time and date as one of our council meetings so council member Watkins and myself were unable to attend that board meeting I did attend the council ad hoc revenue committee meeting we had a financial status update and kind of caught up on the background dates and timing of ballot measures and looking at reviewing different types of taxes and revenue sources and items and going through a whole spreadsheet and just kind of an overview and also looking at other cities and county and potential solutions to the city's recurring revenue needs and we will be meeting weekly with that committee let's see I am an alternate on the area agency on aging and there was a two hour onboarding for new members that didn't happen when I first joined so it was great to attend it this time and there was a lot of good information from the history of the organization to a lot of facts regarding seniors and the fact that the 60 plus population has grown by over 40% since 2010 in California and Santa Cruz County the 60 plus population has increased by more than 58% since 2010 and the over 60 Medi-Cal eligible population grew 92% since 2010 and we talked about senior services funding cost of long-term care different topics such as senior loneliness and isolation seniors in COVID-19 and homeless seniors there are twice as many homeless people over the age of 50 as there are under the age of 25 and in the 55 plus population homelessness is identified as a trigger for mental health issues so we also talked about the state role and the seniors council and basically the overall service support and advocacy role of this agency and then I will pass it on thank you I will report out on a couple of committees that I am on one being the I just want to make clear for the public there was a shift in the revenue committee membership it's now myself Vice Mayor Bruner and Council Member Watkins and we will be working moving forward on the I also attended this month's this quarter's city select committee which is a committee comprised of all the mayors in the county along with county staff that meeting was last week and we received a full update on COVID-19 and the current surge as well as the mask mandate that went into effect in starting this Monday and got a sense from the county's dashboard on where things are going some good results and news throughout the county a very good update in boosters shots shown and also people seem to be able to get to the booster shots pretty easily there's various ways to get there but you can either go through the appointment but there are some drop in places as well that people are getting out and getting their boosters now which is great still slow on getting vaccines to the 20 to 29 year old group don't seem to see a lot of uptake there and so that's a place to work more intentionally the city actually you know due to also advanced testing with schools and things we are seeing you know some cases in number one now in terms of the number of cases in the city so again some of that is because of the more advanced because of the more regular testing that people are doing but also we still have some you know some age groups that need to you know hopefully get in and feel like they can contribute and get in and get their vaccinations under way so the other thing at the city select committee at the Ontario college it is a fellows program fashioned to recruit young people into government jobs and roles and it's being sponsored by a number of retired city managers CAOs other different government leaders and the program will place fellows in various government institutions but government is one of those places that are hit right now on terms of people's goals in life for you know various reasons over the last few years as we've seen but there is a real effort it sounds like a really neat program that started at Cabrio and definitely worth checking out and they are asking for support from each of the local governments if possible to contribute to the fellows program so that there is some sustainability to student availability I also serve on the Homeless 2x2 committee and I think I went to my last meeting just a couple weeks ago we continue to make progress some of what Mr. Mwally really presented today really shows the hard work of the 2x2 I think over the last year concurrent with the city passing the two ordinances that we passed also in a lot of deep conversation and also really working with the county to bring resources for the safe sleeping sites and continuing to outreach to get the outreach, case management all of those services so as we were doing our own policy work we were certainly the mayor myself and the vice mayor we were there at the table with the 2x2 and with our elected colleagues as well as the county leadership staff and with our city manager both retired and also interim city manager really just trying to craft a plan a plan with the county plan of action plan of trying to make sure people don't fall back after getting out of the COVID hotel, out of the hotels but also more importantly really kind of developing a system based approach to all of this so we've had I think some successful meetings we've had some hard meetings but I think we're in a very functional situation with the county now and we learn a lot from them and they learn a lot from us it's always a spirited meeting for sure let's see central cross energy policy board our next meeting just for the public is December 15th from 9 to noon and I'm just scanning through here maybe council member commentary John Cee and I'll have you do the metro update and I think that will be it on my the cows working group is also still meeting focus obviously will be for next summer we're doing some work with Stanford University to look at some additional studies in the area of cows and hopefully we can bring more information to that about that to to council in the community at some point in time save the way it still continues to facilitate that group and has brought in a number of resources including the oceanographic study through Stanford University and our own water quality laboratory is key to really identifying additional work that needs to be done to really make sure that we can keep cows off the beach bummer list and that is the kinds of things I've been doing council member brown thank you it's been a relatively quiet month with external agencies on which I sit thank you vice mayor Bruner for the update on the orientation I wasn't there as a member that's been on that body for the past five years I didn't make it but I'm glad to hear that you got oriented and hope you'll have opportunities to join us or join the group when I'm not able to be there I have just a little bit on the regional transportation commission and transportation funding in particular so we have been as we track the funding that's coming through a variety of revenue streams we things are looking good or better than perhaps anticipated and so our transportation development act funding which is funding through Caltrans so far this fiscal year we've been on track we've exceeded estimated the projections by about 20% you average it out over the months so we are doing all right in that regard although the cost of construction and all of the infrastructure related to both our rail corridor the highway streets and roads obviously those costs are going up but we are in relatively good shape with the funding picture forecasting ahead I was informed that the infrastructure the most recent infrastructure bill which the IIJA and I'm going to forget what it's the infrastructure investment and jobs act does have additional funding for local jurisdictions like ours so we will probably be receiving about 30% more in funding through that particular revenue stream and there is a in that bill and through communications with the federal highway administration it seems clear that active transportation is becoming more and more of a priority and so as a community I think that we are really well positioned to be competitive for some of that funding where there is competitive grant funding because we have a real focus on active transportation so looking forward to accessing additional resources for our local projects both through the RTC and I think the city as well which will be competitive for those grants so I'll leave it there I don't believe any of the other groups that I sit on have met since we spoke since I was updating you all last thank you council member council member call and tarry johnson thank you I'll pick up the transportation thread and give an update on the metro board so Mayor Myers and I who sit on that metro board went to a couple of strategic planning sessions over the last couple of months and I won't go into all the details but a big conversation was the role of metro as we think about climate action and climate response that was sort of the big picture conversation we had let's see there was a report that we have seen increased in ridership mostly due to the university students returning but we are still about 45% below pre-COVID numbers but we're inching our way there we've had a difficult time with hiring bus operators but the good news is that we recently hired eight bus operators to be trained in December and get them in the queue and the big news that we got just last Friday is that our CEO Alex Clifford announced that he will be resigning and taking a position in San Joaquin is that correct so that was the big news so we'll be doing a national search for a new CEO for the metro did I miss anything Mayor Myers on the metro board I think that's those were the highlights yeah I had one more committee so I've been appointed I was appointed last year to the youth action network previously the youth violence prevention task force and they haven't really been meeting because they've been in a year long sort of strategizing and reconfiguring what the purpose of this group is they have really shifted their focus to building youth leadership and building youth capacity to be engaged in the community so they've restructured and they've set their steering committee as a youth body so they've just recruited 13 members from throughout the county I believe there are three youth steering committee members who are from the city of Santa Cruz and these are youth who participate in various youth councils and groups throughout the community focusing on different issues such as childhood obesity youth homelessness climate action and so they've come together in this countywide council they've also reached out to youth who haven't been engaged in this way in their previous years so really a diverse group of youth so 13 members I had the opportunity to meet with them or most of them a couple of weeks ago and as a follow up there was a meeting with the youth action network with a representative from each of the four cities as well as a county representative for us to look at what does it look like to have the youth voice and youth engagement in government decision making so more on that coming great thank you council members for all your updates and also for all the time you put into these other boards and commissions and committees sometimes they take as much time every month as being in council sessions so thank you for spending the time with these other community needs and important items next up we have our consent agenda for today and these are going to be items number 9 through 16 on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items 9 through 16 instructions are on your screen please remember to mute your streaming device press star 9 to raise your hand and listen for the queues saying you have been unmuted all items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion are there any council members who wish to comment on or pull any items today I've got council member Cummings vice mayor Bruner and council member Brown council member Cummings so I have a comment for items number 9 an items number number 14 and then I'd like to pull item number 10 okay vice mayor Bruner I had a question on item number 12 okay council member Brown I was actually interested in item 10 as well so I'll wait for that okay okay great okay let me just put these down okay so we're going to go ahead and move to the items that were either comments or questions on and I'll take item number 9 from council member Cummings you had a comment yeah it's speaking to the teleconference meetings you know now that we've had a new mandate mask mandate that's coming forward kind of saying that we need to wear masks inside I'm wondering if there might be the need to create some kind of policy around whether there are thresholds that that then allow us to go back to virtual meetings versus hybrid versus in person just because we're commenting questions from the public around you know if this meeting is hybrid but then the meeting on the 30th is virtual and then our next city council meeting is hybrid and if we're seeing numbers go up when do we actually go back to just being virtual and so just wanted to put the comment out there that it might be worth this coming up with some kind of policy so that we can have clear guidelines for when we're going to have hybrid versus virtual versus in person okay we'll move on to item number 12 have that policy now and I think it's a good point obviously I don't know if we want to get in the business of making sort of triggers in certain ways but it's worth thinking about so we certainly can do that I don't know Tony do you have anything to add let's see council member coming to you item number 14 yeah I just wanted to thank mayor Myers for putting this item on the agenda this is the opposition to California citizens redistricting commission preliminary redistricting maps and some of the maps that initially that were produced were kind of splitting the Monterey Bay area region in half with regards to our senate representative and then completely excluded the city of Santa Cruz from the Monterey Bay area with regards to congressional our congressman and our assemblymen and so I just wanted to thank the mayor because it was a really quick turnaround on that and it was just and then being able to just ratify that letter today that went to the redistricting committee I think is a great move for us to be able to express our opinions before those maps were adopted and the public comment period was over so I just wanted to thank you for bringing that forward yeah and I want to thank you back because you were watching that and you know you were on top of it and so thanks for bringing that forward and our staff also helped with getting that done so thanks could I add just one thing I heard on a Monterey Bay area managers call last week that a number of people in Monterey County as well as well mostly Monterey County are very unhappy about what's going on with this process elsewhere I heard a story for example which is not a huge place has two zip codes and they were split that's like the community of interest idea that we've been hearing about with respect to setting district lines does not seem to have been paid attention to yeah the other thing I might mention is that I believe the city of Capitola also utilized our letter so they're going to be submitting that as well so that's great yeah okay I'll go ahead and go to councilmember Golder you had a question on item number 12 you I'm sorry Vice Mayor Bruner wrote in the wrong column my question was can you remind me and members of the public the process for applying for advisory body positions Bonnie do you want to do that they just need to submit an application we have it online it's a fillable pdf they can do it online and just email it directly to us and then that is what we put in your binders for the annual appointments and is there a deadline to apply that's like and it's January what yes January 12th thank you the current website has the list of vacancies yes well it has yes it does but yeah I think City of Santa Cruz dot com advisory bodies or I think it's government advisory bodies City of Santa Cruz government advisory bodies thank you and also I would recommend people to look at there's bylaws on each page to kind of get a feel if you're interested in a specific mission to see what they do thank you Bonnie councilmember Cummings you pulled item number 10 excuse me I'm going to take this out to public comment now on the items that were not pulled so I'm going to if there are any members of the public hang on if there Bonnie can you track that now okay if there are any members of the public who wish to comment on items on our consent agenda with the exception of item number 10 which has been pulled now is the time to do so please line up to my left on the designated markers there's no one in the chambers if you're attending virtually please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes and I would go ahead and take comments from zoom callers first and then we would take in person we just for the public there's no one in the chambers with us today Bonnie do we have anybody on zoom we do we do have one yeah hi this is Mr. Phillip here my two points on the item 14 state redistricting map letter questions your main point of opposition that splitting the Monterey coast into two districts lessens political influence of the Monterey Bay region in so far as simple maps as two representatives is more political influence than one assuming there is cooperation additionally the idea of senate district and assembly districts should have the same boundaries is extraordinarily subversive and is an attempt to convert our democratic republic into a pure democracy the senate and assembly have different functions in our democratic republic and they can have different boundaries and that's okay to protect minority representation such as for example small rural communities versus mega populist cities each having disproportionate senate numbers versus population you might want to pull that subversive senate boundary language otherwise and i hope i'm reading it right the proposed map is pretty strange i was splitting districts with one adjacent from aptos all the way down past San Luis Obispo it's not that conspiratorial to suggest redistricting is always always about politicians picking voters i'm pretty sure there are no republican districts within a hundred miles of the bay area although San Luis Obispo does have one so perhaps that split is likely for democratic super majority power grab reason trying to take a republican seat as with all the III type agenda items that come before the council we typically never hear much of the other side as in what are all the reasons for the current proposed map otherwise republicans are not really much of a state factor it's equally likely the redistricting is also occurring as a tug of war between democratic liberals and far left leftist the dsa socialist and the class of communists but which i speculate there are all the above is state reps kind of like to hearsay politics here in San Cruz i'll just wildly speculate that since the council out progresses are the ones supporting the opposition of this split creating inclusion of San Luis Obispo it is because it was potentially less and progressive influence in that district even as the overall state democrats try to take away a republican seat with all well now go on to i'd look for emotion on the remaining items on the on the items that were not pulled on the consent agenda are we doing manual hands i think it's easier for me if we do manual i mean in person real long going on up here crazy it was like bare hands not yellow hands i'll move the items numbers with the i'll move the consent agenda with the exception of item number 10 thank you vice mayor bruner i will second that okay great we have a motion by councilmember coming second and but by vice mayor bruner to move all items on the consent agenda with the exception of item number 10 and can we just we can do the good old fashioned kind right on favor or do we have to go roll no i'll what to do roll call we should do roll call okay can we have a roll call though councilmember Watkins is absent is absent calentary johnson i brown i Cummings boulder vice mayor bruner i and mayor mayors i that motion passes unanimously we'll now come back to item number 10 which was pulled by councilmember Cummings thank you mayor this item number 10 is affirmed consensus to this ban san jacuzzi city county task force to address ucsc growth plans and i'm in no way opposing the recommendations because we've discussed this as the task force and rationale behind it i did want to add a recommendation that the councilmembers who've been involved continue informally having conversations with our county representative and because there was an addition of language to that motion i just wanted to say that i didn't know if it was appropriate to add it at the beginning or if it was more appropriate to pull it so i pulled the item for that purpose just to add additional language which i sent to bonnie and it shouldn't i mean really it's just encouraging the members who have been working on this to continue informally discussing this with our county representative the only thing i would ask is if there's a the only thing i'd look for brown act issues with that because i know right now the members of the task force the seated members were myself councilmember comings councilmember brown so i'd either direction to us on what that would look like that's my only question i'm not i'm not saying it's not a good what i would recommend is that councilmember comings comments be reflected in the minutes but that the council not take any formal action or an establishment of a working group that was the intent it's not a it's not a direction of creating a group it's just a recommendation that we continue having discussions with them so if that's a way to have it included that so that it's informally and it's not it's not a form right i think that's appropriate that the comment be reflected in the in the minutes councilmember brown did you have a comment yeah i just i just wanted to add i do support making some recommendations for the councilmember comings councilmember brown and i want to say this mostly for the public if you're listening in those of you who have been involved in the task force efforts and in communication with us over this period of time that we were we were conformally meeting may have noticed that we're now that that space has disappeared and so we wanted to and i've talked with the third district supervisor with supervisor coonerty as well who is willing to continue to have meetings that allow for us to do a bit more of a public-facing conversation with the community about concerns around the LRDP the intention is not to make this a space for folks to ask us about what's happening with the city and county in this next phase of discussions with the university but rather to continue to talk about community concerns and be available to the public in that way so i just wanted to be clear and we talked about that when we decided to to formally close the official group that we wanted to be open and available and make it somewhat transparent and there i've heard from people who said well we just disappeared and we don't you know and i said well you can call you can always contact me well it's a little different than actually creating a space so we will be talking about the possibilities of holding meetings from time to time that will hopefully meet that need and interest by community members i guess this is one of the things to say on that that topic and then i think Tony might have something else to add but the staff is proposing and trying to get organized for a listening session with some of the folks that have been involved in this process over time and so that we can hear what their concerns are and bring those to the process that we're now working on internally and then we're going on scheduling that great thank you so it sounds like what we'll do is have this in the motion Tony that this comment would be reflected in that for in the minutes for that item is that something right i would suggest that the motion be acted upon and then ask the city clerk to let the record reflect councilmember Cummings recommendation great so i would look for a motion on item number 10 on the consent agenda councilmember Cummings you need a public comment oh sorry you're right okay i'm going to go ahead and bring this out for public comment for members of the public who may want to comment on item number 10 on our consent agenda which is the a firm consensus to disband the Santa Cruz city county task force to adjust UCSC growth plans please press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand not seeing any folks okay seeing none i would bring it back to council for a motion i got a motion started with councilmember Cummings in a second seconded by councilmember brown and can we do a roll call vote please councilmember Watkins as absent calentary johnson brown Cummings boulder vice mayor brunner that motion passes unanimously next up we have item number 17 and this is extending the emergency ordinance number 2020-27 authorizing temporary use of certain adjacent public street and outdoor areas for all eligible businesses impacted by indoor business closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic until December 31 2022 if you do want to comment on this item now is the time to line up to my left or call in using the instructions on your screen since this is the second reading of the audience ordinance excuse me we will not have a staff presentation if there are no questions from councilmembers we will go right to public comment and then council action are there any questions from councilmembers on this okay then i will go ahead and take this i still need to do public comment right Bonnie so i'll take this out for public comment this time if you would like to speak item please press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and the timer will be set to 2 minutes is there anyone in the audience today or in the chambers there's no one in the chambers that would like to speak to item number 17 seeing none i'll bring it back for a motion on this item we'll take people can that one first i'll take councilmember as the motion seconded by councilmember Cummings and we'll do a roll call vote councilmember Watkins is absent councilmember johnson prone Cummings boulder vice mayor brunner mayor meyers that motion passes unanimously okay we are pretty much right on time just a five minute break let's take a ten minute let's take a five minute break let's not break our streak we'll come back i need to adjust some things here at my desk let's take a five minute break we'll come back at 2.50 thank you lean forward okay we got everybody back everybody how do we do on time next up we have agenda item number 18 which is consider motion to rescind the city council's October 12th 2021 denial of the 831 water street development project for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen okay i'm going to go ahead and kind of let everybody know what the role we're going to go ahead and hear any updates on this item from our staff so we'll have a staff presentation i'll then take this out we'll have questions from council if there's no questions from council we'll take it out to public comment i'm going to have the zoom people go first and right now that looks like all we're going to have today there's no one in the chambers i have approved the following groups for extra time for three minutes 831 responsible development Santa Cruz yinbi and Santa Cruz tomorrow if there's other members of the public after those approved for extra time we'll go ahead and give you one minute and we'll be taking public comment for up to 20 excuse me for up to 45 minutes on this item so i'll go ahead and turn this over to Darcy Pruitt our deputy city attorney and Samantha hashert our principal planner is Darcy i'm here can you hear me yes we can hear you hi Darcy we see you i didn't realize i would actually be presenting this item but i can give you a rundown of the issues as you know the council approved a motion to deny the project based on non-compliance with objective standards and that was actually based on the council's decision back in i think october 7 to have all of the projects that involve both SP 35 which is streamlined ministerial approval for affordable housing projects and projects that included density bonus to come to the council as allowed under SP 35 for public review ordinarily most jurisdictions have addressed these SP 35 projects mysterially at a staff level but the council felt that it was important with the novel issues involved at the site to actually have the project come for public oversight to the council the staff did a very thorough review of the project based on all of the objective zoning subdivision and design review and gave the council a very extensive list of the ways in which the project complied and did not comply with both the requirements of SP 35 and the city's objective standards the city council found that the applicant had not provided enough information to review all of the project's compliance with the city's objective standards and also had concerns that the placing all of the affordable units in one of the buildings might violate state and federal laws for a variety of reasons that affect segregation and the city disapproved the project as not complying with state law and federal law and the city's objective standards since that time we have received letters from a variety of places including the applicant the California department of housing and community development and private non-profit housing organizations threatening litigation against the city there have also been other SP 35 projects that have been challenged in other jurisdictions that have resulted in multi-million dollar settlements and the court directed the cities to approve the SP 35 projects and the city council based on some of the feedback that the city has received has decided to reconsider its denial based on some of the feedback based on whether the project can come into substantial compliance and also something that is very important in this is that prior to the time that the 60 day approval window closed the applicant submitted additional materials to resolve some of the issues and maybe all of the issues that were outstanding and the basis for the city council's decision to deny the project for non-compliance with objective standards and this motion to reconsider is to address those additional materials thank you I'm looking to see if Samantha has any additional comments or Lee Butler on the side of middle I don't think we have any additional comments I think Darcy covered it pretty well but we're available for any questions that you may have great thank you Darcy are there any questions right now from council members on this item council member Brown thank you I actually have a few questions and I don't want to get too far into the weeds because I know that this will likely come back to us once some additional analysis has been completed on the new information but I have been concerned about the application elements certain elements and one of them that I'm trying to get clarity on is what the applicant has either stated I believe in the application to the state for low income housing tax credits and also I think verbally or less formally asserted is an expectation that the city will subsidize this project and so I know that that's sort of an ongoing conversation but I'm specifically concerned with or interested in understanding the application I believe states and so I want to ask the question states does the applicant's application state that the city will waive the fees the developer fees for this project and if so on what basis was that decision made and who and if it has not if it is not the case if we could please clarify at what point that decision would be made and by whom council member Brown I'll tackle that one the if the developer were to request waiver of permit fees for the affordable portions of the units we do have a provision in the municipal code that allows for that request it has been our practice to bring those requests to the city council so such a request would come to the city council they oftentimes come after the fact after a project approval and so that could be a separate action to my knowledge the applicant has included with some of the state tax credit application materials with their pro forma analyses associated with those indications that certain number of fees would be waived the the city has not received a formal request to my knowledge but I see Bonnie jumping on here so maybe she has received something and that would be a separate process I will also say that is a discretionary process I'm not aware of anything that mandates that the city waive those fees and so if that comes to the council and the one other thing that I would say is that to my knowledge we have only done that as a city for 100% affordable projects and we have not done that for anything less than 100% affordable projects and Bonnie if I could just to be clear I wasn't asking to get the background on the conversations that are happening around this and what might come to this council in the future I just wanted to clarify whether or not the developer the applicant had in fact stated that those fees would be waived or else in an application and understand that that's in fact not something that would happen without council approval so I'm good with that response Bonnie if you want to add something feel free. Thank you and I would just add that in the sources and uses budget for the TCAC application there is an assumption that fees would be waived for the project although we have communicated with the developer with the applicant that that is subject to council approval which would be in the future so we have indicated that back. Great I just wanted to clarify that today. Great I'm just casting about here no other questions at this point? Okay we'll go ahead and bring this out to public comment then and I'm going to take it looks like we don't have anyone in the chambers today so that'll be easy to assume. First up I'm going to take the folks with the extra three minutes and I will have you get ready to so I see your hands are up which is great I'm going to have 831 responsible development and I have down that Guy Launier is going to be the speaker on this so go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself. Great well Mayor Meyers and council members on behalf of our citizens group 831 responsible development and the 600 Santa Cruz residents who have signed our petition not from Brentwood, not San Francisco not Los Gatos 600 Santa Cruz residents we would like to express our gratitude in the spirit of Thanksgiving thank you for standing up for equity in building practices by saying no to segregated housing our city can say yes to affordable housing and to upholding local ordinances that require economically attainable housing be dispersed and not segregated thank you for standing up for protecting the public health and safety of our community and for honoring health and all policies thank you for rightly declaring yourselves as the decision-making body for SB35 projects we acknowledge the unusual situation of 831 water street and the tricky timeline the city is subject to we are now aware that substantial new material has been submitted since the October 12 public oversight meeting as we have emphasized for nearly a year now we would love to see affordable housing built on this site and in that spirit we support temporarily suspending council's denial of the current version of the application and extending the review timeline in alignment with the applicant's willingness for a December 14 public oversight meeting and a December 16 deadline for a final city council decision on the SB35 application perhaps the applicant has corrected all of the many reasons for denial included in the city's October 14 letter perhaps affordable and equitable housing is now proposed for this project in a design that no longer poses potential threats to the public health and safety of its new residents and their surrounding community and instead respects and honors the valid interest of all members of our community perhaps the project as described in the application's latest version also addresses the health, safety, slope groundwater and density bonus issues that were behind your decision to deny the last application we are ready and willing to review the new materials from this place of hope we stand behind in support of the city's comprehensive October 14 letter to the applicant and thank the city council for your motion and vote we encourage the city council the city to stand firmly on its principled position regarding the forced economic segregation promoted by this project's developer separate is inherently unequal as both common sense and civil law in this country we extend our sincere thanks to staff for their detailed research and work substantiating council's vote and dealing with the applicant's many submissions we hold out hope that a reasonable and responsible project can be built at 831 water street that will help shelter our community and become something we can all be proud of and thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. Next I'll have Santa Cruz Yimbi and I believe Elizabeth Conlon is speaking for that group go ahead Elizabeth Hello everyone this is Elizabeth I'm speaking today on behalf of Santa Cruz Yimbi although the agenda item of the proposed department complex at 831 water street involves the city's compliance with state law and not the merits of the housing project the reason why this housing law is important is because our state's dire need for more homes many of our neighbors are experiencing rent burden live in overcrowded houses and are struggling to get by in the third most expensive metropolitan region in California this is not just a Santa Cruz problem and because the problem is statewide we need state action like the density bonus law to help fill the shortfall of over 10,000 affordable homes in this county we need bills like SB 35 which streamlines affordable housing if cities and counties aren't reaching their goals because all cities need to be permitting affordable housing these days make housing more expensive while a dominant narrative on this housing project has been that the neighbors oppose it we would like to elevate the voices of many Santa Cruz city and county community members who want these homes built recognizing that not everyone can take time in the middle of the day to provide comment we want to amplify some from our petition in your agenda packet Casey said we can either keep complaining about houselessness and astronomical costs of living act on it and develop new affordable housing like this project Pete said this project is exactly why SB 35 was written segregation isn't building two connected buildings with shared common areas it's allowing wealthy neighbors and adjacent single family homes to kill apartment complexes Ariel said as a cyclist I would love to live in a place like this John bluntly said I live close to the proposed development and though the architecture isn't great I fully support the concept and as Jolie said we need more large housing projects near downtown in Santa Cruz it is not surprising that people object we've suppressed change in our built environment for decades in exchange for displacing people economically we need to reverse that priority and that will be hard Dan said housing close to transportation and shopping also helps us reduce carbon emissions as Jolie said it's time to walk or talk we desperately need more housing and more density housing supporting affordable housing at E31 water street is the right thing to do if we truly believe in diversity and inclusion we understand that you and many in our community are upset about the loss of control over this project due to SB 35 but we were only eligible for an SB 35 project because our city is not building enough affordable housing members of council have a powerful opportunity to avoid fights like these in the future championing more affordable housing in our city approving more mixed income projects continuing to work with non-profit developers to build on city land and pursuing zoning reforms let's approve this project and begin the work of making Santa Cruz a housing leader thank you thank you Miss Conlon next up I have Santa Cruz tomorrow and Lira Filipini is here to speak on that hi thank you we support your October 12th denial as substantiated including disqualification of the density bonus safety issues with the structures proximity to the slope and the segregation of the affordable units from the market rate units it's unfortunate that new materials submitted by the applicant and a letter from HCD would trigger a possible rescinding of your vote instead of treated as a new application we haven't had the time to review all the new materials but we have read HCD's letter and field has been misrepresented in the local papers what the letter does say is that they support the development of housing including this project after all this is the task they were given by the state so their support of the project is no surprise of the denial reasons that were wonderfully substantiated in Lee Butler's letter HCD only mentions the segregation and what is included in HCD's letter versus what is completely admitted is notable out of the nine anti-segregation laws where HCD chose only to voice their opinion on AB 491 saying it is new and not yet in effect however AB 491 makes clear that it is not a new law but merely clarification of existing law there's a lot more on that but the point here is that HCD did not wait in on denial based on the other segregation laws and I'll add that none of the SB 35 legal cases lost by cities included segregation as a basis for denial so hopefully soon we'll adopt a policy around the SB 35 timeline like San Francisco's in which the city's letter to the applicant would have ended that timeline cycle and the new material submission would start another one but under the new legislative pressure we understand you may choose to rescind the denial of the project itself and extend the timeline so the new application can be reviewed after all we do have a housing affordability crisis and there's a chance the new application materials correct all of the issues as we continue this process and I'm sure that the council stand behind the decision to be the approval body for SB 35 projects this was publicly set at a meeting that was specifically about SB 35 and Santa Cruz yes it creates stressful and hard decisions but the most crucial decisions are often difficult we trust you our elected representatives to exercise the power and responsibility given to you by the California Constitution this includes the ability for you to be the oversight body for SB 35 applications with you in this role the public can provide differentiated input on an application's qualification for SB 35 as well as adherence to the objective standards if staff were to become the decision making body it would be like a prosecutor also being a judge and evidence found by others may not be equally considered the bias that comes with their roles totally understandable the planning and development staff are excellent at their job to facilitate development and we do need them but we elect you to represent us we elect you to protect us we elect you to ensure our infrastructure resources and carrying capacity are managed so that we may have an equitable and sustainable city thank you thank you okay next we'll go ahead and queue up the folks who are here to also speak on this item you'll be given one minute and first I'll take Rafa Sonnenfeld and go ahead Rafa yes good afternoon council members I'm glad we're here again looking at the possibility of approving E31 water street I just want to say that this whole ever deal is embarrassing it's embarrassing that you've already tried to deny the project on species grounds it's embarrassing that I've had to threaten to sue my own city for denying a project you're legally required to approve it's embarrassing mayor just wrote an op-ed that ignores the science and the recommendations from the experts of the county about the primary cause of homelessness which is the lack of access to affordable housing it's embarrassing that the state's department of housing department is on social media dunking on our city on twitter for having denied this project once the project's a density violence project it's entitled to weigh virtually every objective standard you can try to come up with to block it stop lying to yourselves in the public when you say that you are powerless as a city to address the underlying causes of homelessness the most powerful thing you can do to end homelessness is to approve more housing now stop this charade and do something that actually addresses the primary cause of homelessness rescind the denial letter and approve this project thank you thank you next is kyle kelly hey thank you so much oh is it working there yep we can hear you kyle sorry I always feel bad when people start the media I'll make mine quick since I kind of fumbled the intro here I'm going to call to support the project support rescinding the the previous denial of the project I'd like to move forward and see these homes get built this is great to see thank you next I have sue terrence hello we can hear you I would like to appreciate the position you're in the position we're all in affordable housing we don't need it at this scale and density on this less than an acre piece of property at a very dangerous and busy intersection I appreciate that you have the responsibility to one provide that affordable housing and to provide a safe responsible development that will not cause irreparable harm to our neighborhoods so I would like to work with mr. novan with you to say how do we come to an agreement about housing that is affordable and safe thank you next I have brook Madison hello there once again I appreciate your thoughtful and patient considerations of this complex issue I know this is really hard on all of you please remember historically there are good laws and sometimes you'll conceive laws currently enacted that could endanger public safety and I hardly encourage you to fight the good fight to ensure all of our safety just because there are new laws are pressuring you to fast track developments like this that are safe or right nor does it mean they are will withstand the test of time or be equitable respectfully I submit whatever happens on this site that might endanger public safety or be inequitable will be there for a long time and we and you will have to live with what you allow thank you very much thank you next I have Simon Gorbani last it was stated that it was embarrassing that the council turned down the application and it was embarrassing that someone should have to sue the city first of all I think it's kind of embarrassing that someone that drapes themselves in the flag of solutions to social problems would then go in through a city I think that's kind of a verse and secondly there have been lots of I'm from England and there were lots of attempts to kind of address housing problems in the past and they actually have now looked back at them kind of trying to fix a pocket watch with a sledgehammer and building upwards as a quick solution and now they look back on a lot of those things and see them as embarrassing so all I'm saying is that just because there is a law right now it doesn't mean that in five years time people aren't going to look thank you we have other members of the public at this time who would like to speak to this item I have Sabina I just want to call in and give my support for 831 water we do need housing at this scale and density and we need more buildings at this scale and density your previous vote you broke the law and you know that you broke the law and that's why you're getting soon it's time to admit that you guys were wrong and to make sure this project can move forward it will immediately make votes to end up getting the city sued please stop wasting our money on legal fees just build housing you know that we need housing please just admit you were wrong for once thanks thank you is there any other members of the public at this time who would like to speak to item number 18 which is consider a motion to rescind the city councils October 12, 2021 denial water street development project I see Simon you just spoke I see your hands up so I can't have you go again technically anybody else out there with their hand up Jim Burns go ahead please press star six Jim to unmute yourself I'm sorry can you hear me yes we can hear you thank you very much the YIMI response there are a number of people on their petition who have no stake in what happens in Santa Cruz because they don't live here is so typical of the messaging from people in support of this outlandish and dangerous project the response always is framed to suggest that the citizens of our city don't want affordable housing on this site not true we want it right there at 831 water street just not at a scale we don't want to have homes in an entire area of our city in a manner that creates too many health and safety issues to mention their response always suggests that no one's project is perfect as it is we all know it isn't as you and you have as you rightly know in closing permit me to say that compromises a word that almost never gets used these days but there's plenty of room for it here one that provides affordable housing doesn't create the need for segregated and illegal housing one that provides affordable housing but doesn't create a godawful number of health and safety issues thank you very much for your time next I have Zennan Yulei Crow please hi thank you my name is Zennan Yulei Crow I'm a first year politics major at UC Santa Cruz and I'm really excited to be joining you this year and I just wanted to voice my support for a 3-1 motor street I think it's a tough decision I understand the pressure a lot of you guys are under and I know it can be a tough vote especially when you feel like you're having a lot of pressure being weighed down on you but we know that her capita living in cities is the greenest way we can live urban areas are the greenest places on the planet and in order to move forward to make sure that if we can continue to live as a generation it requires building closer together it requires having this affordable housing and making sure that we give people the opportunity to live where they work so I really implore you guys to go ahead and approve this project but thank you so much for your time thank you anybody I see Andrew Barber has his hand up go ahead please hello sorry I'm out of town and I've been trying to follow this meeting and I just I don't have any prepared comments but I want to say as someone who has lived in this area for a few years I'm a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz my fiance and I live 141 Cutalpa Street so very close to this development and I was so excited to hear that this project was being proposed I thought it was so important to have more housing in the area as someone who is making a very small salary at the university as a teaching assistant anything that has the potential to reduce the cost of housing is extremely important and I think it's important to hear from families that are being pushed out of the city I mean my fiance and I unless housing prices are going to decrease in the next few years it's going to be forced elsewhere and I think that's got to be tough I mean the city probably I would assume once young families to be willing to move there and to have the capacity to handle those young families and I just want you to know as a couple that's just starting out I don't see a future for us in Santa Cruz if the price of housing is not gotten under control and I do think these developments are going to have an effect on the margin to propose. Thank you very much Next I have phone number ending in 8, 0, 8, I'm sorry 1, 5, 3, 5 Yeah, you're very light though you could speak a little louder Okay, good afternoon members of the council Mayor Meyers on behalf of the moderate bank economic partnership please consider rescinding the denial of 831 Water Street and direct fast to complete the Senate Bill 35 objective standards consistency review additional materials provided by the applicant to essentially comply with the city's objective zoning subdivision and design standards now more than ever we need our leaders to reinstate their commitment to affordable housing goals and to create a more streamlined approval process for SB35 application going forward this is an unprecedented opportunity for the city to really set an example for the rest of the region cities should be leveraging new state tools and legislation and begin to look for an uptake of SB35 project going forward. Thanks again for doing your due diligence and working directly with staff to make the right decision. Thank you. Is there any other attendees in the audience that would like to speak to this item? Emily Ham is up next Hi, good evening everyone. My name is Emily. I'm the executive director of the Santa Cruz County business council and I will make my remarks very short as you've already seen our commentary on various forms that I wanted to reiterate our support for the project and also urge you to rescind your decision and we also thank you for your due diligence and we realize this is a tough decision so thank you very much for working with the community on this one. Thank you. Next I have cap panel there you go. Thank you. I wonder what is this development process really it's like whack-a-mole dealing with timelines and deadlines it's really not good civics the council denied the application for good cause now the proponents want to act as though that didn't matter at all sorting the timelines on the front end and extending them beyond practical limits on the back end is not worthy of height and slope variances and the the application today is changed what is the objective standard by the way for the weight of a fully laid and firefighting water tender driving across the roof of a parking garage. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any attendees today that would like to speak to this item please raise your hand by pressing star nine at this point okay I think we are at the end of public comment then I will go ahead and bring this back to council so for those members of the public we're on item number 18 and I'll bring it back for council deliberation at this time any other comments or questions of council member Cummings. Thank you thank you to the members of the public this is a very controversial item and this is a very challenging issue for us to address today I have a long set of comments but I'm just going to get it all out in one swoop because I wanted to touch on our decision to deny the application our role as decision makers under SB 35 and then the distribution of the applications and the application for this project was revised at least twice before the council acted on October 14th the application is now again asking to the applicant is now again asking to revise the application in addition to this the letters from the applicant's attorney continue to propose revisions one letter indicates that the applicant is withdrawing the density bonus request to provide all the affordable units in one building a subsequent letter indicates that the applicant wants to reinsert that density bonus waiver and it's unfair to the public and undermines the integrity of the planning process to allow continual revisions to an application especially after a decision on the project has already been made nothing prevents the applicant from resubmitting an application for the project public policy decision should not be made on the basis of threat of a lawsuit the council acted reasonably and legally in denying the application on October 14th if the applicant has new information the traditional and appropriate way to provide it is the new application in terms of the second part of the motion this application is the first SB 35 application the city has received since CEQA does not apply to SB 35 projects the city's normal environmental review does not occur to assist with project financing SB 35 projects are likely to apply to the county housing authority for federally funded Section 8 project based vouchers the city is the agency that will carry out the required environmental review of these applications under the national environmental policy act and it's critical that the council play a central role in the NEPA process to ensure adequate public participation as far as our role as SB 35 decision makers state law clearly designates the city council as an appropriate body to conduct the public oversight hearing and approve SB 35 projects section 65913.14c any design review or public oversight of the development may be conducted by the local governments planning commission or an equivalent board of or commission responsible for review and approval of development projects or the city council or board of supervisors as appropriate end quote council members are elected by the community to represent the community's interest we have a responsibility to make the tough decisions for our staff council faces complex issues all the time such as homelessness, water supply, budgeting, those are just a few examples we turned to our staff for guidance and advice but in the end it's our job to make the difficult policy decisions should not shirk our responsibilities with this project because the law and the issues are complex it's our job and it's what the people elected us to do so I strongly oppose designating the staff to make decisions that the public wants and expects us to make with regards to affordable housing and the distribution of these units throughout the project SB 35 clearly allows the city to require consistency of projects within its reasonable objective standards from the density bonus law section 65913.4.c that design review or public oversight shall be objective and be strictly focused on assessing compliance with the criteria required for streamlined projects as well as any reasonable objective design standard end quote inclusionary ordinance requirement that affordable units be distributed throughout a project has been uniformly applied to projects in the past and is a reasonable standard there's nothing in the law that eliminates the standard based on the financing of the project staff and the applicant argue that the HCD guidelines permit the project to concentrate all the affordable units in one building however the HCD guidelines are somewhat contradictory it allows the city council to use the inclusionary ordinance as a guide section 402E states absolutely that quote if the locality has an adopted inclusionary ordinance objective standards containing that ordinance apply to the development under the streamlined ministerial approval process section 402F states as staff says that affordable units shall be distributed throughout the development unless otherwise necessary for state or local funding programs section 402F is a state requirement imposed by HCD guidelines on SB 35 projects in jurisdictions that don't have inclusionary ordinances section 402E applies to jurisdictions with inclusionary ordinances and makes clear that in these circumstances the provisions of the inclusionary ordinance would apply furthermore the language in SB 35 providing for HCD guidelines does not seem intended to undermine the objective standards of a local jurisdiction under that ordinance under that law section 65913.4I the department may review, adopt, amend and repeal guidelines to implement uniform standards or criteria that supplement or clarify the terms references or standards set forth in this section end quote the HCD guidelines related to funding sources if applied would not supplement or clarify the objective standards in the city's inclusionary ordinance the guidelines would negate these standards which is not consistent with the law and so based on this information I would also just like to point out what was brought to our attention today was that one of the things that was highlighted as a result of Councilmember Brown's question was that the applicant has also been acting in bad faith by submitting an application for financing under the assumption that the city will provide waivers for the affordable housing units and it's also unclear whether in other jurisdictions that were sued whether the applicants had had this level of revisions to their projects applications and so with this information and for the comments that I've provided I would like to move and I sent this motion over to the clerk so that people can see it that the city take the following action that we decline to rescind its previous decision denying the A31 Water Street application and direct staff to place an agenda item on the December 14th meeting agenda regarding the city council's role in any need for review process for SB35 projects. Second. I have comments when I have it when I get the opportunity to speak. Okay we have a motion on the table that is includes these two items and is second by council member Brown and I'll go ahead and have council member Brown make her comments. Thank you. So I have I had written some comments that had some similarities to council member Cummings comments and I won't repeat those but I wholeheartedly agree I want to just highlight two things here. The first is SB35 does not from as far as I understand entitle applicants to submit ongoing documents that are internally contradictory which is what I have found at least in my read of the documents that have been coming our way kind of fast and furious in response to our last action. We have I believe met our obligations under SB35 to give the developer an opportunity to provide evidence that this project would meet objective standards. Our staff has done a phenomenal amount of work to help us try to understand this this is new for them as well and I just want to I cannot thank our staff enough for all of the work that's gone into this and I do not think it's fair to continually be asking them to respond to whatever the next thing is that the applicant decides might you know be useful for the conversation. It's not good governance to do things this way I think a member of the public suggested that I believe that at this point the applicant should submit a revised new application triggered the new timeline and let us do our job and let the staff do their job in reviewing a complete and an application that is not internally contradictory and asking for different things and you know it's like we don't even know it's a moving target and assessing a moving target like that is very difficult these are decisions that are going to affect our community and I think we have a responsibility to play a role in this I believe the developer should be submitting a new application and so I'm going to support this motion today and I think that would open the door for the developer to re-evaluate take the materials that have been coming our way give us a clear and consistent application and we can go from there. Thank you council member Bonnie can you put that up maybe one more time and just a reminder for council members to try to speak as loudly as possible but in a few I think you were fine but just sometimes I get a little email from folks so okay is there any other questions or comments on the motion I just want to be able to have it up so folks can respond council member Collin Tar-Johnson yes this is a very difficult decision and difficult project for us and the comments from the members of the public who wrote and who spoke up can demonstrate that what I heard from members of the public and what I saw in the email correspondence is the opportunity to review the materials that have come before us I think I tried to take notes as members of the public were speaking I believe 14 people spoke one agreed that we should look at the additional materials that have come our way and that's consistent with all the letters that we've received my understanding is that the additional materials were brought forward to us within the time period that was allotted and I agree with my colleagues here council member Cummings and council member Brown that it was it's been difficult to try to track everything that's come our way feels like a little bit of a ping-pong table but if the materials were given to us in the allotted time slot and we're clearly hearing from the public that we should review these additional materials that may may not but may have addressed a lot of our concerns I would like to give that opportunity so I will not be supporting the motion any other council members I just have a question on the item number 2 I guess for Tony it says regarding the city council's role in any NEPA review process for SB 35 projects I'm just curious about NEPA's role in this would that come in because there may be federal funding that makes that nexus or where is that nexus because NEPA I know just from the nightmare of dealing with NEPA all the time that there has to be a federal nexus so there has to either be a federal permit federal funding what have you my understanding is that the federal nexus is the application for section 8 vouchers but I would note that that is a separate process it's not part of this application so they would need to comply with NEPA in order to secure an agreement with I suppose county housing department for section 8 vouchers so I'm just curious so the NEPA review would be done by the county housing authority then my understanding is that the city would do it but again it would be a separate process from this application okay thank you any questions from council members on this at all you're good okay then take a roll call vote on this motion the motion is made by council member Cummings and seconded by council member Brown and Bonnie why don't we go ahead and do a roll call vote council member Watkins is absent voluntary Johnson Brown Cummings Boulder Vice Mayor Brunner no Mayor Myers I'm a no on this too and I just also for the record I really want to be able to look at the additional materials that are going to be provided and I definitely look forward to the December 14th meeting where we can continue discussing this and so my no is based on that interest in new materials and continuing to the December 14th for that discussion okay we will go ahead and move on do you need a motion at all or no what do you need action taken you need another motion right the motion that's the staff motion is not if you didn't do that when you have to do something else oh you're right sorry I'm losing my mind the glass box is kind of distracting me okay so that motion fails and so we will have to come back and I would look to a motion for on the floor for this item council member boulder I'd like to make a motion as it's written in the packet to consider rescinding the decision to deny the 831 water street project and direct staff to review the additional materials provided by the applicant to determine if the project can be brought into substantial compliance with the city's objective zoning subdivision and design standards to consider scheduling follow up public oversight hearing at the December 14 city council meeting and three direct staff to complete the senate bill 35 objective standards consistency review in light of the new information I have a comment if I could the recommended action was that the council consider taking these actions the motion should be to rescind the decision scheduled to follow up public oversight meeting and direct staff okay thank you thank you Tony okay and vice mayor Brutner okay okay so we have a motion to rescind the decision schedule a follow up public oversight hearing on December 14 at the city at the December 14 2021 city council member meeting excuse me and then direct staff to complete the senate bill 35 review objective standards consistency review we'll go ahead and do a roll call vote did I capture that correctly Tony okay thank you council member comments on item number three which is direct staff to complete the senate bill objective standards consistency review is that for all subsequent SB 35 projects was that just for this project because I know we had direction at other meetings that city council would be that objective standard review committee this is not intended to change any existing council policy the council would still conduct the public oversight hearing at its December 14 meeting but the staff would complete the objective standards analysis and present it to the council at that time thank you council member just to confirm the sort of review of this project related to the new information right so it's a application it's not in any way affect anything else thank you I just wanted to make a comment that I understand the move that is being made here and I too look forward to looking at the new information I just believe that that should come to us in a new application given the the course that this is taken so I just wanted to be clear about that thank you okay so we'll go ahead and do a roll call vote council member Watkins is absent Callentary Johnson aye Brown no no Boulder aye Mayor Meyers aye that motion passes in favor and two against we will move on to item number 19 now this is a proposal to create a city ad hoc committee for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen if you are planning to speak you're going to want to press star nine on your phone we're going to make a few comments the three council members who brought this forward will make a very very short presentation but just make some comments and then I'm going to take it out to see if there's questions from council members and then we'll bring it out to public comments so if you do want to comment please go ahead and get yourself in the queue for that this is a proposal to create a city council ad hoc committee charge to investigate and provide the full council direction whether to establish an at large directly elected mayor direction regarding establishment of future primary or general election timelines and or consideration of ranked choice voting within potential council districts and three advise the council on other matters related to the city charter as they relate to the implementation of a by district voting based structure I guess I can all start this off and I'll look to council member walkins is not here today has any additions to just a brief discussion of this item we brought this item forward primarily after again looking through really a massive really a monumental change that's ahead of us due to the California voting rights act we as a council have been deliberating on this item for gosh almost I think two years now when we first received the lawsuit that we were out of compliance with the California voters rights act for the public many communities throughout California are under similar legal litigation by the by primarily one one law firm primarily but with members of their communities signing on to complete this litigation to have cities in California really consider representation based on the demographics of the census and have those demographics represented on the city councils for those towns we have initiated this through our process of going towards this district election through a settlement agreement that was completed with the litigants we have established a timeline and a process to complete this work with the idea of having seven districts seven district proposal for the city council to move forward with and I believe remind me city manager I believe by March or April correct yes that's right to make a decision so on the maps and the districts they could people who might be interested in running for the various vacancies would have information that they needed so this process has been underway thank you for a number of months we've held a number of city council meetings as well as we've initiated I think at least three public meetings on this one of which was an actual public hearing held concurrent with city council meeting and we three members that brought this forward in addition to those outreach we've also heard personally from various members of our community to investigate the other matters that may come along with the district one being looking at and bringing forward to this council an analysis of what an at large strictly elected mayor may look like for this community secondly is looking at how will our district elections be governed as they move forward and one of the a couple of different things have been brought forward in actually comments by the council as well as the community one is looking at the use of primaries potentially in the process of looking at district elections the other mentioned several months ago when we had a public hearing was ranked choice voting and that's another thing that could be looked at by this ad hoc committee and then finally the third would be to look at the actual city charter revisions that would be necessary to actually look at a possible recommendation on those two items I just mentioned as well as the basic premise of implementing the by district voting base structure so we feel that the public process is important the demographers doing the work we also feel like there's a time sensitive things where we don't want to be working as a community and adjusting our election process over several election cycles and over multiple years so we're bringing this forward today to just get support hopefully to do a process also to look at these other questions and then actually bring back something as quickly as the first meeting in January if we can so that we our council colleagues can have these conversations sooner rather than later because these are questions that are out in the community right now I know we receive some communications from the community and I think we all sit in probably a little bit of the same place in terms of being forced to go to districts and whether that's going to be a good thing or a bad thing for Santa Cruz but the fact is and Tony can mention this again we're up against this decision with not a lot of good legal basis to mount a fight against it at least one that's been successful in any other city and that can come with quite a bit of cost possibly even into the millions in trying to fight some of these to fight this process so that's really the intent of this is to put a set of people together do this work rather quickly and get you some materials for our colleagues to continue to discuss so that we have this kind of discussion concurrent with the districts that are being drawn and managed through the demographer based through the demographer led process which is really what needs to be done to get to the districts for 2022 Tony I don't know if you have anything to add in terms of all of that but you've tracked on some of this and I know we've had a conversation about this item so I'd see if you had anything to add no that that sums it up very well I'm happy to answer any questions or respond to comments of council members and I just add that Deputy City Attorney Cassie Bronson has been working a lot on these district elections matters and she's also available to answer questions for me. Thank you, thanks Cassie for being here. I'm happy to answer any questions on the item. Yeah, thank you I appreciate the intention here and I do recognize that there are a lot of questions circulating in the community about what this is going to mean and we have a relatively constrained process specifically related to the districting because this was initiated through a potential legal challenge trying to be polite about how this came before us. I guess I and we previously had intended to have a more thorough community conversation where the charter review committee was established and members of the community were appointed to that committee that work was curtailed unfortunately we have not since that time reinvigorated that body or tried to reestablish some kind of space to have this conversation and so I worry about the short turnaround at this time I guess I'm wondering what you all thought about that given the these are really fundamental issues and if we want to make a decision to perhaps put something on the ballot for a charter amendment it's very difficult to envision doing that having one maybe two conversations at the city council without some additional work and community engagement so I guess I'm just wondering this work getting us to a place where we will could make those kinds of decisions in a very quick turnaround I'm just I saw Rosemary lean forward I think what we envisioned we've done some research there's a number of cities who are in the same boat we are and several that are a little bit ahead of us so we've looked at charter amendments that have been brought forward and voted on some have been successful some of them haven't we've also just looked at how communities have assessed you know whether or not a directly elected at large mayor is something that people need to look at what are the duties of that I mean there's a lot of questions on that so I think really what the intent of our ad hoc committee our community you know also has expressed some members at least I've talked to is you know that this can be disruptive to have your sort of election process influx over several cycles and so I think our intent is to utilize some of the work that's been done in other cities working with Tony and Cassie to you know look at charter amendment language that we can bring back to you sooner rather than later you know explore the primary piece to it kind of put in writing some of these other questions that are out there do some work around those and come with some discussion really some discussion proposals rather than sort of putting all this on the back burner and that's really I think the intent is that you know we don't you know we don't sort of try to do this two three you know two three election cycles from now because I think we did learn that most communities if they're going to make changes in their districts you know you try to do your package as quickly and as closely integrated as possible otherwise it gets very confusing to the public you know if you go from you know seven to six or what have it you know plus I think we also want to have a conversation with you all transparently in front of our constituents about you know what this is really going to mean and if you did have a directly elected mayor what would how would the council need to operate in that kind of setting you know because even though that might be a directly elected at large position or you know elected position without the rest of those colleagues you know you're not going to get a lot done as just the mayor so really helping us have some conversations around the dynamics of what our governance looks like into the future and so you know it's hard to do that in a compressed time frame but as you know we've had a lot going on this year and I think it's just an expression to try to catch up to the process around the seven districts which has been a little intangible and not super available to folks absolutely can I ask a quick follow up question sure and then I'll go to council member Golder or did you want to respond I just wanted to say that I think in closed session all of us agreed that we didn't like how we got where we are like we don't like being threatened and we didn't like that we were having to only talk about it behind closed doors and so I think the fact that we can open it up in putting it on the agenda and having updates from the committee I mean other than the options that we put on there I didn't see a whole heck of a lot of voice I think and I'm not alone in a concern that if we just went to seven council members there'd be actions in the city and things we know it would be you know very divisive so I mean I think we all we've talked about this idea of a charter amendment to elect a and that large mayor would help in unification of the council moving forward with this different system that we're not accustomed to and so I think that with everything that we've been working on this kind of has been put to the back burner and honestly I haven't thought about it unless it's been brought up in closed session packets but like the bottom line is the clock is ticking and we're going to have to get there and so I would just like for us to be able to take some control as a as a as a governing body to make those decisions you know and that that was kind of our conversation Thanks I do have a follow up I guess I'll just in response to that I just want to say I just wish this had come to us much sooner and I recognize that we've been busy but I felt like the general tenor of our conversations have been well we just aren't going to be able to deal with that and so I was going along with that kind of what seemed to be the general will of the council and city leadership and so it's just a little frustrating to now get it without a lot of time to kind of work through what information will be collected who's going to be weighing in and all of that it's a bummer but we are where we are my follow up question and I'm asking this my questions about community engagement seem to be triggering strong responses and so I want to be really clear that I really just want to know in terms of your work is the intention to create space that's available for members of the community to speak with you and how will that happen and are you doing targeted outreach or will they be advertised if you're going to have meetings and just some of that about the process would be helpful yeah I mean I guess I would like to comment real quick and Renee can jump into a little bit on your frustration about I shared the same frustration and I think what we've found in the last few months is staff leadership that has said yes let's ask this question frankly and so I think we were all a little bit frustrated about how we were going to do the process and there was not a lot of it was a very strict process that was presented to us sort of a cookie cutter sort of this is how you do it is how we get to the finish line and then we'll figure everything else afterwards and so I think I guess for me I wasn't really comfortable with that and I did want to try to like you know kind of push try to push a little bit to get more communication and more discussion with the community if we get approval to do the ad hoc committee we certainly will you know come back as a committee and try to operationalize something pretty quickly and you know the clock is ticking but we would I would anticipate and I think we've all anticipated as much outreach as possible obviously we want to have something for people to work with so not speaking too much in generalities but really looking at specifics looking at maybe what other cities have done and then you know really pulling on different groups and organizations that we can access as quickly as possible I know Democratic Women's Club for example just did a session on this so looking at you know the other Democratic clubs in town you know wherever we can get that access to with these discussions I think is our intent to the extent that we can and it's a tight timeline and it'll be but again we may come to the conclusion that if we move this fast we need more time or we may get there and as a council feel comfortable with putting something on the ballot for the voters to think about they again then just kind of become part of the process you know and taking another step on this important governance question so that's kind of what I see happening I don't know council member Golder and yeah council member any of you I guess and first I want to thank you all for bringing this forward and I also share some of the frustration that was expressed because I felt like earlier this year we were having these discussions the intent was to kind of focus on as council member Brown said if we try to focus on all three of these at the same time it could be a bit overwhelming for people and so we really wanted to focus on the district elections and I totally get because I had these questions and then come to me about what are we going to do about the mayor is it going to rotate, is it not do we have two council members or per district do we have one and so trying to focus that conversation just on the districts made sense but I also understand there's a lot of other questions out there that need to be addressed and yeah it seemed like previously recommendations we had received were to kind of move with one piece at a time and now there's rationale behind why we need to do more at the same time I will share that I'm pretty concerned and maybe I'll ask a couple questions to see if I can get some clarification one is I'm wondering and this doesn't have to come to us today but I'm wondering I know that during the first community meeting that Ralph had put on regarding district elections with the community I think these two topics were brought up my understanding was that they were going to be discussed briefly at that meeting they weren't going to go into very much detail but I'm just wondering if if that happened and if so if there's any kind of comments we might be able to get from what came out of that meeting hi I'm thinking you're making a reference to the September 18th meeting is that correct public hearing that happened there was a council setting and then there was a follow up I think in late August though my recollection of that meeting which I intended either I intended all of it but frankly I don't remember at this point was that it wasn't very well attended and this issue did not come up in any substantive way that's my recollection you know I can I can jump in here Rosemary hi I think I was at that meeting and it was before the actual public hearings there was sort of a less formal meeting that I did with Ralph Demarca where some of these ideas were sort of discussed and it was mostly an educational opportunity for a lot of the public and explain some of these concepts to them it appeared to me that most of the comments were along the lines of do we really have to go to district elections and sort of those sorts of comments and questions rather than sort of getting into the intricacies of how many people feel really strongly about the directly elected mayor for example but I think it was actually a really nice educational opportunity for the public and those members of the public who did attend to sort of ask me questions about the legalities and Ralph was there too so I did attend that meeting yes thank you Kelsey and then I guess a follow-up question because I'm really trying to see if I understand what's going to be happening in January so is what is the idea that when this comes back to us in January there will be a motion of whether we move towards at-large mayor and district elections or is it to create the community outreach kind of process because I also can be a question for Rosemary I'm just wondering the staff's role in this because we're moving into the holiday season and I know a lot of council members there might be council members going back to Chicago since I didn't get a chance to spend Christmas with my family since 2019 I know that's probably somewhere for a lot of people who have been constrained in terms of travel and spending time with their families because of COVID and just knowing that people are going to be really focusing on family and holidays I think it might be difficult to get the type of engagement that we want and so just really trying to understand timeline and process and also the staff because I know that the city goes dark I do think that the issue of staff support is important we do have a person who's assigned to Casey Heemard it's been assigned on the district election item and she had some continuity with that group that was organized in 2018 to look at the governor's structure or 2017 whatever it was but she had some engagement in that group so she's been assigned to work on that particular issue but you're right we've got holiday closure sort of coming up beginning on the 20th and there will be relatively little going on in terms of staff support available during that period of time but I don't know what the council group that has been working on this is prepared to do and when they're prepared to bring it so the conversation Donna and I had had a lot to do with that particular timeline. And I think councilmember Cummings I think we could I mean it does say in the staff report trying to get this something back to us so we can continue to have this conversation by the first meeting in January but to your comments the first meeting or the first meeting in February to give ourselves it's in the staff report it's not actually in the agenda report I should say in the last very last paragraph there but I think and councilmember Golder let me know I think our intent is to get something second meeting in January or first meeting in February and the reason we would sort of put the pedal on the metal in a sense is that if we do after all the outreach and work if we're starting to get what looks to be consensus or at least some potential support we can draft that charter amendment and try to put it on the ballot so we just need to we won't be able to get there if we don't sort of also acknowledge the ballot schedule that we're still looking at so that was kind of the intent with kind of the accelerated timeline more so than you know trying to just trying to get some work done that I think I feel like we sort of missed a better timeline for because you know we just you know it's just where we are so that's kind of where but I think we can back that up to your point first meeting in February or something we shoot for then I guess a follow up question and maybe staff could also weigh in on this in terms of getting an item on the I guess is the intention to have this on the June ballot or the November because it seems like if we put this on the November ballot with the district election questions that would give us a lot of time you know it could be if we don't have to for example vote to put the charter amendment on the November ballot until like June that could provide you know this big window of time when the council can that group and you know maybe there's another community group that could really do that outreach and get us that information back and I have a really clear transparent process so yeah I guess the question is you know it seems like if it's June it's gonna be really tight if it's November there's a lot more flexibility and I feel like I'd be more comfortable that would go on the ballot in June if we move in that direction but I'd like to hear from staff and then any council comments on that because I just like really for me when I first saw this item the questions that came to mind were who we're gonna do outreach with it's the holidays that might not be staff support like and then you know what is the process and I think we laid that out very clear when it came to the redistricting we have these meetings on these days we can weigh in and without that information I'm a little I was reserved when I first read this but through our discussion I'm becoming a little bit more comfortable but would like to kind of hear about what kind of flexibility there is and when I'm just gonna get placed on yeah I think one of the probably one of the first things that the committee will want to dive into is looking at the timing questions you know what is feasible is there is it you know how feasible would it be if it was the November ballot versus the November ballot and that will in part guide the recommendation that would come back to the City Council and then I think there's just a lot of thinking has to go into if the transition to an at-large elected mayor is going to occur that's not the only decision that the council is going to have to confront what will the mayor's authority be how long will the term be you know and all of that will have to be incorporated into a charter amendment that would be placed before the voters so I think the June primary election is a tight timeline and it really depends on you know how quickly the committee is able to do its work and bring recommendations back to the City Council and to the public for you know for discussion and debate Council Member Brown thank you just a couple of follow-up questions which are have been on my mind for a while and I've sort of just again as I said been kind of going along going with the flow that's been laid out as the recommended course of action under the circumstances I wonder given that these are very important questions and I appreciate the interest and the willingness to put time into and trying to work through them and I know that if we have districts in November at least with respect to any of these changes that are pretty fundamental to the electoral process that would have to be handled prior to November if we are not going to put seven districts on for three out of seven in November if we're only going to end up having six districts so there's the timing question and I wonder also given that the initial attorney is now been disbarred in at least one state and as far as I can tell the current attorney on the case is very difficult to reach because there's no public information available that is a working phone number for example I'm not sure where that attorney is at and so I just wonder given that and given the fact that the census was late this year if there might be a possibility of negotiating additional time for making the decision around districts if we want to take this route and we need until November to really lay that out what the possibilities might be and I guess I'm mostly asking my colleagues here if that's something that you would even entertain if it was possible because I think that this is is really important and I don't want to have it be so rushed that we say never mind we can't do it and then we just kind of live with what we get and I'll look to Cassie or Tony but maybe answer the if you don't mind councilman around maybe I'll have them weigh in on the answer and then vice mayor I saw you I don't know if it's Cassie or Tony or both of you Tony you want to go I would say it's council like us to communicate with the plaintiff's attorney that is something the council could have our office to do if we I just feel that if we just fail to move forward with the district elections along the timeline that we're going on now we do sort of open ourselves up to a risk of potentially somebody else swooping in and making claims against the city but I would I wonder if Tony has anything else to add to that Tony did you have anything to add to that sorry my computer just died no I think that's right we will I guess the only thing I would add is that we've not had any problems communicating with the attorney and we have contact information and I don't know what other inquiries have been made but I imagine that an attorney in that situation would be leery of talking to members of the public who is called to ask questions if I can I understand that I just I just wanted to let you know that we're not not upon my recommendation members of the public have attempted to reach the attorney and their disconnected phone numbers so it just to me kind of felt like what are we dealing with with our attorney that's not really on top of it once again I just I don't know that's not my primary reason for asking this question the you know the I think the primary rationale is the census in data is coming late we are under the gun for that reason and if we want to make some of the have this conversation and make some of these other decisions we do need the time had we done this sooner we wouldn't you know I wouldn't be asking this but we didn't and so it's just a question it's I'm not trying to disrupt the process I'm not trying to stall the process I personally would like this to be over sooner as soon as possible but I do feel like it's our responsibility to you know oversee the process in the most thoughtful and you know efficacious way that we can any other comments or questions from council members sorry sorry that's okay so my question is my understanding of the proposal to create this City Council ad hoc committee is to explore some of this information and return to council with direction and that would include timing the timing issue that council member Brown has brought up and I was also actually wondering I seem to remember previously in a discussion with Cassie Bronson when we talked about November the reason going to seven districts was simply because there were seven council members and it would not require a charter amendment but anything else requiring a charter amendment would require a vote and so the timing does come into question with we can't wait until November for that possibility correct without an extension of the settlement so the path that the council and the path that the city is on right now is our demographer is going to be drawing seven districts and those and that is what will get in the drawings and that's that's what will be out for the city to consider you know early 2022 it is possible that the council could approve moving to seven districts seven districts and then at a later time propose a charter amendment to have this directly elected mayor and also change to six districts that would require redistricting we have talked to our consultant and he said that is possible and that is something that's not outside the lens of things that he's done before but it would be a redistricting that would occur shortly after our initial districting we do have I do believe in 2022 we have three council seats that are up for re-election and so those could proceed along the approved seven district map and then you know it's possible to would be possible to sort of make a charter amendment do a redistricting and then have an election of the other three districts it's you know not an ideal situation a little bit complicated but this is something we talked about with our demographer and it's possible but the path we're going on right now is seven districts that was my follow-up question that the idea of most a charter amendment from November versus pre okay thank you okay Vice Mayor Brunner can you take over the meeting for one minute I want to talk to somebody in the back of the room is there any other questions on this at this point and I think we could look for a motion public public public public public public so let's see for members of the public if you're interested in commenting on a proposal to create a city ad hoc committee please line up to my left if you are in person and I don't see any members of the public in person to speak on this so if you are streaming the meeting online or streaming via community TV please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes so I will go ahead and look out to see if there are any members of the public with their hands raised on this item I do not see any members of the public their hands raised okay so give it one more second alright so we will take it back to council for deliberation and council member golder you had your hand up I'm happy to make a motion to create a discussion about the full council with one discretion to establish an establishment of future primary or general election timelines and consideration of rank choice voting and three advice council on other matters related to the city charter as they relate to the implementation of my district voting base structure okay so we had a first from council member golder did I read the wrong thing I did it didn't I I was going to ask you to clarify that I didn't bring my glasses down I was zooming all the way in I'm so sorry guys I read the subject can I also have you council member golder you're very quiet sorry I don't fit in this big chair okay I'm going to make a motion as it's written in the agenda packet do I have to read it you do not thank you council member for future reference for future reference you can say I move the recommended action thank you Tony who was the second I was okay and Bonnie can we do a roll call I'm sorry council member Cummings yeah I guess I'll just ask again so the because I'm really concerned because the way it's written it sounds like that over the break this group is going to have some community meetings during the holiday season and then we'll be making a recommendation on whether we should have an at large mayor rank choice voting and primaries at the meeting in January and I'm supportive of having these discussions I think it's really important that we start moving into having these discussions with the community but having a decision brought back early in the year especially during the time when so many people are likely not to be available that's the biggest concern I have right now and I mean I'd be comfortable with establishing this committee to bring back a process for you know having these discussions and outlining you know the groups that they're and I don't think that this prevents the group from starting to meet with some community groups right like if the Democratic women's club has reached out and has expressed that they've discussed this and want to meet with the subcommittee that's fine you know if there's other groups that can be engaged with I think that's great and if that information can come back along with the process I'd feel more comfortable with that because I'm just really concerned with the amount of time and people's availability during the holiday season to have to be you know really truly engaged in this and the transparency around the process so I wonder if and I don't know if the staff's recommendation can be put up on the screen or the sorry the subcommittee recommendation can be put up on the screen I'm trying to figure out a way to a way that I can feel comfortable with supporting this because for the reasons expressed I do understand the need to have these discussions but I mean for all the things that we brought up today I'm just really concerned with having a direction in terms of move forward with at-large mayor at the first meeting in January. In the motion there's nothing about and it would be brought forward it's not part of the motion it was just really part of the discussion and I think I was looking that way so I'll go counter Johnson and Brown. Those are some really valid concerns and I had the same questions and didn't ask and what I heard was you members of the potential subcommittee heard that and that we wouldn't be bringing it back at the first meeting in January we'd extend it out a little bit further so I just wanted to clarify if there's potential if we brought something back in January at the first meeting in January for the process so here's the groups where we've confirmed outreach to use of their people's democratic they were going to hold it so we can do some work during the holidays to potentially identify a set of meeting dates people who we can outreach to and we can bring you an update if that would work in the first meeting in January and then you would know the trajectory ahead in terms of all that and then we would shoot basically for trying to get a lot of that work done second meeting in January or first meeting in February if we go to the November ballot and I think that's why for me I want to try to understand and to Tony's point if we want to go to March we just need to understand what that looks like so I think that's something that we don't want to jump over as a council I'd like to have that conversation with the council to say okay here's why we wouldn't do it go in March here's why we would go in June in terms of a charter met before the voters so I think that's I completely understand your concerns and you know never don't really want to work all over the holidays but that's kind of as you said the timeline is a little bit it's sort of driven by some of these realities around ballot stuff council member Hanan so that would be great and I think really for us but also for the public to just have a sense of like here's what we've done so far we're going to work for whatever it is two weeks or a month and we are going to meet on these dates just so people know what's happening and feel like they have access to the information and to the conversation that would definitely make me feel more comfortable about turning around I wonder if I could add a comment briefly it seems to me like what the council is discussing at this point is really doing the homework to prepare a range of options for the public to consider so I don't think it's envisioned that that the committee would be bringing a recommendation to the council to adopt at the first time it's presented really what you need to have in front of you is what's realistic what are the options what are the potential good points and bad points associated with each so that you have enough information to have a meaningful dialogue with members of the public on those issues so the outreach I think but I think it's premature until you have a better sense of what exactly is being proposed thank you for that council member commentary I just wanted to add that we not only rely on the three members of the ad hoc committee that we all do our outreach and as we do but just really be intentional and reach out to the community and do this work with you so that we get as much input as possible in a short amount of time that we have great so I think what we would propose is that I think to Tony's point it would be both I think council member Cummings sort of looking at these three things but actually developing a little bit of those of that package but then in the very first meeting in January getting some feedback from the council on along with the list of referrals from all of you on how we should do the outreach but then we need to have something to outreach about we can't have a general conversation about for example the directly elected mayor what are the duties of that person so I think we want to have a little bit of meat on the bone so that our discussion with the community actually gets a response to some of the options that we'll be analyzing if that makes sense that being said I'm wondering if as a friendly amendment we could add two points one would be to return with a process and timeline for community engagement and then the other would be to add in addition to what's on there the reestablishment of the charter review committee and I bring that last point up because it's like there's going to be a lot of time to if it seems like these conversations are going to be much more lengthy and it might be in our interest to reestablish the citizens charter review committee so that if this is going to be a longer timeline than we anticipate and people in the community have expressed they would like us to make district elections and have this be a longer conversation it might be worth rather than this becoming a political issue the community plays a large role and we establish a charter review committee because there's a number of when that body was together these topics were all on there but there were a number of other topics and it might be that if we want to move towards addressing everything we have a citizen so it's just putting an option on there as well for that to happen first I want to see where the so I'm not familiar with the charter review amendment committee so I'm just trying to look I'm looking on the city's website right now trying to see what it was and if someone wants to tell me more about it and maybe I can read it while you guys are asking your questions I'm happy to explain it to you okay so I'm not exactly sure what year it was established I know it was before I was on the council but there was a committee that was established I think when David Terrazas was mayor and actually Sandy you might be able to speak to it because you were actually on the council at this time so maybe it would be better for you to sure so we established a charter review committee that was comprised of members of the community each council member nominated someone and then we had a few additional at large positions they began to meet Casey Heemard actually was the staff person for that doing a great job they began to gather information about these different possibilities ranked choice directly elected at large mayor were included it included other considerations such as the number of city council seats pay for doing this job and a few other items proportional representation was also discussed and there's a small group of people in the community who are really interested in us exploring that possibility as well so they were all kind of in the mix the committee began to meet and it was for a variety of reasons shuttered and my expectation was that it would be revisited and that didn't happen and our previous city manager pretty much said no, that's not happening so there's for fiscal reasons that that was not something that the city wanted to consider and that was part of a grand jury report that sort of got set up to just they know we're done, we're not doing we're not continuing down this road but I thought that they were generating some really productive conversation there was a lot of disagreement there was a lot of strong opinions and they were working together to try to find a way forward to have that conversation and bring us the council a package of perhaps not unifying but options so we did not get the benefit of more thorough deep dive into the possibilities and what the implications would be and looking at other jurisdictions and so that's kind of it was a process that I think had a lot of potential it did it was a significant project for the city and if we really I would love to see that happen realistically I understand under the timelines that we've got it's difficult to think about and I wanted to ask councilmember Cummings when you say reestablish I believe you're talking about consideration of reestablishing the charter amendment these are all if you in your work that we need to do here that maybe that's something you might include as a recommendation to us or at least consider an alternative way forward or a longer term process if it seems like that would be thank you that totally helped me understand and I was looking it over and I saw they had just only a couple meetings it looks like I'm not sure why it ended but I think consider reestablishing the charter amendment totally reasonable to me your intent? I was going to say the intent of this was that since it says the subcommittee will be charged with exploring and returning to council their recommendations that's kind of what it's under their recommendations on transitioning their recommendations on reestablishing the charter amendment committee in addition to the recommendations that you all would bring around mayor voting all these that included because it seems like that's just another approach to addressing these issues is whether we should have a citizens committee and leave this charge and really make it so that it's not a political issue that it's really citizen driven they're coming to us there's been a bunch of outreach so it's just a way of trying to provide another option for moving down this path the maker of the motions is okay with it and the seconder is too did you have a comment? that was exactly my comment it said reestablish the charter amendment committee but I was curious if that meant return with some recommendation whether or not that should be reestablished it sounds like that charter review committee information specific to this topic might be helpful context for ad hoc committee so I'm sure after exploring this topic those considerations will be brought forward if I could just jump in briefly sure I was involved with the charter review committee I think they met twice and I want to say it was in the August and September of 2018 November 1, 2019 thank you in any event I saved all that information that was reviewed and we'll be happy to discuss that with the committee so that you can evaluate whether or not to bring a recommendation back to reestablish something like that okay thank you if I could just put in one plea I'm not going to ask that it be formalized in a friendly amendment but we've received communications from a group that is interested in pursuing or looking at evaluative proportional representation it's a model that's used in mostly in Europe it's very different from the way that we do our elections but I think it's really interesting and I think that there's some things about it that might just kind of generate some expansive conversation about what we can do to engage our community in the electoral process and ensure that votes aren't diluted I mean that's really what this has driven this right is dilution of the vote and you know lack of representation by certain interest groups protected classes so I'm just going to put in a plea to take a call from the folks who are interested in talking with you about evaluative proportional representation and hearing more about it great thanks thank you I just get clarification is it the charter amendment committee or charter review committee charter review I think it was called charter review that's probably right can we do a roll call though good morning did you call for public comment yet I didn't put it out to public comment oh no it's uh Sonya brought it out to public comment Sonya yeah Sonya had it alright okay right? yeah councilmember Watkins is absent Callentary Johnson Brown Cummings Boulder Vice Mayor Brunner that motion passes unanimously okay we have a little decision making here to do we are an hour and ten minutes ahead of time and next we have the updated water rate structure and establishing the revised drought cost recovery fees to implement to be implemented in response to a council declared water shortage emergency rosemary is this noticed at this time could we move into this item and then it's noted for after 10 a.m. this morning so we're good so question for council is do you want to take a long break and then come back or would you like to keep moving we have one other item behind this which is the election of our mayor and our vice mayor and then we have a roll comment so we could breeze through this and get out early this evening does that sound okay I was just don't you want to prolong your hearing my surface it's like I want to I want to get on one of those back boards that put you back the other way okay just a quick remind just for council members because we're learning how to do this when we leave or when we're in this room our mics are still live all the time now rather than getting turned off this is just like a testing they're testing the mics so if we have another hybrid meeting that wouldn't be the case oh it's just for now okay but is the public hearing us there was somebody that texted though they were having trouble hearing yeah but then the sound went off people just aren't speaking loud enough I think it's a zoom to zoom issue not they're okay hearing us got it for the most part okay we will reconvene and move on to item number uh 20 20 where's my can you just go under my computer next up on the agenda is item number 20 adopt a resolution establishing an updated water rate structure and establishing revised drought cost recovery fees to be implemented in response to a council declared water shortage emergency for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen if you so I'll go ahead and we are going to have a very short presentation by our city manager who is also our water director on this item and then we will go ahead and have questions from council and then we will take it out to the public and my understanding is this is actually a formal public hearing right for this so guide me as needed rosemary with regard to that in terms of how people you know need to how much time on the public hearing turn it over to rosemary minard okay great thank you very much I'm going to just give you a very brief couple of introductory comments and then I'm going to introduce I'm going to introduce Nancy fan who is our consultant from Raftalos consultants and she's going to go through a brief presentation that is has a lot of slides in it but one of the reasons I'm showing this particular document this is our public notice for the prop 218 hearing required and this document actually had something like eight pages in it and it includes a number of you know quite a bit of information about how we did the rates and then tables that you'll see familiar from the presentation you're about to see that has all of the rate proposals in them so the details of a lot of the slides that Nancy's going to show in her presentation very briefly are have been out there in the community since early October and the process for today is a is a is a public hearing it's a required public hearing to for the council to receive comments on the rates and to acknowledge the receipt of any protest receives if the protest receives are 50 percent of the total accounts plus one which would be a number over 12,000 in our case then the council is not authorized to proceed with the proposed rates so with that I'm going to turn it over to Nancy and allow her to share her screen with a panelist so I think you should be able to see her momentarily and have her share her screen and run through this presentation with you take it away Nancy that's good thank you so much Rosemary can everyone see my screen and hear me clearly yes we can thank you okay so good evening city council members of the public and thank you rosemary for the introduction I'm Nancy again and I'll be guiding us through the presentation today which starts with a little primer on the rate study process and then we'll dig into the numbers so that means the financial impact the proposed water rates and then the impact of these changes to the city's customers so the rate study process kicked off early last year and reviews how the city charges for water service the water utilities typically conduct rate studies as an industry best practice to maintain the utilities financial health today and also to determine the best path forward to meet financial obligations in the future so rate studies are often performed about every five years or so so the city's water rate study that we're looking today looks at past present and future so what the costs have been to provide water service what the water department's financial position is today and what needs to be accomplished in the future and how much that's expected to cost so the rate structure not only addresses what the city needs to provide to provide safe and reliable water service but how it can recover those costs by looking at the rate structure itself the city's water rate study followed these four major steps that are outlined on this slide the rate setting framework determines what the city wants to achieve from a financial policy for service and rate design process determines how to barely distribute those costs between your customers the financial plan review determines how much rate revenue the city needs to meet objectives and finally the rate adoption process involves the final report and proposed rates and the public hearings that we're all at meaningfully engage the public that meets the needs of not only the utility but also the customers and the community that serve so engaging the public throughout this process has been very critical and was made possible by the integrated efforts of the city council the water commission customer panels and water department staff so since the start of the last the study last direction at nine water commission meetings and two city council meetings we shared information through city communication channels and hosted eight customer panels to glean what matters most to the city's customers and then more recently property owners were notified of the proposed changes in the mails notice that Rosemary just showed on the screen earlier and today we have the public hearing to consider formally adopting the new rate structure and rate as a result of this process so one of the first things that we did in the study was to seek guidance from the city council and the water commission to determine the values based policies and objectives that would guide the study the council and commission established the following goals that serve kind of as their study north star and those include ensuring that water is affordable for essential use ensuring that we maintain transparency and equity for capital and water reliability needs and providing sufficient revenues to meet operating capital and customer service level needs and providing policy objectives that would guide the process we then looked at what this desired outcomes would be that led us to look at changes to the water rate structure which is how the city charges for water service so these changes are designed to make it simpler for the city's customers to understand what goes into their monthly water bills allows customers to easily manage their water use with costs to serve them based on the most recent available data and to ensure that water for essential indoor use remains affordable for everyone in the community so once we have determined the goals and objectives of the rate study we then move on to the financial impact the rate study assumes water use of approximately 2.4 billion gallons per year which is based on usage from fiscal year 2019 and so the reason that we use this historical year to estimate ongoing water consumption is to avoid capturing the shorter term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic for the entire study period the revenue needs consist of three different components so we have the O&M or operating component which funds the operating cost of the water utility the capital slash infrastructure reinvestment or IRF component which funds project cost and debt service and then the rate stabilization fee which is used to fund the rate stabilization reserve okay so if the city did not raise water rates we estimated that the water department collects approximately 39.3 million dollars under the previous consumption of 2.4 billion gallons of water used per year the proposed financial plan resulted in revenue needs of 42 million dollars and I'll use my cursor to circle that right there for the first year which is a 6.9 percent increase in rate revenue so just keep in mind that these revenues don't include the rate stabilization fee which I'll go over in a little bit for those from the proposed drought cost recovery fees that will be discussed later on in this presentation. Outlining the total revenue needs to fund operating and capital costs over the next five years we then smooth out the rate revenues in the latter four years to avoid kind of major rate strikes throughout the study period so the revenue needs determine how much rate revenue the city requires whereas the proposed rate structure changes impact how the city recovers those costs within its rate structure. With any rate study there will be inevitably simply by nature of conducting a rate study a utility and its cost change over time and so does this break all modifications to the rate structure which helps the city meet its defined objectives as mentioned in the prior slide. The first inside outside city surcharge will be eliminated which simplifies the rate structure and reduces administrative burden to city staff. Since the outside city surcharge represented only a small portion of the city's annual rate revenue the cost impact of this change is pretty marginal. The elevation surcharge which is only charged to customers that live at higher elevation zones will be extended from one zone to three different zones pumping water to the highest zone. The fire readiness to serve charge will be updated to allocate costs appropriately based on the capacity in the water system needed to provide firefighting services. And the north coast agriculture rates will now include two different options which is maintain reliability and decrease reliability and this is to address the water reliability challenges that the city is facing for these customers. And finally the residential tiers will shift from four tiers to three tiers to better align with the most recent usage characteristics and to simplify the rate structure between the rates that customers are charged and the cost to serve those customers. And so that also necessitates the clear rationale for the tier definition. Those residential tiers use tier one uses average winter use or five BCFs of water. This represents average indoor or essential water use since irrigation in the winter months is pretty minimal. The proposed tier two which is based on average summer use and goes up to six CCFs or nine CCFs per month that's a proxy for outdoor water use and irrigation use is highest in the summer months. So the proposed changes keep tier one at five CCFs tier two changes to nine CCFs per residential unit per month and then tier three is any average 10 CCFs or greater. So I'll move through the slides for the proposed water rate pretty quickly since this information is all available through the mail prop 218 notice as well as the city's website. The readiness to serve charge this mostly recovers costs associated with customer service billing and meter maintenance. Readiness to serve charge mostly recovers costs associated with meter maintenance to serve charges based on per CCF of water use and recovers the remaining operating costs of the utility. The infrastructure reinvestment fee is based on CCF of water and recovers the capital and debt service costs of the utility. Elevations are charged which is based on CCF of water use recovers the cost of pumping water to the higher elevation zone and then the rate stabilization fee will stay at one dollar per CCF which is used to fund the rate stabilization reserve. Since the city's rate structure is mostly dependent on consumption based revenue which allows the city's customers to have greater control over their water bills but also can create revenue and stability when customers use less water than protected. The funding this reserve helps the city mitigate the financial risk of revenue and stability due to this rate structure. So this graph shows the estimated impact to a residential customer bill each month. So customer with a five eighth inch meter using about four CCF of water per month will see less than a two dollar increase in their monthly water bill. Then when comparing the city of Santa Cruz with neighboring or similar water utilities the city's single family residential bills are on the lower to medium range of the various utilities that we see. And this is for a five eighth inch meter with a six CCF of water used per month. And this shows the sample residential bills for the five-year rate schedule for a residential customer with a five eighth inch meter using four CCF of water per month. And then we'll move on to the proposed drought rates or a drought cost recovery fee. Rates are designed to coincide with the specific drought stages which were defined by the city's water shortage contingency plan. These rates are meant to recover lost revenue due to reduced consumption during drought. Since the water's rate structure, city's water rate structure is largely dependent on consumption-based revenue. But the city's costs are mostly fixed and don't vary with water consumption. The proposed drought rates are a six charge based on meter size to ensure that the city can recover sufficient revenues during periods of drought. There are five different drought stages. Stage one, the 10% overall reduction in use. Stage two is 20% and so on and so forth. So in the instance that the city council formally just declares a drought stage, the drought rates corresponding with that drought stage can be implemented to maintain the utility's financial stability and allows the city to continue to provide reliable water service. The drought rates follow the same five-year implementation structure of the water rates which are adjusted in the latter years based on the revenue adjustments required in the financial plan. The PROC 218 notice shows the entire five-year schedule for all different drought stages that will show just the drought cost recovery fees for stage two. The graph shows the impact for a residential customer with a five-year, five-inch meter using six CCF of water per month. So we can see that at the baseline with no drought a customer will pay about $75 per month using that much water. And then in stage two with a 20% reduction with the drought cost recovery fee which is in gray right there applied to it will be paying approximately $80. I think that is the end of the presentation. Thank you. So now that the next step is if there are questions or then we can take the questions and then beyond that you can open the public caring and if you have anyone who would like to comment. Is there any questions from council members? Council Member Golder. Council Member Cummings. All right. I'm wondering if you could go back to slide 25 just for a quick second and I just wanted to catch that. Okay. So right now are what stage drought would we be in right now? What the the council declared stage one drought cost recovery fee or drought stage in April last year and the declaration really expired at the end of October. We did not actually implement a drought cost recovery fee structure in this last round partly because we were in between rate studies and the last study didn't really bring in very much water or very much money because it was that at a much lower level but also because we kind of made a decision that we would use the rate stabilization reserve to mitigate whatever impacts we ended up having this summer on the rather than trying to impose the drought cost recovery fee. The drought cost recovery fee has really been retained from the existing structure because our rates are so heavily dependent and honestly I would really not like to put it in place but if we got to a stage three stage four our rates would be so impacted by people cutting back our revenues would be so impacted by people cutting back the drought, the rate stabilization reserve probably wouldn't be enough to keep us whole so it's kind of it's linked to a council declaration for a specific stage if it's implemented it's not required to be implemented but if the go ahead and do implement it it's 12 months spreads out over 12 months and then it automatically stops unless the council re-ups another stage. Rosemary can you give us an example of like what rainfall would have to be or maybe last year where you've had to get like four or five like what would that look like that seems so extreme. Oh gosh, yeah that would be pretty bad. It would be like having a summer of 21 and a summer of 22 and a summer of 23 so it would be the same kind of very dry year we had last year about three years in a row recognizing that what we had done to get through the first year would draw down our reservoirs to some degree so it would be really horrible. It's one of the reasons why the big focus is applied development because if we're vulnerable in that way it would have negative consequences across the economy of the whole service area. Thank you guys very much. Councilmember Cummings did you have a question? I just had a clarifying question so when these rates kick in it's really to help cover because if people are cutting back they're not consuming as much water as we're looking for that and these fees are really to help continue to keep our operations moving in these times during drought understanding that at some point we're going to have more rain people will consume more water those rates will go down. So you're talking about drought cost recovery fees yes those are very specifically related to having us be able to maintain operations for our debt service right because we borrowed money for capital projects and we're continuing to do that but we need to be able to cover our debt service in particular so if you were to take 30% of our revenue and say we didn't get that this year because of having a 30% cutback then we would be at risk of not being able to meet our debt service and certainly to operate our operations as Nancy said the water department is a really high fixed cost entity about 8% of its total costs are variable and those are mostly power and chemicals whereas if we produce 10 million gallons today or 7 million gallons today the amount of our cost doesn't very very much because it's mostly in fixed cost and then again just for clarification anytime we go into those stages that decision comes to the council for absolutely and we would articulate that and in cases like a stage one in particular even though it would be authorized for us to go ahead and put the drought cost recovery fees on we might not do it because we would be able to say you know we would be able to absorb that that's one of the benefits of maintaining the rate stabilization reserve it gives us some flexibility so it's kind of and I think we would obviously tell you what we're planning to do but in general like in the stage one that we did in 2018 and the stage one we did this year we did not impose the drought cost recovery fees even though we could have thank you thank you seeing any other hands up I'll go ahead and take this out to the public for members of the public who are streaming this meeting on item number 20 if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen we will go ahead and ask you to press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand and then when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and then we'll set the timer for two minutes so again if you're in the audience tonight and you want to comment on item number 20 let's see who's out there in terms of wanting to comment on this item okay phone number ending in 6241 that's our first person so go ahead and press star 6 to unmute and you'll be ready to go good afternoon my name is Linda Will-Susan and I live in Live Oak I'd like to thank the Santa Cruz city council the interim city manager Rosemary Menard and the city of for the council's action earlier this year to permanently eliminate the surcharge on water rates by customers living outside the city limits this action which is an important aspect of today's water rates recommendation will ensure that rate payers throughout the city's water service area are billed in an equitable manner consistent with the city's policies and the state law thank you thank you next I have phone number ending in 1-810 yeah I don't have too much to say that we overdrive people won't use more than that or less windfall of money is there any provisions for carrying that over and not building every one the next year anything like that that's all I have to say thank you is anyone else in the audience today for item number 20 if you are if you could please raise your hand by pressing star 9 get a sense of who's out there okay then we'll go ahead and bring this back to council for deliberation so at this point we have received some protests and I'm going to ask the clerk to tell us if they come in and go to her offices yeah we've received 36 36 protests so the measure is 50% plus 1 which as I mentioned earlier would be around 12,000 to reach that 50% plus 1 we got there so at this point the council is able to move towards the motions that are here and there are two one is to actually adopt the rate increases that are laid out and the other one is to accept the cost of service analysis which was included in the packet it's an important document it's an administrative record of how we did what we did in combination with the long range financial plan that the council adopted in September it's the two pieces of the puzzle that brings forward the information that underlies the rate study work and the compliance with Prop 218 but also setting out the long range goals of what we need to generate in terms of revenue and the reasons behind that is there a council member ready to bring a motion forward or these two options council member Brown I will go ahead move the staff recommendation to adopt the resolution establishing an updated water rate structure and to accept the cost of service report as written in our agenda packet I just want to make a well actually I'll make the motion wait for a second I do have one comment I will second that motion council member Brown I do want to make a comment about first of all think the water director and the staff and our consultants for this incredible amount of work that's gone into bringing up this proposal it doesn't I mean there are certain things that we can't do and we've had we've received comments and I've over the years lamented and I'm just going to do it one more time the fact that Prop 218 makes it very difficult for impossible really for us to do any kind of rate structure that addresses the financial situation of our customers and so low and fixed income people are adversely affected in ways that most don't experience from these incremental changes and so I just wanted to say that I know that folks have been writing in and talking about that and I wish there was more we could do but I also wanted to just reference that in a conversation that I had with our water director and interim city manager it sounds like there may be some possibilities and again I want to thank you for being on top of those possibilities and that we may be in a position to get into a pilot program or some sort there are things that may be coming I don't want to raise hopes but I do want to say that to the extent that any and all possible avenues for us to address that challenge I think we are pursuing and I'm confident that our staff is doing that so I just wanted to say that before we take the vote this is obviously over time this is going to have an impact and it's also going to keep our water system operating and that's what is the most important thing yes thanks for that you and I talked about it and I did mean to mention that and I forgot but the affordability issue is clearly one that is just totally in the front of me as we try to make this major investment and I guess I'll just say three things maybe briefly one is there is ongoing interest at the state level there certainly is a large money that's coming through right now to help deal with people who weren't able to pay their utility bills during the COVID situation at least the water part of their utility bills so that part is definitely something we're working on taking advantage of the federal infrastructure package that was signed into law last week includes funding for EPA to establish I think 30 to 40 pilot projects to look at affordability and I think because of the work we've already done on assessing water affordability in our community and something that we shared I've shared with you both in a separate session a while ago and then more recently I think as part of the little bit of the update that we did on the financial plan in the time frame in September we have a benchmark and I have asked the person who's done the work for us on that particular basis to update that looking forward to the end of this five-year rate period which as you can see from that one slide does include a significant increase for people using not that much water in what their costs would be those costs are mostly being driven by capital and that's the other piece of this which is being in a position to find ourselves resources from any kind of grants or you know those kinds of funds in the state or the federal level of which there are a lot right now does will benefit rate payers in this community and those things are aggressively being pursued and should we find ourselves in a situation where we get a huge chunk of money for a capital project particularly as a grant we will definitely be making adjustments to these rates so that they're sort of phased in more slowly or adjusted as needed because what's driving these rates over time is the reinvestment in the capital that is so important for water system that's already experiencing the effects of climate change and Rosemary with those adjustments also I've gotten a couple comments from the business community so I'm assuming those are not those kinds of things are evaluated across all of our service area for all types of users okay great yep okay so we have a motion on the floor by Council Member Brown seconded by Vice Mayor Brunner and Bonnie I would call for a roll call vote Council Member Watkins is absent by Calentary Johnson aye Brown aye Cummings aye Boulder aye Vice Mayor Brunner aye Mayor Myers aye that motion passes unanimously thank you to the whole water department I know this has been a and the water commission I know this has been a heavy lift for your department for several years so congratulations getting a lot done on the water department side that's for sure so thanks and just to confirm it passed unanimously Council Member Watkins absent Council Member Watkins absent absolutely sorry okay next up is agenda item number 21 which is our election of our new Mayor and Vice Mayor for 2022 for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen so we are the process we'll do here is we will go ahead I'm looking to Bonnie do we do Vice Mayor first or Mayor first we did Vice Mayor last year first but it's up to you why don't we go ahead and do Vice Mayor first and we'll do the nominations and then we'll go to public comment and then we'll take a vote correct probably public comment first and then the nomination okay so I'm going to go ahead and take this out to public comment this is our item number 21 tonight it's election of the new Mayor and Vice Mayor for 2022 if you are streaming this meeting please press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and we'll set the timer for two minutes and we don't have any just for the public there are no members of the public in the chambers so we're going to go straight to zoom if you want to comment on this item you'll need to please raise your hand at this point not seen any raised hands so I'll go ahead and take it back to my colleagues and I would look for nomination for the new Vice Mayor for 2022 I'd like to nominate Martin Watkins for Vice Mayor for 2022 and a second I'll second that second by Golder so we have nomination for to nominate Council Member Martin Watkins to be our Vice Mayor for the 2022 term seconded by Council Member Golder and could we do a roll call please Council Member Watkins is absent Council Member Johnson aye Brown aye Vice Mayor Brunner aye that nomination passes unanimously with Council Member Watkins absent I assume she knows she's going to be nominated right yes she did okay I'd like to look now for a nomination for Mayor from my colleagues I'd like to nominate I'd like to nominate I'd like to nominate I'd like to nominate I'd like to nominate I'd like to nominate Vice Mayor Brunner for Mayor second by Council Member Cummings so we have a nomination to nominate Sonia Brunner as our new Mayor for the 2022 term and that is a motion by Council Member Golder and a second by Council Member Cummings and can we do a roll call vote Council Member Watkins is absent Council Member Johnson aye Brown aye Vice Mayor Brunner aye that motion passes unanimously and we have Council Member Watkins as absent on that so congratulations new Mayor Brunner right on that's great and just for members of the public and the Vice Mayor are actually sat is that the word seated I think it's seated into their new rolls on December 14th so please come on out and celebrate our new leadership in the city and wish them well for 2022 our last item tonight is oral communications for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you want to comment during oral communications now is the time to call in instructions are on your screen oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda are there any members of the public who wish to address the council I see that we have one hand up and that is a phone number ending in 1810 and you can unmute and you have two minutes to speak I was going to bring out the verbal flamethrower everyone politically disagree with as a racist white supremacist but instead I'll just revisit your white supremacist resolution item number 28 last meeting one essence of the Brown act is to require providing agenda items content to the council and public in advance a secretly prepared friendly resolution amendment as usual blindsided the council and public with surprise novel actions sidestepping the public entirely after public comment was over which then put council members on the spot with little considered analysis it's unlike other items with two hearings I had the chance I would have spoken about how wrong it is for legislative bodies to promote activism to expand upon novel restorative justice ideas because a you never even defined restorative justice anywhere except suggesting it's whatever the Santa Cruz equity collaboratives says it is that you blindly agreed to promote and b because justice is mostly fully occupied by state law and see okay I don't trust effective equity concepts to find restorative or less less leftist justice anything besides the press associating them with the BLM billboard the Santa Cruz equity collaboratives mysterious to me my opinion is the foundation of the leftist equity falsehood is the concept that a human's potential is some knowable certainty and also that a central picture idea quadruplet of SEQ people very inappropriately dressed in black t-shirts reading and white supremacy a pretrial criminal court hearing which made for a bad prejudice radical political optics suggesting they are leftist activists and not qualified parties to redesign justice anything Abby must stop his kiss my black arts t-shirt also conveys this grandstanding activism as does the BLM billboard itself I speculate their idea restorative justice may be a mob coercive political grandstanding public shaming I question your judgment specifying justice M for special access and blowing city dollars directing staff to engage with them for an undefined purpose which I will thank you your time that brings us to the end of our meeting this evening I just want to thank everybody that joined us on zoom not many people in the chambers but that's okay and wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving and our next meeting will be on November 30th at 4 p.m. so thank you everybody and the public and have a happy holiday good night are we still live Bonnie?