 Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. All right. Everyone take their seats, and we'll get started. I will call the meeting to order and ask the clerk to call the roll. Supervisor Leopold? Fun time. Friend? Here. Capit? Here. Big person? Here. And chair community? Here. So now we're moving on to our moment of silence and our Pledge of Allegiance. Since this is our first meeting back, there's been a couple of sad instances, both locally and in our country over the last month. And I think it's important that maybe during the moment of silence, we all take time to think about a couple of different incidents and people. First, two county employees, Drew Valdez and Melanie Benedetti both passed away. And please keep their families in your thoughts. And then second, as we are all aware, there's been these mass shootings across the country, including very close to us. And please keep the families and the victims and the friends and the communities that are trying to heal against and deal with the census violence and your thoughts during this moment of silence. So please join me. Yeah. Also for Rea DeHart, who passed away last night or today? Last night, age 95. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, the redeeming justice for all. Now I'm going to ask the CAO if there are considerations of any late additions to the agenda. Additions or deletions to the consent or regular agendas? We have additional materials on the regular agenda. This is item number nine. There's a revised attachment C packet pages 40 and 41. And there's revised attachment D packet pages 53 and 54. Thank you. Thank you. Now I'm going to ask if any board members would like to remove any items from the consent agenda and put them on the regular agenda? I won't remove, but I'd like to discuss. Tell you what, that sounds great. And we'll do that under item number six. OK. Perfect. Thank you. Now we are going to move on to public comment. This is an opportunity for members of public to speak to us about items that are not on today's agenda but are within the purview of the board of supervisors. Also items that are on our consent agenda or our closed session agenda. Or if you can't stay because you have to get to work or have some other obligation and you want to speak to one of our items on the regular agenda, this is your opportunity. Can I see how many people would like to speak today? OK. Perfect. I see some hands being raised. So why don't we do two minutes and please come forward and feel free to speak. Thank you. Good morning. Jenny Gomez Felton. I'm a new member of the Fish and Wildlife Commission. I'm here to follow up on the letter attached under Correspondents Letter M from Chair Chris Berry. I was on the ad hoc committee that worked on this letter and we inadvertently left off the exhibits that should have been attached and I have them here for you. To summarize, we're writing about the county's significant tree ordinance, which applies to only the coastal zone. And the purpose of this existing ordinance mainly speaks to the preservation of large and historic trees for scenic corridor value. We would like to recommend that this ordinance be expanded to include the rest of the county and that the purpose includes some of the valuable services that our large trees provide, such as fire protection, erosion control, flood protection, protecting water quality, and ecosystem services such as habitat for other species, some of which are threatened and endangered. Exhibit one shows almost one third of the county has limited or no tree protection for significant trees. And the way we calculated that was overlaying coastal zone, incorporated area, state parks, and Cal Fire jurisdictional area. And after you take all of those out, there's still about a third of the county that's not included in this ordinance. Just last week, a fascinating article was published in Forbes about cloning our coastal redwood trees in order to combat the global climate crisis. I was shocked to read that trees, like the ones I have growing in my front yard, can sequester 250 tons of carbon dioxide, whereas average tree sequesters one ton, 250 times. This article also references another recent article in Science Magazine that reports planting one billion hectares of forest could sequester roughly five times the amount of carbon that was admitted globally last year. And I'll send those to you later. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for your work on this. Good morning, I'm Nancy Macy, and I'm honored to be here speaking for the Valley Women's Clubs Environmental Committee. We are grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important issue. We strongly support the Efficient Wildlife Advisory Commission's letter to you that the significant tree ordinance be expanded, beyond the coastal zone of the county, excuse me, and include the rest of the county. And we strongly feel that its purpose, it does go beyond the purely scenic value of the trees and should include the momentous importance of such trees to the health and wellbeing of our environment. So we urge you to act now to pull the letter, review the exhibits, and direct the planning department to expand the ordinance. Please join our surrounding counties, Monterey, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and catch up in protecting significant trees as they are doing. Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Good morning. My name is Elizabeth, and this is Violet. And we are here to speak on behalf of support for breastfeeding moms returning to work. It's very important that we get the help and support from our work and returning to work and feeling comfortable being able to breast pump during our lunch hours and break hours. And it's just, you know, awareness for everybody because not everybody knows that it's law that you're supposed to have the help. Not everybody knows that. It would help if we had our bosses and supervisors help us with that and supporting us to have a special place to do so in our lunch hours. My work has been very helpful. I work for FedEx. I'm a FedEx driver. And of course, it's really hard to do so on the road, but they've been very accommodating with letting me be in the office until I decide to stop breastfeeding and breast pumping. So I would just like for everybody to hear this, that it is possible to do so if you want to be a breastfeeding mother. Thank you. Thank you. How old is Violet? Violet is six months old. Six months. Yes. Incredibly cute. Yes. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Jimena and this is Alexander. And we want to thank the county for working with our local coalition in passing lactation accommodation for accounting employees, as well as raising awareness of breastfeeding in our community. This is my second child and I actually had a lot of issues breastfeeding him after my first was actually really easy. So it was really very nice to have the support from local coalition, as well as lactation consultants at the hospital in the struggle that we had this round. Also want to thank you guys for raising awareness just in our local community. As a mother, it's nice to see that the community kind of comes together sometimes when it comes to our children. And by the way, did you guys know there's only one changing table and it's down in the basement in the county building? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hi, my name is Lily Beggs. I work at Southern Maternity and Surgery Center. We were one of the first hospitals to offer lactation support in the hospital. And I just want to thank you for acknowledging World Breastfeeding Month in here in Santa Cruz. I'm proud to say that I was instrumental in helping to get the lactation room started here many years ago, well before other businesses were recognizing the importance of mothers having a place to use a breast pump or breastfeed their babies in the workplace. This is my grandbaby and my daughter is back at work and I see how much of a challenge it is to be a working mama. So I just want to help encourage all the people that employ mothers that are breastfeeding to provide as much support as possible. My husband and I are both in on this journey to with her to help support her and I just want to recognize how hard mothers who are back to work with young babies and are using a breast pump and making sure that they continue to supply breast milk to their babies, which we know is the healthiest start for our babies and we want to support healthy families in our community. And thank you, John Leopold, for coming to the recognition of the baby friendly hospital. Thank you. Thank you. I'm already counting down. So I thought I have three minutes. It says I have two minutes. We're doing, Steve, we're doing two minutes because we have so many people who want to speak today. We want to make sure we hear everybody. Okay. My name is Steve Holman. I live in Bonnie Dune for 43 years. Cal Fire Administration is trying to drum up public support for a tax increase for a county fire jurisdiction, CS48. This is the third time in 15 years that this has been attempted. The first time the voter said no. The second time your board decided not to call an election. I object to Cal Fire Administration using county fire property tax funds for an online survey, for a telephone push poll for mailing out flyers and for calling community meetings to push for their proposed tax increase. I object to Cal Fire using the specter of wildland fire to scare people in supporting the tax. Why? Because no matter what, in state responsibility areas, Cal Fire is 100% responsible for wildland firefighting 24 seven year round. Even if County Fire did not exist wildland fires would still be Cal Fire's primary responsibility. I object to the fact that the County has never ordered an audit or forensic audit of Cal Fire's use of the County Fire budget. This is necessary and people have been asking about this for 10 or 15 years now. I'm gonna try to skip a few things here. So I'm here to call for an audit for the Cal Fire County Fire accounts before your board even considers calling for a tax election. I'm here calling for exact specifics about exactly where and when and on what Cal Fire administration would spend any new tax funding before your board calls for a tax election. Cal Fire has also made the ludicrous assertion in writing in a mailer that says that adding a third engine to be a third firefighter on an engine improves the response time. I don't understand how that happens. You still have to get three people and get going. Two people and get going. It's the same time. There's a lot of other things I could say but I'm about out of time. Thank you. Steve, if you email me those comments I'll disperse them to the board. Thank you. Hello, I'm Victoria Rader and I'm a resident of Santa Cruz. I live on 38th and Moana Way. And I'm here to question the safety issues of this final map, these map changes on the Pleasure Point Roadhouse track development. It seems the way the plan has been proposed everyone is going to come in to the new lots and leave by Moana Way, which is probably, I think, a mistake. But safety-wise there should be at least an emergency exit off of East Cliff Drive. And preferably there would be an egress for the people that are gonna be living there as well. I don't see how a fire truck could possibly turn around. There's no way a fire truck can turn around on that small road. They can't even turn around on Moana Way. We don't have 40 feet on Moana Way. So I oppose this current plan and suggest that there be an egress off East Cliff Drive. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, my name is Kevin Collins. I'm here in support of the Fish and Wildlife Commission's letter recommending the expansion of the Heritage Tree Ordinance, which probably needs some updates to its text, recommending its expansion to the entire county. I visited a number of cities where strictly enforced tree ordinances were in place and they look completely different from other towns and counties. This county's blessed with this big mountain range covered with forest, but nevertheless an extensive part of it is under the jurisdiction of this county and considering the number of residents, many who love their trees, this is an important issue for us. I've always thought it's exclusion from all areas other than the coastal zone was an odd omission, the fact that the Heritage Tree Ordinance. Now I have to jump to another subject. I had intended to come down here this morning to discuss the Public Utilities Commission. This county is a party to the ongoing wildfire mitigation plan development that the commission was instructed to do by the legislature. I'd like to point out just a couple of little details because I have so little time. This is the wire that's a biggest threat to wildfire ignition and electrocution in the state. PG&E has 21,000-circuit miles of this wire in use. 7,000 miles, 7,100 miles are intended or at least referred to in PG&E's wildfire mitigation plan to be replaced. But that still leaves obviously 13,000 miles of this dangerous conductor, which is so fragile, breaks all the time, is filled with splices and is so out of date it was used in the 19th century. So I hope the county continues its involvement in this issue, it's a very big deal and it's not being properly reviewed. There's not enough public advocacy at the Public Utilities Commission. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, diagramic from South Skyline. I just want to give you a quick update on where we are with our CSA-48, the proposition 218 to move forward, having contacted many, many citizens in our jurisdiction talked about the goods and the bads, the uglies and the hapies. And I would say that people understand that we have to move forward with funding of our emergency services. We can always get into a debate about which penny goes where and how it got there and why it was spent correctly. But I think we all know when you look at the broader picture of how we fund CSA-48, Santa Cruz County Fire, that we've pretty much reached the bottom of that revenue stream and we need to infuse more in the public and my impression is in support. Thank you guys very much. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you very much for hearing us. And I'm Jane Meehl, member of the CERA Club County, Santa Cruz County. And I'm talking on behalf of the CERA Club. The CERA Club is supporting the Chris Berry's letter for the significant tree ordinance. And as you know, it is under the written correspondence N. The letter is recommending that the tree's significant tree ordinance be extended to all of the Santa Cruz County because right now only 25% of the county are protected. And the trees are of incredible importance. And we would like to ask that the Fish and Wildlife Advisory Commission gets the opportunity to talk, to work with the planning department on reviewing the ordinance before it comes back to the Supervisor Board. We thank you very much and we think it will benefit all of Santa Cruz. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Bob LaMonica, I live in Santa Cruz. I wanna talk about Judge Ariadne Simons who was censured by the California Commission on Judicial Performance. And three of you signed on a statement of support for Judge Simons, Caput, McPherson and Coonerty. And I wanna thank for whatever reason, Leopold and Friend did not. Now we have a problem as a culture dealing with abuse of power. We don't know how to recognize it. We don't know how to respond to it. We have a judge that fixed her own traffic ticket, red light ticket. She ran the red light ticket, red light on 41st Avenue by Capitola Mall. She fixed her own red light ticket. This is documented by the California Commission on Judicial Performance. There's no way around that. I'd like to know why the three of you who claim that you have no jurisdiction, this is outside your purview, why you signed this along with a lot of other people to excuse away a judge which should be held to a higher standard from a fixed her own red light ticket. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. My name is John McKeon. I'm a longtime resident of the Big Creek Fire Station area, CSA 48. I'm a member of the Davenport North Coast Association or DNCA. Those initials are probably burned into Mr. Coonerty's early. I'm here to make sure you know there is significant support for the proposed Santa Cruz County Fire Proposition 218 measure that's under consideration at your August 27th board meeting. DNCA will be doing everything it can to help get the message out to our residents to make sure they take a look at the information posted on the county fire website. In my mind, Santa Cruz County Fire is a real bargain. However, system resources have been falling over the last 10 years while the fire and traffic related demand factors are continuing to increase. In the case of Davenport and Swanton, they are going to increase dramatically in the future with BLM, San Vicente, and possible rail trail public access. It's really a no-brainer to support this measure. We just need to keep people focused on the importance of this measure to their fire insurance rates and continued availability of 24-7 resources. We have to keep them from getting sidetracked into illusory ideas of other alternate funding sources or resentment that a lot of the call-outs we're paying for are for non-residents. The crew sizes, hours, and equipment under Prop 218 will be the same no matter who is being served or how often. It's also important to keep the fire stations open during the winter. Red Cross has a study out showing that there are more structure fires in winter than in summer, probably from chimneys, fires, and such. Anyway, we just want to let you know that we are with you on this one, and thanks for listening. Thank you, thank you. Hi, my name is Jeremiah Enduro-Gay. I live in South Skyline. I'm here to speak in support of the Proposition 218, the proposed personal tax for emergency services, specifically fire. There is, at least in my conversations with members of my community, there is a lot of support for this proposition, so I wanted to voice that. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Tony Crane, Aptos residents representing a neighborhood in opposition to the second story program that was implemented in our neighborhood. I am also an available witness to multiple crimes and unethical acts by county employees and compass employees. I've sent you plenty of evidence to all of this. I have sent also last night an email with an attached letter that I sent to the director of planning, Kathy Malloy, regarding the obvious and provable obstruction of an official proceeding. So I'm adding that to all the other criminal and unethical acts. So I want you to read it, and now you can call yourself informed and see that this is ongoing. And you guys know what's going on. You know that we alleged fraud in the beginning and now it's just snowballed into this conspiracy to just continue to sweep it under the rug, including the obstruction of the initial proceeding that we requested for a code violation investigation in which misleading information was given by both an encompass employee and in our opinion by county council that did not match the actual terms of the grant that was given for this program. It's as clear as day and you guys continue to ignore it and you continue to fund the program even though you said that you would not. So please read that and consider yourself informed. Thank you. Good morning, Becky Steinbrenner, resident of rural Aptos and again, want to protest that citizens are no longer able to pull consent agenda items for better discussion publicly due to your policy change over a year ago. I want to ask that there be a public explanation of your special meeting that is scheduled at the Museum of Art and History a week from today. There's no agenda and I would like you to explain what that special meeting, which is very unusual what the purpose of that is. I want to also say on item number 19, changes to the county election campaign code, nowhere in information available to the public is the actual change made evident. I read through the code and there's no strike outline, anything like that. So I would as a member of the public like to know more about what this campaign change is about. Number 30, regarding the MOU with Watsonville Airport and the tower there, I support having emergency communication to link all parts of the county as an amateur radio operator. I depend on that to help our county in emergencies. And so I want to support that memorandum of understanding. I do want to make sure that amateur radio is included in the tower and that the Verizon contracts and equipment with that do not preclude the efficient use of amateur radio communication at that site. I want to say that the pleasure point number 46 really needs to be struck because there is creating a dead end street and that is against the county fire code. You cannot do this because there is no secondary access. So I support the residents and the safety of them in the pleasure point area. Do not pass this. It needs a secondary access. I support Mr. Berry's letter and all of the speakers this morning who have talked about significant tree ordinance. Thank you. On August 20th, we'll be holding a special meeting to discuss senior isolation. The human services department has partnered with the MAU to do an exhibit on this. And we did a similar one around foster kids at the Museum of Art and History. And this is the one to talk about senior isolation. Thank you. In coordination with the exhibit. In coordination with the exhibit. Good morning, Mimi Hall, Health Services Agency director. And I'm here to introduce two of our newest members of our leadership team to my immediate right. I have Dr. Marilyn Underwood. She is our new environmental health director for the county comes to us with a long history of leadership both at the state and at Contra Costa County. And then to her right, we have Dr. Gail Newell, our new health officer who also has a long history in county work but as well as private practice and as an OBGYN. And I'd like to invite them to say a few words about themselves. Good morning chair, board. It's a pleasure to be part of your community to live here and also to work with the folks both in the unincorporated and in your cities. As you know, the environmental health division carries out a lot of important duties for carrying out state law and county ordinance to protect the environment and consumers. And I look forward to the challenges here. I did work for eight years in Contra Costa County and found that very rewarding to work at the local level having prior to that been at the state for 19 years serving environmental health, working around the state at toxic waste sites and industrial sites to protect the community. So I look forward to bringing my expertise here and to looking working with you all individually. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Mimi for the introduction. And thank you chair and supervisors for this opportunity to introduce myself briefly. Gail Newell, health officer. And I have as Mimi stated, I have a long history in obstetrics and gynecology having delivered babies for over 30 years mostly in the central valley, my home area. I've now been a resident of Santa Cruz County for five years. I've been the health officer in San Benito County prior to this time and I'm thrilled to be able to work in my home community now in that role as well and look forward to working with each and all of you to improve the health of our community. Thank you. Thank you and welcome to you both. Thank you. We're glad to have you. Good morning, Dana Wagner, Community Bridges. This is Jamie Vermillion from Community Bridges and this is Harrison and Sloane. You all actually met Harrison when he was seven months old. And I wanted to thank you once again for passing the proclamation for breastfeeding awareness month. This is World Breastfeeding a Week and Breastfeeding Awareness Month. And thank you so much for your ongoing support you. This is probably the 13th year that we have collaborated with you to pass this proclamation and I really thank you for your support of mothers and babies. And of course to invite you to WIC's 13th annual Breastfeeding Health Fair and Walk. Supervisor Caput came last year. We were honored to have you there. Thank you very much. It's a lot of fun for families. We have 24 agencies in this county who are coming to the walk organizations to highlight their work with moms and babies. And we just really appreciate your support. Thank you very much. Thank you and thanks for coming today. Thank you. Good morning supervisors. My name is Tina Tau. I live in Boulder Creek. I wanted to make two points. One is I fully support the plastic band that is item number 14 on the agenda. And I realize that's gonna take a while but as an environmental scientist I think this is really important. Secondly, item number 45 on the agenda which has to do with restriping. Almost $800,000 was spent on this restriping initiative and I realized that some of that was paid for by the highway. But it's only been two months and there's already cracks and potholes and on Bear Creek Road. You should take a drive. It's unreal. Like this has just been a paint over and I don't think it actually fixed the road. So I think the supervisor should maybe consider talking to the contractor to fix the problems or consider just repaving the road altogether instead of just painting over it. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let's carry it. This will be our final speaker. Off the bus in here. Two minutes, Coonerty. There we are again. And censoring of the Consent agenda items. It's interesting. I was looking at a Board of Supervisors meeting here from 2002 and sitting there was Jan Butts and there were three women on the board and two men and the item had to do with calling for a moratorium on cell towers. But Jan Butts asked, like they've done for years, is there any member of the public who would like to address a Consent Agenda item and pull the item? And you men, you kings of the county have censored that primarily because I and Becky Steinbruner and it's in an email have brought up items revealing policies you're doing that are detrimental to the public well-being. What are you concealing and doing that? Of course on the national level with administration, women are being censored and demeaned. It's a shame at least four of you seem to be in that category on this. What do I bring up all the time? The dangers of radiation from all these wireless devices 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G and radiation, whether it's from nuclear sources or non-ionizing radiation, cause biological harm including cancer and you, Supervisor Leopold have said publicly how you had to be evacuated from Three Mile Island. Today is the commemoration of the US bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 killing 100,000 people like that. Outrageous. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board. We are going to now move on to action on the consent agenda. These are items 16 to 48 and I'll ask Supervisor Caput. You had a comment you wanted to make? Yeah. Item 28, the grand jury report, civil grand jury report on the jail facility and I'm glad to see on there that the Sheriff's Department agrees with the fact that the current jail facility is in great need of renovation or actually replacement. It's something, it's gonna be a big issue in the future that we're gonna have to deal with and the sooner we focus on the main jail and all the problems that it does have with the facility, the better off we will be. So it will be a big issue in the future. I was glad to see that the Sheriff's Department did agree with the civil grand jury, okay. And then item 30, the only questions I had, I did talk to the fire, some of the firefighters and they have no objection to renewing a contract with Verizon for a radio tower at the station two at the airport and near and at Watsonville. The only thing I could not figure out from reading it is Verizon has the contract, is it a cell tower or is it a radio tower and what is the difference? Does anybody have an answer to that? If we have a, is that all right? We have staff here who could address that question. Thank you. Tammy Weigel, Information Services Department, Assistant Director and I have the radio group is underneath my purview. That cell tower is, it's a joint, it's what they call co-location. So it is one of the main microwave towers that actually provides radio communication services to all the first responders, fire, police departments and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff. Verizon sub leases on that tower. The county actually owns the tower. The land is owned by the city of Watsonville and specific the airport. Okay. Is there a difference between radio tower here in this case and the cell tower? The tower itself supports cellular equipment and radio equipment. So the tower itself is supports those two types of equipment. All right. And if I could ask real quick, Marilyn, if you wanna just tell me what your opinion is on this, can you make it short? That'd be great. Thank you. Yes, thank you. I'm gonna submit for the record this paper about neurobehavior symptoms in your cell towers. You're not talking about the effects and here's it's listed as rapping aging syndrome symptoms or electromagnetic sensitivity. Here's a list and a graph done by Santini of symptoms frequently reported around cell towers, fatigue, sleep disturbances, headaches, feelings of discomfort, difficulty concentrating, depression, memory loss, vision problems and skin problems, dizziness, loss of appetite. We've heard these symptoms a lot. If something is dangerous and biologically harmful, it should be prohibited and I will submit this and I've been by that airport and it feels terrible. I was in the charter office a couple of years ago across the street and talking with a young employee about these symptoms and pointing to the cell tower across the street and she said, is that why I feel so terrible? So these are often repeated symptoms. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Thank you. After... Oh, should be canceled. And the only other question I had was when I was reading it, it says if the contract is gonna expire next year. So it did say in there if it was gonna be removed and replaced somewhere else that the cost would be close to a million dollars. The only question I had on that is I thought when Verizon enters into a contract, they pay for the construction of the towers and then they also pay for the service and it says in there $16,000, is that per month or is that per year or whatever in the contract? So we have somebody. Thank you. Good morning, Masahiro Kame, ISD. The $16,000 is the consideration given to us on an annual basis and covers the entirety of what we owe Watsonville as well. Okay, and then who pays when there's a tower that is... We would be responsible for the move. Who? We would be responsible for the move, dismantling the original equipment and finding a new location and assembling a new one. But if Verizon enters into a contract, they pay for the building of a tower, is that correct? I do not believe that's correct. It's not in any of the documents that we have available to us right now. Yeah, then why would anybody enter into a contract with Verizon if we have to pay for the tower? We own the tower in the first place. Yeah. And so they are using available space on that tower. The tower is just a structure, whether we hang public safety, radio equipment, amateur radio equipment, or third-party equipment, it's still a structure. Thank you. And after talking to the fire department, I am gonna vote in favor of this because the fireman back it. Okay, thank you. And then the other, that's it. Do you rise for a question? Yeah, thank you, Chair Coonerty. I just wanted to comment on item number 44. An issue I've commented on several times, this has to do with the Felton Park and Library, but this is for the ratify the contract for the Felton Park, that the combination of which with the Felton Library will be the first of its kind, I believe, in the State of California and one of a few in the nation. But I wanna really especially thank the Park staff, the CEO, and the negotiating staff at large for bringing this item forward. And I'm glad we're able to build the park now to go along with the construction of the library that's almost completed, but both we hope to be opened by the early time, sometime next year. And a special thank you to the Felton Library friends. Without that partnership that's been gone going for years and years and years and a few people in particular who have made that effort. Without that partnership and the contribution and the fundraising efforts that they have had, it would have been very difficult to construct this park at this time due to be, because of the rising construction costs. But we're gonna have, it's gonna be a reality and it's gonna be a great asset to the Santa Rosa Valley and Felton in particular, but for the entire county as well. And I just wanna thank everybody again for this and making ratifying this contract to become a reality and moving forward. Great. Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. Just have a couple of comments on item 39. I wanna thank the probation office for continuing to go out and seek funds for programs that have shown can make a difference. What we've seen over the last 20 years in terms of our work with young people through the probation office is a decline in the rate of juvenile crime and the decline in the number of young people who are staying in our juvenile hall. Your ongoing efforts to find grant money to support innovative programs really makes a difference. And I just wanna acknowledge you for your work there. On item number 46, which is the track for the Pleasure Point Roadhouse, I just want everyone to know that the fire department, Central Fire has reviewed these plans for safety. And this project was approved by our board almost a year and a half ago, two years ago. And this is just the final piece of that approval. Lastly, while disappointing to see that on number 48 that we are not ready for a contract around mobility, shared mobility services, I, in conversation with staff, trying to make sure that we have a good contract that protects consumers is very critical as well as the transportation benefits. So I support the efforts of our staff to keep on pushing on that. And hopefully soon we'll have a contract that we can support. And these shared mobility devices like bikes can be available for people in our community. That's it. Great. And I just wanna briefly on item number 43, thank the parks department for the renovation of Davenport Landing restrooms. Bathrooms are a big deal. And this one was in desperate need of renovation. And I appreciate the efforts to make that happen. So I'd entertain a motion on the consent agenda. I would move the consent agenda. Motion by Leopold, second by McPherson. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed. That passes unanimously. Thank you. Now moving on to our regular agenda. Item number seven is a presentation of the Breastfeeding Coalition and acknowledgement of the County for supporting working women with a model lactation accommodation policy as outlined in a memorandum of Supervisor Leopold. Well, I'll be brief in my introduction. You've heard from a couple of mothers already this morning. We have a couple of speakers. This board has supported Breastfeeding Awareness Month for many years. And it's an important part of our health program. And so we'll hear from a couple of speakers and I'll have a couple of comments at the end. Thank you. Dana Wagner again from Community Bridges. I'm also the chair of the Santa Cruz County Breastfeeding Coalition. And we are here to acknowledge the passage of the lactation accommodation policy. Women in the workforce, women with young children are the fastest growing segment of the workforce. But I turn you to this comment by Melinda Gates that unfortunately workplace policies and practices have really lagged behind this demographic. The County Health Services Agency and the Breastfeeding Coalition have worked, collaborated together for many, many years to try and close this gap. And we really acknowledge and are grateful to the board and to the County now for taking this bold step in recognizing the needs of working families and supporting workforce mothers. And so now I'd like to turn it over to Jen Herrera who is the Public Health Manager and Director of Nursing for the Health Services Agency. I just wanna say thank you to the board and this lactation accommodation policy was really a collaborative effort with the Breastfeeding Coalition, Health Services Agency and the Personnel Department. Conditions in the workplace have a substantial effect on breastfeeding duration. We have employees who are working mothers, many of which return to work three to six months after giving birth. It's important to ensure that work environment permits mothers to continue breastfeeding as long as their mother and baby desire. A mother-baby friendly workplace is great for the employer as well as the employee. Employees are likely to have lower healthcare costs, lower absenteeism and a higher retention rate. And I'd like to introduce to you one of our public health employees, Deanna Mercado, who has been utilizing our lactation accommodation policies. And her daughter Poppy. Thank you, Jen. Good morning, board. So when I first started with the county, I was breastfeeding my son. And so I was breast pumping as well at work. And now with my second child, Poppy, she's reaping the benefits. And I feel lucky that when I started in the department, not only were they very supportive, but also actively advocating for breastfeeding working mothers like myself. So when I went in to that environment, it makes it that much easier to come back. I had the confidence that I could go back to work every day, but then also have the independence to be working at my career, but then also working at being a mother while being away. I remember going back and knowing that so many people had work to get an amazing space designated for breast pumping. And a lot of people also worked in getting us a fridge so that we'd have our own space to put breast milk, which I call it liquid gold. So we didn't have to worry about spoiling or being spilt in a common fridge. And then also, it gives us a peace of mind, like me and my husband knowing that I can do this at work and then bring it back home. And then Poppy is given the best nourishment possible. And as you can see by these cheeks and ankles, she is well-nourished. She does. Well, she has a lot to say about this because she's the main person that reaps the benefits. But overall, my story is not unique. There's many of us. And that's what makes it so important for policies like this to pass for employees like me, to get that support, to get that advocacy. And I thank everybody who made the effort to get this passed. And then also, you guys board of supervisors for supporting this and then passing, passing this lactation accommodation policy. So I thank you, my family thanks you and Poppy, most of all, thanks you. Thank you. We love that hairstyle too. Yes, exactly. Dr. Gail Newell, health officer again. And I see it as very fitting that my first time addressing you is to celebrate the lactation accommodation policy for the County of Santa Cruz because this is so very important. After 30 years of delivering babies, over 10,000 babies, putting them skin to skin, helping the families initiate breastfeeding and having three children of my own, all of whom were breastfed. I am so excited to help celebrate this policy that you've implemented as of April of this year. I think you know, I hope you know that breastfeeding has tremendous benefits for infants and also for parents. So not only do we have the benefits to employees that you saw on the previous slide. Babies who are breastfed have improved nutrition and decreased risk of infection and illness. That means that their parents can come to work instead of having to be home with sick infants. Did you know though that women who breastfeed are also recipients of many health benefits including lower rates of breast and ovarian cancers and the longer they stick with breastfeeding. So once they're back at work, they have increasingly lowering risks of type two diabetes and obesity issues. So the longer we can help our employees in the County continue to breastfeed, the better for them, for the County, for their families and for our public health overall in our community. So we recommend as physicians that babies are breastfed exclusively for the first six months of life. Most parents have to return to work at six weeks after delivery. So it's important that we can accommodate lactation in the workplace. And we want the breastfeeding to continue for one year, two years, or even longer as chosen by the mom and the baby. So thank you again for this important policy for being a good example to the County of Santa Cruz as an excellent employer. And again, I look forward to working with you in the future on ongoing public health issues. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, this board has shown strong support for families and young people. The Thrive by Three Fund is in part designed to help children zero to three. And when you're talking about breastfeeding, we're closer to zero than we are to three. But it starts very early and through the Visiting Nurse Program that visits mothers and families before a child is born. It's a way of setting this up. I want to express my appreciation to the Health Services staff and the director for moving forward on this lactation accommodation policy. I think that when we celebrate these kind of issues in the county, we have to lead by example. And having a strong lactation accommodation policy is critical. And I'm also grateful as the picture showed that our three local hospitals have all been identified as baby friendly, which means that they're doing work when babies are born to help mothers prepare to breastfeed their children. You know, this spring I had the great fortune of going to the Prado Museum. And in the museum was this incredibly large portrait of a woman expressing milk into space. And I was amazed by this portrait. And I learned that in mythology that it was said that Hercules was born as a product of the God Zeus and a mortal woman. And in order to achieve immortality, Zeus had his wife, not the mother of Hercules, breastfeed Hercules so he could achieve immortality. And when she realized what was going on, she pulled the baby away, thus expressing milk. And that is why we call it the Milky Way. So when you look up in the sky, we're talking about breastfeeding. So I have a proclamation to share with our speakers declaring August 19th as breastfeeding awareness month. We appreciate the work that you do every day to help new families and ensure that we have a great outcome for all kids who are born here in Santa Cruz County. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Let's give a round of applause. Let's give a round of applause. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you all for coming out today. I'd like to add something to this. I don't think so. We're not supervisors about to speak. If it's okay. Sure. Is that all right, Marilyn? Yeah. Well, everybody's starting to leave. I wanted to thank you for everything you did for our family. My wife, especially when she was in the hospital and with twins, it was kind of difficult. So one question I do have, how normal is it? We had to have a supplement along with the breast milk because of, is it because of the twins? Do you have an answer for that? It just takes time. It takes time and practice and patience. Pretty normal. Thanks. You did a fantastic job. It's not as easy with twins, but it's certainly possible that you did a fantastic job. Right. And when they were still in the incubator for a couple of weeks, I had to make the milk run going down to the hospital. That was with the help. That was, you helped our family without getting a pump. So thank you very much for everything. Thank you very much. Okay. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thank you for this. And it's excellent, you're promoting this. I wanna give some larger context. Breast milk is what's designed for babies. It's the best food. However, it's been contaminated by the chemicals in the environment. You're talking about public health supervisor, Leopold. 50 years ago, I was part of a lawsuit to ban the carcinogenic pesticide DDT. And I was a member of La Leche League in Berkeley at the time. And we were all found to have DDT in our breast milk. And I was horrified. Still makes me cry sometimes. And what we also have an obligation to do is to see that we live in a healthy environment so that mother's milk and our bodies are not contaminated. And the umbilical cord of babies is found to have over a hundred chemicals in them. Most of them toxic. Nowadays, there's more with, you know, the cell phone radiation impacting infants on and on. But I want to add a copy of this article from the San Francisco Chronicle of 50 years ago. And there's me 50 years ago with my breastfed daughter, Jamila, climbing all over me. And this was an historic, this kind of thing should be done again. That was one of the few pesticides that was banned because of the then Delaney amendment, which isn't in existence. Thank you for this policy. And let's protect the environment and protect the infants. Thank you. Thank you. A quick comment. Just thank Supervisor Leopold for having this presentation. And a quick note on DDT, Maryland. The chemical companies after it was banned here continued for many, many years selling all the DDT to other countries in the world. So it didn't stop them very much, but it slowed them down. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. We're now moving on to item number eight. This is a presentation of Lisa Lurie, Executive Director of the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County as outlined in a memorandum by me. Good morning, members of the board. And thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning. I'm Lisa Lurie, Executive Director with the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County. And I'm here also with Paul Horvath from the City of Santa Cruz Emergency Services to provide some updates on county-supported programs. As you know, our quality of life and much of our dominant economies here in this county, such as agriculture, tourism, research, and recreation are all inextricably linked to the health of our natural resources. Just as we must maintain our bridges and buildings and roads, so must we steward our natural resources to ensure their long-term health and the flow of benefits that we receive from them. The RCD's mission is to respond to the most pressing natural resource issues by assisting landowners and others in our county on a strictly voluntary basis in being part of the solution. Our work is conducted through effective partnerships with the county, other local, state, and federal agencies, NGOs, and private entities. Our work falls into two general program areas, watershed restoration and protection, as well as stewardship in agriculture. And these are just a few pictures of the type of work that we're doing across each of your districts. This work supports the county, its residents, and visitors in a number of ways. We provide confidential, non-regulatory, technical, and financial assistance to landowners and growers in designing, permitting, and implementing conservation projects on the ground. We provide a one-stop shop to help expedite the implementation of conservation on the ground through permit coordination. We provide outreach and education and serve as a hub for local collaborative conservation, bringing together diverse stakeholders. And much of this work supports the implementation of state and federal mandates that are passed down to the county, such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, as well as helping to meet some of the county's strategic planning goals. And in working with partnership with county departments, we help fill critical niches in meeting the needs of our community related to the stewardship of our natural resources. We are grateful to receive on an annual basis roughly $75,000 in a combination of taxes and augmentation funds from the county that really serves as a critical part of our baseline funding for general operations. And this is really what helps keep our doors open. Through effective grant writing, we're able to leverage those funds into an annual budget that's on average $2 to $3 million, this year closer to $5 million. So this represents not only a huge amount of conservation on the ground, but also an incredible return on investment in terms of state and federal funds that we're able to bring into the county and infuse into both employment and conservation outcomes. We also have been recently receiving funding through county departments for specific programmatic activities within the RCD. And those two program areas are landowner technical assistance and then coordination and administration of a countywide fire safe council known as Fire Safe Santa Cruz County. And those are the two program areas that I'm here to report back on today. Since 2017, we've received about $50,000 annually first from zone four and then the Department of Environmental Health for landowner assistance. So as much as our work is funded through grants, the assistance that we're able to provide is often focused and limited to the constraints of those particular grants, whether it's watershed or resource concern. These county funds have really enabled us to respond to a much broader request for assistance throughout the county. And through it, we've been able to serve 200 community members who otherwise we would not have been able to serve in addressing resource concerns on their private properties. You can see here the diversity of the types of requests for assistance that we receive. The majority of them have something to do with stormwater management and erosion control. And then also, you can see that we receive requests from every corner of the county, but about 50% of the requests for assistance have been from the San Lorenzo River watershed over these last two years with that county support. The technical assistance that we provide first begins with a phone conversation, understanding what the concerns are, what sort of support is needed, make referrals where appropriate, and then that often leads to a site visit. So about half of these requests have resulted in an RCD staff member and oftentimes an engineer going out onto the land with the landowner to make recommendations about addressing the concerns. In addition to the one-on-one site assessments and support, we also do community workshops. And these regularly hit and exceed capacity. The topics that we address are everything from rural roads, drainage and erosion, to fire preparedness, and general natural resource management. These workshops generate a huge amount of requests for assistance. Just last June, we hosted two workshops that immediately led to two full days of site visits that we've since completed. These are just a few examples of the types of positive feedback we receive from our workshops. And based on a show of hands this year, 90% of attendees, it was their first time. So that indicates that we're reaching a new audience each year. After the initial assistance and the workshops, these lead to recommendations for actions on the ground, which we are then able to oftentimes work with landowners either through fee for service arrangements or through securing grant funding to then implement projects. So for example, the RCD was recently awarded a roughly $800,000 grant to implement the types of erosion control in projects on roads, rural roads and residential properties in the San Lorenzo River watershed that came out of these site visits. And we're now working to secure additional funds to expand those services countywide. Lastly, the county funds support us in developing and updating publications related to technical support for natural resource management, which we make available to the public on our website. So the second program area is related to county support for coordination of the countywide fire safe council. So November of 2015, your board requested that the RCD assume management of a centralized fire safe council. The RCD helped incorporate that entity, named the fire safe Santa Cruz County as a nonprofit in 2016. And the office of emergency services has since allocated annual funds to help continue coordination administration of that event. So at this point, I'm gonna hand it over to Paul to talk to you a little bit more about fire safe Santa Cruz County. All right, thank you board of supervisors for allowing me to provide you with an update on fire safe council within the County of Santa Cruz. Just a quick overview. We started receiving funding from the County Supervisor Leopold, recommended funding back in 2012. We were getting a $20,000 a year for four separate fire safe councils. Since 2016, we've created one fire safe council with representatives from the other councils, as well as representatives from public, private and other governmental agencies. So we're very well represented and we're finally starting to get ahead of steam, ahead of us. Just backing up a little bit the mission is to educate and mobilize people within the Santa Cruz County community to protect their homes and environment from wildfires. And also our goal is to receive funding so we can create some fuel mitigation projects. Within the city of Santa Cruz, we've started three projects along the Wildland Urban Interface. That's where the forest meets up to the homes. We're thinning out some of the area, clearing out some of the dead trees along the fire roads, which allow us to get in and get access to put out some of the slow the progress of fires. We can't stop it, but we think we can at least slow it by doing this. And so we've been very active in pursuing grants to be able to achieve that. You could go to the next slide please. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were clicking at the whole time. I paid a little bit better attention. All right. So we've talked a little bit about the mission and just up here we have a slide that shows the different agencies that are involved in the fire safe council. We're really reaching out to get grant funding. We just received a grant for $30,000 to do community awareness and education in the wildland area. And continue on. And then so recently we just developed, we became a 501C3, so we're able to get funding. We also have developed a business plan and a strategic plan. And we're gonna continue to update your board annually with our accomplishments through the fire safe council. So having been in paradise during the fires last year for two weeks and seeing the devastation, I see how important that is to us. I know how important it is to your board that we are active in educating our residents and developing projects that will ultimately save and protect homes within the county of Santa Cruz. So that is all I have for you and I thank you for allowing me to speak. Thank you. All right. All right. And Lisa has a few more slides. So just in summary, the accomplishments of the FireSafe Santa Cruz County, in addition to the formalization of the organization itself, launching the FireSafe Santa Cruz County website, which I wanna make sure everyone is aware of. It's a information hub, as well as the go-to place for landowners to request assistance for such things as chipping our chipping program. Paul mentioned the recent grant that FireSafe acquired and additionally the RCD has leveraged funding for additional grants to support implementation of the strategic plan of FireSafe Santa Cruz County. We've hosted a number of informational events that have been really well attended. And recently we hosted events related to the insurance in high-risk areas in collaboration with FireSafe Council that were attended by over 200 members of our community. Lastly, we currently have a chipping program through the RCD where we're providing assistance to landowners for creation of defensible space around their homes. Landowners can request that assistance through the FireSafe Santa Cruz County website. We've already received 100 requests for assistance. So the demand is huge. And we're working, we have a two-year grant funded program to respond to as many of those requests as possible. And we encourage folks to continue submitting those requests to help demonstrate the demand and the need to grow that program. Future priorities for the FireSafe Santa Cruz County include developing a full-time FireWise community coordinator, continuing to expand outreach offerings, building the capacity amongst the member organizations to meet that strong community demand and scale for assistance that we've received. And then to continue to strengthen the relationship between the RCD and the FireSafe Santa Cruz County so that we best meet the needs of our community. So I just wanted to leave you with a few thoughts on ways that the, as the Board of Supervisors, you can support the work of the RCD and FireSafe Santa Cruz County. Of course, we're very appreciative of the financial support that we receive from the county. We also encourage you to participate. If you're interested in a tour of the work that we're doing within your districts, please give us a call. Supervisor McPherson, we recently went out to a project site with you and we welcome that opportunity. As well as we extend the invitation to attend events and meetings such as those of the FireSafe Santa Cruz County Board. Please refer landowners and other members of the community to us for support within our missions. Share information about what we're up to through your networks and social media. And then as you hear about priority topics and needs from your constituents, please reach out as we're interested in partnering on outreach and further developing our services to meet those needs. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for doing so much with relatively little, at least in contribution from us. It's really great. I wanna ask supervisors have any questions and ask that keep them brief because we have a couple items we still have to get to. So, Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation and for the ongoing work. It's nice to see Mr. Horvett back here before the Board of Supervisors. The RCD has a long history of doing great work and you've done a number of great jobs in the first district and I thank you for that. I'm really glad to see the leadership that you've taken on in terms of the FireSafe Council. I know this is a major priority for rural residents and it's the topic of conversation. And I really appreciate that your staff has been available. Angie came to a meeting with the North Rodeo Gulch Rode neighbors in which they've organized themselves. We had 50 people at the meeting. They've organized themselves. You're coming out with the chipping program and I'm grateful for that. You said that the chipping program would be a bi-annual program and I'm wondering what that cost on an annual basis. That is a very good question and I can follow up with you with those exact numbers. Our current grant is through the California FireSafe Council and by bi-annual we do kind of two rounds each year of providing that service out into the community and I would have to get those numbers to follow back up with you and I can kind of present that in terms of how many people were able to serve with those available funds. Great, I look forward to getting that information. Membership in the FireSafe Council, you showed a number of different folks. Is that set? Does it have to be that as there's a group in my district, the Santa Cruz Mountain Alliance who's been focusing on fires safety and I'd love to get them involved with the group. Yeah, that would be great. We would love to have them come to our meetings or meetings are open to the public and if there is interest in participating in our board we would be happy to include them. We have other FireSafe Councils. Like I mentioned, we had four throughout the county. We're kind of the hub, if you will. And so yes, we'd be more than happy to have them attend. Great, great. Just babe. And then I'm sure I'm not the only one but the Summit Area borders Santa Clara County, South Santa Clara County FireSafe Council has been active up in the Summit Area. They don't ask people where they come from in terms of their chipping program. I'm wondering if there's coordination with those two parties? Yes, we have their admin support person. Patty, her last name escapes me at the moment. Cicela. She's attended a few of our meetings so we're working closely together with them. As a matter of fact, is the $30,000 grant that we have obtained for community education and outreach is kind of through Santa Clara County and they're kind of the host agency for that. So we're coordinating closely with them. We're also gonna coordinate closely in the future with San Mateo County's FireSafe Council because we have a lot of wildland area that kind of borders each of our counties and it makes sense for us to work together and to have more of a regional approach, especially for grant funding. Great. Well, this prevention piece is incredibly important as we think to protect ourselves from wildfires. And over time would be interesting to think whether we're providing enough resources to do this kind of prevention program. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Yeah, I just can't overstate how much I appreciate what you're doing with so little is what's been mentioned. I mean, it is really fantastic. If every organization, governmental agency could do with what you do with so little, we'd all be much better for it. But thank you for doing what you're doing. It's really impressive to see that the new inquiries, 90% of them are new. That is really, I think that's a credit to you and how you organize this, the Countywide Fire Council. So they have a real sense of trust in what you do and a good reason for why you're doing it and they want to be part of it. So I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I'm very pleased that we as a county were able to increase our stipend to you this year. It's a really important thing. We don't know how important it is. I hope we don't have to realize the importance of it if we ever should come up with some kind of a catastrophe. It's always good to see you, Mr. Horvath. And you mentioned one thing. You said the grant program was usually two to three million. This year it's five. What was the boost? I'm sure much of it was along the Santa Rosa Valley watershed because that's where 95 calls or a majority of your calls come from. It's interesting. This year happens to be a very, a big year in terms of large implementation projects. And so one is a large manage-off for recharge project that we have going on in the Pajaro Valley which is slated to break ground any day now. And then we also have a number of projects looking at water quality impacts from livestock operations that are going in this fall as well as projects addressing and reducing runoff of pesticides from farms. So a lot of agriculturally focused projects. Then the other is the project that we went out and looked at which is the large woody debris project, a stream habitat enhancement project on East Zianty Creek up in the San Lorenzo as well as we have a number of grants coming through our RCD that are going to our neighboring RCDs to implement similar restoration projects. So it just happens to be a big year. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Thank you very much for everything you do. And I saw in their insurance events, what does that quickly consist of? Does it help people, of course, protect their homes, but does it also have an effect that insurance rates do they go down if we have funding for firefighters and all that? Yeah. Well, this all started, the talk about insurance has started a while back when homeowners were getting their policies canceled throughout the state and it's been something that's on the rise. So we thought it would be appropriate for the fire safe council to bring in the state insurance commissioner to coordinate some workshops throughout the county so that residents could come in and ask the insurance commissioner questions about fire insurance rates and how that all plays out. And we learned some interesting things that these insurance companies are allowed to have a method to evaluate homeowners in terms of issuing fire insurance and those methods on the evaluation are confidential to the insurance company. So there isn't a clear cut picture on if we do this, therefore you're gonna get better rates. So, but that's one of the many reasons that we're very active is as we are concerned that homeowners are getting their policies canceled and we wanna assist them in providing programs that will improve the fire safety, the hardening of their homes in the wildland area so that they're able to get insurance. It's not so much that they can't get insurance but that their insurance rates could double or triple because of their homes. So that's something we're very actively involved with at the moment. And then real quick, I probably could ask this later in private, but the insurance companies will ask how close is the water fire hydrant to a neighborhood? When you get out in the rural country, other than the water you have on your trucks, how do you hook up, do you hook up to pumps out in the rural areas? Are there pumps or? There's certain ways that we get water in the rural areas. The most common way would be shuttling water. So there'll be a water source. So you might be drafting water from a creek or a pond or something like that. And then having numerous water tenders, those are big trucks that will store up to 3,000 gallons of water. And so they'll create a shuttle operation where they'll deliver water to where the firefighters are attacking the fire so that they're able to get adequate water. And so that's the kind of situation that you see in the wildland area. Do you have a big responsibility out there in forested area and all that? That's to coordinate all that is, I wanna commend you on all the training that you do and everything that you're able to do. Yeah, and Cal Fire does an absolutely amazing job all summer long with the wildland fires and actually into the fall and the spring months too, so. And the last question is home hardening, is that? That's protection of your own home, your own structure. Correct. What's the number one factor? Would that be the roof? Would that be? You know, there's many factors. It's hard to say that there's a number one factor. Obviously the weather and topography are prime factors in a wildland fire. We don't see those conditions here quite as often, but we do see them, such as what we saw in 2008 and 2009. Building materials are important, having pine needles in your gutters, clearing flammable vegetation and dead leaves from around your home and removing dead vegetation and limping up trees up higher so the fire cannot climb up a tree. So all of that might not stop the fire, but it'll slow the progression, which will allow crews to come in and have a better chance of protecting the structure. And with the roof, with, of course, wood shingles are probably the most dangerous, but how fire resistant are the current asphalt shingle? They're fire resistant, they won't prevent fires. A lot of times what happens is embers will get into the attic space. Sometimes the little screens ventilating the homes are too big so embers can get in there. So there's a lot of work in trying to make sure that homeowners have smaller screens and are able to prevent that type of a situation from occurring. Thanks a lot. Thank you, both of you. Thank you. Is there anyone from the public who'd like to comment on this item? Good morning, Becky Steinbruner, resident of rural Aptos. Thank you for your presentation. I'm speaking as an individual here this morning. I wanna thank the Fair Safe Council for all the work they do and the Resource Conservation District. I live in a community that is the Borders Nicene Marks State Park and we are one of the lucky communities to benefit by the free shipping program. It's always easy to cut things down to create your fire defensible space but then what do you do with it? And that's the block for a lot of rural people. Hauling it to the woodways to the landfill is expensive. And so this is a great service that the Fire Safe Council and Resource Conservation District are providing for the rural communities. I did attend a number of those fire or state insurance commissioners presentations and the turnout in Ben Lomond was incredible. And at all of them we heard people talking about their policies being canceled. This is huge in the state and particularly in areas that are in the high risk areas deemed so by Cal Fire. According to a report that you can see on the state insurance commissioners website it's called Fire Related Reports. In 2017 the commission did a study of this and deemed that our county is 33% of the rural residents are in the high fire risk areas. And statewide by zip code of high fire risk areas the incident of policy cancellation is up 500%. The incident of increased premiums and problems with that is 275% increased. So what Mr. Peter Mesa, can I have a little bit more time? Can I have one more minute? No, no you can't. Thank you. Mr. Mesa, I encourage you to look at the Fire Safe Santa Cruz website. We were lucky enough to have a presentation here that allowed us to record it. That recording is on the Fire Safe Santa Cruz website. And I would like to talk with you at another time when I have more time about what you can do to help your residents in the rural area. Thank you. Marilyn Garrett, resident, I guess you call it semi rural aptos off of Freedom Boulevard there. And thank you for your report and your work. And I was watching the slide there about PG&E being part of this fire safety program. However, PG&E has a history of causing fires. In fact, the Cal Fire Report about their faulty lines and failure to repair a way to get ready there. So I have some questions about PG&E being part of this since they're part of the cause of the fires. And they're planning to cut a million trees in California which will include some of our county as well. I'd like to see a presentation here by someone like Kevin Collins who's very knowledgeable. You've heard him speak a number of times about forestry and PG&E and their history and the tree cutting. The problem I see with cutting a lot of trees is it's habitat for creatures. The trees are the lungs of the earth. They provide shade. And it seems like global warming will increase by this massive massacre of trees. And it seems to me that there's a lot of questions with this policy. I'd really like to see an ecologist dress this. So those are my comments. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker. Thank you. Ed Hayes, I'm a member of the board of both the Fire Council here in Santa Cruz and the South Skyline Fire Council. South Skyline kind of came down to see what we could do to coordinate. And one of the biggest results is the chipping program has been very successful. Santa Cruz residents up in our area have really benefited because we hadn't really done that much before. And now we're getting in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 people just in the skyline area of South Skyline to participate. But the one thing I wanted to mention on the Fire Safe Council for Santa Cruz, one of our big things that we wanna do this year is you might have heard mentioned is this Firewise Community Program. And one of the things that we think we need to do is have a person that can coordinate with the community, different little communities within the county to be certified as a Firewise Community, which means that your community has taken action to find out what you can do, what needs to be done to prevent fires within the community and to take action to do this. It doesn't have to happen in one year, but if you have a program in place, then you can be certified. This is a nationwide certification thing. We think that that's gonna help negotiate with the insurance companies in the future. If each little community in the county can be certified, then we have, we can say to the insurance companies, look, we're doing this and we are certified that we're safe. And so we think that's gonna help the community protect itself. Thank you again. This will be our final speaker. Hi, honorable Board of Supervisors and ladies and gentlemen in the audience. My name is Michael Cox. I live in a rural community. I commend the program and the FireSafe Councils. I think trying to get engagement and leadership's local experienced people on the ground, getting their communities together to work on this issue is a great idea. I think fire is the new plague in these urban wildland interfaces. The fire up in Paradise reminds us that sometimes these are not forest fires, they're structure to structure fires. So there's a lot of education that has to go on. I think the chipping program is great. One thing I did myself that a public agency maybe couldn't do is I called the individual tree cutters to find out who would be willing to give me a crew with a chipper for a set price on a daily basis. And I got a really good deal and was able to carefully trim and raise all the trees as was suggested. So I think these are all really important. I think the screens are really important. We saw in Paradise that the screening of the ventilation on the homes was really important, especially with structure to structure. So thank you for your support of this. And my suggestion again is let's keep trying to get neighborhood champions that can go door to door, can rally the neighborhoods. And I think having a certification, something we can show the insurance companies that we meet a minimum fire safe standard is a really, really great idea. Thank you very much. Right, thank you. Thank you, and that concludes this item. We, just so everyone knows, we have a 1045 scheduled item. I know people have been waiting patiently to get to item number nine. I don't think we're not gonna be able to get it in and before the 1045. So my guess is my best guess would be come back at 1130. I apologize that you've had to wait so long, tried to keep this meeting moving, but it's been tough. So we are gonna take a 10 minute break. We're gonna start promptly at 1045 with our scheduled item. And then we'll hear the additional items after that. Good morning, everybody. What's up? Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for coming out this morning. We are now at our 1045 scheduled item. This is item number 14, which is to consider a presentation on options for reducing litter and plastic pollution and direct public works to return on or before September 24th, 2019, with proposed ordinances for further action as recommended by the deputy CAO, Director of Public Works. So Mr. Machado. Thank you and good morning, Chair Coonerty, Board of Supervisors. My name is Matt Machado, Director of Public Works. The item before you is our initial research of options and opportunities to reduce plastic pollution in our community. This research was initiated by your direction this past February. Today we are looking for further direction on board selected options. So we may attempt to quantify impacts to all stakeholders, conduct outreach to those affected and quantify the cost of implementation and enforcement of potential future policy decisions. Presenting these options today, we have researched will be Casey Colasa, our solid waste manager, and Tim Gontroff, our solid waste resource planner who I'll turn it over to. Thank you, Matt. As Director Machado said, we're here today to talk about pollution prevention. Santa Cruz County has a long history of leadership on dealing with plastic pollution. And you see here just a few of the examples, including plastic bags, styrofoam, waste from food service operations including straws, and your recent steps on plastic waste from hotels and motels for which work the county has won numerous awards, both statewide and nationally. This is the direction that the board gave to us in February, and it called for a few specific recommendations and then a broader one. You asked for suggestions on dealing with plastic bottles of water, plastic use in food service, tobacco waste, and then a broader category of any other suggestions for reducing plastic pollution, and we have several for you. And you also directed us to consult with both the Waste Task Force and the County Commission on the Environment, which we did. And that was really just the beginning of our consultation. We talked with other colleagues, both within the county and in neighboring cities and counties as well as across the Monterey Bay region and elsewhere in the state. We spoke with experts in the state government, including members of the legislature who are working on some similar measures. And we also consulted with subject matter experts around the state, some of whom I think we'll be hearing from a bit later today. Before we get into specifics, I want to acknowledge that we're addressing a number of issues, any of which would be deserving of much more detailed discussion. We don't have time for that today. So we'll be offering some broad policy options with an understanding that as you decide which ones you want to go forward with, we're going to need to delve into them in much more detail and there will be many more questions to answer. So as I said, we've done a great deal of public outreach. We've had meetings with local nonprofit groups. There's been a lot of media outreach. We've talked to local business groups and many individual business owners and managers. We also conducted a survey of county residents from which we got more than 2,000 responses and unusual response for county surveys indicating a very strong support for additional measures to reduce plastic pollution. So getting into some of the specifics. We talked to a lot of folks about what could be done to reduce pollution from plastic water bottles and we got a lot of suggestions. They ranged from mandating recycled content to banning all sorts of plastic beverage containers and even just banning all plastic containers entirely. Some of those suggestions we thought probably would be more practical on a statewide basis. Others seemed like steps that might be a lot to take on all at once and might be something the board would consider in the future if we were successful with initial efforts. So based on a lot of conversations and consultation and also some initiatives that have taken place in other communities around California and beyond, we wanted to suggest your board consider a prohibition on the sale of water in plastic bottles below a one gallon size. This is now the law in a number of communities on the East Coast. It's under consideration under a number of California communities. And interestingly, you probably heard the San Francisco airport just passed a similar measure that takes effect on August 20th. That's a very quick turnaround. That requires the water only be sold in either glass bottles or aluminum cans. Both of which I should mention are widely available. These are not unknown options. We wanted to add an additional suggestion that if we're going to encourage people to use reusable containers, there are things that we can do to encourage that. The county has already distributed close to a thousand of these reusable water bottles and travel mugs. You may recall that when the board banned plastic shopping bags as a mitigation measure, we gave out a great many reusable shopping bags. And if you'd like to see us do more of that for drink containers, that's certainly something we can do. In addition, the general services department and the parks department are already looking at installing additional hydration stations to make it easier for people to use reusable containers. And the board may want to encourage more of that. Food service is an interesting area. The county has already taken a number of steps to curb plastic pollution from food service. And as we talked to stakeholders and experts interested parties, we got a great many suggestions. And after a lot of discussion, we came to just a couple of what seemed particularly useful ideas. Berkeley recently implemented a 25 cent charge for all disposable single service beverage cups, which compose a very substantial part of our litter and pollution from the food waste industry. We thought that was worth a look. And in fact, the city of Watsonville just adopted a very similar measure, although they set their charge at 10 cents. And again, the intention is not for people to simply pay more for their beverages. It's just as the bag charge you implemented was, it's a reminder to bring your own container. Okay, I think I'll leave that and move on to the next issue. Tobacco waste. This is a problem that everybody is well aware of. We see cigarette butts everywhere we go. It is the single most littered item in the entire world. And what we clean up most of in all of our beach and river and other public cleanups. When we began the process of consultation, we were focused on extended producer responsibility options. And when we suggested that, we were asked some tough questions, including, well, if you go that route, how much of the tobacco waste do you think you'll be able to prevent? And we had to acknowledge probably not very much. We think we could probably successfully require the tobacco industry to help fund our cleanups, possibly do more cleanups. But we're not likely to ever get more than a fraction of the tobacco waste that way. There are a couple of additional factors that we had to consider. One is the recent state mandate that every county and city of California take steps to clean up its stormwater. One of the most frequent pollutants of our stormwater is tobacco waste. So taking action on this for environmental and public health reasons would also serve to meet that state mandate. And then there's the related but different issue of electronic smoking devices, which pose unique waste disposal issues. They are typically composed of a combination of plastic, metal, glass. They have electronic components, they have batteries. And then to use them, you add toxic chemicals containing nicotine, which is considered a hazardous waste. So when people are done with them, the only legal way to dispose of them is as hazardous waste. And that means taking them out to a landfill or transfer station. And then it becomes a county liability and they're quite expensive to dispose of. So it's really a headache for local governments, including our own. And that's setting aside the pretty dramatic public health issues, which I know some of our guests are going to address. I was startled to learn that after decades of declining youth smoking, it's increasing again, largely due to electronic smoking devices. So I mentioned the EPR approach, that's still something we can consider if the board chooses. But there have been a number of actual bans on some of these products recently, including bans on cigarettes with plastic filters, as well as bans on electronic smoking devices. Most recently, the city of Beverly Hills to widespread amazement ban both. So there is some precedent for this. And I'm sure you're aware that a bill in the legislature as B424 would do the same. That is now a two year bill. So it will come back for consideration next year. Okay, moving on to other plastic pollution. We received many suggestions for additional steps the county might take. And we asked a lot of questions, did a lot of research, consulted with a lot of experts, and we narrowed those down to a few that seemed both practical and particularly impactful. So we're gonna share those with you now. Helium balloons, it turns out, are a major source of death of seabirds, sea turtles. They float out to sea, they're mistaken for food. They become entangled, they choke on them. They choke their digestive tracts. It's affecting other wildlife as well. The silvery mylar balloons are an additional hazard. They've caused numerous power outages. They've even caused fires when they become entangled in power lines and cause shortages. So we wanted to suggest that your board consider a probation on the sale of helium balloons. Plastic microfibers is an emerging issue that we're hearing more and more about. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently found plastic microfibers throughout the Monterey Bay Sanctuary. That was quite a startling discovery. They have been found in almost every sample of drinking water tested, in many samples of seafood, in products such as beer and honey, and even in human blood samples. Unlike a lot of our plastic pollution problems, these have both a very specific source and a practical alternative. It appears that a great deal of the plastic microfiber pollution comes from our laundry. Most of our clothing these days is made of synthetic fibers, which means it's various kinds of plastic, more than 90% of what we wear. And every time we do a load of laundry, that laundry sheds up to hundreds of thousands of these plastic microfibers. They're so small that they float right through our wastewater treatment plants they go out to see where they are taken up by microorganisms and passed up the food chain, eventually into the bodies of wildlife and human beings. We learned that there are already filters on the market that can be attached to washing machines that will capture up to 98% of these plastic microfibers. I brought a sample just to show you. And I'll ask, to pass that around, would you pass that over please? Now this is just one example. There are a number of them on the market. They're readily available. They're relatively inexpensive. You can order them from Amazon. They're YouTube videos that demonstrate how to install and use them. And they just require occasional cleaning out just as you would clean the lint trap from your dryer. It's a pretty simple device. As with most of the measures the board adapts, if you decide to go forward with this, we would probably need exceptions for certain areas where maybe there wasn't space or for whatever reason it wasn't appropriate. But we were pleased to find that there is a practical solution that is gonna help combat this problem. So we wanted to encourage you to consider a requirement of these on new washing machines as a sort of experiment. And if that's successful, you might want to adopt a broader mandate. The K-Pod type single service hop beverage dispensers have become ubiquitous. John Silva and the gentleman who invented these calls it the biggest mistake he ever made. He envisioned this as being a niche product that might become common in offices. He never expected it to become so widespread. And we now use billions of these little plastic cups every year and then throw them away after a few minutes. It's a product that is designed to create plastic waste. Almost none of these are recycled. There are varieties that claim to be either recyclable or compostable, but we found that almost all of those go in the trash anyway. So this is a product that has longstanding alternatives. And we thought you might wanna consider prohibiting these in Santa Cruz County. Contact lenses are a plastic issue that I was completely unaware of until we began this process. It turns out that Americans throw away and flush and wash down the drain. Billions of contact lenses every year. And like plastic microfibers because they're so small, they tend to pass right through our wastewater treatment plants out to sea where like other kinds of plastic they're mistaken for food by wildlife. With the proliferation of daily wear lenses, the number has climbed astronomically. And we have learned that again there is a ready solution to this. Some of the contact lens manufacturers sponsor free recycling. They offer this to optometrists who sell their products. And a quick telephone survey uncovered the fact that about half of our local optometrists already subscribed to this service. I learned that mine does and I didn't know that until I asked. So it's certainly something we wanna publicize and you might consider asking the optometrists who are not already subscribing to this service to consider doing so. There's no cost to it. And then they could publicize it to their patients. We wanted to mention that plastic pollution reduction is also an element of the county's operational plan. You have already said a deadline of June of 2021 for action on this. So what we've prevented or presented are some measures you might consider to fulfill that element of the plan. And I'm gonna pass the microphone to my colleague Casey Colasa to discuss this next slide. So we put together a table with all the options presented in the presentation and there's columns to the right that address their ease of implementation, cost of implementation and impact. And we fully acknowledge that a lot of these things we were taking guess at as far as the impact and cost. But there are different levels for sure, depending on what options you take. And including enforcement, I mean, we would have to go out, do education outreach and also do enforcement to make sure we go through with ordinances that the vendors and people affected by this are following through with what they're required. Thank you, Casey. So we've covered a great deal of material and a number of possibilities very quickly. I wanna just say a few words about next steps in the process. After the board discusses this and decides on which options you wanna pursue, then of course we'll be delving into these in greater depth, we'll be resolving any questions there are, we'll be working out the details that need to be worked out. And of course we'll be consulting with the various stakeholders, including any affected businesses because we know they know more about their business than we do and that we don't know everything. So part of that process will be working out all those details and then bringing you back whichever ordinances you request, at which point of course there will be public hearings and the opportunity for additional public input. So we've talked a long time and I know we have a lot of folks in the audience hoping to speak so we're gonna stop there for your questions or further discussion. Sure, I'm gonna ask my colleagues if they have any urgent questions otherwise we'll get right to the public who's been waiting. Okay, so let's, how many people would like to speak to us today about this item? All right, please line up and you'll have two minutes each. The table. Yeah, although. You Dr. Nuanie. Okay, so he contacted me in advance, he's getting four minutes on behalf of his organization. Good morning, board and Supervisor Conrad, thank you very much for accepting my request to speak a couple of minutes here for you and it's great to be here in Santa Cruz County. I live in San Diego, my name is Tom Navalny, I am a public health physician. I've been in clinical medicine prior to that in Gernville, a town not unlike parts of Santa Cruz where I learned after six or seven years of clinical practice the hazards of smoking and as a physician you're on the tail end of those hazards. Just as we are on the tail end of the environmental hazards that are posed by a cigarette butts. Now I want everybody to quit smoking, I'll make no bones about that, that's my public health job and what I've done for my career as a public health service officer and later as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health in the US Department of Health and Human Services. The cigarette butt issue sounds like a small thing, these are small pieces of trash, they don't cause anybody any problems but as has been pointed out, these are the most common item picked up on beaches in the world for the last several decades. The tobacco industry has tried very hard to make their product which kills 450,000 Americans every year somehow safer or at least market it as somehow safer and that's what they did with the filter which has been on the market now for at least 50 years that's been, since the first scares about tobacco and health caused them to try to change their product. Well the fact of the matter is that the filter has no health benefit. It is cellulose acetate, a non biodegradable plant-based plastic that is a marketing tool, it makes it easier to smoke, makes it easier to take the first hit for those of you who smoke probably realize that if you compared unfiltered and filtered cigarettes you'd find that the filtered cigarette is a lot easier to start smoking with. They make it sort of a discouragement for smokers thinking that they're doing something to preserve their health by having a filtered cigarette. Well it isn't that. In fact what we've seen with the filter we've seen certainly lung cancer rates go down in this country tremendously. We've had some significant success. It used to be more than 50% of Americans including Californians used to smoke. We're down to 12% here in California so our lung cancer rates are down but there's a particular cell type called adenocarcinoma which is a result of inhaling more deeply interior lungs and affecting the periphery that has actually gone up in incidence over the last 30 or 40 years since the filter's been on the market. So for these reasons I think the filter is a hell of a hazard. It makes it easier to smoke especially for kids. It makes it harder to quit for adults who want to quit and it certainly has had this adverse impact on adenocarcinoma. But more importantly in terms of this bill in terms of plastics it's the single most important plastic piece picked up on environmental cleanups in communities and beaches throughout the world. And something easy can be done to help remedy that. My work is now focused on tobacco and the environment on a variety of levels. I have something called the cigarette but pollution project which is a 501 C3 charity here in California and we try to bring together the environmental concerns as well as the public health concerns regarding this issue. It makes sense on both ends. It makes sense because by eliminating the filter through sales restrictions which you have done already on filters it makes sense that people are going to smoke less. They're gonna smoke less without the flavors. They're gonna smoke less without this filter that makes it easier to smoke. So my job will be in some ways satisfied by getting an additive on cigarettes to make it less likely that it would happen. Secondly, by eliminating it from the environment there's going to be sort of an upstream approach to this pollution problem, this plastic pollution problem. This one's regulatable, fairly easily I think. The law, National Family Smoking Prevention Tobacco Control Act that has empowered the FDA to regulate tobacco products explicitly allows states and local jurisdictions to regulate the sales of tobacco products and in this case regulating the sale of filtered cigarettes can go a long way both in terms of preventing that source of waste in the environment but also making it harder for people to smoke which is our objective in public health, the state's objective, the county's objective, the U.S. government's objective. So it can happen at the local level and I think that that is where a lot of the action has happened in terms of tobacco control as well. Thank you. Thank you. At the end of my time and I wanna thank you for that and if there are any questions later I'll be happy to stick around and answer them. And thanks for coming up today. You're very welcome. Good morning. Catherine O'Day would save our shores. Welcome back from your break. First, I want to extend a really very heartfelt thank you for your strong environmental leadership. It's clear that individually and as a governing board you understand there is urgency around protecting our ocean paradise for our and future generations. We believe this even if you are unable to move forward with all the many and diverse actions we request and advocate for. But that said, I do want to implore you today to stretch beyond your comfort zone in considering the recommendations put forth by our DPW to significantly reduce plastic pollution. Since you hear from me often I will make just four succinct points that are not opinion but held to be true by scientists across the globe. Number one, plastics kill. We've all seen the disturbing pictures of wildlife who have died of starvation because their stomachs are filled with undigestible plastics or that have been entangled and strangled by plastic debris. Number two, plastics threaten human health. Numerous toxic chemicals and additives used in the production of plastics are carcinogens, neurotoxins, mutagens, endocrine disruptors and obesogens. This is of concern because researchers believe we may be ingesting a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Number three, plastics contribute to global climate change. They emit greenhouse gases at every stage of their life cycle from fossil fuel extraction through resin and product manufacture and distribution to breakdown. Number four, plastic pollution costs billions. Estimates indicate that California communities alone spend 410 million of taxpayers' money per year to collect plastic waste. Our plastic crisis is really that serious. So now is the time to make hard decisions and take bold actions. Please go as far as you absolutely dare to act on the recommendations. Please continue to lead the way. Please protect what we love. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for saving our shores advocacy. Hi, I brought the whole team here today. My name is Ron Goodman and if you were listening to NPR this morning between the horrific stories you were probably listening to, there was also an inspiring story that on August 14th, Pakistan as a country is banding the use of single use plastic bags and an international environmental organization said that that'll get rid of about 70 billion plastic bags and most of the plastic bags that are into the ocean which is the second greatest source of plastic in our oceans. There are inspiring things happening. It's possible to happen even in Pakistan. Locally in Santa Cruz we have stores that have started using glassware and silverware so that you can get food from like a hot bar, use that instead of single use at the farmer's market we went to the other day. We got a compostable plate and metal silverware. It's possible to do this. We have businesses right here that are trying to do it. We need to do it for this generation because the plastic is not going anywhere. This is the slogan that they used in Pakistan. Do something drastic, cut the plastic. I'd say maybe it's not so much drastic but bold so just to channel a little Elizabeth Warren there. Why do it if we're not gonna do something bold? Thank you. Good morning, Chair Coonerty and supervisors. And I want, my name is Linda Moran and I'm with Citizens Climate Lobby Santa Cruz Chapter. And I would want to thank you especially for that presentation, very, very useful. And I also ditto everything that Catherine Adage has said to you. Those were exactly right on comments and remarks. As somebody who has worked a long time to put a price on another greenhouse gas that is a global pollutant and that is carbon dioxide. I would want to suggest that one of the ways that we can also deal with this plastic scourge is to begin to make a yearly rising price on those items on that chart, which are deemed hard to phase out because we all seem to respond to economic incentives and even though it is absolutely clear in some of our minds, probably everyone in this room, that plastic really does need to be dealt with in really stringently regulatory ways. There are many ways to incentivize people's using alternatives. And one of the ways, of course, is by putting a price on it. And so that is the one thing I would hope that you would build into the formula as you go forward with getting the scourge of plastics out of our community. Thank you. Thank you so much. Judy Castada, Live Oak in the wonderful hardworking supervisor, Leopold's district. And I thank you all for your leadership and your wonderful hard work, important work. I've worked in education for 40 years or so because I believe profoundly in prevention and education when we work together. Just retired from Cabrillo's planning and research office after 17 years. We've never needed your precedent setting bold action more than we do now. We're drowning in plastic trash, a plastic trash nightmare, communities, our oceans, but also our psyches. I'm the silent majority that avoids this kind of thing, like the plague. But I think like me, many of us feel complicit and deeply conflicted. The board's bold actions are an amazing, powerful force for prevention and education. And you may not always know all of your good actions, what all of your good actions generate, but their sphere of influence for good live on and can't be underestimated. I had to Google the year, but I was reminded of when the board passed a sweeping animal ordinance, highly controversial at the time, spay neuter regulations, tethers for dogs and pickups, banned steel jaw leg hold trap, vehemently opposed by the fish and game at the time threatening lawsuits that never came. Bets at rodeos, the Google results, 1986. A couple of you were teeny kids, no doubt, but what I didn't expect from the Google search were all the links that popped up from counties, municipalities, schools, organizations, all over the country, all over the world. I was stunned, presidents were set for public health and safety. The board's examples had spread like wildfire for good saving countless lives since. Today, we're so proud of you taking on another critical public health and safety issue. We know now, maybe the first generation, we're causing our own demise on this plastic fossil fuel climate change path, which are all diabolically linked and we know that we're the last generation that can still do something about it. We humans don't have to continue to be the evil villain in this scenario. Together with our fearless supervisor, superheroes, we can save the earth. This is our Apollo mission. Thank you so much for your time and consideration. Good morning, Peter Stanger, LaSava Beach, second district with supervisor, Zac Friend, the wonderful supervisor. I just wanted to mention that a lot of the cleanups occur on the beaches and so you quantify those products that are picked up. I ride the roadways and one of the items that isn't quantified here is those little airline bottles of alcohol and the people that, especially on the rural roads, not so much here in the city areas. When they drink and drive, I'm afraid people do that. You'll see the beer cans, you'll see the water bottles, yes, but those little plastic bottles are proliferating all over our road sites. So I'd like you to also consider, in addition to what the county public works has come up with, the personal size, single use alcohol bottles be banned or some other way to curtail their sale in our county. Thank you. Good morning to our Coonerty and supervisors. My name is Ashley Blake O'Drager with Oceana. As a Santa Cruz County resident, I'd first like to thank you and mention that I really appreciate the leadership that you have shown with regards to protecting the environment over the last many years and hope to see that strong legacy continue into the future for the benefit of our county. Single use plastics enter waters on an average amount of 17.6 billion pounds a year, which is completely overwhelming and single use plastics are actually flawed by design and that they're made from a material meant to last forever but designed to be thrown away. As you are very well familiar, at this point, single use plastics are completely pervasive. They're found in the ocean's tiniest plankton that produce a significant portion of the oxygen that we breathe all the way up to large whales. It's been found in ice melting in the Arctic all the way down to the deepest points of the ocean. And as was mentioned earlier, the toxins associated with plastics have been found in human blood and tissue and those toxics have been associated and linked to different types of cancer, birth defects, autoimmune disorders and other ailments. Additionally, it's very expensive to address mitigation of plastic cleanup. Santa Cruz County, thankfully, provided some data as part of a 2012 statewide study that found that local governments are spending in excess of $420 million a year to mitigate single use waste, which includes single use plastics and preventing that litter from entering the oceans and waterways. In conclusion, I wanna thank you for your serious consideration of taking additional actions to address the impacts of single use plastic and hope to see your strong legacy continue into the future for the benefit of our communities, wildlife and our economies. And I believe we can be part of the solution, not just a contributor to the problem. So thank you very much. Hello, my name is Dallas and thank you so much you guys for being here today. I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time up here. The logical part of me, of course, wants to rattle off a whole bunch of facts, but instead I just wanna speak from the heart of my generation and the even younger generation. We're like in a white raft is how I feel and we're all willing to do the work and we're just so happy and thankful that you guys are paving the way with the first few steps and taking this very serious because I'm not in environmental law. I'm not in any sort of environmental schooling. I'm just your everyday 30 year old working three jobs and trying to start my business deeply in love with my planet and I wanna have a family and children that can be in love with it too but we are dying and we are very sick planet and a sick people. I mean, there's plastic in our body. That's really weird. And so really I just wanna send my gratitude that you guys are willing to come forward and take those first steps and be those people and we are here to match that we're ready. We don't need any of the extra things. We don't want them and we're ready to come in behind you with the solutions. We just need the space to allow for that to happen. So thank you so much and please take these into serious considerations. The plastic water bottles and the cigarette butts would be such a great, great first step in the right direction. So thank you again and have a beautiful day. Good morning supervisors and chair Coonerty. My name is Tiffany Weiswest and I'm here to talk to you today not as a representative of the city of Santa Cruz who I work for, not as a representative from the county commission on the environment but rather as a resident, a private citizen of the city of Capitola. I just wanna make that clear. You know what you have before you today has been as articulated already is that bold opportunity where you can aggressively implement some actions that has the potential to affect the rest of the country. As we know, as California goes off in the rest of the country and even the globe goals and as Santa Cruz County goes so again, lots of opportunity there. I wanna speak to the costs because I know that there are costs involved with some of these high impact items but I urge you to consider that without acting boldly now, the unequal distribution of costs that we are facing is completely overwhelming. What happens when our fisheries are gone because we don't take bold action? Our food webs disintegrate and we see increased incidents of cancers and other kinds of health impacts. The costs now, yes, there are costs but they are manageable, they're feasible. When compared to these other very, very high costs that we are facing as a society, these societal costs, it really increases the imperative to act now. So I urge you to act now to take the strongest stance that you can and the most aggressive actions that you can take. Thank you. Hello again, my name is Ali Webster, I'm chair of Sir Frider Foundation. It's my third time speaking in front of you all. I wanna start by thanking you all for always listening with an open mind to the environmental issues in the community. You've already done so much and we super appreciate it. I brought a souvenir today. These are 367 cigarette butts that I picked up on my own in about an hour along the three quarter mile stretch between the Trestle Bridge and the Boardwalk between the beach and the sidewalk. 367 cigarette butts. I urge you to count how many cigarette butts you see between the door and your car today. There's lots in the parking lot. These are toxic waste. Would you drink water that's been soaking in these if I opened this up in your bedroom and left it there? Would you be happy about it? That's what we're forcing on our ocean right now. I'm picking on the butts but they are not the only plastic that leeches. Most of our plastics that are littered are leaching toxic chemicals into our ocean and our waterways. Our addiction to single use is out of control. Plastic is a part of what we eat, what we buy, what we wear, it's in everything. Slowly but surely it's going out of style by passing plastic reforms. Now we will be jumping ahead of the state of California and the world. Our current weight of production and consumption is wildly unsustainable. Reform is inevitable. It's just a matter of when we do it. So let's lead the way. Hi, I'm Brett Garrett and human beings are destroying the planet with fossil fuels and plastics. It's basically the same industry and I appreciate all that you're doing on this issue. I had a couple of maybe practical things on the list. I think we should do all of the above. But contact lenses, I wanna make sure that the packaging is included in the recycling. There's, I think there's more plastic in the packaging than in the lens itself. The microfiber filter, I hope they make those filters out of something other than plastic. I hope we can somehow, I mean, it looked like there was a lot of plastic in that filter. And for me, it's all about reducing the demand for plastic. So hopefully we can request people to use a non-plastic filter. I hope they exist. And another plastic source that occurred to me is those bags that are used in dry cleaners and the bags that are used in catering companies. When they send out the dishes, they're all wrapped in plastic bags and the dishes are reusable, but the plastic is thrown away. So that might be another place we can cut down on our plastic use. Yeah, so thank you for all you're doing. Appreciate it. Caroline E. Lam, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. I wanna share some good news. I'm on the board of the Senior Citizens Organization of San Lorenzo Valley at Highlands Park Senior Center. We've been doing a fundraiser for some over 40 years of a community, all you can eat pancake breakfast. And we've had recycled reusable table service to some extent, but with some careful shopping through thrift shops and donations from our members. We've gone totally zero waste table service. We got some lunch and plates for all you can eat pancakes and some mugs. We had to buy glasses because we couldn't find enough of the right size, the same kind in the thrift shops, but we ordered those online and they came in a cardboard box. No plastic bubble wrap. None of them broke, none of them came perfectly well. We do collect the meat or eggs that are left on the plate and share that with pet owners. We compost what we can on the coffee grounds and so on. We take our oversupply of pancakes, potatoes or cut fruit to homeless organizations. So I want to invite you all. Third Sunday of the month, it's up December. We get a chance to take off. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. My name is Meredith Corwin, Keith. And I want to thank you for hearing my comment. So I opened recently the zero shop down in Capitola village with the mission to provide resources for individuals to cut their single use plastics. And that can only take us so far, each individual taking their own actions to bring their own reusable mug or refuse straws, but it's really going to take a larger action. And so I want to just strongly encourage you to consider the recommendations that have been put forth to you today. And thank you. Good morning. I'm Rod Caborn with Save Our Shores. And thank you all so very much for continuing to consider all of these items and everything that you do environmentally and in every other way. Thank you. I would like to speak to the fact that we've got a list up there and it's almost kind of teed up. It's like, well, if we get a few of the easy ones through then maybe everybody will be happy. And that's, but I'd like to talk about the definition of hard because I'm a little confused by that statement to be honest with you. I mean, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming as people have said already. And as you all well know, we are breathing plastic. We are ingesting plastic. We are polluting everywhere. And therefore the only argument can be as to why it's hard is because if you get pushed back economically. And so what I'd like to suggest is you are all brilliant orators. I've heard you speak before. And there are arguments to be made. So why not just make them because the community is behind you on this. People are proud to be, people are proud to be a part of this. And everyone's ready to embrace this. And don't underestimate the genius of our business people. They apparently are the ones that are gonna push back. I don't see it happening. If you actually make the decision and make this policy, all of it stand and then invite the local business to show their brilliance and their genius and to lead the country in innovation actually finding ways of mitigating environmental problems. Then we're on to something. And then people are working towards solutions as opposed to selling cases of plastic water because it makes money. Thank you. Hi, my name is Douglas Hall. I'm a 10 year resident of Santa Cruz. And everything has been articulated quite well. I want to really emphasize only two points. And that is that you have some recommendations from staff that have very high impact. And those are the ones that should be implemented and taken care of immediately both in terms of the plastic bottles and the tobacco waste because they'll have enormous impacts and can be done without any cost for the community. Thank you. Hi, Gail McNulty, Bonnie Dune resident. And mom to Evie, who's 13, Jack, who's 11 and Henry, who's seven. As I fear for my children's future, I am grateful to be working for Save Our Shores, a nonprofit with a 40 year history of catalyzing citizen action in accounting known for pioneering environmental protection and innovative thinking. In recent years, we have seen an exponential increase in threats to our beloved Monterey Bay. If this tsunami persists unchecked, by 2050 there may be more plastic than fish in the ocean. Our marine and coastal wildlife may be decimated and scientists predict a catastrophic chain of unstoppable climate induced impacts. While I've been shuttling my kids to soccer and junior guards, worrying about what they eat and reminding them to brush their teeth, their future has become less and less certain. By the time Evie, Jack and Henry are adults, it will be too late to avoid ever worsening fires and storms, longer droughts and food shortages, not to mention the known and yet to be known health impacts of the microplastics we're all currently ingesting, unless we make dramatic changes now. At this critical juncture in human civilization, we must face reality, act boldly and create hope for all of our children and the natural world on which we depend. Let's lead the way as we protect our Bay, acting swiftly and boldly to draft and approve serious single-use plastic reforms. Together, we can stand up to the profit-driven, live like there's no tomorrow plastic industry and set a powerful benchmark for the rest of California and the nation. We can't live in a disposable world. Our children and the countless children in California and beyond already suffering from plastic production fumes and piles of waste need us to work together to create a just sustainable future. Thank you. Hello, my name is Elizabeth Flynn. I teach chemistry at Cabrio College and I just wanna say thank you for doing the right thing. Thank you for doing the hard things like that other person was saying that just because it's hard doesn't mean it can't be done and it's so important in this country, we are a rich country. When you travel to other places in the world, people can't afford these pieces of plastic that we are using and throwing away and so it's our responsibility to do these things that you're gonna be doing here. In Santa Cruz and we support you and like that person was saying too, if the business is pushed back, we'll be your support and maybe they won't even push back. You might as well try. And in my, so I teach chemistry at Cabrio in my chemistry class, I have my students do a plastic waste audit and it really opens their eyes to the problem and I've told them before about the steps that our city has taken in reducing plastic waste and I'll be your free outreach, if you do the right thing and I'll get to tell everyone about it. So yeah, we encourage you to do the right thing and again, the bottom line isn't the economic bottom line, right? The bottom line is the bottom of the ocean where they recently found in the deepest places but any rover has gone plastic particles in that area. So the bottom line is the planet and the health of our community and our Bay and thank you for doing the right thing. Hi everybody, my name is Chris Slang, I'm a grad student at UC Santa Cruz in the Environmental Studies Department and a lot of what my research looks at is just consumption and how that manifests and how we can envision it as a community across communities within cities and across a gradient of the individual all the way up to the structural. And what I'm here also to thank you guys for the opportunity to speak and for being in Santa Cruz in a place that has so much environmental consciousness and so many beautiful places in the state. But I really wanna talk about the environmental injustice implications of plastic and we've mentioned the ocean, the whales but I'd heard the tobacco waste and sort of the human health consequences but plastic is really connecting us across a global network of injustice. The US is one of the leading exporters of plastic where it ends up in island communities, predominantly low income and communities of colors are located next to the landfills or plastic and all of our disposable waste is. Also next to the refineries where this is created to begin with, the Gulf of Mexico and sort of the South as a sacrifice zone for extracting our fossil fuels. It's no coincidence that this is a place that has the predominantly largest African-American percentage in this country. So I wanted to think about plastic not just as an individual but as a structural as a global thing that a disposability culture reproduces itself across racial lines or across class lines and so by being anti-plastic we're also informing a form of social justice in and of itself and I just wanna second what everybody else has been saying about being bold. This is a time of immense chaos politically, socially, environmentally and we just have to do everything in our power to create infrastructure that facilitates a just consumer experience whether it's bulk distribution or refillable water bottles and also the pricing and the taxing mechanisms that can take place. So thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing what you guys choose. Yeah. Good morning, my name is Tara Leonard and I'm a health educator with the County's Tobacco Education and Prevention Program. I wanna thank you first for your recent action in banning the sale of flavored tobacco products. That is a really important first step in decreasing both the negative health impacts of these products and also the overall volume of waste that they generate. That's because as I tell the kids that I work with tobacco products are bad for your body and bad for the planet. As Dr. Novotny has already pointed out when used exactly as intended they kill almost half a million people in the United States alone every single year. And then as if that's not bad enough 65% of them are flicked on the ground making them the most littered item in the world and an extremely dangerous one. According to the National Fire Protection Association improperly discarded cigarette butts cause devastating wildfires and are responsible for more than 20% of all fire deaths in the United States. That's close to a thousand deaths a year. They contain arsenic, lead, nicotine, the very chemicals that we have decided we need to protect the public from through important smoke-free air regulations. But they are under our feet millions of them every single day where they are toxic to wildlife to pets and to small children. A 2011 study found in fact that a single cigarette butt put into a one liter gallon of water kills half the fish in it. So surely this toxic plastic waste must have a very important public health reason to exist. I mean that's what the industry has been telling us for decades, right? But no, as Dr. Novotny has already shared with you a 2018 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute determined that in fact, cigarette filters not only provide no health benefit but they actually are related to an increase in the most common form of lung cancer. And why should that surprise us? Since the 55 years, since the very first Surgeon General Report on Smoking and Health, this industry has only taken action to mitigate the devastating impacts of its products when forced to through legislative action. Sadly, tobacco butts are no different. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, good morning, my name is Tyler Fox and I'm the owner of Santa Cruz Ways Magazine. I'm here to bring up an issue called greenwashing and we've been talking a lot about plastics here and I'm truly inspired. I hope you guys are too. I hope as you move forward that you take greenwashing into consideration because a lot of these big corporations are seeing the movement that we started. So what they're doing, they're putting the green stripe on things, 100% compostable. So we have this new ordinance in town but we don't have a commercial composting facility in this county. So what happens? They go to the landfill unless we're shipping them down to Marina which I'd love to hear if we are or if we aren't but they end up like in the landfill filling up our landfills which is supposed to be at capacity by 2050. I just learned. So time is ticking. Like I said, really think about this. Just because it has a green stripe says 100% made from plants. Okay, don't fall for that BS. So please as we move forward, think about these things and thank you everyone for speaking and thank you for listening. Appreciate it. So be our final speaker. Hello, my name is Ian O'Halloran. I'm a commercial kelp harvester in Santa Cruz in the Monterey Bay. I owe this whole entire region to the welfare of my life. It supports my economic wellbeing, my fun, my pleasure. And I also get to see the direct effects of plastic pollution in the entire ecosystem along this coast, not only in Santa Cruz County but in San Mateo County. So while I'm harvesting, I'm picking up trash as well. These isolated regions are interconnected to the entire coast of California but the entire world, I have people asking me about my products if there's radiation in the kelp. Privately and with my own funds, I test for radiation and heavy metals in microbiology. This entire issue is interconnected and interwoven with the health of this entire world. So I urge you to take action on this. I also want to credit Save Our Shores and Surfrider and Santa Cruz Ways for bringing up all of these issues. The downtown street team, I see cleaning up the highway so that's a great initiative that I don't know who's past but I see them making their way up the coast and really helping out these isolated beaches where especially during summer we have an influx of people from over the hill all over California that are coming in and trashing these beautiful areas. So this is of utmost importance right now in our life to tackle this issue and I can't say thank you enough for taking this into consideration and we're gonna do it as a community together. So thank you so much. So let me just take this moment and thank everyone who came out today. I know it's not easy to come out in the middle of a day on a weekday but all your comments were so based in science and concern and optimism, it makes a big difference. So thank you for being patient and taking the time. I'm gonna open it up for supervisors to ask questions and make comments. Supervisor Caput. Thank you. Old school is becoming new school and the old days I remember my mother would tell me plastic bags, they never gave them to you but the grocery store, you took your own bag. If you go back far enough it was probably like a potato sack, right? But people went to the store and they would use a reusable bag. And then we can look at milk, used to come in glass bottles. I mean, the milkman would deliver it if you're old enough to remember on the doorstep you can get cream on top or whatever if you wanted it. But so what I'm getting out of here is we can go down the line and talk about ideas. Plastic, I remember there's a movie, The Graduate, right? Over 50 years ago and the uncle tells the graduate, you wanna get, be successful, plastics. And that's where it all started. It was plastics, everything, throw it away, use it, dispose of it, get rid of it. I remember going to the Waste Management Commission meetings that we have once every two months and how many of these things are recyclable? This is a coffee cup. We probably buy it at Starbucks or we buy it at Pete's. And it's not recyclable, am I correct? Most of them are lined with plastic and so they are neither recyclable nor compostable. However, the ones being used in stores in the unincorporated areas of the county don't have the plastic liner. So they are in fact compostable or recyclable. Okay, but the great majority were people like that. The great majority you can only land for. They're not recyclable. And then how about the planters if you buy a breakfast to go or even to eat in the store at McDonald's or at Jack in the Box. It's the black tray with the plastic covers. How much of that is recyclable? That is actually one of the least recyclable types of plastic. Okay, the problem I brought up before too was when you go to a fast food chain, if they had an area where I could put the recyclable stuff that I'm using right there in the store and then they had a garbage can for the other, people will cooperate, but there's only one garbage can. Is that because most everything they sell in that store and everything it comes in is landfill? It's actually a very good point and one that many people have made. It's an additional item on our matrix that we didn't discuss. So thank you for bringing it up. It has been commented on often that while we require businesses to offer recyclable or compostable alternatives, when you're done with your meal, often all that's available is a trash can. So a simple change that the county could make would be to require businesses to offer recycling to their customers and if they sell food to offer compost as well. The collection service and the composting are available. We just need the bins. Right, so the availability is a big deal. The only problem I have with, when you, let's say you put a 10 cent, you go into a fast food store and you say we're gonna charge 10 cents extra for all the stuff that cannot be recycled, they'll pass it on to the consumer. Of course. Right, so we're not solving the problem. The only thing we're getting is maybe some more tax money to look at the problem. What I'd like to see is, yeah, something that requires where the public has a choice right there and they can put it in the right container. So I think that's a big part. And it does say here, increase public education. The public by and large is, that's a big part of it, but the public by and large is really behind all of this and they will cooperate if they're given the opportunity. The other thing I guess when I mentioned the plastic problem is not today's problem. It goes back many years. We have to be proactive rather than reactive. And it seems like now all of a sudden we're reacting to all kinds of issues when it comes to plastic. When we've had 50 years to look at this. And so now I guess it's more than late. We need to do something. That filter right there, what do you do with the filter when it's full of all those fibers? But Supervisor Caput, I just want to remind all the supervisors that we have a bunch of items. We have people waiting to talk to those items. So if we can keep our questions really brief, that would be great. I'll answer very briefly. It works much like the lint filter in your dryer. You just shake it out into the trash and replace it, it's very simple. Would it go to hazardous waste? No, it would go to the landfill. All right. And then notice it is made out of plastic. That's correct. So, whatever. This is one example, there are other brands. How much of this crisis that we're reacting to rather than being proactive is because of China rejecting a lot of shiploads of garbage where we before didn't think of twice sending it a ship and having China worry about it. That has certainly made it more difficult to recycle plastic, although the county is doing well at that we still recycle most of the plastic we collect. It has not had an impact on the growing proliferation of plastic and that's the issue that most of these measures are designed to address. Okay. And now plastic tarps on strawberry fields. Do they use them more than once? They do not. They do not. We're talking about a big deal here. We're talking about big stuff. Okay. It's not recyclable. Actually it is. It's another issue we could talk about at great length. Santa Cruz County actually pioneered the recycling of agricultural plastic and based on our success, the state help fund and agricultural plastic recycling business in Salinas on core recycling. They do recycle agricultural plastic, although there's not as much capacity as is needed. Okay. All right. That's a step forward. And then milk, the one gallon containers, they all come in. Where does that go? That goes, that is recyclable. In the county that is recyclable, in the city currently not. It varies from place to place. Okay. And then, yeah, I guess the other thing I've gotten at the last question. Thank you. We've got into a society where we gotta be consistent. When we're talking about landfill, we're talking about reusing things and everything like that. Artificial turf, that ends up in landfill after it's shelf life is used up. Talking about a football field and everything like that. So I guess what I'm getting at here is at the same time we gotta worry about, we're worried about plastic, but we have to worry about all kinds of things that are in our life that we use once and then it gets thrown away. There will always be more work to do. There's no doubt. Thank you. Okay. I'll try to be brief. I don't know if I can because I'm just inspired by the intensity and the sincere statements that were made here. I just wanna let everybody know that my office as well as every supervisor up here has received your cards and letters and emails and et cetera. So we did receive those. We know how you feel and how intense you are about this and how you want it to move along. I especially wanna thank a distinguished speaker, Dr. Navotny, and each and every one of you that spoke was distinguished. But thank you very much, sir, for coming up here. You're well highly regarded and appreciate your efforts. And thank the Public Works Department for following through on our direction that we made in February about and our non-profit partners. I think we really... It's a big problem that we know and we must reduce the plastics for our own health and the health of everything that's in the Bay and all around us. There's going to be an enormous amount of education that we're going to have to really put out there within our community and throughout about the dangers of plastics. And getting support from any of these initiatives is gonna take a large scale education program that an outreach that is going to be a consistent effort. And we have done it here before and we're gonna do it again in Santa Cruz County. In order to be successful, we'll need to have a real customized outreach program, I believe, an implementation strategy of how we're going to make this become a reality of what we want here in Santa Cruz County and what we have done in Santa Cruz County that was listed in the most recent one by Supervisor Friend's proposal about either the plastic bottles or containers in hotels and motels. That started something that others are following through with. And that's happened before with our plastic bags and so forth. So in order to be successful, I think that we're going to have to make most importantly an environmental and public health statement about the necessity of doing this, as well as economic for the case that we're going to be proposing. And I wanna make sure that whatever we come up with and what we're going to do that we let the manufacturers of these, not products, but the plastics that are being manufactured, let them know that we're doing this in the glass as well. Let them know that we're doing this and why. And I think that we're going to need, I think we'll be more effective if we take a regional approach at this. And I don't wanna sidestep the issue, but I think if we are broader in this, and I think we can, we saw it with Monterey Bay Community Power, first tri-county effort ever in the state to ever put something like this together and we did it. And the statement that was made, people wanna do it. We know, there's people that are, the leaders right here in this room and there's many more of you, but the people in this county want to follow if we just tell them how to get there. Now this is, it's somewhat complex and it's far reaching, but I think that we need to do, if we can, I think if we can approach it in a regional consensus building, I think we have a format of how to get there and how to do that. I think we're going to be more effective. And I'll be, you know, for Santa Cruz County, there's been a lot of hard work that's been done in this area before and there's a lot more to do. And the bottom line is we can do it and we can lead the charge. But I do think we're gonna have to have a bigger scale of how to address this and let the manufacturers, it's not the consumer's fault so much as it is the manufacturers of the product and how they change it. So I'm with you, we're all with you. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the testimony and the continued advocacy. You know, the issue of plastic pollution is real. This board has worked on it before and we will continue to be a leader on this issue. You know, the, as I look at the number of different pieces that are here, I just had a couple of questions about it. One was, excuse me, is the question about the food waste piece and the question of 25 cents. We see that our colleagues in Watsonville recently did this at 10 cents. Is there any research that sort of looks at 10 cents, 25 cents, whatever that is? Yes, there is. Berkeley was the first jurisdiction in California to adopt this measure and they did not pick the 25 cent number randomly. They actually hired social science faculty from the University of California, Berkeley to do an extensive study to determine what would be the impact of various levels of charge and what they found was that the minimum charge that would have a significant impact in people remembering to bring their own reusable containers was 25 cents. So that's why Berkeley went with that number. City of Watsonville was concerned about potential impact on portions of their community and opted for a lower charge but the research is pretty solid. Yeah, and when we did the plastic bag band, we started off at 10 cents but moved it up to 25 cents after a year or something like that. Correct, that was in the original ordinance that after a year it would go up to 25 cents so that's an option as well. Great, the other question I had was on this issue of microfibers. You know, I think this is a very serious issue as well. You know, it's interesting, my youngest daughter maybe eight or nine years ago did a science fair project on microfiber pollution and we did this whole thing where we designed our own filter and we washed lots of clothes to see what we would collect and we had a lot of spills into our garage where the washing machine is and she put together a science fair project which won here at the county science fair and she went to the state science fair and when she went there and she presented her project the judge had said, this isn't a real issue. And she was crestfallen as you can imagine but she also didn't believe it either. And when I told her today that we were coming and we were going to be talking about microfiber pollution she said, you're finally catching up dad. We should be running for office soon. Gonna finish architecture school first. And you know, on the issue of contact lenses this is actually a relatively newer issue. I know that because of issues with my eyes I have to wear daily contacts and I'm very sensitive about what I do with that waste and during the course of the conversation about what happens with contact lenses I never really thought about it really besides that you know I went online found that the Bousham loan has a one to one program where people can send it back and they only identified two optometrists that are participating in the program but when I contacted my optometrists they said yes, we could bring it in and it was interesting to hear from you that this is something that's already going on. I think it's important. You know, one of the things that we've seen just this week on the front page of the Santa Cruz Sentinel was a story about the San Francisco airport and one of the things that told me is we have to lead in order to start that national conversation that story was picked up across the country and it's starting a national conversation about plastics and what could happens at the airport and because everybody's familiar to going to the airport and it's part of a larger conversation that's going on around plastics. This board in our county has been working on on waste reduction at its source for a while and I think that we need to continue to lead in that piece and we need to show what we could do here. So there's on a couple of these I just want to go through this list for one second on the plastic bottles. I think that we have to start showing ourselves that we can, I think the first step is bottles like these and we shouldn't be selling single use plastic bottles at county facilities and we need to do public education and have resources for people to start doing differently. I know I was part of that handing out of cloth bags. We passed them out at Live Oak Super. Tim, you and I were there on a Wednesday passing out bags and some people said, well, I don't remember my bag but now most of us remember our bags and you go to the stores and you remember your bag and just like that carrying around bottles like this has, we can make that happen and we need to help to make that happen. On the issue of food waste, I think like my colleague says, we need to think about this regionally or at least county wide but I think we should look toward an ordinance but we should also direct you to work with the other jurisdictions so we can have a common charge. We shouldn't, it shouldn't be 10 cents here and 15 cents there and 25 cents there. We should do that collectively. I've talked to colleagues at the city of Santa Cruz and there is interest on that council about a similar type measure. So there's an opportunity for us to look at this county wide. Tobacco waste is a big challenge because I don't, the doctor's presentation, he is exactly right. This board has supported state legislation from our assembly member Mark Stone to rid the filters on cigarettes. We also know that when we did the flavored tobacco ban that that required a lot of outreach to retailers so they could think about that and we got pushback from retailers who said they was gonna kill their business and everything else. We still did it anyway. And so we, as we look at tobacco waste, I think we do need to do some more outreach with retailers to help them prepare for what our future would look like without that and say that we are considering an ordinance but do that outreach first and bring them in on the conversation. On plastic microfibers, I think it's really important that we move towards this. I think that the county should take a leadership role in the purchase of filters like this and do some public education to help people understand that this is a pretty easy thing to use and to come back later after that public education campaign with an ordinance that we could take a look at. I think that that's critical. And on contact lenses, we should actually find out how ubiquitous this might already be and get a decision about whether we need to make it a ordinance or not or whether it's, there are plenty of opportunities and part of it is just educating people about the dangers of it. So I'd be prepared to make a motion that would prohibit the sale of water and plastic bottles, single use plastic bottle less than a gallon at county facilities to direct the county staff to draft an ordinance around single use disposable cups in the unincorporated area, but with additional direction that you work with our other jurisdictions to find a common charge to initiate a public education campaign that includes the distribution of some filters and come back later with an ordinance after that public education campaign around microfiber pollution and to report back to us around the contact lenses about whether there are enough places where that's being done or whether we require an ordinance to make that happen. And the public education I assume. Oh yeah, and the public education is critical as part of that. I mean, one last thing I would add, I think we also need the CAO to come back at budget times for planning for the installation of additional hydration stations in county facilities. I think that that's critical. That's a motion. I'll second the motion and I do have some questions still not of my colleague, but in regards, one of the things that I found, actually when I first came into office, it was not too long after the plastic bag ban had been implemented. And most people believe that the fee that you pay goes to some sort of purpose, but it doesn't. It just goes back to the business. I mean, the entire idea is that it's a disincentive and under Prop 218 you'd be required to go to the voters to ask that that be dedicated to a purpose. And I think it should be dedicated to a purpose specifically for environmental purposes or environmental cleanups within what the public works department does. And we subcontract with some of the nonprofit providers that spoke here today. I don't think we should make, in essence, the same mistake in regards to the food wear. And I think that we should, if we're going to implement this, also go to the voters and then say, shall we dedicate that 10 or 25 cent fee toward environmental cleanup costs in the unincorporated or incorporated areas? If we're going to do this with other jurisdictions, it would make sense to me that we would include the plastic bags, although I know they're more de minimis now at grocery stores than they were originally. But you should include all things that we charge a fee for. It strikes me that as opposed to just providing a 25 cent disincentive, we should have a 25 cent fee that actually goes to some sort of environmental cleanup for the waste that it's actually being created. So if the maker of the motion would be open to when that comes back, that we learn about how that would be implemented because I recognize that this would create, at least on some small businesses, a burden of collection of a fee or a tax that they hadn't done before, which is different from what we've done. I don't know what the extent of that burden is. I recognize that this is an outreach effort. But I think that it just doesn't make sense to me to charge a fee, I'll recognize it reduces consumption. It doesn't go back to mitigating the issue that we're all sitting here talking about. That fee should go back to the cleanups and to these programs that we're funding that do exactly that. So if the maker of the motion. Yeah, well, I'm interested in hearing about what that would look like. I'm not sure it's what it would actually provide in terms of resources. And I do believe that it's the fee that changes people's behavior, right? I mean, I think that's the key point. But I'm open to hearing about other ways and some suggestions about whether that could actually make a difference. So this doesn't change the process of the fee. This directs where the fee will go. So for example, if the voters decide that they don't want the fee to go to environmental programs, the fee still gets collected because the board has taken its action or the local jurisdiction has taken its action. I don't know why the voters wouldn't want the fee to go toward environmental cleanup, but I think that it sounds reasonable, especially because I'm confident most people think that's where the fee's already going. They just don't recognize that it just goes back to the business that's charging it. Then you would have the dual advantage of reducing consumption and actually funding something that has an environmental and local benefit, which is what I just think that that seems like an easy thing to do. We didn't have a comeback date yet. We haven't asked, but I think we should provide some direction as to when these will come back. There are various elements. The letter actually suggested September 24th, but that's a discussion. Yeah, I would ask that not to be September 24th because I think we have the coastal development piece, the syringe services. I mean, it's gonna be a busy day on September 24th. So almost any other day besides September 24th. Tim, part of this is conversations with other jurisdictions and everything. And so does it make sense to come back in October or November? October would give us the time to do that consultation. Okay. So at a meeting before the end of October, work with the chair on what's appropriate date. Sure. And I assume more information is gonna come back on the microfiber filter side. I was under the impression that you presented it as a pretty easy thing to do. I've talked to a couple of people that have attempted to install it and have been unsuccessful on it. So I don't know, it'll be interesting. I think it's something that needs to be done. It's something that needs to be done at the point of manufacture, meaning that we need to encourage manufacturers to actually make something that has this built in. That's a statewide issue, not a local issue. But what I also don't want is to create an island in Santa Cruz County where we're actually incenting people to purchase things in the incorporated area or outside of the county as a result of getting around ordinances within here, which speaks to the importance of what Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Leopold said about harmonizing with other jurisdictions because you could very easily make an argument that if it's difficult for you or you don't wanna, or if you wanna avoid the ordinance and we've done this on everything from sewer laterals to other policies at point of sale, that we probably want this to be countywide because it doesn't strike me that under its current construct, it's easy for a lot of people to be able to do it, especially if you have an outdated system. But we would like it so that if you purchase something anywhere within the county, incorporated or unincorporated, something is done. And so when you come back, I'd be interested in also learning about the viability actually of an absent state legislation and what could be done just in the unincorporated area that doesn't provide that distance to it. Thank you for your work. The only thing I have to add, so I'm fully supportive of the motion and I'm glad that we're moving forward and it's critical when you read the reports about the Bay or about our human health, it's sickening the level of plastic pollution and it's way it's infiltrating all aspects of our lives. The only thing I would make, it's critical that we at very least come up with a countywide strategy. I was, we passed the flavor tobacco ban following the city of Santa Cruz. It was absolutely the right thing to do. I'm glad we did it. I was sitting in a coffee shop last week and I heard two young women sitting behind me saying, one said, oh, I just drive up to Scotts Valley now to get it and the other one said, well, why you do that? I just haven't delivered it online. And I thought, you know, like we made a statement, we're moving forward, but we're also now creating a larger carbon footprint as people maneuver around these, move around our rules. And so to the extent that we can make sure that we're uniform and especially, I mean, some of our smaller cities, 40 people like you all showed up today show up in some of these smaller cities. I think that you could really move an agenda forward in a way we haven't been able to. And we can very least start with Santa Cruz County and then let's spread to our Jason County so that we can make it really comprehensive and change people's lives. The direction is gonna include more than just attacks. And what we're directing is, are we going towards the source, which is the manufacturers? We did this before with Styrofoam, right? Styrofoam, if they keep, if we kept buying that and we just put attacks on it, we'd still have it. But these companies are capable, we landed a minute on the moon 50 years ago. They're capable of coming up with something rather than these cups like the county provides. There is no doubt that the alternatives to this throwaway culture and this plastic packaging exist. We have a job here to enact ordinances and push policies that push these manufacturers to do just that. When we banned the plastic bags, all of a sudden there was a plastic bag coalition as if it was an endangered species. And you know, when they talked about jobs and everything, at the end of the day, we have to push to get these manufacturers. The single use plastic cup isn't gonna go away completely with our action, but we need to start getting people to think about the tools that they need to have a lighter footprint on the earth to take plastic out of our waste stream. And these actions today help us make that happen. So they'll come up with an alternative that is recyclable if we put the pressure on the manufacturer. Yeah, I believe so. So we have a motion and we have a second and we're grateful for everyone who came out today. So all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you all very much. Okay, we're gonna move on to item number nine, which is to continue a public hearing to consider a resolution amending the general plan, local coastal plan, and accepting the secret determination of a notice of exemption and ordinance amending the Santa Cruz County Code chapter 13.10 to create a permanent room, housing, combining zone district, and to schedule a final adoption of the ordinance for August 27th, 2019, as outlined in a memorandum of the planning director. And I'll give people a moment to clear out of the room. Or mind Daisy and Pie that we've heard this item a couple of times so we can keep it short. Got it. All right, so why don't we get started with the staff presentation? Okay. All right, well, thank you, Chair Coonerty, supervisors. As you mentioned, the purpose of today's continued public hearing is to consider general plan and county code amendments to create the PRH Combining Zone District. As a reminder, the purpose of this zone district is to recognize the conversion of former visitor accommodation and care facilities to permanent housing that is affordable by design. So you last met to review this proposed combining zone district on April 23rd, directed staff to make some substantial changes, which meant that the amendments needed to be sent back to the Planning Commission for further review. The Planning Commission held two hearings in May and June and have come up with resolution 2019-07, recommending approval of the proposed amendments with some additional changes. In my presentation today, I'll focus on just those changes since you last met and reviewed the items in April. So first, regarding the general plan and local coastal program, modifications were made as a result of planning staff coordination with the local coastal commission staff in order to enable the creation of the PRH district, while also meeting and not weakening the LCP policies. Regarding the county code, again, as a result of coastal staff coordination, the VA visitor accommodation and CT tourist commercial zones have now been excluded from eligibility for the PRH district within the coastal zone. The ordinance was also modified so that new definitions are now listed in one place, and it clarifies that the PRH applies only to type A visitor accommodations, which are hotels, motels, and lodging houses. The wording of the ordinance was also adjusted to remove terms that are not defined in the code. The purpose of the district was streamlined to clearly state the intention of the district and clarify what is intended inside and outside the coastal zone. Regarding short-term rental use, at your last hearing, your board directed staff to clarify that short-term rentals are allowed if the use is already existing, the property has paid transient occupancy tax and a maximum of 30% of units on a PRH zone parcel may be short-term rentals. The planning commission further clarified the term current and payment of TOT to mean paid for the past three years, and recommended that new short-term rentals could be added to the PRH property if it's allowed as a use in the underlying zone district and you still don't exceed that 30% maximum units. Other changes to the county, the proposed ordinance, the inspection requirements have been clarified to give a one-year window for the five-year reviews, so five-year review could begin six months ahead of the five-year due date up until six months after that five-year due date to give some flexibility. An application requirement was added that property owners must indicate on their application whether they have or intend to have any deed-restricted affordable PRH units. This is something that aides coastal staff in their findings for coastal development permits. The planning commission also modified the proposed process for revocation to provide additional time to property owners to respond to notices and prepare for public hearings. Okay, and then finally, the planning commission also considered the findings of denial and revocation that were added by your board. Public comment was received expressing concern that these findings of denial or revocation were too vague or broad. In response, the planning commission revised certain findings indicated here to tighten up and clarify their meaning while retaining their intent. So in particular, the words untrue statements were revised to false statements intentionally submitted. Regarding inspection requirements, language was added to clarify that this review includes reinspection using the PRH inspection checklist, as well as review of the PRH permit use and development requirements. Staff also changed the word active to verified regarding code violations since property owners have due process rights and active cases are ongoing cases where a violation may not have yet been proven to occur. Regarding the criminal activity on the properties, the commission directed staff to work with the sheriff's office to modify the language for the finding related to criminal activity and staff produced the findings shown on this slide, a record of repeat visits to the property related to criminal activity that is attributable to the property owner management tenants or visitors. The planning commission's resolution has addressed public comments that were received regarding clarity in the ordinance related to definitions, findings of denial or revocation, the process for revocation and other topics, as well as coastal commission staff concerns. All public comments received since your last board's, your last board hearing on this topic on April 23rd are included in your packet as attachment H and a coastal commission letter of support of the amendments as currently written is included separately as attachment I. You may note that we've also received public comments about the suitability of the Bayview Hotel property for rezoning into the PRH district. As you know, an application for the Bayview Hotel is not being considered today. Since the planning commission continued consideration of individual applications to a date uncertain following adoption of the general plan, LCP and county code amendments. So just wanted to clarify that. So staff recommends that the board reopen the public hearing, consider the planning commission's recommendation and the proposed amendments to the general plan LCP and county code, adopt the resolution along with the CEQA notice of exemption and approve the ordinance and concept. Please note, there are some proposed changes to the ordinance language related to clarification and typos. You have received a couple of correction pages on the dais. So I would include those in our recommendation for your approval. And then we recommend that you direct the clerk of the board to schedule the ordinance for a second reading and final adoption at your next regular meeting on August 27th. Great, thank you very much. Is there any public comment on this item? Please come forward. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner, resident of Aptos. Thank you for the good report and for your excellent work, Ms. Allen, in this project. It's been a long, long project. I'm here to support this project because I think if you go back to the original intent, it is to try to support affordable housing in this county and I think it does it very well. Unfortunately, because of the Bayview Hotel property being one in the mix, I think it has been singled out and a lot of the additions and things added to this action were to become punitive for that property. And I think that's very unfortunate, Supervisor Friend. I want to also point out, I'm glad that the language was clarified in terms of code violations, active, things like that. And I want to let you know that the owner of the Bayview Hotel did submit a Public Records Act request to the Sheriff's Department because she's been accused of having so many sheriff visits to her property. The report showed that anytime a CHP or a sheriff pulls somebody over in the area and because the parking lot is open, the hotel is not being used at this moment. So people are pulled over in there because it's an open space out of the way of traffic. The Bayview Hotel comes up as the issue, the identifier for that action. There are many, many like that in there. So it is not really well represented some of the information that you may have, Supervisor Friend, about the Bayview Hotel, which I suspect largely comes from the developments around the Aptas Village Project Developers. I recognize there are issues there, but I think we need to support this project and all of these people have patiently waited to hear you. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board for deliberation action. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Ms. Allen, actually, for not just working with the Planning Commission, the board, before all your community outreach that you've done, you've been very responsive to every community inquiry that's come in. And I appreciate that. I do have a couple of questions regarding some of the Planning Commission changes. As you know, Supervisor Leopold and I hadn't supported the short-term use. I still have those concerns haven't changed for me. I think that the board has been in the business of restricting short-term rentals as the ability to ensure that we have a long-term housing, but I recognize that three members of the board disagree, that's the right. But one of the things I thought was clear, the board originally had voted on direction in April to not allow them. And then the board reconsidered, but one of the reasons was, was because there were legacy properties such as in Supervisor McPherson's district that have been doing this and therefore paying TOT. What I don't understand is why we would now allow a property to expose factor or retroactively pay TOT to come into compliance. I mean, either you've been paying it and you've been a good actor or you haven't. One of the things, the lecture aside from the community member, one of the things that I've been working on is ensuring that people that are actually good actors could actually partake in a program that could potentially benefit them. I don't understand why the board or the planning commission, maybe you could provide clarity would allow for somebody who is derelict on transit occupancy taxes to be allowed to be considered for such this program. Yeah, the allowance for retroactive payment of TOT would go back only three years. And the purpose of that is to make sure that the ordinance is internally consistent also with the findings of denial or revocation. And it allows for some flexibility. Yeah, I would say that was just about trying to create the same window that for example, we created for the vacation rentals to make the window large enough to make sure we preserve anything that is out there existing as housing. And it is of course up to your board whether you allow that extra broadening of the window or not. That's correct. We can't go further than three years. That's why you're proposing. I'm also saying you could choose not to allow the back look and opportunity. I mean, what the board could do is say that you have to be current on TOT. Again, walking back from April, the board took an action that we didn't want. The board revised that on a three, two vote saying that we would allow them because there are people who have been using, have been doing this and have been actively doing this and advertising this. Therefore that would speak to me that they've been in compliance. They've been a short term rental that have been paying TOT. If you broaden it to say that you can now retroactively pay it then you're allowing in essence somebody who says, well, okay, I did it but I was doing it underground and I was flaunting the county system and but it's okay because I can just pay it off. So I'm confused as to why that would be a board priority. I wouldn't support that as a board priority. I don't support the short term use at all but I would hope that the board majority on this would see to it that you would have to be somebody who is current on TOT. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to be a reason for evocation. The second question I had is just on the language and might be a better question for council but on 1310428D1, the modification on language for purposeful false statements versus I mean I guess what would be deemed an honest mistake. I don't really, it seems like that puts a burden that I don't know how we would prove. I mean, so somebody could falsify something claim that they didn't intend to and then I don't know how this burden, why the county would put this burden on ourselves to have to prove that. We have a certification in a lot of the forms that we provide, including just basic permits. So you certify that everything you said is true. We don't really have the, I mean, I recognize that if you have a, you transpose a number that's one thing but I don't understand why the county would place this burden or whether this creates an undue burden, maybe council can answer. How would the process go? I mean, so we would have to, it would go before a hearing officer, the burden of proof would be on the county to show that this is an actual false statement. I'm confused on the process there. Yeah, the way that it's being proposed right now, it would go before a hearing officer and that would get worked out in the mix, but it would be on the county to show that it was a false statement as opposed to, as opposed to what some have referred to as an honest mistake. And it's totally up to your board as to whether or not you would want that to happen. It's basically, this I believe was changed as a concession to community input that believed that it was a vague and ambiguous statement, but we could have arguments back and forth as to why it's not and why it would be keeping in conjunction with every other ordinance that we have to keep it the same way it always is. Okay, I mean, I would like to see that consistency in that regard. I don't understand why when we're permitting something, we would put an undue burden on the county then to showcase that somebody is deserving of said permit if they committed a false statement or whatever pretenses. It's already flexibility within the planning department during an application process to have communication with an applicant and verify certain things that happens all the time. Things are modified all the time throughout an application process, but to have that level of specificity that I think puts an undue burden on the county, I don't think actually serves our purposes nor is consistent with other elements of the code. So I'd also like to see that change, but I'd be interested in hearing others input on these two issues. Thank you. So, President McPherson. Yeah, and I understand the concern, a legitimate one. And I was, it was my community, my district, Consentments Valley in particular, that had the concerns. And I just want to thank the planning department. First of all, the commission and the housing advisory commission for their work on this. And our goal in this whole thing is to create a pathway for these properties to provide some form of affordable housing. And I think we're going to do that and get more of that because of what we have before us. This is really especially important in Santa Rosa Valley and my district where large scale development of affordable housing is really not feasible because of restrictions, particularly with subject tanks and so forth and one acre minimums and so. But I think this also allows some properties to remain economically viable in this respect by having the flexibility to serve visitors and permanent residents. As long as they qualify under the code that we're, I think we're about to approve. And I do, I think that doing this, the properties that have done it legally and paid the POT and I think it was probably not more than a dozen properties or something we were talking about at the time. But I don't know if we have that specified, but that being the case, I would like to just continue on with it and I can appreciate what I know. I can understand the opposition to this, but I think it's a legitimate request for those who have been determined to have followed the rules of the game, so to speak. So I'll hear from more of my colleagues, but I'd like to make the motion that we would, that we'd move to this recommended action as proposed, but I'll hear more from my colleagues as well. I'll second. Okay, motion a second. Any other? Well, I think the intention of this ordinance is a very good one. And the idea of having our code look at what these properties actually are, it makes a lot of sense. The short-term rental piece is just confusing to me because it seems in a lot of ways to run counter to the goals. And that's why I didn't vote for it last time. I appreciate the remarks made by my colleague about the question of false statements. It's one thing to take public input, but it's another thing that people should be held accountable for the statements that they make. And I think the county does have a reasonable history where if someone makes an honest mistake, it's an honest mistake. But if someone tries to not be honest, that there should be consequences. And it shouldn't be our burden. Should be their burden. So I'd appreciate if we, I'm not sure I can support this with this short-term rental piece at all, but I think it would be wise to change the language about who's responsible for okaying the false statements instead of giving the burden on us, it should be back on the applicant. Okay, so we got a motion and we have a second. I'm supportive of the motion. I think, frankly, I think this process has taken far too long for the number of properties we're talking about and to have our talented planning department spending an ordinance amount of times on essentially moving forward with what already exists. And I think I trust you to, that you understand the economics of all these various properties and what will work and what won't work. And I'm just interested in moving away from, getting this done, seeing how it works and moving on to more substantive planning issues in our county. So that's why I'm supportive of it, but I appreciate the work. It's not that, I think the work's been great and really important. I just think that cost benefit of any more time is not worth it. So we have a motion and we have a second. Would the maker be willing to split the motion? I think that there's unanimity on the creation of the program. I think there's not unanimity on the short-term rental on that language change. If the maker isn't, then I'll vote against the program overall because I'm not given a secondary option. I can propose a substitute motion, but what I've heard the maker say is not that far off from what I'm saying, which is that I have no issue with the good actors on the TOT, but what we're allowing is for people who haven't paid it to now come into compliance by realizing that they're being given this gift and they can come into compliance. I have a concern with that. And so there was two elements that we were looking to change, but I'll... Can we go back to the recommended actions? I mean, I'm happy to split the motion, but I don't, within this, the motion was to approve the recommended action so I don't pulling, there's no one bullet point to pull out. I think we should just sort of move forward with a vote. What we're asking for in terms of splitting the motion is we wanna support the idea of the permanent room housing designation and the goals of that. We don't support the short-term rental piece and to break that off into a separate part of the motion is a way of acknowledging that we generally support the program, but we have concerns about that. And I'm okay with that conceptually. I don't know how to do it practically. Well, I think my colleague has a different motion and maybe if you listen to that, maybe there's a way of meeting the needs of you can't figure out how to do it, maybe someone else asks. I would just need to find within the code section where the short-term rental number is, it's 13.10.42... 427K? 427K. So it would be then I'll introduce the substitute motion which is for the recommended actions without 13.10.427K and a modification of 13.10.428D1 which is the modification that was made by the Planning Commission on false statements to adhere to the original proposed language to the Planning Commission by planning staff. So the burden is therefore on. This isn't, the problem is that's not splitting the motion. This is a substitute motion. If it's just a splitting... I introduce the substitute motion. Okay. And that's what I'm doing, which is for the recommended actions with these two elements being modified, which is the elimination of 13.10.427K which is the short-term rental component and the 13 and modifying the language in 13.10.428D1 back to the original language that was proposed to the Planning Commission by planning staff, which puts the burden on the applicant, not on county. I would second. Okay, so now we have a substitute motion on the floor. Yes? Supervisor, we can't adopt the recommended action as stated because it has to come back for first read. The changes that you're making wouldn't allow the board to adopt it. And that's what the recommended action is. I just want to be clear about what the motion is. And why would that be if the Planning Commission considered this already? And I'm just changing something that they've already considered. It wouldn't have to go back to Planning Commission. It just has to be renoticed and be put on a future agenda under the Brown Act for the planning commission. I think that's a good point. Okay, so we're going to adopt the agenda under the Brown Act because we're adopting an ordinance. So in order to adopt the ordinance, it has to be noticed, placed on an agenda. This is the version that was placed before your board. So we're going to have to come back. We can't adopt it on first read with those changes. Today, today. Okay, so the substitute motion then would say what? To come back with those changes? Yeah, exactly. The substitute motion would be to come back with those changes at the August 27th meeting. And we could do the first reading on August 27th? Absolutely. It's similar to what's being proposed here. Yes, the matter would just come back on August 27th with the changes that you want to make. Staff would make those changes, bring it back on August 27th. So August 27th, and instead of the second reading would be the first reading and in September 11th or 10th, whatever that meeting is, will be there. Assuming it passes on August 27th, the second reading would be on September the next meeting. I recognize this as an exercise in futility because there aren't three votes for this. But it's a statement of where we are, which is that we're supportive of the program and concept to understand that the maker of the original motion won't accept the changes. So that'll be my motion to come back on the 27th with these changes. I know we have a second, I know we don't have three votes for it. I will move through on the regular process and I think two of us will vote against what's being proposed. So, do you want it? Substitute motion, yeah, I'm honest. You want to vote? That's my substitute motion. All right, so we have a vote on the substitute motion, which is to bring it back on the 27th for a first reading without the short-term rental. Okay, so we're voting on the substitute motion rather than the first motion. Correct. And if it passes, then your motion would be null. Okay, so all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. Okay, so now we're back to the original motion, which is to approve the recommended actions. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. No. No. Okay, so passes three to two. Thank you all for it. Wait, this is an ordinance. Does it have to pass four to one or three to two is okay? Three to two. Okay. Okay, thank you very much for your work. Item number 10 is to public hearing to consider the proposed condemnation of real property located at 111 Ralston Ridge and adopt a resolution of necessity to institute imminent domain proceedings to obtain possession of the required real property interests as recommended by the deputy CAO and director of public works. And do we wanna have our county council put this in context or? Yeah, this is a concerns of matter that's currently in litigation that I think your board is aware of. We're negotiating with the property owner. This is as close to what you would consider to be a friendly eminent domain proceeding as possible. And we kind of need to do this in order to preserve our ability to pursue the eminent domain action at trial in the event it goes through. But we're looking at a resolution of the matter we're negotiating with the property owner. After that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Machado to supplement. Right, okay. Good afternoon, Chair Coonerty, Board of Supervisors, Matt Machado, Director of Public Works. County council stated it quite well right there, but I'll add that the homeowners are not in opposition of this resolution necessity or this public hearing process that we are working together for a mutual resolution. I will also add that this requires a four fifths vote to conduct the public hearing and to adopt the resolution necessity. I will stop there and answer any questions you may have. No questions. I just do appreciate the work that our county council public works department has done on this. I think it's a great move forward and I would move the recommended action. Hold on. First, I'm going to ask if there's public comment. Thank you, Becky Steinbrunner, I'm a resident of the mountains. So when I see eminent domain coming through from the county to take away someone's home, it caught my attention. I understand that it is not being contested by the owners. They're still living there. I drove by and looked at it. And quite frankly, I think that before you approve this, you need to see photos. Supervisor McPherson, have you been to the site? So I think before we take someone's home, there are actually two homes there and eliminate a property tax base of over $6,000 a year. For a repair that I just, I didn't see the danger. There's still people living in their homes. They're not red tagged. So the damage to the homes is not so significant that people, they are not habitable. There are places like that slide all over the county. There are concrete barriers at the base of the slope for traffic and even the bicycle shoulder is there on Bear Creek Road. I do not see the value of the county taking someone's home to provide a slip out repair that happens all over the county. This is not making sense to me. And I didn't want to disturb the occupant. I'm happy to hear they're not contesting it, but I would like to have them come and be more involved and issue a statement to you to verify that. I would like your board to see photos of this area because it's a long way out. And again, we're talking about taking people's homes at a time when there is a very little housing in the county, especially in the San Lorenzo Valley for affordable housing. So I think this needs to be put on hold until you have time to really look at it more carefully. Thank you. Thank you. That closes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board for deliberation. I am not a fan of eminent domain by any reason, but this has been well reviewed or overseen by all parties. I think it's the right thing to do for public safety in the future. And I'll make the motion for the recommended action. Okay, and I'll second that. I'll just comment. I'm not a big fan of eminent domain either, but in this case, there are a lot of circumstances and also the condition and everything of the property that have to be looked at. And we have looked at it. This is a little different than just going in and saying, hey, we want to get out. Yeah. For the benefit of the public, this is not done in the dark of night. There have been lawyers involved. There have been the property owner has been involved. There have been many conversations. We don't take this lightly. And as our attorney said, this is a friendly action in the hopes towards working to resolve the issues. I'll prepare. Where is exhibit A with the findings? All right, we're not going to have you yell out, please during our, no, no, you already, you've already spoken for your two minutes. Thank you. So we have a motion and we have a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Moving on to item number 11, as the board of directors of the Davenport Sanitation District of public hearing to consider the 2019-2020 Davenport County Sanitation District sewer and water service charge reports and adopting a resolution confirming the 2019-2020 sewer and water service charge reports as outlined in a memorandum of the district engineer, Mr. Adler. Good afternoon chair and supervisors. On June 11th, 2019, your board approved the 2019-2020 service charges for the water and sewer for the Davenport County Sanitation District and set today is the day for the public hearing to hear the reports or about the reports. The sewer service charges are increasing overall by 4.2%. The water service charges are increasing overall by 4.4%. In order to complete the water and sewer service charge proceedings, it's necessary for your board to open the public hearing, take testimony, hear any objections or protests, and then at the conclusion of the public hearing adopt the resolution confirming the sewer and water service charge reports and I'm available if you have any questions. Thank you very much. So I will now open the hearing. Is there anyone who'd like to speak to us today? Seeing none, I'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the board for deliberation and action. I'll move the record back. Second. Got a motion by friend, a second by Leopold. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you, Mr. Adler. Moving on to item number 12, we'll consider an ordinance repealing chapter 7.32 and sections within 7, 4.20 and 7.28 of the Santa Cruz County Code and amending chapters 4.20, 7.16, 7.28, 7.30, 7.31, 7.39, 7.79, 7.110, 8.02, 8.03, 8.12, 8.16, 8.18, 8.21, 8.22, 8.23, 8.26, and 8.28 of the Santa Cruz County Code to change typographical errors, address organizational issues, align the code with changes of state law, delete unnecessary material, make additional miscellaneous changes and schedule the ordinance for final adoption on August 27th, 2019 as outlined in the memorandum of the County Council. Chair, if you don't do it in one breath, you have to do it again. That's right. I know. Memorized. Yes, memorized it. So good morning, Board. Back with our eighth installment of changes to the County Code. This one deals with health and safety, public welfare chapters. We're continuing to make progress on this project. We anticipate that we're gonna continue to bring you additional ordinances over the next few months as we start to get closer towards finishing it off. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Surveysel, Leopold. Thank you, Chair. This is a very interesting project to be taking on. And in this section, I learned about mosaic index Cs and that we have prohibitions have been nudity on our beaches and everything else. There is one section that I'm prepared to support these changes, but I'm gonna ask that we add on an additional direction around section 8.12, which is the drug paraphernalia piece. When I read this, I didn't realize it was in our code. I didn't realize the words roach, clip, or bong were in our code at all. It's a relic of a different era. And now that we have legalized cannabis and there are stores that are selling these pieces of equipment, we may not need this section. I talked with Sheriff Hart yesterday and he tells me that they never use this code section if they're gonna go after people with paraphernalia. There is a state health code section. And I think if we're cleaning up our code, it might make sense to get rid of this. Recognizing that not all of the rest of you have had conversation with Sheriff Hart, I'd like to recommend that when we adopt this that we direct staff to meet with the sheriff's office and come back with a recommendation about whether we actually remove this section of the code because I don't see very much use for it. Is that a motion? First, we'll ask, is there any public comment? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the board for action. I would move the recommended actions in direct county council to meet with the sheriff's office and come back with recommendations about whether we need to keep section 8.12. We'll do. Well, we got a motion, a motion by Leopold and a second by Friend. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Moving on to item number 13, which is considered final appointment of Chris Miller of the Workforce Investment Board as a representative of the local business for a term to expire June 30th, 2022. I'll first ask if there's any public comment. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the board. Move motion by McPherson, second by Friend. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. We're now moving into closed session. Will there be any reportable actions? No. Okay. Thank you.