 We'll call the meeting to order of Thursday, August 9th. The Capitola City Council, may I have a roll call, please? Council Member Harlan. Here. Council Member Bertrand. Here. Council Member Peterson. Here. Council Member Bator. Here. Mayor Termini. Here. All rise, please, and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the pride of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Mr. City Attorney, may I have a report on closed session? Thank you, Mayor Termini. The item, the council had a number of items scheduled for closed session this evening, including a matter that was added on as a late item pursuant to the Brown Act before we adjourned into closed session. That was the tort claim of Madison Wells. That claim was added on the advice of council who advised that the claim came in after the agenda was posted and could not wait for direction until the next council meeting, which won't be a month from now, until a month from now. Due to time constraints, the city did not discuss the city of Capitola versus Friede Pellerin litigation concerning Greenway. That was not discussed in closed session. Similarly, due to time constraints, the Oscar Ramirez tort claim or case was not discussed in closed session. The council discussed the Wells tort claim in closed session and gave directions to its attorney, Vincent Hurley, with regard to negotiations in that matter, which will take place in the near future. And finally, the council heard from myself with regard to the receivership case involving Mr. Thomas DiAngelo. And I received directions from the council with regard to that matter, but there was no other discloseable information out of closed session. Thank you. And I wanted to state that tonight's meeting is being live, cable cast on charter communications and AT&T U-Verse, channel 99. Our technician is Lynn Dutton. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda? Only the item that was added to closed. This is now time for public comments. It's time for the public can address the council on items not on tonight's agenda. So if you have any items to say to the council, please come forward. Welcome. Thank you council members. My name is Mark Crane. I live on Bay Avenue. The roundabout on Bay Avenue has been on my radar and the city's radar for since about the early 90s that I'm aware of. And I just wanted to state that I was absolutely in favor of it and that would encourage you to make it come forward as fast as you can. I think that it will really be a gift to the neighborhoods around there. Every day I witnessed traffic moving across my front driveway from either the church, from the schools, from any of the events that you so graciously sponsor and hold in the city. And I just wanted to say I'm a proponent of the roundabout. So thank you. Thank you very much. Would anyone else like to address the council? Then we will go on to city council, city treasure. Oh, I'm awfully sorry, sir. Step up. This is for public comments. On items not on the agenda. Okay. Good enough. Mr. City Treasure, do you have anything to tell us? Yes, quickly. Thank you, Mayor Termini. I know there's been a lot of controversy lately over the, well, not lately, but over the jewel box traffic calming issue. But looking at the invoices, the last community workshop that we held cost us $11,000 in consultant fees. So that's a number that you should be aware of. I hope we got our money's worth. That's all. Thank you. City staff, anything to tell us? Staff has no comments. No comment? Ed, no comments. Kristen. Yes. Just have quickly two upcoming community events that I wanted to share with everyone who is interested. One of them is our Capitola Foundation for Community Service and Public Safety. We'll be having our charity golf tournament on October 5th. So that's something to look forward to. You can find out more about that at capitolafoundation.org. And the other one is the Community Action Board is going to be having an event on October 4th to roll out our Community Action Plan and discuss our plans for, our plans for and our previous efforts in community engagement. And that can be found at capitolafoundation.org. Stephanie. The museum has a wonderful exhibit. We are open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday from noon to four. If you haven't been in lately, come on in. We also have some wonderful old videos that people have given to us. And so if you want to sit down and watch an interview with Audrey at the Capitola Theater or interviews with other interesting people and lots of old begonia festivals when they were very plain and simple, come on in and have a good time at the museum. Jacques. So in recent talking with constituents, something came up, Jamie, you might be interested. Steve's not here, I think. A walkway going from the new parking lot up to Bay Avenue. So it was expressed that that is a route they like taking, but they feel rather insecure walking in a potential traffic pattern. So they'd like to see a little walkway to make it safer. Anything else, Jacques? No. Anything else? The event happening on September 29th and 30th is gearing up. That's the new Capitola Beach Festival, replacement of the irreplaceable begonia festival. So keep your eyes open for that. In case anyone didn't notice last week, the circus came to town and a good time was had by all. We'll move on to boards, commissions and committees. Yes, on Tuesday, the Historical Museum Board interviewed two qualified applicants for an opening on its board. They have recommended Dr. Brian Lagakas, who is a retired art history teacher from Cabrillo for the position. Is the applicant here? I heard that he might be here this evening, if you would. Okay, and. Oh wait, we haven't appointed him yet. Hold on a second. I'm gonna call for applause in a minute, hold on. And so he is the recommendation of the museum board for a three-year appointment. Thank you, what's the pleasure of the council? Move the approval of the recommendation. And there's a motion and a second, all in favor. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous, now you can applaud. You wanna come up and tell us something or just wave or you're good. Thank you very much. We'll move on to the consent calendar. These are items taken with a single vote, unless someone from the public or the council or the staff would like to pull any item. Would anyone from the public like to pull any item on our consent agenda? Seeing none, council? Motion to approve consent calendar. Wait, I have one, yes? Second? Yeah, we have a motion and a second, but I think we have an item that Jacques wants to take off. So I read about the grand jury report in terms of mental health crisis and in particular our intersection with our police department. So I'd like to receive the report. I have no problem with that. Respect the grand jury, definitely, and their work for the community. But I'd like to recommend to staff here, excuse me, city council that we bring back the chief to talk about how our police department here in Capitola responds to cases like this, where you obviously have a person who has a mental health issue and there's a confrontation or some other kind of action that calls for a police officer of Capitola or any other division actually to respond to that. And I've talked to the police chief about this. We do have trained officers to deal with these situations, but also feel it's very good to have a presentation so that the public gets an idea of how Capitola police responds in these circumstances. And we will bring that forward at a later date. And on the same note, I received a letter from a citizen that two of our officers on Wednesday night helped a disabled Capitola resident when his electric, little electric rascal chair just petered out on him and just wouldn't work anymore. So they commenced to lift him up in the chair and bring him into his home. Thank you very much. So we have a motion to second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Consent calendar's approved. We'll move on to general government public hearings. And the first item is the citizens initiative regarding placing an initiative on the ballot. And because of the size of the audience and the amount of potential speakers, we ask you to choose whether you would like to speak for one minute, two minutes or three minutes. For one minute, you take a green card and you get to come up first. For two minutes, you take a yellow card, you get to be the next wave. And if you take a red card, a full three minutes will be afforded to you, but you have to wait till everyone else has spoken. So hopefully after this staff report, you can line up. And when you fill that card out, there's no reason to fill it out at the podium because dropping it in the box gives us all the information we need. Staff, can we have a report on item nine A? Mr. Mayor, members of the council, I think the city attorney is gonna be leading this presentation for us this evening. And I'll be helping as appropriate. Thank you, mayor. The first item you have to consider this evening is more or less ministerial. You have no other options under the elections code, which is at this point, you have to decide whether to submit the initiative to the voters on the November ballot in exactly the form that has been submitted to us. Or secondly, you have the prerogative to adopt the initiative exactly as it was presented to us and make it part of the Sanctuary of the Capitol Municipal Code. So that will be your first task. At the last council meeting, you instructed our office in conjunction with the city manager's office, the planning department, public works department and the finance department to prepare an impact report and you instructed us on the topics to be addressed in that impact report. The impact report is authorized by elections code section nine two one two. That report is part of your council agenda packet and it's been available to the public since last Friday for their review and consideration as it has been to the council. The elections code nine two one two one two report, pursuant to the council direction was to address certain items and those are listed on page one of the report. The proposed ordinances consistency with the general plan, the local coastal program and the bicycle transportation plan adopted by the capital city council and certified by the California coastal commission. The proposed ordinances consistency with the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail master plan adopted by the regional transportation commission and the capital city council and certified by the California coastal commission. The legality of the initiative, the initiatives impact on transportation, infrastructure, the initiatives impact on traffic congestion, the initiatives fiscal impacts, including impacts relative to the availability of grant funds for Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail improvements within the city. So we conducted that analysis in some detail and the results of that analysis are set forth fully in the report. After reviewing the pro-fort, you will see that we have concluded that the ordinance in a number of different respects cannot be reconciled with the Capitola general plan and the bicycle transportation plan and also the Monterey Bay Scenic Trail master plan. And we have outlined all of the policies in those plans that are either impeded or contradicted or frustrated by the mandates that are set forth in the initiative. So we came to the conclusion that on this basis, there are a lot of inconsistencies and in order to legally implement the ordinance, the plans would have to be amended. In other words, in our legal analysis, one of the premises is that if a land use ordinance is proposed by initiative and it has the effect of amending the Capitola general plan, that has to be expressly stated in the initiative that the intent of this ordinance is to enact this particular land use ordinance and simultaneously amend the general plan to make the land use ordinance consistent with the general plan. The California Supreme Court has held that if a land use ordinance is proposed by initiative that would effectively amend the general plan and the general plan amendment is not apparent to the electorate, the initiative fails and we identified a number of instances where that is and the initiative itself tells the electorate is not intended to amend the general plan. So we found a fundamental legal flaw there. The second legal flaw we found in the ordinance was that it instructed city staff on how to implement a plan that was adopted by the city council. In other words, the general plan and the scenic trail master plan were both adopted by the city council. Those are legislatively adopted policy documents. Once the council promulgates policy legislatively, staff is tasked with implementing those policies and the implementation of those policies is done by staff through the city manager. The city manager is responsible for the administrative service of the city. So once a plan is adopted legislatively, the implementation of that plan, in other words, bringing back a CIP with the projects called for by the plan, bringing back a budget that allocates appropriations for projects called for the plan, that is all done by the city manager. And he brings it back and the council will approve those appropriations and the CIP, but the actual carrying out of the projects is done administratively. There's another body of law enunciated by the California Supreme Court that says initiatives have to be legislative in nature. If they dictate administrative action, they impair the operation of the city and not being legislative and being administrative, the initiative is invalid. So we found a flaw there. The ordinance on a third basis tells the city, subsection A in the operative section of which contains the ordinance's mandates, tells the city, it tells you and city manager how it can and cannot spend city money and city resources. Again, the California Supreme Court has said that an initiative that impairs the fiscal prerogatives of the city council, you are duly elected as the trustees of the city's funds. You have a fiduciary obligation to spend the city's funds in a manner that you deem in the public interest. And an initiative cannot deprive you of that authority or interfere with that authority. We came to the conclusion that this does very clearly by saying how you can and cannot spend city resources that are entrusted to you to be spent. And then finally, we came to the conclusion that the ordinance is vague. It's very hard for city staff to understand exactly what and what, for example, is related to or they use terms like related to and we've identified those in here. And detour is a very important term used in the initiative but the term detour is not defined. So we came to the conclusion that again, under principles enunciated by the California Supreme Court because staff understands that the ordinance intends to bridge its authority, but it does not explain to what extent and who makes those decisions and things of that nature. So it places staff in an untenable position. And if you read the last section of the report, there are some very tangible illustrations of how that's done. Do we interpret the word detour to constitute the entire portion of the scenic trail that is off the rail corridor? If so, that means that does that mean that city staff cannot expend money or resources to maintain any of the bike paths that connect the one end of the where the path leaves the trestle bed or the rail bed and to the point where it returns the rail bed over on Monterey or does it mean just the trestle? We don't know, they use the term trestle in one of the mandatory sections of the ordinance under subsection B, they use the word trail. It's very difficult to understand exactly what the mandate was. So we came to the conclusion that there are some significant vagueness problems and the council gave us direction to have those concerns, those legal concerns brought to the attention of the court so the court could weigh in on them and see if the court agrees with us and that lawsuit was filed last week and a hearing on that lawsuit will be conducted on August 20th. So those were the concerns that we had and then there were other things that were not legal in nature such as traffic congestion, transportation, infrastructure impacts and fiscal impacts that the rest of the remainder of the city team weighed in on and for that I'll defer to the city manager. Thank you, John. I think it's important to note that this, the proposed initiative is not a referendum, it is new proposed law and as such the proposed ordinance contains two operative pieces of language which you can see up on the screen right here. The first is that the city of capital on the summarize shall take all the steps necessary to preserve and utilize the corridor and trestle for active transportation and recreation. In general that is a relatively benign statement where it is simply a referendum but as law it all of a sudden takes on a different level of significance and interpretation for one thing the city of capital doesn't own, manage or regulate the trestle or the corridor it's owned by the RTC. The city doesn't permit train travel, doesn't in any way regulate train travel or regulate the tracks but because this would be law for example should the RTC seek to take steps to repair the trestle next week and come to the city for an encroachment permit for example would it be incumbent upon the city to deny that encroachment permit to allow reconstruction of the trestle if it wasn't for active transportation. So you can see because it's not a referendum and because it's law it creates sort of inherent conflicts and contradictions that become difficult to rectify. The second piece that you'll see there in B creates a little bit more confusion in that it says no city of capitol or department shall expand any funds or resources related to the construction, reconstruction, operation, maintenance, financing, marketing or signage of a detour of the trail onto capitol streets and sidewalks. Now the challenge in that is when you really dig into the language is interpreting what is a detour of the trail onto capitol streets and sidewalks mean is the implication that it's simply taking a route from the trail onto the capitol streets and sidewalks and you can't build or maintain that detour onto the streets in which case the impacts I think would be relatively benign from a fiscal infrastructure traffic standpoint. However, as Mr. Barrisoni pointed out if the interpretation is that the detour is that the city is precluded from building, maintaining or constructing a route that would allow people to go around the trestle. Essentially it would be a freeze on infrastructure, investment and maintenance in this subject corridor that you can see on the screen. Ultimately over time staff concluded that where maintenance prohibited as outlined in the ordinance under this interpretation obviously the condition of that infrastructure would deteriorate over time and potentially subject the city to increased liability. So I know it's a lot to get your heads around but I think the city attorney summarized it accurately and well in his initial introduction in that there is very little discretion that we have at this point. The city of Capitola is obligated to put this on the ballot and simply the there's no discretion associated with that choice. So with that I'm gonna leave it and let council ask questions. I have a question for you and or the city attorney and that is have you reviewed and can you comment on the letter from Mr. Maroni from the coastal commission? Yeah I just reviewed that this afternoon I got about four o'clock this afternoon and he in general terms comes to the conclusion that the ordinance is not necessarily inconsistent with the LCP. If you look at our the 9212 report let me find the page. And for the audience that doesn't know the LCP is our local coastal plan which the coastal commission watches very carefully. On page 67 of the council's agenda that's part of the 9212 report there is a local coastal program policy develop a scheme for safe bicycle connection between Cliff Drive and Park Avenue and improve bicycle parking facilities. Implementation develop overall bicycle plan for Cliff Drive Village Park Avenue transportation utilizing directional signing and seek regional transportation commission funds for development. Well that is part of the detour under one of the interpretations of this ordinance. So I came to the conclusion that the ordinance prohibits us from expending resources for those purposes. So in my estimation the ordinance can be interpreted to prohibit us from implementing an LCP policy. There the coastal commission staff's letter suggested that we still had discretion to budget funds for those purposes but I don't read the ordinance that way. Okay. Mr. Mayor I would also add one other point that I failed to mention previously is that the one point piece of discretion the council may have is if the council wants to designate any members members to sign or prepare an argument related to this measure. So that would be a second action after placing the item on the ballot. Not mandatory but Not mandatory. At our pleasure okay. Any questions of staff? I think Jacques you had your finger up. So with deteriorating facilities and capital which traffic, pedestrian vehicles, bikes and stuff what position does that put the city in? Well to the extent that you have a bicycle accident and personal injuries resulting from that accident there's a theory of liability dangerous condition of public property. If you're a notice of a condition of public property for a sufficient amount of time that's dangerous and potentially injurious to users of for example a bike path that has a pothole in it or something of that nature and somebody has an accident they can sue on a dangerous condition of public property theory of liability and upon demonstrating that the condition was indeed dangerous and the city was on the actual or constructive notice of it with sufficient time to cure that problem we would be held liable for the injury that was sustained. One more question. The condition district had a bicycle accident and we had to pay out quite a bit because of it there was serious injuries. Another question Jacques? Yes I do have another question. Assuming this passes what position does that put Capitola in respect to RTC? If they move ahead with plans and obviously the trail plans the relationship between us and what kind of legal issues might arise? I don't know if there's any legal issues I think it's primarily those would be political issues with direct impacts on the RTC's willingness to release funds to the city for various RTC projects in the city and the city manager is in better position to comment on that than I am. Mr. Mayor, Council Member Bertrand I think that the key would be that in our analysis our best guess is that it would make the city grant applications to the RTC less competitive if we were unable to complete the trail pursuant to the RTC's adopted trails master plan. So for example if we were only able to do Section X but we couldn't do Section Y presumably our applications would be less competitive when the viewed against other grant applications. I guess one other point that I think the council is all aware of but I think it may be helpful for everyone to understand is the decision about what happens on the trestle is going to be a decision of the RTC and the city of Capitola has one seat on the RTC board so the RTC could decide has one seat on the RTC board we currently have two representatives as Council Member Batur serves as the Metro representative on the RTC board but the RTC could vote 12 or 10 to two to keep trains on the trestle with the Capitola votes being against. That could happen. Capitola would have done everything in its power under this code to comply with the first set of code that's up there. However, we would be stuck with for the foreseeable future Section B which prohibits the city from maintaining or constructing or signing a detour. And so you can imagine how that plays out over time potentially 20 years. Essentially there's this built-in penalty where all the city of Capitola can do is vote on the RTC board and lose and write letters to the editor and not maintain streets and sidewalks that allow for this detour. So it puts the city of Capitola in a very awkward and difficult position, I think down the road thinking again, independent of your views about what the use on the trestle should be just because we don't ultimately control that use. Any other questions? I have one more for you. I'm sorry for taking so much of the Council's time. Assuming that this was meant to be a plebiscite to get the opinion of voters in Capitola what they felt about this particular excursion on Capitola streets, you laid out that we only have two options that either adopt or put it on the ballot as it is right now. But you've also told us in very great detail enjoy reading your report how this actually is an illegal, there's many issues with it that makes it so. Including potential liability based on the question I just asked. Does this Council have any leeway to try to put something on the ballot right now for the next election to actually get the public, give the public a chance to express their views on this without any legal ramification? If we had more time of the Council it would have been within the Council's authority to put an advisory ballot measure on. If the Council had received enough interest from constituents that in its opinion they should weigh in and get a view of the full community, the Council would have had the authority to put an advisory ballot measure on just to gauge the level of public opinion pro and con this type of proposal. And with that information the Council could have then acted legislatively. Unfortunately, the last day for us to do anything is tomorrow. So there's no time for the Council to prepare an advisory ballot measure. And that's not something that could be done by initiative. This initiative, a lot of people have written letters to me over the last week saying that this is their opportunity to express their opinion. But unfortunately it's much more than that. It's a mandatory ordinance. It creates some very difficult legal problems for the city of Capitola, which I've just identified. I'd like to open up the public portion of the hearing now. So everyone with a green card, please line up. I would beg you not to hang back so you could be the last word, line up because I'm gonna move to the yellow cards very quickly. Jack, welcome. Thank you, thank you, Council members. Thank you staff for your well thought out report. I would like to associate myself with your report. You had a lot of great information there. I know that this person who's brought this proposal forward wants to be active in the community, wants to get their opinion out there, wants to do something, wants to make an impact. And I applaud that. However, this person has chosen to put themselves in opposition to other citizens. And we have the right to come forward and be offensive to your position. I take great offense to this proposition. This proposition is gonna cost our city a lot of money. There's a lot of better places for our money to go than fighting an initiative. As staff has mentioned, there are many plans in place already. And this initiative is just gonna cause us problems. So thank you for your report. I'm opposed to this initiative and I'm opposed to the person who's brought this initiative forward. Thank you, Jack. Can we have the tone of activated, Mr. Treasurer? That's good work. Next, step right up. Don't be shy. Welcome. Good evening, everybody. My name is Sierra Taylor and I'm here as a parent. I currently live in SoCal, but I've been in the community since 1975. And I'm also currently on the SoCal Union School Board as a trustee. I would like to support Greenway and a trail for our families. We have a lot of children that live up in Capitol and it'd be nice for them to have a safe pathway to walk to New Bright Middle School. And I would also like to say that as a community member, it'd be nice to have a pathway that's safe for our community, our families, our school children. And I'm in support of Greenway. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. My name's Rebecca Rainey. I live in Capitola and I grew up in Davis, which even to this day has the greatest percentage of bicycle commuters in the entire United States from what I understand. Great place to live, great place to get to work. So this may be a little bit of an oblique statement. I'm sorry that this bicycle personal mobility discussion has gotten kind of bogged down in so many different legs of the octopus. But I'd also like to say that I worry about the bike path going up Stockton Avenue. My partner and I often get our sandwiches and sit up on those benches above, on the cliff above it and eat lunch. And I've seen some road rage. I've seen some near misses and some near hits. And I can't imagine more bikes and pedestrians being on that pathway, whereas I think the trestle would be a wonderful solution. Thank you. Thank you. Next. Welcome. Good evening. I'm coming at this as a born and raised Santa Cruzan. My name is Jasmine Sky Marani. I was formerly a congressional intern for Representative Panetta. I'm also a masters in policy student and a prospective election law student. So I'm coming at this questioning the right to a democratic process that all American citizens possess. I think it's incredibly important that if we're going to be offering people voices, we should also be offering them choices. Locally, I can't think of anything more important than the right to transport oneself. I think the fact that we have something that is such a wonderful piece of living history here in Capitola is being very much underestimated. So I just urge you to think with a patriotic heart tonight. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next. Welcome. Good evening, Council. My name is Manu Koneg. I live in the city of Santa Cruz. I've also lived and grew up in Corralito. So I traverse the city many times across Stockton Avenue in my regular commute. I also help collect a good number of the signatures for this initiative. And I will say that the people of Capitola resoundingly supported this initiative in that process. And of course it wasn't our intention to create these difficulties for the city. I really think that as Jacques said, or I'm sorry, Council Member Bertrand, you should put this on the ballot as a quote unquote plebiscite and opportunity for the people of Capitola to vote on this. And in doing so, don't submit a partial statement that tells the voters whether or not it's how they should vote. Council can always sue after it's voted on and prevent it from actually taking effect, but it is important to let people vote on this issue. Thank you. Thank you. Next. Step right up. We're doing green cards right now. Please, you have a green card now's the time to speak. Yes, that is a green card you have. Don't think I had it back. Yes. My name is Kitty Hansen. I live in Capitola. I bought my house here 20 years ago as formerly a Santa Cruz City firefighter. And I ride my bike in Capitola at least three or four days a week. And I have commuted often. And I would like to say that I ride all over the streets and I've not had an accident and I've not felt unsafe. And I think we had to look at the broader picture which is transit from one end of the county to the other. And if everybody did their due diligence and went and listened to the general manager from SMART last Wednesday at the Simkins Swim Center, he will tell you that not only does do every businesses along the way benefit from that train stopping in their town, but they have room for 24 bikes in each car of that train. And that train is full of bicycles. So they get on where they want and they go all the way up to Wilder and they ride up in the hills and they come back. It's, that is the bigger picture. And I think even though I live here in town, I'd love to ride my bike across the trestle. I think it's more important to have the whole county involved. Thank you. Well said. Anyone else with a green card? Step right up. Welcome. I'm Maze Gerhard and I live in Aptos and I worked with Manu on the Greenway signature campaign, getting signatures in support of the bypass. And from my point of view, I think that we should put it on the ballot because as Manu said, it would be a great way to let people vote on the issues they care about. And also like, it's like, there's a lot of support for building a bypass instead of a train for a lot of good reasons. One, the tracks are really old, especially the trestle, you can see visible signs of aging. And to build a train would take a lot of money to put it there and like, it would take a lot of time to complete. So I think we're just going for the cheaper option, which is also the best as a bike rider myself. Thank you. I think we're up to the yellow cards now. Yes, I see no one else with the green card or maybe I do. Yellow card. Yellow card, step right up. Somewhere again, my name's Mark Crane. I've lived on Bay Avenue since 1993, I think, somewhere in that range. And I'm speaking as a proponent of the ordinance that's been proposed. The primary reasons for this are that it doesn't, I don't, the city attorney and the public works city manager have laid out some worst case scenarios. And I honestly don't think that they really needs to play that way. It's an advisory. I wish there was time to work with the various parties and make sure there's language in there that could give the city to do the freedom that they wished. And yet, still constrain the fact that the wishes of the people, and we'll see what the wishes of the people are, but it's to not spend city funding on detouring the trestle for pedestrian use. I, my boys, all of my family have walked that trestle illegally, probably, since I've lived here in 89. And it's there, it is. It's, anyway, I'm in favor of the intent of what the ordinance proposal does, which says don't spend city funds on detouring. The previous person said they hadn't had any accidents and then the one before that said they've seen near misses. The trestle's a really clear easy way across it. Anyway, you've got a decision in front of you, go for it, thank you, and thanks for the time. Thank you. Next. Good evening, my name is Yannica Strasse, I'm the executive director of Bike Santa Cruz County. Bike Santa Cruz County is in full support of the adopted plan for the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail, a continuous off-road multi-use path across the county. Our highest priority is that the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail is routed across the Capitola Creek on the trestle bridge rather than permanently detoured through the village. We appreciate that the petition signature gathers for bringing this issue to the forefront. But it is entirely possible to have both the train and the trail on the Capitola trestle and we support the regional transportation commission and their efforts to study that possibility. Measure D raised sufficient funds to build the majority of the trail and can be leveraged to apply for and get state funding to build the remaining portions. Regardless of the outcome of the unified corridor study and whether or not passenger rail becomes a reality, it will be many years before a trail's funded design and built on the trestle bridge. Before the trail is built on the trestle cyclist will need to be rerouted through the Capitola village. This is already a popular cycling route and any improvement will be a huge benefit to Capitola residents and cyclists. Please support infrastructure improvements through the village to prevent this option while planning and design is happening for the trail on the trestle is detrimental to Capitola residents and visitors as well as cyclists across the county. Please do not support the Greenway Capitola initiative and instead actively work to educate the public on the negative impacts that it has on the cycling community and the community as a whole. Thank you. Next. Hi, my name is Barry Scott. I live in Aptos, but I was buried out on the beach about 25 years ago in Capitola. So I love this town. If you ever, I'm on the board of Friends of the Rail and Trail and I also manage a group that we've had for a few years called coastalrail.org because I'm a big advocate of public transit and using the bridge for rail transit one day and a trail. I think a trail is more likely to happen sooner if we keep the rail part of it. And I think a great argument can be made for light electric rail transit that many of you may not be able to imagine because nobody's really presented it to you before. I was talking to Chad Edison this morning in Salinas at their groundbreaking for the Salinas to Gilray extension that Monterey County is implementing. And he said, yeah, I think battery electric multiple units are the kind of trains you're gonna see on your branch line. You know, the Caltrans has a significant funding for this. And before I run out of time, I wanna say one thing. I love Capitola. You have a rail corridor running through town. If you're gonna gauge public opinion, I hope that you'll include the entire county because it's the entire county that will benefit or perhaps fail to benefit on what happens to that little strip of a bridge and trestle there. It is a county owned property with a federally recognized active rail line running through the community, the city of Capitola. And as such, it's really kind of everybody's interest what goes on with it. So good luck. I'm sorry that you're in this position. It can't be easy and I wish you the best outcome. Thank you. Welcome Sam. Always good to see you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, council members. I hope I picked the right color card. Yes, you did. I just wanted to get up and express my point of view as a 30 year resident of the city of Capitola. I don't think I could see something that is gonna be more defining and impactful for our city than the use of the rail corridor. Now, once again, it's kind of like Capitola is that the center of attention. And I think we've always embraced that position but here we are both literally and figuratively. I wanna one compliment the city manager the city staff and the city attorney on completing this report or thorough report in such a short period of time. I do, I did wanna focus on their conclusions at the end about this all maybe turns on interpretation and the intentions of the drafters of the ordinance. And there's interpretation A, which is a more minimal impact. And I would foster that I believe that that's what the purpose of this ordinance is. And because it's so impactful for our community, I think it's important and appropriate to put it out to the residents of Capitola for their expression, their vote on the issue and of course being educated about what this may mean for their lives and the lives of their children. And I did wanna submit, I think there's a difference between the Monterey Bay scenic trail and the rail corridor and the direction that they may go in. I believe the scenic trail is, it exists now. You can see people using it now. It will continue to exist and be used in the future, regardless of what may happen on the trestle or the rail corridor and maybe in conjunction what may happen on the trestle and the rail corridor. If I may just quickly, I seem to run out of time but I also believe I think it's appropriate to go to the court because I don't think that the council, you should have your hands tied on what should be done to provide for the safety of bicyclists and the safety of pedestrians that move on the roads in our community. So I think that that's important to do but one final point, I think that- We're gonna flag you for not taking a red card but go ahead. If I may just quickly, I think you should look at the wording on the ballot measure and be sure that we don't put in language that may imply that it has the more exhaustive interpretation B that was stated in the report. Thank you. Welcome. Hi, I'm Ed Spurr and I wanna thank you for your service to our community. I had prepared some remarks in favor of a safe and level pathway through the county because we don't really have that. But after listening to you this evening, I realized that the RTC seemingly has made up their mind that they wanna passenger train and whatever's left over in the right away will be a narrow sidewalk. And I did help circulate the petition that you're talking about tonight. What I wonder is that if you need to gauge the community, like I think there was over a thousand signatures, 800 of them being valid, if you wanna gauge the community, then get to put something on the ballot. You've got like all day tomorrow. Just a couple of words. Are you in favor of this or that? Find out what the community's thinking. There's lots of different opinions, but you don't really have a whole lot of power. The RTC is in charge of this thing. And if we're gonna write for the sidewalk and the train to be built, it won't be in my lifetime. So seize the opportunity you have all day tomorrow. Find out what your constituents and our neighbors are thinking. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Hello. This is my first time addressing you, but thank you for your service as well. My name is Andrew Wolfe. I live in Capitola, right up near New Brighton, and been a resident of Capitola for the last five years. My daughter is eight months old, and I walk along probably every morning and every evening, including this evening, along the railroad, as well as out to the cliffs to check out the surf and the feeding frenzy that was this afternoon. It was super fun to watch. And I've been really inspired by a lot of the people who've talked today, and especially the last two gentlemen, speaking about democracy and our local democracy. And really, I've gauged opinion just in my own neighborhood in New Brighton. I've found very few people that really are incredibly favor of having a railroad, a rail going through very close to their neighborhood and having that offset, and not being able to access the trestle, as well as not having a world-class bike and trail that goes through. But besides that, the last two gentlemen really emphasize the fact that I think we really need to understand what this community, more than just ad hoc and stories here and there, but really understand what this community wants and what the desire for their future, for the future of my little Zoe and for the future of a lot of kids that I know in the neighborhood, as well as the community in general across all age groups. And so I really hope that you take that to heart and really look to understanding what this community wants through a ballot measure and protect and move for safety more than anything. But thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Welcome. Thank you. My name's Renee Roberts. I live in Capitola, up close to Gales. And thank you for hearing the public opinion on this matter. And I appreciate the legal analysis given earlier this evening in the city council meeting. And I understand the position, the very difficult position that you are put in. I would like to voice my opinion in favor of the Greenway Trestle proposal. Of course, I don't love the idea of limiting funds to the rest of the city use. However, I am, personally I grew up in a town up in Marysville, Washington in which the town was truly divided by a train and train tracks. And it was very annoying and it was difficult to traverse from one side of the town to the other side of the town with the constant train use on the tracks. And I would hate to see Capitola experience that. I have a little daughter who's two. We often go to Jade Street Park and I'm concerned about the impact about regarding the train use there. And as the citizen previously said, you do have a day to put together something. And I know that's not a lot of time, but I would like to see something on the ballot that is reasonable, practical and can make our community more safe. Thank you very much. Thank you. Just for the record, it's not a matter of just writing something for the ballot. We would have to have two council meetings between tonight and tomorrow to make it happen. So it's not gonna happen. Step right up. Hello. Hello. I'm Quinton Schaefer. I just graduated high school at Santa Cruz High. I live in Santa Cruz. I did a lot of work with Greenway, talking to people, going door to door. I just wanted to say that from what I've seen and read and experienced, this is one of the most divisive issues in Santa Cruz for a long time. And I've seen so many different outlooks on the whole matter. And especially coming here, I just feel like it has a lot of weight in this community. I did a lot of work in Capitola and one neighbor would immediately grab me by my collar and yell at me to get off their property. And the next one would be hugging me and kissing me and telling me they love Greenway. Try running for office. I just want to say especially with such a historical landmark being at the center of this matter, there's gonna be a lot of change that would come with all this and the people just deserve a voice. I think it'd be great to just put on the ballot. Thanks Quinton. Red cards. Step right up. Who has a red card? Good evening. Yes, sir. Good evening. Council members. I'm Daryl Johnson. I'm a member of the Seniors Council Board of Directors and also a member of the Aging in Place work group that was formed as a result of the Seniors Council Solutions Summit that was held in October of last year. I think some of you are, I know some of you may have attended this. I know at least one did because Council Member Bertrand is a member of the Seniors Council Board and was one of the guiding forces in helping the Seniors Summit to take place. We appreciate his participation and the work he does on our board. The Solutions Summit was a group of over about 100 service providers of advocates and political appointed people that were a part of meeting to develop solutions to the problems of seniors within our county. We also acknowledge and appreciate Councilwoman Stephen Stephanie Harland's work on the Seniors Council Advisory Committee. But I'm here this evening to provide you with information about some of the challenges that we face in Aging in Place. While our focus will always be on finding solutions and delivering services, we were aware that we first of all needed to determine what the problems were that we were facing. With the 60 plus population having already increased in our county by 49% since 2011, during the same time that under 60 people decreased, we know that there are issues and concerns that are critical in the area of seniors issues and aging in place. So I'm here tonight to present the infograph about Aging in Place in Santa Cruz County and we will be back later to help find solutions to these major problems. Contact information is on the back of the page for those who would like to look into real solutions to the challenges that we face. We ask for your continued support for services for older adults as you have in the past. Thank you. Thank you, sir. So good evening, Mayor Termini and Capitola City Council members. I'm Tom Evans. I'm a resident here at Capitola from the jewel box. I'm also the chair of Greenway Capitola. So as you know, in less than six weeks, over 800 Capitola registered voters signed our petition because they all want a bicycle and pedestrian trail in the rail corridor and across the trestle. And the vast majority of the people that we spoke to and others have already stood up and talked about this but the vast majority of the people that we spoke to in Capitola want to trail across the trestle. And the reasons why are clear. A trail across the trestle provides safe routes to school number one. May I get you closer to the microphone, please? Yes, so a trail across the trestle will provide safe routes to school. It'll also provide easy access across the village for people of all ages and abilities. It'll provide skateboard access across the village to both New Bright Middle School and the skate park. And finally, it'll provide a safe and separate pathway for pedestrians and bicycle commuters who want to get across the village. This last point's gonna grow in importance as more people embrace active transportation and new offerings like Zoom bikes appear. A trail across the trestle is part of the vision for the spine of the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail Network. It's actually shown in three different pages of that plan. However, unfortunately, it's not actually part of the plan to have the trail go across the trestle as you all well know. So this measure shall have the city do everything in its power to have a trail along the corridor and the trestle in Capitola to be used for active transportation and recreation because that's what the majority of the citizens of Capitola want. So I encourage everyone to come out and vote on November 6th when this is on the ballot and vote yes for this measure for a healthier, safer, and better Capitola. And since I have a few seconds left, I just wanted to point out two specific instances. This actually wasn't part of my prepared remarks but just happened recently. Yesterday evening, I was walking down Cliff Drive to attend the band as well as many other people were as well as traffic all lined up along Cliff Drive. And a woman was walking down there, pushing her baby stroller. And cyclists are coming by and they're not going fast or out of control or anything like that. But there's not enough room and they almost hit her. I mean, twice, just last night. This is why, I don't know if she was crossing through Capitola or if they were crossing through Capitola, but if there was a corridor across the trestle and either of them were, that would have been avoided. And then this evening, walking here in this picture is very appropriate, eight people on the trestle taking pictures. That's when it's off limits. Thank you. Welcome. Good evening, mayor and council members. My name is Nick Boliage and I'm from Watsonville. Hello, Stephanie. Haven't seen you since back in the landfill days which has sat on for 30 months. That was great. Bad connotation, very bad connotation. Carry on. What about this? I don't own a railroad and I don't own a bicycle manufacturing company nor a hiking shoe company. Because those are the three things that are really gonna be big here. I'm really coming to you here as an outsider. I've been involved in a lot of government issues in this county and other areas over the years, a lot of them. And I've seen a lot of funny business in government bodies. So I'm gonna give you an outsider view because I'm not a Capitola resident. Most of the time elected officials and government bodies detest citizen initiatives. And at times those same officials and government bodies like to do funny things with initiatives. And I've advised people over the years some of the things that government bodies or elected officials would like to do against an initiative. They order a report. Sometimes they monkey around with a ballot question. Sometimes they file a lawsuit. And other times what they do is they use public funds before the election and do this for information only purposes to try to sway the voters. Looks like you've already got three of those four. I'm not saying it's nefarious, it's just for someone that's an outsider that's seen this many times, it's unusual. I'm disturbed in regards to the impact report. I looked Friday on the agenda. There was a agenda report from the city manager listed five attachments. It did not include the impact report. And I couldn't find the impact report on there. Monday I see there's a different city manager agenda report that says attachment six, which is the impact report and the impact report was there. It's not fair to the public if that impact report was not there Friday. I know it's not illegal. I'm not saying it's illegal, I'm saying it's improper. And that gives the public a lot less time to view that thing. Something that should be avoided in the future. And for history it should be pointed out that it wasn't there. In regards to the ballot question, there's a lot of power in those 75 words. I find it very unusual to have words in there and quotation marks in a ballot argument. That's not a role of a ballot question. It's not the role of a ballot question for an individual has to hunt down what those words mean. A ballot question should be short, concise to the point and should be enough information there for a person that doesn't wanna read much to make a decision. To have to look for quotations or what they mean is very unusual. And I think you should reword that, remove it. You got time here. I would suggest take a short break, have the city attorney fix some of that wording. And finally, just another quick thing is you really could save a lot of money. You could adopt the initiative as is and not hold an election, drop the lawsuit and you can save a lot of money. Thank you, thank you. Hi Gail. Gail McNulty, I'm with Santa Cruz County Greenway. And just, I know there are a lot of people in the room tonight that maybe are not going to speak. So if you could raise your hand, just if you were here to support the Greenway measure, it might be nice just to know. I hate to drain you in, but it is my habit to make sure that you know you're talking to me. I apologize. That's okay. Okay, so a couple of things that were not addressed earlier but are part of the resolution tonight. For one thing, it was the last speaker mentioned that there's a 75 words for the ballot and we know that there is a version on there drafted by Mr. Condoti or Mr. Barassone. One of them, it's actually inaccurate and you received a letter today stating that it directly conflicts with the, not just the intent of the measure but the actual content of the measure. So I hope that you will address that this evening. Also the, there is a yes, no piece of that resolution as to whether or not the measure text will be included in the voter pamphlet, which of course is something that will determine how educated people are if this does go to a vote. So we hope you will give careful consideration to that. Mr. Barassone, tonight presented a very long and detailed legal opinion. I ask you to remember that this is not the word of God. This is an opinion and a very different opinion will be delivered to your council tomorrow. So please listen to this opinion and take it for what it is. It may be from a lawyer, but it is an opinion and there is a lot of gray area as we all know with the law. Please don't allow yourselves to make a decision tonight that you might regret based on this one opinion. On behalf of Santa Cruz County Greenway, I would like to thank Juan S. Camila, Tom Evans and Sarah Taylor for having the courage to put forth this citizens initiative in an effort to provide a safe, direct way for people of all ages and abilities to travel from one side of Capitola to the other. We would also like to thank the Capitola City Council for hosting the only public forum on the rail corridor conversation in January. That night, three of the four council members present voiced that they believe Capitola needs and wants a trail in the rail corridor that crosses the trestle. The outpouring of concerned Capitola voters who eagerly signed that petition to get this measure onto the November 2018 ballot in just over a month reinforces this and now that measure has qualified and voters will hopefully have the opportunity to have their opinions officially counted. Many cities have transformed their trestles into iconic things and citizens initiatives, I'm running out of time so I just wanna say it is an awkward thing coming tonight and we know that it's difficult to make this decision especially in a small town like Capitola where everybody respects this council but citizen initiatives can be very good things. In 1972, a citizens initiative created the Coastal Zone Conservation Act, aimed at protecting California's coastline from the massive development and environmental degradation and on that note, I would just like to once again thank Juan, Tom and Sierra and everybody that came out tonight to protect democracy and ask for safety, the safest choice for your community. Thank you. Thank you, Gail. Welcome. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Well, I'm Juan Escamilla, I'm the proponent of this and believe me, I never thought I was gonna get sued and go through this stuff but I'm very lucky to live in Capitola, I live up on 47th Avenue right next to Jay Street Park and I get the opportunity to see the sunrise and I go on the benches in the evening and watch the traffic go by and I kinda drink my soda there thinking what a beautiful place to have traffic and I get to look at the side and look over the cliff there in the beautiful water but I also see the crossway down there, and you see a buildup of the traffic and the cars and the strollers and all kinds of things that could be useful if we had the trail going through Capitola. I myself, I go to Midnight Mass at Christmas and I enjoy walking across the trestle at Totally Dark and have my flashlight and go to Midnight Mass and come back and I think it's such a lovely way to look at our beautiful city and again, this was done out of a necessity to have the kids that cross there every morning to go to school, the skate boarders that are not allowed in Capitola anymore, they don't skate across but that's how they get from one end to the other so those kinda things is what we intended for it to do. It was intended to get some safety, some vehicle or bicycle lane only, that was the intent of what we were doing and now we've gotten to this whole thing so I do appreciate you taking the time to listen to us, I do appreciate the fact that you are, you're torn about what to do and stuff so thank you again for your hard work and I appreciate it. Thank you. Welcome, Vic. Hey, how you doing? I'm great. Good seeing you, Mr. Mayor, rest of the council, staff. I'm Vic Morani, I'm here mostly tonight because I'm kind of a proud dad. My daughter Jasmine, who spoke earlier, is a master's student and she was the intern for Congress and Panetta, which is true and she got me kind of interested in all this stuff again. I've kinda been in semi-retirement for a while. First I wanna acknowledge both the mayor and Stephanie, I know you're, as I say, termed out but many, many years of service and I greatly appreciate, I know many other people greatly appreciate your service so thank you. But I was also a high school teacher and I taught history and government, all those kinda fun things and what we learned in First Amendment to the Constitution at the very end it says to petition your government for regress of grievances, to petition your government for regress of grievances and I went, wow, that's really powerful stuff. So when Juan and Tom and some of the other folks, Sarah Taylor, who's an elected official in Capitola, approached people and a lot of young people got involved, not just my daughter but other people and I think you've seen some of them tonight. And it's really refreshing and kind of exciting. I saw the letter that they put out to folks and this has a picture of the trestle. Our Capitola trestle vision, let the people vote. And Mr. Escamilla has his 75 words which he didn't read, I'll read them. To minimize congestion in Capitola Village, promote safe routes to schools, ensure accessibility for people of all abilities and ages, provide easy beach access and support sustainable economic development, shall the historic Capitola trestle be used for a safe, continuous trail for pedestrians, cyclists and other human and electric assisted transportation within the rail corridor by prohibiting use of city funds or resources to detour the trail onto Capitola streets and sidewalks. That's pretty clear to me. Now I know you're going to court, August 20th, a judge, Judge Gallagher, great judge, he'll decide whether this thing's legal or not. So you guys are gonna vote to put this on the ballot, he'll decide if he says, hey, if he agrees Mr. Barrisoni, it's illegal, end of story. But if it stays on the ballot, it means that Mr. Barrisoni maybe wasn't quite right. And let the people vote, let them use their First Amendment right to vote. One last thing I want to say, which is kind of interesting, if the RTC is truly the owner of this stuff, they are one lousy steward of that trestle. And they better fix the thing. So that's all I have to say. Thank you very much. Good evening, Mayor and Council. No matter how many times I get up here, it's always nerve-wracking to stand before you and speak. Understood, understood. I actually am gonna come to the table with a little bit of a different commentary. I live on Riverview, I look at that trestle. We used to watch the train go across at noon and five every day, let clock work out my daughter's window. She loved looking out of her crib. We have spent many years enjoying that trestle. We photograph it regularly, but my biggest concern in all of this and what I fail to hear or see being discussed is the condition of the trestle itself. And it is in such ill repair, it does not take any sort of engineer with any advanced degree to look at that structure and consider its safety just sitting there right now. Whether it becomes rail or trail, my biggest concern is we're talking about a safe passage of pedestrian use from one end of the town to the other. How do we force the hand of the ROTC to update and maintain and inspect and ensure that that trestle can withstand any sort of traffic, whether it's foot or otherwise. I feel like we're discussing all of these gray options, whether it's rail, trail, both, whether it's walking, biking, cycling, skating, whether there's a train running across it or not. So if that trestle were to fail and fall down or crack or become completely unusable, which in my non-engineering opinion, it probably already is, what would we do then? What would plan B be? How would this, whether there are foot traffic or not and it should become rail, what is the plan then? All of that will then be coming through the village as it does now, and we would be stuck now with not being able to force the hand of the ROTC to maintain and fix it. So that really is more of my opinion this evening that I wanna approach to you is that, whatever goes on the ballot, if it does make it on the ballot or not, that is a huge critical piece of getting from point A to point B, and I have to question its safety and its maintenance. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Mayor, council members, my name is John Flanagan. I've been a resident of Capitola now for over 12 years. I'm on the board of realtors, and I'm in Rotary with Barrisoni. So, first of all, I wanna say thanks for doing the impact report. I think that's important information to get out to the public, just the pros and cons of what this ordinance means. I would also like to say that I'm absolutely in favor of this ordinance being on the ballot. I have a four and seven-year-old, and I didn't plan on being part of a bunch of runners, but my wife ran cross-country in college. My kids love running. The idea of being able to go from one side of Capitola to the other side of Capitola across this bridge is extremely appealing. And it's not just my wife and my family. I mean, there's a whole community of people, whether they're cyclists or runners who are looking at this bridge as a real opportunity to get across Capitola in the most efficient way possible. And that would be, of course, across the trestle. I also wanna say that the last couple days, I was in San Francisco, and my wife and I rented the jump bikes there. And that is a future that is absolutely coming to Capitola and Santa Cruz County. Being able, through Power Assist, to get from point A to point B very quickly on bicycles. It's not even, like, years away. It's months, maybe a couple years away. So I see this trestle as being a way of getting a lot of people efficiently across, I mean, the county, from Watsonville all the way to the west side of Santa Cruz by bicycle. So I am absolutely in favor of this ordinance going on to the ballots, and thank you for your time. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank no one else queued up to speak. I'll bring it back to the council now. Ed. Well, thank everybody for your comments. You know, there's a couple of things I heard tonight that resonated with me seemed to make sense. There was a term used, we need to believe in democracy. When I've been on this council for six years, we've sat here, we've collectively passed an ordinance on whether we should have cannabis in this city. If Santa Cruz did that ordinance, City of Watsonville did it. As a city, my role and our role, I think is to pass ordinances that affect this city. We passed one for plastic bags. It impacted our city. It was a decision our city made about how we wanted to be inside our city with plastic bags, how we wanted to be with cannabis, how we wanted to be with smoking, how we want to be with speed limits, how we want to be with even how many surf schools we have out there. The problem is, is that there's a corridor that's 28 miles long that runs from Watsonville to Santa Cruz. So what you have to ask yourself is, I was thinking of a good analogy and Quinton came up from high school and finally when he was talking, I got the idea. He's in high school and he wants the sophomore class to only vote on something that affects the entire school. How would that go over if he said we're gonna vote on who gets to use the recreation period and only the sophomores get to vote. So I take that and I say, is this about Capitola? Is this about what all the Capitola residents want? Because if the solution is, if we were to just to build a brand new trestle, then we would put a pathway on it. Does that mean that everybody go away and everybody be happy? Is that what you really want? Do you want a new trestle that goes all the way across with a bike path and a train trestle on it? Would that make everybody happy? No, because that's not what this is about. This is about an initiative about whether we want a train or a trail. It's a larger issue. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about coming here, trying to take away the rights of the city council to administer the city. Our job is to make this a safe place for the people that live here. That means to upgrade the roads, the bike trail, the things that make it safe. Another comment that was made was, do something reasonable, practical, or makes the community safe? Well, whatever we have, our roads, our bike trails, we have to try to maintain those until a decision is made. And when I think about that corridor, think about the corridor as a house. You're getting ready to buy a house. That house we paid $16 million for. That's the trail. And right now there's an $850,000 study that's being done, unified quarter study to determine what's the best use of that trail. That's like when you get a termite report on a house. So the RTC is gonna be charged with looking at that report and it comes out at the end of this month. And then making a decision about what's best for the entire corridor. We're not gonna wait for that report. We're gonna put it on the ballot and try to make a decision that's not representing the entire county but the city of Capitola. And you want us to support that, to take away our rights, to not let the county vote on what's the potential needs of this county. And I think that's being a little presumptuous and it's not democracy. So my vote is for democracy. But tonight, my hands are tied. So my motion is that I make a motion that we place the initiative, place the ordinance on the ballot without alteration. Second. Under comments. We're still discussing it. Ed, anything else? You got it. And you got the second? Yes, definitely. Hey, Kristen. Yeah. I also wanna thank everyone who's taken the time to speak tonight and to have sent emails and other forms of correspondence to the council about how you're feeling about this. I echo what Ed said and that one of the frustrations that I'm feeling here is that I feel that there is a conflation between the issues of supporting the Greenway, the overall Greenway idea and supporting this particular ballot initiative and they are not the same thing. So when people get up and say, I think it's important that we have the trail. I think it's important that we don't have a train. I hear you. And that's not what this does. That's not what this is about. One of the emails or many of the emails that have been coming in, one of the lines in this kind of seems like a form letter which I completely understand is the residents deserve a fair opportunity to vote on the future of the trestle. I agree. But again, that's not what this vote does. It doesn't give us an opportunity to decide how this trestle will be used. That being said, a majority of the emails and calls that I get in regard to this particular issue and the issue larger from Capitola residents tells me, no, they don't want to train. They want to trail. And so I hear you and I am in support of the general spirit behind what this is trying to do in giving Capitola residents a louder voice in this process. I really do. That being said, I'm frustrated with the complication between the two issues. That this ballot measure has something to do with whether or not there is support for Greenway and Capitola. The ballot initiative options, as mentioned earlier, are either we adopt it or we put it on the ballot. Tonight, we don't have the choice to say, no, don't put it on the ballot. And really, if a judge comes back and says it's legal, speaking only for myself, I can't see a reason why we would try to remove it from the ballot. I don't think that's our responsibility here to say, well, we don't personally like it, so we shouldn't have it on the ballot. That being said, I'm not against initiatives. It was brought up that initiatives have done great things. That citizen initiatives have done great things. I absolutely agree. And again, all I can continue to come back to is that this particular initiative isn't going to change whether or not we have a train. And I think that's very important because it's hard to have any further discussion about this as long as we're keeping those two things linked together and they don't belong together. So that's my general feeling about that. But I do wanna say that otherwise, overall, I hear the general outpouring of people saying, we want a trail. I hear you, I am not ignoring or devaluing that, but for this particular issue, that this isn't about whether or not we are going to have a train or a trail. Thank you. Thank you. And Kristen, thanks for your comments. And I echo, I'm glad many people participated. The letters in the inbox are tremendous. We're voting here for what Capitola wants. It is true that the RTC owns the whole rail line, but we can't vote for everyone else in the county. And I don't see anyone else in the county putting a plebiscite on the ballot for the whole county. We're here because we care about this city. And we take this opportunity to take that chance to get our chance, I'm repeating myself, to vote. It may be true, I respect John Barr's son. He's an extremely complex jurist, lawyer, many years of experience dealing with these issues. I respect his opinion, but I also heard Sam came up and he said, you know, maybe there is a different view on this. Lawyers may disagree. And as Kristen said, we're gonna have a judge, look at that. I'm totally in favor of democracy. And one thing that I'm starting to realize after four years in this office, is democracy isn't clear cut. We're not all lawyers. We may not know how to write the most effective proposition that skirts around all the legal issues. But what I hear what Tom said tonight very clearly, and Juan also, and there was a student that talked to, was a clear desire to address an issue that up until now they didn't have a chance to address directly. Many decisions were made many years ago that got this whole process going. But what I've been trying to tell people is, things change. I believe that we didn't take into account, and maybe we didn't have the ability or the foresight, what all this would mean when it came to Capitola. We thought in terms of generalalities, it would be nice to have a trail, it would be nice to have a train and a trail. We didn't quite figure it all out. So the people that put this ballot initiative, or put this petition together, wanted to have Capitola have a chance to make a statement. So things change. Wouldn't it be nice if the people who are elected and who run the RTC, respond to the new needs of the people? So let's get to that. I've been talking consistently since I've been on the RTC about the investment study, unified quarter investment study. A lot of people say, oh, this is just gonna be a wishy-washy study. You can read into it whatever way you want. I want everyone in this room to get involved in the dissection of that study. I want you to talk to your friends and neighbors that the RTC has 1,000 people from Capitola looking at how you react to that study and your opinions about that study and how you're gonna vote based on that study. That is critical. I'm just gonna leave it at that. We have the chance to make a vote. Politics is not always clear, but this is an effort from the people of Capitola to have their input and I support it. Thank you, Jacques, Stephanie. Thank you very much. I'm a big supporter of public transportation. I grew up in Alameda, went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley, and I didn't have a car, and so got around on the bus, go back and forth and go different places. I was there when they were just planning BART, so it was mainly by bus that you got around, and that's still very popular today in the Bay Area as public transportation. I think the idea of a train here is a little nutty because I think it's so expensive, but who knows, who knows? I'm willing to give it a try, and I have told people that I'm waiting till the corridor study comes out before I take a formal position on this. I'm sorry that you all think this is just about putting a trail on the rail line because I think everybody's for that. No, I haven't heard anybody speak against it. That's very popular and it's a great idea. Also, I'm sorry that you were a little misled and tell us you want a fair vote and I wanted to know what fair meant. That implies that there might be an unfair vote. An English teacher, and so I know how important words mean. As far as putting two measures on the ballot, that would be totally complicated for the public because the first one, this one could pass and the other one might not pass or it might, but it's too bad that the organizers didn't say, we don't want to train in Capitola. That would have been very clear, but what's come out of it is this convoluted measure that is, I don't think it's legal and I don't think it's good for Capitola. So I want to just give you a little bit of history on the sanctuary scenic trail. We had been, I was chair of that for about 15 years. It was called the Santa Cruz County Integrated Monterey based Sanctuary Task Force. Very long name. It was a huge committee that was made up by a whole lot of representatives of people in the county that were interested in promoting the sanctuary. Sanctuary was putting their office down in Monterey and we wanted to have a presence for them in Santa Cruz. We didn't want all the efforts to be in Monterey County. So we formed this task force to see what we could do to get them to have a presence and to be doing some things in Santa Cruz County to promote the sanctuary. So we got them to have an office here with staff people. Of course, they wanted free rent and the city of Santa Cruz generously gave them free rent out on the war for an office for many years. We decided that our goals were going to be three things. To promote the sanctuary, to help businesses, surf businesses and related restaurants and hotels and so forth because we're not under the Department of Natural Resources as you might expect. We're under the Department of Commerce. If you know what that means, it's all about money. And so they wanted us to make money on the sanctuary and we said, what do you wanna do? Charge surfers. So we decided that in order to do that we would develop a brochure and it was called 50 Ways to Get Your Feet Wet in the Sanctuary and I still have copies of it and I love it. Lovely color brochure that we put in all the hotels, places where they had store their brochures and we distributed it also pretty widely and that listed all the places where you could get your feet wet. You could rent a boat, you could rent a kayak, you could go out on the Chardonnay, you could go out on the wharfs and have dinner and enjoy the sanctuary. We were also, as part of our education, wanted to put up interpretive signs which we started and we were working on when the next phase happened. We got them to open, we were thinking small in those days and we thought, oh a kiosk where we can have educational programs and pass out more brochures and educate people about what the sanctuary is and what it does and what you can do there was a lot of confusion of it about it at that time. So we actually got them to build the beautiful sanctuary visitors' center right down at the foot of the wharf in Santa Cruz. That was much more than we ever dreamed and that was also through the generosity of the city of Santa Cruz, I think donating the land and they finally committed, the federal agency didn't really want to commit a lot of money to these kind of things, but they did and that is a real gem, a real jewel where people can go and learn about our sanctuary. We're really lucky to have a sanctuary. There aren't that many of them in the United States. The other thing we talked about over the years was having a trail with interpretive signs so people could go along the trail right along the coast, you could drive, you could walk, you could take your stroller, you could do whatever you wanted to and stop at the various pullout places and learn about the sanctuary through the interpretive signs. We weren't gonna buy anybody's property or take anything. We had the trail mapped out from Davenport to Capitola. In Capitola we got stuck because we didn't have a good way to go around, we didn't want people walking, riding and so forth on McGregor Drive which didn't have sidewalks. Well, somebody from the rail community came to us and said, hey, what about us? And we said, fine, you come and join our group because we got stuck in Capitola, we might wanna use the rail area for a connection back to the coast again. So they were always part of the conversation. It started out actually as the California Coastal Trail which is administered and named and run by the Coastal Conservancy State Agency. They were part of this. We said, we're not taking your trail, we want it to be the California Coastal Trail and the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail and we'll be partners, absolutely. We're not trying to step on anybody's toes. So that trail was along the coast identified from Davenport through Santa Cruz and along Pleasure Point down into Capitola Beach and we have one of the interpretive signs down in Capitola Beach that was paid for with a grant that we got. We were getting some nice grants for this. So anyway, we were going along just fine, just fine and we were looking for more grants to do more interpretive signs and more educational outreach efforts to educate people about this wonderful sanctuary that we're, it's so special to have and so wonderful to have it. No oil drilling in the sanctuary. Oil drilling was being proposed off on Unuevo at the time and Congressman Panetta was able to get a trailer in every year no funding for offshore oil drilling. But he couldn't get it over one year. So finally, we said we need permanent protection. It was for, no? The cities in the county, this was back in the late 80s, early 90s, all adopted zoning regulations that barred facilities for the transfer of oil from onto city property. That was another strategy. We got the cities all along the coast to have an ordinance and Capitola has one that says there cannot be any facility onshore to transport this oil from the oil rig out there if they did put one out there without a vote of the people. And of course, I don't think you would have voted for that kind of an oil transfer facility on the coast because people didn't want offshore oil drilling. So we, so Sam Fargo had involved in anyway, the sanctuaries were formed for permanent protection of our coastline against offshore oil drilling. That was the main reason why it was formed and also for the scientific exploration and for the studies that were being done. We have the largest concentration of marine research areas I think in the world on the Monterey Coast. We have so many in Pacific Grove and Monterey, Long Marine Lab, et cetera. It's a real hub for marine scientists to do their research. So anyway, we were doing just fine until Congressman Sam Fargo said, well, I'd like to help. So I'll see if I can get some money for you. And so he got $8 million, $4 million for Monterey County and $4 million for Santa Cruz County. So with our $4 million, we had to put it in some sort of a public agency because we were just a committee and we didn't really have a bank account and we ran things through the county but we couldn't do that. So we got the $4 million and we put it in AMBAG, Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments and they banked it for us. And then after a while they said, you know, we don't have the staff or time to work on this project. We're gonna move the money over to the Regional Transportation Commission. And that was the big mistake. So then they said, well, we're gonna develop a plan that'll include the rail line. And we all said, uh-huh, they're taking our $4 million and they're gonna spend it on the rail line. They're not gonna do a damn thing along the coast. That's exactly what's happened. So anyway, in our plan, we had our main plan along the coast was spurs to the rail line. So people wanted to use either. They could do that. Well, it's gotten turned around to now it's the rail line was maybe some spurs to the coast. Well, that's not fair and it doesn't meet the intention of it. They took our money, our logo and our name. So if they're gonna use our name, the Sanctuary Scenic Trail, we still need spurs to the coast so people can see, hear, smell the sanctuary and learn about the sanctuary or else they should take our name off of it. So one of the problems with this measure is that if we can't have any detours off there, who's gonna go down to the beach and learn about the sanctuary? So we have to have these little spurs and trails so people can do that if they want to. That was the intention of it. You could get off at various places and go visit the beach, visit the sanctuary, have your day at the beach too and enjoy it and learn about it. So sorry this has gotten so complicated that you just don't wanna train but I'm sorry you didn't say that in the first place. Those are all my comments. Thank you all for your help. Thank you. Well, forgive me for the expression but thank you for finally bringing the train back into the station, I appreciate that. And I will be sparse. Remember it's initiative, not a referendum that's important and when we say file suit, we were not mounting an attack against this as a city. We'd like to know whether what we're bringing to the voters has any legal grounds trying to see whether it's legal now rather than later. Seemed like a good idea. It was not an effort to derail this. I keep on doing that, don't I? I'm sorry. Just let me get back to the nuts and bolts of this. Would you speak to me about the parentheses because I didn't even notice them as I was reading this. Did we insert those or is that from the people who are bringing this forward? No, Tony Condati wrote the ballot question and he was quoting language from the initiative itself. So the quotation marks are in the initiative itself? No, they're not. Those are words that he pulled from the initiative but he wanted to make sure that they were the ballot question. He wanted to emphasize to the voter that the ballot question was using the terminology of it but we can take those out if that's the council. Okay, because it could be as we could see not taking questions from the floor, but thank you very much. I could see there was a good point made for the fact that it makes it, it gives the impression. I know what Tony's intention was but it gives the impression that we are paraphrasing and perhaps singling those words out. So that would be a friendly amendment that I'm gonna bring forward but I'm also gonna wait and ask the city clerk. There seem to be a number of things tied to just putting this on the ballot and one of the most important things for me is including the text of the measure. I didn't know that that was even optional. I thought the text of the measure automatically goes into the voter information. Does it not? No, it doesn't and the reason is because sometimes you have tremendously lengthy ordinances, for example, taxation ordinances the cannabis ordinance we opted not to because of the length of 30 pages. Yeah, because you have to include all this language. It's mandated by state law and a lot of it's legal jargon. So it's actually less confusing to accurately paraphrase for the voters. In most instances, including this one, the ordinance is not unduly lengthy and we think it's in the best public interest just to publish a text of the ordinance into ballot. And to include the entire text of the ordinance and would that not belay any concerns by the attorney for Greenway with regard to how this is worded? I mean, that letter was a bit confusing me. Forgive me, the letter we received from Greenway's attorney on what the objection was. It seems like we're going forward chapter inverse with the way we're supposed to. I'm prepared to address that if the council wants to. Please. I received that letter today as well. He, the attorney, his name is. Lowell Finley, Mr. Finley. He first of all cites the Tressel detour provision in the findings and I looked at that and what it says is the Regional Transpiration Commission has proposed making the Tressel off limits to pedestrians, bikes, electric bikes and skateboarders deterring pedestrian and bike traffic from the corridor onto bike lanes and sidewalks in the local Capitola Street Network and across the Stockton Avenue Bridge. So he's talking about the existing bike lanes and sidewalks in the local Capitola Street Network and across the Stockton Avenue Bridge. So that's right in the ordinance itself. If you go to the plan under the master trail plan under section 4.11.2 it says there are current discussions about improvements to this bridge Tressel due to structural conditions. Coastal trail access through this area will need to continue on existing surfaces and streets and sidewalks across the Soquel Creek and navigate through Capitola Village. Future plans for the Tressel replacement should include a new bike, pedestrian facility in the bridge. So the initiative and the master trail plan are talking about the same existing streets and sidewalks in the Capitola Village. Mr. Evans was correct in acknowledging that the trail itself as designed in the master plan and approved goes through the village itself, okay. Well, John, let me try and zero in on where my question is coming from and that is what is the attorney's objection and what in what we're doing tonight is he objecting to? I was not clear to me because he says the summary inaccurately implies that the measure would prevent expenditures for trail connections and trail connections. He's again using the term trail with corridor and as Mr. Evans acknowledged, the Tressel, at least that portion of the corridor is not part of the trail. But the ordinance, it says any funds, the no city of Capitola Department shall spend any funds or resources related to the construction, reconstruction, operation, maintenance, financing, marketing or signage for a detailed detour of the trail onto Capitola Street or sidewalks. You can't have a detour of the trail onto Capitola Streets and sidewalks without having a connection from the trail to those Capitola Streets and sidewalks. And then he says that the ordinance inaccurately implies that the measure would prevent expenditures for trail connections. So it is unclear to me what he is saying in this letter and I don't think the question is inaccurate. Okay, then I'm glad we weren't, I was the only one who was confused. If I may weigh in. Yes, please. He was, he particularly pointed out the word routing instead of detour and it may be a friendly amendment to change the word. That was the one that was italicized in his letter. And if you read the report, the term routing was chosen because as Mr. Evans acknowledged, the Capitola Village Streets and sidewalks do not constitute a detour from the trail. They are the trail. And that was a conscious decision to use that term instead of detour. We thought detour. Understood, I think this is angels on the head of a pin. So in this moment, correct me if I'm wrong, but the motion on the floor, should the friendly amendment go forward to strike the parentheses that we inserted and to print the attached measure in its entirety, does not fly in the face of those in favor of putting this on the ballot and who circulated it and their desires and their attorney. Would that be a correct assumption? Correct. Good. Is that friendly amendment okay? Question of the city attorney. Good. City attorney, have any problem with removing the italics and the provision that the mayor suggested? No. And that's a friendly amendment. Great. And we're all in favor of including the full text. Yes, absolutely. And so we'd be taking the quotes out of this? Correct. The quotes remove the text. And this is exactly the way it was presented by those who circulated it. This is the core, this 75 words here. Is their attorney have a problem with these 75 words? Yes. It's not the question that they proposed. Our office was responsible for preparing the question and we did. So they have an issue with the way this is presented as a question to the voters? Yeah, the question that they proposed that they wanted was the one that Mr. Morani put into the record. Are you more confused? No, I understand more now. My apologies. Okay, I am going to just say that this could have been drafted more carefully. And I think that goes for every referendum or initiative that's ever been placed in the California ballot. It's usually the day after the election that we question it. So it could have been done better. It is clear to me this is less about an ordinance within Capitola than a statement by the citizens of Capitola and their feelings about a trail. You may not say it in here. No one, you know, I think we all agree that we want the citizens to weigh in. This is the way they're weighing in. I have no doubt that this is going to be resoundingly passed by the citizens of Capitola because I speak to a lot of them. So I think that I'm just going to go forward and call the vote unless you'd like to make another point. Well, I just want to clarify. Could you ask me for a friendly member to remove the italics and to add some language? Are you still asking for that? Or do you find that that's not? No, no. We're removing the quotation marks. I said italics. And I'm just having the entire text in the ballot pamphlet. Those are the only two things. I'm not going to try and wordsmith this according to the way my friend Vic read into the record. It just seems ill-conceived. And adding the additional language. Correct. What additional language are we adding? The additional language. Is there any additional language? We are checking the box for the full text. The full text of is going into the ballot. Correct. And removing the italics. Quotations. Quotations. Thank you. And I second the agrees with it. Okay, can I have a roll call vote, please? I actually have Stephanie Harlan as the second. Sure, he'll relinquish the honor. No problem. I'm sorry. Are you okay with those amendments? Council member Harlan. Aye. Council member Petrand. Aye. Council member Peterson. Aye. Council member Botthorff. Aye. And Mayor Termini. Aye. Thank you. We'll take a five minute break. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Hey, Dan. Here we go. That is my favorite people. We have special color cards for all of you. Mr. City Manager, you ready? Let's move on to 9B, determine amounts for community grants. Staff report, please. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Council members. We're here to talk about the 2018 through 2020 community grant program, the level of history. In 2014, this city moved from a one year grant program to a two year grant program. We've just finished up a two year grant program so we're looking at funding for 2018-19 and 2019-20. In 2016, the council separated the budgeting of the program from the allocation of the funds. And right now, the council budgeted $275,000 for the program in 2018 and 2019 as well as 2019-2020. On May 30th, the council appointed council members Botthorff and Peterson to review the grant requests and give recommendations for the full council. Staff also sent out applications to all current grant recipients per the council's direction. This year, the city received 30 grant requests from 30 community groups funding 40 different programs. Two previous grant to e-recipients did not reapply. The total grants requested this year for both years was $270,947. The subcommittee met and made some recommendations. They reviewed the applications as well as the grant requests. The primary recommendations the subcommittee made was to use the 2017-2018 award amounts as a base for 2018-19 awards with following two exceptions. Senior citizens' legal services, the base for 2018-19 would be the previous grant cycle because in 2017-2018, there was a reduction in grant allocations for that. So the 2015-16 was actually higher. So that was the recommended base for that group. And the other one is community bridges lift line program. The requested amount was reduced from 47,000 to 30,000. The second was that there'd be a 2% adjustment above the base of 2017-18 for 2018-19 as well as an additional 2% adjustment for 2019-2020. The total recommended award amount for 2018-19 is $240,914. And 2019-2020 with that additional 2% is $245,000. It's $245,732. Additional subcommittee recommendations was that they suggested creating a local critical need fund in 2018-19 with some of the remaining community grant budget. This fund, as discussed during the subcommittee, would be available for use for local critical needs as designated by the city. That is actually the end of my presentation. Is there any questions? Why some of and not the balance of? Because we have already approved 275 for this. Why would we not take the remainder above and beyond the 240 and put it in that critical needs fund? That was a subcommittee recommendation. Well, then where's the rest of the money going? No, we approved 275,000 as a council. Would you like to ask? Tell me about it. So the subcommittee got together with the parameters of $275,000 for each year. And when we took, there was a lot of redistribution that was going where some agencies had not applied for funds and then there was some that was a lower request than was originally initiated. So what we had was a, without doing a deep dive into analysis of how to reallocate the extra funds, we said, let's go ahead and give a color to all the agencies equally distributed across the board. Let's try to set up an emergency fund because we really didn't have any kind of a measure to pump money in and if something came up mid-year or something, there was some tragedy that we wanted to address. And then the balance of fund is that we had a discussion that because there were gonna be possibly two or three new council people next year that would come in that we would set the money aside because there were programs that were not fully funded in education and or seniors. And we said that this would, when mid-year review came up we would still have the money in the budget year to redistribute at that time with maybe some of the influence of three possible, two, three new possible council members. So it still remains available to community grants? It is in there with the intent to spend. Okay, the 10,000 was set aside for the emergency fund to get it started. The remaining funds was to be used after the election at mid-year review because there were a lot of programs on the youth side and senior side that had not asked for the amount of funds. And rather than to just distribute it randomly, we said, if somebody comes in and there's a keen interest or something develops we would have that money to spend in the budget year. One more question, because this is a two-year effort. Yes. I will assume that that fund will be carried over to the next year. I believe that was the intent. There was never an intent to reduce the $275,000 each year. So that at the end of next year, it will be more like 50,000 in that critical need fund if we don't use it or allocate it. Well, the critical need fund is only 10,000. Oh, well. The median amount would carry over, trying to get direction on how to carry into funds, but it was my intention that probably it would be spent in this year. If not, that residual amount would be carried over with the understanding that we still allocate $275 each year. I just didn't want to see it evaporate. It did not evaporate. Okay. Stephanie, the question. I think we should allocate it right now. I think they could all identify critical needs if they have right now, and more things that they can do with the money. And we budgeted that amount. I think we should spend that amount this year. Okay, we're gonna wait till we have our discussion, because I think someone wants to speak, not sure. Can I make a clarification? Go right ahead. I just want to clarify that the critical needs aren't necessarily critical needs of the community agencies that we're funding. It's the critical needs of us as a council. So for example, if there's a flood in the village, we don't necessarily know which nonprofit would be most able to assist us if we needed hotel vouchers, if we needed work crews, if we need anything like that. So having this critical need fund says that if we have a massive issue, for example, a flood in the village, that we as a council can pull from that fund to say, we need people to do this work, we can fund you now to do it. That's why we have the emergency reserve fund. It's not just the nonprofits. No, that's why we have the emergency reserve. They have over a million dollars in the emergency reserve fund. Different, it was a different intent. Okay, very good. Raymond, come on up. I'm always glad to see you. And before we start the clock on you, let me tell you, I appreciate you were one of the largest reductions and you're able to help us with the lift line reduction in creating the funds and having the access. So thank you very much. Ditto on that. Yeah, thank you. My name is Raymond Cansino. I'm the CEO of Community Bridges. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your continued work to invest in social services tonight. It's not just about the $275,000 that you provide. It's for the thousands of people that are impacted and benefiting in our communities. And so thank you so much on behalf of them. This provides meals to seniors. It provides transportation. And I have some co-workers with me tonight that will explain a little bit more. I also want to commend you all for putting this proposal together. You're carrying the torch. We first started this conversation also with Scots Valley and they were for the first time in 10 years raising their base minimum. So thank you so much for continuing that. We're going to continue this conversation across the county because I think it's critically important. So one thing I do want to mention is 2% is great because it's going to help us get 50% towards inflation. The last year I just want to point out that we had a 4% inflation rate. And so I just want you to consider that. It's $5,500 for all of social services in order to address inflation just for one year. But we really appreciate the continued support and the continued investment to all social services, not just Community Bridges. So I do want to just provide that information because it just came out in June in case you haven't seen it. Thank you. Next. Welcome. Hello, good evening. Thank you for having us. My name is Ivan Garcia. I'm from LIVO Community Resources. I wanted to thank you all for your continuous support of our Family Resource Center. LIVO Community Resources is a family resource center of Community Bridges. And I just wanted to share that with your continued support, we continue to provide youth programs such as our free tutoring, one-on-one tutoring for our youth that a lot of citizens from youth from Capitola and Live Oak utilize greatly in partnership with the county sheriffs. We're providing free sports, access to sports during the summertime. And we're very excited to have a clinical supervisor on site to be able to provide mental health services to any citizens throughout the county. But thank you for your support and the 2% increase. We really, really greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Greetings. Greetings, Mr. Mayor and council members. I wanna, my name's Kirk Hans. I'm the Lifeline Program Director of Program of Community Bridges. And of course, you know, we provide specialized paratransit transportation to mainly low-income elderly and or disabled individuals. And I've worked for the company for 21 years and Capitola's always been one of our big supporters and stakeholders and partners. And I wanna thank you for that. And we had the opportunity as we received some funds to measure D to give back to Capitola. So there was an opportunity. So our ask was about $18,000 less than last year, little over 37% reduction. And we just want the opportunity to thank and give back for that. But also as stakeholders and partners, I really wanna talk about our clients and what they have to say about the services that you have partnership in. And we did a survey and fiscal year ending this year. 97% of Lifeline clients feel less isolated due to the services that are provided by Lifeline. That's a tremendous amount. That's almost 100%. And of course, isolation also leads to loneliness. And as I was driving home from work, I heard on the radio the Surgeon General speaking and he was saying loneliness leads to increased heart diseases and dementia and earlier death. So we're contributing to good health through these services. Also 83% believes that the services help their family because they're more independent. So now their family members aren't, they're not as dependent on family members so they can go off to jobs and do other stuff. And lastly, 70% agree that they have increased physical health due to transportation services that Lifeline provide. Even though that's a smaller number, that's huge because as we're also partners with Elder Day, a lot of times people don't see really improved health as it is more of maintaining health and maintaining better lifestyle. So I really thank you, your partners in that. All council members here and previous council members all contributing to this. This is what our clients have said on the survey and just wanna appreciate you for all that. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and council members. It's an honor to be here tonight. My name is Steven Matzi. I am the new 60 plus senior program coordinator for the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County. Our program addresses the needs and challenges of the LGBTQ older adult population that can be especially at risk and vulnerable. So I'm here to talk about the program as well as to thank you for your support in our program. First, I wanna share a few key piece of information with you. Most LGBTQ older adults have suffered a lifetime of marginalization, discrimination and oppression which often leads to their apprehension of accessing mainstream services. They are more likely to age alone. They are often estranged from the biological families. They are two times more likely to be single and three times more likely to have no children. This diminished support can lead to an increase in social isolation which has been well documented to affect their physical and emotional well-being. Our program actually started right here in Capitola at Fort Vale Terrace Mobile Home Park on Plum Street 15 years ago when a handful of seniors recognized the need for them to build and maintain social connections as they age. They held monthly potluck luncheons and built and maintained sustainable friendships. Although our program has since outgrown the community center at Brook Vale Terrace, Capitola will always be in our hearts. Here is how your support past, present and future has helped us to address the needs of the LGBTQ older adults. We have served 743 duplicated LGBTQ elders through a variety of activities including five bi-monthly luncheons and 12 men's and women's gender-specific social events. We've also implemented a new evidence-based curriculum called Wellness Initiative for Senior Education, one of which has happened here in Capitola. This program has given those seniors an opportunity to not only take control of their health as they age, but also empower them and to build maintainable social connections. It also celebrated their diversity and their resiliency. We realize that more work still needs to be done as our LGBTQ older adult population continues to age and we appreciate your support in that mission. We need to target more outreach to bring more LGBTQ older adults to our program, including those here in the city of Capitola. We also hope to one day add a direct service component and possibly LGBTQ senior-specific support groups. In closing, I just wanna say how grateful we are to the support that the city of Capitola has shown our program over the years and appreciate the opportunity to be here before you tonight. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello, Helen. Good evening, mayor and council members. I'm Helen Ewan-Story. I'm the assistant director for the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County. And we had the opportunity recently to come before your council, so we give you a little bit of information, but I'm really here tonight to thank you for your longstanding support of our rental assistance program, which is one of six of our anti-poverty programs county-wide. As you know, our rental assistance program serves low-income households, seniors, disabled folks, low-income families. Keeps them housed, avoiding eviction and homelessness and all the financial and social trauma that's involved with that. So we really wanna thank you for that longstanding partnership, as well as your recommendation for continued funding the next two years. You know, another part of the proposal that I really wanna appreciate and others have spoken to it is your thoughtfulness in terms of recommending 2% cost adjustment each year. The two-year contract is really important, obviously, for all of us nonprofits to deal with the increased cost of business. So thank you for that thoughtfulness. You know, I had with me a little earlier a staff member, Irene Martin, who's our Northman County case manager for our rental assistance program, as well as an assisted family. And unfortunately, they weren't able to stay. But I just wanna talk a little bit about the impact of your support and what that assisted household let us know. You know, they have a senior in their household and they had a problem with the social security that was delayed and they got behind in their rent. And our support with your real financial support kept them housed. We were able to assist them for two months to help avoid eviction and homelessness. And that's one of many stories that we shared with you previously in terms of families that we helped disable folks in the community that we've helped. You know, folks that we're seeing really struggling with medical issues, with family separation and other issues that really, you know, really degrade ability of a household to stay housed. So I wanna thank you again for your thoughtfulness and just continue to invite partnership certainly with, you know, the innovation, the local innovation fund. We welcome any partnership and consultation about any priorities. We know what a critical issue poverty is in this community and this county where the second highest poverty rate in the state behind LA, which is quite a distinction. So we know it's an issue that's impacting so many. And so we look forward to continuing to partner with you around this issue. Thanks. Thank you. Greetings. Good evening, Mayor and members of the council. Thanks for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Arts Council of Santa Cruz County. My name is Jim Brown and I'm the new deputy director of the Arts Council. We're grateful for the 39 years of continuous support provided by the Capitola City Council and the creative partnership that we've enjoyed together. This year we inspired 574 Capitola school children through our Spectre Arts program in the schools. Student artwork from Roy Segura's class at New Brighton Middle School was featured at the youth art exhibit at the county center. And a handful of classroom teachers participated in our Summer Arts Institute, which prepares students to, I'm sorry, prepares teachers to incorporate arts into their academic lessons. We also provided numerous grants to organizations that serve Capitola residents like Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, excuse me, Tandy Beale's Santa Cruz Poetry Project, the Santa Cruz Symphony, as well as supporting grants to individuals in Capitola and specifically a project called the, I'm sorry, the Capitola Plan Air Painting Event. This October, eight Capitola artists will participate in open studios and two Capitola businesses, Palace Art Supply and many Hands Gallery will be some of our most important partners in distributing our open studios guides. We also know that thousands of Capitola residents really enjoy the open studios program. In 2012, our funding from the city of Capitola was reduced from $4,200 to $930. And that funding level has stayed relatively constant, it's grown slightly, as people have noted, your increases over the years, but we currently have the lowest level of funding recommended for any of the non-profit organizations in your grant portfolio. This year, we asked that the Arts Council funding be restored to $5,000 to reflect the amount of programming and community impact that we have in Capitola. And we appreciate your consideration of this increase. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Good evening, City Council Mayor. My name is Lisa Berkowitz. I'm the program director for Meals on Wheels, a program of community bridges. I was thinking tonight how lucky seniors and older adults are who reside in Capitola, not only because it is a really beautiful city in our county, but also because city councils, both past and present, have always found it in their hearts and understood that it was very important to support senior services, in particular senior Meals has been a very welcome, we've been a welcome recipient of all the support. And this year that has allowed us to serve over 8,000 meals to City of Santa Cruz, I'm sorry, City of Capitola residents and they are most appreciative of all the help. I would like to invite any of you to come any time and help us deliver Meals. We have several times during the year where we specifically invite you, but you're always welcome to go out on a route or to come over to the Live Oak Senior Center and help serve which there are many seniors from Capitola who participate over there as well. So thank you again, we are very much appreciative and on behalf of all the seniors we serve in Capitola, thank you. Thank you. Good evening mayor and council members, I'm Brenda Moss, Executive Director of Senior Network Services and first, thank you so much for your support in the past and in the future. As you probably know, Senior Network Services is basically the link to many of the great programs we have for seniors in our entire county and we start with being the Information Assistance Program. So seniors, friends, family members, neighbors can call our agency and get information about what services may assist that senior and through that program we have various links within our own agency to six other programs. We have a senior shared housing program, case management services, money management services, the family caregiver support program, a home help and respite registry and the health insurance counseling and advocacy program and there are so many people turning 65 all over the nation, but particularly here in Santa Cruz County, we provide workshops on new to Medicare and health insurance, it's a whole different story when you go from plurigroup insurance to Medicare and we're doing workshops throughout the county and we have sites here in Capitola, people come in for one-on-one counseling to understand their benefits and we do a lot of home visits for people who are not able to come into our agency and we really appreciate all of the support that you have always provided to all the senior programs but especially to senior network services so thank you for the cost of living increase. Thank you. Good evening everybody. My name is Leila Bratovich and I'm here representing the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County. I would like to thank you on behalf of our organization for your continued support for our programs providing mediation and conflict resolution services to the residents of Capitola and Santa Cruz County. We've served over 300 people from Capitola specifically over the past year. All of the mediation that we've conducted about 85% of them resulted in a mediated agreement and people resolving their issues through use of dialogue and help in facilitating reaching those agreements and based on our surveys, they said about 95% of the participants who would recommend our services and would use us again. So I feel like we have a pretty good track record over the years, over the many years, 30 years that CRC has been around in providing these services. In addition to facilitating dialogue whether through a neighbor dispute, landlord dispute, disputes over like vacation rentals, ordinance and as well as youth services through restorative justice programs, we have really been able to offer that to the residents because of the support of your city, of the city of Capitola. We also offer training opportunities where many people come and gain their own skills in better communication skills and how to communicate better, how to better resolve problems without resorting to violence, without resorting to offensive means of resolving conflict and use some mediation skills. I think I send this in the report but I would like to invite any of you or your staff that would like to attend one of our trainings. You are welcome as our supporters anyway. Just come and join us. We have one full day workshop coming up on September 11th. So just let me know if anybody would like to join that. I would also like to say that conflict is inevitable. It happens all the time. It happens many times a day to most of us and it's not good or bad, conflict in itself. And it's only in the way that we deal with conflict whether it becomes good or it becomes bad. So if we're able to deal with conflict in a positive way it can be an opportunity for growing relationship and for making men's of a bad situation making something good. Overall that results in having nicer communities that are safer and that are better community wellness. That's what I wanted to say. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Hello. Hello, I'm Jan Sherchild, program coordinator of Project Scouts. We've been doing your taxes for 40 whatever years. I've only been in charge of the program for 17. In terms of money I was thinking if we had not had your earlier conversation my brain might have been working well enough to say well you know if you've got this extra money you could do another half percent or maybe it's 3.3, I have no idea because it's 9.30 at night and I'm one of the people that's just aged into Medicare. I do wanna say that our goal this last year was to help 90 capitol residents with their taxes we actually helped 108 and part of that is because there have been two programs doing free taxes in the county and the other one folded because it just they couldn't survive with the funding that they had and I was exhausted at the end of the year. It's a really hard thing to keep the program going. So one of the things I wanna say is we can do more taxes if we have more volunteers so one of the things you can do to help is to get people to volunteer. You don't, not everybody does the taxes some people help people fill out the forms make sure the forms are in order those kinds of things but that kind of help is really helpful. Total refunds generated for capitol residents were almost $63,000. That's money that all of it comes back to the community it's not going to any, I'm not allowed to mention any companies but it doesn't go to the headquarters. We also were able to generate earned income credits for low income families. The other thing we do the statistics I don't have because we don't have money to have big statistical computer programs is the number of seniors that we were able to say you don't need to do taxes anymore. And some of them have said well I've had the same income for years I've been going to a paid preparer they never said I didn't need to do the taxes and I was paying them $100, $200, $300, $400 so that's more money that's staying in your community. So thank you very much for keeping Scout going and keep it up. Thank you. Good evening Mayor and council members Karen Delaney with the Volunteer Center. I'll start off with awesome news, a little bit of a brag. We have over 20 programs and over 11,000 volunteers countywide that help us transform lives for good because of the awesome work of our team this year we were named by the governor's office as California's 2018 nonprofit of the year. So give it for us, it just is fun to say that but also sometimes my job is so awesome because we get to make communities better. I do sometimes part of our job is pushing back and asking to reframe. We are grateful for your support this year as many years. I want to go back to what Helen said I'm sure you all saw that very troubling article about with the new method, more accurate method of calculating poverty. We are now the second highest, well it wasn't news to me but what I want us to really understand is 24% of our local people using an accurate measure that counts cost, what it costs to rent and to pay for childcare and to pay for food by that measure 24% of the residents of our county are living a poverty lifestyle and if you read our in poverty, if you read that report they say the distinguishing thing about Santa Cruz is that the majority of the people in poverty are working sometimes more than one job. And because our cost is so high most of the working poor and a lot of the seniors that are in poverty the ones we come and talk to you about and beg for all the time their income is too high to qualify for a lot of the services that if they lived in a normal cost community would actually lift them out of poverty. They don't even get to apply. So without grants like yours and our other local funders these people have nothing. And why I'm bringing this up is we need to have a different conversation. We agree with each other, we are equally committed, we are partners in the trenches but we need to look at this spending differently. So my pushback is this, we're one of the many programs that requested we are seeing a huge increase in our family programs. We have waiting lists in every program despite being the best nonprofit in the country. It's not because in the state it's not because we're not doing a great job it's not because you're not generous it's because the needs here have grown dramatically in a new way and this community is not recognizing it or responding to it. And so as you said earlier Council Member Bertrand wouldn't it be great if people step back and said hey maybe the needs are different let's take that into consideration. So when you have requests when you have money on the table and requests from long term partners who are telling you we need more money because there are greater needs the choice to ignore that and set aside money not to fund the chosen and proven partners but to wait for an unnamed crisis later when we have people every day in our office in crisis which is why we ask for more funding I just really want us to think about that and is that really the best use of the data that's available to us so thank you. Thank you you get the spirit award tonight thank you very much and do me a favor try and cheer up. Okay. It's always a mistake to follow Karen. Oh that's the truth Dan you're a brave man. This is a hard act to follow. My name is Dan Haifley Executive Director of O'Neill CIOC for about four and a half more months I think and I just want to thank you for your ongoing support for our program we've served 1100 students in the city capitalists since we started in the late 90s and this enables these students to learn the language of science to learn lifelong stewardship and particularly today this is more important than it has been in a long time not just the environmental stewardship part with all the threats that we're facing with the ocean and climate change but also the fact that science itself seems to be questioned and there's a methodology there and that's what we teach through our field trip through the curriculum we offer through each classroom that we serve as well as a community service project that each class does so we deeply appreciate the support that you've given us we support really appreciate the recommendation tonight and thank you for the cost of living increase and makes a big difference for us so thank you. Thanks Dan. Thank you for your many years of service. Good evening I'm Kristen Glenn I'm the grants manager from D'Antes Community Dental Care we provide over 1600 visits to capitol residents every year and so on behalf of our patients I wanted to come and express our sincere gratitude for your enduring support this helps kids focus on school instead of a toothache adults have the self confidence to go to a job interview and seniors helps them to eat D'Antes did a local needs assessment and in Santa Cruz County less than one third of those on Medi-Cal can even access a dentist and this doesn't include people without insurance so seniors on Medicare we believe that everyone deserves the dignity of a healthy smile and in total D'Antes serves over 11,000 patients in Santa Cruz County but I just wanted to come and say it's only with the support of community leaders like you that we're able to do our work and so on behalf of those on our patients thank you Thank you Hello Is everybody awake? Oh yeah Hey I just want to say to Karen Gray Bears was named president of the first president of Bush's one of the thousand points of life So does that count? Oh! Long time ago So it's volunteer one-upmanship now Okay good all right We've been around a lot we've been partners for a long time and I just want to first of all thank you on behalf Tim Bratton Gray Bears our board chairs are you still awake Frank? Hey Frank is our board chair and he was going to talk about he lives in Capitola and has helped us a lot We like to say Gray Bears promotes good nutrition, activity and social connection is like the three Capitola pillars of healthy aging Does that sound good? We can put that tagline somewhere Last year in the last two year grant cycle 290,000 pounds of fresh produce healthy staples to seniors mostly our flagships are Mid County Senior Center and Bay Avenue Senior Apartments but also Shadow Brook is the big one 135 bags will be delivering they're both days each week today this morning and tomorrow a great organic apples in the bags today we just got some strawberries directly from the field tonight about four o'clock that came in so they'll be in the bags tomorrow so you know the typical bag a lot of produce and we hear it from people all the time Jeannie a Capitola resident said I've never eaten so healthy I'm almost 80 and I'm eating salad several times a week for the first time in my life is that great love the strawberries too thank you so in addition to that I mean the question is what doesn't Gray Bears do we now process Styrofoam so we keep it out of the sea out of the ocean we're doing a lot for the environment as well and we do a lot with volunteers in that two year period 52 Capitola volunteers 7,000 hours of service for Gray Bears to help us do what we do we asked for a little more money this year so the reason why is we food costs go up it's up 16.7% in the last year we've added that to this year's budget which is really what the ask was we appreciate the COLA we appreciate your years of support and we just wanted to hope that we could backfill a little bit of that that difference thank you thank you Mayor City Council members thank you for having me here this evening I'm Suzanne Willis I'm the Development and Marketing Officer for Second Harvest Food Bank Second Harvest provides support for about 55,000 residents in the county here in Capitola it's about 10% of your city rather than the 20% that we're seeing countywide overall we distribute more than 8 million pounds of food annually here in Capitola we're looking at over 10,000 pounds of food a month going out through our distributions the two largest distributions here in your city are for seniors and for school children so we're really focusing on that sort of generational aspect of food insecurity but we also are supporting those who are suffering from mental illness and drug addiction as well through our services with the current threats to our social safety networks your support is ever more important the work that we're doing with CalFresh Outreach the work that we're doing with our nutrition education and food distribution programs and then partnering with agencies like Grey Bears and others here in Capitola really means that we are able to try and reach the most vulnerable in your city and we can't do that without your help and with that I'd like to thank you for your support I'd like to thank you for the the COLA that you're presenting as well I think that's great your partnership is so important to us one of the things that I wanted to highlight is that through a pass through grant that we were able to receive this last year we were able to support the Bay Avenue senior centers in their ability to increase their grocery rescue program we were able to bring in even more food that they're picking up because we got the money for them to increase I think it was to increase refrigeration as well as to get some cold blankets so the food the cold chain isn't broken on that food anyway all of this work all of this partnership is made possible by your support and we really appreciate that I would like to invite you to come down to Second Harvest for either a tour or even a team building day who doesn't need to build their teams we can put you to work so thank you for your partnership and thank you for feeding hope in Capitola I'm going to bring it back to the council before I open it up to the council I'd like to ask Christian who is the other member of the committee that worked on this and I'll preface my question by saying I'm inherently lazy so when I see requests of 270,000 and a budget of 275 why didn't you just give these organizations what they requested and in the second year instead of a 2% COLA give a 1.5% COLA and still be under 275 what was so hard about that I don't mean to minimize the work you did I appreciate what you did but I'm feeling like we just need to give 270 out it's like, you know, what's the story sure, sure so I'm looking at a very longer term outlook outlook at this with a two-year budget cycle for community grant applications one of the things that I really want to look at in the next two years is how we're doing this and how we can make it more equitable in the way that we're giving our money how we can ensure that there's opportunity for more programs to be funded than there is now because historically we don't allow new people to come in and apply, correct? it's just the people that have already last few cycles we haven't last few cycles that's all I can really speak to in my historical knowledge but I wanted to look at coming in the future how do we find ways to make it so that more programs can get funding the funding is provided in a more equitable way and I plan on in the next two years having non-profit stakeholder roundtables I plan on having community member roundtables to really look at this from a much deeper perspective now in terms of just the numbers when we looked at this we were also considering things like the potential TOT tax and in the future the fact that some of the funding for our youth programs is going to come from somewhere else so we're actually going to have even more money but that's even more of a reason to just go with the 270 I would think that's just again I didn't want to let him go because he just wanted to keep as much money as he could but that's alright he's not really like that he's not really like that he would let the other people speak we'd love to address it but I want you to know we spent three sessions trying to work us out and understand that when community groups come and ask there's 15 people that are here tonight there are 46 total asks there are some people that ask for more money there are some people that didn't maybe I think a lot of people in my experience of doing this for six years would just give us a cost to living some people came back and they asked it for $5,000 some people asked for $1,400 sometimes we could see that they were asking for 3% there wasn't a reason for the ask so Kristen volunteered to say you know what I'm going to take these applications I'm going to do a deep dive I'm going to look at all these agencies I'm going to see what the ask is for where it's going to go the money is there it has been allocated we're not taking the money we didn't have by we were suggested that we can put a ballot measure on tomorrow that's unfair and it was a little unfair to tell Kristen to say Kristen I want you to research 46 agencies and figure out who's entitled to this so the agreement we came was let's take the money let's take what people have asked for let's take what they were granted in the 2000 and last cycle let's give everybody a cola which they've asked for let's not exceed the cola that we gave our own employees I just did and let's take the residual funds and let's let her do the deep dive look at these agencies find out which ones really could use the money based on some of the needs that have been made and then reallocate that money at the mid-year review and that was the intent of the committee it wasn't so easy to say just because somebody said we could use 5000 more I'm sure if we went to all 46 people and said could everybody use 5000 more they said well if we knew we might have got it we would have asked for it and I told everybody there wasn't a chance to do the work and Kristen volunteered to take it on as her own personal project I said if you want to run with this I will support you and that's what I'm doing tonight I'm supporting her intention to make it a project and to allocate the money at mid-year review still in this budget year yeah come a year from now there's still an opportunity to continue to allocate more money there's maybe an opportunity to allocate more money to programs that otherwise would have never had the opportunity to ask us for it you know and as far as the emergency critical need fund and the presumption is that a lot of assumptions we made on allocating some funds was on the success of the TOT measure if the TOT measure is not successful some of these groups and there's a couple groups I believe Larry that did not apply that may still apply because they didn't get their act together to apply and should they figure it out we don't want to look at it and say no we're not going to do that and so because the TOT won't be decided until November because mid-year review and this would be a great opportunity to give her time to let it all come together the intent is still to spend every nickel of 275 and on that note Stephanie I'll start with you well that's why I asked the council when I was mayor to choose for everybody to choose four or five groups to get to know them because then you would which didn't take me up on and then you would have gotten to know what their greater needs might be and what they could have done with maybe a little more money and I'm disappointed and sorry that we didn't do that I'm quite familiar with many many of these programs I do think we should give the arts council more money for running the specter program and helping with the other activities and the plein air show not quite a thousand dollars is ridiculous that's really terrible I mean that's a wonderful program in our schools and for the teachers also a wonderful opportunity for training so I would really like to just allocate the money all of it and I don't think we need an emergency fund I don't want to allocate it to other groups that didn't get their act together that's not fair to these people who got their act together and submitted the application so that's not I don't think that's a good idea at all so I would just like to allocate the rest of the money and be done with it and we've given them a nice cola it's not really the cost of living but I think it's fair considering our employees too Doc what do you have to say you know I think we're doing I've been a big supporter of funding nonprofits for sure and I could I'm on the senior council I could go on and talk about scouts Gerald didn't have the time to finish probably all the things he wanted to say dentists came up and one of our surveys is one of the highest needs for dental care so I'm well aware of many of the issues that everyone in this audience here in this chamber supports when I first came to Capitola one of the things I was lucky enough to join Sam's in the back he appointed me on the fact one of the first official committees I had and I still remember that sorry finance advisor committee since the beginning of my tenure on the fact and I've been on it now for 12 years or whatever it's been pretty a long run but the allocation for finances the needs of the 501C3s and the services that we help provide for has been very contentious and we've never made any changes they've been added to as more groups came and requested money but we've never actually come up with a good evaluation I remember Mike tried to work that with I think Bob Begun right so I think what Kristen is doing here is saying and I said earlier and I think it was repeated a little bit a while ago things change and so it's kind of hard I think for some in the audience here and many haven't shown up but to hear that and so I think that's what the effort is right now is to try to look at what we have and what are the needs of this community capital primarily and we also recognize that it supports the accounting programs too just as well so I think that's what's going on here I for one and I know others that are involved in our position right here may want to refocus things and I don't know if that's going to be the case our recreation department is going to go through a big change and maybe serving people through expanded services that address the needs of kids so I think everyone here in the audience knows you spend a dollar on a kid and it's magnified by about seven and what better way to serve the community than through kids later on in life they're going to be very much thankful for that aid when they were younger and growing as you know I'm on the senior council I just said that but in life the things that you have to contend with like loneliness and a whole variety of other issues so what is the proper balance and I think that's one reason why we haven't been able to address it carefully so I think what's happening here is that effort and I respect Kristen I have to give a shout out for her program here is to have these one-on-one meetings such as Stephanie talked about and try to get a better understanding a deep dive into what the programs mean and how they're funded and what they mean to the community and in general and that's going to be a hard thing I'm very aware of the fact that every single program needs to have continuity in terms of funding you cannot plan your services on an annual basis it's uncertain what your funding is going to be I don't know how this evaluation is going to work out in whatever way it works out especially if we get support for the TOT increase it's going to have to be over a number of years it's going to have to be very gradual so the programs can adjust so I think this is an effort that's going to be something we all learn from okay capital is going to learn better what the needs of the community organizations are and how they provide services and the community hopefully is going to support us in providing more money to provide for those services so we don't know at this point how this is going to play out it depends on a lot of things that are up in the air when a council like this asks the community for money it's a very serious thing it's serious to me we're asking money for the TOT increase Ed is working extensively on that to get the commercial entities in this community behind that tremendous job we're going to ask for money from the marijuana tax to me whenever we ask for money that implies a bargain with the community you don't ask for money and just take it we have to be providing services and so that's what we're going through right now and this is just the start of it I commend Kristen for making those bold moves to try to put a plan into place it's not an easy thing to do it might shake things up I don't know I have a feeling though when you look at capital's commitment to supporting nonprofits and the services that they provide we've been there at rather high significantly high amounts compared to other communities here and I'm going to make sure that stays that way but right now we're in evaluation mode thank you Stephanie? my other concern is that waiting until mid-year we may have new council members that don't know anything about these groups so they're not going to make educated decisions about it but I'll wait until then that's not a good process Kristen give me the last bite I'll get the last bite one of the things I do want to say is that I did look at every single one of these applications every single one of the applications that came to us I looked through all of them I read them all of those of you that came up and speak today 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 I have direct experience as a recipient, as a client as a board member with seven of you that got up here today so the work that the non-profit community does in our community is incredibly important to me which is why I'm putting so much effort into trying to understand it and revamp it if that's what needs to be done over a two-year period I don't want there to be any belief that I am ignoring those community partners that have been here for a long time so that they can open the door so that they may be able to have opportunity for new community partners to join us and what we already have and we've already started here in Capitola let's see here I'm trying to see which notes I wrote down as I was thinking I did see that report about how Santa Cruz County is second highest in poverty as the co-chair of the board for the community action board we do look at that's what we do is we run programs that fight poverty in Santa Cruz County the arts council, I was one of those kids in first grade that had their art up in the county building it was a big deal, there's a ceremony it was fantastic I was invited to see Odyssey and saw how fantastic experience that is for the kids conflict resolution center, I'm looking into your September workshops that you're going to be offering second harvest, less than five years ago I was in line for your food banks I understand how much work the non-profit community does and how much of a difference that it makes so I don't want in any way for this to seem like I'm trying to cut down the funding that I'm trying to hold on to money just so that we can keep it I'm already started peer-reviewed scientific research on equitable grant funding on should we use competitive or formula-based funding should we ask our applicants to approve that they have equity in their organizations and then weight the applications based on that these are the kind of questions that I'm asking and like Ed said it wasn't something I was going to be able to do in a two or three or four week period which is what we had in this particular instance I wanted this to be a much deeper dive to ensure that the non-profit community has a bigger say the community citizens have a bigger say and that we can work together towards that so again I can't emphasize enough that the non-profit community is invaluable to our community as a whole and I wish we could just throw money at all of you all the time but I'm just trying to determine how do we do that as a city in a way that benefits our non-profit community it benefits our citizens because ultimately that's what it means for the non-profits right as we as a city have a general plan and there's going to be holes in that general plan that we can't always fill we can't provide housing vouchers we can't provide food for people who need it that's what the non-profit community is stepping in and filling those gaps in our plan as a city so again you know my idea here was that we were trying to set aside funds for at least a year or at least until the mid-year budget process so that we can see is there an opportunity for more people to join us at this table is there an opportunity to determine hey maybe those one of the things I found in my research is that those with the smallest budgets are typically have the biggest need for the grant funding but are getting the smallest amount of funding and that as you get higher up those who have the really big budgets are getting really big amounts of funding and so maybe that's happening here maybe it's not I haven't gotten that far into it but that's something that I want to look into I want to make sure this is a fair and equitable process for all of us finally you know I don't know do our emergency reserves allow for us to fund hotel rooms for those who are displaced if there's a flood there for any emergency that we the council deems necessary but any cause in that emergency that's what I'm saying if there's a flood in the village understandably we could use that money for repairing a pipe for pumping out water can we use that money for housing displaced citizens can we use that money for putting food on their table is that the kind of thing that our emergency reserve can do I think the answer is technically it could be I mean I think in general the emergency reserve has been prioritized for infrastructure type improvements those types of things but I think technically it could be used for those other sorts of uses as well good general and now without further ado I want to understand that we did spend a lot of time I want to thank you for appointing the two of us to this subcommittee and we took this challenge seriously and for me the second time serving on the subcommittee and what I didn't want to do is if I've watched this over six years just continue to come and reallocate come and reallocate there hasn't been any increase there has been no potential and what I didn't want to do is I didn't want to take the money that was left and reallocate it because should we find that there's another need or we want to go in a different direction the worst thing we do to these agencies is tell them we're going to take money away from them there was a couple corrections we made on here where last time around we had a discussion at the end and we ran out of money and we took money from some agency and I can't remember who it was and Larry can help me your legal services because and we were going to fund them out of somebody's private pocket and that's not the way for any of you to count on your funding so we started off saying let's just go with what people receive let's give them the increase let's do this because it was not about giving you something and a year later taking it away so at this point I'd like to make a motion that the city council accept the consent committee recommendation and approve our proposal I'll second that okay for discussion allow me these asks are not arbitrary look at the request for 1819 do not assume that if there is extra money people just kind of these organizations willy-nilly bump $500 or $1000 on very specific because they're dealing in dollars sometimes not even thousands of dollars there is a flaw in the basic premise and that is in a bad year like 2012-13 we took deep cuts from these people and the only thing we did to correct it over the years was put 2% or 3% on and the arts council is a perfect example we cut them deeply because nobody thinks arts important or not as critical as food and the deep cut remained in place for the next 6 years just doesn't make sense we have enough money to fund everyone's ask I think that when the TOT measure passes we will have considerably more that we don't have to reallocate that we can keep a side but keeping it aside for an emergency I have news for you this is an emergency every year is an emergency I have sat in the offices I've done the work as Stephanie did as well as you and been closely associated with these organizations every day is an emergency it's amazing that people even walk into the office knowing what they're going to confront they're going to confront great need with very little resources every single day and to say we have allocated 275 and in hopes of some kind of looking forward and deep diving and whatever you want to use to describe it we're going to hold back an extra 40,000 we can grant every single request and give a one and a half percent cola and still be within the 275 after 2 years that's my pitch that's what I'd like to see and in my heart it's the only thing I can vote for with conscience it is for us it's doing some planning and being strategic for the people out there it's 30 or 40,000 that don't get to the people who need it Stephanie you know many of these agencies have waiting lists or not serving enough people and as many people as they would like to and a case in point is big brothers and big sisters we only give them $2,800 they have a huge waiting list and we know from the statistics that having a big brother or a big sister reduces truancy, improves grades improves success in life reduces probably psychological issues that they have and it's a tremendously good program for youth over the long run we're only giving them a pittance if they had more money they could recruit more volunteers in their program how many of those kids are from capitol though it's in their application and that's all I'm arguing is that rather than giving this money out across the board is to be able to look at those things in a deeper level and say yes this is important work absolutely a child having a big brother or big sister but if we're talking about a waiting list how many of those kids on the waiting list are capitol kids I would like to not have this argument and call the question I'm not going to let the question be called yet even though she's in the middle of her I don't think it's good to pit council members that's what we're doing here actually that's what a debate is we're arguing it in a rational way I understand everyone's feelings I understand the ownership you have in the work you've done it's good and Jacques you had one more question I haven't finished my comment even if we only had 5 or 10 capitol kids on that list if we could serve them it would sort of really really improve their life and that's worth it for the 5 or 10 kids that are on that list it's worth it for one kid to help one kid to do better in school and have a better life Jacques you had a question or a comment or are you done commenting I had a comment but you don't have it anymore I do well then make it this is our problem we're trying to figure out how to effectively from capitol standpoint deal with the allocations like I said ever since I was on the finance advisory committee it's been the same discussion and at some point I think I completely agree with Stephanie when I sit and look at the allocations in the senior council we realize that I think that it should have been done in a slower trajectory that was my main point that I just said but at some point I think we have to sort of grab this and try to work with him so I'm going to support this and in midterm we could reevaluate and say okay well maybe we made some mistakes maybe we should actually fully fund that request or maybe take on some other agencies that we feel better serve the people of capitol or the county of Seneca we have to have that evaluation and I think that evaluation rather is an important one to do I'm going to have a roll call vote before I have a roll call vote to Stephanie's point there are things on here you can do numbers on like meals on wheels and we can count meals and we can count breakfast lunches and dinners and there are some things that you do because they have to be done big brothers and big sisters is one of them there are a few other things on here that strike that where you can't look at the numbers one person is important enough and Jacques it's easy for us to say wait six months for midterm you need to sit in one of these nonprofit offices and tell someone that in six months we may be able to help you with your rent it makes no sense roll call Council Member Harlan Council Member Bertrand Council Member Peterson Council Member Bontore Mayor Termini Passes 3-2 Thank you folks, appreciate you coming and we're on to ballot measure arguments are we up? Yes as soon as okay so we have a rather full ballot this year arguments have been to match the county the process is there is a filer for an argument and code sets the process a filer needs to be either authorized council member or members an individual capital of voter a bona fide association of citizens or a combination of voters and associations paperwork for the fabulous number of people back there there was paperwork available if anyone was there still probably is that filer then determines the signers there are up to five signers there are not the limits on the signers that there are in the filer and they must all arguments must be accompanied by the paperwork which has the original signature on it the county has, sorry trying to rush through this it's okay, I know, it's alright the argument paperwork is also available from the county I'm doing the speed version here I have set my deadlines to match the county a week from tomorrow arguments week after that rebuttals analyses from the attorney are also due on the 17 I am requiring that originals be in by five o'clock you cannot submit electronic or fax versions and tell me you're gonna get the originals later I choose the arguments but I have to follow the code if it's our and we have authorized members where the first priority the sponsor the initiative have the first right for arguing in favor of their position should we not get arguments from that then I would move down to bona fide association of citizens and individual capital of voters if we would happen to get the same category then I would work with Gail Pellerin and choose from among those and now this is the time for us to determine we have these four measures we have already requested in a partial analysis for the business tax and the mayor has provided a draft and we have an updated draft the pdf is in there for review his recommendation was perhaps that the entire council would wish to be the signers in this case and not go outside of the council to have any other support shall we take these one at a time yeah my thought start with cannabis since it's up there hopefully this language meets with everyone's approval I have one one correction go right ahead so councilwoman harland so this version is slightly different than the version that was in the packet okay well I'll tell you what I had made some corrections in the let's see in the last paragraph it starts out the tax is an important part of the city's ongoing commitment to fiscal responsibility it was carefully crafted public forums to find the right balance between generating the revenue needed while addressing certainty for this emerging industry I don't think anybody's, it's not even grammatically correct but I don't think anybody's going to understand what that says it's been corrected to it was carefully crafted in public forums to find the right balance between generating revenue while creating certainty for this emerging industry I don't think that's going to mean a thing to the voters I think just eliminate that we want it to be as clear and simple as possible they're not going to care about take the edits out of this and just show it all in black sure they're not going to care about public forums of the right balance between I don't think I think that's kind of extra information that's not needed we should just make it very clear to people people don't understand kind of legalese like that I think is this similar to other language to the other measures I used other measures languages and it was common together the average voter I don't think is going to care well we had 300 words I'm just afraid to leave any out no make it simple Kristen shock what do you think about this the way it reads I like it I think the line about the public forums is kind of important maybe an average general voter might not care about if it was a public forum but it's the voter that's going to be scrutinizing why did we decide to do this that would want to know that there was public forums involved public forums where it was discussed or you can say it was discussed at four city council meetings or something like that so they know it was thoroughly discussed I don't like the whole sentence no the whole that whole is just that sentence I think it's fine the tax is an important part of the city I was just an English teacher so I very very want to be very precise in words and say what we mean and keep it simple my recollection that's the discussion we had that was the open discussion then we should say we discussed it at four council meetings we were concerned about balancing we were talking about generating money and then trying to figure out where this industry is going I mean we had the police chief up here discussing about where this is going all that stuff in there we did I know but I don't think the public is going to care about that sentence well in jock's version of transparency it's like we're just putting on there the things we talked about that's being transmitted this is how we came let's say that we had four council meetings it was discussed just to see a note Stephanie I went to public forums because that's what a council meeting is calling it just a council meeting gives it gives the impression that the council discussed it and then went forward council meeting is a public forum public hearings where we had many speakers to say that we had four city council meetings with public hearings to discuss this issue do you want to open to the public any of you ne'er-dwells back there the breakfast club want to come up here and talk to us or no no okay good motion to adopt language second anybody have anything else to say then we're just doing it a little bit differently than we normally on the language this is just a vote in the language and I would like to add a hostile a hostile amendment that we also consider the fact that I requested all the council members to sign on to this so we have no one else signing as just the full city council sound right I'm going to ask not to sign this one oh okay I'm going to ask the treasurer to sign it in my place I'm happy to do that with the existing verbiage good you really just signed its name and I'm only kidding okay understood so we'll keep that out of this motion we'll keep the motion pure for our city clerk and have a roll call vote just on the language please Mr. Mayor just to clarify then I think we would say please join us yes in voting yes on measure correct correct councilmember Harlan no councilmember Bertrand yes councilmember Peterson yes councilmember Botthorff yes Mayor Termini yes and as far as signers do we have to actually take a motion and a vote on the signers I think you just did no we didn't include that because Ed didn't want to sign on it it was just a motion so so the motion so a motion to have the four council members who are willing to sign make a motion that the four council members excluding myself and the treasurer sign the the four council members and the treasurer not yourself excluding myself good all at once let's all in favor aye opposed good rolling okay let's move on to TOT I would like to request that Kristen and Ed because of the stellar work they've done on the subcommittee before get together and draft and identify signers to submit for the argument in favor of the TOT ballot item does that sound something that you would accept absolutely okay then done motion to authorize those two as the yes make a motion to authorize myself and Kristen and up to three others to sign the second and to prepare the argument yes all in favor aye opposed that's good now let's see how about does it need two council members to work with the treasurer to draft and identify signers may I ask if you we're not we don't think there's an impartial analysis is required for that it's fairly straight we are publishing the entire ordinance so we're good okay now we're down to the treasurer can I just throw a little addition in there which is that I already have a draft I want to see it I don't know I gave it to the staff whether you want to or not you're one of you're one of the three we just need two council members to jump in there with them Stephanie can you get involved with the treasurer and since let's see Stephanie and myself work with you I know I'm trying not to put you on the spot because I don't want you to embarrass yourself so is there a motion motion to have a mayor termini and councilman from the Harlan and the treasurer on the is there a second second all in favor opposed and let's see I think that we've done our job here mr. city manager do you want us to do more mr. mayor I think on the appointed treasurer because it's a little bit esoteric you may want to direct the city attorney to prepare an impartial analysis to explain to voters that treasurers are required under California law and explain some of the sort of nuances to not make an argument but just explain the situation and that would be the city attorney who would be preparing that impartial analysis is that the pleasure of the council absolutely so moved second all in favor I opposed unanimous thank you I believe that handles all of our ballot measures does it not or do you have something else you need well the only other one would be is if you want to identify signers to craft Greenway argument I don't think there's any appetite up here to touch that in any way shape or form unless there's somebody has a need to John is there a question or comment in your eyes I just said I would expect that the main organization in support of the ballot measure is the Greenway people and the main organization in opposition to the ballot measure are the Fort people and you probably would expect them to submit arguments that's going to come forward one way or the other good happy to be involved if they need a member well you can contact that organization and see now we're down to designated a voting delegate and alternate for the 2018 league of California cities annual conference who wants to do this don't all rush at once you're going you're going to be our voting delegate I nominate councilwoman Harlan for that position second anyone else all in favor opposed that could be the ultimate not me too I nominate councilman Bertrand for the ultimate second all in favor aye opposed have a nice trip Mr. Mayor the only other question we would have is if councilmember Bertrand and councilwoman Harlan are planning to attend is anybody else planning on attending because if so we would have to cancel the September 13th council meeting are we still good September 13th the three of us bring it on yeah I want to see that agenda no sorry I'm even going to move from this chair on that meeting you're right you're going to be right there that's right just be the three of us anything else we're all good are you leading to the delegates discretion to make the votes I trust them I was reading some of the things I think we should at least bring it up so I'll bring it up you can come back and report I'll bring it up before the Stephanie usually does that's it thank you to the gallery out there it's great I hope we were mildly entertaining and we all learned something about democracy and pitting one councilmember against another not my intention to love you all