 All of our council members are here now. Good afternoon. Welcome to our 1pm session of the November 9th, 2021 meeting of the City Council. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsanacoust.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in at the beginning of the item you're wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please meet your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming, so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for public comment, press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented on your item of interest. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you Mayor, Council Member Zvodkin. Here. Council Member Johnson. Here. Here. Vice Mayor Brunner. Present. Present. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website at cityofsantacruz.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting. Whenever we move into an item, an agenda item that will be open for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items Council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be open for public comment during today's meeting are numbers eight through 12, excuse me, eight through 32 on our agenda with the exception of item number 27, which has been removed. I'd like to ask the council members if there are any statements of disqualification today. Seeing no hands, I will go ahead and ask our city clerk to announce any additions or deletions to the agenda today. Thank you, Mayor. What you already mentioned that item 27 has been removed, other than that, that they're done. Thank you. I'd like to make an announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda today. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda item number 32. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in towards the end of item number 32. I'd now like to ask our city attorney to provide a report on closed session, please. Thank you, Mayor Meyers, members of the city council. I have a couple items to report today. This morning, the council met in closed session to discuss the following items. Item one was public employment and specifically the council considered the city manager position in closed session. There's also an item on your afternoon agenda relating to that. Item two, bear with me while I open. Item two was a conference with labor negotiators and the council received a report from its negotiator. And with regard to service employees, SEIU service employees has received a report from its labor negotiator on that item. Item three was a matter of existing litigation involving the county of Santa Cruz at all versus Purdue Pharma at all. And with respect to that item, council unanimously adopted a motion directing city manager to sign all necessary documents required to join a settlement agreement with opioid distributors. Ms. McKesson, Cardinal Health, Amerisource, Bergen, and manufacturer of Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Settlement agreement has been proposed for that item. And as soon as that is executed, it will be available for inspection upon request by members of the public. Item four was an item of significant exposure to litigation. Council received a report from the city attorney. And that item will also be continued at the end of your open session for further discussion this evening. Item five was a conference with legal counsel involving anticipated litigation considering initiation of litigation and one potential item, one potential case was discussed. There was no other reportable action. Thank you, Mr. Pindotti. We'll now go into item number six on our agenda, which is the city manager's report. Rosemary Munard, our interim city manager is here. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. So we're going to give you a quick overview of several things today. One is an item, an update on COVID. We haven't had that on the on the agenda for a little bit. So we'll have that. And then Lee Butler, our deputy city manager and and, you know, homelessness response manager in addition to the planning community development director will be giving you a quick update on homelessness. And I do want to mention that there was a an FYI was distributed this morning. It will be posted, so it will be available publicly. But I wanted to have you have that. He's going to give you a quick overview of that. And then I just have a few slides about upcoming events. And we'll close with that. So with that, Chief Vody. Yes, thank you, Mayor Myers, Vice Mayor Brunner. I'll be short and sweet. Just want to give you guys an update for the COVID pandemic for November 9th. Currently, everything is, you know, optimistic in terms of in the last 14 days, we've seen a 15% decrease in the number of cases. Although with that in mind, the California Department of Public Health does warn that due to the holiday and the colder climate, they are sort of concerned about a bump, if you will, in terms of number of cases. Transmissibility is still substantial. In this county, 60% of it is due to community spread. So while you're out and about, second only to household transmission, people bringing it back home to their families. I think it's important to note that Monterey County has reinstituted their indoor mask mandate. With that in mind, masking indoors is still strongly recommended by the health director of Santa Cruz County. In terms of vaccines, we are currently at 398,620 doses administered. So currently we're at 72%. The population has to have at least one dose. And in terms of full vaccination, we're at 67%. So in context, the state is currently at 73.5%. So we still have some work to do as a county. And again, I wanna put it out there that appointments for vaccinations, both initial and boosters, are at myturn.ca.gov. In terms of children, the Pfizer vaccine has been approved and is rolling out for five-year-olds to 11-year-olds. They are currently taking walk-ins and appointments. As of last week, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education has implemented this plan as of yesterday, November 8th. For those that are wondering, it's one-third the adult dose. It's two shots three weeks apart and it is extremely effective. And then for those that are under five years, six months to four years, they're expecting to have some sort of approval in early 2022. Next slide. Here's a quick snapshot of the Delta surge, if you will. So you can see up in the upper right-hand corner. It's from July 1st to November 5th. And it sort of shows you that we are currently leveling off in terms of number of cases. But I think the most important part of this slide is on the right side. If you see person-to-person community acquired is still 60% of the current transmission and only second to only the person-to-person in the household. Next slide. We are currently seeing a significant decrease. Although I have to be honest, the last couple of weeks, it's been in the 30 to 25% range. And now we're sort of leveling off at a 15% decrease in the 14-day change in terms of number of cases. And as you can see, the preliminary data indicated by the triangles indicates that we might see some changes that are less than desirable. So next slide. But we currently, as you can see here in terms of transmissibility in Santa Cruz County, the, we're well below the one, the number one in terms of transmissibility. So we currently are on a good trend and hopefully can continue that path moving forward. Next slide. And in terms of vaccinations, I think it is important to note that currently at least 72% of the county population has at least one dose. In terms of complete vaccination, fully vaccinated in the county, we're at 67%, again, in contrast to the state, which is at 73.5, we still have some work to do. And I think we're gonna see some significant increase in terms of vaccinations once children between five and 11 are vaccinated. Next slide. And then just to sort of push the booster doses. Again, if you are someone who is 65 or older, or you have underlying medical conditions, it is advisable that you get a booster shot for the vaccines that are currently available. All three are currently available in terms of boosters, Pfizer, Moderna and J&J. Pfizer and Moderna are recommending that after six months, after your second dose, you get a booster as opposed to the J&J, which is two months after the first dose, you would need to get a booster. So something that I wanna push out there because I think only way we're gonna turn the corner is by giving vaccinations and of course getting the boosters as needed. And so in order to do that, I say go to myturn.ca.gov to locate schedule initial vaccine and boosters as needed. Next slide. And of course, for any additional information that you may need, go to centerpiecehealth.org to get additional information up to date in terms of COVID and the vaccinations that are available in town. That's all I have. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chief Odie. Is there any questions from council members? Hey, Director Butler. Hey, Rosemary and good afternoon, mayor and council members. As Rosemary mentioned, we did provide the council members today with an FYI memo that will also be posted on our website. Wanted to take this opportunity to just quickly go through that with you. Some of it contains information that you are already aware of, like the county continuing its operations up at the armory through the end of the fiscal year and therefore the need for us to readjust our approach on the safe sleeping program that we were planning up there. But it also contains some additional information regarding our approach to various directives that we have from the council. The memo outlines four different safe sleeping and or 24 seven programs that we would have one at the armory, one at the 1220 river site that the city owns, another at the bench lands, which is currently existing and then a fourth at it yet to be determined location. It also identifies the estimated costs associated with those as well as estimated costs for a RV safe parking program. And each of the three tiers that the council is contemplating as part of the prior consideration of the oversized vehicle ordinance and the same item that's on your agenda this afternoon. And finally, it talks about some additional costs with respect to potential services like a dump station and RV dump station or mobile service. And so all of that is in the memo and feel free to reach out to myself if you have any questions about that. And we will be bringing additional information back at future council meetings related to the next steps associated with the items identified in the FYI memo. The last thing I wanted to point out on the homelessness front is that with respect to the $14 million that the state has authorized, we have initiated a process with the county and many of you will recall Dave Sampos with the Sacramento State Consensus and Collaboration Program. He is working with us to go through a process with the county to help make sure that we're aligning those resources in a manner that meets our long-term objectives and not just our objectives, but also those of the county to try and get those resources pointed to where they are supporting the long-term efforts of multiple organizations. As part of that, we're also going to be looking at how that may also be used to inform our regular interactions and how we can improve our collaboration and coordination and communication. So we're happy to have Dave on board for that. And we are looking forward to working with the county on getting those dollars put to good use. And I'm available for any questions that the council may have. Council member Contari Johnson and council member Cummings. Thank you so much for the memo. I wanted for the public for it to be clear that the 24-7 transitional shelter that you've identified in the memo is part of the CSSO and is part of the safe, is instead of the safe sleeping. Is that correct, Dr. Butler? So we're looking at how we might incorporate 24-7 camps in lieu of some of the overnight only. And that can result in better outcomes. And so we're looking at that and we wanted to put that out there to let the council know of as well as the community know that we're contemplating that approach at this point. That's great. We really appreciate your work and staff's work on that because that is something that we heard is a concern from the community and from folks in the public health world. And I also just want to point out that for members of the community who are concerned that nothing is happening around service provision and standing up services that there is actually a lot happening and taking place from behind the scenes. So I want to acknowledge you, director Butler and the rest of the team. And just I appreciate all the work that you're doing to stand up these services that are really, really much needed in our community. Thank you. The one thing I would add there is that, we'll also be coordinating with people in the surrounding areas. So we haven't done some of that outreach yet that we want to do 1220 River comes to mind. While there was a program there before, we will be reaching out to folks in the immediately surrounding area to talk with them to understand the concerns they have and to try to build in provisions to help address those concerns. Great. Thank you. I look forward to hearing more next time you guys bring this to the council. Council member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. I had a question that I brought this up with the Interim City Manager the other day. But Lee, since you were mentioned the $14 million I thought maybe this would be a good time to ask this question. So will there be a time or an opportunity for the public to weigh in on how this funding should be spent prior to the city and county kind of making a formalized agreement? Because it seems like there's, obviously we want to invest in infrastructure. I think that's a good kind of route to take with the funding. And I think that that was part of the rationale for getting the funding brought to the city of Santa Cruz to help us with our infrastructure needs. But I'm wondering if there might be an opportunity for folks from the public and members of the council to weigh in on this prior to agreements being made between the city and the county. I'll take that one. So I have a room coming that I did discuss this and I would be happy to bring back an agenda. To sort of talk about sort of the general approach we're considering. I think a number of us really do want to sort of tee up the funding question and where that money's gonna go kind of as the initial thing so that we can get some of it being put to work. And so I think that probably for something like the December 14th agenda I could put something on that would allow for us to have a discussion about what we're considering and the ideas that are behind that. So I'd be happy to do that. Great. Thanks and I think a lot of members of the public would just appreciate the transparency and opportunity to hear about this. So thank you. I have a quick question. Lee, if you could maybe just take a couple of additional comments. There is a lot of frustration about the conditions and not kind of moving forward with some of the hopefully what we were hoping in terms of finding some stability for folks, especially over there on the bench lands. And you mentioned that sort of reformatted a little bit and looking at a 24 seven camp and you mentioned because of better outcomes and can you maybe explain to the public what you mean by better outcomes? Because I think we've learned quite a bit, the county's learned quite a bit about placing folks from the previously supported hotels due to the COVID situation as they've gone through there, the project re-home, I think there's some learning going on. And so I think maybe we're being influenced a little bit by some of those findings. Could you maybe expand on those a little bit? Sure, so the county has been in the midst of a re-housing wave that they have targeted at the individuals that they have had in the hotels primarily. And both through that program as well as through other service provider experiences, the stability and the stabilizing effect of the 24 seven programs has established has proven in many instances to help move people along into more permanently housed situations in a manner that is oftentimes better than just the overnight only programs. There are certainly exceptions to certain programs but in general, that's been the finding. And so that's one of the things that we have been taking into consideration as we've been consulting with nonprofits, like focus strategies who does work throughout the United States and in our conversations with the county and learning from their experiences as you noted, Mayor Myers. And do these shelters, the 24 seven encampment, what I would call sort of a temple, which basically is kind of filling the role of a shelter in many ways. I would understand that those are probably much more expensive to run than a overnight sleeping site. Is that right? They can be. There is additional staffing involved. It's interesting that one of the things that we heard from some service providers was that there sometimes needs to be more staffing for an overnight program because that the community hasn't been established. There isn't that level of trust among participants. So there might be more staff but they're for a shorter period of time. So that daytime staffing isn't provided and that is more expensive. So the 24 seven programs are more expensive. And one of the things that we're taking into account is those outcomes. If we can actually have better outcomes that are moving people into housing then those expenses could be better off in the long run. Can those go ahead, Rose. Can I just add a comment to that? We did, I think the FYI memo that was distributed does sort of show you what the differential is. It is more expensive to run the 24 seven but not dramatically. So I think that's really the takeaway. And, but the 24 seven could be facilitated as a place where people are provided shelter, but also are managed, have a case manager have the ability to access housing. So one of the diagnoses that shows up in the focus strategies work for the county is that we just aren't, we don't, people are not leaving, right? I mean, so we're not making that next connection in their ability to, you know, to move out of homelessness. And so they're ending up staying in shelters and in cabinets for a long, long time. Would we operate this sort of in the vein of trying to, you know, move people through into transition on them permanent and then, you know, on and on in terms of that housing goal that the county, you know, has basically set. So would we be mirroring their goals, I guess, by establishing these kinds of facilities? So I think that's a really good question. I would say, in general, yes. The county has some very specific timelines that they have identified for their goals with respect to shelter stays and percentages of placements. I can't say that, you know, we're going to have those exact same numbers in terms of percentage of permanent housing placements and timelines for, you know, placements and timelines for the maximum length of stay or average length of stay. That said, at the basic level, yes. We want to work with both the county as well as what we have included in this FYI memo is having some level of case management support that the city also provides to help connect people to many of those county resources and help them move from these locations into more permanent housing situations. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important that, you know, the goal of the camp and standards ordinance, you know, really recognizes the larger public need to be able to access parks and, you know, places that are really truly meant to be for the public and not, you know, becoming. So I just worry a little bit that, you know, we're going to continue to, you know, fall into the cycle of not really having any ability to help people get into, you know, I just, I'm a little worried that we're going to be setting up things that again, we're not getting what we need in terms of sort of a systematic approach to helping people out of homelessness and then, but also providing additional places for people to be. So we don't have, you know, our parks being used, frankly, you know, I mean, that is something that came through very clear as we develop the camp and standards ordinance. So I'm glad that we're moving towards something, but I really hope we can keep in mind that we do need additional places for people to go so that our public spaces don't become our impromptu shelters again or places for people to be. So I'm supportive, but I just hope we really, you know, we put all the pieces together. Do we have any updates from the County on the 120 spaces they committed to finding last March? Is there any spaces that have been found in the County at all for helping with our needs? I can say that the County is pursuing a number of project home key applications and the city has had one conversation with H, the housing and community development at the state regarding project home key and has another one scheduled. And so they are pursuing through project home key some other options, you know, where those ultimately end up we'll see because some of that is competitive. Okay, great, thank you. Appreciate it. Sorry for all the questions. Moore, Rosemary, do you have additional items? I said one comment. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Justin. Yeah, I just wanted to express appreciation for the potential 24 seven shelter models just because there are, you know, for people who are homeless and trying to find whatever jobs they can get, there are people who work night shifts and those people need places to stay as well. So if we're, if we only have overnight sleeping, you know, that also kind of prevents having some kind of sleeping areas for people who may need to sleep during the day. And so I appreciate moving in that direction because it might be that, you know, we can work with some local businesses that operate during the evenings to try to find people job placement and that can be in somewhere where they can find shelter when they're working night shifts as well. So just started with that out there and express my appreciation because it can help support that demographic for all of this population as well. Thank you, council member. Okay, just a few slides. I'm going to share my screen now to talk about a few things that are going on. This is a, in the ramp up to the holiday period, we have a ton of things going on that I just wanted to give the council members a, you know, a chance to sort of see and also sort of talk to the community about. So on downtown plan expansion, we are seeing a number of community workshops are scheduled starting this weekend. And there's a community survey that's out. There's idea walls of places that you can post comments or join an existing discussion and interactive maps. So the link to that is here at cityofsantacrews.com backslash downtown. And so we're encouraging taking lots of input on this topic and encouraging everyone to get involved. And then on objective standards, that process has, there was a robust conversation at the planning commission last Thursday. And so if you have information that you would like to review with the existing proposed objective standards or feedback, and there's a virtual community meeting tonight on that. So make yourself, if you're interested in this topic that's where to go. Library mixed use projects, a number of meetings were held last week and workshops will be upcoming in December to review the design concepts with the community. So stay tuned for that, lots of stuff going on. I'm sure there's a website on this one that you can sort of get some feedback on what's been going on there. And then there's later on in today's agenda is an item of resolution related to anti-hate week that's happening next week actually. So this is a series of events that are united against hate week events. And you can see that there's a quite a bit of information here and you'll be able to access all these through the QR code here or I'm sure there's websites on the united against hate week website. And just to a heads up, we've got heading into the holiday season. There are a series of city office closures on Thursday for close for veterans day. Thanksgiving closed for the November 25th and 26th. And then the winter closure is the 20th to the 31st where the offices are closed but essential services will continue. So just giving the community a heads up on those things. And with that, I'm gonna turn it back to you. Thank you, Rosemary. Maybe one other additional announcement is I believe we will be going back into a hybrid council, city council meeting starting on November 23rd. Right. So we will be back in city hall and we will also be broadcasting or not broadcasting. We will also be having a hybrid with a Zoom. So those folks who were interested in getting back into person, you will find a very different looking city hall when you walk into the council chambers but we will be able to go back in person there at the city hall chamber at the council chambers starting November 23rd. If you do wanna come to the council chambers, I know there'll be information that will be made available regarding requirements for masks and demonstration of vaccination, limitation, the number of people who are in the chambers and can be in the chambers waiting room over in Tony Hill room. So there's a series of things please if you wanna come down to the council chambers, please take a minute or two to go online and take a look at that. We'll be highlighting that on our website so you can get all the details before you get here. Well, that information also maybe be posted outside council chambers early on, Rosemary. If people don't have computers they can walk by and check it out. Yeah, happy printed in Spanish also potentially. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm not today for the city manager's report. Any other questions for the city manager today? I've not seen any. Okay, we'll go ahead and I'll call now on the clerk to provide any updates to our calendar. Next up is our consent agenda and these are items eight through 20 on our agenda today for members of the public who are streaming. My video went off. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting and now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items eight through 20. Instructions will be on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device press star nine to raise your hand and listen to the queue saying you have been unmuted. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who want to comment on or pull any items? Please raise your hand. Council member Cummings. Questions for 17 and 18. Any other council members with a comment or question on item or a request to pull an item? I'm not seeing any additional hands. So we don't have any items pulled today. I'll go ahead and have council member Cummings ask his questions on item number 17 first. Thank you mayor. I just had a question that came from a member of the public. They were asking about the status of the vegetation and the arts plan that are associated with the rail trail segments and kind of what the status is like where they're at and kind of what's the plan for moving those pieces forward. Good afternoon. Nathan Lynn, transportation manager of the city of Santa Cruz. Happy to answer your question there, Justin. So the rail trail vegetation plan as part of the rail trail segment seven phase one parks for access assisting us our assistance city year in revamping the vegetation that was installed earlier this year. By the time second seven phase one was constructed it was spring. So some of the hydro seating and plantings are doing quite stick. So arts and rec is going to give the sub coming winter and they should be hydro seating along the rail trail end of this month. When it comes to the arts portion of the rail trail we're still having a tough time getting a contract to come in and install the poetry that was a part of second seven phase one. Economic development is the lead on that. And we're trying to assist and get a contract on board for a reasonable price to get that included. In addition to that, we also have art scheduled for the ballards on Palm Street. So it's mosaic tiles too that I believe that again economic development is going to be reaching out to get an artist on board and getting art installed as planned on that segment. I see Bonnie Lipscomb has turned on her camera. I don't know if she has anything to add on those questions. Yes, thank you, mayor. I would just add to what Nathan and Nathan said is that we are hoping that some of our card that's the city arts recovery design pilot grant program applicants may be able to actually work on the mosaics for the ballards. And so we've been Kathy Menz who's been working on that with applicants has been working on that. And specifically also, in addition to those projects there are also two card applicants working on proposals for installations on the rail trail itself. So we are working to move that forward and it's a little behind the scenes at this point but it is being worked on. And just a quick follow-up, has there been any just mentioned this to the arts commission to see if they might be able to help identify this cook it up with some of these efforts? I know that Kathy is in regular communication with the arts commission and specifically around all the opportunities around the card program, the card pilot program. So I don't have confirmation exactly as it relates to the rail trail but I can circle back with that specific information. Okay, that concludes my questions on this item. Thank you council member item number 18. Yeah, so again, received some correspondence from members of the, from a member of the public and with regards to the fiscal impact they were wondering if this was the cost of the final design or the total overall cost for the design. I was wondering if staff I'd be able to provide a comment on that. Certainly I have to apologize my camera seat functioning this morning. So I just have my name up there. This is Josh Spengard, Mayor, members to these council senior civil engineer with Public Works. This is regarding amendment number, I believe nine for the design contract for the Murray street bridge. The design is essentially complete. So what this amendment is about is getting the utility agreements in place and final coordination with various utilities including the county sanitation district and that coordination facilitated a fairly major revision in the design. So I don't know how specifically you wanna define design. I mean, the design is essentially done but we're just trying to get through the last administrative hoops with Caltrans as far as getting the funds available and moving phasing around and getting these utility agreements in place. Once we have the utility agreements in place we'll have a right away certification which will essentially allow us to request funds for construction from Caltrans. So we're pretty close to the end of this this whole thing right now is just if there are any additional amendments to this contract they would be along the lines of providing additional information for regulatory agencies, for example or construction support once you actually go into construction. But the design is really it's done and it's been done for some time. Thanks. Yeah, I think what the concern was from one of the members of the public was whether or not there were any other costs that came up around the design earlier on that maybe weren't captured in that $459,959. And so that was really what I was trying to get at is just to know whether or not this was the total cost for that, the design phase or if this was just the final cost for the final design. So yeah, I don't expect that we would see any more amendments during the design phase. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you council member. Okay, I'll now take this out to public comment. So this will be for our consent agenda today. And if there are any members of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda we have not had any items pulled today. Now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and then the time rule will be set to two minutes. And again, this will be for items on our consent agenda agenda today which are items eight through 20. Council has not pulled any items today from this consent agenda. Like a peek at our attendees today. If you do want to speak to any of these items please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. And I am not seeing anyone with their hand up on these items. So I will go ahead and look for a motion for our consent agenda today. Council member Watkins and then council member Brown. Sure, I'm happy to make a motion to move our consent agenda. Council member Brown. Okay, thank you. We have a motion by council member Watkins and a second by council member Brown to move our entire consent agenda this afternoon. And that is going to be items number eight through 20. And Bonnie, could we do a roll call, please? Council member Watkins. Aye. Council member Johnson. Just see if she's having problems here. Hang on one sec, let me just see if I can reach her. I don't know if she's having internet issues. Okay, I guess we'll go ahead with that vote. And my vote is that is I also, I'll try to see if she's having issues. Okay, that motion passes unanimously. We'll now move into our... Just to clarify, it's not unanimous. We don't have... Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, sorry. That motion passes six in favor with council member Boulder being absent. Okay, we'll now move into the consent public hearing items today and this will be items number 21, 22 and 23 on our agenda. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if you want to comment on items 21, 22 or 23, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to comment on or pull any items on the consent public hearing today? Council member Cummings and then council member Bruder. I'd like to pull items numbers 21 and 23. Vice Mayor Bruder. Thank you. I was going to... I just had a question slash comment for item 23. Okay, that item will be pulled today. So we can have that, we can do those comment slash questions during that item. Okay, for members of the public who are listening, there have been two items pulled from our consent public hearing. That's item number 21 and item number 23. So we will go ahead and... Here, hang on, let me catch up with my stuff there. If there are members of the public that would like to speak to any public consent public hearing item with the exception of item number 21 and 23, which have been pulled by council members, now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to one minute. So we will not be... So this will be... Let me see here. This is just for item number 22 on our agenda, which is the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 21-19, amending the Sanctuary's Municipal Code chapter 6.12 to comply with state-manded organic waste disposal requirements. That is the only item that still remains on our consent public hearing. Is there anybody in the audience who would like to speak to this item? Okay, I see none. I will go ahead and bring this back to council and I look for a motion for item number 22 on our consent public hearing. Council member Cummings. I'll move item number 22. And I'll second that. So why don't we go ahead and go with a roll call vote? Council member Watkins. Aye. Calentari-Johnson. Council member Golder. Bill Absent. Vice Mayor Brunner. And Mayor Meyers. That motion passes six in favor of zero against with council member Golder absent, currently absent. Okay. We will now move on to item number 21, which has been pulled by council member Cummings. Thank you, mayor. So this item on our agenda is the 2020-2021 but action plan second amendment for CDEBG funding allocation. And one of the things that stood out in this item, which I'd heard some concern from members of the public on was the funding for the hygiene bay and how that's being shifted. And one of the things I've heard as well is that we're spent, there's a considerable amount of money being spent on the kind of temporary showers that are being used in that location. And one of the things I would like to recommend as part of our discussion, since we're gonna have the discussion about the 14 million and a lot of that goes towards infrastructure, we'll be recommending that we have the consideration of funding for the hygiene bay renovation be considered as part of that discussion. So I mean, I know this is a major infrastructure project that the city had committed itself to and I think that at a minimum, if we're gonna discuss how the 14 million should be allocated that we include this as part of that discussion. That's where we're brown, did you have comment on that? I just wanted to make a quick comment that I support that consideration as a member of the community programs committee, we received this request from housing matters several years ago and in the process of getting funding headed their way, obviously we, they had a lot of costs as a result of that to use the temporary facilities, the mobile showers and that's a continued cost for housing matters. It's not inconsequential and we're gonna end up spending a lot more money in the long run if this isn't, if we don't identify funding to get those shower bays up and renovated. And as we see the cost has increased substantially and so the longer we go with this, the more money we're spending that is then not available to actually make the repair and the renovation that's needed for the longer term. So I do think that it's important that we just acknowledge that. I support the making the change under the circumstances at this time and just wanna make sure that we don't spend another multiple years trying to figure out what to do about this because I think we were committed to providing that support and it is a city property. So just wanted to add my support. And I would maybe look to city manager or someone with economic development for any further updates or clarifications on the proposal for that. I don't know Rosemary, I'd say turn on your camera. I think Lee has got some basic background. I know this is in discussion. So let's start with Lee and then see if there's, if Bonnie has anything else to add. Thanks and good afternoon again, mayor and council members. Yes, we are looking one to continue some level of CDBG funding for the hygiene bay. And even if we took all the CDBG funding that we have available, it wouldn't get us to the point where we could fund the current cost estimate for the hygiene bay. But it is something that we also see as a priority and that's one of the things that we're hoping that we can get alignment with the county on to support because that is an integral part of the services that are provided out there at the housing matters campus. And when I say getting alignment on and getting the additional funding, the 14 million is a prime candidate for that. But we are, as I mentioned before, going through that collaborative process with the county. And I will also say that given the change in costs and scope of the hygiene bay, we are also public works is in the process of preparing documentation for a formal bid. So the wheels are moving and we do still need to confirm that funding. And so I appreciate those comments and that's sort of in alignment with the direction we're hoping to head as well. So council member Cummings, are you comfortable with the motion that was drafted for this item? Now that there's a little more information. I didn't have any concern with the recommended motion. I just wanted to add that when we have that discussion that we also include on the 14th about the 14 million that we include the hygiene bay as part of that. So that's the only change to the motion, to the recommendation before us. Okay, any other questions from other council members on item number 21 on the consent public hearing? Okay, I would look for a motion then on the site. Public comment. Oh, excuse me, I'm gonna go on to public comment. Yep. So I'll go ahead and take this out for public comment. This is gonna be on item number 21 on the consent public hearing. If you are interested in commenting on this, item please press star nine on your phone now to raise your hand. And I am not seeing any hands going up and take this back to council for a motion and council member Brown. Thank you. I will go ahead and move adoption of the resolution amending our fiscal year 2022 budget to reallocate CDBG funds to the fiscal year 2022 budget and the staff report as it's listed in the agenda for the rest of the staff report. Thank you, council member. Council member Cummings. I'll second with the amendment that we discussed as part of the item on December 14th, the hygiene bay renovation. Can you specify what that amendment is for the minute? Sure. The amendment is to add to the discussion regarding the $14 million on December 14th, funding the renovation of the hygiene bay and housing matters. Does the maker of the motion accept that amendment? Yeah. I just want to clarify that's the discussion about funding homelessness response and services in general, including the 14 million. So, yes. City manager. I was just going to say that the presentation is sort of about the process that I'm imagining is about the process we're working on with the county. That will be the core of it. We'll see where, what else gets wrapped around it. But yeah, that's fine. We can talk about this when we get there. Great. Okay. Yes, I'm on board. Thanks. Okay. Okay. Let's go with the roll call vote. Bonnie. Council member Watkins. Aye. Calendary Johnson. Aye. Vice mayor Brunner. That motion passes 6-0 with council member Golder currently absent. Okay. We will move to item number 23, which was pulled by council member Cummings. I just had a few comments on this. And given that there's been a lot of discussion around this item, I just wanted to say my final comments. There were members of the public who reached out and there was a number of things that they wanted to have expressed at the meeting. One was that the intent of this ordinance is meant to help individuals experiencing homelessness who are living in their RVs. And they had expressed that having the enforcement tied to services would be beneficial because it's currently not. Another comment that came up was that the gray water provision, which is outlined, technically would make washing your cars in the streets illegal due to the fact that it says, including but not limited to discharging of recreational vehicles holding tanks. And so that's something that people were concerned with around the language and the ordinance. If the city is developing this program in the absence of working with the county and other jurisdictions, there's concern that we could potentially see an influx of RVs before the only safe RV program in the county enforcement shouldn't just fall on the police. And there should be an interdepartmental approach that should be taken given that we also have code enforcement and parking enforcement. Some individuals expressed that their personal vehicles will be targeted even though they're tax paying homeowners. And we're going to discuss the funding for implementation later, but there was also some concerns around the fact that we haven't identified, you know, costs the who's going to provide the services and where the funding will come from. I know today we received a memo on that and I'm sure that, and I'll be sure to share this with members of the public as well, but I just wanted to share that with the council because people had asked that we express this during this meeting. And so that ends my comments on this item. Thank you, council member, council member Brown. Thank you. I just wanted to make one additional comment with a positive communication I received from actually two groups who I believe are beginning to connect with each other about volunteer efforts to develop some kind of supportive assistance to folks who are living in their RVs around vehicle repair and, you know, addressing issues to get their vehicles road worthy so people can move and also to potentially facilitate RV dumping because we don't have, as we've discussed and we know don't have a lot of facilities for that and where we do, it is quite pricey. So there are efforts underway and I think a group of retired people, they said we're retired people, we have time and we wanna work on this. And so there's a couple of cool things happening that I just wanted to, and so this conversation while it has been difficult, I think has elicited some community response that about ways that people can be involved and try to help us help the city out and help our community out and the neighbors as well as our unhoused neighbors moving forward. So I just wanted to stay tuned for more and thank you for giving me an opportunity to raise that here. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Calantar-Johnson. Thank you. Thanks for bringing that up, Council Member Brown. I know there are also neighborhood groups who want to and are working on the same as supporting. So I don't know if those are the two groups that I've met up and if not, then maybe we can help facilitate that with their neighborhood groups and community groups who also want to support those efforts of getting vehicle repair support and registration support and supporting where dumping, fees for dumping. So I'm glad that you brought that up. And then I just wanted to comment on Council Member Cummings comment that community members have brought up that the subcommittee and staff have been actively working with the county and well, maybe Director Butler can share more, but the county is also looking at standing up safe parking in unincorporated areas. So it won't be only in the city. And I'll just leave it at that. Thank you. And I'll also queue up and I'll maybe look to lead Butler potentially. It just for the public to know that the county and the city also as part of the work through the two by two over the last year and then Director Butler's work with county, lead on the county staff and our new homeless service manager, encampment policy and kind of a more of a county wide sort of approach to encampments is in the queue. And I believe also Director Butler, we are also because we've received some funding from the state, we're also starting to tap into some technical provider that technical for providing for encampment management, et cetera, through the state HCD, I believe. So this is all part of the governor's new multi-agency, multi-effort to physically bring about one point, I think it's about $1.3 billion for homelessness this year, about three times more than the federal government will be doing, but there are a number of different technical resource availabilities that are starting to show up because of that. And obviously because of the two ordinances we've passed, we have opportunity to continue to work with HCD and other state agencies to kind of refine the fact that many, many people unfortunately are sheltered outside in Santa Cruz. And so these ordinances start to move us towards finding better resolution and better solutions. I don't know, Director Butler, these are things that we just learned about basically in the last couple of weeks as the governor's been rolling out a comprehensive program statewide. Sure, thanks Mayor Myers and council members. I'll just add onto that briefly in that we're doing a lot of things to help coordinate with the county and we have had some of those conversations with respect to how the county can locate RV and oversize vehicle parking opportunities, whether they're city run on county property or if they're county owned and operated properties. So those conversations are ongoing and we're also continuing a series of other conversations. I mentioned the conversations led by Dave Sapoos with Sacramento State University as well as the county has been working with us and focus strategies and focus strategies has been providing some technical assistance to us. And then we're also working with the county and we've got an initial kickoff meeting tomorrow with respect to encampments and the city and county response and that's actually going to also, Watsonville has been invited to that as well. So it'll be a broader effort as it relates to that technical assistance which is also being supported by a nonprofit organization. Yeah, and I'll just finalize just for the public to know how these pieces are fitting together. The governor's created a new California homeless coordinating and financing council and there's additional funding actually through a grant program that also looks at encampment solutions and specifically the city of Santa Cruz and the county of Santa Cruz are mentioned as cities and counties who are what he's now calling sort of the initial cohort of part of his governor's 100 day challenge. And so again, we're very much in the front lines of kind of where the governor and the goals and objectives of a homeless response system that is literally sort of being developed this coming year. And by being the recipient of this major investment, we hope to be in a really good spot in terms of continuing to receive resources. And I certainly understand the concern about how we pay for these things. And we'll certainly hear about that later today. But again, we're at the front lines as a city now. We were not there a year ago. And we've really do the work of John Laird and Assemblymember Stone, they've really raised the consciousness of what we're faced here as a small city. So many resources for homelessness are going to the larger cities in California, cities of millions of people. And because of the data and the information and the hard work of our staff and the work of our state electeds, we've really raised the awareness of the kinds of issues that we're focusing on. So again, for our community to know that this is not, these are not actions that we take lightly. They are very much a set of actions to actually position the city of Santa Cruz to get as much help as we can for the people who aren't in homelessness. And also in the beginning of this year, the state has announced that they will be creating a new California Interagency Council on Homelessness. And again, the work we do here, especially with our encampment management policies will be looked at. And I hope we can continue to receive state resources. Certainly we're out of the gate in a really good spot. So just wanna make sure that the community understands that these are not a punitive approach, but building upon that system of hopefully resolution and better solutions to having people sleeping in their cars on the street. Any other comments or questions on this item? I know Vice Mayor Bruin, you had your hand up earlier, yeah. But my comment was a lot of great things were said, but my comment was regarding some members of the public and just really, I know that Dr. Butler mentioned, touched on it earlier regarding the safe parking program and any update on that progress. And I think they're just in talking to people who had reached out, it wasn't clear exactly what a safe parking program was. And just kind of if there was update on the three tiers and really for the members of the public to understand that it is a program that we are proposing to direct staff to implement that would have elements, all the needed elements that are missing currently, which are designated areas with trash receptacles, restrooms, water hygiene, access to services, social services and connections to whatever needs are needed for whoever is in an oversight's vehicle. So I know there has been work since our last meeting and I just wondered, Lee, if you could give just a quick update on any progress with that. Sure, happy to Vice Mayor Burner and thanks for that opportunity. And we have met in the past two weeks, we've met a number of times with our internal staff working groups, including both public works and police department, as well as members of our city manager's office team. And we also had a discussion with the council subcommittee related to the tiers. And we've been looking at a number of things. First with tier one, we are looking at the police department parking lot there. And we talked through with police how that could work and how we can put together reference materials for individuals at those locations that give them both the rules for that program and how to connect with the additional tiers. We've also talked about potential locations for the additional tiers that would be tier two in particular and how that would be an overnight only program with access to the hygiene services that you mentioned and also how we would hope to partner with some nonprofits that could potentially for tier three have a longer term, even if it's not 24 seven all the time, but closer to 24 seven for the tier three, again, to provide that stability, but that's yet to be determined in terms of that would require partnerships with nonprofit organizations. And so we're a little bit further along in our discussions with tier one and tier two, but also starting to think about tier three at the same time. Thank you so much. Thank you. Council member Cummings and council member commentary Johnson. Council member just started a question in my head that I had last time and I wasn't able to ask. So I was just curious with when it comes to people who are living in their vehicles and we don't know if this has come up at all, but it's just out of curiosity. When we're having conversations with the county, because for example, there are people who are living in their vehicles who aren't having a negative impact. They really don't need mental behavioral health services. The issue is that they can't afford housing, right? And so I'm just wondering what kind of programs or services that the county has to address that population, which is really just a population of people who are down on their luck and can't find an affordable place to live. So they're living in their cars and just how that kind of factors in so that the people who we don't wanna have, who aren't causing problems really aren't being penalized for the fact that they have to live in their vehicles. So both thank you, council member Cummings. Both with the city and the county, there are opportunities for first and last month rent assistance and assistance related to rental payments in general. There's limited funding related to that and particularly limited staffing with respect to the county's rehousing wave, for example, but they are looking at expanding that and offering that. That's the rehousing wave in itself has been focused on housing, navigation for individuals who were in the COVID hotels, but they are looking at expanding that out to the armory where they're operating up there and similar services could also assist individuals at the safe sleeping locations. And we would be looking to do that is to the extent that we can connect individuals who are at the safe parking locations with the county service providers. Okay, is there any information on the city's website or the county's website regarding how to connect people to those programs? The city's website is through our economic development department. It is chooseanacruz.com. There's information on various housing assistance programs there. And the county does have some information on their website but also some nonprofits that I believe both of those websites will point individuals towards as some of them are operated through third parties. Thank you. Council Member Calentari-Johnson. Thank you. Yes, briefly, I did forget to mention that Vice Mayor Brunner, Council Member Golder and I are continuing to work with staff and continuing to meet with community groups on the design of the safe parking program. So just wanted to make sure the public knew that we are staying engaged with this process. And then I did want to, just again, I know acknowledged earlier, but for folks who weren't listening earlier, I wanted to acknowledge Director Butler and the team for how much work has been done, in particular around the safe parking and just a very short amount of time since our last meeting. So I wanted to acknowledge and thank you for that. Thank you, Council Member. Okay, I will go ahead and take this item. This is item number 23 on our Consent Public Hearing, which has been pulled. And I will go ahead and take this out for the members of the public who may want to speak to this item. Now is the time to press star nine on your phone and that cues you up for public comment. When you hear, when it's your time to speak and I will call off either your name or the last four digits of your phone number, you will hear an announcement that you've been unmuted and then the timer will be set to one minute. I have approved two groups that I'll take first and these are group requests representing organizations and I'll go ahead and have West Side neighbors go first and then I will have Stepping Up Santa Cruz go after that. So West Side neighbors, you requested extra time and I'll go ahead and call you on you. I'm not sure which phone number I was told that I believe Manuel Prado was going to, Prado was going to be the representative today but I'm not sure which phone number you're on. Bonnie, did you have any communications with there? The person who was going to speak today? Just the name, I can lower the hands and you can ask Manuel to raise his, everyone else to keep their hands down and Manuel raise his hand. Okay, great. Other than that, I have no, I don't know. Okay. I just lowered everybody's hand so Manuel can raise his hand. If the representative from West Side neighbors could raise their hand, I'm interested it would be Manuel but I believe Carol Paul Hamas also was another rep that is anyone here to speak on behalf of West Side neighbors? Please raise your hand. Okay. Bonnie, I'll see if they come back in. I'll go ahead and take, stepping up Santa Cruz and I see Serge had called in and so Serge please go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself and you will be ready to go. And it looks like maybe I have, maybe we did locate the West Side folks so we'll look for that phone number next but Serge go ahead and go first please. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yep, we can. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon city council. My name Serge Cagno and I'm speaking for stepping up Santa Cruz. I pay taxes. I volunteer for county boards. I volunteer for neighborhood courts. I volunteered for the city's past cats committee. I worked as a consultant last year helping set up the COVID shelters and motels. I presently am the executive director of a nonprofit program. I've been a part of this community since the 90s. I love Santa Cruz and work to be a positive member of my community. I live in my van and I use it as a mobile office. With this proposed ordinance, I would not be able to have done that work because at times I worked nights supporting those programs as they were starting. There were other night staff at the Vets Hall shelter who lived in their vehicles as well and they would not have been able to do that work either with this ordinance. With this proposed ordinance, I would not be able to go downtown to a bar and spend time with friends after midnight because I couldn't park on the street. Nor would I be able to see a late night movie or visit, stay the night at a friend's house if they didn't have a driveway for me to park in. Please stop saying doing something is better than doing nothing. Doing the wrong thing is still wrong. None of the nonprofits providing services or the county staff support this ordinance. There is no research showing that criminalizing homelessness is helping helpful to get people housed. Things you can do, work with the county and nonprofits to help those in need, provide an adequate number of syringe disposal containers, provide a free sewage dump site within the city limits, stop vilifying all people living in vehicles as criminals who dump sewage, leave trash, steal and cause problems. Some of us are productive members of the community. As long as the safe parking is a required part of this ordinance, you're clearly illegally making it illegal and unwelcome for those living in their RVs to live in the city and work in the city. Thank you. Thank you. I'll go ahead and see if we have the member from West Side Santa Cruz up to be here. Is that number, phone number ending in maybe 6959? Or are we unmute them and see if that's them? Bonnie? For star six to unmute yourself. Are you with West Side neighbors? No. Okay. Okay, why don't we go ahead and hold take regular public comment now. Go ahead, the person on the line ending in phone number 6959, please go ahead. For star six to unmute yourself. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. This is Lynn Renshaw with Santa Cruz Together. Santa Cruz Together collectively supports this ordinance. This public comment, the point I want to make is that this public comment is only one way that people provide input. Most people are working right now or picking up kids. Instead they call you guys earlier or send email ahead of a meeting. 335 people emailed city council about this second reading over the last weekend. 310 of those emails support the ordinance. 25 were opposed. This is consistent with the email public correspondence uploaded on the weekends before September 26th and October 26th. There were nearly 1000 additional emails with about 10 times more people in favor of the ordinance compared to those opposing it. No one in the press. It is him. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I will go ahead and see if West Side Neighbors is up. Bonnie, can you lower everybody's hands again and see if I can get the West Side Neighbors folks person cued? If you are the West Side Neighbors person, please raise your hand. A star nine to raise your hand. There we go. Okay, I see phone number ending in 1943, but press star six to unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes, please. This is Manuel Proto speaking on behalf of West Side Neighbors. Wanna thank the council members who brought the ordinance forward in response to neighborhood concerns about the impacts of overnight RVs parking, particularly in the West Side neighborhoods. Also wanna thank the council members who voted to move it forward. As the previous speaker mentioned, we know there's very strong sports ordinance over 800 emails sent at the previous two meetings in support of the OVO, as well as I think a thousand signature petition to request enforcement of no overnight parking. This issue has become unmanageable as it exists now. We support the ordinance in the first step in addressing the valid concerns of the neighborhoods and businesses negatively impacted by this issue, as well as the needs of those living in their vehicles. We support the safe spaces parking expansion on city county property, not in the neighborhoods. We do not want people sleeping overnight in their vehicles on city streets. We support providing services to help people improve their situations, including county case management and services. We support enforcement of the existing overnight parking rules and the establishment of a program, including enforcement that will help people to move to safe spaces where they can receive supportive services and sanitation services. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, that concludes the two groups that had extra time in two minutes. So I'll go ahead and just cue everybody up who wants to speak on this. Again, if you press star nine to put your hand up and I'll go ahead and take caller phone number ending in 7211, press star six to unmute yourself, please. One number ending in- Can you hear me there? Yes, we can. Go ahead, please. Hi, Peter Cook. So I lived in the neighborhood lower west side and I've seen over the years that by not enforcing these rules we continually have new people coming in to see a new license plate from Georgia, one's from Washington state, one's from Canada. And by having this open door policy, what we're doing is we're continually allowing new people to come into our neighborhood and our community and overburden our systems so that we're not able to help the homeless people that are here already. And so I think we need to have rules in place so that we're not continually just allowing more and more people to always come into this neighborhood, bringing in new vehicles and new problems and a continual basis. And so I think that would be for the homeless people that are already here as well as the neighbors that live in the neighborhoods and the businesses. I think it's really important that we have some rules in place so that we are able to start actually addressing the problem, not always just growing the problem. So I thank the council for taking this on. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Sabina. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Great, thank you. I wanna call out that in the oral communications on the agenda, it says that no extra time for groups will be allowed, but it seems like you've given extra time for groups and so I'd love the legal council to weigh in on that because it seems pretty unfair to me. I also wanna call out that this is obviously a cruel and inhumane ordinance that is going to cause more people to be unhoused. And I wish you would stop just listening to your wealthy west side homeowners that are contributing to your campaigns and actually listen to the folks that this is going to affect. All of this is super disappointing, but we're all disappointed in you guys, so not very surprising. Thank you. Next I have Hollis Maloy. Lower at their hand. Okay, yeah, I was gonna say it just disappeared. Okay, phone number now ending in 0249, please. This is Carol Paul Hamas. I wanna thank council members Golder, Brunner and Conn Tari Johnson for bringing forward this ordinance and thanks to the five council members who supported passing it on the first reading. This week, somebody brought to my attention that there are two apps, one's called I Overlander, one's called RV Life, both list specifically free parking overnight on the lower west side. People who are living in vehicles by choice should be able to afford an RV park. People who are living in vehicles out of necessity are in a whole different category. They need help by very much support expanding, excuse me, the Safe Spaces Parking Program and providing easy access to sanitation and services for people who need assistance in improving the conditions that they're living in. Thank you very much for supporting this ordinance and for passing it today. Thank you. Next up is phone number ending in 4844. It doesn't sound like the public is really being included in this discussion. I'm Robert Norris-Hoff. The Butler memo that you discussed has not been made available on the agenda that I could see. So I'm not sure how you're gonna square this with the Brown Act. There's no provision for any kind of real new places to go police lot, are we kidding? It's a lot of talk. Now it's not that intelligent comment from the public would necessarily be much point since it's really clear that the council is a preconceived enforcement agenda that's directed at driving homeless people out of town, particularly if they live in their vehicles and it's ridiculous, of course, so just drive them onto the streets. For the community, however, and any interested council members who want to take actions directly, monitor support and protect folks in RVs and vehicles and not wait for Lee Butler's latest vague report that comes in and simply asserts what we already know. And so really that's what you listeners have to do. Money for the homeless is going to be used for enforcement bucks to clear the park, nervous privilege and walk their dogs. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Sophie. Hi, I've been a resident in Santa Cruz for about 10 years and I also just want to say I'm deeply saddened and disgusted by this ordinance and the misimpregidious that it's based on. As you all have said previously, the only thing this ordinance offers is that it increases criminalization for activities that are already covered by existing law and enforced by city and county staff. So you've made it clear that your priority is to spend city resources on having the city attorney take on prosecuting people into desperate situations and directing more ticketing rather than prioritizing setting up plans ahead of time and resources that will actually solve the problems that folks have emailed in about. Because I doubt that the majority of people who feel that this is an issue that's affecting their neighborhoods think that the only option is to jail everyone and get them out of town. I think there's plenty of people who also agree it's a problem and that there are things we can do. And I think that directed in advance, the winter will already be in desperate situation now. Thank you. Thank you. Next I have Hollis Malloy. Yes, hello. Thank you for taking the call. I'm in full support of the overnight ban and there's a couple of things I'll take a lead from some of the council members and saying I think there's some information the public should know, which is there is a huge distinction between the unhoused and these problem RVs that the police and the West side are dealing with right now. People who simply are in their vehicles living unhoused do not get the police called on them. They do not disrupt public peace and they are not the issue that we are complaining about. What we are complaining about is the problem RVs that is drunk and disorderly conduct, child endangerment, environmental issues. The city dump won't take these RVs anymore because it's an environmental issue and they will get penalized. Well, leaving them on the city streets is a dereliction of duty. We must get these problem RVs there, environmental hazards off the streets. For the advocate saying that we don't care, well, this clearly has safe sparking. We are offering services. It requires willing participation. And so thank you for the over the ordinance. Thank you. I'll ask one more time if there's anyone here that wants to speak to item number 23 on our agenda, which is the ordinance on the Oversize Vehicles, please press star nine to raise your hand. Okay, it looks like we have heard from the public. So I will go ahead and bring this back for a motion and a vote by the council. I look for a motion by council member, Palantar Johnson. Thank you, mayor. And thank you to all the community members who have called in and who have written letters and who have taken time to meet with various council members. Again, your input helps us design the safe parking program and helps us move forward. And this is, as many people said, the first step. And I'm hopeful that we will be moving forward with a services oriented approach and we will get folks into a pathway to housing, which is ultimately what we wanna be working towards and everything that we do. So with that, I will move to, let's see, I'm looking for the motion language. Do I read it straight from here? Move to adopt ordinance number 2021-20 amending title, 10 vehicle and traffic at chapter 10.04 definitions and chapter 10.40 stopping, standing and parking and chapter 10.41 citywide parking permit pertaining to the parking of oversized vehicle and chapter 16.19 stormwater and urban runoff pollution control at section 16.19.070 discharge of sewage prohibited. Motion as written in the agenda packet. Thank you, council member, council member Watkins. I'll go ahead and second that motion. Okay, we have a motion by council member commentary Johnson to adopt ordinance number 2021-20. And we have a second by council member Watkins and I would ask for a roll call vote please. Council member Watkins. Aye. Council member Johnson. No. No. And for the record, I'd just like to say that I and many members of the community who I've spoken with agree that we should be addressing problematic RVs but this ordinance really targets any vehicle over 20 feet even for those people who are not problematic or homeless and also that it fails to address the previous concerns raised when this was appealed to the coastal commission. So I'm supportive of all the services that are being offered and look forward to seeing how we can roll this out but I do not support this ordinance for many of the reasons that we're brought for by the public. So no. Holder. Aye. Vice mayor Brunner. And mayor Meyers. That motion will pass with five voting for and two voting against. So that motion does pass. We are gonna go ahead and take a come back in about 250 take a 10 minute break here. And for the members of the public, I'm gonna move item number 24 ahead of item number 25. So item number 24 is the appointment of our new city manager. We're gonna take that item when we return at 250 and then we'll go to item number 24 which is the public hearing and adoption of our 2020 urban water management plan. We'll take a 10 minute break and then come back. Okay, thank you. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. I'm sure council member Brown and Watkins will come in as we get open back up. I just wanna for members of the public, we've made it just a slight change in our agenda this afternoon. We're taking item number 25 now and then we will take item number 24 following this item. And item number 25 is the appointing of our new city manager approving the city management manager employment agreement and authorizing the mayor to execute the agreement. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the city council for deliberation and action. If you are again interested in this item, please press star nine to queue yourself up and we'll move to public comment after a brief number of comments and discussion regarding the items in the item. I'll go ahead and start this item and I see Mr. Huffacher has joined us, which is great. I first want to start the item by recognizing and thanking interim city manager Rosemary Menard for coming on top of her already very busy job as our water director to really fill the shoes of our retiring city manager, Martin Bernal, who is really one of two city managers that the city has had in the last, gosh, almost probably 40 years, I think, I don't know the exact amount, but again, long-term longevity and Rosemary has not only filled those shoes, but she has just really dove in head first in really picking up a lot of very complex policy issues that council was working on, getting ourselves ready for our budget, looking at obviously some difficult policies around homelessness, looking at some of the development proposals that we're currently struggling with. Her leadership has been greatly appreciated by the city council members. I know that all of us have learned from her since her appointment starting in August and I know she'll continue to be a leader amongst our department heads as she transitions back to the water department and helps our incoming city manager, Mr. Huffaker, get ready and succeed in the transition. So Rosemary, I think all of us just really wanna give you a round of applause and thank you for everything you've done. I know we've got a few more months working with you, which we will enjoy, but again, really just stepping out of a very complex department that you're doing and leading and jumping into city manager was really a gift at this point in time. So we're very lucky that you did that for us and we so appreciate it. Extremely thrilled to introduce to our community and folks watching today are the council's choice to be our new city manager, Mr. Matt Huffaker, he's here on the screen. Matt is coming to us from the city of Watsonville with a over 15 year career in city administration and city management most recently as the city manager for the city of Watsonville. And I know we all feel that our city in common here in the county is giving up a great leader, but we are just thrilled that Matt has decided to come work here with the city of Santa Cruz and embark on what I think is an exciting decade of projects and programs and policy that this council and past councils have set in course and including new civic buildings, really committing to housing affordability longterm and also looking at other economic development opportunities for helping our businesses stabilize and grow as well as completing some major infrastructure needs such as rehabilitating our wharf and working on the civic auditorium eventually and our swimming pool and other needs. So Matt is stepping into a very big job. His energy is contagious. There was unanimous consent from the city council about bringing forward his nomination as our choice for city manager. And we are pleased to present him as our choice and I'll close there and offer my council members, I was like, before she go into a coffee pit, I would offer my fellow colleagues to make comments and Matt if you would like to also comment at the end and then the item before us for the public, is that we will be appointing Mr. Africa will be approving the employment agreement and then authorizing my execution of that agreement. So I'll turn it over to my council member colleagues to see if they have further comments. And then Matt again, we'd love to hear from you if you have a few words. So anybody want to queue up for any additional comments? Council member on Tari Johnson. Thank you, mayor. Matt, I have had the privilege of working with you on some of the projects I've done in the city of Watsonville and I know how much you care about community members throughout our county. I know how dedicated you are and I'm just really thrilled that we'll get to work with each other in this capacity and roll up our sleeves and do the hard work that's ahead of us. So thank you. Council member Cummings. Thank you, mayor. I just wanted to thank all the council members and the staff for all the time that was taken to go through this process. It has not been an easy process too. And I just want the public to know that, you know, it has not been an easy process to land on who our new city manager was going to be. And, you know, it's probably one of the most important jobs in this community. And it took a lot of time for us to go through all of the various applications and multiple rounds of interviews. And I'm just happy to see that Matt is gonna be our next city manager. I've had an opportunity to interact with Matt on a number of occasions last year in particular during COVID when we were having the city manager mayor meetings frequently and a variety of different conferences. And I've always heard good things about Matt when people were working in the city of Watsonville, members of the council down in Watsonville. And so I'm just excited to see what's to come for the city of Santa Cruz and look forward to working with Matt moving forward. Thank you, council member. Council member Watkins. But thank you, mayor. And I'll just echo my colleagues' comments and express my appreciation. One, to Rosemary for stepping in in this interim capacity and doing an exceptional job while being here. I'm really grateful for your leadership and excited to have you also support our incoming city manager, Matt. And I wanna welcome you and I look forward to working with you in this capacity. And I know that the community will get to know you in the coming months and as well as the staff. And yeah, lots of great work to do. And so thank you for taking on this role and onward. Thank you, council member, vice mayor Bruder. Matt, welcome to Santa Cruz. We really went through a long process and I would really like to thank our HR staff recruiting firm, the city staff, everyone that walked us through this process. We work together as a team. I really appreciated the council through the interview process and we've landed with this appointee, Matt Hefaker, who I'm very confident will bring wonderful strengths. I look forward to working with you, Matt. Thank you for making Santa Cruz your next home. Thank you, vice mayor. Any other council members? Okay, I will go ahead and Matt, if you are willing and yeah, we'd love to hear a few words from you. So again, congratulations. Yeah, I'm very happy to you. And for starters, mayor Myers and council, I'm just incredibly humbled and excited to be considered for this opportunity. As many of you have mentioned and the mayor has mentioned, it's a really exciting time for Santa Cruz. It's a special community and I'm very much looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and working with each of you, working with our incredible city team and our community members to help emerge from this pandemic stronger and to continue advancing the many important and exciting initiatives that are underway. I'll also have the opportunity to continue supporting our region as a whole, as I know that many of you are committed to that as well. So I just couldn't be more excited and very grateful for having this opportunity and I look forward to the days and weeks to come. So thank you. Thank you, Matt. And thanks for joining us today. I know that you're queued to go back to your council meeting as well. So I really appreciate you taking the time. I will go ahead and take this out unless there's any other comments from council. I'll go ahead and take this out for public comment at this time. We're on item number 25, which is adoption of the resolution in appointing our new city manager, Mr. Matt Huffaker. And if you do want to comment on this item, please press star nine on your phone, raise your hand. And I'm not seeing anyone out there to raising their hands. So I will go ahead and bring this back to council for a motion and we'll go from there. Vice mayor Bruder. Oh, you're muted. I would like to make a motion to adopt resolution appointing the new city manager, approving the city manager employment agreement and authorizing the mayor to execute the agreement appointing Matt Huffaker as the new city manager. Thank you, vice mayor and council member Boulder. I'll second. Okay, we have a motion by vice mayor Bruder, seconded by council member Boulder on adopting the resolution to appoint Matt Huffaker as our new city manager, approving the employment contract, excuse me, employment agreement and authorizing the mayor to execute the agreement. And Bonnie, could we have a roll call vote please? Council member Watkins. Calentary Johnson. I, and I apologize. I had to step out for a moment, but I'm also thrilled that you're gonna be joining us. Mr. Huffaker. Hi. Boulder. Vice mayor Brunner. I. And mayor Meyers. I, that motion passes unanimously. Matt, we will see you here on January 3rd. Thanks so much. Thank you, take care. Okay, you too. Okay, we will now move to item number 24, which is a public hearing for adoption of the 2020 urban water management plan and water shortage contingency plan. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Our presenter today is Sarah Easley Perez, principal planner with our water department. So I'll turn it over to Sarah. Mayor, I'm gonna give a little intro to this in my former world, which I will be going back shortly. I, this was one of the items that I need to combat the interim director of the water department. And I agreed that I would kind of keep a tab on as we went forward along with the financial item that you're gonna hear more about next month or next meeting. But I did want to give a little bit of an introduction to this. But there are water management plan of which the water shortage contingency plan is a part, is a requirement that the water department has from the state. And it's a plan that has to be developed and updated every five years. It's quite a regulatory driven document with lots of, you know, the charts and the date and the analysis has to be exactly in this format so the state can be able to sort of look at things kind of across the board and across a whole range of very different kinds of water utilities. And sometimes that works and sometimes that's a little bit of trying to put a round peg in a square hole for individual projects and programs such as, you know, the one we have where we're not connected to any of the state water infrastructure and et cetera. But fundamentally we work this plan together. We've done this, this is probably, I think the first round might have been in 2010 that we had to do one of these. And so we've had to update it every, actually even earlier than that, multiple times. So it's a project that is required, the process in front of you with respect to the review and adoption has to be in the public care format required by the state. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Sarah who's been the main architect and project manager for this and let her give you a brief overview. Thank you. I'm going to share my screen. I'm the mayor and council members. I'm Sarah Perez, principal planner with the water department. And I'm here today with Benjamin Pink, our environmental project analyst to provide an overview of the 2020 urban water management plan, which includes the water shortage contingency plan that's before council today for public hearing and consideration of adoption. I'm gonna run through a quick presentation and overview and Ben and I will be available to answer any questions. This is driven by regulatory requirements. And then we update the plan every five years. It is a plan that captures a snapshot of the year 2020, looks back to the previous five years between 2015 and 2020 and looks forward on a 20 to 25 year time horizon. There are a number of required topics that will be included and I'll be overviewing some of those key topics. The water shortage contingency plan. This plan is required to be a part of the urban water management plan but at the same time it must stand alone and be adopted independently. The city council did adopt an interim updated water shortage contingency plan in early 2021. And this allowed us to implement in 2021 as it was needed. But there were some new requirements from 2020 that were deferred in that 2021 plan that have now been included. And those include some regulatory requirements such as describing the process by which we evaluate our water year and some other requirements like that. So in the 2020 urban water management plan the water shortage contingency plan is comprised of two components. It's chapter eight which is water shortage contingency planning and appendix O which is the water shortage contingency implementation. And that appendix is the updated version of that interim updated water shortage contingency plan that was adopted earlier this year. I just wanted to quickly go over a public review of the urban water management plan and water shortage contingency plan. The plan has been made available on the city website the downtown library in person, engineering counter at the water department. We did publish notices of public hearing and a newspaper. We additionally took the plan to the water commission for their recommendation for adoption to you. And to date we have not received any public comments on the plan, urban water management plan. There's a lot going on in this graph but I can provide a quick overview. This graph looks at 1951 through the year 2020. Population is shown in green. We have accounts in purple, water production in red and along the bottom it shows our annual precipitation and additionally droughts are highlighted in red. And the main takeaway here I wanted to point out was really the diversion in 2020 of population where population continues to increase but water demand has really been steadily falling since 2020. So we've really seen a disconnect there between growth and a water demand. And that's due primarily to conservation, changes in water code and more efficient use of water. Additionally, in 2014, you see a large drop in demand here during our last drought. So our community really came together and conserved during that drought but since then water demand has really not rebounded. We've maintained at a very low rate of water use. Projected water use, which is a requirement of the urban water management plan. We can see this table here is in a million gallons. So in 2020 our demand or our water use was 2.6 billion gallons and in 2045, when we expect population to increase by about 18%, we're only projecting about a 4% increase in water use. So really a very slow increase in water use and that again is due to Fleming codes, ongoing conservation and the high efficiency of new development, especially multi-family developments. The LXD7X, which was passed in 2009 and this required all urban water suppliers to reduce urban water use by 20% by 2020. So this 2020 report was that reporting out on how well we did that. This orange line here was our target and 110 was our target to meet that goal and our gallons per capita per day here is 74, that's our GPCD. So we very well met our goal of 110 and additionally I wanted to point out this green line, our residential per capita water use. It's not required to be calculated for XB7X7, but at 47 we're among the lowest residential water use per capita in the state. A quick overview of our water supply where our system relies primarily on surface water sources with about 90% of our supply coming from our North Coast Springs on Lake Dell and Laguna and majors on the San Lorenzo River as well as our single surface water reservoir, Loch Loman, and we get about 5% of our water supply from our belt's wells in the live oak area and those operate during the summer dry season. Onto water service reliability. To summarize some of the major constraints on our water sources, our local supply variability as paired with our limited storage with having just one surface water storage reservoir are challenging to our supply. This water year classification graph shows rainfall from 1921 through 2020 and it's classified by wet, normal dry and critically dry years and the main takeaway from this graph is an incredible amount of variability in the type of water years that we get and in addition, in the years in the 2000s, we're seeing a lot of wet-lash weather where dry-dries followed by wet-wets which makes it very challenging to operate a water supply system with limited storage. Some of the additional challenges that the water department faces are ecosystem restoration and protected species. Our goal is to provide habitat supportive of an anatomous species, coho salmon and steelhead trout while operating our water system. And there are challenges in working those together. We additionally face constraints on our existing water rights as well as a source water quality in our existing surface water sources and treatment capacity. So to ensure future reliability, we are safeguarding against future water shortage by implementing future water supply projects that are described in the urban water management plan. This includes implementation of our water supply augmentation strategy which we've been pursuing since 2015 at the direction of city council. And we have four elements of water supply augmentation ranging from demand management, which is conservation, transfers and exchanges up for storage and recovery. And as a backup to that, either recycled water or desalination with recycled water currently prioritize. In addition to that, we're implementing a number of other projects to help implement the water supply augmentation strategy. Those include the Santa Cruz Water Rights Project. This project is wrapping up its final EIR and it's expected to come to city council next month in December. That includes modifications to our existing water rights, water supply augmentation components as well as a surface water diversion improvements. And we are additionally implementing our Santa Cruz Water Program, upgrading a number of our major infrastructure facilities, including our single surface water treatment plan, the Brown-Gram Hill water treatment plan, raw water pipelines and improvements to the TAKE diversion. Slide looks at a couple of the required reliability assessments of the Urban Water Management Plan. The drought risk assessment, which is this assessment here, looks at near-term supply reliability from 2021 through 2025, assuming the next five years are drought. And the takeaway here is, if we assume our water rights modifications, which include agreed flows that are protective of fisheries, so those anadromous fisheries in our watersheds, before we've implemented, but before we've implemented water supply augmentation projects, we project a fairly significant shortage if we had five years of consecutive drought. This projected supply availability analysis, it looks out on a longer term from 2025 to 2045 and in that we can assume the implementation of our water supply augmentation strategy and we see improved reliability where we expect supply to meet projected demand going forward as long as we implement those supply projects. It looks at our demand management measures, our conservation programs. The city has a long history. This graph goes back to 1981 of implementing conservation programs, which has brought us to having among the lowest per capita residential water use in California. The very low water use is great in a lot of ways in terms of needing demand, preserving water resources, but it also presents some challenges with a hardened demand that makes it harder for our customers to cut back further during temporary periods of drought. So that demand hardening really necessitates that our implementation of our supply augmentation to safeguard our future water supplies. Next, I'm going to overview the water shortage contingency plan. As many of you are aware, I'm sure this May through October, we implemented the stage one water shortage warning from our water shortage contingency plan with a goal of a 10% reduction in peak season demand. Based on that experience, we made some minor modifications to our existing water shortage contingency plan. And those changes are summarized here. We added a couple of core principles. We made explicit some flexibility in the way the plan is implemented, as well as clarify of allotment exceptions who does and doesn't qualify for very exceptions. 2021 implementation, a couple of highlights. We had targeted monthly outreach to educate customers who exceeded their allotment. And this brought down from customers exceeding from 34% in May to 25% in October. So we were able to reach a number of people. We processed over 5,000 exception requests through our system with no appeals. And additionally, we implemented water smart software, which helped decrease the level of manual processing. And we were successful in getting almost 40% of residential accounts registered on the portal. And 32% of single family accounts went into the portal and actually updated their profiles, which is great. We expect this to be a key tool for us moving forward. I want to just summarize our next steps for the urban water management plan and the water shortage contingency plan. Today, we're consideration of adoption by resolution of the two plans individually. Following that, within 30 days of adoption, the plan will be filed with Department of Water Resources. And within 30 days of that filing with Department of Water Resources, we'll also make the plan, the final plan publicly available and provide to the jurisdictions that we serve water. The presentation, thank you. Great, thank you for that presentation. I will go ahead and see if council members have questions regarding the presentation. Thanks, Sarah, that was great. Any questions from council members at this time? Not seeing any hands. Okay. Okay, I will go ahead and take this out to our public right now and see if we have any attendees in our meeting today that would like to comment on this item. If you do, if you would like to comment on this item, which is the adoption of the 2020 Urban Water Management Plan and Water Shortage Contingency Plan, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand at this point. When it's your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and then we'll set the timer for two minutes. Is there anyone in the meeting attendees today that wanna speak to this item? I do wanna recognize that Water Commissioner Doug Engfer is on, I see in the audience. So Doug, thank you to the Water Commission for shepherding this to us. Just wanna recognize you. I'm not seeing any raised hands in our audience. So I will go ahead and bring it back to the council. Excuse me. Excuse me. Council Member Cummings. I'm happy to move the staff recommendation. I did just have one kind of question of curiosity. There is the potential for the university to be expanding in the future. And I'm just wondering how university expansion and population on the university campus might influence the water saving plans in the future. Water management plans under drop. Yeah, I'd like to build that question. And then Sarah or you could add in. As you know, the university had done a lot of work between the 2005 and the 2020 LRDPs. And basically kind of added about 10,000 students to their enrollment during that period of time and had their water use stay pretty much the same as it was. So they did project in their EIR, they projected 192 million gallons of additional demand for the 20 year period that they're working on. That demand is integrated into the forecast information that you saw. And it doesn't mean that we support what's gonna happen or don't support it, but we plan for including it. And you can see that even with that additional demand, which presumably is related to a lot of additional housing that they were planning to have on campus, right? That we're still able to incorporate that. There are a couple of other issues that we've been, that we've talked to the university about in our comments having to do with the potential for them developing alternative supplies, which we don't support because they would come out of the car system, which underlies the work campus, but could potentially have negative impacts on water quantity and water quality, particularly temperature in the lower river by changing the dynamics and the amount of flow that's coming out of that car's resource into the lower San Lorenzo River. That could have a negative impact on our ability to support the inadmiss mysteries that we've done a lot of work on. So I think that's kind of a high level overview of that issue. Thank you, Rosemary. Any other comments or questions? We have a motion by council member Cummings. That means a second. I'll go ahead and second that. Any other comments from council members? I just want to, again, thank our water director and our water department for all the work you guys do, you know, for a city of our size, we have one of the most progressive and proactive water departments in the state of California. So, and it shows in our conservation statistics, we have a very aware public, and we have a really great laser focus on not only modernizing and updating and taking care of our water system, which a lot of communities, unfortunately, can usually oftentimes lose track of, but we've also made this huge commitment to actually simultaneously, as we take care of water for humans, we've also made the commitment to take care of water for our fish and wildlife species that depend on our, especially our streams that we get our water sources from. So we're very lucky to have such a competent people managing the most important resource that our city survives on. So just want to compliment you, Rosemary, and your whole department on the work that you guys continue to bring forward. It's really, really those of us who, you know, we probably maybe won't recognize it as we're sitting here, but future generations will definitely be very thankful for all the proactive work you guys do with regarding to our water supply and managing it for the future folks. With that, I will go ahead and ask for a roll call vote. We have a motion by council member coming seconded by myself and this will be to adopt the 2020 urban water management plan and water shortage contingency plan. And it is adopting a resolution for both the management plan and the contingency plan. And can we have a roll call vote, please, Lonnie. Council member is Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. That motion passes unanimously. Well, thanks again. Okay, we will move on to our next item under general business. And this will be item number 26, which is health and all policies year one implementation report and fiscal year 2022 to 2024 work plan for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. If this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation on the item by staff followed by questions from the city council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. I will invite up Tiffany Weiswest, our sustainability and climate action manager. Welcome, Tiffany. Thank you, mayor. Good afternoon, mayor and city council members. Tiffany Weiswest, sustainability and climate action manager and the city manager's office. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you for the presentation. I'm very pleased to bring it to you after some time the year one implementation work plan progress report, as well as the community wellbeing indicators that we're proposing adopting and our work plan for the next two years for health and all policies. In January of last year, 2020, city council adopted the year one implementation work plan after nearly two years of work evaluating what health and all policies might look like here at the city, looking at how other agencies have operationalized it and conducting a series of listening sessions led by then mayor, Martine Watkins. That resulted in this work plan that you see here today that was a follow on to the city council policy and the ordinance that was adopted in November of 2019. This year one implementation work plan contained five objectives, eight actions and a number of different process and impact evaluation metrics. The outcome evaluation metrics are the ones that we're bringing to you here today. So that was the last piece that was outstanding. Just to look at the progress on those objectives which is detailed out much more in the agenda report for this item. But chiefly, these five objectives we have achieved. The first was really preparing guidance on how do we actually look at equity, public health and sustainability, the three pillars of health and all policies in our agenda reports because that was one of the requirements from the ordinance and the policy that came through. We developed a guidance document, a half hour training video and we've conducted a number of group trainings on how to incorporate health and all policies into the agenda report. That guide, we'll see a bit later on what the quick reference chart looks like to guide folks through that process and thinking through these three pillars with respect to their item. We also have brought forward today a framework from measuring and reporting on equity, health and sustainability and improving the wellbeing of our community. I think it's important to remember that these community wellbeing metrics are those that we expect to see on the yearly or really more the decadal scale of change. This is not like our interim recovery plan that has quarterly metrics that we're tracking that do change more frequently. We're looking for the longer term change and identifying the trends and those changes. And that those proposed indicators are also an attachment to the agenda report. It's seven pages and fortunately, those all come from our county data share site. So they're very easy to update. We also said that we would conduct an annual evaluation of this effort and report to council. That is what we're doing here today is reporting for really it's been a year plus. And next we will do our next annual reporting one year from now at the end of calendar year 2022. Our fourth objective was to ensure new staff commissioners and leadership are trained in all three pillars of health and all policies. And we've really taken an iterative and somewhat experimental approach to this. We did add with human resources a number of new trainings beyond those that are mandated by law around diversity, equity and inclusion and some deeper topics. We did have over 200 staff go through those trainings. We also conducted and many of you participated or I think maybe a couple of you participated in March of this year in our leadership equity screening workshop which was a really valuable, I think workshop that allowed us to explore these topics in much more depth than I think we have before. And also as an attachment to this agenda report you see the summary outcomes of that workshop which I think are really interesting. And then lastly, the last objective was to support stakeholder partner convenings. And we were looking for one or two cross-sectoral convenings and we did do more than those. We participated in a couple of course coffee chats a regional sustainability and equity convening as well as on the national level the national association of cities, county's health officers as well. There's a lot of interest in what we're doing here in Santa Cruz with health and all policies as other jurisdictions across the US are doing the same thing exploring what can health and all policies mean in our jurisdiction. So that's been very rewarding interacting with these other folks and learning what they're doing as well that we can bring back to our work here today. So that's really a snapshot of where we've been also in your agenda report you probably saw in the table one that there were over 60 new and ongoing projects, programs, policies and other initiatives that align with health and all policies. And I think that's rather an astounding body of work. And you'll see in that table which pillars are directly applicable or being addressed in that table. So S crossed by P is sustainability by public health in case there is any confusion on what that nomenclature meant in that column of that table. This is what the agenda report guidance quick reference chart looks like. And this of course accompanies it's the short version of our broader guidance documents that's fairly simple and gives some really concrete examples of how folks have incorporated health and all policies language in the agenda report. And I thank you all for continuing to look for that language and ask for it. As you can see this quick reference chart has each of the three pillars down the left hand side and then ask a number of prompting questions to really kind of get the juices flowing and instigate kind of some deeper thought and analysis as to how these pillars either have been incorporated or have not into this item. And for the equity piece we're really drawing on we sought to not reinvent the wheel on tools that already existed such as Monopma County organs, equity and empowerment lens. And this is really the equity piece of our quick reference chart that we ask people to take a look at. And in fact, this quick reference chart and the Monopma County five piece that you see on the screen here it does not only need to be used for the agenda report it can be utilized at the beginning of a project a policy and initiative to think through from the beginning and do some planning to ensure that those principles are incorporated throughout. So we're offering it as kind of the moment in time when it comes to council but really this can be leveraged in a lot of ways. And in fact, many departments or several departments have already begun to do so. This then is page one of seven pages of the proposed community wellbeing indicators. And a few things to note about this. Number one is we align with the core conditions for health and wellbeing. Seeing as that is a city and county framework that a lot of this health and all policies work falls under. So aligning with that. First of all, as well as the core community impacts that the county has developed. So again, just looking to marry these things together for ease of use for employees. And then you'll see the actual indicators and the indicator data. On the far right hand side, we have the current city Santa Cruz value and their current county value. And in some cases city scale data are not available and we would need to default to county data. And I think that this is going to be something that could evolve over time. I know with the interim recovery plan as we phase out of that over the next year, 18 months, whatever it may be, perhaps there are some of those metrics that maybe belong in here for looking in long-term. And similarly through the climate action plan 2030 process we anticipate that there will be some green economy metrics that come out that may be integrated into this in the future as well. So this is something that's adaptable and it's really easy to use. Then we have some kind of next steps that we're proposing along those five objectives that were in the original work plan. We really want to expand staff engagement on the guidance document for the language and the agenda reports. We had 10% of agenda reports in 2020 that included health and all policies and that was before we even had a guidance document. Our target for this year is 50% and for next year 90%. And so we are looking at how can we expand engagement? And in fact, we have brought back by popular demand and have put on the employee training catalog for calendar year 2022 is agenda report guidance that will be co-taught with the assistant city manager and myself where we can also talk about health and all policies. So how to craft a cogent concise but informative report that includes health and all policies. In terms of the framework we've brought it to you here today, the implementation plan calls for reporting on that every two years. So we will do so in two years from now. We will bring our next annual evaluation to city council one year from now as well. And in terms of training, this was something that really came up in our leadership equity workshop as a very high priority is that, okay, we have started to do some of this basic training around these topics, but now we need to go deeper into these topics. And in fact, in addition to the agenda report, we have two new trainings that are on the calendar for 2022, one of which I'm really excited to co-instruct with our communications manager that will be best practices in equity engagement. So we are developing that right now with our civic spark fellow. And then lastly, supporting participation by staff and leadership and more convenings. We have not identified those convenings for this year, but we'll be doing so shortly. However, one thing that also came up in our equity leadership workshop was that there really was a need for community engagement that's non-project based that is solely for the purpose of relationship and capacity building. And so we really wanna flesh out what does that look like? And I know that our communications manager is doing a really great job of helping to connect the dots across the department on the engagement that we're doing. So we're doing it more efficiently and doing it with that equity lens, of course. And I'm really pleased, in addition to that, there are over 15 new and ongoing projects, programs, policies, and other initiatives aligned with health and all policies going forward. And many of those are reinforced through the next item on your agenda. The racial discrimination, I'm not saying the right term, I'm sorry, but the next item that's on the resolution regarding the structure of racism and white supremacy and actual steps towards a more just, inclusive, safe community. I'm sorry, I wasn't sure what that was exactly called, but many of the 15 new and ongoing projects are reinforced, for example, joining the Government Alliance for Racial Equity that would bring really great frameworks and resources to the city to be able to, again, guide deeper in training, provide tools for our employees to utilize as well as the community. And that is my presentation for you here today. And I have the recommended motion on the screen, but I'm happy to take any comments or questions that you might have at this time on health and all policies. Thank you, Tiffany. Great presentation. I'll go ahead and look to Council for comments and questions, Council Member Cummings, Council Member Watkins, and then Council Member Calmentari-Johnson. Tiffany, thank you for that presentation. It's good to see how this is all rolling out. And the various policies that are lining with health and all policies. I'm just curious, I know you mentioned that there's a number of trainings that are being offered through health and all policies, and I'm just curious kind of what metrics are being used to evaluate the kind of impact and outcomes, just to understand how these trainings, like what kind of effect they're having whether it's on employees, policy development, but really just trying to understand the effectiveness of these trainings and how we measure that. Yeah, thank you for that question. All of these trainings do post-training. We ask before people leave to evaluate the training in a Likert scale kind of format. That's not something I have at my fingertips right now, but in general, we saw very positive reception to these trainings. Some comments on, hey, going deeper and broader would be useful and took that to heart that something else that came out of the equity leadership workshop. And so that is why right now I'm exploring with HR what are the deeper kinds of trainings. As I mentioned, equity best practices and engagement is one of them that we're gonna be offering. And then of course the agenda report guidance is the second one. And then there's a third one, which I'm not recalling right now that we already have scheduled as, oh, that's on the time at action plan 2030. We have scheduled for late 2022. And then I think we're still evaluating with HR what are some other next step equity ones that we can bring in for this year. So any suggestions on topics or facilitators on that would be welcome. This is the right time for that as HR is compiling that employee training catalog for next year. Thank you. You're welcome. Council member Watkins. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Tiffany. I don't really have any questions, but I do have a couple of comments and one I just really wanna thank. I wanna thank you, Tiffany, for all your work on this and for really carrying this through from a concept to figuring it out with the community, with the staff and then now to actualizing it and seeing all of the things that are listed in the table in terms of the work that we're doing is so encouraging and knowing that this is a foundation for us to build on is so exciting. And I know that we have in the next item to really think about how we can support this work going forward and kind of a proposal to reconvene a council subcommittee to do so, which I am very much so in support of, but I also just really wanna take a moment to really, you know, applaud the uniqueness of this being centered under our climate action manager, really recognizing that sustainability and the existential threat of climate change and public health and equity are so interconnected. And that is, I think, really forward thinking that I just wanna take a moment to highlight because I think it's truly remarkable and I think hopefully other communities can learn from what we're doing here. And we know that it's a continuous improvement process and these first steps have been really just wonderful and deserve to be celebrated and thank you. So thank you for this report. You're welcome, Council Member. Council Member Collin, Tari Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. Yes, I would like to echo Council Member Watkins' remarks. Thank you so much, Tiffany, for all the work you put into this. This is so impressive to see what has already taken place and what's coming. I had one question around the metrics. I love seeing these metric tables. The, there were two areas under community connectedness and under safe and, or not safe, excuse me, stable and affordable housing. I see that we don't have metrics at the city or county level. And I'm just wondering what our plan is to find those indicators or to find indicators that are close to them. You know, I'll have to look into that and get back to Council Member Collin, Tari Johnson. As I'm looking at this, I realize it was about a year ago that we actually developed this and it's really now only coming forward. And I would love to be able to consult with Nicole Young, our consultant, who helped to prepare this because she has a pulse on, as you note, there are some that mentioned that there could be data coming online in the data share and that could be, these could be a couple of them. So I'd love to be able to report back to you on that once I'm able to answer that question. Great. Well, I was impressed to see how many boxes were filled and how much data is accessible to us. And I think, you know, all of this is, makes us really ripe for additional sources of funding for the work that we're doing in our community. It's just, it's really, really quite impressive what we have in place, the data we have in place. I didn't mean to point out what's missing. I was just wondering what the plan was around it because what we have in place is really quite robust and impressive. So thank you for all your work. You're welcome. Thank you. Other comments or questions from Council Members at this time? Okay. I will take this out to public comment now. So this is item number 26 on our agenda, which is Health and All Policies, year one implementation report in fiscal year 2022 to fiscal year 2024 work plan. And I will call on Pauler ending in 1-8-1-0. Yeah, this is Garrett. I have spoken before of the potentially un-American aspects of the high-up policies declaring them as Marxist, leftist, globalist dogma. I won't repeat those here except to repeat, high-up is based on the false assumption that all life outcomes must be equal and or inequality itself is an injustice, which is moronic and this justifies assigning privileges to some because of loosely correlated differences in life outcome and leads to unjustified discrimination and excessive government central control that tends in the extreme as communists clearly requiring that government must then control every aspect of people's lives to force equal life outcomes or any outcome it so chooses, citing health safety cover authority to control almost anything imaginable. A glance at your goals and community indicators page shows, for example, your concerns about fast food consumption, how fat people are, and pretty obvious leftist focuses on diversity, climate change, the story of justice, et cetera. While information is helpful, just how far you intend to go violating people's individual rights and discriminate against people or businesses to achieve your goals should concern anyone who values liberty. I imagine like the let's go Brandon Patriots feel when Biden goes too far. High-up itself is not concerned with American principles of liberty. Just an idea, if you wanted to improve health and wellbeing statistics, maybe stop importing poverty here to come such as illegal aliens with sanctuary city status or homeless enticements such as increasing subsidies or drug crime leniency, but instead promote outright prosperity through making businesses easier to form instead of shutting them down with misspoke as ill-considered lockdowns. I have concerns data cited to justify action goals are not simple objective measurements fact, but from observations or surveys or comes from data share, the steering committee of which are largely non-profits and potentially less than objective oriented self-serving interest, potentially tainting the data whose existence depends on a perception of their societal need. Community assessment project data is similar. The baseline year, Ohio core condition status indicators also appear old or unavailable or questionable as measurement facts. It is strange for a one year report, there is no update for this incomplete year old or more indicator list. Thanks. Thank you. Any other members of the public who wish to speak on item number 26? We just caught that number. Anyone else? Okay. We'll bring it back to the council. And yeah, I just very quickly make a quick comment. I just, I think local government is shifting whether people want to sort of acknowledge but more and more people are looking to local government for some of the things that local government didn't used to do. We used to do a lot of pipes and not as much programming, but where I think we're learning the success of our community really relies on access to local government and I think health and all policies provides that access. So it's a very complimentary policy and set of work that I think really makes sense, especially now where community is wanting to understand more about how to stabilize themselves, whether it's in an economic condition or a family condition or what have you. So Tiffany, I just want to applaud your work. So thank you for what you're doing and how you're operationalizing this. I have council member Watkins raised your hand and assuming you will look to make a motion. Back to, I'd be happy to move the recommendation, which is a motion to accept the health and all policies year one implementation report and approve the proposed fiscal year 2022, fiscal year 2024 health and all policies work plan. Council member Collin Terry Johnson. I'd like to second. Okay, we have a motion on the table to accept the health and all policies year one implementation report and approve the proposed fiscal year 2022, 2024 high up work plan. Motion by council member Watkins, seconded by council member Collin Terry Johnson. And could we have a roll call vote please, Bonnie. Council member Watkins. Hi, Collin Terry Johnson. The motion passes unanimously. Okay, we will move to me again. You're welcome. We'll move on to our next item, which is actually item number 27, which has been removed from the agenda this afternoon. So we will not be having discussion on this item. Council member Cummings, I believe you had, I believe you might have had a statement or did you have anything to include on this today? We'll move on from this item. I know you had some conversations with some of the community members. Yeah, no, I think that I can save my comments for the next item since they kind of tie hand in hand. So if we can go on to the next item, I'll have a couple of comments I'll make at that time. Okay, great. We'll move on to item number 28 now, which is a resolution recognizing the history of the current existence of racism and white supremacy and actionable steps to work towards a more just, inclusive and safe community. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by the council members who brought this item forward followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. I will go ahead and introduce Vice Mayor Brunner, who will open this item. And then council member Collin Tari Johnson will follow Vice Mayor Brunner, and then I'll have a few comments at the end. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor Myers. This item, really I'd like to speak to a brief background and how this came about. And it stems back to July, I believe, was the joint statement that Mayor Myers and myself made regarding declaring racism a public health crisis and standing united to be committed to anti-racism and anti-discrimination work and to take meaningful action. And there was a statement that we posted, it was about three paragraphs, that really we wanted to commit and part of my goal over the next year as well is really committing to ensuring that our policies and programs and practices in the city are safe and welcoming for everyone. And so we really wanted to take some of the information that we had also received from various community members and information working in alignment with some of the information from the health and all policies plan and tying it to action and actionable steps and committing it. So we really quickly wanted to, first of all, acknowledge and recognize what is happening and historically in the city and identify and recognize internal analysis and needs for where we can continue improving internally in the city and increasing also opportunities for leadership, opportunities for people of color. And really trying to take what started as something very simple quickly grew to many components in this. And we really wanted to make sure that we were addressing some really key components in this resolution. So I will hand it over to council member Calentari Johnson to kind of speak of that process. Thank you Vice Mayor Brunner and thank you for your leadership on this. As Vice Mayor Brunner just stated, this is really our commitment to action and our commitment to operationalizing parts of the health and all policies framework that we just heard from Tiffany Wise West. We received a number of correspondence from members of the Asian-American Pacific Islander community from the Black community Latinx community. And there were some specific asks in response to some of the hate that's been happening here in Santa Cruz as well as across our nation asks for the city to step up and again both internally and externally respond. So we met with various community members from these groups a number through a number of months since I can't remember now, maybe July or August. And we co-created what you see before you, the resolutions that you see before you was not written by myself, Vice Mayor Brunner and Mayor Myers. It was co-created by a number of community members in alignment with our health and all policies plan in response to the history and current acts of hate and white supremacy and outlines a process and mechanism for us to move forward within the health and all policies framework. And I'll pass it to Mayor Myers. Thank you. And I just wanted to kind of forecast a little bit about sort of where this will sort of coalesce, I hope into a community wide set of work and hopefully set of events that actually again going back to our community and how they have risen up and how they have come forward. The resolution also recognizes and promotes that the city should become a regular participant and sponsor of the United Against Hate Week, which is a national effort born out of a small group generating out of Oakland called Not In Our Town, which has done work nationally around speaking out against hate, doing trainings and really helping people understand how to recognize these kinds of trends in their community. We have many local people who have come and contacted council and there's a group that is now formed to participate and is spearheading the United Against Hate Week here in Santa Cruz starting next week. And running from November 14th through the 20th, we did provide a flyer and there's our Elizabeth Smith, our public relations, public information officer is lending assistance to this group to get the word out using social media as well as the city's websites and Facebook, et cetera. So again, this is very much born out of our community. We've also learned through Tiffany about the GAIR group, which acronym is escaping me right at this moment. But then again, this is governments against racism and again, looking at that local government level and providing tools and outreach in our jobs as local government and local leaders. Finally, I've reached out to, we've reached out to as well as our community reaching out to us, we've done outreach with other electeds as well, including the three other mayors as well as county supervisors. And I know that the county of Santa Cruz, the sheriff's office, our police department and the three other cities, Watsonville, Capitola and Scotts Valley have all joined in supporting next week's event around the United Against Hate Week. And the four mayors have also issued joint proclamation recognizing that week, as well as the need for continued education countywide on to help reduce incidents of hate and bias and find effective ways to deal with such incidents when they do occur. So we're very excited about next week. And we just feel like things have come together really well and I've really enjoyed working on this resolution. And we look forward to comments and questions from our colleagues. Any comments or questions as we, or I take it out to the public? Not seeing any hands, okay. Okay, I will take it out to the public. This is for item number 28, the resolution recognizing the history and current existence of racism and white supremacy and actual steps to work towards a more just, inclusive and safe community. I see Mr. Phillips, 1-810, phone number ending in 1-810. Go ahead, please. This system exists in Santa Cruz. I declare the really significant racism as it exists today is what I refer to as leftist, extolling racial perhaps hate toward white people in the form of uttered falsehoods, acting on those falsehoods to the detriment or disadvantage or discrimination against white people. They are the real racists of today. Racism is of no consequences by itself. It matters not what people think, only what they say and do. The anti-white racism and the fabricated guys of leftist anti-racism premeditatedly seeks to and does generate inequities and clear evidence of the today more into a greater detriment and risk to any and all white people, American ideals and prosperity than any other form going forward. This racism is reflected in leftist racial diversity and quota systems and hiring, admission, government subsidy, affirmative action programs, race-based permits, the false rewriting of history, lowering of academic standards, the devouring of merit, one-sided essentially falsehood based planet, race-based council resolutions and actions, reinforcement of a council culture directed toward anyone or thing that opposes these false narrative views, mandatory employment indoctrination and required regurgitation of such false views, inappropriate critical race theory instruction in public schools, conservative censorship in media including local media, and here in the council's action goals of bestowed planned discrimination privilege in so many forms being promised to those by the council based solely on being any other race than white. That is pure anti-racist racism and action by you, not government by the people for the people. Restorative justice is a term that can only fairly be applied to the judicial system to actual violations of law at the time, restoration from actual living violators at the time or those states judged in a court, possibly restoring that which was then by law illegally deprived them at the time. Social justice lawyers and legislative positions need civic lessons about the separations of powers in the United States. Trying to apply restorative justice outside the judicial system by enacting discriminatory essentially ex post facto laws, disinventing white people is both racist and a violation of the constitution as separation of powers assigned to the judicial system. Obama was wrong when he said diversity is our strength. It is not strength but an obstacle to overcome to achieve unity made even bigger by your actions. Thanks. Hey, if there's anyone else in the public right now that would like to speak to this, please press star nine to raise your hand. I'm not seeing any. So I'm gonna go ahead and move, bring this back to council for emotion and deliberation. Council member Cummings. Thank you, mayor. And I just wanna thank the council members who brought this item forward today. And I'll just start by saying, I've been just really grateful for being on this body since I've been on the city council, I'd say every year there's been numerous attempts at us trying to work together to bring forward whether there are policies, resolutions, proclamations but really trying to promote diversity, equity, inclusion in our community and to acknowledge the realities that we are facing here in the city of Santa Cruz. And while I personally feel that Santa Cruz is a very anti-racist city, it's clear that there's still work to be done and that there's still white supremacists, the rights of supremacy that exists within our society along with other forms of discrimination that exist. And so I think together we're committed as a body and we're committed as a community to trying to make our community more diverse and inclusive. And this is another resolution expressing our intent to continue to do just that. I'm happy to move the recommendation forward. I was contacted and also wanted to see if my colleagues would be amenable to adding a couple of bullet points to the last portion of the resolution where we list the action items, but the motion would be to adopt the resolution recognizing the historical and current existence of racism and white supremacy in the community and endorsing action steps for the city of Santa Cruz, which would also include bullet point one to return to the council in early 2022 with an agenda item, including any relevant analysis to declare June 10th a holiday starting in June 2022 for all city employees in the city of Santa Cruz. Work with the Santa Cruz equity co-lab, relevant government agencies and other community organizations to promote and expand upon restorative justice and our criminal justice system and community. And third, return to council in early 2022 with an agenda item to discuss the creation of human rights and equity commission. And so I know last year when President Biden signed in June 10th as a federal holiday, there was a desire for us to do that in the city of Santa Cruz. And it was like, I think the day before June 10th. So we weren't able to do so. And I know that for many members of the community, they wanna see this happen to help celebrate the end of slavery in our country. And it's also a day that we all go out and celebrate our African-American community this year when we being that we had the celebration of the change in the names of the London Nelson Center. So that's the intent of that. And then I just wanna, I was gonna discuss the next point as it relates to the item that was postponed. The item that was before us previously was postponed largely because there's potential legal implications for us to take a stance on a case that is in its early stages. But I think this resolution in particular really highlights our commitment to working on restorative justice. And I know that that's something that's really important to the SC Equity Co-Lab. And so really wanted to make sure that we included an item to demonstrate that we are wanting to take action to continue working with that group and the other groups in our community on promoting restorative justice. And then I was contacted, and I know this has come up a number of times, but I think it would be worth us having a discussion about creating a human rights commission and what that would take because as we're trying to address many of these issues which fall under human rights and equity, it would be advantageous if we had another group in our community that could help weigh in on that. So that's the motion and the justification behind the bullet points before you. And then I'll just stop there. Those are all my comments, thank you. Council members, questions or comments on the suggested additions to. So Council Member, this would go in the sort of the action steps. Okay. Right. I just have one question about the last bullet. I'm wondering if you would be amenable, to possibly have that be a discussion with the county as well, whether a countywide human rights and equity commission might. I mean, I think to your point, I'm just wondering your thoughts on that if we could say return to the council in early 2022 with an agenda item to discuss with the county of Santa Cruz, a countywide human rights and equity commission or, let's see here is watching this, she writes countywide human rights and equity commission or assessment of such a commission being in the city. The reason being that I think so much of what I think we're learning is that these issues cross our jurisdictions and I'm just wondering if maybe we explore that with our county supervisor leadership and then see if we back into that I'm just curious about your thoughts on that. I think that sounds like a great idea and wasn't sure whether to start with the city or the county, but I completely agree that taking a regional approach at this is probably most appropriate. And so I think that's a great amendment. Okay. Okay. Great. I appreciate that. Mayor, can you repeat what you said after this for right here? Retour those. Okay, to discuss with the county a countywide human rights and equity commission and based on results of that discussion, develop further action by council. Is that okay? Council member Cummings? I'm sorry. Okay, great. Do we have a seconder to your motion? Don't believe we have. Okay, so we have a motion with these additions. Council member, I'll go ahead and call on council member Collin Turing Johnson. I don't know if you were planning to do the motion on the overall resolution. Happy to back up, but go ahead council member. Sure. And yeah, I'm happy to second. I did have some questions and comments. So maybe there's friend amendment. Thank you council member Cummings for those additions with item number two, I just want to be mindful that there are other community groups that we've been working with and that would also be interesting. And I see here that it says other community organizations. I just want to be mindful that by naming one, we're not excluding others who would want to participate. So I don't know, that's just a thought. Yeah, that was the, I just wanted to explicitly call them out because of the previous item and they've been really wanting to work on restorative justice. So made sure to include in there other community organizations just to also not be calling out every single organization in the town, but just wanting to highlight that the SC co-lep has been in direct communication with myself and the mayor over the past couple of days and really expressing that they want to work on this. So just wanted to call them out and then any other that wants to join in I think would be appropriate. I have a question when there's a moment. Sure. Go ahead, I had another comment, but if you wanted to jump in. Is the attend here to incorporate items into the resolution or is it to stand alone as council, a direction to accompany the resolution because these could easily be incorporated into the list of bullet points beginning on page three of the resolution. That was the intent because on page three it was a set of action steps that have been identified for the city of Santa Cruz to pursue beginning in 2022. And so that was the intent is that these would be incorporated into that list of bullet points. I do have the motion language to read that. It says here with the following additional action steps. And I think, Monty, it should say and to incorporate the following additional action steps into the resolution. And then you can continue for the city to pursue beginning in 2022. And I'm sorry, Ms. Rosemary, I was wondering if that friendly at the end of the friendly amendment it ought to say further action for council consideration. Is it sort of recommendation? That am I council? Yeah, that's, I find it. Develop recommendations for further action for council consideration. Okay, was that? Can we go back up to this, Tony? What was the language that you're suggesting? Incorporating into the resolution and then delete the word with, yeah. Okay, I did have one more comment with that. Are you complete, Tony? Looks like it. Okay, so then on point number three, I just, I wanted us to think about this also in the context of the health and all policies committee that as part of this resolution, we're asking to be reinstated. And I know that other communities have used their health and all policies committee as larger county wide committees that really do this work of human rights and equity work. So I just wanna make sure we're not duplicating that we're, and I don't know how we would want to wordsmith this if at all, but that it's not exclusive of the health and all policies committee because that could potentially, the work of the health and all policies committee could also be doing this human rights equity work. I don't know if that makes sense. So I don't know how we wanna make sure that it's not duplicative and that health and all policies committee is indicated into this. Does that make sense? I'm not articulating very clearly. Yeah, I guess I would just follow up to say that the commissions are usually larger community bodies and it's either individuals who are appointed by the council each council member or they're kind of elected by council as we'll do later with the, I think sister city. So that's the only distinction between the two groups. But if the health and all policies committee wanted to kind of spearhead what the creation of a human rights commission would look like, maybe they could take on that role. So I mean, I'm just saying that I think, I think they're separate groups and we would, and also if we're gonna align it with the county in terms of what the commission would be in its composition, you know, I think it would be good if there's a subcommittee that wants to work on that and it's the health and all policies committee. Maybe that could be something to discuss with the city manager as this comes forward. Sure. Yeah, and I know that other communities, their health and all policies committees are really, it's county wide, it's robust, it has community diverse stakeholders and community input. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's potential here for us to align what's being proposed here under number three and take our health and all policies subcommittee to like a larger, you know, I get very excited because I know what's been possible in other communities. So I don't know that it needs to be added to this. I think if we understand that that could be a place where it could live. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, council member vice mayor Bruner. Thank you. I actually was also going to comment on number three and just call out that in this resolution we have directed that in order to accomplish, to assess and accomplish these proposals that the council refers this to city manager's office for the role of the health and all policies committee. And so I wonder if the intent of number three would fall under the health and all policies committee rather than a separate commission. And so I just wanted to bring that forward as well. It sounded like maybe the health and all policies would be a good starting place maybe for the city to express and sketch out kind of what this may be and then bringing it maybe to the county as a question, you know. So maybe we do some of that work internally and then we could bring that to the county to council member Col. Johnson's, you know, where health and all policies typically does kind of come out of that county body in many communities. Rosemary, do you have a comment? I just want to know that in the staff review of some of the action items on the resolution, HR manager Lisa Murphy did identify a little bit of expanded role for the existing EOC group. So I think that that's another resource that we would want to, it's not a instead of necessarily but it's another resource for bringing to the four. And I think that it's really important whenever talking about something like this that a new commission or even additional work in this nature that we talk really clearly at the get go about what kinds of things we want it to do. I mean, I'm a big believer in forms follow function. So it's like where are the gaps that we want to close and then what's the right tool to achieve that in the most efficient and effective and, you know, way that has the biggest impact, obviously. So, you know, to the extent that we can recognize that there's a suggestion here of a how before we really figured out what the what is, I would just like to make sure that that's reflected in thinking about what we're trying to do here. Thank you, Rosemary. I think we have consensus kind of on this. It sounds like kind of as it's fitting together. Is that, is that right? It looks like it. Yeah, okay. Vice Mayor Brunner, did you have any other comments? You're good. I'm good, thank you. Thank you. I have Council Member Watkins and then Council Member Brown. Thank you Mayor. I'll keep my comments short in the interest of time. I just want to, you know, share my appreciation to all who worked on this and I appreciate the additions and discussion moving forward. I'll just put a sort of an exclamation mark on the thought around kind of what the purpose would be inventory of what we already have in place or enhancement in that way and potential alignment with the county, particularly as it relates to some of the overlap between the health and all policies work that I think could ultimately, or is designed to ultimately infiltrate every aspect of government and our partners to really think about equity and human rights and health and sustainability, right? So I think there is that broader kind of infrastructure that we already have in place. So having it start as sort of a discussion point for that committee to explore, I think is a really great direction at this time. And so for those reasons, I'm supportive of what we have before us. Thank you, Council Member, Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to express my support, my appreciation for the work that's gone into, the thinking that's gone into this and the work that's gone into this. And I do think that there is space for, as that as the health and all policies, committee reconvenes and begins to talk about how to actually take some of these kind of principles and put them into concrete things we can do and actions we can take that also having that conversation about the potential for some kind of body, human rights and equity commission, city, county. I mean, I think I don't have any vision of exactly what that would look like. But what I will say is that in terms of institutionally, that is very different than a three-person subcommittee of the council that will sunset after some work is done. So I think that considering that, and I just wanna say it here now because I'd like for the committee to hear that considering that is really important to think about how it is that we over the long haul are thinking about and operationalizing concrete actions and also how those are evaluated not just internally with the city, but more broadly within our community. So I do think it's important to just recognize those as different kind of, again, institutionally different like organizational forms, a council subcommittee versus a citizen's commission. And think about what the synergies might be and what the path might be forward for a longer term, kind of broader community-based or community-involved and engaged effort. So, but yeah, do really appreciate everything you all have put into this and the responsiveness to community concerns that have been raised. And I think there's a lot of really positive work to be done moving forward. Thank you, council member. Okay. I know we have a motion on the table and I believe council member commentary Johnson has seconded this motion. Is there any other comments by council members at this point? Okay, we will go ahead then Bonnie and do a roll call vote, please. Council member Blotkin, council member Johnson, vice mayor Brunner. Motion passes unanimously. Okay, we'll move on to our next item or bring a little bit behind and try to catch up here. Our next item is number 29, the sister cities committee appointment for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. If this is an item you wanna comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return for deliberation and action. I'll go ahead and have Bonnie give us any additional information she'd like to share on this item. Thank you, mayor. We just have a vacancy on the sister cities committee and they wish to fill it ahead of the annual, they don't wanna wait for the annual appointment. So we have two applicants that you guys can choose from. So if you wanna put the nomination and see if anybody has a different nomination. Okay, great. Council member Boulder, excuse me. Like, I'd like to nominate and I think it's, I think it's Kirsten, Kristen, I don't know if it's Kristen or Kirsten, Madison. And Bonnie, just remind me, do we need to second each of these, correct? No, you would typically, you can, but you would typically have, if someone else has another nomination and then we would go through and take a vote on each nominee. Okay, I'll go ahead. I just have a question about her application. She is not a city resident. Is that necessary for appointment to sister cities? I didn't get a chance to check with you about that. It is, it's not a requirement. I believe that vacancy that was on there now was not a city resident. So she would just be taken accounting. I'm gonna nominate, I'm gonna nominate Mr. Let's see here, Mr. Stelling as well. So we can do a vote. So Bonnie, well, should we hold? We'll do Kristen's first. And if she gets the majority, then we wouldn't obviously vote on Mr. Stelling, but I would like to, you know, if she doesn't, how do we, yeah, is that the best way to do it? It's a little bit odd, but. Yeah, I could just do a roll call vote and that specific council member can just tell me out of the two who their vote is and we'll make it Halley. What I don't know if you wanna do, just see if anybody in the public wants to say anything before we get to this part. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna bring it out before we started the vote. Let me just look up here and take this out to the public. This is gonna be on item number 29. This is an appointment to our sister cities committee. And if you are interested in commenting on this item, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand at this point in time. Anyone in the audience want to, okay. Not seeing any of those. We'll bring it back and we'll do the voting, Bonnie. Okay, council member Watkins. These are always so hard cause it's always so nice to see people wanting to serve. I think I'm gonna go with. I will say that we will have an eventual another opening if that uses your. It does actually. So I'll go with Thomas given his experience at this point. I want Tori Johnson. All right, yes, I'll go with Mr. Mr. Stelling as well. Brown. For a Kristen, Mr. We have a ton of Stelling. It's based on his experience and. Holder. Kristen. Vice mayor Brunner. Kristen Madden. And Mayor Meyers. Yeah, I'm gonna go with Stelling. I do, I'm glad we have some additional opportunities to do some appointments. But at this point, I'll go ahead and go with Mr. Stelling. Is the pick. Okay, great. Okay, we will now, let's see, Bonnie, I'm just looking, I think we have somewhat caught up. Not really though. We're still running about 20 minutes behind, it looks like. So let's soldier on here. What was that? Oh yeah, 20 minutes, yeah. Yeah, I think we're running about 20 minutes behind. So let's go ahead and keep moving. Hopefully we'll get a little break, possibly before we get too much further in the, so we're gonna go ahead and move on to item number 30, which is the ordinance extending temporary use of certain adjacent public street and outdoor areas for all eligible businesses impacted by indoor business closures related to COVID-19 pandemic. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation. And I'll go ahead and turn this over, I think to Rebecca or Bonnie, not sure which, is it gonna be you Bonnie? I'm just going to, thanks mayor, and I'm just going to briefly introduce the item and then turn it over to Rebecca, our economic development manager. I just wanted to provide a little bit of context in that. We came to you in August a couple months ago with a recommendation to extend the emergency ordinance for businesses for outdoor dining for a year. And at that meeting, you directed us to come back and specifically working with the city attorney's office, we have a regular ordinance to extend the previous emergency ordinance for a year. So it would go through, it currently expires at the end of December this year. We now have a regular ordinance extending that emergency ordinance that will go through next December of 2022. Also in the August 24th meeting, you directed us to specifically look at options for the 1,100 block for the following year. We have done quite a bit of outreach and heard both concerns and benefits and do have a recommendation to open the 1,100 block as soon as possible in 2022, but to work with all the existing businesses on that block to make sure that those that have outdoor expansion areas can continue to operate those and to reopen that as soon as possible. Rebecca will go into quite a bit more detail. I just wanted to provide that context before she starts her presentation. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rebecca. Excellent. Thank you very much, Bonnie. And good afternoon, Mayor and City Council, Rebecca Unit, Economic Development Manager for the City of Santa Cruz. So this, excuse me, Bonnie. Of course, having Zoom issues. So the item today, as we mentioned, is an update and a introduction of an ordinance to extend our current temporary outdoor dining program through the end of 2022. So we have prepared a regular ordinance to extend this program. The reason we're bringing forward this regular ordinance instead of just extending our emergency ordinance that we had in effect previously is that as we're all fairly aware, a lot of the pandemic related conditions and restrictions have been eased. We are still very much in recovery mode and still in a pandemic, but the emergency nature that we initially enacted this program under is slightly lessened. And as we move into the new year, having this regular ordinance in place is just gonna give us a little bit more security in continuing this program forward. And then I also wanted to just mention since we have met last in August to give an update on this program, we've been doing outreach to the existing temporary permit holders to get an understanding of whether or not they wanna continue in the next year with their temporary permits as well as getting an understanding of if they want to move into a permanent program once we have those details in place. So we've been doing a lot of outreach with our 97 permit holders and have just over half of them responded to but we know that they're very busy business owners. So we're continuing to do that outreach to follow up with them, make sure that we get in touch with every business. And so this ordinance will just give us that continuation of the current operations that we have for that program, no additional changes of what we're allowing under that operation. And then as Bonnie mentioned also at our last meeting we wanted to bring back a recommendation for the 1,100 block of Pacific Avenue. Currently we have a full free closure on this block. So this is the stretch of Pacific Avenue between Cathcart Street and Lincoln Street. And right now this is the one-way northbound stretch of Pacific Avenue. And we have several businesses that have expanded onto the street closure. Originally when we first started the street closure back in the summer of 2020, businesses were able to just set up some chairs and tables in the streets. Much more sort of open environment. And as the pandemic has gone on and just the need to adapt and sort of bring in more infrastructure, businesses have built out some of these platforms that you see in this image here. And with that, the use of the space has sort of changed over time, but it's still been a great area for events, activations and different things. We've heard quite a bit of different opinions about how the space has been used in sort of the success of the street closure over the last just over a year that we've had it in place. So we've been doing a lot of outreach about sort of what we want to see in the space going forward. Initially in 2020, when we first had the street closure in place, we did have a meeting with the Downtown Association, the Executive Director of the Downtown Association pulled together a group of stakeholders from the 1,100 block as well as some other businesses that are just on the boundaries of that area to talk about sort of what people were thinking about the space, if they were liking the closure, how it was impacting them. And there was really a mixed bag of opinions there. And then when, so we continued on and had the street closure and moved forward. And as we've sort of gone through our full year of, or I guess, almost two years now of having this space in effect, we have heard a lot more rumblings around impacts of different groups. And so we spoke in with some of the, we spoke again with the neighboring businesses on the 1,100 block as well as those off the 1,100 block and have talked with some of the event producers. And we've also heard feedback from the residents that live on that stretch. Some of the major themes that we've heard from this feedback is that people really like having more space for dining, seating, pedestrian access. They're really like having that enhanced event area when it's programmed well. But we've also heard that there are some impacts to residents who maybe have mobility issues because that street is closed, they're not able to have their ride drop them off directly in front of their building. One of the residential buildings on that block has their elevator access only on Pacific Avenue. And so that's really challenging for some of those residents who are needing to get much closer access or get deliveries to their residents. And then we've also had other businesses who aren't a restaurant or a retail business that really rely on having that customer experience and having their customers being able to access their business close to the parking. And so they've had issues with reduced customer parking. And then we've also heard from businesses off of the 1,100 block Pacific Avenue that have had the feel that their impacts their business in terms of the traffic flow being cut off to them because this is that one way stretch that goes north on Pacific Avenue. It sort of changes the traffic pattern for them. And so with that, we talked internally as well to see if there was maybe a different configuration or a way to do sort of a partial closure or on a weekly or a monthly basis or if there are other options for us to keep that going in some fashion and really with the capacity and sort of the demands of the different users, it really makes the most sense to just reopen the block. And then we would also be able to allow those businesses that are currently operating their outdoor dining spaces to continue that use but reopen it for the other uses that need access on that space. So if we do move forward in this direction as we're recommending, we would work in early January 2022 to reopen and work with those businesses that are currently operating on the block to make some changes to their outdoor dining. Some of them expand into the drive lane on Pacific Avenue. So we need to reduce their expansion areas down and then bring in the additional safety barriers that we need to make them safer through traffic. And so we'll be working with those businesses and we've already started that outreach to them to let them know and talk through those logistics. And so our recommendations today for you are to introduce for publication and ordinance extending emergency ordinance number 2020-27, authorizing temporary use of certain adjacent public street and outdoor areas for all eligible businesses impacted by indoor business closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic until December 31st, 2022. And our second recommendation is to direct staff to work with businesses operating outdoor expansions on the 1,100 block of Pacific Avenue to modify these spaces for continued use with through traffic to allow for reopening of the 1,100 block of Pacific Avenue as soon as possible in 2022. And I will take any questions. Thank you, Rebecca. Great report. And thank you for doing all that outreach with the neighborhood especially. We got some communications from folks. Council member Cummings, did you have questions? I have three pretty short questions. Thank you for that presentation, by the way, to Rebecca and all the work that you all have done to help support the businesses with outdoor dining during this time. And I just do want to say I do want to say I think you highlighted something that I hadn't really thought about which was the fact that for some people who are maybe elderly or have mobility issues the fact that they can't they have to get dropped off at the end of the block and then have to walk in that can be challenging for some folks. So that was something that I hadn't thought of that I'm glad you brought up. I was just curious, my first question, you mentioned that there's some businesses that operate that need parking outside of their business and I was just curious if you could give an example of what that is because I just think about retail and restaurants but if there's other types I'm just curious what an example of that would be on that block? Yeah, so we do have some service businesses on that block so there's an optometrist office there and the optometrist office requires they have customers that are coming for appointments and some of their clientele are older as well and might have mobility issues that they really benefit from having potentially available on street parking there that's completely cut off right now. Great, the next question I had is there a number of folks who have benefited from the outdoor dining have been asking about how can they get going on trying to create permanent outdoor seating so they can start making preparations now whether it's saving money or getting loans or what have you and so I'm just curious kind of where things are at with that and in terms of the process for people to have permanent businesses for outdoor. Yeah, absolutely thanks for that question. So as I mentioned at the beginning we've been starting the outreach to them so we have a form that we've sent out and emails to all of our permit holders and we've been doing some follow up with them and basically the first step that we're really trying to get businesses to do is fill out that form and let us know yes that they want to extend into next year for the temporary and then yes or no if they want to go permanent and so that's sort of us logging that data and then we have also started looking at for those that have filled out that response on the private property side of things we have been working with planning to do an internal review of what it would take for those businesses to go permanent so looking at sort of what's their site plan what would their parking requirements and permit requirements be under our codes currently to do that analysis and see is there an easy path for them or are there some things that we maybe want to look at from a policy perspective to ease that going forward so we're doing a lot of data collection on that and then on the public sector or the public property side of things or parklets we are working with a landscape architecture firm right now we're trying to get our agreement in place to work on some plan set designs with them as well as have them help us with our design guidelines with what the new platform requirements would be and so we're hoping to have that early 2022 as well to get those going so we have quite a few businesses that are reaching out that are trying to make plans as they go forward and so really the best step is to have them check in with me and my colleague Nathan to talk through sort of where they're at in the process and what their specific needs are and we can see what information we can provide now and then give them sort of the information we have about what's coming down the pipeline and when those next steps are gonna come. Great and is there an update that might happen with city council at a future meeting that we can let people know about that process? Yeah we don't have one scheduled as of yeah I know this was sort of our next time but we can definitely bring something back in January Bonnie I'll let you talk about that. Yeah just to add to that we could yeah bring something back as Rebecca suggested in January we could do a little deeper dive as part of our interim recovery plan quarterly update one of the items associated with that as well and I just wanted to add to Rebecca's comment about sort of next step in process particularly for the downtown businesses and she mentioned the landscape architecture firm that we're working with and part of what we're doing and the reason for the form and the follow up individually is we wanted to give businesses options of looking at if you have an outdoor expansion now you can look at that and say okay this is the minimum that's gonna be required to make this permanent if that is an option that you want to do the sort of the least expensive option to make it compliant for permanence and then also with the landscape architecture looking at we're trying to come up with some uniform standards and an option that's sort of like a template of or a model of a uniform standard for the downtown for some of these businesses and we're also looking at and this would be something that would come forward to you at a future point of potential grant funding to offset the cost of that if they want to go down that route versus just the minimum to make it permanent. So we want them to have options for those that are just like I don't want to spend a lot of money I just want it permanent versus those are like I want something really nice and I want to invest that but I don't necessarily have the full funds for that and I want to see what options the city might provide so we're trying to be able to provide some guidelines as well and so that's what we're working with the landscape architect on as well so doing individual assessments of each particularly downtown outdoor expansion area. Great, well thank you all for all your hard work on this I know a lot of people in the community appreciate it. Any other questions from council members on this item? Okay, I'll go ahead and bring this item out to the public then. We are on item number, let me grab my notes here, 30, excuse me, on item number 30, which is the ordinance extending temporary use of certain adjacent public street and outdoor areas for all eligible businesses impacted by indoor business closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you wish to speak to this item please press star nine on your phone now. That will raise your hand and when we see that we'll be able to put your name and so I'm looking for immediate attendees to feel welcome to do that. I am not seeing any hands come up. I'd like to say yes. I was going to say Peter is on the line. He may have to do an announcement in Spanish to see if there's anybody for him to translate. Great, go ahead Peter. Thanks, hello city council. Thanks, city mayor. Actually what I have is I guess you're, Rebecca definitely did a good work spreading a word on this resolution. It reached the beach flat and for those who don't me, I'm Peter Bichier, the community is on for the city of Santa Cruz and David Torres reached me unfortunately at this time he is busy, he cannot be here directly but he wanted to, he was definitely thinking of the first parcel resolution because obviously he's in beach flat not on the Pacific Avenue but for him it really has told me that this has been or really had saved his business basically like last year when they opened the outdoor part and basically he wrote me in Spanish. He was saying, let's see, so he says last year he lost 80% and of course I'm translating, he wrote me in Spanish and I'm reading I don't think there is point of reading it in Spanish unless you want me to tell too but I was just translating as I read it 80% of his business went down from last year but then having this little roof and having this little extra outdoor helping immensely and he would definitely have to have it like to have it renewed for the 22 and permanently would be also ideal. He says he create a little different atmosphere outdoors and a lot of his customers also like to go in and eat outdoors and just so it opens up not only when we allow some of the eating inside but also outdoors and he says that even pre-pandemic he had always had a dream to have a little bit like downtown, like Pacific Avenue have these little outdoor areas because he's in close to the boardwalk, the majority of all he's a clientele is I feel with the boardwalks so when it's open people go from the beach or to the parking lot and from the river and they just walk by there and now having several areas where they can eat outdoors it helps a lot and having a little music there so he says that he please support his resolution and hope he hopes that at some point he will be permanent and that he really appreciate the help in that. Thanks for listening. Thank you Peter for passing that on. I'll look to see if there's any other hands up in the attendees, I'm not seeing any so I'll go ahead and bring this back to council for deliberation and council member Cummings. I'll just move the staff recommendation. Okay, and council member Brown. I will second that. Great. Okay, we have a motion on the table to extend this emergency ordinance for outdoor dining areas until December 31st, 2022. This motion introduces the ordinance for publication and direct staff to work with businesses operating outdoor expansions on the 1,100 block of Pacific Avenue to modify these spaces for continued use with through traffic to allow for reopening 1,100 block of Pacific Avenue as soon as possible in 2022 and ordinance number is 2020-20. Okay, we'll go and do a roll call vote please. Council member Watkins. Aye. Elementary Johnson. Vice Mayor Bruder. Mayor Meyers. That motion passes unanimously. Okay, we will go ahead and keep moving. We're going to go on to item number 31 which is the collective of results and evidence-based otherwise known as core investments update regarding request for proposals and next steps discussion and additional core funding and deferral annual of the core annual report. And I will have Laura Schmidt, our assistant city manager, make a presentation today. We'll be receiving the presentation from the staff and then we will see if there's any questions from council and then I'll take it out to public comment after those questions and then we'll come back for deliberation in action. Welcome Laura. Thank you, Mayor. I would also like to welcome Randy Morris who's on the call. I think you can see him in one of the tiles. Randy is the human services director from the County of Santa Cruz and he will be our resident expert on core helping me out this evening. So thanks Randy very much for joining us. Today we're going to the follow up to a conversation that we had with you on September the 28th and during that council meeting you agreed to the three year new term for this RFP time span as well as a hybrid tiered funding approach with one deeper investment called a targeted impact tier as well as transitioning our $45,000 city funding to and the language of that is to spread it across base funding and we're going to have a little bit of a conversation regarding that later. Today what we're going to take you through is an update of what's been going on to September 28th. We're hoping that you will approve the release of the request proposal that you will direct us to return back to you in March or a checkpoint prior to the rating panel and just do a general update. And then we also want you to specify the $45,000 in our set aside to potentially go to the target impact here based upon a recommendation from our community programs committee and then possibly address additional funding requests to that targeted impact here for the city. And then agreed that the county is going to defer the yearly core report to no later than December of 2022 to include a final five year report. And that's all just that little bit. And just as a reminder that all of these actions in the slide that you'll see except for the couple that are specifically related to our investment or in alignment with what the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors approved earlier today. So just a heads up on that piece of it. So I'm going to share my screen and we'll get started. Are you able to see the slides? Yes, we are Laura. Great, thank you. Gonna reset with my tiles so I can Brady bunch you guys and see you. All right, so we're going to talk and give you an update on the timeline and kind of context you where we are in the process and give you a review of some stakeholder engagement that has happened since September the 28th. Discuss the important details of the core RFP which is included in your agenda packet and summarize our next steps. So the timeline, we presented a framework for you in the fall and that was the end of September meeting here at the county or at the city. And then we also had a parallel meeting at the Board of County Supervisors as well. And today we are here to ask you to release the draft request for proposal that's included in your packet. There'll also be some technical assistance work that the team will be doing with potential applicants. And then in the winter of 21, into the early part of 2022, we'll be receiving the proposal from the applicants with the final deadline being February 4th of 2022. And then in the spring in March, and this is one of the potential direct since that you'll give us is for us to return back to you with a status report on the application process and how that's going. The panel will review the applicants and there'll be recommendations of awards. And for us, those funding conversations happen in our May budget hearings. And then you all do a final budget adoption usually in the first meeting in June for us and we'll then adjourn in July. And then in July of 2022, so that'll be fiscal year 2023 for us, the actual contracts would begin. The team is doing a lot of work with Nicole Young and Nicole Levin as well as various county staff to do engagement with stakeholders. I've not participated in this, but they've worked with the community foundation and the seniors council. And then there was a comprehensive October 19th stakeholder engagement session, as well as a follow-up survey that went out to potential applicants. And there is a summary document in your packet as well related to the results and the feedback from the October 19th meeting. The key takeaways from that meeting, that the many of the questions that the potential applicant pool had were around operationalizing equity in the RFP and how that would happen and how the proposal review would happen and the scoring and then the funding award decisions and the criteria related to that. And you will see a really great amount of detail of that of all these questions answered in the actual content of the request for proposal that is included in your packet. Just a reminder of the tiers that you approved at the end of September, the small, medium, large and for the first time, the targeted impact tier. And then for us on this item, we had specifically requested that the 45,000 be spread across the base, but when we had a conversation with community programs committee, they thought that the intention needed clarification and then rather than spreading our 45,000 dollars across the small, medium and large tier, the community programs committee wanted to clarify that with the larger council and recommend that it specifically go into the targeted impact so that the city could participate in that tier of the process. So that would combine the county's 750,000 with our 45,000 to be a $795,000 award. So this is, these are the slides that are unique to the city that the board of supervisors did not consider. So one of the things that we'll talk about at the end of the presentation is whether or not you wish to direct staff to focus all of the 45,000 into the targeted impact rather than distributing it across small, medium and large tiers. And then additionally, the community programs committee recommended that the council consider additional funding for the targeted impact up to 55,000 in addition to the 45,000 for a possible total of up to 100,000 for a city contribution into targeted impact. A lot of numbers. Okay, so going back to the RFP, who can apply? Non-profits 501C3s including faith-based organizations and grassroots groups with non-profit fiscal sponsors, public education agencies and collaboratives with identified lead agency as well as federally recognized tribal agencies are all available to apply. What is core funding for? So for the small, medium and large tier grants, their direct service programs or projects that address the various core conditions. And the core conditions is the circular model at the beginning of the presentation. The targeted impact grant is for a collective impact to approach improving conditions for equitable well-being across the core conditions. So the key word there I believe is equity. But also continues the focus on direct services and it may include capacity building for systems communities and organizations as well. So what are the application and award parameters? There's no limit on the number of proposals for applicants but the funding requests for an applicant is not to exceed 25% of the total core funding that you saw in the previous tables. You cannot apply for the same program or project in multiple tiers that are proposals. So if that program or project is a medium tier proposal you can't deploy it into small and large as well. And then the administrative rates that you can ask for reimbursement is up to 15%. And then the award amount will be within 10% of the amount that you applicant request. The support that the applicants will have during this process, there'll be a request for proposal informational session once the RFPs approved. There'll be group workshops. Our consultants will have informal office hours to lend specific support to applicants and there'll be individual technical assistant sessions and then there'll be Q and A for a two month window with rolling responses. So the applicants will be able to basically the same RFP process that you normally go through as far as asking questions and getting information back from the county and city. As far as the actual responses and the review and the panel process to support that we're going to recruit locally as much as possible and build a pool of diverse reviewers across all of the core conditions. They're going to recruit and select reviewers with an equity land and provide training to reviewers which is always helpful. And then that show the next steps, the RFP hopefully it is approved tonight. It's gone through the approval process at the board of county supervisors and it will get released on November 16th. The proposal responses are due from the applicants on February the 4th in 2022. We'll report back to you as directed by you in March of 2022. In May of 2022 during our budget hearings for the city we'll get recommended awards. That'll be part of our budget packet to you. And then in June as budget is adopted that will be the combination of the final decision and our funding for the fiscal year and then the new contracts start in July of 2022. For the council what we have for your recommendation to take action on tonight is receive the update approve the release of the core RFP direct us to return back to you in March with a status report on the core applicants submitted and subsequent rating panel process to fold the $45,000 set aside into the core's targeting impact here and that's a recommendation from the community programs committee direct the CPC to turn back to council with future discussion and recommendations as to the funding picture changes and defer the core annual report. The asterisk on the proposed recommendation number four we would need to insert additional language there if the council decides this evening to add any additional funds for the budget of $45,000 to increase our contribution to the targeting impact here we'd have to adjust that language. And with that I turn it over to Randy if there are things that I didn't emphasize or you would like to add additionally I'd be more than happy to have you comment to the council though I will hand it over to them for any questions that they may have. Thank you, Laura. It's good to see all of you and again I look forward to seeing you in person someday. I think there's two things that might be helpful based on what I heard you speak about when I was your county partner on September 28. The first is just to wanna say a touch more about the community foundation Mayor Myers you expressed hope that we'd be able to develop some partnership and leverage some of their funding. So I just wanna share a touch more that we have had active collaborative discussions with the community foundation. We have committed together City County and community foundation to talk at the time the core applications are in hand and the community foundation grant applications which are released in January are in hand. And at that point to review whether or not we have some overlapping application where it might make sense to marry funding then. So we sort of collaboratively agreed to that it was premature to have any party commit to giving the other party some money when the RFP is released. But that's not because we're not committed to looking at what's in hand together in the spring. So I just wanna make sure that was known. And then the other is I wanna say I have not discussed what I'm about to share with Laura or Rosemary, but I hope it makes sense. Given the decision you have in front of you from your program committee and thinking about how and in what way to apply your city money. One of the reasons we recommended the board that we come back in March is because that's before the rating panels meet and we will have the applications in hand. So part of what we're hoping bringing forward to the County Board and to your council is sort of an aggregate summary of what's in hand at which point there's another opportunity for both legislative bodies to give new and refined direction to the County of the city. So I imagine that might be a moment where if this is a controversial complicated issue you still have another opportunity to be very directive about where you want your money to be applied with some more information because we'll know what applications we have in hand and sort of where the areas of interest are from applicants. So I hope that's helpful as well. And I'm here for questions and answer when and if appropriate. Thank you, Randy. That is very helpful. Great. Does that conclude the presentation Laura? You guys are available for questions? Yes, we'll hand it back to you, Mayor. Thank you. That was great. Any questions from city council members at this point? I've not seen any questions. I have one question on the asterisk in that motion. Laura, my understanding is the 45,000 is already the set aside. So that would be, that is basically being referred to go into the new system. In the agenda report or the way it was noticed it says 45,000 to 100,000. So if we wanted to go to that 100 we have to approve that extra 55,000. Is that right? Correct. You already approved the 45,000 the motion language on September the 28th mentioned spreading it across the base. Whereas the CPC would like the council to consider keeping the 45,000 at a minimum and put it towards targeted impact. And then should the council desire on top of that allocate additional up to 55,000 in budget. Now the timing of this core agenda item is a little bit interesting because next you will hear the financial status update. And ideally it might have followed the financial status update because that is obviously a financial decision that you would be making. But we needed to juggle and also take into account that we had county agency staff also participating in this and possibly they may not be used to our late evening sessions. So. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. That was my one question. Council member Cummings and then council member Brown. Yeah, I wanted to follow up on the mayor's question. So with this, like if we, for example, allocate that 45,000 and if we decide to increase the amount allocated an additional 55,000 is that just one time? Or is that are we kind of providing direction that that's something we want to do every year? So I'm just, I just want to make sure that's clear that if we, whatever we're doing, that it's kind of a, is it one time or is it kind of we're saying that we want to move in this direction moving forward? I believe minimally since down September 28th council bought into that this was a three year program. Minimally council should make the commitment to whatever it is for the three years of the program. Okay. That would be my understanding of what the intention would be. So yeah, if we decided to add an additional 55,000 that would be those combined additions for at least three years. And then the last question I had just wanting to know who applicants in the city should contact if they want to apply for these funds. Laura, do you want me to share a little bit about that? Yes. I didn't look specifically in the RFP who the contact information is, but. Yeah. So we, the County Human Services Department are going to, you know, pending your city council on top of the board's approval this morning, I'm going to spend the next week preparing to release the actual application opening an online portal and initiating a lot of communication with the community, which will include information on our County Human Services website and also some social media outreach and reaching out to our email group of all the stakeholders. So there'll be ample information out and in there will be contact information. And I'm being really honest. I actually myself don't know what, but what, but those materials are all in draft and ready to go. So it'll be a public in a week. Okay. I'm asking because, you know, if we're in communication with nonprofits, it would be a good fit for this funding and where people start asking us questions, just being able to direct them, whether it's the County of the city and, you know, certain websites or what have you just being able to know where to kind of direct people. Yeah. And I would just say to get more targeted because you get a million emails and questions and all that stuff is there was a quick summary on Laura's slides that came from slides we presented this morning where there's going to be a series of engagements between the application deadline in early February, which includes a mandated RFP informational session. So I think the first place to move people to, and that's likely where we'll be moving people to is go to the session where we'll be a public communication. We also have a question and answer period that we'll manage in the County in concert with you as the city. So there'll be multiple places to send people where we want the playing field to be even. We don't want anybody to get a different answer because they know somebody. So we're trying to be very open and transparent and have the communication flow. And if people miss something, things are posted so they can see the questions and answers. So all of that will be in the materials. Great, thanks. Just one of them. Council member Cummings, also in the attachment and this will be available online once the RFP is published, but in section five that details out, it'll have the link to the portal that Randy were where all the deadlines were to send information and that sort of thing. So like, as he said, there's, there'll be ample information and links out there for them. Great, thanks. Sorry, Council member Cummings. No, that was, I appreciate it. And then just one more comment, kind of following up on item 30 that we had with the resolution at recognizing historical and current existence of racism and what's permanency in the County. Part of the actions was really trying to connect with communities of color to these kinds of resources. So it might be good if there's some targeted approach from the city to try to get this information about this out directly to nonprofits that are run by people of color and people who are typically underrepresented in getting funding for these kinds of opportunities. We can definitely follow up on that and moving forward, our staff lead, our representative to the core investment team will be Dr. Tiffany Wise-West. She will bring that bridge to the sustainability program and the health and all policies and the equity aspects. And I think that linkage of her work to core is essential and it's great that we're going to be able to leverage her with the larger core teams that's out there. Council member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I just lowered my hand. I was gonna try to help clarify if we didn't get there, but I think we did. So I'll just reserve my comments before we take a vote. Thanks. Okay, thank you. Okay, I'll go ahead and bring this out to the public now. If you are interested in commenting on this item, we are on item number 31, collective results and evidence-based core investments update regarding request for proposals and next steps, discussion of additional core funding and deferral of core annual report. And I will look to see if we have any folks who have raised their hands in the audience on this. If you do wanna comment on this item, I'd like you to raise your hand by pressing star nine on the phone. Okay, I'm not seeing any hands raised, so we will go ahead and bring this back for council deliberation and action. Council member Golder and then council member Contari Johnson. I'm happy to move the item as it's written in our agenda. And council member Contari Johnson. Thank you. I can second, but also had some comments. I wanted to first thank Randy Morris and Human Services Department and everyone on that team for the work that you've done to get this here. And I also wanted to acknowledge and thank Laura who jumped into this and really took it on. And this is really a lot of years in the working and you came in and just understood it really quickly and you were able to engage in a really meaningful, thoughtful conversation with the community programs committee. So I wanted to just thank everyone and just a note on this commitment to the targeted impact strategy that this is really a best practice in the world of philanthropy and communities that have done this have seen greater results and outcomes. And I think that 45,000, although not a lot, it's a start for us to show our commitment towards seeing results and outcomes. And that's why the community, and I won't speak for everyone in the community programs committee, but that's why we're bringing this forward as a recommendation is that we at least start with the 45,000 set aside, which again, as a set aside, it was already designated for funding for these community programs, but that we move it towards this targeted impact because this is a best practice. We're giving it a try, we're trying it on as a community and it's a good place for us to contribute. If there is funding available for us to increase it to 100,000 so that it's about 10% of our base funding, that would be great, but I think that does require further analysis and consideration. So again, thank you for all the work to everyone who's done the work on this and last probably over a year. Thank you, Council Member Watkins. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. And I'll just echo Council Member Calentari-Johnson's comments as a core committee member myself. I really appreciate the work that went into getting us to this place. Really thanking Randy for being here with us, the county and the city for partnering in this way and really optimistic to hear that the community foundation is now also part of the conversation because ultimately if we don't lose sight of what the bigger picture is, which is essentially how are we creating these safety nets and how are we thinking of it through a lens of collective impact. You know, we'll miss sort of this broader trajectory of change we seek to have an impact on. And it's nice to know that we're continuing to modify and engage and refine as we did with this process. As you all did really, as staff with this process to get us to this place, I think it's really great. Just really sharing also the echoing of the 45 set aside, really that has been kind of in place to meet immediate needs and having it fit within this framework and this within these parameters makes a lot of sense. And certainly looking forward to the conversation around whether that could be increased depending on our kind of our financial considerations. So lastly, I will just say, I'm really also excited to have Tiffany Weis-West support this committee moving forward. I think she's gonna be a really great asset as well. So happy to support the motion as presented. Thank you, council member. I have council member Brown and then council member Cummings. Thank you, mayor. Yeah, I would echo the comments of my colleagues on the community programs committee. Thank you to both of you for being really, really deeply involved in this process and very thoughtful about how we move forward. And thanks to Laura and Randy and everybody who's been involved. We have some awesome support to help guide us in how we make our decisions. And so, and I'm happy to support this as well. I did wanna just make a comment about the discussion we had around the potential to increase the $45,000 amount to potentially up to $100,000. So the additional $55,000 for the targeted deeper investment. So a couple of things come to mind. First, I mean, just to put this in historical context, the city of Santa Cruz has been a supporter of nonprofit community programs for many, many years. We, I think as in many arenas, we are a pioneer in really stepping up and being engaged with our community, our nonprofit community partners. And so we've maintained that commitment and over time that funding has diminished. And I think I've said it before, but just to give you a sense, 20 years ago, the city invested $3 million in community programs. And so it has been a significant reduction over time for a variety of reasons that fiscal challenges at the city. And we're facing one right now again. And so I understand the concern about making motions that involve potentially allocating additional dollars. So while I don't, we, the Community Programs Committee didn't ultimately decide to recommend that today, we did talk about the importance of potentially increasing that commitment in that category because we want to be a full participant. And I know we will still have a voice and we'll be involved, but to really make that a meaningful commitment. So I'm just wondering if, I don't know that it needs a, a amendment to the motion, but I'm just hoping that we can agree to bring that back and incorporate that into our budget discussion to make sure that that does not get lost in the gloom and doom that I believe we are about to hear more about. So I don't know if, you know, like how that, just like logistically, practically how that, how we make sure that that is kind of comes back to us without providing that, you know, formally an emotion is that I guess Laura, I would ask you having been, you know, helped us staff this for in the, in the recent past, is that something that we'll just, there will be some continuity and it will end up being part of the discussion based upon the conversations we've had or do you want us to provide direction? I think item number five can be that direction because it directs the CCC to return back to council with future discussion and recommendations of the funding picture changes. And funding picture is a direct line of sight to the budget. I think the other fail safe that you have is Tiffany is part of the city manager's office and I'm part of the city manager's office and we're the ones that propose the budget and core is part of that budget that the city manager's office proposes as part of our participation in the budget hearings. So I think the item number five is your line of sight back to the council. And then as you meet as the community programs committee this could be an ongoing conversation that you have. Great, great. I just saw that general number five kind of return with future for a future discussion would cover that. Okay, great. I think it would, it would if you're comfortable with it. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it. You're welcome. Great. Council member Cummings. I think my question was just answered with the comments from council member Brown. I was going to ask if council member Golders motion was to keep the funding allocation set at 45,000 but it sounds like that was kind of what the committee had agreed on not increasing at this time. And so it sounds like if that's the case then my question has been answered. Mr. Morris. And I just want to share a timing question as you're asking these logistics. The request for county and city staff to return to both legislative bodies in March is because that's intentionally before the rating panels meet to review the materials and make recommendations. So if you go through a process you do end up considering augmenting based on whatever if you have that decision made in March that is the moment we can get additional direction on multiple levels so that we can give clear instruction to the rating panels, sort of the size of the funding and the tiers, et cetera. So I just want to add that to the logistical pieces that you're tracking. Thank you. Council member Coventry Johnson. Thank you. That's really helpful, Randy. So maybe we can put an item recommendation five that timeline of March just to have some more specifics there. The maker of the motion. Let's see. We're going to go back to council in March. By March. By March. So number five, Laura. There we go. I would also, if the maker of the motion council member Boulder's okay with that I'd also want to just check with my colleagues on the CPC council member Brown and Joaquin so I'll pay with that. Thumbs up. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor by council member Golder, seconded by council member Coventry Johnson with a change with more specificity to zero in on this period of March in terms of any additional funding. And I think we're good to go. So Bonnie, why don't we go ahead and do a roll call vote? Council member Watkins, vice mayor Brunner. That motion passes unanimously. Thank you, Laura for picking this up. So quickly, thank you, Randy, for being with us today. We got you out at 5.30. That's pretty good for us. We could add you here till 1.30 in the morning if we really wanted to. So I have heard and please get over your colds, everyone. We will. Hi, mayor. I just wanted to say thanks to Randy as well and his team. They've been working around the clock and getting this RFP into tip top shape and it's been a huge consolidated effort over at the county. It's just been impressive to work with them. So I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank Randy and the team over at the county for all their help. Thank you. And I want to thank the council members who sit on our community programs committee. I know many of you have been on that for a while and your guidance and leadership has really, I think just continues to refine this program and do a really meaningful, impactful program for our community. So thanks for your work. Okay, council, you have earned yourself a, basically, why don't we take, why don't we go ahead and take a, we'll start back up at six o'clock. So go ahead and get a break, run around the block. We'll come back at six. We've got one more item, which is the item number 32, the city financial status update. And then we do have oral communications and we will have to go back into closed session after oral communications. So we'll see you back here at six o'clock. Thanks everyone. Council members can turn on their cameras. Looks like we're gonna form to start back up again. For members of the public, we are starting up again tonight. We are on item number 32, which is the city financial status update. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you wanna comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation on the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. We'll go ahead and turn this over to Lupita Alamos, our budget manager. Welcome Lupita. And Bobby is here as well. Bobby McGee, our finance director. So I'm not sure exactly who we'll be doing it, but I'll turn it over to our finance staff. Thank you Mayor Myers and members of the council. Good evening. I'll be handling the presentation tonight, although the city's budget manager is here if there are questions of her as well. So let me share my screen here and bring the presentation up that's coming up. I'll just take a moment to recognize the entire finance team who contributed to this report as you can imagine a large number of people to put all the data together that goes into the staff report as well as the presentation. So I just wanna say thank you to the finance team who is here tonight and available for questions at the end of the presentation. So tonight on our agenda, we wanna talk a little bit about the purpose and background of why we're here tonight. Provide the council with a fiscal update, some revenues to date, what we're looking at as far as the recovery and impacts on the horizon. And the next steps planning ahead for what we might be looking at in the future. All right, yeah, are you able to see? We cannot see, we don't see your presentation, Bobby. Let's try that again. Okay, let me stop the share. Are you able to see it now? Yeah, it's not in full screen view, but we can definitely see it. Is that working? It is, yep. My apologies to the council. I thought I had that worked out. Okay, as I mentioned on the agenda tonight, we're gonna talk a little bit about the purpose and background of why we're here. Provide the council with an update on revenues and expenses, impacts that we see on the horizon and ultimately planning ahead and what the next steps are. So the purpose tonight is to give the council an update on the city's financial status and lay the foundation for next year's budget for both operating and the capital investment program and then start conversations on the long range financial planning for the city. For background's sake, as the council knows, the city has been experiencing an ongoing structural financial deficit, which has required some budget solutions in recent years. And we expect that that will continue into the future, absent any future budget solutions. And we'll talk a little bit about that tonight. The impacts from COVID-19 and the revenue losses and economic impacts of that, as well as the CZU Lightning Complex fire really contributed to a lot of revenue losses for the city and a reliance on reserves. In the past budgets. And the employees certainly did their part in contributing through furloughs and a hiring freeze, which was put in place. And through the council's actions, there was a journey to economic recovery through the re-envision Santa Cruz program, the establishment of an ad hoc revenue committee and through the acceptance of ARPA funding, which is one time only funding designed to assist with previous revenue losses that were created as a result of the economic crisis. And so as the council likely remembers, at the time of the budget hearings and budget adoption last year, businesses and travel were still under restrictions due to COVID-19 impacts. And that really impacted the revenue sources, especially the transient occupancy tax, as people were just not visiting Santa Cruz nearly as much. And the economic recovery at that time was very uncertain. We didn't know how long we were going to be in this. And so we adopted the budget with some very conservative revenue recovery projections at that time. And highlights of that, it was a mostly status quo budget with one time cuts having been restored. However, we did lift the hiring freeze and there were no furloughs considered in this year's budget. There were no budget reductions in this year's budget, other than those that were resulting from one time expenses projects and operational efficiencies. And a very modest amount of $2 million in overall CIP general fund money was budgeted for the highest priority projects. And so moving into a fiscal update, as we start to look at the recovery and how things are going, it's actually recovering a little bit faster on the revenue side than we had originally projected. And so I'll draw your attention to the green bar up there on the sales tax line, which is the first quarter sales tax receipts that ended as of September 30th, 2021. And as you can see, there's been a pretty significant recovery in the sales tax area. This is due primarily to some additional online tax, the Wayfair decision and those types of things that in the past we did not see. And so we expected to see a stronger recovery in the sales tax area this year, not quite as strong as this. So it's actually a little bit of good news there. The other ones to highlight some of the revenue recovery as we move out of the COVID pandemic, if you'll notice the transient occupancy tax, as you can see, as we're in deep into the COVID times, the orange bar, the transient occupancy tax was significantly lower. And you can see there's been a fairly strong recovery in that area as compared to not only the COVID year, but it's compared to the 2019 first quarter fiscal year also. And then fees and charges. And that line has gone up quite a bit as well as compared to the orange bar, which is the COVID period. And that's due primarily to the increase in development fees, parks and rec fees, some planning permits and things like that that intuitively lets us know that the recovery is in full force at this time. And I will caution that we should not look at these numbers and expect that we multiply this by four and that's where the revenue ends up because these items are cyclical in nature. And so this is what the first quarter looks like. And we'll have a little better understanding of what overall revenues will look like for the year when we come back with a mid-year report. And so while we looked at revenues, we also looked at the first quarter general fund expenditures. The first quarter general fund expenditures city-wide are about 19% to date, which is what we would typically expect in any given year. That's due primarily to projects that are slated to start later this fiscal year or projects that are already in process but have not been completed and completely paid for yet. So across the board, each budget we have looked at and we are trending to stay within budget appropriations at this time. However, I will note that additional budget appropriations will be required as new council directed programs and services began. And so when we looked at our revenues and our revenue recovery plus our expenditures, we started to develop some budget scenarios that we could look out into the future and try to project what this budget will look like from a multi-year basis. And so this graph here on the left, the general fund available balance plus stabilizations are the blue dotted line there is the council's reserve goal of 16.67%, which is very much in line with GFOA best practices. And as you can see on this graph here, the red line is actuals in the past and what we're forecasting in the future. And we plug in a certain amount of assumptions into the model which develops these projections. And so the assumptions on our base case scenario include no cost increases for any new services or programs or personnel. It also includes revenues continue over at the current pace and the current rate. And this particular graph was exclusive of any ARPA funding, which we know we are going to receive the ARPA funding. And so when we look at this, as you'll note in fiscal years 21, 22, 23 and 24, we are slightly below the council's reserve goal. And in 24, 25, we would hit the reserve goal and then start trending above that starting in fiscal year 26. And then in scenario B, we took the same set of assumptions and then we added in the ARPA funding, which we know we'll receive. And once again, this ARPA funding is one time only money. It is not theoretically available for ongoing services or programs. And when we factor that amount in, you can see the reserve goal actually exceeds the 16.67% immediately and absent of any future increases and expenditures, that type of thing, you'll see that the reserve grows pretty healthy up into the fiscal year 29 and 30. And so in scenario C, you see quite a dramatic change in this red line here. And we essentially took the same assumptions with the ARPA funding added in and added in modest increase to operating costs to maintain current levels of service. And the assumption that we made was at the expected rate of inflation. In addition to that, in this particular portion of the model, we added $5.5 million and new expenditures for homelessness program expenditures. And as you will note on this graph here, in fiscal year 22-23, you're essentially at your reserve goal. However, that starts declining very rapidly with the addition of the homelessness program expenditures. And so by the year 25-26, you essentially run out of money and you have nothing left in your reserves at that time. And as part of this overall budget forecasting program, we started looking at the unfunded CIP projects that are known at this time. And this is what is in the budget book at this time. And I'll draw your attention specifically to the general fund priority one projects, which you can see is about 3.7 million of the highest priority items right now. And in addition to that, we know factually that this graph is understated at this time. This is some of the most urgent needs that the city is aware of. And as part of this process, we started working with all of the departments on identifying multi-year CIP projects that we know will be out on the horizon to try to get a much more accurate understanding of what unfunded CIP needs are, not only in the immediate future, but the long-term future. So we would expect that this graph is understated here and I wouldn't wanna speculate what that number might look like once we finish this process, but I can tell you it will be larger than this. And so we factored in to scenario D, the ARPA funding, which was there, we left in the 5.5 million dollars in new expenditure appropriations for the homelessness services program. And then we added in $5 million in new expenditure appropriations for the CIP program. And once again, modest growth in expenditures at the rate of inflation is all we anticipated there. And as you can see on this graph here, you essentially run out of money in fiscal year 2324. The reserves are completely depleted in this scenario. All of the one-time money is completely spent and there's no ability at this time for the city to maintain its levels of current levels of service. And so that's about $12 million in that last scenario there. And so when we started thinking about what does a $12 million budget solution look like in terms of cuts? And so hypothetically, that would essentially mean the complete elimination of your administrative services functions citywide. That would mean no more finance department, which would include payroll and accounts payable, paying vendors and receiving revenue. You would have to completely eliminate the resources department, meaning hiring people, administration of benefits and information technology, which means no more computers, no more computer programs, no more email, those types of things. And obviously reductions that make magnitude just simply not possible. And so planning ahead, we started thinking about what are the things we need to do in order to ensure the fiscal sustainability of the city. And so staff will continue to work with the council ad hoc revenue committee to explore any new potential revenue sources, anything we can think of. Any proposed new programs and services must absolutely be developed and evaluated with budget estimates and a careful, thoughtful, methodical approach applied to whether we have the money to do these types of things or not. We will be working on coming up with recommendations for the operational budget as well as the CIP plan, not only for fiscal year 23, but also a long range financial plan for the city, which would include strategies for dealing with some of these capital needs, known capital needs. And so with that, I will say thank you, really appreciate your time and let the council know that staff is available for any questions. And I will also mention that the budget team is here tonight as well. So if we need any additional support, we've got several members of the finance team that are here to answer your questions tonight. Thank you, Director McKee. And just a reminder tonight, this really is an update item in terms of any action, but mostly just really getting this important update as we move through our fiscal year. Are there questions or comments from council? Council Member Watkins. Yeah, thank you for the presentation and overview. And I had a chance to review the agenda report and Rosemary, I apologize, we weren't able to connect beforehand. My question is in regards to the federal infrastructure bill that was passed recently and what that could have in terms of implications on our budget projections for some of our CIP needs. Yeah, those are not known at this time. I don't have any insight as to what the city might be receiving, but obviously as soon as I hear anything, we'll be happy to share that with the council. Can I add a couple of things on this? Okay, a couple of things are worth talking about. It's just in general. One is that often when you get a big chunk of money like this coming in, whether they're competitive or grants or even allocations, the work ends up, the money ends up getting spent on stuff that you've heard described as shovel ready. And while that makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, if your projects are in very early stage of development, sometimes you can't get them shovel ready in time to be competitive. One of the things I would say regarding this in terms of where the water department is, and we talked about this when we talked about the financial plan for the water department in September, is that because of the three, four years of work we've been doing on developing projects, we're a lot more ready to go after some of this money that's coming down and that's a good thing because doing so will help mitigate some of the rate impacts that are associated with funding that. And I'm sure we do have some things that are more ready to go than other things. So it's a matter of trying to look around and see what's coming and what matches up with what is gonna be available. So that information is just beginning to get out now. Vice Mayor Bruner and then Council Member Cummings and then Council Member Cohn-Tarr-Johnson. Thank you, Bobby McGee for that presentation. It was very helpful to see where we're at and those projections and assumptions. And really to me what I see is a clearer picture of what our goal is and where our gap is. And as the revenue committee moves forward understanding what exactly some of those assumptions are that need to be worked towards. And I know my question is, this is a scenario, these assumptions given nothing else changes. And we know that many things will be changing, including for example, with some of the homelessness services the 5.5 million that is projected. I think I would imagine that other costs related to that would come off and come down. And I don't know that comparison of how significant that would be. And even just as a most recent example in our oversized vehicle ordinance research some of the costs cleaning out the storm drain, for example, I don't know if that's a good example but there were significant costs with certain items related to that. And so just if you have any idea or that has been looked into at all some of the costs that would go away with some of these other items coming on programs and direction. Yeah, thank you, appreciate the question. And I'll say that when we built these budget models we take what is known at this time. And so there's a lot of unknowns that we could reasonably expect in the future that are not essentially built into this model. So the way we typically deal with these things is take what your known costs are at this time and then we don't speculate on what the council may or may not approve or direct staff to do in the future. And so we just add an assumed rate of inflation to what we do know today. And that's really how we build the models. If you wanted us to build something else into other assumptions and we certainly could and the reason we built in these two particular assumptions such as the Homeless Service Program and unfunded CIP needs is those are known in certain previous directions by the council that we felt was appropriate to build into this model. Right, and I guess that's why I was wondering if there was any further dive into those specific scenarios of what costs would go away based on the direction. Yeah, no, not at this time yet. Yeah, not at this time yet. Not at this time, yes, correct. Thank you, thank you so much. I appreciate the information. Council Member Conn-Tarr-Johnson. Thank you. I think you may have responded to my question, but it's connected to what Council Member Watkins brought up about the infrastructure bill that just passed and how that would impact. I know that our city is also working with a grant firm and I imagine that we'll have some grant opportunities coming our way. So it seems like what I think I heard you say is that since those are real unknowns, it's hard to create scenarios with that in mind. Is that, yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely accurate. Now, we could certainly do some modeling and make some basic assumptions, but at this time it's really just a guess. And so we try not to guess. We try to give you as accurate of a picture as we know, irrespective of what we think may happen in the future. Okay, and I think just a comment that this is, I mean, it was clear before, but this has made it very clear that, well, the Revenue Subcommittee has a lot of work to do with that we need to keep all options on the table and all of us as council members just being very thoughtful about how we make those decisions. Cause this is, it's very real when you see it in those graphs. So I appreciate all the work that you've done and thank you for presenting us with a stark but real picture. Thank you. Thank you, council member, council member Cummings and then council member Watkins. Thank you, Mayor. Having gone through budgets now three times and been on the budget committee three years, I think this is pretty concerning. And for me has been part of the reason why I've been hesitant to move forward with approving a number of these services where we didn't know the costs for implementation and where the funds are gonna come from because I mean, this projection, I think also is a little bit conservative because in the general report, it said it's between 5.5 million and 7 million. So this is, if we include in the CIP, it's more like 12 million to $14 million deficit that we'll be looking at. And that's really concerning given what would be eliminated as a result moving forward. I have a couple questions actually at this time, I think I mostly just wanted to make those comments. Yeah, I'm just really concerned. So I guess moving forward, given that the council is given direction, what are options in terms of whether or not we can keep going down this route or because I mean, it seems like we've committed to moving forward and spending this money, but this is a huge, there's a really big cliff we're about to fall off if we keep going in this direction and there's no guarantee a revenue measure will pass. And as we're coming out of this recession or the pandemic recession, there's a lot of concern about how we're gonna be able to move forward. So I'm just curious about water options in terms of keeping us from going into this financial crisis. Sure, and if we, and thank you for the question, if we were to continue down this road, obviously we would have to find some type of budget solution in order to maintain this level of spending. And that's kind of why we highlighted that as you mentioned, one option would be to find some additional revenue that would support these ongoing programs, ongoing revenue to support the ongoing programs. But the funding that we have available right now is one time only revenue and we're talking about ongoing programs. And so that's why we wanted to highlight that as a matter of budget solutions, if we were to look at cuts, I mean, that's essentially what $12 million looks like is it cuts out your entire administrative services function as a budget solution to fund some of these other programs. Rosemary, did you have a response? I just wanted to add that I think as the staff has really worked on the CSSO implementation work and to some degree started to integrate the things that are in the Oversize Vehicle Ordinance, where the costs associated with those programs are, is in the programs and services that are being provided. And we're kind of, I would say, between a rock and a hard place with respect to, whether we do the ordinance and that part of that, of the equation, there's been a lot of support in the community for the kinds of services that are being laid out through the implementation of these ordinances. And it feels to me as though we're facing some version of that one way or another, whether it's five and a half million or whether it's a number that's lower or it's a number that's higher is, it's not irrelevant, but it just feels to me as though the major sort of change that's occurred in the last year is that the city is stepping up to making a face and even more significant because we've absorbed costs into our budgets, right? But even more significant commitment to providing services for people experiencing homelessness. So I guess what's the, is there a timeline for when the council will hear back about the revenue measure? I know in the previous revenue committee, we did some polling about how the funding should be spent. And it seemed like, when we were trying to put together an outreach strategy, there was a number of different things that the funding would go towards, not just solely homelessness. And so I'm wondering if there's gonna be a poll that goes out where we can kind of get a sense of where the community's at. And then I guess also our options with, it is a quarter of a certain sales tax and what revenue that will bring in, TOT, what revenue that will bring in just so we can get a sense of, regardless of what tax measures we bring forward, are we gonna meet these goals of kind of closing that gap? Yeah, council member Cummings, certainly we will be looking at those types of things as we move forward. And just for clarity's sake, when we're discussing the model and what types of revenue we need to find, to your comment about the homelessness program, we built in 5.5 million into the model. And I know that the staff report shows a little bit different number because that includes about $1.5 million in the one-time costs for the start-up of that program. But yes, as we move forward, as part of the revenue committee, we will certainly be looking at every aspect of these things and what it takes and how do we get there and what our best recommendations would be to the council for trying to achieve those goals. I would add that the timeline for a revenue measure going on to the June ballot is the early March. So that's one of the reasons for doing this work now and getting the revenue subcommittee going now. We do think that we wanna put something onto the ballot, the June ballot, we have an opportunity to get that organized. And so the things that have happened historically in a revenue subcommittee will happen again. And that's the kind of timeline we're talking about. At least for the June ballot. And then there's that early August timeline for the November. Thank you. Well, yeah, I'll just express some pretty concern. And I think we're all probably a bit concerned about where this is headed. So thank you for the presentation and I'll just leave my comments there. Thank you. Council Member Watkins and then Council Member Golder and then I'll cue myself up. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll just say, I think we all share a concern around the budget projection. I think we have a different financial picture how we had a chance to let the voters weigh in on the sales tax measure that wasn't brought forward by the previous revenue committee. And so I think it's important for us to be aware of what is feasible in terms of moving forward. Just to clarify, I agree with what you said, Rosemary, and that I think there are opportunity costs associated with any kind of decision we make. But my understanding is that the consensus of this council was to lead with programming, especially as addressing homelessness. And I share that belief. And if that's not consistent with what I think other council members feel, I'd like clarity on that because I think that's something I've heard even from council members who have voted no, that leading with services is the response we want to have. And that does cost money, but it costs money either way. And we wanna have more, we wanna have pathways for success. So I guess my question is in terms of polling absolutely, in terms of a revenue committee, absolutely, in terms of increasing our revenue sources, absolutely necessary to get us out of this fiscal predicament that we're in. And feasibly, if we aren't able to get full consensus from the council to do a sales tax measure, which was by polling standards pretty supported by the community, and then when can we bring something like that forward? I guess it's my kind of, maybe it's a question for legal, but if we don't get full consensus to declare a fiscal emergency, which clearly we have, then when can we bring a sales tax measure forward? Maybe Tony, you can answer that question. You can bring a tax measure forward at a regular city council or at an election that coincides with the city council election without declaring a fiscal emergency. November, so November. So November of 22. Okay, okay, that's just something to keep in mind I guess as the revenue committee begins their work. That's right. Thanks. Council Member Golder. Thank you. I would agree with what Council Member Watkins said before me, and I would also just like to remind my colleagues and the community, the amount of money that we have been spending on doing what we've been doing as a city for the past decade or more, if we think about the costs that we've spent hundreds of thousands for cleaning up encampments after we kind of, encampments, we've been doing restoration work, right? There's been fires, the cost of mutual aid bringing in the, you know, fires from other, fire departments from other jurisdictions to battle bulls. We've had crimes that have to be prosecuted. Just yesterday, my 10 year old niece was biking home from school and was bike jacked by a grown man. And guess what? The bike was found down by the levee and the man was arrested. And so what are the costs associated with that? And so my hope is that with these services in place with our camping ordinance and our oversized vehicle ordinance and trying to move in the direction of focusing on getting people back on track. And I'm sorry, sometimes people are unwilling to get themselves back on track without a little bit of push. So if we're working as a council and as a community to get people back on track and we're offering that compassion to bring these members of our community back into society, reintegrating them, if you will, then my hope is that over time, those costs that we're spending now would go down. And so I think with bringing forward a revenue measure with exploring maybe a percent or two of TOT tax, maybe, you know, getting creative with other ways of increasing the budget, encouraging, you know, businesses and other development in other areas to get business in town, it won't look so bleak. And if we constantly look just like doom and gloom, then obviously nothing is gonna happen, but we can't just wash our hands and be like, oh, this is horrible, we can't go on. So I'm in complete support of everything we've been doing. And I really thank you for this update. And it just motivates me more to try and move forward with the course of action that we're doing. Thanks, Council Member. I'll cue myself up here real quick and then Sandy or Council Member Brown, I'll have you come next. Yeah, I mean, I guess I kind of share some of my colleagues' comments, current comments. And then I also just reflect upon sort of conversations in the community that I've had, especially with the business community and specifically with actually our hotels. They're in a very competitive place right now. And many of those owners are really struggling with the condition of our city. And the condition of our city is largely related to some of the conditions that we see unfortunately with the way that we're managing or not managing homelessness. We have not been really managing homelessness at all. We've been convincing ourselves that, letting people kind of, unfortunately live the way that they are living is okay. And it's really not borne out very well in terms of how it's, the levels of what's happening now in the community. And the polling we did for the sales tax measure last spring really showed very strong support. It was, in fact, homelessness ranked, I think as the highest community concern and willingness to get us to step up and try to start managing it, provide services, figure out ways to stabilize folks to the extent that they can then get into case management and other things. I think also I've watched a lot in the philanthropy world of our county and hats off to housing matters. They just raised $9.5 million for their Permit Support of Housing Project. That's a signal that our community is willing to help throw them thoughtfully as well as potentially through tax measures or other sources of funds to tackle the issue. Homelessness has a huge impact on our economy. It has a huge impact on our local businesses. It's impacting local families now. And I'm not to say that, homeless people are out there running around stealing kids' bikes, but it is a massive impact. And you talk to the hospitality industry, they see those impacts. They're competing against places that don't have the severity of what we have. And so for me, it's a combat that we actually acknowledge this massive social policy issue we have and we start to work towards it. I'd also like to note that there's $1.2 billion that's gonna hit the street from the state of California and a similar investment, not quite that big from the feds. So again, a lot of this is about getting ready. A lot of this is about looking like you actually are taking management and you have the humanitarian perspective that you need to start to lean in and work with the issues. So I think we can sustain these costs. We have to be very thoughtful and programmatic about it. I'm sure some of the 14 million that we have to do some of these startup investments, but doing nothing again is not helping anybody and it's definitely not helping our local businesses. And there is plenty of costs that we haven't included, including response times. If we do have a major wildfire, there will be additional costs, significant costs. So to me, the homeless question really comes down to our risk management question around financial investment in some social service programmatic outcomes that we do for hopefully not forever, but we make an investment and we try to remedy the trend. We've seen plenty of communities that have done this and unfortunately the state is not helping and we're gonna have to start solving some of the issues ourselves. So I do think these are good investments. It's what our community, I believe, wants and hopefully we can get a revenue measure together that we can get on the ballot and let our voters tell us what they wanna be helping us do as policy leaders. So I'll go ahead and call on Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I feel the need to make a comment here. I was gonna save this time for questions, but because we've moved into the comment and our commentary portion, I feel the need to just say a couple of things. First, I am beyond thrilled that I am hearing this indication of support and commitment from council members and that our staff has kind of stepped up and is presenting us with some real data on the potential costs for providing services to support our unhoused community members in ways that will I think be more effective than the enforcement only no management approach that the city has utilized for the past 30 years plus as far as I can tell. And it's really obviously getting the pressures are increasing, we know that. So I'm like, this is what I've been advocating since my first day on the council and I'm like really thrilled that five years later here we are and there's some real possibility here. And then with respect to the question around revenue measures, given that I was the person, I will say it here, I was the council member who withheld my vote on a sales tax, a fiscal emergency for a sales tax the last time around. And I was not able to really communicate with the revenue committee due to Brown Act issues. I'd like to say it here that under those circumstances, I and primarily based upon communications with our previous city manager because that was my conduit for having conversations about what the intentions were, I did not have the sense that this was the priority. I had a sense that generally, yeah, this is what it pulled well and this is what we care about but I did not get that sense. And so that's a real difference. I see that as a difference. And so I just wanted to say that here now because I won't be able to weigh in given that I'm not on the revenue committee this time either. But I do think it's important to be clear while I have the opportunity and not violating the Brown Act to say that my support for something like that really depends upon my level of confidence in the funding being spent on the most critical needs that we have in our community. And I'm not gonna do an autopsy on the discussions that were had in the previous round. But I do hope that the revenue committee will consider in addition to polling for a sales tax, other revenue measures. I just gleefully filled out my poll. I'm one of the people who was pulled by the county about an empty home tax. And also about the potential for a TOT and increase. And those were not questions that the city council or the revenue committee saw fit to ask in the last round. And I really hope that you might consider that as part of your discussions. Because I think there are opportunities for increasing revenues in ways that will not have a significant impact on, again, our working class and marginalized people in our community. So I think I'll leave it there. But I really do just wanna stress that I'm willing to be a participant in this conversation. And but I do wanna see us really put our money where mouths are with respect to where we spend that funding, what we prioritize. So thanks for letting me jump in with that. And I'll leave it there for this round. Thank you council member. Are there any other questions or comments? Vice mayor Brunner's cats at 2, call it a night. From council members at this point or any other questions for our finance director or our finance staff? Looks like we're good. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really sobering report. And I think I'm curious to you when you're projecting these trends, I was curious also about, I didn't see in the red line kind of in the scenario too, typically we kind of have these eight year, sort of seven to eight year recession periods, Bobby. And I'm just curious, I've seen other financial charts where there's this, there is a trough that gets hit. And I didn't see between the no ARPA and the ARPA where we have this very positive red line that's going, do we really think that that is possible or do we see that dip that we know as our typical recessionary kind of cycle that California goes through pretty regularly? Just curious about your comment on that. Yes, thank you. I can tell you that the spreadsheets that are behind these graphs that you see here are very complex and detailed. And yes, we do build an expected recessionary impact in every seven years. So that is reflected in the graphs that you saw tonight. There's a tremendous amount of factors that go into this, but certainly that was one of them. And so, when I think about what we've lost in due to the COVID-19 catastrophe, we dipped into our reserves and it looks like a two month of our reserves is I don't know what it is exactly, but I just did some rough math. It looks like, that's about 18 million. So we, if you're assuming two months, you wanna keep that in the bank so you can get through something. So it's almost like we have to, we're almost building kind of double building out of that issue, right? Because we basically have borrowed from our reserves to close the gap that we had through the COVID issue. But then we wanna fill that back up and then we also wanna get back to the additional two months. So, I mean, we're sort of digging out of a four month issue, which is a significant amount of money. And that's why that red line goes up, but then eventually we get that, we've refilled the piggy bank and then we're just back on track with proper reserve practices. Is that a way to kind of describe what we see in these charts? Yeah, certainly. Obviously, the reason we put that blue line up there, which is the reserve goal, is that is the council's policy that has been directed to staff. And I know that that recommendation was previously made on GFOA best practices and recommended reserve levels for contingency funds for anything that may come up in the event of an emergency, a catastrophic event, whatever. So that would certainly be an appropriate strategy to take is exactly what you're suggesting there. Okay. And that 21 million we lost, really. You know, I mean, that's significant because unlike a lot of communities, the ARPA is not ever going to make us whole. We're never going to, we're always gonna lose about that $7 million, which is then compounded by the borrowing against ourselves. So, okay, great, thank you. Yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead, please, yeah. Oh yeah, I just wanna highlight that that ARPA money is one-time-only funds that was against previous revenue losses. So it's not like it's extra money that showed up. This is actually helping fill the pot back up that was lost due to COVID. So to your point, that is absolutely correct. This is really one-time-only money. All right, thank you. Council Member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. One question you mentioned with regards to the sales tax, that there was, sorry, the sales tax revenue increase, that that was a result of a specific act and I couldn't make that out. And I was just curious if you could speak a little bit about that and it was related to online sales. I think it would just be helpful for the community to understand how that retail has helped in this, how this act has helped us. Sure, that was actually called the Wayfair decision where we started collecting sales tax on online sales, which had not been previously done in the past. And so one of the things that we experienced, which was a little unexpected as we went into COVID is when you look at sales tax by sector, one of the things that we saw was a decrease in many of the sectors that you would expect, such as the purchase of automobiles, the purchase of fuel, things like that. However, what we saw was that while the residents here in the city of Santa Cruz were not spending money on those types of things, they did continue to spend money. They just did a lot of online purchases. And so the county pool increased dramatically. The money that comes through the county pool as a result of the Wayfair decision increased dramatically. And so I think that the sales tax graph that I showed you tonight is very reflective of that. Okay, and just for clarification with the public, it's like if individuals at home are buying items online, regardless of where they are, not necessarily buying them from businesses here in Santa Cruz, but businesses from afar as well. And that helps increase our sales tax revenue. That is correct, yes. Great, yeah, I just wanted to make sure that that was clear because this is something new and I think it's gonna be worth us tracking and trying to better understand as we're kind of shifting away from here, brick and mortar retail and kind of moving into the space where so many other people are buying things online and how that will help when it comes to our sales tax revenue. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, well, I know that the revenue committee will be starting up work this next week. And I believe that we'll be building our budget over the next several months. So thank you for this peak into the future, pretty intimidating, but hopefully we'll get creative and pull everything back together. So thank you for your work and thanks for this early update, it's really helpful. Anything else on this, Rosemary? Do you wanna see if there's any public comment? Oh, I'm sorry, yes, I will do that. If you are interested in speaking to us on agenda item number 32, which is the city financial status update, I'd like you to please go ahead and raise your hand by pressing star nine. And I see we had a hand up and it just disappeared. If you are interested in addressing the council on this item, which is item number 32, city financial status update. If you could raise your hand by pressing star nine now, and I'll call on you and you can speak with the council. I am not seeing any hands up. So we'll go ahead and bring this back to council again, this is just to receive an update and we don't anticipate to take any deliberation or action past that, correct? Right. Okay. Thank you very much again for all the work. Okay, next up we have oral communications for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. If you wanna comment on oral communications, now is the time to call in. Instructions are on your screen. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda. If you're interested in addressing the council, please press star nine on the phone, excuse me, on your phone to raise your hand. You will have two minutes to speak. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. We request that you clearly and slowly state your name before making your comments so that we can accurately capture it in the meeting minutes. However, it is not required that you state your name. Please remember this is a time for council to hear from the public. We are not able to engage in dialogue with each member of the public, but when we are able, we will address the questions raised after oral communications has been completed. So for again, please go ahead and press star nine if you'd like to speak to us tonight in oral communications and this will be for items not on the agenda. I see phone number ending in 8469. Please go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself and we'll be able to hear from you. Press star six if you can. That should be- Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Go ahead, please. Thank you. My name's Mike Glotkin. I'm a citizen of the city of Tana Cruz. I wanna comment on a response to a comment you got on two of your earlier items, but not on the items themselves which would not be appropriate for oral communication. What you got was a rant from somebody who obviously has the free speech right to say whatever he wants about whatever, you know, an item. But his assumption was that there's somehow a level playing field in the legal frame of how people respond to the possibilities of advancement in all kinds of areas. And his view was that given that there's a level playing field, any type of attempt to sort of regulate or support or provide breakdown barriers that stop people of different ethnicities or genders from participating in the public process, there's an outrageous attack on white people. And you were appropriate to let him have his rant, but I think it's worth responding that his rant is not based on any factual information. The reality is there's massive evidence that there are barriers to entry into all kinds of fields that are based on not just historical barriers like slavery, for example, but current ongoing barriers that stop people from equal participation in the public process. And you can demonstrate that without any difficulty that there are disparities in wealth, income, education, healthcare, housing, public safety, access to elected office, corporate positions, top governmental positions, on and on and on. And so when people make these kinds of comments that somehow, you know, if we just didn't do anything, just let stuff go the way it is and treat everybody the same and ignore that there might be differences in access to barriers to people's access. It really is misunderstanding the reality of the situation that we're in. So I just wanted to call in and respond to that. It's unfortunate that people have these rants. It's a racist rant in the sense, I don't just, you throw the word around this way, it's a racist rant in the sense that it doesn't base itself on current realities or what's actually going on. So my view is that I just wanted to respond to that and I will leave those comments left without a response. Thank you. Thank you. Next I have phone number, Indian 1810. Yeah, hi, this is Garrett. Hey, I don't expect leftists to agree with me. That's okay. Anyway, in this country, we have a principle known as innocent, until proven guilty. In the stricken item number 27, you had intended to use the government loudspeaker to publicly take sides, judging racism, guilt, hate and penalties before and while our system of justice played out, which shows you intended no respect for how our system of justice works, who decides guilt and judgment, jury fact finding and we're a meddling party since it is city property. It was therefore not appropriate that the city council stand in solidarity with the arts commission and the Santa Cruz equity collaborative in response to the BLM billboard vandalism and their conviction of hate actions of the alleged perpetrators prior to the conclusion of the case, as that is too much like Maxine Waters to me. The support documents have been up for the last five days, which I still consider an ethics violation by publicly showing support for plaintiffs, proclaiming hate crime guilt and proposing restitution while the trial was still in session in print by posting such on the council agenda website. I assume you don't care what facts a jury finds or what the judges penalties are, your giddy prejudice shows. The agenda discussion item was stricken Monday, but not the accusatory print supporting documents. Discussion was stricken, and I assume for the reasons I pointed out to you in my letter, which I believe was deleted at the same time. None of that should ever have been seen on a city website during a trial or still left up. Whether the vandalism is or is not a hate crime and with what guilt or penalties will be decided by the criminal justice system, not by you, not Abia Nostafa, not Santa Cruz equity collab. The BLM Stencil billboard is not an original idea, not even a mural. It is merely property consisting of stenciled paint letters and is the name of a national violent, Marxist anarchist organization that's caused a mega national violence. I say approving a permanent easement created a glorification symbol of mob violence of a group many consider the poster of domestic terror. Your prejudice doesn't recognize that this vandalism can possibly be just a youngsters doing entire burnout vandalism, or it could be no different than protesters committing vandalism against statuary they oppose, removing a mission bell, they just approve protest vandalism in the clock tower or the police station or even a possible protest against the violent arson. Thank you. Time is up. Sander, Nadenberg has your hand up next please. You press star six, we should be able to hear from you. Go ahead, please. You'll have to mute whatever device you're using in order for us to hear you, otherwise it'll be an echo. If you're watching on TV, you'll want to turn your TV down. If you're speaking to us on a phone or- Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Okay, can we take this? Can we take this? My name is Karen Nadenberg and I'm a very concerned community member and mother. I live on the lower west side and my three children all bike to school almost every day of the year. I have two kids at Bayview Elementary and I have one daughter at Mission Hill. And yesterday my nine year old, she's actually turned nine two weeks ago, so I consider her six, eight, was biking home with council member Golder's daughter, or niece, sorry, her niece, along the rail trail, which we always let our children bike on the rail trail. We live about seven blocks from school and my daughter was three blocks from her school when a man jumped out and blocked the rail trail and robbed her and her two friends at the age of nine. And another mother was a few yards way behind walking her dog. This was at 3 p.m. in the afternoon on the way from school. And he grabbed the bike from one of the girls and got on it and he rode away after, you know, he yelled at them and said he was gonna get it. And anyway, they were traumatized and they seemed to be doing fine at this moment, but I felt like I let them down as a mother by allowing this to happen. And then went with my husband and we drove around our town that we love. My husband grew up here. I lived here for 20 years. We both work in the community. I worked for Dominican for 15 years now. And we saw that when we drive a mile to the north of our house and a place to look for this person, maybe who stole and basically robbed our nine year old, that there was everybody camping, bikes stolen all over the place around the area a mile to the north of us. Then we drove a mile down, mile and a half maybe to a left. One last thing I can say is that I wanna let you all know that not dealing with the issue of homelessness, crime, and rampant public drug use in the city is endangering our youth. And that was made abundantly clear yesterday. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have a phone number ending in 4879. Please press star six to unmute yourself, please. If you press star six, you should be unmuted, be able to unmute yourself or they disappeared. Right there hand. What was that, mine? They just lowered their hand. Okay. Okay. Last call for oral communications this evening. If you do want to address the council on items not on tonight's agenda, please go ahead and press star nine and we'll be able to take your comment. I'm not seeing any additional attendees. And so I will bring this back to council. I do see there's two council members. Typically we wouldn't address questions, but I'll go ahead and recognize these two council members, council member Watkins and council member Calhoun Tarjot. Yeah, thank you, mayor. I know we can't take action tonight, but I just want to offer my sympathy and empathy to the parent who had this experience happen to their child as a parent of two young daughters. And as a kid who used to go biking around in town, raised in the 80s and 90s, like that is a very traumatic experience and just know that I commit as a council member to continue to work towards solutions so that our kids are able to thrive in our community. And I wish healing for your family and I wish healing for your daughter and her friend. And I also just want to thank Mike Brocken for his comments as well. You know, we're advised not to engage when we hear different comments sometimes during public comment, but it certainly appreciate free speech and it's true. A lot of the information that is shared often is not accurate and is further further propelling white supremacy and inaccurate information and is a disservice in that way. And so, you know, we reframe, but I appreciate the comments that were made. Thank you, council member, council member Calhoun Tarjotsen. Thank you. I also wanted to thank Mr. Rotkin for calling in and calling out what is inaccurate. And just to note that the comment of the individual that it's their right to call and make the comments that they make, but it is confirming that racism is very real here in our community and we have to get to work immediately. So thank you, Mr. Rotkin, for your comments. Thank you. And yeah, I'll just add my comment as well. About the young girl that experienced what she did and definitely commit to addressing some of these safety issues and concerns that our community, frankly, is very vocal about and is really asking for change. So thank you for speaking tonight. Are there any other council members at this point? Council member Cummings. I also want to extend my sympathies to the family who experienced that tragic interaction with that individual. I've had a similar instance as a child where one guy tried to steal my bike, another guy tried to steal my shoes and it definitely leaves a mark on those individuals for a while. And so I will say though that being said, I'm really glad that our police department was able to apprehend that individual who is no longer on the streets. And so I just want to thank our police department for all their hard work, for being able to track down that individual, arrest them, and I hope that they're brought to justice because that kind of behavior is completely unacceptable. And I think everyone on this board wants to try to prevent those kinds of things from happening in our community. And so I just wanted to express my sympathy and also express my gratitude towards the Santa Cruz police department for doing a great job apprehending this individual. Thank you council member. Okay, for members of the public, this does bring our meeting to adjournment this evening. The council will go back into a closed session at this point in time. Thank you everyone for attending this evening and we will see you. Our next council meeting is on November 23rd. Thank you for attending. And council members, if you can stay on, we'll be going back into closed session. Thank you all. Thank you.