 You know, you already got where are you asking? Yeah, sorry, I had to unmute myself. Okay. So the board chair is called meeting to order at 904. And the roll call is Dr. Detrack. Here. Dr. Calantara Johnson. Is it. Dr. Konig. Here. Dr. Lynn. Here. Dr. McPherson. Dr. Myers. You're muted Donna. Present. Dr. North Guy. Here. Dr. Pegler. Here. Dr. Peterson. Here. Dr. Rothwell. Here. Dr. Rotkin. Here. Exefficio director Henderson. Here. We have quorum. All right. And today's meeting is being broadcast by community television is Santa Cruz County and we thank them. Here. Are there any. Comments from board of directors. I just have a few. I think some of us have taken the TIGM ride. Interesting from the board walk up to. Well, not to about where the trestle is in Capitola and back and. A lot of discussions and how many people would do this and that and how the metro could just line up and. You know, connect. You know, this is an interesting ride that I'm glad to win. I think some of the others have too. So I just wanted to. Mention that. And also. I've received and I talked to John and a couple at the retreat. And you know, the new Kaiser facility and people concerned about not having access to. Public transit and so forth. And I know it's going to be very. If it can be done. I don't know, but I'm not sure that's going on. If it can be done. I'm not sure if it's going to be done. But the same communications. Those are just two comments. That's it. Thank you, Bruce. Anyone else. If not. She and I are Alex. I had the email they shared with you. Would this be the time to share that? Or would it just be part of the packet. Actually don't know what I did was. So is not to confuse anyone, because it really doesn't have anything to do with the board agenda. and everybody should receive it at 1130 this morning. Perfect. I just want to be sure of those. We did receive an email from a local citizen really complimenting the work of our metro drivers and safety and courteous and all of, just really a very nice email that I shared and that everyone will be receiving. So thank you, Gina. Chair. Chair. Yes. Also just to add, I also took the TIGM ride in Watsonville. And I have also heard of course lots from my constituents about the desire for some kind of public transit to the proposed Kaiser facility site on Soquel Avenue. So it would be good to understand and be able to communicate under what circumstances metro would extend transit to that area. We've had some preliminary discussions with staff, but I think it'd be good to work on our communications plan there. Thank you, Director Koenig. And any other announcements? And I think, let me ask, CEO Clifford, the, I know that we've had some requested different times for routes. And is that something that could be addressed either here or at another point on that process? Yeah, we can put a report together and bring you back a briefing on that. I will tell you briefly, the background on that is that we were asked to comment on that way back when the facility was proposed to be constructed at the location. And our comment was that is just not a good location for transit. It would require extensive rerouting of our bus lines. It's not on a major corridor, it's on a frontage road. It is just hugely problematic. But we can explore other options and other options might include asking them to fully fund the cost of whatever the cost would be of some reroute or new route or whatever it ends up being the best suggestion for the next border. But we can put our thoughts together and come back to you. Yeah, I think that'd be great. I could end up and I know that people think why did the board approve it there in the first place and there was interest or we had interest in located at the corner of Thurber and Soquel was a no go there. So that's why it's on the other side of the highway. Anyway, and I would say that I was at a roadway, a bike, a roadway meeting, yes, when was it Monday morning, Thursday morning. And a man who gave a presentation includes transportation information, which was great. And for those of you who want to know about that was a bike ride, it was the 24th year, they raised $200,000 for profit agencies here. So give it up for the Rotary Club and those who ride bikes. Thank you. All right, any other comments from the board? Yes. Yes, Director Rodkin. Yeah, thankfully I am not on the board of supervisors and I did not want to second guess their decision about the location of their clinic. But I think it's important to make a comment that when new uses of any kind come in to the community that in general, but particularly if they're gonna be facilities that might need that transit would be particularly important for seems to me that it's critical that we not set a precedent that somehow we're gonna just like take service away from other people that then serve this new facility or action or something like that. So whatever we come up with, I think Alex Clifford's comment that CEO Clifford's comments that we might ask them if they might want to pay for some route that or changing routes in some way that doesn't disadvantage other members of the community that we serve, that seems okay. That's fine with me, that's be great. But it's early bad precedent I think to suggest that we would somehow take roots off of Soquel Avenue which serve all kinds of businesses and have traditional work. And then move it's furniture or someplace off of the beaten path or that wouldn't be smart for us. So that's before we, having staff put something together, I don't want them to take their time redesigning our route system to serve a decision. Again, maybe that was the only place to put the clinic. I'm not arguing whether that was a good or bad decision but we can't readjust our transit service at the cost of other riders to make that work. And I'll just add that location and first the board is not finalized or approve any permits for that location. So that's very much still a work in progress. And I just heard some communication that, of course, Metro, we plan our routes based on demand and we get to understand what level of demand would be necessary in order to extend a route there. And if that would mean potentially placing new housing in the area was we update the housing element for the county. And I've also heard the proposal that some kind of, just Kaiser circulator route from the mall be added since the mall is our mid-county hub and understanding what that would cost and again, what kind of demand would be needed to implement it. All reasonable questions we ought to look into, I agree. And just to add on that, I know we have someone, we have someone in Scott's Valley that's been asking for a route change when UCSC leased a section of the Borland building or enterprise building and brought in 500 employees. But it was because of the location and some of the similar areas being a frontage road with no place for the bus to pull off. That's been a challenge. So it helped me understand when this came to light that it wasn't just a simple thing of saying, well, we have 500 new employees, can we just add a new route? But it did, it helped me to talk to Alex and that might be something you may wanna meet with Alex, Manu and just kind of understand the challenges because once I saw that, I went, oh, okay, there's a lot more than what I realized. I just thought, you got riders, bring a bus. So I know what you're hearing because I've been getting those emails and understanding, finding some of the challenges were more in-depth than I thought. So anyway, thank you and I know we will be looking at it and at least we'll have a little more information. And next, are there oral and written communications to the board of directors? None, okay, other than I know the one that is coming, labor organization communication. Anyone waiting? Let me check for participants. Joan, Jeffries. I see, yes, I do see. Joan. All right, Joan, Jeffries. Okay, hello, can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay, wonderful. Thank you, good morning. And thank you very much for taking my comments today. So I am speaking on behalf of myself and several other employees at Metro as well as members of our union, SCIU. We have been informed by management that Metro does intend to implement a vaccine mandate with all employees needing to be fully vaccinated by the end of December or face termination. We are currently in the meet and confer process for this policy. While we greatly appreciate that Metro management is engaging in this process with us, we do have several very serious concerns about what will happen once this is implemented and we strongly urge Metro to consider delaying this mandate. Point number one, I have two points. Point number one, is it truly necessary at this point when we are already in compliance with Governor Newsom's directive to either be vaccinated or to be tested on a regular basis? I mean, at this point, I honestly think it's safer to be around the unvaccinated here at Metro than the vaccinated. Unvaccinated are getting tested regularly. They are masking. They are social distancing. They are going above and beyond what the vaccinated are likely not doing here at Metro. So please take that into consideration. At the same time, look out what other agencies in this region are doing. I'm a member of the Business Outreach Committee. I did a quick survey. Out of 12 agencies in this area, only three are currently implementing a vaccine mandate. Only three. AC Transit is not. Cal Transit 4 is not. BTA is not, et cetera, et cetera. The second point, and this is critical, please realize the effect that this will have on Metro's ability to function. We understand people will be allowed to submit for medical and religious exemptions, but we are concerned that these requests will not be seriously considered and will be quickly dismissed by citing hardship. If this mandate goes into effect and exemption requests are denied, Metro will lose several people whose job functions are critical here with years of institutional knowledge. And more than one department will literally be decimated. This mandate is simply not needed now. Metro is already highly vaccinated and is in compliance with both Governor Newsom's policy and federal policy. To implement this mandate at this time would actually cause more harm than good, not only to Metro and its employees, but to the greater community at large that Metro serves. Thank you. Thank you, John. Do we have any other comments from labor? I see a hand from James Sandoval. Yes. James. Morning, Board of Directors. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello, everyone. James Sandoval here representing Smart Local 23. I just wanna echo what Joan is saying. We know and understand it's Metro's right to mandate this vaccine and we're bargaining in good faith over the implementation for it. However, we don't agree with the mandate. We really hope that Metro and the Board of Directors considers the ramifications of this happening because at least for the bus operators, we're literally begging people to apply for this job by offering $4,000 and yet we still don't see enough applications to fill the current vacant positions that we got. And from my understanding, this will potentially force us to lose 20 plus operators to this mandate. And we're barely hanging on as it is, this is gonna force us to leave people behind as we're already dropping service as it is. And we just, we really hope that you consider all of these factors with this mandate. And if you do continue this mandate that this mandate's evenly applied across Metro and not just to Smart and SEIU. Thank you. Thank you, James. And any other hands? I see Jordan Vasco. Hello there. I just wanna echo off the previous comments. Just wanna keep it short and simple. And I just wanna say that the employees that would be affected by this hold very critical positions at the agency. And this is not a circumstance where you can simply just throw attempts at those positions. And so if these people are eliminated from Metro, I can just foresee the period of time between January and about March, April being, I don't wanna say a disaster, but I just have a don't, I don't have too much optimism with attempts filling these roles. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you. And any other hand, am I missing any? I don't see any Donna. Okay. Madam Chair. Yes. I'd like to respond. Yeah, I'm speaking for myself and not the board as a whole. I don't know the entire board's views, although certainly this issue's come up number of times informally. I know that our management is in discussion with the unions and I assume those negotiations are serious. So the questions of how exemptions for religious or other clear health reasons and so forth will be taken seriously. But I just wanna say, speaking as one board member, while as I usually agree strongly with Joan Jeffries and with James Sandoval, I'm afraid I don't know the other driver very well, on a lot of different kinds of issues and positions, I feel very strongly that we need to be able to present to the public that a ride on one of our buses is a safe ride that coming to deal with our administrative staff is something where they can be depend upon safety. And frankly, I'm being blunt in my, this is my individual comments. If we end up having to cut some routes or reduce our service because we've lost personnel, that would be a shame, that would be terrible. But I'm not willing to be extorted basically on what should be good public policy because it's very clear that vaccinations are the best protection against the virus and the idea that somehow the people that are vaccinated are less safe or either in the workplace or driving buses. I want every one of our riders to know that when they get on one of our buses, they're gonna be safe. And if we wanna bring back our ridership, which is an absolutely critical factor for us, I think it's absolutely necessary that we let people know that our drivers and our other staff, the personnel that the people come in contact with it, the stations and the main Pacific station in Watsonville, that they're gonna be safe when they're in contact with these people. And I think sending that message out in a very clear way, our workforce is vaccinated. It's absolutely critical. And I'd be willing, I hate to say it, but I'd be willing to see 20 drivers go if they don't understand the community needs of having an agency-wide vaccination for a service that's as critical as transportation. Again, I'm only speaking for myself. I don't know the board's views overall. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments from the board? Only thing, oh, yes, Dan. Yeah, I'd just like to emphasize exactly what Mike just said. Vaccinations is the way to get out of this COVID disaster that we've been in. I do not buy the fact that you're safer by being tested frequently. You'd have to be tested every day and even that is not perfect. If you're gonna be tested once a week, you can easily get COVID in between the tests, spread it before you even know you have it. Vaccinations is the surest way to protect not only the actual employees for Metro, but also the public. And this resistance to getting a vaccination just makes me angry. We have mandated vaccinations for all sorts of different diseases like polio and measles and so forth. And we've been able to virtually wipe out polio. There's only two countries in the world that even have polio cases anymore. And it's all because we mandated it. So I'm sorry, I just don't buy the argument. I'm a strong union guy, but I really depart from the union on this position. I think they're completely wrong. And I think we need to go forward with the mandate. And if we lose people, we lose them. It's their choice to lose their job, but there is no good reason not to get vaccinated unless they have a real clear medical reason for that. And that has to be documented. Thank you, anyone else? And just the only thing I'd like to add is the board has given direction that we fill the vaccination and at least testing and vaccination, we've given that direction that we feel this is very important. So it's not something management has decided without the encouragement of the board. So this is, it's not, it's something that we've shared the, we've shared with management our concern that writers feel safe. So it's not just a unilateral decision of management. This is my comment is, we feel this is important to bring our writers back. And I think all of us have said, we wanna make sure our writers feel safe, whether that, what that looks like, just have to trust the, we trust our management to continue working and working that way in that direction. So. And any other comments? Okay. Next, we will go to the Metro advisory, Mac written communication. We don't have anything. Okay. And, and do we have any additional documentation? No, ma'am. All right. Moving to the consent agenda. Are there any changes to this consent agenda and any one wanna pull on the item from the consent agenda? We're gonna ask the public as well. Yeah, I will. And then do we have any, any one from the public that wish to pull or comment on any item on the consent agenda? Then. I move approval of the consent agenda. I second that. And I roll call vote. The motion is to accept the consent agenda as presented. I saw a, I heard, excuse me, a motion by director Rockin. I'm sorry. I missed a second. It was Larry. And thank you, Larry. Okay. And the roll call is Dr. Dutra. Yes. Okay. I heard a yes. Director Callentary Johnson. Yes. Dr. Coney. Aye. Dr. Lind. Aye. Dr. McPherson. Aye. Dr. Myers. Sorry. Aye. Dr. Northcat. Aye. Dr. Pigler. Dr. Peterson. Aye. Dr. Rothwell. Dr. Rotkin. Aye. unanimous by those present. Thank you. So we'll move to the first item on the regular agenda and let me make sure I have the. I have it, so good. A presentation employee longevity awards. And I'd like to start with Maria Hernandez, 25 years. And first of all, I'd like to know is Maria here? I don't know. Oh, ma'am, she didn't attend. All right. Well, Maria has been our customer service rep and she started as a temporary employee for two years prior to being hired with Metro. Maria also continued to ride fixed route so she can relate firsthand to our customers. Maria has served all 25 years in the customer service department. She's gained recognition in the department as being hardworking and dedicated employee who brings a positive attitude and takes pride in her work. Maria is also very popular with the community, especially on senior day and kids day at the county fair. She takes a hands-on position in her role and goes above and beyond to assist her customers providing outstanding service to Metro and for what Metro strives. Some of Maria's previous duties entailed paper applications for para-cruise, Polaroid photo IDs, and assisting with translations at public hearings. Over the past 25 years, Maria has set a high standard in the department and she is known as our walking headways. So thank you, Maria. Congratulations and a round of applause for Maria. We also have Ephraim Hernandez who is 20 years vehicle service worker. He declined to share his bio but we really wanna congratulate and appreciate Ephraim for his 20 years service with Metro. And a round of applause for him. All right. Next we have an acceptance file, the state legislative update from Josh Shaw and Michael Pimentel of Shaw, Yoder and Twith. Oh, that's, and Lang, I'm sorry. I should have made sure I knew how to pronounce all of those names. So is it Josh? No worries, Chair Lange. All right. Yeah, good morning. Josh Shaw with Shaw, Yoder and Twith. Meltzer and Lang. Chair Lange did a great job, better than frankly, most people get a couple of my partner's last names. We do have a brief slide presentation for your board members. Donna Bauer or Gina Py, if we could have that up. But I'm also pleased, I'll jump in. I'm pleased to introduce this morning, reintroduced to the board, my colleague, Michael Pimentel who is with us. Michael really has become the lead for the public transportation practice in our firm. So Michael and I will be sharing the presentation this morning. We're gonna talk to you about two topics. First, key legislation that moved through the state capital this year. And then we'll talk about funding, both opportunities and lost opportunities and what we see moving forward. I'll start off with legislation and remind the board that the California state legislature works in two year biennials. Of course, there was a general election last fall. So there was a new class of legislators seated at the beginning of this calendar year, 2021, the first year of the biennium, about 25% of legislators turned over. So we got to meet some new folks, including some really strong supporters of public transit. The legislature adjourned the first year, the 2021 session on September 10th. A number of bills went to Governor Newsom. We told you when we visited you early this year that about 2,400 bills had been introduced. About 900 of those went to the governor throughout the year for his actions. So the legislature adjourned on September 10th and the governor had 30 days thereafter to act on all the bills that went to him. He signed about 770 bills into law. He vetoed about 67 bills. And about 1,500 bills still remain. And some of those frankly died throughout the legislative process. They were voted down in committees and or they were put on hold, meaning the legislator who was carrying those bills couldn't decided not to try to move them all the way to the governor this year, probably facing some political or policy issues and instead made those two year bills. So some of those bills will come back in 2022 and we can begin to talk about those with you next year. I'll tell you folks that just as you have the legislature operated largely, virtually although legislators were often in the capital, the COVID protocols that began last year, stayed throughout this year, of course, there was very little access by the public into the capital. Most legislators had their doors shut, for instance, and you really had to call and make an appointment. If you wanted to see somebody, it was, sure. I'm sorry, Kingston, can you guys get to like slide 34? We're off, we're way off here. Yeah, I was just kind of blowing through that but happy to pause. I know you're really fast. You talk as fast as I do. That's a compliment. We'll get further. And we're on the slide that says 21-22 legislative section. You can click through that. There's Michael, he'll be up in a second. We'll talk about legislation. Here we are. So I was just transitioning from this slide by noting while the legislature is in full swing and the administration, that all the executive branch agencies are in full swing, the COVID protocol still make it very difficult to obtain actual personal access. So we continue to do a lot of our business on Zoom calls, exactly like this, cell phone emails, stand-up meetings, maybe outside the Capitol but within the Capitol the access has been difficult for us to enjoy the same kind of relationships. But we continue to have great relationship with your delegation this year, particularly they are always very accessible to us. On the next slide, Michael and I will get into two or three bills of most interest to Metro. I'll tell you that not very many public transit related bills were introduced this year and thankfully very few that were adverse to our interest and only a few that really move transit forward. Here's a bill that your board supported and we lobbied for you and asked the governor to sign this bill, not relative to transit but public meetings under the Brown Act. Of course, during COVID, Governor Newsom issued an executive order exercising his emergency power to relieve some of the burdens of the Brown Act so that you can meet virtually exactly like you're doing today. This bill codified some of those practices not only for local governments like you but as well state boards that have separate requirements that are a lot like the Brown Act but basically long story short, when a governor calls an emergency for health or safety reasons with certain characteristics you can continue to operate exactly like you're doing today. Again, you supported this bill and governor signed it into law so that when the executive order expired about three weeks ago, you were able to do exactly what you're doing today. On the next bill, I'll note again, not a transit specific bill but assembly bill 418 had to do with the investor-owned utilities practice in the last couple of years of instituting public safety power shutoffs. Of course, begun really after those horrible wildfire seasons where we learned that some of the IOU equipment would spark the wildfires and so now the IOUs when they fear those kinds of dry windy conditions and or are experiencing other pressures on the electric grid, they institute these PSPSs which is great for safety and making sure the power lines are safe for all of us but from a transit agency perspective, particularly given that the state has mandated that you convert your entire bus fleet to 100% essentially electricity. You need to be operating zero emission vehicles that usually means electric. As we head towards that future, the concern expressed by C.O. Clifford and your operation staff is if we're not allowed, we have to only run electricity and there's a PSP, will some of our buses be decommissioned, essentially we'll lose the charge. So this, so the state in recognizing the PSPs are a difficulty for local governments has allocated some funds through the state budget the last couple of years to help local governments harden their facilities and try to be resistant against these kinds of emergencies. This bill would have codified that approach and in fact, established a community power resiliency program. The thing is most of the money allocated by the state the last couple of years have been to cities and counties. Most of you are city or county officials, you appreciate that. The special districts in the state, including transit agencies kind of got the short trip with no money. This bill would have included special districts in the list of agencies that the state would have to provide future funding like this for. So transit would have been eligible. Santa Cruz Metro supported this bill. We were happy to log in for this bill. It got all the way to the governor's desk. Unfortunately, the governor vetoed the bill. He did note there's some concern about upward pressure on general fund funding. In other words, setting up a program like this with rules about how funding would be spent might create pressure for future legislators to provide that funding. We actually think that's a great argument for the bill. Governor cited some other existing authority that his administration has to in fact allocate this money to special districts if they want to. So at a minimum, we've talked with your staff about trying to resume an effort like this next year and really lobby the administration harder to provide funding to Santa Cruz Metro and other transit agencies who have to be concerned about what's the backup plan if the electric power goes out into the future. So Michael's going to talk about another bill that was more officially presenting adverse circumstances. Yes. I just want to let the members know that the supervisor Coonerty and I yesterday introduced a change in ordinance to ease the decibel level for generators in the unincorporated area because power's gone off. I think we've got 3,000 people up in the center of the valley right now without power and some have been based without water, but that's a different thing. But we're trying to allow that to happen with some, you know, we don't want these things running 24 seven but to allow generators to be activated more easily. So that's just a general, it's going to go into a second reading and all, but I just wanted the board members to know and you might want to know too what we're doing at the county level in that regard. Yeah, thank you, Senator McPherson. I'll turn it over to my colleague Michael now who will talk about the next and final bill we wanted to highlight for your attention. And thank you. For the next slide. Madam Chair, Madam Chair and board members, it's great to be before you again today. I didn't want to touch on SE 674, which is a bill that aims to further leverage transportation contracts for the creation of good paying jobs. I'll stand back and say it's a logical goal, but as initially drafted, it did present some significant implementation challenges to transit agencies that frankly would have increased the incidence of bid protest. Now the California Transit Association on which Theo Clifford serves as an executive committee member and a member of our state legislative committee took the lead on voicing concerns on this bill on behalf of the industry and worked with the author to negotiate a series of very critical amendments to improve the bill and ultimately to limit those adverse impacts on public transit agencies. Now the bill ultimately did not move forward this year. It was made what we call here in Sacramento a two year bill meaning it will be back in the second year of this two year legislative session. We will be working throughout the winter through the California Transit Association, of course, in concert with Theo Alex Clifford to move this forward in a way that is going to be more implementable for agencies should it ultimately make its way through the legislative process to the governor and ultimately signed by him. And so at this time I will hand it back to Josh to provide just a high level overview of the state budget and I'll be back with you to talk through some of the specifics of the state budget. So Josh back to you. Thanks, next slide please. Yep, we'll talk about funding now and I will talk about some existing continuous, let's stay right on that chart, some continuously funded transit programs meaning the legislature doesn't act, the money just flows in by operation of law versus some choices that the legislature and governor had to make this year with some discretionary funding. Some good news for transit there but some more work still to do. This chart may be hard to see for folks on the screen but I believe you have it in your packet. There's a summary of three or four of the major transit funding programs that come up every year and are continuously appropriated. In other words, the revenue source is specified, the expenditure of the funds is specified and the legislature doesn't have to budget for it. But we wanna show you the main one that we are concerned about for you is the top row, several constituent parts of what we call the state transit assistance program. This program is operated by formula, you get a good chunk of that statewide, particularly because of your high per capita ridership and your local sales tax efforts that the state wants to match. The source of funding is based on sales taxes but also ridership matters. So we were concerned, of course, when COVID hit that this program would plummet. This chart basically is telling you when we visited you earlier this year and the governor's budget proposal for 2021 had just come out, we thought this program was going to be about 667 million. Now it's up to six months, six, seven months later, it's up to 786 million, about a $120 million increase. You can see right there that the economic recovery California has experienced in the last year is great, including for public transit. And down to the bottom of that chart, that's LTS. Those are local transportation funds. That's really the state's biggest transit funding source. It's a quarter percent of the sales tax we all pay, what we would also call Transportation Development Act. So that really measures economic activity. Earlier this year, we would have told you that program was about 1.8 billion. It's up to more than 2 billion. Now that we're three and a half months into the 2021 year, you get a formula share of that amount and that's part of the lifeblood of transit funding that the state has established over the years. So those are all continuously funded programs. I'll be happy to answer questions about any of those other programs that we didn't mention, FTA and LTF are the two major continuously funded programs. Michael will talk now about some program funding that's a myth of continuous funded and some discretionary money that the Legislature and Governor did bring together this year to help you meet that zero emission vehicle mandate that I mentioned earlier. So on the next slide, Michael will take it over. All right, and thank you, Josh. So on this slide here, I do want to highlight that we've been working closely with Metro staff to identify funding to support that transition to zero emission technologies. We understand that you're taking early action to deploy zero emission buses and to ultimately support that overall transition, 100% zero emission by 2040. We supported and helped secure through the state budget access to up to $1 billion for zero emission bus deployment. And that's part of a much larger $2.7 billion investment in zero emission vehicles. More generally, that would be inclusive like duty, medium duty, as well as locomotive technologies. Now, I do want to recognize that for the second time in the history of what we call the HFIP program, that's a program that supports a voucher incentive to help buy down the incremental cost of zero emission buses. We have secured a new set aside within that program for transit agencies specifically. That means that when those funding availabilities open up in previous years, they would be open up to trucking companies, the transit agencies, the airports, and school districts. We have money that is specific to transit agencies. The other thing that was established in this budget for the first time is a funding set aside within the infrastructure programs that are overseen by the California Energy Commission that again would be specific to transit agencies. And that ensures that as agencies like Metro are moving forward with investment requests, that they can get those funded without the need to compete with other sectors that also have an interest in the electrification space. And so we'll move on to this next slide, where I do want to highlight some additional investments that could benefit Metro. One is the establishment of a new $1.1 billion Clean California program of that $300 million is made available to local governments and that is inclusive of transit districts. And this program is being established to help support things like litter abatement programs, site cleanup at a variety of public rights of way, including transit stations and transit stops. And so this is a program that again has just started up and we are seeing that Caltrans, which is leading this program is in the initial stages of holding stakeholder workshops, shape up this program, shape up the guidelines and funding will be made available to transit agencies as well as other local government interests at the start of 2022. I do also want to acknowledge that there is the establishment of a new program that will be overseen by the state's strategic growth council. This is $600 million for what is identified as planning and implementation grants for infill as well as for strategies to reduce BMT. This is a very broad category of investments is being brought online, but it can support things like programs to provide their free or discounted transit passes to the public can also be used to provide some operating support to transit agencies. Strategies that frankly reduce BMT and this program is one that again is just starting up but we'd expect in early 2022, funding would be made available to agencies through their MPOs or their RTPA. And so at this time, I will hand it back to Josh to run through the balance of proposed transportation investments that need to be addressed in 2022. So Josh back to you. Thanks, the next slide begins to tell the story of investments that didn't happen. Michael just concluded with an overview of continuous appropriations that were included in the state budget for transit as well as some new dollars that transit can take advantage of. Why were there new dollars, by the way? In January, we visited you just after Governor Newsom proposed his budget proposal for the state in January. At the time, we were still not sure how and if so, how quickly the state would come out from under the economic dislocations of COVID hitting us last year. So his budget was relatively constrained. Of course, throughout the first six months of this year, state tax revenues overperformed against his relatively conservative projections. In fact, state is doing incredibly well in terms of state revenues, including to the general fund. So the governor had an opportunity in May to propose new funding across a variety of health, welfare, education, social services and transportation programs. So he asked the legislature for a new package of about $11 billion in new transportation investments. It was a multimodal package. There were bridge repair dollars that he proposed from the general fund. There was new transit funding that he proposed from the general fund. He also proposed to spend the remaining $4.2 billion in Proposition 1A general obligation bond funds for the high speed rail project, the state's high speed rail project. Those bonds were approved by the voters years ago but had not yet been fully appropriated by the legislature. In total, the governor put about $3 billion of direct transit funding on the table out of the general fund. Unfortunately, our story ends with a sad note that really more work to be done. The legislature didn't agree with the governor on his high speed rail funding proposals. And so they never acted a comprehensive multimodal transportation funding program that the governor asked for. So while initially budgeted as a placeholder, that language in the state budget that was enacted by July 1st said, if we don't get to agreement on some of the other things like high speed rail, then the monies revert back to the general fund. That's why this slide says reverts back. The 2.5 billion you see for instance on the screen for public transit capital projects was contingently budgeted by the legislature but they put a sentence that said, again, if we don't come to agreement with the administration on legislation that implements the other things the governor has asked for, this 2.5 billion drops back into the general fund. That's exactly what happened. Having said that, we'll close on a bit of an up note. There are many signals that the economy continues to exceed expectations where California is really rising up out of the economic profession caused by COVID and in fact overperforming against the last several years. The governor just the other day in a public press conference noted that he thinks the new revenue estimate for that current year will be above projections by over $15 billion. There are other signals that it might even be larger than that. So we expect going towards next year when the governor proposes in January of 2022, 23 budget that he will put back on the table these transit investments. And we hope there will be more, but we have confidence that the new administration wants to revisit these transit investments. And we've seen from legislative leaders that they intend on continuing the negotiations with the governor that left off on September 10th when they went home. They'll continue to negotiate in offline, if you will heading into next year's resumption of the 2022 legislative session. And we hope that all the folks in Sacramento who make these decisions will get there on new funding for transit. But we'll continue to be involved for Santa Cruz Metro and make the case that you deserve a chunk of that new funding. Michael will conclude by telling you one more story about what we were able to accomplish in the context of the 21-22 budget that we think will provide cost release, cost pressure release for Santa Cruz Metro and other transit agencies. Here's Michael on the next slide, please. All right, and thank you, Josh. You may recall that last year we worked with CEO Clifford to scope an initial round of statutory release for transit agencies that we then successfully secured in the fiscal year 2020-21 state budget. Now, this year in recognition that transit agencies like Metro are still grappling with the impacts of the pandemic on their operations, on their finances, we pursued extensions and expansions of that statutory relief in this fiscal year 2021-2022 budget. Now, these relief measures include extended relief from the financial penalties associated with non-compliance with fare box recovery and FTA's efficiency criteria through fiscal year 2022-2023, for example. We've also secured the truly significant reforms to the Transportation Development Act that are frankly an outgrowth of the work that we had conducted as part of the California Transit Association through our team-reformed task force, which of course, CEO Clifford has a seat on. Now, I won't go into exhausted detail for each of those relief measures that you see on your screen. However, I will highlight that we've secured several permanent measures that make it easier for agencies to ultimately meet their fare box recovery and FTA efficiency requirements. These include new exclusions from the definition of operating costs or cost pressures that include providing ADA paratransit service, the cost of pensions, as well as for public safety contracts. And for the first time, we also were able to secure language in the Transportation Development Act that allows for federal funds to be counted for local funds, for the purposes of calculating your fare box recovery ratios, also that allows for discounted or fare free transit to also be counted at its full retail value for the purposes of calculating your fare box recovery ratio. And so I'll end on that note and on the next slide, we are happy to take questions from any of the board members on this report out on state legislation and the state budget. Thank you. Are there any questions from board members? Up, it's several hands. So I believe the first hand up was Dan Henderson. I think it was Bruce. Up, all right. Bruce first. Doesn't matter. Okay, thank you, Josh and Richard for an excellent presentation for your work in Sacramento for us. As you know, Santa Cruz County in its four cities are members of the Central Coast Community Energy from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara. And I am some of these clean energy issues. For instance, the state's triple CE is gonna reach its greenhouse gas emission reduction by 2030 with the state having a 2045 target. If we, can that be introduced in any part of getting some of this clean zero emission transit buses? Similar to like when we passed measure D was we became a self help county. We got into, because of that we got some increased revenue from the state. I don't know if that's even been mentioned or could it be or can we or do you think it's a good idea? I'll give you my initial reaction but frankly, I'm going to turn to Michael who is our expert in zero emission funding opportunities. I'm not aware that there's any existing statute or even Air Resources Board regulatory plus up or bump up that recognizes communities who are pursuing the kinds of solutions that you just described. Michael can correct me if I'm wrong though here Michael but I don't think it's an obvious benefit notwithstanding we could make that case but I don't know that there's an automatic scoring is there Michael? Yeah, I would just redouble on Josh's remarks at this stage there is in current authorities that provide for that type of allowance to my awareness or have not been active conversations in Sacramento that would allow for us to scope in that type of progressive policy into the overall transition and the way that the state is recognizing and crediting the transition and early action. However, we will certainly be looking up for opportunities in this next year as legislation is introduced for what might be an opportunity there for this county or this agency and being able to actually something like that certainly is good policy does co-latch well with the general interest in moving towards not only cleaner fleets but cleaner energy supplies that ultimately mean that as we are making that transition we're doing so in a way that not just talking about the tailpipe admission but also that point of source emissions and so that will be something we'll continue to look for and see if there are opportunities for getting this county plugged into those types of efforts. Thank you again for your excellent work in Sacramento, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And next, Dan. Anderson. Quick question. Maybe you don't have the answer so I can maybe probably do a Google search and figure it out, but maybe you have something. Do you have any updates on either assembly bill 2176 or state bill 288? 2176. How about you? Yeah. Director Henderson, we absolutely have an update on SB 288. Michael, why don't you provide that while I'm frankly gonna look up and I'm sorry, Dan, the assembly bill was which one? 2176. Okay. So on the SB 288 front, that is a bill that provides equal extensions for certain clean transportation projects. That is a bill that has authorities to transit agencies that spend into I believe calendar year 2024 we as representatives of the industry stepping back also representative of the California Transit Association we've been working with our state legislative committee which again is inclusive of CO Alex Clifford to scope what would be an extension and an expansion of that bill to speak to new project type. We recognize that too often transit projects are being held up by TIPA protests from communities that have concerns about certain projects. Oftentimes in ways that undermine the delivery of a clean transportation project, we are working currently with Senator Wiener to advance what will be an extension and an expansion of that bill in calendar year 2022. We're still working on the parameters of exactly what that will mean in terms of what new project types might be eligible, what the duration of that extended release will be but it is very much an active conversation and something that we'd expect that there's good uptake for in the legislature, recognizing that getting these types of clean transportation projects up and running is something that aligns very well with the state's broader greenhouse gas mission reduction goals, but also to the reality that there is new funding both state and hopefully federal funding that will be on the horizon that we will want to move out the door quick. And so that's something that again will be starting up in 2022 and we would hope to have some form of an extension and an expansion in place by the end of calendar year 2022. And relative to AP 2176, of course, the representative from UCSD is asking about a bill that was in the legislature last year that would have mandated that all transit agencies provide free service to basically college students whether you see the state system or community colleges. In fact, Michael and I were in front of you last February when a range of bills had been introduced and there were three that would have provided or would have required transit agencies to provide free transit service for different demographic segments. This bill, 2176 did not make it through the process last year but of course about three weeks after we visited you last February, COVID hit stay at home, a lot of bills like this fell by the wayside. I'll tell you that this year no bills, so in the new 2021 legislative session, no bills mandating any kind of free transit service for any particular demographic have come up this year at all. Nothing was even introduced much less moved through the process and we haven't really heard whispers about those coming back in. But again, to the degree the economy continues to rise up and we come out of a health crisis, I think I would expect that next year, the second year of the session, 2022 where legislators can introduce new bills again in January or February, it's possible that one or more of the members who introduced these kind of fair free transit bills in the last session, they could begin to begin to revisit these. So we'll keep all eyes and ears open including in the off season this winter and certainly bring to the Metro Board's attention if the school fair free bill or any of the other kinds of fair free bills come up again. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Director Rodkins. You mentioned basically being held harmless in the metrics of like, how much you're providing local service in terms of getting funding from various sources that when you provide free service that there might be a way to calculate the retail value of that. Would that cover the recent decision that we had made to provide free service for a while or is it simply perspective into the future? So it wouldn't be retroactive. However, to the extent that the policy is one that carries forward, that would be something that can be scoped into future years and the calculations that are associated with those future years. And so it is a permanent policy that will be something that carries forward into the future unless there's some additional amendments taken to the transportation bill. That's great. Because, you know, we may find ourselves in the future in situations, especially because COVID's not over where we've decided to make sense for us to provide free service and not to be penalized for that when you're actually providing service, better service to the public on some level. Seems like important. The only other thing I have as a comment, I really wanna appreciate the work that you do for us in Sacramento. Oftentimes the public wonders, like, why don't you put all your money on the street? You know, let's get it out there in the buses. Why do you hire consultants and do this and that? I think when you look at the amount of money that you've helped bring to this agency and the bleeding kinds of things you've stopped from happening to us are well worth the funds that we spend on you. You do a fantastic job for us and I just wanted to really appreciate your work. Thank you. We shouldn't assume that these funds just flow to us in some automatic way. A result of a lot of work that your agency and our CEO and others in the industry provide. But your work particularly, I think it's been very, very good for this agency. Thank you. Thank you, Director Rock. And we love working for Santa Cruz Metro. Thank you. If there are no more questions or comments from the board, I have James Sandoval. This is Hando. Go ahead, James. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. Thank you for that presentation. I just got a question of Assembly Bill 237. That was just signed by Newsome on October 9th. Do you guys have an update on that? Do on the same Google thing, James, or looking in our legislative database, James is asking board members in public about Assembly Bill 237 by Assembly Member Adam Gray about unfair practices and health protection. The governor, as he says, did sign that into law. I'll simply mention the quickest thing I can tell you is that doesn't go into effect immediately. It was not an urgency statute. So that would go into effect, become actual law on January 1st, 2022. And it defines various covered employers with regard to offers of healthcare. And at that point, I really should stop because we would want to provide a more thoughtful, deliberative answer. It's not one that I have particular expertise in off the top of my head, but that is law at this point. Maybe you could send us a written comment about what that's about so we could understand the response to James's question. We will do that. Thank you. And then CEO Clifford. Yes, thank you, Madam Chair and directors. I just want to take a moment to thank Josh and Michael for another outstanding year of work. This has been obviously a weird year and we still got a lot of good stuff done. They have worked hard to protect us. I always feel good about their representation. Sometimes you worry about the larger transit agencies just controlling the agenda. And Josh and Michael help us feel like we're equal to those larger agencies. And I really am appreciative of their work. I also want, well, and all of their hard work on this continuing discussion that's been going on now for a couple of years about TDA reform, the work that they did led to relief. Now, we were not in jeopardy, but we could have been in jeopardy in the future, but a number of our calling properties were in jeopardy of losing money and they were able to get these various concessions put in place, at least for a short period of time. So that was great work. And then just to close, I don't know if we did last time, but we should congratulate Michael on his appointment to the executive director of CTA. Congratulations, it's great. Thank you. Thanks, Alice. Alex, we appreciate you. And I just, I want to echo everyone, the other comments and thanking Josh and Michael for your work and an excellent presentation and just invaluable support that you provide. Thank you. Great, thank you, Chair Landon, board members. Great to be with you this morning. We hope to see you soon and stay well. You too. Next, we have the federal legislative update from Chris Jiglo of Capital Edge. Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Chair Landon, good to be here, as always. Actually, I usually say, you know, that I wish I was out there, but I see these weather reports about bombs, cyclones and such and that just scares me. So for once I'm glad to be here in DC on a beautiful fall day as opposed to Santa Cruz. But anyway, I do, I too have a few slides, hopefully, that can answer some questions that you might have about what's going on here in DC. So if we could pop those up, but essentially, you know, infrastructure is, is sort of the topic of the last few months here in Washington DC. It's been, it's been. Excuse me, excuse me. Sorry, Gina. Kingston, can you go to slide 50 please? We're on agenda item 12. Beautiful. Thank you. And you can go to the next one. So yeah, so here's the four things that I, you know, basically the top, the top two is what's going to take up most of my time. And these, both of these packages have, you know, multiple names. And so I'm just going to give them, you know, names of infrastructure package one, infrastructure package two, where we're also looking at the upcoming budget for the Department of Transportation for federal fiscal year 2022, which formally actually started on October one. And then I throw, I'm throwing in the debt limit here because that can kind of screw up a lot of things with regard to the budget and these infrastructure packages. So next please. So the infrastructure bill number one. And I know that the CEO has been keeping you folks up to date on a lot of the progress of this at previous board meetings. And so some of this may be duplicative, but just wanted to kind of go over briefly what we're talking about. This first infrastructure package was started out to be known as the bipartisan infrastructure framework. It was negotiated among about 20 senators, about 10 Republicans, 10 Democrats in the Senate to try to come up with a, what we would call a traditional infrastructure bill that would be able to survive a Senate filibuster, which means it needs 60 votes in the Senate, which means it needs at least 10 Republican votes to be approved there. They came up with something, they passed it on October 10th. And it got the vote of, votes of 19 Republicans in addition to those 10 who were actually negotiating the bill. The president was involved as well. As you can see, it has sort of your traditional infrastructure in their transportation, water, broadband, cybersecurity, updating the electricity grid. The bill has not been voted on by the house yet and we'll kind of get to that. The bill totals about $1.2 trillion. I like to say that it's about $550 billion in what we would call new money. There's some stuff in there that would have happened anyway. You see below the, below they talk about the five-year reauthorization. That, you know, that five-year reauthorization bill was going to happen anyway. They folded it into this infrastructure bill. So I say we've got about $550 billion in new money. Out of that $550 billion in new money, about $275 billion of that is going to the Department of Transportation. About $21 billion of that is going to the Federal Transit Administration. And I would say about $5 billion of that is what we will be focusing on should this become law. And that's about $5 billion for the low and no admissions vehicle grant program. That's a huge increase. The program right now is authorized at $55 million a year. It's been funded somewhere between $100 and $150 million a year for the last couple of years. So this would be a pretty big bump, about a billion dollars a year over the next five years for competing to purchase electric vehicles. The rest of the FTA money goes to a lot of fixed guideway projects, what they call a new starts program and also some rural. I put this kind of little question at the end, some anti-trudges bias in the Senate and I will answer it. Yes, there is. And there are many people in the, I think that there were many who wanted a more robust transit title in this bipartisan infrastructure framework, but there were many senators on both sides of the aisle who believed that transit got quote unquote too much money in the last few pandemic relief bills. Now we're talking about apples and oranges here. And I know you guys know all of this, that this infrastructure bill is for not for service, but more for investments to help the economy whereas the pandemic relief bill was to keep services running. But that didn't sway a lot of folks, including the Republican leader of the Senate committee that has jurisdiction over transit, Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, very vocal about saying that transit got taken care of in the pandemic relief bills, we don't need to do anything with them in infrastructure. So as I mentioned, this infrastructure bill includes a five year reauthorization of federal transit administration programs. In general, it looks to be 36% increases over current levels for most of the programs that we care about formula and competitive and a little bit more for the stick program that we benefit from. And we're Santa Cruz Metro years ago, we're part of the discussion in creating that small transit intensive cities program. We get a 50% increase. That's also thanks to Congressman Panetta who was an original co-sponsor of that proposal. I will say that this Senate reauthorization is not as bold as the reauthorization that was approved by the house this past summer. Those included over 50% increases in most of those formula and grant programs, pretty big increases also included some earmarks, including some for Santa Cruz Metro. The house kind of got left in the dust with regard to this bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to try to get something through. And since the Senate has sort of become the vehicle for reauthorization now, I know there's some frustration in the house about that Boulder bill not passing, but I think in the end, people thought this is what we can get. And so we'll take it. Next slide, please. The infrastructure package number two is the one you're probably hearing about right now. People call it a human infrastructure bill, a soft infrastructure bill. The president calls it his Build Back Better program. Some people call it a budget reconciliation bill that's named after the procedure that they'll use to consider this bill, which prevents filibusters in the Senate. And so this infrastructure bill was always expected to only receive democratic votes. And so it's basically being negotiated among Democrats. And as you can see, it includes those sort of non-traditional infrastructure proposals, childcare, universal pre-K, community college, affordable housing construction, green energy incentives, including, speaking of Congressman Panetta, the proposal that he has to provide a 30% manufacturers tax credit for the purchase of commercial vehicles, including buses. So again, something that would contribute to lowering the cost, hopefully of purchasing electric and zero emissions buses down the road. That human infrastructure bill, as instructed by several house committees in the last month totals about $3.5 trillion, but the total cost technically is actually zero because it would be also offset by some tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations as approved by these house committees. The only real transportation component of this bill, there was an agreement among the president and particularly these bipartisan senators who created infrastructure package number one that they wouldn't quote unquote, double dip and put too much transportation in the infrastructure package number two, stuff that they couldn't get in number one. But the house did sneak in $10 billion for it would be a new program for HUD and FTA to create a program that would connect affordable housing with transit service. And so that again, is in the house bill right now. As I mentioned, it would be considered under budget reconciliation procedures, which is kind of a way of saying that we don't, it can't be filibustered in the Senate. So you don't need a 60 vote threshold to pass it. It can pass with a simple 51 vote threshold. At this point, you probably have seen this in the news, not all the Senate Democrats support this bill. And so as a result, the president and the house need to negotiate, particularly with two senators, two Democratic senators in particular who have problems with the size of the bill and the contents of the bill. So we're likely to see this thing scale back to about 1.5 to 2 trillion. As a matter of fact, the president talked a whole bunch. It was actually, these CNN sound halls sometimes never have any news to them. It's kind of the Pat talking points, but the president last night revealed a whole lot about his negotiations over this bill very publicly with senators mansion from West Virginia and cinema from Arizona about it. I'm guessing that in the end, we'll be back, we'll be down to about a 1.5 to 2 trillion dollar bill. I'm guessing that looking up at the top line about some of the things in there. I think the president admitted the free community college was going to probably be gone from that. I'm guessing the affordable housing construction is gonna be gone from that. I'm also guessing that $10 billion for that new program for HUD FTA would probably be shaved off of that in favor of some of the other things that are more priorities for those two senators and for the president. So now again, like I said, on this bill, it's only Democrats who are negotiating here. We don't expect Republicans in either house or the Senate to vote for it. And so now they're hopefully going to get down to brass tax now that the president I think knows where these two Democratic senators are on this bill and really get down to sort of creating a bill that can come to the house and Senate floors and be approved. Once that happens, the house will likely vote on both infrastructure bills at the same time. You recall that infrastructure bill number one, that Senate bipartisan bill is already past the Senate. Now folks in the house have wanted to hold off on a final vote on infrastructure number one until an infrastructure number two package is sort of ready to be approved. They didn't want it to get left behind. And so they were urging the speaker not to bring that first infrastructure bill up for a vote until they can vote on it at the same time as the second infrastructure bill. So hoping that they're still hoping that that can happen by the end of the month because as I mentioned to in this infrastructure bill number one, we've got a reauthorization of current transportation programs and that current authorization expires at the end of this month. And so people are hoping that we can kind of get all of this wrapped up by the end of October. I am not confident that's going to happen. It's still a very big bill. It's a big package to put together this infrastructure package number two. And so I am guessing that before the end of the month we will see a short-term extension, simple standalone short-term extension of current transportation programs maybe through December or something to try to give them some more time to vote on this. I would give it sort of Thanksgiving a better deadline for trying to vote on both of these infrastructure bills in the house. Again, we've still got a lot to negotiate on those two bills. So next slide, please. So another deadline that we're dealing with right now is December 3rd. Right now, I mentioned before that the current federal budget is being run under what they call a continuing resolution or a CR which essentially funds government operations in the absence of a finalized budget by Congress kind of funds them at current year levels right now until we can get a final budget that the fiscal year started on October 1th that CR lasts through December 3rd and also included, not included it was a separate bill but Congress approved a small increase in the federal debt limit to try to avoid us not being able to pay our bills. That also looks to be expiring around December 3rd. So again, looking at that Thanksgiving time to kind of come to a conclusion on a lot of these things is hopeful. So the DOT budget, it's interesting these continuing resolutions for a lot of agencies are really easy because it just kind of funds things at their current levels and everybody can kind of go along. The Department of Transportation actually needs an actual authorization like the authorization included in infrastructure bill number one in order to do most of its programs because that authorization allows for these programs to be funded through the Highway Trust Fund which is funded through federal gas tax revenues. So there's sort of an extra layer that DOT needs to be able to do things. And so if Congress keeps doing these continuing resolutions that fund things at their current levels we would miss out on those 36% increases that are included in the infrastructure bill number one that I talked about a few minutes ago. So we're very hopeful that Congress can kind of come to a conclusion again on the budget by Thanksgiving. Again, we'll sort of see. We're in the negotiation phase right now where the house has completed its version of a budget. The Senate Democrats have come up with their version of a budget and now we need to kind of get the Republicans in the White House involved to finalize that. Again, being able to allow rank and file members to go home for the holidays and not have to come back to Washington is a strong incentive. So hopefully we can come up with something before Thanksgiving. And then I will just mention the debt limit that right now Republicans in Congress are saying that they're not gonna help Democrats with increasing the debt limit. And they haven't, they said they're not gonna vote for it and so at some point, if Democrats want to increase or suspend the debt limit in any way, they're going to need 10 Senate Republicans on board. And as of now, Republicans said we're not gonna help unless you guys talk about some long-term deficit reduction at the same time. So again, we're gonna be seeing this sort of cliff, this debt limit cliff where the Treasury Department says we're gonna run out of borrowing authority sometime around Thanksgiving or early December. And that's gonna, again, all of these things sort of add in to how everybody's working here, right? With regard to evenly divided house and Senate. How everyone's working together. Am I angry at them because they're not helping me on the debt limit? Am I angry at the other side because they're kind of trying to push through an infrastructure bill that I don't like. This is all going to kind of, hopefully it doesn't add up to the perfect storm of us not getting anything about Thanksgiving and maybe cooler heads prevail in the end. So I think that was it. If next slide, I think that's all I had and happy to answer any questions or mention anything that I forgot, like I said, Alex and I talk a lot. And so I may have forgotten something that we've been talking about there too. Thank you, Chris. I see Jimmy Dutre has a hand up. Hey, Chris. Hi, Mayor, how are you? I'm good. Good to see you. I wish I could see you in person, but soon. Once the bomb's like one's gone, I'll come. Right, we'll see you soon, I'm sure. I'm sure, hopefully in the spring. So two questions. I just want to get clarification. So there's not going to be any formula out of these, any formulas coming out where we're going to get a set amount of money. All it is doing is going to increase the programs and we're still going to have to be competitive for those programs. Is that what I'm, I understand that correctly. That's correct. With this infrastructure bill with the new money, that I talked about the quote unquote new money, that is going to be on a competitive basis. But the increases that I was talking about in the reauthorization, those would include our formula programs as well. Okay, so it's going to be a little bit of both. That sounds like that. Yeah, I think so. I think so. And Alex, I think we've done between Alex and other staff, we've done a little bit of noodling about how much that would mean increases with regard to that. And they're, it's not bad. Okay, yeah. I mean, any bit, any bit, any bit helps, right? Yeah. So we're very thankful. I mean, we have our electric buses running now. So, and the public loves them. So we just, I think we're heading the right direction. We need to continue doing that. So my second question is in regard to the infrastructure bill number two. And I don't know, maybe you just have a little bit more insight or maybe since your ear is in Washington. I hear Senator Sinema is not going to raise one penny on the wealthy at all. And that was how this was going to be funded. So do you have any ideas of how infrastructure bill number two is going to be funded? It's going to be tough. You know, that I think that either you have to try to, you know, Congress is pretty good in a crisis of, you know, kind of looking under the couch cushions to try to find money to offset things. But we're running out of that, you know, the last sort of few pandemic relief bills, we've tried to do that. And so it may come down to, you know, with infrastructure bill number two, since it's only going to get Democratic votes using this reconciliation process, you could conceivably get sign off on 51 Democrats, including the vice president, to actually do deficit spending on that infrastructure number two. You would increase the deficit and not offset all of it. You are correct. Again, that was, again, one of those really interesting things that the president sort of revealed on the CNN town hall last night that he sort of gave away his talks with cinema that she doesn't want to raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, which is very interesting. So yeah, I think that offsets are going to be again, which is why I don't think we're going to get this infrastructure bill number two by the end of the month. There's, you know, throwing that, you know, kind of grenade into the discussion with regard to offsets is going to set them back for a few weeks, I think. Great. Well, thanks, Chris, for your update. That's as usual. Always great to see you. Good to see you. And next, we have director Rodkin. You're muted, Mike. I read a lot of media about what's going on in DC, and nonetheless, I always learn something when you come to us about what's actually going on behind the scenes in DC. And so my question is, how do you rate the risk that if they make a deal that works for Joe Manchin and cinema that the progressives in the house are going to bail and screw this up from the other side of the, you know, the spectrum or whatever? Is that a serious risk at this point, or do you think they're going to fall on the line ultimately? Obviously, you don't know for sure, but what are your feelings about where this is going? Yeah, my feelings are that ultimately they will, but I think they're going to make it very difficult for the speaker, as are on the other side, this sort of, you know, there's a group of moderates who are really pressing for what they want, but this group of moderates want is, you know, come on, bring infrastructure bill number one to the house tomorrow, so that I have something, you know, I'm vulnerable and I want something to go home to tell my voters that we've done, and we'll deal with infrastructure number two, the progressives who tend to be in more safe seats want to hold the speaker's feet to the fire and do both of them at the same time, they don't want number two to be left behind. In the end, I think that ultimately, while they're not going to like, you know, what infrastructure bill number two is going to include, that they're going to want more and want it to be more bold, I think they're going to see that, you know, you know, unfortunately the votes are just not there. Thanks for that, and let me also say, as I said to Josh about California, I don't take it for granted that we get what we get out of Washington because of your work, it's absolutely critical and people should not assume, again, that sort of this money just falls from the sky, it comes from hard work by a representative consultant that we hire basically to, let's say, increase our power in DC around these kinds of issues, and thank you for your great work in this area. Thank you, my pleasure. I would also say, you know, for those on the board, you know, who are the county supervisors, councilmen mayors, you know, like I said before, I think there's a lot of, you know, particularly for Santa Cruz County, I think it's gonna be hard to see that, you know, a really large amount of money for homelessness and affordable housing to kind of be removed from this infrastructure number two, I think it's a total of $90 billion, including $35 billion for the home program at HUD, which is, you know, the main federal affordable housing account, $35 billion for that, which, you know, it's a program that gets about a billion dollars a year usually. So unfortunately, that's, you know, I see that, you know, sort of falling by the wayside, again, talking about this kind of moderate progressive internal fight among congressional Democrats. Thank you. We have director McPherson. I just want to summarize, repeat what's been said, but thank you, Chris, again, for a fantastic job of the most divided Congress I can remember. It's incredible. It's impossible to imagine how difficult it is to try to really get something through and get anybody on either side to agree on anything. So thank you very much, because I know when we have visited DC before and we've gone to various congressional offices, they know who we are and who you are and you've done a great job for us back in DC. So thank you. Thanks to the supervisor, right? You know, I've said this before, you know, Santa Cruz Metro punches above its weight in Washington, DC. And I think it's, you know, it's thanks to the, to the really active board and a connected CEO and staff that are always available to provide the backup information that we need. You know, I think I mentioned it earlier, this, you know, Congressman Panetta's proposal for a manufacturer's tax credit for zero emissions buses, it wouldn't have happened if, you know, the CEO was in town for an APTA conference and we went by and talked to his new transportation staffer and Alex said, boy, we would really love some sort of federal way to lessen the divide between the cost of a compressed natural gas bus and a zero emissions bus. And since the Congressman is on the House Ways and Means Committee, which deals with taxes, you know, they kind of went and put pencil to paper. So, you know, that sort of active activity pays off CEO Clifford. Yeah, I just wanted to take a moment to jump in too. We're doing so well with our state and federal representation and, you know, equally over on the federal side, Chris does a fabulous job. This has been, again, a remarkable year. You've heard the reports that I've provided you every single month. Chris helps me navigate through that as we approach the board meeting because the ground is always shifting right up to the last minute before the board meeting. Those notes are coming together. I really appreciate that and the fact that he's willing to meet with me on a regular basis and talk through these things. I just also wanted to point out that on the House infrastructure side, Chris really helped us to get a number of earmarks into that. Now, unfortunately, Congress is working on the Senate version, so the earmarks are not there, but had the House version move forward, we would have had a whole bunch of earmarks. And I really appreciate how savvy Chris is in helping us to identify the types of earmarks that each Senator and each Congressperson would be interested in and help us to write the letters to the appropriate people that we needed to do. And then he also talked about the Panetta tax credit for the electric buses. So we've made it through round one. We have a bill that's included in the human infrastructure side, but there's still some work to be done that Chris is helping us on. And that one is the interpretation of that 30%. It appears Congressman's staff interpret that as a 30% against the purchase price of the bus. Well, that's significant if that comes to be. And if we figure out how to make that go from a tax credit for BYD and Protera and other electric manufacturers to the bottom line purchase price of the bus, that could be $300,000. And that $300,000 plus a state HVIP voucher, all of a sudden an electric bus will cost less than our compressed natural gas buses do. So this is exciting times and Chris is helping us to navigate that and hopefully to get that interpretation of that tax bill very clear about how the money, how much the money is and how it flows back to us. Chris, thank you for another great year. Thank you. And Director Rodkin. No, I'm done. All right. The sun's hard for me to tell if it's a hand or it's a sun. Yeah, yeah, I don't know if that's, it's not a good background for a reason to hand. Or change the color of the hand. Thank you for me as well, Chris. Everyone has shared their appreciation, but I want to add mine as well. Thank you for all your work and support. All right. Thank you. Any other, I don't see any questions or hands in the audience. And so we will move to, Oral, I'm sorry, a Paracruz update. That will be Daniel Saracossa. Good morning. Good morning. We have today Ken Hart from Swift Consulting Services. He's here to provide everybody with an update on the Paracruz facility project. Is Ken there? Yes, his hands. We just need to bring him. Is that his hand that I'm seeing? This is hand is there, but I don't see the microphone. Right. There it is. Have to unmute again. Good morning. Morning. Can you hear me? Thank you. I'm not hiding from you. I think I have an issue with my camera and I need to reload my driver or some such thing that's clearly outside of my wheelhouse. But thank you, Chair Lind and board members. I want to acknowledge and thank the design team that's been involved here for the high quality plans that they've prepared and then for the timely revisions following the receipt of County comments. As I understand it, the district has already applied for RTC grant and the FTA grant application deadline is over 1119. So we've been really working to try to get the planning commission agenda prior to that date. And we are on the agenda for Wednesday, November 11th. And there's at the 10th anyway. So the staff report for that hearing will be available the week before that's Wednesday, the third it'll be published not anticipating anything untoward in the conditions, but we want to be ready to address concerns if any with the planner before the hearing and with the PC if need be. The approval is expected to occur on the first hearing with planning commission. There isn't a two week appeal period. So the effective date would be November 24th. The next steps as we see it would be the preparation of construction drawings and documents. And I've asked the design team members of what kind of timing that would be involved in that. They indicate that there would be about three months necessary to prepare all the construction drawings and documents for submittal of the building permit application. The building permit application and approval is it will take a couple of routings and comments with the planning department. And I'm assuming a six month period for that. And if that if everything goes according to that schedule that the permit would be issued on September 1st of next year of 2022. If the construction is proposed to begin in the fall, we would need a winter rating permit, which I don't see why the county would not grant that for this site. Otherwise, construction could begin April 15th, 2023. So that's all the comments I have and I'm available to answer any questions you might have. And I see a question from Director Rockin or a hand up, please. Do you need any participation of our board in the planning commission meeting? Or is this, I think it's basically pretty smooth at this point. Let us look at the conditions that the recommended conditions of approval. All of the communication I've had with the planner has been very smooth and he doesn't seem doesn't seem to have any concerns. I don't know what other agency comments he's going to be incorporating into the conditions. But let us look at those proposed conditions before making that decision. Okay, just let us know if there's, you know, if our involvement would be helpful, please let us know. We'll arrange to have some folks show up and speak on behalf of the public, particularly the disabled communities and senior communities needs. Certainly. And I wanted to thank Paracruz. I understand you're 100% vaccinated. That's just awesome. Thank you. Chair, one additional question. I know actually in a community meeting I hosted about the Kaiser project, it came up that folks in that neighborhood around Madison lane, et cetera, miss being able to use that's the site we're discussing for a park and ride. Is there any ability to use it for that in the interim, but before we get started actually breaking ground on the project? Well, I think that's going to be a question for your staff. But John Swift with in the office that I work in is handling the Kaiser application and he did indicate the other day that. I'm actually discussing the Paracruz site that you're talking about, right? In the past it's been used as a park and ride. And so it was an appreciated function by the community. We're talking about a year at least until potentially breaking ground. Is there any way to continue using it for that function in the short term? If I can interject, Supervisor, why don't I provide you a briefing offline on this? There's a long history to this and that exact point. So rather than take up time today, I'd like to provide you a briefing on that and anybody else interested in it, but we'll reach out to you. Okay, thank you. All right. Any other questions or comments on the Paracruz report from Daniel or Ken? Thank you both then. Thank you. And then we would move to the update on cruise on demand microtransit service. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, well, I just saw their head. Hopefully the hand up, it disappeared. So hopefully I didn't miss anyone. I looked in the public, but okay, thank you. All right, thank you Madam Chair. Good morning. I appreciate it. Excuse me, John, before you start, Kingston, can we go to agenda item 14? That's great. You can leave it on that for a few minutes. So this item is an update on Metro's cruise on demand pilot, which we began in April, 2021. The service allows customers to book trips on demand from any address within the district up to a distance of three miles. If the service area is the same as our Paracruz, complimentary ADA service area, the service hours are the same and the fare structure is similar for $4 for trips up to two miles and $6 for trips up to three miles. We have an app where customers can book a trip and they can also use our customer service call center. The goal here was to test whether on demand service could increase ridership and otherwise hard to serve areas of our service area or potentially reveal new markets that we might not be serving well with our current fixed route service. And it really sought to take advantage of two unique factors that Metro has. One, we already operate an on-demand service in-house our Paracruz service. And we had an app already in place to be able to extend that service to the general public. This type of general public on-demand service is often called microtransit. Lots of agencies are experimenting with type of service. So we were fortunate to be able to jump into this without having to extend really any funds and see how on-demand service could help or again reveal new areas in our district. So next slide. I'm just going to jump into the ridership results through the first six months. So on the red bars there are the cruise on-demand ridership. We were averaging about 200 trips per month from the start of the program through about July. And between July and August we saw a pretty significant decrease. And this happened while Paracruz ridership began to increase. And we anticipated that this might happen because the two services share the same vehicles, the same operators. We kind of knew that when Paracruz ridership began to increase as we're coming and continue to come out of the pandemic that the cruise on-demand trips might not be able to be booked by customers. And so that decreased from July to August. We think as a result of that that doesn't explain the decrease from August to September where Paracruz ridership remained flat but again cruise on-demand ridership decreased to under a hundred trips in the month. And this I think as a result of the ending of the temporary reduced fare period that we had through September. And so at that point in September basically where trips were $2 and $3 depending on the trip distance they doubled to four and six. And I think that fair increase resulted in the trip decrease that we saw there. So just to step back one second. So Paracruz trips that we get to and they need to be booked 24 hours in advance. And then up to from the 24 hours advance up to truly on-demand we allow the general public to book trips on cruise on-demand. The next slide please. Before you move on, could I ask about that last slide? Yeah, please. Do we know, was there a decline in the number of people trying to get up the on-demand ride? These bars show us that we didn't carry a bunch of on-demand riders but was the demand still out there? We just couldn't provide the rides for them because they had the bands for full. Or what? What's going on? Yeah, so then we partially answer that in the next slide. Okay, sorry. Yeah, and this shows average daily trip. Trips completed, no shows and canceled on cruise on-demand. So the canceled as someone booked a trip and then canceled it. So the total, if you added up the total bars you've kind of get a sense of the total activity that was coming through the cruise on-demand platform. Unfortunately we don't know the reason why these trips were canceled. It could be that someone just changed their mind about when they needed to go or it could be that they couldn't book the trip that they wanted to and they booked it and then canceled it. I kind of think a lot of the cancellations that we see in August where for the first time we have more cancellations than actually trips completed is a result of that. And again, it's a result of the increase in para-cruise ridership and cruise on-demand customers not being able to book the trip when they wanted to go. I did look at the para-cruise ridership and there are a number of cancellations in para-cruise as well so the tall orange bars there are at least May through July are similar to proportionally what they would look like for para-cruise ridership. The August one is concerning where there is more cancellation than trips actually completed. But again, it could be just a couple of people booking a lot of trips and then canceled. Unfortunately we don't know the intended or the desired time versus the trip that the customer actually ended up getting. We always knew this was gonna be an experiment based on the fact that we had access capacity and it was not sustainable in the long run without a new source of funding. Right. So it's not the end of the world here but it's, thank you, it's what you've done so far really interesting. Thank you. So next slide. Well, I'll hold on to the previous slide for one second and just say that one thing we've discovered is that two thirds of the customers that are using cruise on demand are actually existing para-cruise customers. And so it's essentially para-cruise customers who like the ability to book a last minute trip or to book a trip within the 24 hour booking window. We do constrain those trips up to again, distance of three miles. And we do that because we don't wanna overload the system and we wanna be able to always be able to serve the longer distance trips that para-cruise often requires say from Watsonville to mid-county or wherever. We don't restrict those but we do on the cruise on demand side. So one really interesting thing that this data and this program helps us reveal is we actually get full trip origin destination data which we don't have in any fixed system. So on the left I'm just showing the pickup location and it's mostly centers around activity centers where you might expect Santa Cruz the city of Santa Cruz accounts with 42% of cruise on demand pickups. Capitola jumps out and Watsonville particularly jumps out. So there was relatively more demand for the service in Watsonville than we see on our fixed routes. And on the right is our fixed route service areas. And it's because we don't have automatic passenger counters or to know precise boarding locations on our fixed route customers. So it's not a perfect comparison and the Cabrillo South County routes those are our trunk routes. So that's the 71, 69 A and W those are traveling all the way Santa Cruz to Watsonville. But we can't compare the local Watsonville routes because we know that those pickups are entirely in Watsonville. And you can see that the demand on the fixed route side or the demand on the cruise on demand side is relatively higher than it was in Watsonville which suggests perhaps that we're underserving the area or that there are areas that we're not serving as well as we could be with our current fixed route service. And so with the pilot even though we have limited ridership it allows us to really delve in further into the location. So we know every pickup and drop off location that's being served on cruise on demand and we can go in and see is this being served by a fixed route should we consider alternate routing as the case may be. So that's really been an interesting benefit of running this program even though the demand has been relatively low throughout it. And I will just caveat the whole thing by saying that a relatively small number of customers can influence all of the data. So two individuals for example have accounted for 10% of all trips county wide. And just a handful accounted, let me see here, five customers accounted for half of all trips taken in Watsonville. So we need to caveat everything here with, and this is actually how a lot of these microtransit programs end up working a lot of agencies where a certain small number of customers end up figuring it out and are able to book their trips and others are not and data you see is kind of influenced by that relatively small number of customers. So that pretty much concludes the data through the first six months. We're gonna continue through the next six months of the pilot. There's no action to take. I laid out some alternatives to consider at the end of the year and the report. And I will just say that we're in this somewhat challenging position as Director Rocken alluded to. We don't want to too hard on this because we're not sure we really have the capacity to serve more trips. And so we're in this kind of weird limbo area where we're not marketing super extensively. It is on the website, but we're cautious about setting up a situation where customers may have a bad experience because we actually don't have the capacity at the same time, we're not gonna go out and expand the service right now through hiring additional operators just to serve crews on demand because we don't necessarily know that the demand is there. So yeah, I'll conclude my report there and we'll continue with this pilot for another six months. Thank you, John. Any questions? So I see a hand up. Let me make sure are there any questions from the board? And I see Alte has a hand up. Thank you for the report. And I love knowing that. It's fair to say, it's safe to say that because we're not marketing, because we don't really wanna push this out that we don't really know what the demand is. That's fair, that's a fair comment because the demand can actually be higher if we were actually marketing this as a resource but we couldn't afford to sustain it. So we're just trying to this out. What happens when this drops off? What is the community's expectation? Are they hearing this as a pilot and it's in particular way and we're expecting to just get data? Are they hearing that? Yeah, I mean, we're presenting the same information to the public that we are to you that this is a one-year pilot and that we're taking advantage of our existing resources through Paracruz to try this out. Again, two thirds of the customers are existing Paracruz customers. And so I think that one just goes to show that the most effective marketing has been through word of mouth, through operators, through people that are already on these vehicles. There hasn't been that much expansion beyond that into the general public which was the goal of the pilot to open it up, open up the services of the general public. You know, we, yeah, again, it's, I have mixed feelings about it whether we should push harder. I think there is room now to try to market harder because we saw that drop in ridership, right? So there should be capacity available whereas when we saw the drop from July to August when Paracruz ridership went up, that was probably an indication that we were losing some capacity because Paracruz ridership was increasing. But now the ridership is so low, you know, it's around four to five passengers per day average total that are booking trips on the system that I think we did, again, try to market a little farther than we currently are. Okay, so is there harm in me telling students in hard to serve areas that they can use this as a resource? Not at all, please. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Director North. Next, we have Director Koenig. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Ergo for the report. As you've repeated that a couple of times, it's interesting that two thirds of the users are actually Paracruz customers. And so really, what I'm hearing is that this is maybe a way to extend or improve our Paracruz service. Do existing, does our existing Paracruz service allow folks to book through an app like this but just 24 hours previously or is there no app-based booking? No, there is app-based booking. It's just the 24 hour is the cutoff. And so, right, it is revealing that we could look at expanding the booking window to same-day bookings. We might wanna think about the distance limitation, but we may not need to do that. And Daniel might have more to say on that. There's no requirement that we do same-day bookings for ADA, Paracruz trips, but it could be a nice feature that we offer to customers. Yeah, and could, how is it currently being marketed, the cruise on-demand program and could maybe the marketing be improved just within Paracruz customers, existing Paracruz customers who seem to find the greatest utility? Yeah, I know that's a good point. So I mentioned that two thirds of the customers are Paracruz customers. That's still only 10% of Paracruz customers over the same period. So there's a lot of 90% that didn't try the service. We have a website landing page. Danielle's developed brochures. We've done some outreach to businesses around the community. But again, then we kind of paused because we didn't wanna overload. We didn't know what the demand would be, but I think there would be a benefit at least trying to market more towards existing customers. And I think, I don't know for sure, but I think there's a way to potentially market directly to our customers. I think we have, you know, address, mailing addresses, email addresses, perhaps what we could just spread the word that way. Yeah, I think that'd be a great idea. I mean, especially because that kind of service change could potentially be continued in the future, right? If we're not, if these are existing customers that we already have a funding stream for. Thank you. Dr. Dutron. Hello, yep, I got you. So it looks like that 59% of people who used it were in a fixed route service area. And I think you used the word at Watsonville being underserved, am I mis-saying something? Am I misusing your words? What do you think is a solution to fix this? So I, again, one benefit of having this data from an on-demand service is that we actually see pick up and drop off locations that we don't get to see in our fixed route data. And so it was interesting to me as I was going through the data that there was a higher proportion of use in Watsonville on cruise on demand than our fixed route service in general. So then our Watsonville only routes. Now that's also a function of the level of service in Watsonville. And I will say that in general, the Watsonville fixed routes are the lowest, the lowest performing people, the lowest passengers for revenue hour in our system. So I don't know the answer there. I think we need to delve more into this. It's pretty shocking, right? I mean, you see that when that Watsonville is using this program, but they're not getting on the buses. Yeah. And I mean, I was actually going to send Alex an email. I wanted to talk to him about service and stuff in Watsonville and with our circulators because I think we need to really look at our drop offs and our stops. And we're missing some really opportunity places that I think people would start using the bus a little bit more if we dropped off and picked up in places that they want to use and not dropping them off in isolated bus stops. So that is a conversation, Alex. I would like to have with you. And then, I mean, this is really a clear, this to me is a really clear issue. And I think that we really need to fix that because we need to get the people back into using our fixed services. So I think there's a further discussion to have. So thank you. Jimmy, if I can make a suggestion, you might want to invite John to that meeting because you're going to get into that level of detail. You need somebody who has the plain data right in front of him. Not that Alex doesn't have a speaker on everything but that might be a more productive meeting. Yeah, and I can, you know, I really can talk about the community, right? Cause I know where people want to be used, use their services. And, you know, I mean, I like, we drop off as to the Pradajante, that is a place people use, right? There are other places I think we're missing the mark on that we could definitely probably change these numbers because of, you know, our service. So thank you. Director, CEO preferred. Thank you, Madam Chair and Directors. Just wanted to close on a couple of points. One, this is just a six month review. So we're not making any decisions yet. We're just giving you the outcome thus far and based on information that we do know. As John has tried to indicate, I think numerous times through his presentation, there's a delicate balance. We're trying to serve our paratransit folks. We're trying to use excess capacity and keep costs low. So as a result of the strategy that John and team put together, you know, you have a marginal costing approach where you're just using excess capacity. So the cost per trip is marginally less than typically on demand is as long as you're using excess capacity. So there is some concern about doing it too well. And what I mean by that is if we do it too well, we exceed that excess capacity. We're no longer in a marginal costing perspective and we have to add additional drivers and additional vehicles. And you might say, well, that sounds like success. Great, let's add more drivers and more vehicles. But then the problem with that is you, you know, our paratransit cost per trip is over $80 per trip, over $80 per trip. It is very expensive. As Director Dutcher pointed out, we need to encourage always fixed route as the first choice and fixed route is about $10 a trip. So, you know, both are subsidized, very, but way heavy on the paratransit side. So we have to be careful. We have to think about that as we go through this process. So absent any windfall of new operating dollars, you're just limited to moving the dollars around within your existing budget. And those are the tough decisions. Where do you put it? You know, we've had a lot of discussions as we come out of COVID based on feedback from riders that on our trunk lines, they wanna see more frequent service. Actually, riders across the system, whether it's urban or rural, wanna see more frequency of service on the fixed route that costs money. So where do you put those dollars? Those are difficult decisions you have yet to hit. So just in closing, I would say, we'll bring you some of those decision points when we come back to you with the one you reviewed on the microtransit. Thank you. I see Nate, Braco has a hand up. Hello. Yes, we hear you. Hi, Nate Braco, our local 23 union representative at Paracruz. I just wanna say, although we, I agree with the analysis that has been put forth. None of the alternatives that have been, that were put in the packet have been presented at all to the union. So I just wanted to give a couple of points to those. First off, the first bullet point, as far as contracting, the union highly disagrees with contracting out any of the service. We strongly believe that any new jobs created should be good paying union jobs. As far as the other alternatives, any type of really, they've reiterated this several times, Alex Clifford and John, that expanding service, any kind of expansion of service or extra marketing to get more ridership in the on-demand microtransit service, really ultimately will lead to the need to hire new employees. Paracruz is already taxed in the ability to perform on time with the amount of drivers that we have. We could always, we could always use more just for the basic paratransit service. So I just wanted to keep that in mind. And I also wanted to say that we, and hesitant to say that lowering fares may be a good alternative because I feel it disadvantages our paratransit riders, even though the majority of the microtransit is paratransit, but the ones that don't use it having to pay more fares for, or higher fares for similar rides. I mean, to me, it's a moral ethical issue there. That's it, thank you. You're muted, Donna. Thank you, Nate. All right, any other comments from, I see no other hands from the public and no other hands here. So thanks, John. Thank you. Yeah, some challenges, but look forward to the next report. Okay, our next item is committee assignments, and that is to me. And what this item is, is that, as all of you know, we received the resignation from Maria Gonzalez in September from as a Metro board member, and Mayor Dutra has appointed, or Watsfield has appointed Nate, I'm sorry, Alta Northcutt to take that position, and we had the pleasure of seeing her sworn in at our last meeting as a board member or director, and we have the committee assignments that had been vacated. So we had, just a moment, I'm pulling that up on this report. Okay, she had been nominated to, recommended to take the positions, just one moment. All right, we need to fill the seats on the SCCIC and the SCCRTC, and I have received that recommendation and appointing Alta Northcutt to take those positions that were left vacant by Director Gonzalez. So do we need any further? I have a question. That's just to finish the term, correct? So that's one more month, I mean, basically two more months, when is the election? January, January are usually when the nominations, and in this case, the positions were filled or in February of last year, so February of this year, 2021. So it should be, yes, just a couple months. Yeah. Okay, and my preference is that the seat strongly stays in a South County unrepresentative as the other two seats are represented by mid-county and a North County representative. So if Alta would like to continue filling the seat for Aurelio, I think that is, we definitely need that voice on the RTC. That was why I made the appointment. I'm just backing you. All right, no, no, no. And the only question that you raise is, I should have made sure, and my understanding was Alta was willing to step into that role. Yeah. Is she? We don't know, right? We have. Before we, Before I let you to work. We've taken you hostage. I'm here for it. I'm always. All right. Congratulations. I'm excited to see you fill those shoes and thank you for being willing to serve. You know, because we're going to float a bond, you might get a free lunch out of this, Alta. Yeah. All right. I don't think there's any formal action. Just in, am I correct in that? The report is asking for a board approval. So if you could have a vote, that'd be great. All right. I'll move, approve the nomination. I'll sign here. Okay. We have a motion by director Rock and a second by director Dutron. And a roll call vote. Okay. So the motion is to accept the nomination of director Northcott to the vacant seats on the STCIC and the STCRTC. Motion was by director Rotkin and second by director Dutron. Yes sir. And the roll call is director Dutron. Yes. Director Calantari-Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Director Lind. Aye. Director McPherson. Aye. I believe that director Myers has left about 1030. I'm back in, Gina. I'm sorry, I did come back in. I didn't get a chance to email you. I'm an aye also. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And director Northcott. Yes. Dr. Pegler. Aye. Dr. Peterson. Aye. Dr. Rothwell. Thank you. Director Rotkin. Aye. unanimous. All right. Congratulations. And thank you for serving. Next is our CEO oral report on the COVID-19 update. And COVID-19 update both. Thank you, Madam Chair and Directors. I'll start off with our new hires and promotions. No promotions this period, but new hires. And as you may recall, you authorized some additional positions to be filled in the parts department as a result of needing to cover shifts that we historically have not covered. We had a great application pool for that. And we were able to hire three individuals. Miguel Duarte, Alfonso Rico and Carlos Fernandez. And I would just point out that Miguel Duarte is an internal. I don't think we call it a promotion, but he hired and went through the interview process. He's currently or was a bus operator. So that's exciting that you can move within the organization that way. And then we hired Thomas Faray as our database administrator. And Jesus Estrada Almarez as a new paratransit driver. So congratulations and welcome aboard to all of those folks. I'll move on to the remainder of my report. I have, as usual, a lot of items to cover as quickly as I can. Feel free to jump in and stop me at any point if you want me to elaborate on something or you wanna ask some questions. It is good to note that we've had no new COVID cases since September 10th. So we're currently on a good streak here, thankfully. However, as you may recall from last year, we are entering into the holiday season. And then as you know, from last year, COVID cases in the county, in the state and the nation spiked after Halloween and all the way through the new year. So let's hope that does not occur, but we should just be aware of the pattern of last year. In the way of vaccination rates, our agency-wide average vaccination is currently sitting at 85%. Nearly, well, several of our departments are over 90% with the exception of purchasing customer service, facilities maintenance, finance, fleet maintenance, and bus operations. In the area of mandatory vaccinations, you heard a little bit about that this morning from the union representation. Our current hybrid policy of once a week mandatory testing, if not vaccinated, will increase on Monday to twice a week testing. So even if we put in place the mandatory policy, it will have probably about 60-day period of time for folks to think about it and hopefully get fully vaccinated. Again, in the vein of trying to protect our employees, we're gonna take that to the next level in the interim and do the twice a week testing. As was mentioned earlier this morning, management is finalizing, well, has finalized our draft mandatory vaccination policy. You heard a little bit about that from the unions this morning. It is very similar to the San Francisco model in which once put in place, there will be a certain period of time, probably something like 60 days for employees to get fully vaccinated or provide us proof of full vaccination before we enter into the discipline process, which is disciplined up to and including termination. We are, as was mentioned, in the meeting confer process on the discipline part of that with the unions. We've had at least one meeting with them on that part of it and I believe there are another meeting with both unions scheduled for next week. So at this point, we're targeting trying to wrap up that process and issue the memo towards the end of this month with a December 31st deadline to provide the proof of full vaccination. As I mentioned last month, we still have two FDA COVID assistance, federal COVID assistance audits underway. I don't know why they're doing two. The audits are required in the legislation that created CARES, CARESA and ARPA. And so we're just lucky to be up early, I guess, but those take time and they could take, but one of them will have an exit conference probably in early November, we're learning. And then the other one we think could take up to three months to close out. I talked to you last month and I think the preceding month about our problems with synchromatics with our automated vehicle location system that we purchased and was being installed. On October 12th, Metro issued synchromatics and notice of termination for default. So at this point, all that remains is to come to an agreement on how they will reimburse us for money's paid to date and how they will, the process of, by which they will remove their equipment from our buses. Just in the way of background, the total cost of this project is a $1.6 million project. It is broken out by $1.4 million in state transportation program stiff money and 200,000 in local money, state transportation improvement program stiff and 200,000 in local money. Today we've paid synchromatics $923,000. We expect to get every penny of that back and the balance of the project, if they were continuing on the balance of the project today would be about $659,000. Now we did have some concerns about our state stiff money because that money expires this November. And I just wanna say WandaMood did a really wonderful job working with the California Transportation Commission and they voted, they just recently voted to allow us to go to keep the money through July of 2023. So we believe that will be sufficient time to wrap up the synchromatics exit, if you will, and to bring a new contractor aboard and have the equipment installed. So thank you to the CTC and thank you for WandaMood for a job well done. Alex, if it's not exposing us to any legal problem, could you give us a little more detail on what went wrong and what your plans are for how we're gonna, the next contractor, how we're gonna, who are the other potential contractors and where is this going? I'm gonna turn to Isaac who knows that subject really well. All right, good morning everyone. Isaac Hawley, ITS Director. So the next contractor in line would be Clever Devices. They actually were a very high storing vendor in the initial evaluation, but in the final analysis, the team elected to select synchromatics for various reasons, but they were the second highest in the final determination from the team and so procurement guidelines and from, and we of course deferred to Julie and Hansen Bridget to ensure that we were doing this the right way. Clever Devices is the next in line. And so now we are in the process of pursuing in tandem to the exodus of the other vendor pursuing them. What went wrong to your question, Mike? What went wrong was we had fundamental issues of device stability on the buses. Head signs would go offline. We had incorrect head signs displayed. I mean, stuff that's really visible and adversely affects the public. Those things were going offline. We had the MDT that is the mobile data terminal or the tablet that is, in this case is a tablet on the vehicle, that would go offline. It would just fail or need to be reset. And so the bus operators were battling these things over this period of time, you know, throughout this deployment and we simply could not accept the system in the state that it was. And we were really concerned that even if we achieved a moderate degree of stability, we were concerned about the end result being a unreliable real-time passenger information system. We really did our due diligence to make this work and pardoned up with operations. The operators were really great about giving us feedback on what was happening out there. And we just, we hit a point where we just said we can't do this anymore and we have to. It's the right thing to do for the public and for the agency. Any other questions and details that you'd like me to delve into? Just to, is the tech, the second bit or is the technology, what do we know about the technology itself? I'm not, you know, there's obviously human input into this whole process, but the actual system itself, is it a system that's being run in other places successfully and working or? Clever devices is a very well-established vendor. We actually ran their equipment on the 1600 series buses, the buses we leased to buy from Paul Revere Transit back, right? Some years ago. And the stuff just worked, very, very, very stable. And it's like the IBM, I've used the analogy, it's like the IBM of ITS solutions. No one was ever fired for selecting clever devices. So it is a proven system, AC Transit runs it, they just finished a deployment of their system and they've been pleased with it. It's, again, it is stable and it just works. So. Thank you very much. That's great. That's, it was a bit of confidence. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Any other questions? Well, thank you. And next. Well, Alex still has other stuff to think. Yep, bye, Alex. We can't hear you, Alex. Or I can't. It doesn't show you're muted, but we can't hear you. How's that? That's better. Here you go. Sorry about that. PERSUAL, unfunded liability topic you've heard about a lot recently. We are wrapping up the review of proposals submitted for the municipal advisory services for the issuance of pension obligation bonds. So Chuck and team are working through that process to get us to point to issuing the bond early next year. Watsonville circulator, lots of questions coming in. How is it doing? It's the most common question. So as you know, that just went into effect on September 16th. And since then, ridership is averaging about 42 boardings on weekdays and 48 on weekends with 702 total rides in that partial month of September. Total ridership on local Watsonville routes increased in September, while some inner city routes had slightly less ridership. For example, the route 71 and 69A. So there probably was some movement of riders off of other routes over to it, which is probably why those routes went down. Now, what does this equate to on a productivity basis? Equates to about three trips per hour. And really where we want that service to be is at about 20 to 30 trips per hour. So we have some work to do and we'll be working with John and Danielle in the days and weeks to come to talk about marketing strategies. We need to increase the ridership on that, but it's a very new route and it takes a little bit of time to get the word out. A quick update on our Caltrans project, which is the SoCal Freedom Corridor. We expect to receive notice to proceed from Caltrans in November. The plan is to release the RFP in January and award to the consultant in February. And we actually have until June, 2024 to complete that project. Another frequent question is ridership. And we should all be asking that question on a regular basis. So when we look at FY22 versus pre-COVID FY19, UCSC ridership was down when COVID hit, was down 90% compared to pre-COVID levels for much of the last year and a half. With the return of the students, ridership shot up. To 90% of pre-COVID levels in the month of September. Really great news. The new round 18 is the most heavily used UCSC route overall and by Trev. On the local side, local ridership is just under one half of pre-COVID levels. And highway 17 is at about one third of pre-COVID levels. So both local and highway 17, we have some work to do. Now, if you look at that on a total system-wide basis, total system-wide when comparing September FY22 to September FY19, again pre-COVID numbers were down still about 33%. But a vast improvement over where we were at when we were down at 80 plus percent below year over year. So things are going in the right direction but still a lot of work to do. Looking forward, we have the upcoming winter bid which goes into place on December 9th. And back by popular demand, we're going to extend some buses on the highway 17 to serve San Jose State University. John has worked out a way to do that to satisfy the critics that were upset at us for pulling it back and to do so in a cost-neutral way. So that was good news. We'll get those back running in the December 9th bid. Our driver, relative to our driver shortage, we're gonna have a temporary suspension of some low ridership highway 17. These will be your early morning trips and 391X round trips to save operators. So that's solely related to our driver shortage at this point. You recall we participated in the Clean Air Days. Metro earned a title of one of California Clean Air Days top engagement partners and was featured on KION for offering free fares on October 6th. So thank you, Danielle, for that great job. Relative to our bus operator recruitment and hiring bonus, the recruitment closes on the 24th. So two more days and that closes. To date, we have about 33 applicants. We also have a commercial running on Comcast and that commercial is also posted at our website scmtd.com. We've purchased KSCO advertisements. If you listen to that station several times throughout the day you'll hear our recruitment advertisement. Our story about bus operator shortage was also covered by KSBW and Lookout Local. And James Sendeval and I were able to partner in an interview with KSBW to help the public know about our shortage and the opportunity here. And then we were also placing now hiring ads on our buses. HR attended a job fair at the board walk on the 13th. And then for reference, because we've been asked this question several times and haven't always had the answer at the tip of our tongue a reference bus operator starting pay is $19.97 an hour. So we pay you while we train you to be a driver. And then after you complete probation you bump up to $23.75 an hour. And then after you complete your first year you bump up to $25.26 per hour. So find an employer who has that aggressive as a pay schedule and has the benefits that we have. HR has two more vaccination clinics coming which will also include the booster shot. So for those employees that we talked about earlier they still have an opportunity to think about it through the vaccination clinics here on site. And then HR has established a connection with the Center for Employment Training in San Jose. They are holding trainings for people who don't wanna go to college but are still looking for a career path. They have an automotive specialist program for example. So they're gonna post our flyers in all their classes and they're gonna let us know when they start holding in-person fares again so that we can attend. And then in closing, if we could just bring up the bus wrap, go that's a good slide. So this is a new bus wrap for our fixed routes not the electrics, just our fixed routes. Danielle has been working on and next year we will receive six gillig buses and those gilligs will be in this wrap design. So this is a vinyl wrap as opposed to a paint design which allows us a little bit more flexibility. So our plan is to run those six buses throughout the system and look at what kind of feedback we get in the way of this new scheme. If people say, no we like the retro go back to the retro then we can go back to the retro. But if they like this new innovative concept that Danielle has come up with then with your concurrence we'll keep pushing it forward with other bus deliveries. Madam Chair, Directors, that concludes my remarks. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Good job. Thank you everyone. Okay, any questions for Alex or any part of the report? Oh, I see. Yes, Director Northcutt. I just wanted to extend an invite to anyone on the staff. Cabrillo is starting our conversations about housing and some of our housing will impact the Watsonville Aptos area because Watsonville also has a housing update we have to meet, which means we'll be talking about lines, where housing is placed, how many people we can afford to sustain. So when we start talking about routes and that's kind of what led me to this reminder. So when you were talking about routes and what they look like and where our existing customers are, I would like to include you into the conversations that Cabrillo is having about housing for our student populations. We are in the process of writing a grant to see if we can qualify for the fund, the fundings for planning. And then we'll be reaching out to students about what that looks like and then we'll be talking about locations. So I will keep you posted on that, but I would also like to extend an invite to participate. That's great, Alta. And John would be our point person on that. That's great. I don't know to what extent Watsonville has done this, but in Santa Cruz, a lot of projects have gotten approved that are particularly for low-income housing or affordable housing. Part of the arrangement is that the company that's developing is usually private sector, even nonprofit or for-profit, but they make arrangements that they have to not only provide an adequate bus stop nearby and so forth if it's appropriate for our routes, but actually subsidize the rides of their residents. So that's something you definitely be looking into here. Right. And that's kind of what prompted that comment because we're gonna be going back to a state of how many housing units we need to provide and based on our populations and the routes and how we service people to get from general location to general location is gonna be a big deal. So yes, all of that. Thank you. Okay. If there are no other questions or comments then I will ask our... Thanks, Madonna. I see James hand is up. I didn't see it. Sorry, James. Just doesn't, yeah. There we go. I don't think it has a microphone yet. Maybe it's an old hand and there we go. No, still. James, oh, there we go. Now he has it. There we go. Thank you. First, I just wanted to say thank you, Alex, for extending that invitation for KSBW to collaborate on the message of the issue of bringing in more operators and also to comment on the new design. I really like it. I haven't seen it yet and I don't know what other operators think about it, but we get a lot of compliments on our new electric bus and how it looks and how it stands out from our passengers and I think this design is gonna do the same. Thank you. Thank you, James. I actually have another comment to you, sorry. Okay. In terms of the radio stations we're dealing with, I believe KSBW has got a bunch of good stuff going on but a lot of their, the profile of their listeners are tend to be more senior, older listeners. So we might also look at radio stations like Cape Hague and that younger rock stations and stuff that younger listeners are listening to because that's probably our demographic for where we're gonna hire bus drivers. It's not gonna be seniors for the most part. Mike, I think we're doing that but let me turn to Danielle and to Dawn to confirm or deny that. I believe HR has one on KOIN through iHeartRadio, is that correct, Dawn? Yes, I was just gonna say iHeartRadio, yes. Yeah, you may already be doing it. I just, as I said, KSCO was mentioned and again, they have a lot, it's a big listenership there and stuff but a lot of those folks are tend to be older. But the iHeart, word of mouth, word of mouth. I think I saw commercial too. Commercial? Yes, on Comcast with our current employees. I think I saw it on CNN. Like, I was like, whoa, we made it big. That's good, it's on a wide range of channels. I'm glad to hear you're saying it, that's fantastic. And for you having, it is on our homepage on our website, which Alex mentioned if you wanna check it out. I think I saw it on KSCO or, I mean, KSBW or KOIN, I'm not sure which one but one of the prime time shows. So I see, Dan Henderson has a hand up. Yeah, thank you. So just, you know, because we're at UCSC, we're faced with some of the same challenges in identifying operators for our campus circulator. You know, it's a, they're different, they're similar tasks, but they're different, you know, driving county wide is a lot different than driving the circulator. But I was wondering if, I'm not sure who would be the person to ask, maybe Alex can speak on it or direct it to someone else. What are some of the primary versions or challenges? Why can't or don't people want, I mean, want the position, wanna take that career path? You know, I have some like, you know, anecdotal thoughts on the matter, but I'm wondering if you have had any feedback or any sort of insight as to what makes this such a hard position to fill. You know, it could be as simple as cost of living around here, but all across the United States, like lower cost of living, we're seeing the same type of situation. So do you have any thoughts on that? I do, Dan, and I thank you for the question. I will tell you that on that topic, I just a week ago asked CTAA, which is a small to mid-sized transit agency association across the nation, to take up that exact topic and to find out if we can create some sharing of what others might do, what others might be doing that's more innovative to address the problem. You know, here's the problem as I see it that makes it a struggle to find folks that are interested in this job. You know, we already know it's a difficult job. It's long hours, but because of the way it's seniority works, you come in to the agency with no seniority, low seniority, and that means that you may not get particularly appealing runs. You're gonna, you know, you might be working late night. You likely won't have traditional weekends off for many, many years as you work your way up the seniority ladder. That's really unappealing to somebody who is family oriented, maybe has some children to think about coming to an organization and not being able to be home for dinner because you've got the sort of unwanted shifts of driving later, maybe not being able to spend time with your children on traditional weekends because you're working every Saturday and Sunday. And then in addition to that, we have shifts that sometimes fall to the lower seniority, which are split shifts. So you're gonna drive for some number of hours, you're gonna be on a split for some number of hours and then you're gonna come back and drive again. All of these things add up to making the job not fit for all. And so I think we need to begin a conversation nationwide about how this work is gonna be delivered in the future. And I don't know that answer, but I do know that the model doesn't work any longer and it has to change. I think it's probably worth noting that, first of all, there is a split shift differential. So if you end up with a switch, if you get more money for that, then you would if you were in a straight shift, I believe that's still the case. Only if it exceeds a certain number of hours. Right, but then some of those do, and that's some people that get paid for that, that inconvenience, let's call it, of having two shifts. But also the virtue of this, of course, is you suffer for a while, if it is suffering, you suffer for a while when you're initially hired. But as you gain seniority, you get the commitment that you're not gonna be ending up with a weekend shift or a night shift. You have to build dependability. If this is your career, that the majority of it's probably gonna be getting a shift that you like and it's driving where you wanna drive and for sure at a time that you find community. So it's not forever, it's just an unfortunate sort of entry level problem, but it's real, but it doesn't go on forever, people need to understand that. But remember too, that our drivers typically stay 20 or more years. So again, seniority comes very slowly. Well, and I'd also note that I know we in the city are having difficulty feeling many positions and I'm hearing from other local businesses that they're struggling, recruiting, across the job market. So for whatever reason, there's definitely a challenge in filling positions, even in our doctors and teachers and things. So I'm certainly part of that's the cost of living, but it just generally, since the pandemic, there's been more of a challenge in filling position than there was prior. And I think the pandemic is a big issue. There are people who are suffering through it, living with it and not necessarily even working, living off savings for a while, looking at part-time temporary solutions that are at some point can be, I've got to get a real job and it's got to be something that would benefit, we have the best benefits of anybody around. And so it really is a matter of somebody deciding that the pandemic at some point is going to come do it in and wind down and they need to get back into our real career. And we offer a real career here. But I just want to point out for our industry, for our industry, COVID exacerbated the problem of recruitment, but the problem was here before COVID hit. This was going on for a couple of years before COVID hit. This nationwide conversation about transit agencies across the nation, having a very difficult time filling their positions. And that's why I've moved to this thought process that I just described in response to Dan Henderson's question. Our model is broken and we're not gonna, I'm not gonna fix it. A bunch of administrators aren't gonna fix it. It's gonna take a partnership with the union and a partnership with the unions across the nation to figure out what the new model looks like. John, I just wanted to share when we were at the job fair a couple of weeks ago, we had people from other booths coming up to us that were also looking for drivers and we had nice big poster size, advertisements out with our pay rates and our benefits. And they were making comments like, oh my God, great. Everybody's gonna pass right by us and go to you. You're paying much more than we are. Oh my God, you're giving those benefits, you know? And then there was jokes made like, okay, well, we don't find anybody. We're gonna come over here and apply. I mean, there was just kind of a joking thing with all of us out there because all of us were looking for the same types of positions. There were people out there looking for cooks, for servers, for drivers, for admins, everything. Somebody on my HR staff went to another booth to have a conversation and she actually tried to coach my person. She said, oh, are you happy at Superiors Metro? Because I'm looking for an HR person. So I mean, it's getting pretty desperate and it's all around. Yeah. I mean, underlying this is an educational problem and that our schools have pretty much moved towards the model that everybody's going to college and not everybody is. I mean, they might be going to community college for two years, but ultimately there's this idea that everybody's gonna be in sort of a white collar job and the system, the world doesn't run on white collar jobs alone, unfortunately. And so how you get back to, I went to a vocational high school where I was an auto shop three hours a day and unfortunately there are not many public schools left with that kind of a real training for people to get into the mechanics jobs and things like that. So there needs to be some shift in an issue. We don't have control over that. I mean, the educational system really needs to be restructured in a way to suggest that people need to be trained for the real jobs that are out there and go in wanting because people end up overproduction of PhDs and college teachers who fight each other for the jobs and don't make no money at it because the drivers for this district make more than lectures that you see up around. Yeah, I went to vocational school too and it's a shame that it's not offered everywhere because college is not for everyone. It's just not, there's, you know. Well, as I say, it comes down to people assume that if you got a college degree you'd be making more money, that's not the case. I know in a concrete situation, the profession that I'm in lecturing at the university, we make less money than a bus driver does after you've been around for about three or four years. Well, not everybody wants to deal with the public either. I mean, we're talking about an increasingly surly public and I think, you know, you can throw money at people and benefits but they don't want to have to deal with people. You know, when we're having to mandate masks and before they get on the bus and so forth and dealing with people who refuse to do it and a lot of people just don't want to have to deal with that. And I completely understand that. So you can train them how to drive the bus and so forth but there's a communication element there that has to be also part of the equation. And if that's not there, then you're going to end up with a lot of people who are going to find the job onerous because they don't want to deal with it and they don't know how to deal with it effectively on a daily basis. So it's not just a question of money and benefits. It's also a question of dealing with a very, very difficult situation dealing with the public. Not everybody is civil, unfortunately. It definitely takes a special set of skills to do that. You know, a special set of customer service skills. You know, you can come here and have, you know and apply and have 10 years of driving experience. It's not going to do you any good if you don't like people. You know, if you can't, if you can't, you know, close your, you know, not react and things like that. It just takes a special skill set. And I think people are intimidated as well. You know, we talked to some people out there and when we mentioned driving, oh my God, I can't drive a bus. I could barely drive my car. And you know, thank God we had a bus operator out there with us and she was very good. It helped us a lot. You know, she talked a lot and she explained to them, it's actually easier to drive the bus than my own car and she would go into these long conversations with them. So that was a help, you know, that we had somebody firsthand that could speak to them about it. But you're right. I mean, you know, we could pay them $100 an hour if they can't deal with the public and deal with being yelled at and I don't know, thrown things and things like that. I mean, it's not going to be a good fit. We should bottle our current drivers, customer service skills and find some way to like put that into training and hiring process. Dan Henderson's had his hand up a while, so. Yeah, just to kind of wrap it up, at least from my perspective, thanks Alex for the information. I just want to throw my hat in the ring to participate in those discussions. I think we would find some really interesting results, you know, or you know, locally, I think there's probably a lot of merit to what you say about seniority and you know, perhaps unappealing hours and benefits and then nationwide, I also look at the truck driver shortage. You know, it's also a class B license. You know, don't have to deal with the public. You can kind of set your own hours. A lot of truckers work during the week and then they're home on the weekends, those types of things, but there's by some measure almost 80,000 truck drivers, a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers across the country. I'd love to be part of the conversation and try to figure this out because it affects everybody and it affects Santa Cruz locally and of course it affects the university too, so whatever we can do to help find us. A couple of public. James Sandoval. Well, I have my hand turned. Oh, sorry, wait a minute. I missed Director Northcutt before I go to the public. Sorry. Thank you. I want to thank Dan and Alex for that conversation. Working with adults who are returning to college for new skills are trying to learn different kind of trades because the job they were in at the past is no longer a viable job for them. I am finding that folks who are, you know, this certain generation is not getting their license until later. So they're not interested in driving because Uber takes us everywhere and Lyft takes us everywhere and we can kind of get around. So our licenses aren't even being conferred at the 16, the traditional 16 and 18 year old. You're having folks get their license much later, which means their driving record is different, which means their ability to qualify for certain jobs. In addition to that, you have people who are returning to the community with different kinds of backgrounds who may not qualify because of, you know, whatever bad decisions when they were 16 may have gotten the rest, whatever. So we're seeing a large population that's wholly excluded from being able to participate and getting hired. And we're in this place where there are no houses, there isn't a real viable cost of living that adjust to what our needs and demands are. And so the demand on the resources and the need for them have created this kind of thing. So I don't even, that's even before COVID to Alex point, that's even before COVID. And so you had this situation when COVID happened, a lot of our students at least left the area because it was more affordable to do classes online and not live here. And so their families went with them and so did them physically. So they're not taking these kinds of jobs. And even at Cabrio trying to recruit for students is hard, student workers is hard because do I want to be on campus? Do I want to submit myself to, you know, there's a lot of things. So even pre COVID, you had this situation that was bound to explode. COVID just highlighted that. Thank you. Okay, I don't want to miss anyone else. Now we'll go to the public, have first team Sandoval. Looks like Nate came in. All right, Nate's got a microphone. Go ahead. Both of your grads up. I just want to say out of, you know, an anecdotal experience of myself and what I think is the experience of many other people is, you know, we come in and we think of driving. We don't want to drive. My dad's a bus driver. And when he kept telling me to apply to the Metro, I'm like, I don't want to be a driver. I don't want to, that's not the career I want, right? But to look at things on the other hand, I'll let director Rothwell said and what everybody else brought up is dealing with the public. There are a lot of intangible benefits as far as the bonds that we as drivers create with the community that really, that's what kept me here. I came in with a five year plan to go somewhere else, but, you know, within two years, I absolutely fell in love with the job and for that reason of the sense of community that you build with the passengers, it's for a lot of the most of the long time drivers. I mean, that's really what keeps us going. You know, it's, yeah, we do have to deal with unruly public at times, but it's really those that you really feel like you are a part of the community and you're really doing a good thing for our society. And so, you know, for future campaigns, like how do we express that, those intangible benefits to potential new drivers that, you know, it's much more than just the benefits and it's much more than just the pay or the shifts you work. There's a whole lot more to it than that. Thank you. We need you, we need you, Nate, out there, out there at those work fairs sharing that. That's what we need. Recruit him, Danielle. Thank you. James Sandoval. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. To echo what Nate is saying, he was actually the one that approached me when I was working at a minimum wage job with the application to apply for this place. And I just remember that moment thinking like, I can't drive the buses, you know, I don't think I'd be hired there. And it was internal recruitment that got me here. And it's going to take internal recruitment to bring in more people in my opinion, because my experience talking with people outside of Metro that don't have family here, that don't understand what it means, is they're intimidated by the big old buses, the cost of living, they know it's a problem. They see the starting pay, instant gratifications of things. So they only look at starting pay and not so much the total package. And also being a frontline worker right now during a pandemic, you know, doesn't really help. I mean, it was a problem before, but it's more difficult now. So it's exciting to hear that we're going to work together to try to bring in more people to Metro, to our Metro family. And I'm just really hoping that we get together to figure this out because it's going to be a really difficult task. Thank you. Okay. If there are no other hands, then I will go to our general counsel, Julie Sherman to talk about what we will be moving into closed session and discussing. Thank you. We've got one closed session today. It's a third party liability claim as indicated on the agenda listing. We will be joined by the attorney representing Metro in that case. This attorney works for your third party claims administrator and there will not be a report out of closed session. Thank you, Julie. And do we have a link to that on our, you know? You should have received one this morning. Yeah. We did receive a separate email with the link for closed session. Thanks. If you don't have it, Mike, let me know. I can share mine, I just have to change the name. Yeah. You've taken over my full screen, but as soon as we get off this call, I'm sure I'll find it. Okay. Chair Lee, I'm sorry, I just want to note that we have a few directors have had to leave. So Director Callentary Johnson has departed as has Director Myers and Director McPherson. And I'm going to have to go to if this goes any longer or so. I think we have a quick item in closed session. Yeah, it should be quick. A little while, we shouldn't take long. Let's keep our quorum, please. Yes. Okay, so we will, I do have an announcement of a special meeting on Friday, November 12th, 2021, and regular Board of Directors meeting on November 19th at 9 a.m. venue to be determined, but otherwise we will adjourn and move quickly. I'm sorry, recess to closed session. Thank you. Thank you. See everybody in a moment. Tina, I don't have it. I'll tell, okay, babe, I'll send you an email with mine, okay? Thank you. Okay. I think we're just waiting for Gina to do whatever she needs to do, unless there's some reason we don't need to wait, but I think we usually wait for her. I'm headed to the light rail ride today. Yeah, you can go. We just had one of us to come back to announce, but thank you and welcome as a full-fledged director now. Thank you. I get to see what happens in those closed sessions. Yeah. I was a union rep. I know. Yeah, you do. I have a good weekend. Take care, bye-bye. All right, I think Alex probably went to get Gina. You're muted, Alex. How's that? Good. Gotcha. We'll be here momentarily. Okay. I'm going to set the papers aside and stand a moment. Oh, that felt better. Just shows you, you can never tell. I looked at the agenda and said, oh, this is going to be a shorter meeting. And it was, it's okay, but you never can tell. The legislative updates usually take some time. Yeah, that's one of the things I should have anticipated. And it was all good. It just... Sorry, sorry. So I just returning to, I believe, just announced that we have nothing to report at this point from closed session. Correct, no reportable action. No reportable action and adjourn the meeting. Can I just ask one question when you adjourned on it? Jimmy Dutra lead at 11.50, or did he stay for the closed session? He stayed for the closed session. Okay, thank you so much. Yep. Okay, have a good one. All right, have a good weekend, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Happy Halloween. Yes.