 Good morning, everyone. I'd like to call the Santa Cruz March 24th Metro Transit District meeting to order. It's really nice to be here in person with you all this morning, and it's not dumping rain on all of us. So welcome. I'll move on to agenda item number two, which is Safety Announcement by Curtis Moses. Thank you. I'm going to ask Ms. Donna Bauer to do a roll call, please. Here. Here. Director Newsome. Present. Heroes. Yeah, here. Thank you. So we will now recess to the Santa Cruz Civic Improvement Corporation annual meeting. And I'll pass it on to Director Rodkin. So I'm going to quickly explain what this is. In order to get loans floated or bonds more importantly, it's necessary to have some kind of a non-profit agency that is not the transit district as a way to transfer the money from the federal government over to us. It's quite bizarre, but that's the way it works. And we've all seen banks and floating these bonds. So we created this group, the Santa Cruz Civic Garden. That's the reason the group got created. When we were actually floating a bond for the transit district, a lunch out of it, mostly it's a pretty inactive group, in which case we don't serve anybody lunch, because that's what that group is for. So we keep it in reserve. It costs a fair amount of money to set that group up, the cost of incorporation and some other kinds of things. So rather than sunset it when we were done, we kept it alive for future possibilities of floating bonds for the region. Thank you. We'll go to Director McPherson. Thank you. Just like to announce, I acknowledge the appointment of Metro Board of Directors to serve on the SACIC board officers. Due to five directors having been termed out or vacated their positions on that board, the following board members were appointed to the Metro Board of Directors February 24, 2023, meaning to serve the following positions on the SACIC board of directors, Bruce McPherson, president, Dr. Colin Terry Johnson, vice president, Dr. Koenig, secretary, Dr. Pegler, treasurer, and director Downing as a member of that. The four positions will serve an additional two-year term to March 25th, and one position will complete a term vacated to March 24th as highlighted on Attachment A. And I understand it does not take a vote to, you don't need a motion or a vote to make that something based on employment that's made it already. Thank you. We're done with that meeting. We're not. Can I have a roll call of the SACIC? Is there anybody in the public that would like to address us? I said there's no bond activity that we anticipate at this point. With that, sorry, I would just call to adjourn the meeting of the SACIC. You need to, in addition to the, or deletion to the agenda, which there, then prove the prior year minutes of March 25th, 2022. If I move, we approve those. Second? Pegler, term number seven is the acceptance of the financial statement for the fiscal year 22, which is Attachment C. Are there any questions by the board members? Any questions from the public? Move a motion to accept the financial statement this year 22. I'll second. And we will now adjourn to the next SACIC board of directors meeting. Thank you. Excuse me for, thank you. OK, we will reconvene the Metro District Board meeting, and I'll move on to announcements. Today's meeting is being broadcast by community television of Santa Cruz County. We had planned on having Spanish interpretation, and due to unforeseen circumstances, we had a last minute cancellation, so we will not be able to provide that today, unfortunately. And we're fortunate to be able to participate, have hybrid participation. So if you're participating online, please mute yourself so we can minimize background noise. Any other announcements? I'm missing? OK. I'll move on to agenda item seven for board of director comments. Any board members have comments? Good morning. I just wanted to, you have COVID, you have fires, now you have this. And I think it's just phenomenal that you just keep getting there. The other thing I wanted to do is thank John for posting the reimagining meeting this week. It didn't go quite as planned, but we got spoke about things. Thank you, chair. I want to report that last Wednesday I had the opportunity to go up to Sacramento as part of the Central Coast Coalition a day. We've talked, so there's representatives from all the way down to Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo County, Monterey County, San Benito County, and ourselves here in Santa Cruz County. We talked to a number of state representatives about common transportation projects that would benefit the Central Coast region. Exciting to hear that our representatives in the Assembly and Senate are forming a Central Coast Coalition to have a little bit more voice up against the folks in LA and the Bay Area. Probably the most notable meeting for this agency was a chance to get in front of Under Secretary Mark Tolson and talk about the advantages of the proposal we have for the Transit Inner City Rail Capital Program grant, or TERSIP, they've applied for a grant that would fund a number of hydrogen buses as well as a hybrid fueling station. I'd say you understood the advantages of investing in smaller urban areas like ours, where there's possibility for a significant change in the way that people get around. Hopeful about that. And I just wanted to thank, I was really proud of the response from Metro and of Ronald Srinettis wrote us and coming back to work after getting his family out of the safety from their home in Pajaro and still coming back to be able to drive for para-cruise and the response from the Metro staff and employees that raised the funds to help him. I just read that article in the Sentinel and just, it was to everybody. I mean, it just reminds us of the dedication of our drivers, but also the staff to be there to support one of those that is struggling right now. Thank you. I want to just thank the staff and the administration of Metro just for getting ahead of so many issues, offering the rides and share the ride. Great meeting at the museum, part of history, not tomorrow. But in this day and age of electric vehicles and going to electric buses, I am very proud to announce that on Tuesday, three to two votes, the County of San Luis Obispo decided to join Central Coast Community Energy. Now we have the seven cities, the San Luis Obispo as well as the county, so we have the whole county. And now in that Cripple CE, we have 35 agencies that are participating and having us have a cleaner environment. It was a rough old goal. We went down there two weeks ago to get it on the agenda and you get that three to two vote and it's very, very pleasing. It's gonna be a really good thing for this whole region. Other directors? I'll take a moment and also echo my colleagues' comments that I want to acknowledge and thank the staff and the drivers for the work that you did over the storms over the last couple of weeks, really going above and beyond and showing the community that we are more than providing bus transportation. We are critical to public health, public safety in times of crisis and at any time. So just thank you so much for the work that you did in helping our community. Okay, we will move on to agenda item eight, which is oral and written communications to the board. So this is a time set aside for directors and members of general public to address any item not on the agenda, which is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the board. So I will first go to members here in person and see if there's any oral communication. I don't see any and I will now look to those participating virtually. If you'd like to comment right now at oral communication, please raise your hand. I don't see any hands raised, I'll give it another. Oh, I don't see that. Okay. Hi, this is Brian. Oh, that's why, I was looking to the right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I know. So you want me to talk? Are we ready to go? Okay, please go ahead, Mr. People's. Hey, this is Brian. People's from trail now. I'm gonna mention my favorite subject, which is the Coast Santa Cruz Coastal Trail. The North Coast Trail that goes from Wilder to Davenport has been delayed for years because it goes along the coast and the Coastal Commission has placed major restrictions. Actually, they only allow a temporary retaining wall for the trail. And so for this reason, it's been delayed and we actually don't have enough money now likely to build it. When we look at the entire Coastal Port or from Watsonville to Davenport, there are many locations that the trail or the rail line goes within 20 feet of the coast. And also it goes through the federally protected Harkin Slough, which is actually underwater right now. So what the issue is is that the idea that we're gonna have a new electric train 20 feet from the coastline is not realistic. And what that's happening is it's preventing our trail from being built. There's actually even no plan to build the trail to Watsonville. Watsonville is actually probably the community that is most penalized by this because they will never have a trail because the train advocates are trying to believe that they'll have a train. But what we've seen with the North Coast Trail is evidence that the Coastal Commission will not allow it. Think about it. Everybody envisioned Manresa Beach where the tracks are. It's 20 feet or Park Avenue in Capitola along that cliff. The idea of spending a billion dollars for a train, 60 trains a day go past that. Now, many people think that the public wants a trail and are a train and we're gonna give it to them. Well, unfortunately, you can't give it to them on the Coastal Corridor because it's 20 feet from the tracks. And what that's doing is it's preventing our trail from being built. You've only built 1.2 miles of the trail over the decade. And actually it's cost more than widening the highway. Building a 12 foot wide trail that costs more than widening the highway doesn't make a lot of sense. So I wanna encourage everybody to start being realistic on what we can and can't do because we're not getting it done. We're not getting the trail built. Watsonville, you're not getting the train widened the highway, that's the path forward. So I appreciate everybody's time and I want everybody to just start to have that realization that you're never gonna have a train and it's preventing our trail from being built. Thank you for your time. Let me ask a logistics question. Is there a timer on for speakers? Okay, I can't see it on my screen. Okay, thank you. Are there any other members participating virtually that would like to speak for oral communication? Anyone seeing what I'm seeing? No hands up? Okay. All right, we'll move on to Labor Organization Communication. Hello? Okay, there you go. Good morning, Board of Directors. It's good to be in person again. I really missed this. For everyone online that doesn't know who I am, my name is James Seneval. I'm the General Chairperson of Smart Local 23 who represents the bus and paratransit operators here at Metro. And first I want to say congratulations to Shabra and Kristen on your appointments as Chair and Vice Chair. It's gonna be great working with you guys to make sure we get Metro where it needs to be. And I also want to thank Scott and Vanessa for meeting with me. It's great to know you guys a little bit better and making sure that I have a relationship with each and every board member here that we're all continuously working together to make Metro a better place. And I just want to mention that negotiations are coming up. Our first date for negotiations is April 6th and April 7th. And I just wanted to say that it's been a great change for the past year working with Michael Tree. We've been spending a lot more energy working together instead of fighting against each other. I'm hoping that this negotiations will be a smooth one. I will say the last one for the board members that were here could remember it was a pretty rough one. So I'm hoping that we could reach a deal that would help us better recruit and help better retain the operators that we currently have. So with that being said, thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm moving to item 10, additional documentation to support existing agenda items. Thank you. So we are now moving to consent agenda which is item 11.1 to 11.7. I'll look to directors to see if there are any comments or questions or if any item needs to be pulled. I would suggest that we pull item 11.7 proving a consideration of award of contract to Miller-Maxfield Inc. for strategic planning services for future revenue options, not to exceed $338.50. Okay. So we're pulling item 11.7. Any other comments, questions, items pulled? Okay. I'll look to see if there are any members of the public that have comments on consent agenda items 11.1 to 11.6. Anyone here in person? Anyone virtually? We have a motion by Director Rotkin. Second. Second by Pegler. And we'll do, do we do a roll call vote when we're in person? With the exception of number seven. That's right. With the exception of seven, 11.7. And he'd be promoted to a panel. I can't hear anything. I just hear people saying aye. Can you hear us, Director Dutra? I can only, I can hear you and I can hear people saying aye but I could not hear the roll. Oh, you couldn't hear Donna, huh? No. I actually haven't been able to hear her really the whole meeting. So I don't know if she's, I can hear you now, yes. See now you just went away again. So I don't know if you're backing away from the microphone maybe. Yes. So can I vote? Yes. Aye. We have you down as aye. Thank you. Okay. All right, so that passes. We will now move to 11.7 and I'll pass it to Director Koenig. Just thought this item bore a little bit more discussion. One of the first opportunities we've had is a board to discuss the potential for a revenue measure in the coming years in a little bit more detail. I was just curious, I've had a couple things. I mean, first of all, have we done any initial polling about a potential revenue measure? Second, you know, this is fairly large sum of money. My, you know, back at the envelope calculation or from past experiences that a countywide campaign will cost about $400,000 give or take. So this is close to that amount. I'm curious, you know, if these services would actually be for the execution of a campaign or if they're simply research oriented. I think it's also worth pointing out that 2024 is going to be quite the year for revenue measures. I think many of the agencies that I'm a part of are discussing the potential for one right now. So I was just also wondering how much we've talked with other agencies and other directors here can talk about their experience on that. I mean, the board is talking about potential, or supervisors is discussing potential revenue measures. So yeah, I think that the timing bears discussion as well. We'll ask Michael if you wanna respond to some of that. Sure, you hear me okay? So great questions. Long story short, the contract amount is task order base. So we would pay as we go and look into opportunities and one of them could be a future ballot measure. Certainly November of 24 would be a potential time to go to the ballot. We have done polling and it's in the giraffe mode and so we're looking at over, we're analyzing it and our thoughts are to come back to the board once we've kinda locked in where we think that poll directs us to as far as what the public sentiment might be for a potential metro ballot measure. But long story short, it's a multi-year contract which should you progress through various phases so to speak as you make decisions on whether you wanna be on the November 24 ballot. This contract price would allow you to do multiple polling events and generally speaking to go out and do a statistically valid poll if the public is about a $50,000 endeavor. So this includes those type of activities. So I guess the quick comment is we're analyzing a poll that we've done. I would say early indications are in the giraffe poll that it looks very interesting for the board as far as an opportunity to potentially go that route. Thank you for the clarification and I understand that this is sort of just an overarching contract and it's still, you know, it's pay as you go and certainly not a comment on the qualifications of, you know, at Maxfield, an excellent local firm and clearly scored very well in the RFP process. I'm just wondering about the timing here. I mean, I'd feel a little bit more comfortable seeing the poll results first. I'm also understanding if that was looked at in the context of potential other revenue measures on the 2024 ballot or beyond. The other question I had is, are there potential revenue measures this board could look at other than a sales tax measure? You know, I think so. I think as we move forward, part of the work of this contract and the firm, Miller-Maxfield, would be to look at all opportunities for strategic funding moving forward and to that end, we've had some initial discussions with the city managers, with the county administrator just to kind of get a lay of the land in the field for who's thinking what. So I think some major decisions are upcoming for the board and this contract allows you to basically gather the information, put together this final version of the poll so you have good information to act on. You're saying that Miller-Maxfield would be involved in analyzing the poll results that we already have? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, I authorized the poll under my spending authority and for lack of better word, need some professional assistance in making sure that I'm analyzing correctly the results moving forward. Are there other directors of comments? I have a question. Is that Jimmy? Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. So when was this poll taken? So it was the first week of March. Director Dutcher. So it was recently taken and from your initial glance and I know you're not a complete expert in this area of reading polls, what did you see in it? I would say from a, like a real div of Metro and majority may not ride Metro, they see value in investing the maintenance and future improvements of Metro. I actually had a conversation yesterday with a writer or he used to ride Metro. He was really disappointed that the 91X was taken away and that was his, it really shortened his transportation throughout the county. And so he's now switched back to driving in the car. But I think that we are gonna have to do a lot of work on really trying to win the public's trust back, especially since, when I believe when we did the Cabrillo College, when they taxed themselves that the 91X was really promised as a route that was gonna be preserved. And that didn't happen. So I'd be really curious to see what the public is, how they view us as an organization when we already went out and promised a certain route. And then we have recently taken it away. So that'll be, it'll be interesting to see the results of this. And I have to, I mean, I'd like to, I kind of agree with Director Koenig as well as it'd be, it'd be nice to see these results first before really, you know, moving forward with such a contract. Thank you, Director Dutra, Director Rodkin. Unfortunately, in doing work on elections, it's not always, for example, trying to pull public opinion, get a realistic read of what the public might be willing to support. And again, in the end, it's not the poll doesn't determine what happens in the election does if you have one, but being able to run those polls on the basis of CEO general managers going to set them off rather than having a big public discussion about the poll gets you data that's useful. If you announce you're about to do a poll and whatever and stuff, groups get organized and basically make the poll useless. And so I think that's why we're having the money available, the ability of our general manager to make a decision about when it might take the right time, what kinds of questions need to be on the poll. Unfortunately, those are things that we have input on, but I don't think it makes sense to have those discussions in public or to see the poll first or put it out in public before you then vote for the money that funds that possibility. I also have to say that there's not an agency in this county that doesn't really need to improve its public transportation situation and we're the real key to that in all the five jurisdictions that we're talking about. So even though I know those agencies all have interests and they might be floating measures of a variety of different kinds, the idea that somehow we should step aside and wait for them to do their things. Almost all of them that had bond measures on our local tax measures and the last several elections, we haven't had an election for a general pay increase other than the measure D, which funded not just us, but all kinds of things. Since 1978, I worked on that tax to get us our initial half-send sales tax. And the result of having that kind of local self-help funding is what's responsible for all the federal, not all, but plays a key role in the funding that we've gotten from the federal and state governments because the ability to show that our local citizens support our public transit system is the real key to getting that funding that moves us up in the competition with a variety of grants that we apply for. So I think it makes a lot of sense for us to approve this general amount of money is to be available for this process. And the board, of course, will get to weigh in on before we actually expend any of it in the future. It's not like it's just a blank check to Michael Tree to go spend it on wherever he thinks we ought to be doing. The board will get a chance to actually weigh in, but it lines up an agency that's demonstrated their ability to do this kind of work at a professional level and prepare us for this kind of activity, which I think is critical for this agency. A small additional infusion of funding to this agency would make a huge difference in facing all the problems that we're confronting here. Thank you, Director Rottkin. Any other directors, comments, questions? Thank you for those comments, Director Rottkin. One question is, could we extend the, or modify the contractors to say that we could extend it through, or an additional, either an additional period after the first extension of three years or make the second extension four years? I'm just thinking about maintaining the option of any efforts in 2028 through the end of 2028. I'm gonna guess that, I mean, I'll leave it to Saft to determine whether it's feasible, but at some point that people bidding on this are tying up their resources and preparing for this. If you ask them for another year, I bet they won't do it for free. I hope we can talk them down to the littlest amount of money if we go that way, but I think let's recognize you don't get, it's not a free lunch for this. Michael, did you wanna comment on that? I was just wondering if Director Tonic could restate exactly what you were envisioning there. Just, so the, I think the contract says it's for two years with a three-year potential extension, three years would take us to just pass the presidential primary in 2028. I'm wondering if we either could add an additional option for extension or make the second extension period four years or maybe make it two two-year periods, or sorry, three total two-year periods just so that we have the option of extending the contract through the end of 2028, which of course would be the next with 2028 presidential election. I could, the parties can always agree to extend the contract by amendment, and I think the question will come down to where things are in terms of the compensation of that item. Can you hear me? Sorry about that. The parties can always agree to extend the contract by amendment when the time is appropriate. I think the question will be where things are in terms of the compensation if that item would need to come back to the board, but that's sort of the option to amend the contract is always. Great, thank you. Thank you. All right, if there aren't any other comments or questions by directors, I'll move to, I'll see if there are any members of the public who have comments or on this item, okay? Anyone virtually? All right, I see Mr. Peoples hands up. Thank you. This is Brian Peoples from Trail Mail. You know, in 2016 Measure D came out. We actually came out as a political action committee opposed to Measure D at the time. And the reason was because they had 24% of the funding going towards a train, actually $14 million going to a new Monterey County train station. So we were coming out to oppose it. And so what happened was Zach Fran and Don Lane, who's the mayor at the time, negotiated and changed the language. So they reduced it down to 8% of funding going towards the rail. And the money was transferred to Metro, paratransit and so then what we did is we became a supporter of it. And our supporters actually fund provided the greatest amount of donations for Measure D. 2016 Measure D. And we all know how important that election was. Big supporter, we were a big supporter for Metro at the time. Having said that, watching how the Metro board members on this board, when they're voting, how they vote on the RTC board, putting a train over Metro funds, we questioned whether we would support another sales tax measure for Metro. And I would honestly tell you, if we continue down the path building an expensive, narrow trail next to the old railroad tracks where the train is not possible because it goes 20 feet from the ocean, that kind of leadership, we will, I will become a PAP, a political action committee opposing any Metro sales tax measure. And the reason is because we're watching how you're spending our money today and how you're misusing. And you've only built 1.2 miles of the trail. And the trail costs more than why need the highway. So that kind of use of our tax dollars is not appropriate. And so you go back and asking for more money, we will oppose it if you keep heading down the path we're heading. If you don't, if you do start moving in, doing the interim trail and supporting that, by all means, we'll support the Metro tax measure. But right now you guys are wasting our tax dollars and you're not building the trail in a timely and effective manner or environmentally, you're cutting 400 trees down. So anyways, thank you for your time. I just wanna make sure you know that if you keep managing our money the way you do, we will, I will become a PAP opposed to any tax measures for Metro. Thank you. I thought I saw Mr. Matt Ferrell's hand up. Did you wanna make a comment, Mr. Ferrell? You're unmuted, you can speak. Matt, can you hear us? No, he doesn't look like it. Matt, you can speak up as well. His hand was up, yeah. So I think he can't hear us. I wanna give him an opportunity to speak. Matt, can you hear us? You had your hand up. Okay, I think we move on. All right, any other members wishing to speak on 11.7? Chair for Smart Local 23. I just wanted to comment on a couple of the things that we've heard here today. And I'd like to remind you that the RTC spending doesn't necessarily reflect Metro spending. And we started this meeting talking about the things that our drivers and our staffs do for this community. We need financial support to be able to do that. We have an extremely aged fleet. We have a shortage of staff across multiple departments. And the only way that we're gonna fix that is by remaining competitive. We're gonna remain competitive, we need money. I think that Michael has shown over the last year he's extremely responsible and extremely proactive in trying to fix these issues. And for him to come here and tell you, I need help doing that. It's very important. And I think we should look at that and see this man is doing everything that he can to fix the problems that we have. He needs your support to get it done. This is not money that is going to be wasted. This is nothing to do with the train. This is about Santa Cruz Metro and our bus system. And Michael has done nothing to make you question whether or not he would spend this money appropriately. We're in full support of you supporting us. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm gonna just see one more time if Matt's able to hear us and wants to speak. Matt, can you hear us? No. Doesn't appear so. All right, I'll come back to the directors for a motion for 11.7. Director Rodkin. I'll move approval of the staff recommendation but amend it to direct staff to meet with lower max field to discuss the possibility of an extension option. I just, that's not part of the motion but to explain the motion. For example, we might agree that if it's extended within a year or something which doesn't require them to put aside a lot of resources to get ready to go and those, if you do it at the last minute it's expensive to add it, maybe not earlier. So the motion is to direct staff to talk with them about what it might cost us to have an option for extension. Thank you, Director Rodkin. Otherwise approving the matter before us. Second. I'll second. Director Paikler for this question. Just one last question. What is the spending a limit that you would have to come back to the board to approve any further spending under this contract? 50,000. I'm prepared to support this understanding that we're not actually agreeing to any specific expenditures today but just the fact that we're pursuing this. I also appreciate the time to daylight this a little bit discuss further among the board. I do think there's some issues that we're gonna have to address here going forward. As I said, it's gonna be extremely competitive environment in 2024. Not to say that this agency is not worthy but of course it absolutely is as we've all expressed. I just wanna make sure that we're all realistic about how best and most efficiently to invest our resources to be successful. And I appreciate Director Connick's comments because I do know as he mentioned other jurisdictions will be looking at funding as well but I was good. I'm happy to hear that Michael and staff that there's been communication with our local city managers and CEO for the county and that that's part of the research that you're doing is talking to the various jurisdictions finding out what their plans are and coordinating to where we all be most successful so that I agree is an important component of that as well but otherwise I support the project. Okay, there's no further discussion. We'll take a roll call vote. Aye. Kirsten. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Feros-Carter. Aye. Thank you. We're moving to our regular agenda. We have item 12 which is presentation of employee longevity awards. So I will present those now. We have a certificate of appreciation for Javier Favella and I will apologize in advance if I mispronounce anyone's names. Javier Favella who has worked with the Metro for 10 years. So thank you. Certificate of appreciation for Jose de Zamaripa in the mechanic two position for 10 years. Patrick J. Orthon, bus operator for 15 years. Maurizio Italia, bus operator for 15 years. And John C. Nevin, transit supervisor for 15 years. Thank you for your years of work with the Metro and we really appreciate it. Let me just make sure I didn't miss anybody. I don't take comments on this, right? All right, so moving on to agenda items. Will you round up a pause for this? Yes, thank you. That would be... Is this the one? Okay there. I just wanted to make note that I know it's gonna be a lot harder nowadays because we're short staff, but back in the days we would invite these people that would get these longevity awards to our meetings so they could speak to you all. And I thought it was a great experience because you get to see these people in person and it was a big deal for a lot of people. So I'm hoping we could eventually get back to that. I'm not saying we could do it now but it would be great to see it back. So thank you. 13 is retiree resolution of appreciation for Mark Saunders, bus operator. And I have a logistics question to Donna. Do I read the entire resolution? Hannah, there's some really nice things in here. I'll just take a moment to read it. Thank you. So whereas the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District was formed to provide public transportation, you know what, I'm gonna skip over that stuff and talk about Mr. Mark Saunders. Whereas Metro required an employee with the expertise, dedication, appointed Mark Saunders to serve in the position of bus operator. And whereas served as a member of the operations department of Metro for the time period of November 9th, 1999 to February 23rd, 2023. Whereas Mark Saunders provided Metro with dedicated service and commitment during the time of his employment. And whereas Mark Saunders served Metro with distinction. Whereas the service provided to the residents of Santa Cruz County by Mark Saunders resulted in reliable quality public transportation being available in the most difficult times. And whereas during the time of Mr. Saunders service, Metro improved existing and built new operating facilities, converted the fleet to a CNG propulsion system, developed accessible bus stops, improved ridership, responded to adverse economic conditions, assumed direct operational responsibility for Highway 17 express service and the Amtrak connector service, and assumed the direct operational responsibility for the Paracruz service. Whereas the quality of life in Santa Cruz County was improved dramatically as a result of the exemplary services provided by Mark Saunders. Now therefore be it resolved that upon his retirement as bus operator, the board of directors of Metro does hereby commend his efforts in advancing public transit service in Santa Cruz County and expresses sincere appreciation on behalf of itself, the Metro staff and all the residents of Santa Cruz County. Be it further resolved that a copy of this resolution will be entered into official records. So thank you so much, Mark Saunders. And let's do a round of applause. Oh, and we have a comment. Yeah. I believe I need to make a motion. We need to take action on this. Yes, we do. So I move that we approve this. Great. All right. We'll call vote. Director Brown. Director Downing. Aye. Director Dutra. Aye. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Director Lind. Aye. Director McPherson. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Queeros Carter. Aye. And Director Rockin. And the motion passes. Now the applause. Round of applause. Congratulations. And thank you for all your service. All right. Moving to item 14. And that is our state legislative update from Mr. Michael Pimentel. Okay. Should we move to the next? Sure. Let's do that. So we will be doing item 15, which is our federal legislative update. Chris, give me up. Welcome. Thank you. It's good to be here. I usually start my, you know, my rift is, you know, thank you for allowing me to come out here for the good weather. But right now it's super nice in DC right now. It's actually warmer, I think. But anyway, it's good to be here in person for the first time in three years and see all of you and get together here. So thank you for the opportunity. I thought I would kind of just go over a few items that are going on here in Washington DC. One in particular that I want to kind of concentrate on with regard to the budget, but I do have a couple of other items. The DOT budget, the IIJA, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or as the president calls it, the bipartisan infrastructure law, kind of implementation of that. And then we are in a new Congress. We started a new guys that everybody knows. In January, we started the first session of the two year 118th Congress. So just a little bit about that. Oops. So first with regard to the budget, the FY 2023 budget for the Department of Transportation and all other agencies as well was enacted in late December of 2022. That's about three months after the official start of the federal fiscal year. October one is the official start of the federal fiscal year. And it's been about 25 years. I think last year was the 25th anniversary of Congress last actually approving their budget before October 1st. So we've got some problems with regard to being able to enact a budget on time here in Washington DC. For most of the programs at the US Department of Transportation, funding was kind of steady, a little bit of smaller small increases. We really do benefit from that by partisan infrastructure law, which also included in addition to these competitive grant programs, a five year reauthorization of federal transit programs. And so these funding levels are kind of baked in, hard to reduce. And so I talk about small increases, but I don't want to undermine the fact that the first year of the IIJA, which was fiscal year 2022, included some pretty significant increases, particularly of transit formula programs, 30% increase sort of overall. And so they've really front loaded that, those increases kind of two or 3% increases after that. So while I say small, these are still sort of much larger than FY22 with regard to that. So same thing with the bus programs, the competitive programs that we like to apply for, those also got some small increase, actually over the authorized levels that the infrastructure law has enacted. In this very goofy budget parlance, we call it a plus up. You've probably heard me say that before, where Congress takes that authorized level and increases it a little bit. And again, those are small increases on giant increases. So for instance, this low and no emissions bus program that is about a $1.2 billion program now, again, back in FY2021, that was about a $200 million program. So even though it looks like a small $150 million, I believe is what the plus up was for this program, it brought it from $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion almost. So again, not insignificant with regard to that. The FY2024 budget process has started. You might have seen that the president sent his proposed budget to Congress in the last few weeks. Just like every other president, those are kind of considered by Congress to be dead on arrival. Congress takes its power of the purse really seriously. And so they will take the president's budget under advisement, but they will also make changes to that with regard to that. This is the one thing I wanted to kind of talk a little bit more about, and that is these differences between the White House and congressional Republicans with regard to spending. So as we know that Republicans are now in the majority in the House. It's a slim majority, but they are in the majority of the House. And so it's going to take some bipartisan negotiations to pass an FY2024 budget. Up to now, House Republicans have been pretty certain in their desire to include a lot of deficit reduction in the annual budgets over the next few years. And while they haven't given us sort of specific programs that they would like to either cut or reduce or eliminate, to reach those very, very, I think it's $10 trillion over 10 years, some really pretty big cuts. What they have said is that, oh, we're not going to touch social security, we're not going to touch Medicare, and we're probably not going to cut defense spending, which is about half of the entire federal government budget. So what we're looking at to get trillions of dollars of deficit reduction is a really narrow path. It's probably somewhere between 25 and 30% of the overall budget is where all of that has to come. And so that's where we talk about, where we worry about these Department of Transportation programs being vulnerable to reductions, even with those baked in amounts in the IJA. That's kind of the president's law. And so I think that we may see some proposals by Republicans to cut back on everything. And I'm not talking just about transit, but other things for those of you on county boards and city councils, Department of Housing and Urban Development, really vulnerable, EPA, Department of Labor, things that you care a lot about. And so it's going to be a battle. The president doesn't want to do all this. As a matter of fact, his budget proposes an 8% increase in those areas that we call the non-defense discretionary budget. And so he's going to fight it, but in order to get a budget passed, it's going to take some Republican votes. And so I think it's going to be a kind of a hairy summer and fall with regard to that. Again, I don't think, I think the 26th straight year, we won't meet that October one budget. And we may even have a government shutdown at some point in the fall. If I were a betting man, I would say we might have one of a few days, a few weeks, depending on when it happens. But it's going to be tough, and we're going to have to do a lot of work. Luckily, we've got a congressional delegation that's very supportive of federal transit programs and Metro in general. But we're going to have to work very hard to make sure that they know how important these programs are because again, if there's horse training that's going to go on, somebody's going to, you know, somebody's ox is going to get cored or how they say it. So anyway, so just kind of a warning that we're looking at kind of rough waters over the next few months, but hopefully we can come out okay. They ruined this Donna with regard to the, yeah, it doesn't seem to be going forward, or it was before. Here we go, thank you. So I thought I might, with regard to that, bipartisan infrastructure law, IIJA, thought I might kind of give you an overview of where we are kind of a year and a half in. It was enacted in October of 2021, about a trillion and a half in infrastructure spending. About half of that was that transportation reauthorization. I feel like with regard to actual new spending, I talk about it somewhere in about the $500 billion area over five years as opposed to the 1.5 trillion that people talk about overall. They were going to do that, the transportation reauthorization anyway. And so I think, so the infrastructure bill kind of added on to that. So anyway, we've seen almost, I think there's one small culvert program or something like that that needs to come out with regard to the competitive funding here. But almost all of it is sort of on the street with regard to notices. I think now, I say about half of that first year funding has been awarded. I think it's now a little bit more than half of it. And others are getting ready to go. Here's just a couple of examples of those very competitive, but large, we're talking billions of dollars in competitive programs annually. So like the low and no missions, which we care really, we care a lot about, that mega grant program, which Metro benefited from with that, the RTC, Caltrans Highway One grant that was just given. And then this safe streets for all, which is a pedestrian sort of basically safety program. And I believe the county got a planning grant for that recently. And so we do have a pretty good idea of how all of these look. I was talking about the last point here, where I was talking about what we've been seeing and it's what we've been expecting from the Biden administration. They're very focused on, particularly in the transportation area, of making awards that deal with safety, modernization, climate change, and equity. And the awards seem to bear that out. I would also say that the awards seem to be very geographically spread out. And some folks may think it's not the case, but it seems to me that the DOT has been making awards in red states and blue states and big states and small states, urban and rural. They've been trying really hard to spread it out in an equitable fashion with regard to that. I'll pop up to that second to last point with regard to the Biden administration. We are hearing and seeing this administration really sharpening its rhetoric with requirements. And Bi America is one of those, which Bi America has been kind of the law of the land for a long time, but the federal government has been pretty generous with waivers if you can kind of convince them that you can't find something domestically, they'll give you, pretty much give you a waiver for that. Impression is that this administration is really going to tighten up. They really want everything to be kind of made in the USA. And in some cases, that could make a project more expensive or delay it with regard to supply chain issues and stuff like that. But like I said, this administration seems very focused on keeping those rules in place. And then the last thing I talk about, we've talked about this the last time I was on line with you guys, but it hadn't been official yet, right? We've now got a slim Republican majority in the house. I believe it's Speaker McCarthy can afford to lose about four votes on any given day if Democrats hang together. And so that's gonna make passing legislation there hard. The Senate, same thing, very slim majority. I count the one is independent Senator Kirsten Sinema from Arizona, who was a Republican, changed parties. Says she's not caucusing with either party, so that's why I've kind of, there are, among those 50 Democrats, there are a few independents. Bernie Sanders is an independent. There's a Senator from Maine who's an independent, but they caucus with the Democrats. Sinema is not doing that, so that's why I see that. And so as a result, we're probably gonna see a lot of Connolly Harris, the Vice President, in the Senate chamber to break ties. And so, but again, that slim majority in the Senate gives us this kind of dichotomy between the two that where they're not doing the same things. The House is doing their bills and the Senate is doing theirs, and there's not a lot of coming together on the same items. Again, we know this, but again, sort of official with regard to the House delegation. Of course, your Congressman Panetta represents a good chunk of Santa Cruz County and has now been given a lot of the area in the San Lorenzo Valley and all we're in as she was representing. And then we've got a new member down in the Watsonville area, Congresswoman Zo Lofgren, who's a really senior member of the House. She's a ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee. She's a very senior member of the House and she's a chair committee, very well thought of among her colleagues. And I would imagine with all of this weather, she and things happening down in that new part of her district that she's getting to know it faster than she ever thought she might, but she's been very interested in, the CEO has already been before the election, briefed her staff on metro operations and so we've got a good relationship with her staff already and she seems to wanna be willing to help and be effective in Watsonville. And then the last thing I was saying before, the FY 2024 budget I think is, that's the one thing that the House and Senate have to come together on, right? If the Senate can do their judicial nominations and they can do legislation that the president supports but the House doesn't support but eventually they gotta come together on this budget. They probably have to come together on this debt limit. Some people are saying, maybe we don't have to increase the debt limit but the Treasury Department said, sometime this summer we're gonna run out of time and so that's another area where I will agree to vote for a debt limit increase if you agree to my demands with regard to deficit reduction. So again, that comes back here. House Republicans have a lot of leverage with regard to that so again, have to be very careful and fight for the programs we care a lot about. That's about it in a nutshell but happy to answer any questions or if I missed anything I'm here to help. Thank you so much. Thank you. Questions? It's clear that for structural reasons, because of structural reasons that, but you have your ear to the ground in Washington. Are there people among those Republicans who are actually speaking about targeting transportation funding and the scuttle butt and stuff like, that's where I'm gonna go get the money or is it just talk is about, let's claw back unused pandemic relief money if it's unused or unobligated. Let's claw back out years of the infrastructure bill with no specifics but it's sort of, I think Republicans see those as maybe low hanging fruit because it's kind of out there but hasn't been spent yet. Let's take it and do that. But nothing specific yet, especially in the transportation area. Let me see if there's any public comments. And I see Mr. Pimentel. So we'll go back up to item 14 and that is state legislative update. Hello, Michael, thanks for being here. There we go. Well thank you, Madam Chair and Board members. Appreciate your flexibility this morning and allowing me to move after Chris and we'll say that I think there's gonna be a lot of congruency in terms of updates and really some of the challenges that exist here at the state level relative to how we have seen challenges at the federal level. Now, I would ask that we pull up my PowerPoint slides so I can run through just a few items that speak to where we are with this legislative session for the 2023, 2024 year. So I'm gonna pause for a beat so we can pull up those slides and then get underway. So we can move to that first slide. And Donna, I'm not seeing anything on my end with regards to legislation. So 2023, 2024 legislative session. I am not gonna, this is still now. To share it from your side. I certainly can do that. All right, so folks, I'm gonna walk you through just a few high level updates with regards to work under way here in Sacramento. I wanna note for you that we are in the regular session for the 2023 to 2024 year. And here, the legislature has reconvened for this session. They were convened on January 3rd and we are just passed a deadline for submitting legislation for this calendar year of 2023. That deadline was February 17th. And with that deadline, we saw more than 2,500 bills introduced in this legislative session for this calendar year. And I'm gonna be touching on a few of those notable bills that have some potential impact on Santa Cruz Metro as I move through my presentation. But just wanna also note for you that as a matter of process, we're also very quickly approaching a spring recess. That's when the legislature breaks for a moment in time and they will be reconvening on April 10th. And so between March 30th, April 10th, I expect no legislative action. But as we've seen over recent weeks, there has been a variety of legislative hearings to consider legislative proposals as well as aspects of the governor's proposed budget, which I will touch on in a moment. So moving to the next slide, I'll just highlight for you one of those bills that has some potential impact to Santa Cruz Metro. This is a bill that is being sponsored by the California Transit Association organization that Santa Cruz Metro is a member of. This bill, AB 463, heart. Michael, if you could just pause one second, we lost the screen one moment. Oh, there we go. Okay, please continue. All right, sure thing. So this bill establishes for transiting agencies this designation of an essential use customer. And that essential use customer status affords transit agencies with the ability to have continuous access to electricity in the event of rolling blackouts. And the concept here is that agencies across the state are moving very rapidly to introduce zero emission technologies. We've had a lot of discussions with the Metro team about your own plans for both battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell technologies but recognizing that there has been increasing demand on California's electricity grid. The incidence of grid challenges has become more acute. That is something that may have an impact on your ability as an agency to carry out two core functions. One would be daily service delivery. The other would be emergency response. And I think as was alluded to earlier in today's board there have been extreme weather events across the state including in Santa Cruz Metro or rather Santa Cruz County that has required a Metro to be activated. This bill would afford Santa Cruz Metro like agencies across the state with some added ability to have a reliable access to electricity. Now I prepared this deck prior to the bill being heard in the assembly utilities and energy committee. And today I'm pleased to note for you all that this bill did pass out of that committee with bipartisan support and we'll be moving on to the assembly appropriations committee. Now I also wanna highlight an additional bill for you and this is one that we've talked about in years past albeit in a different form. This is AB 610 by assembly member Holden that would establish a structure for funding youth transit passes through transit agencies in partnership with educational institutions. This bill was before the legislature last year as AB 1919 and that bill did reach the governor's desk but was ultimately vetoed because there was not funding to bring that bill online. Now this year advocacy organizations from across the state are working to identify that budget resource that can support this program. And they're pursuing that in tandem with this legislation which is currently a bill that's passed out of the assembly transportation committee and onto the assembly appropriations committee. Now I also wanna highlight a bill that has the potential to significantly modify the structure of transit operations but also two laws and regulations impacting transit agencies at the state level. This is the bill AB 761 by assemblywoman Laura Friedman happens to be the chair of the assembly transportation committee. And here this bill acknowledges that even pre-pandemic most transit agencies across the state were seeing declines in transit ridership but certainly because of the pandemic we have seen that ridership has become increasingly stagnant at a level that is well below pre-pandemic levels. And while that does not exist for every agency across the state on balance it does. And with that assemblywoman Friedman is looking to introduce a bill that would convene a new task force at the state level to review those challenges that are presented to transit agencies in their recovery from the pandemic and then also challenge agencies in their long-term efforts to incite mode shift away from cars and to high capacity public transit. Now this bill is one that just passed out of the assembly transportation committee. Again, this presentation was prepared for this week's hearings and the bill will be moving on to the assembly appropriations committee. Now this bill is one that is very critical in part because in Sacramento there are ongoing conversations around transit operations funding. Chodras operational funding shortfalls that are the outgrowth of the pandemic but also to provide support to agencies in advancing strategies to regrow transit ridership as a legislature has contemplated those requests from the industry writ large. They've been very clear reform needs to be part of the conversation. This bill helps to advance one form of reform to move that type of investment forward in this calendar year. Now I do wanna highlight then a few items related to the state budget. And here I just wanna note for you that Governor Newsom did release his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2324 on January 10th of this year. And the budget picture is frankly pretty dark. The governor's administration has projected a $22.5 billion funding shortfall for this year. And with that, as you'll see in a moment there are a variety of proposed cuts that are on the table primarily from discretionary spending as a mechanism for reducing that budget deficit. And so here I wanna note for you that perhaps the most operative cut before the transit industry is a proposed cut of $2 billion to the state's transit and intercity rail capital program. Now, as you heard earlier in the remarks there is strong interest from agencies across the state in building transformative capital projects. Santa Cruz Metro does in fact have a request in for a program from the TIRCP for what is known as cycle six of that grant program. And I will note for you that these $2 billion in reductions speak to out-year investments. And so it would not have an impact on the funding cycle for which Santa Cruz Metro has just applied. It would speak to future funding cycles that are actuated through a new process. The TIRCP by and large operates as a competitive grant program that is overseen by the California State Transportation Agency. These $2 billion in reductions relate to a form of investment that would in fact flow through the regions for a project selection at a regional level for purposes that relate to the interests of the TIRCP program which is largely building, again, transformative capital projects but also supporting the transition to cleaner technologies like Santa Cruz Metro's interest in moving to hydrogen fuel cell buses. Now, I also want to note for you that another proposed reduction that is on the table is this $1 billion reductions of programs not that full balance would impact transit buses, ferries or locomotives that are deployed by transit agencies. It's a broad-based cut that would impact light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles but there would be a proposed 10% reduction to the investments that would flow to the California Resources Board's hybrid and zero-emission truck and bus voucher incentive project also known as HFIP that provides voucher incentive to reduce the incremental cost of transitioning to zero-emission technologies. And I want to just then show you what that looks like in real terms. I noted again, broad-based cuts across the board. You'll see that there are a variety of programs that have seen reductions. Those are spoken to on the far right column where you see the amount of funding that is retained relative to the initial budgeted amount. And then as I had noted, you see a roughly 10% reduction for transit bus across programs overseen by CARB as well as programs overseen by the California Energy Commission which relates to infrastructure investments to support zero-emission bus transition. Now I also want to note for you one thing that does not speak specifically to elements of the transportation program that the state has control over. And so these are programmatic investments that flow on a formula basis and for which the state does not make annual appropriation decisions around. Programs that are highlighted, for example, include the state transit assistance program that is funded by the sales tax on diesel fuel and the reductions that you're seeing here in terms of funding amount. And you'll see a total reduction of $118 million relate just to changes in economy, changes in fuel consumption that have led to reduction in the revenue that's being generated by these funding streams. Now, as I close, I do want to note for you that there is here this focus on the next step of the budget process. And that is going to be the introduction of the May revise. This is an opportunity for Governor Newsom to present updated budget figures that reflect the state of California's economy mid-year. Now, here I want to apply for you that we are likely to see in May revise a relatively lean budget. And that is because both the state and federal government have delayed for some counties across the United States and in case of California, across California in filing taxes. And that is because of the extreme weather events that we've experienced in recent months. And so as a result, in normal years, we would receive the tax receipts in April. The governor would be able to present his best estimates come May. This year that deadline has been postponed till October. And that means that again, we'll see a lean budget come May. And then there would be some successive actions that take place later in the year to plus up investments as we see a fuller picture for the state's budget. Now, I also want to just highlight for you that the prospect for new state transit funds remains uncertain. I noted earlier in my remarks that there is a push for new transit operations funding. That is going to be a challenge because of the state general fund picture, but also to the reality that other forms of discretionary investments like cap and trade are oversubscribed. And so the message we've been hearing from Sacramento in addition to reforms is the need for self-help or counties for localities to bring online things like low option sales taxes as a way of supporting but addressing their individual programs and priorities in the absence of additional state support. And so I know that there was some conversation earlier in today's board meeting around Metro and potential efforts. Here, I would say that there's some congruency with some of the message that we're hearing here in Sacramento about the need for that focus on self-help generated revenue as opposed to waiting still on the state government for additional support. Now, I wanna note for you that irrespective of these delays in the deadlines for tax receipts, we are gonna see a budget adopted in June. It will go into effect for the start of the fiscal year 23-24 by July 1. But then as I noted, there would be later term action likely in late summer, early fall that would serve to provide supplemental investments to support the state budget and the priorities that the state has. And so at this time, I'm happy to take any questions, comments that you might have on the workings here in Sacramento. It's certainly a lot of activity. Unfortunately, with the budget outlook being as it is, it's gonna be a challenging year across a variety of fronts, whether budgetary or legislative. I was happy to take questions. Thank you. Number one, I've got a couple, have a couple of questions on assembly bill 610 holding youth transit passes. What's the definition of youth? I mean, more than half of our ridership is UCSC and Cabrillo well over half. Just go to grade school or what does it go to? Yeah, so the way that they have identified youth and the purposes of this bill relates to the institutions that would be partner agencies with the transit agencies. And so here there's a clear identification to K through 12 institutions, CSU, UC and California Community Colleges. Okay. And at the end that you were talking about self-help and part of the reason that all passes that transportation were included in measure D and that's why it passed, I think, is that we became a self-help county. Does this mean we have to renew our self-help status? We are a self-help county. There's not every county of the 58 in California or self-help counties with transit. Are we a self-help county now by definition of that or do we have to do another thing to quantify for being identified as self-help? Yeah, so I would say that you are, as Santa Cruz County, currently a self-help county, if you've operationalized a local auction sales tax or any other form of measure some counties have, for example, parcel taxes, things of the sort, then you are categorized as self-help. But the general point that I was making on that slide was not so much a matter of new designation for counties or a new need to say get recertified as self-help, but rather the general message that money from Sacramento may not be forthcoming. And if localities have interest in making further investment in transportation or public transit, likely much of that revenue would have to be revenue that is derived from the regions or from the localities. And so that has been the dominant message from Sacramento. There is some interest in having some honest conversation about additional state support, but noting the budget picture and the challenges that we face here in Sacramento. Again, that focus has been a message of subsidiary and really that focus on generating revenue at the local level to support local priorities. Okay, one final question, this could probably be addressed to both federal and state. With previously we were talking about the federal legislation seems to be addressing rural as well as urban. Do you think trying to make that equal or as much as fair as possible between the urban and the rural areas? Do you think that the, we know where the power is in some of the big cities, for instance, in California and in the big states in the nation, but is there any establishment of fairness in all of these bills that rural or we'll get the same attention as urban counties? That's probably pretty hard to, it's gonna be a team effort and boy with the close situation we have in Washington, DC, that's gonna be hard to satisfy everybody, I would guess, but. Yeah, what I would note for you is that as we look at programs that would bring new funding online, for example, AB 610, the Holden bill on Fairfrey Transit, monies would go out on a formula basis. Formula basis generally defined based on population, but then also to based on the revenues that are generated by the agencies in the region. And so that prevents what is necessarily solely investment in urban counties and urban transit agencies and ensures that there is a funding that is spread across the state. On programs like the Transit and University Rail Capital Program, one of the criteria for investments that they maintain is a heavy focus on ensuring geographic balance, geographic equity in the total balance of investments that that program makes. And so I wanna, I suppose, take this opportunity to note one thing with regards to Metro's TRCP grant application. We did work very closely with CEO Michael Tree on collecting a series of support letters from your legislative delegation to help support that application. And one of the things that we were very clear to elevate within that context is the reality that irrespective of this focus on geographic balance, geographic equity within that program and its long history, the realities that Santa Cruz Metro has not yet won an award from that program. And so we're very eager to highlight that within the state's review of that application, recognizing that as that program moves forward, there's going to need to be that balance of ensuring that counties across the state are benefiting from its investments. And then Director, I also wanna note for you that we're also seeing some changes in leadership here in Sacramento, whereby Assemblymember Robert Rebus, one of the members of Santa Cruz Metro's delegation will soon be elevated to the role of Speaker of the California State Assembly. And so with that, I wanna suggest that there will be a rebalancing of priorities within Sacramento policymaking and funding decisions to further ensure that there's that balance between rural and urban counties across the state of California. First of all, I wanna thank you for your service for the transit district. Along with Chris in Washington, I think we are able to be represented by lobbyists who really do a great job of bringing us funding and we should appreciate that. And the small amount of money we spend on that is well worth it. My first questions about the state budget situation, you'd said that there's about a $22 billion deficit and then you outlined about $3 billion that's coming out of transit. Where's the rest of it coming from in the Governor's budget? Yeah, the remainder of cuts are being made to a variety of things like energy programs, some health and human services programs. There's a balance of investments that are being proposed to be rescinded, generally through, again, those discretionary investments that the state has made over these last few years. And my second question, Bruce McPherson has raised this, but the youth bill 610 that's being considered, I don't know if you're the right person to answer this or our staff, but we have a program of free rides for youth that we're working on. And I'm just wondering what the relationship is between that state legislation and what we're already doing. Yeah, so what I would note for you is within the structure of the bill, there's actually an opportunity for Santa Cruz Metro to be able to draw down some additional state resources. So the bill is really focused on one, encouraging transit agencies that today do not have fair free youth transit pass programs to implement those programs. It does so by providing new resources to those agencies, again, in partnership with educational institutions. But the bill also does have a provision or should say a section that states very clearly if you're an agency that today has a youth transit pass program in place and that can be again defined as a partnership with a UCSESU, a California Community College or a K-2 Paul institution, you can draw down on resources from that program as well to further support the efficacy of your existing programs. And so for example, no doubt you all are receiving some form of financial support for your partnership with UC Santa Cruz with Cabrillo College. The bill would provide some additional resources in the event that you wanted to, for example, increase service levels to those colleges or in the event that you wanted to expand the nature of your service. Some agencies, for example, may have their partnerships on for the duration of the school year. Students, of course, oftentimes are around campus for that full calendar year, there would be an ability to expand into additional months for that partnership that may not otherwise be covered by the agreement, the financial support that you receive from those educational institutions. And so built into it is again, that type of support for existing agreements, recognizing that we want to honor, uplift, continue to support those agreements and the reality that many agencies were out at front making these types of partnerships to the benefit of California students. Thanks. The directors have questions. Can you remind us, sorry if I missed it, the exact status of 610, is it anywhere near the governor's desk? No, it's still several steps removed. And so currently it sits in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. After it moves out of the Appropriations Committee, it will go to the assembly floor and then it will go through a similar cycle that it did in the assembly where a bio will be routed to the Senate Transportation Committee after moving off of the assembly floor onto the Senate Appropriations Committee, onto the Senate floor, and then onto the governor's desk. And so, so a few steps before that bill is actually something that he may act on. And then as I noted with last year, we saw the same bill, largely same structure of this bill moved to the governor's desk. Again, he had vetoed that because there wasn't a budget appropriation attached to it. And so Mr. Holden is working alongside the sponsors of that legislation to ensure that there is a budget appropriation that moves alongside that legislative vehicle to bolster his chances of being signed by Governor Newsom this year. My recollection from AB University of California, CSUs and so forth because there are students of those institutions that are not used. So complications arose with what's the definition of who's in and if you're a 60-something student getting a graduate degree included. So I just raised that as a concern that that be clarified. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Pimentel for the report. I mean, it is a challenging situation in Sacramento clearly that we're looking at. And obviously if these kinds of cuts do come to pass, it would be more difficult for us to ultimately achieve our aspirational goals of 100% zero emissions fleet. I mean, the buses we have, excuse me, all no are not cheap. So that was part of our message with the Central Coast Coalition is to our legislators is that they push back a little bit against some of the governor's proposed cuts to TERSIP and other transit funding so that, because it does take sustained funding in order to make a difference for our agency and for others throughout the state. I was just wondering if you could remind me when we'll hear back about our TERSIP application. Is that made in time frame? Mr. Drucker, I actually do not know the exact time frame for that. Staff at Natural may be able to better advise on that, but I believe that it should be in the spring time frame. Maybe program awards sometime in April, I believe. And so as Director Rotkin mentioned, how much impact would it have if we showcase some of our early successes in what we're doing? I understand it's a little different from what's being proposed, what we're doing locally, but is it worth our time to communicate our early successes with the state decision makers? I would say certainly to support the bill in moving through the legislature and then having communications with your legislative delegation about the impact of the programs that you have in place currently in Santa Cruz County would be an asset to their deliberations on the bill. I will note for you that as we saw with AB 1919, the bill is likely to move forward without significant opposition. We have seen broad coalition bipartisan support on both bills. And so I wouldn't discourage the engagement. I would note for you that very likely it will move to the governor's desk this year much like AB 1919 did last year. Thank you so much. I'm not seeing any other, oh yes. Not to, sorry about that. Not to belabor the point, but as the bill, as 610 moves along, I don't know how much of an opportunity anybody from the CSUs or the UCs are gonna have some sort of consultant or some sort of mechanism to provide some feedback. Because as 1919, 2176 prior to that, as those were written, it's great in concept, but there are a myriad of gotchas that could really backfire, at least how I see it. I won't speak for any of the other UCs, but the way that a lot of transit is funded, the way that it's set up, I just, I notice there's a lot of gotchas and it's a great idea, but it really has to be well thought out so that it doesn't become, it doesn't blow up in everybody's faces and it doesn't result in reduced services for students, which if you look at it a certain way, that could happen. So as this moves along, I mean, I don't know what opportunities we might have. I might have other experts when it comes to the UC transit for our students might have to chime in, but if that opportunity is there, I'd love to be a part of the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I do wanna acknowledge that given where we are in the legislative year, the process and the opportunities for engagement from stakeholders in the public are nuts. We do have a number of hearings that are gonna be forthcoming, again, in the Appropriations Committee in both houses and the Senate Transportation Committee and would certainly advise that if this is a bill that Santa Cruz Metro ultimately wants to take a position on or offer guidance on, we can certainly work with CEO Tree and his staff to tee up what those recommendations are and advance them to the relevant committees and to your legislative delegation for consideration. So Matt, please, Matt Farrell. Good morning, Chair Calantari-Johnson and Metro Board members. I'm speaking today in representing Santa Cruz County Friends of the Rail and Trail. We wanted to let you know that we have written letters to all our state legislators, encouraging them to support additional funding for TERSIP and for transitioning federal and state funding to allow money to be used for operations. And finally, encouraging them to support AB 610. I'd also like to thank Assembly Member Gail Pellerin because she is a principal co-author on that bill and we plan in the coming weeks to follow up with these legislatures and encourage their support for the bill. I think it's really commendable that your team at Metro and the Board have moved forward with this pilot transit pass program, youth transit pass program. And while I don't know the details, my intuition tells me it will position you well if the governor has the vision to sign this bill. So thank you very much for your time and for all your work. Thank you so much for that update, Michael. And to our legislative update, thank you that you got a sense of what's ahead and how we need to. Thank you for having me. I'm 16, consideration of authorizing the CEO General Manager to negotiate a lease agreement for 809 West Beach Street in Watsonville, Mr. Chuck Farmer. Hello, I'll wait till a presentation comes up. Let's see if it works, oops. Okay, so I wanted to kind of bring this to your attention and I want to kind of go through this. So this is a property down in Watsonville and what we're doing is looking to rent it as I'll just say is a parking lot in a staging location. Okay, so I'm going to go through. The reason why we're looking at this lot is one, we are receiving hopefully by the four to the end of June five electric buses. On top of it, we've now I think locked it in that by May through July of this year, we're going to get 10 articulated buses from San Diego that is going to come up. On top of it, we are doing a lot of projects across the agency. This includes looking at a hydrogen fueling station that we're going to be putting in, which is going to go in our operations lot up here in Santa Cruz. We're also looking at development of Pacific Station, which is slated right now for November start date, as well as the Watsonville station and then our Soquel Park and Ride, which is where our paratransit is going to be located. All of this, and I think going through the storms, I think a lot of the people in the operation so I can tell you, we've had to move buses out of our operations lot, stick them up on the street to move things. We're just really kind of at our capacity at this point right now at our location. Getting these new buses in, it doesn't mean another bus walks off the lot. It also, we're getting in Artex, which are 60 feet and more than likely the buses that go out are going to be 40 feet. So this is a bus and a half that's coming in and we're only swapping it out with a bus that's 40 foot. So as part of it, we need some kind of location where we can put these extra vehicles until either they get pushed off into, whether it's auction or for that matter, even storage. For example, we have a whole bunch of equipment that's sitting on our Soquel Park and Ride and when they start, we're going to have to move that equipment somewhere and there is no location that we have right now that we could put up in Santa Cruz on our lots. So we're kind of limited in that space. So this is really about a space and resource issue at this point. And like I said, this is a three year lease that we're talking about and we're talking about something that we could extend later on as well. And the lot is actually kind of large and I'll kind of go through that here in a second. And if anybody's talked to me, we've been looking at this for months and months and months, trying to find something. And up in the city of Santa Cruz, there's no room. There's nothing in Capitola. There's nothing in Aptos and literally it pushes you down into Watsonville, which is the prime location and it's actually a great location. We found a place that's actually a parking lot. The whole thing is a parking lot. We don't have to worry about a building in the way and we can actually use this and utilize this space. So if we go on here and like I said, I think I kind of mentioned a couple of these items. This is overflow for some of our buses. And like I said, we're gonna use this for staging of all our stuff. At some point, we're gonna be getting hydrogen fuel tank and we're gonna get hydrogen buses. I mean, we have this terse of grant. If we get it, we're gonna start moving on it. We may actually get the buses before the hydrogen tanks, hope not. But if we do, we're not gonna be able to use the buses. So we have a place to store it and then once we start using the buses, then we have double council buses. So as you can see, we don't have room and this creates a real problem in the sense that we're parking these on the street. And of course, there's some neighbors there and so forth as well as that we've had issues with some vandalism and so on. And we need them in our lots, not on the streets. So as part of that. Excuse me, Chuck, could you hold on a second? Okay. We're trying to get these slides out to zoom here. Oh, okay. We're good now? Okay. All right, let's see if I can go on the next one. So let me show you where it's at. This map right here, which hopefully everybody who has a screen in front of them can actually see it a little bit better. In the top right hand side, that is our actually current Metro Watsonville Transit Center. If you pull out, go over to beach road and hang a right. Driving down beach road, it's all the way down on the left hand side of the road. The actual distance on it is just a little, I think it's a little bit over a mile. And this is the property itself. So right now it's 809 Westby Street. It's 3.36 acres. It's almost fully paved, whether it's tar or whether it's concrete, but it's mixed match throughout there. And as part of that, the size of this is more than enough to what we need for right now. But the value that we did by going around and looking at other locations, we're either constrained where it was either a huge building that took up the majority of the lot, which of course we don't need a place with a building, or it ended up being a grass field where we would have to do a whole slew of infrastructure improvements, the lay down pavement and so forth. So this actually fits our needs because this is exactly what we're looking for. And then this is what it looks like right now. As you can see, it's got a fence already around. And then you can see the pavement and it goes all the way back, not quite to those buildings back there, but close to it. And right now, green waste is actually renting a portion of it and they're on a month a month. So if we go get approval to move forward, green waste would have to shift their vehicles back over to their lots and then we would take the lot itself. And then as part of it, just to kind of give you an idea on the size, if you take the parking lot that's sitting in our maintenance facility, which is on the left and the parking lot that's in our operations facility on the right and you look at the acreage, it's roughly about the same size of all of that. So we're really doubling our parking area at this point. And so to get the cost, so what we're asking is it's approximately $11,000 a month on the lease piece. There's a permanent cost of roughly about $10,000 and we're estimating it's gonna be less than $90,000, just to clean up the lot, maybe fix if there's a hole in a fence or something like that and so forth. If we have to put up some lighting as a parking lot, but that was pretty much the whole, full investment is about $100,000 a one-time sun cost and the rest of it is leasing and that's $121,000 a year. Pros on this, like I said, it's ideal location, availability, that's been really tough. I mean, like I said, we've been looking for a year and can't find anything that's came up. The cost is very cheap. This is the cheapest place. There's a place right down the road on beach that's really just, I guess it's a grassy area, much, much smaller, but they wanna sell it for $3.8 million, far beyond what this is. So we're, right there, we've got a good deal. Like I said, increased parking and storage serves as a backup location. Something happens here. For example, like right now, if we knew we were gonna have floods again and we have to move those buses up, we could move those half those buses down there in storm until the floods are over and then bring them back instead of sticking them on the streets. And then at the same point, and I'm just gonna mention this one time, at some point, our Watsonville facility is gonna be up and be under construction and then we also have the, I'm sorry, the SoCal Park and Ride will be under construction for Paratransit and where our Paratransit is located right now, the lease will be coming due here in the next couple of years and we will have to move and we could use this as a bridge to move Paratransit and then of course, move them into their new place when they're here. So that's another good thing. You know, the bad thing, like I said, it's incremental spending for the location and then of course it's the sunk costs that I just talked about. It's the fact that it costs a little bit more money. Anybody have any questions? Can you tell us how this fits into our budget situation? Is this gonna require an amendment to our budget or it's already been out of a fund that's already anticipating this? So how it's gonna fund is through our operating capital reserves and it is actually in the budget, the budget I presented and then what you saw that's on consent right now. We actually put it in. The capital costs are much higher so they'll come down based off of what we have here. Fantastic lot, like I said, close to highway, close to the Grand Center in Watsonville so it really meets a lot of our needs. I'm just curious about the existing SoCal Park and Ride lot that we're renting in capitol. I think it's the SoCal Research Park, right? How big is that lot? What is our current lease and does it expire? For the SoCal Park and Ride? So we have it, we own it. Yeah. Well, to clarify. We own the location off of Highway 1. Yeah. We're storing bus shelters there. We actually move para-cruise operations to it? Or current? Sorry, I meant the para-cruise operations. The current today. Yeah, so current today it's in Aptos. It's in an industrial area just north of 41st and we're back in a corner. We've given up half the space so now we have only half the space left. The way it works is very tight back there. When an operator comes in, they have to pull the bus out and pull their car in because there's a lack of parking right now. The lease, the way it's set up right now, it actually expires here in August. And we have an option for, two options actually for one year extensions that we can use at any point in time. And at this point, I know that the landlord does want us out sooner than later. There is no doubt about that. I understand quickly that we could potentially move para-cruise operations to this Watsonville lot or is it just competitive? I realize we're putting a lot of demands now. Yeah, so if we have to move or we make a decision to do it, I'll work with Julian team on the general council but we could move temporarily the para-transit, everything, the operation center and so forth, bring them down to Watsonville. They could operate out of there until the so-called parking right is complete. And then at that point, move them in. Can I speak? Yes. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great, thanks. So I guess historically going back, I think that it was a big mistake for us to sell our property when we owned it here in Watsonville. I think it was on Sakata Lane. But it's nice to see that there is a, or hopefully there will be, support from this board to move some of the facilities down to South County. I guess my question is, I have a couple of questions. One is what's the term of this lease? And because we're in the middle about doing our general plan here in Watsonville. And so I think that the zoning in that area may be up for discussion on the future of that area. So just wanting to make sure that if it does get zoned in a certain way, the owners aren't gonna pull all the work or money we've invested into that area in order to benefit financially for them for themselves. So can you answer that question first? Yeah, so we're going in with, basically our offer is $11,000 a month for three years. And that's going to our real estate agent who's gonna pass it over. The owner of this property knows that if this goes through, that's approximately what we're gonna do. Do they come back with a five-year lease? I don't know yet. This is our initial pushover to them to find out. I think that a five-year lease is safer just because of the uncertainty of the market and probably in any city today. I mean, to make an investment that we're gonna be putting into this area and then in three years to have the lease ended, I mean, this happened with cannabis growers, right? Going in and a lot of some of our businesses in that area got pushed out because they wanted to go in a different direction where they could get more money for their location. So I don't know, I just feel safer that if it was a longer lease, just because three years, we blink and three years is over. I mean, it's time flies so fast. Okay, I mean, we could look at five years or however. I mean, I'll talk with Michael about it and we'll decide which way we wanna go. Yeah, I think, you know, I think we'd be interested in talking, but I think big picture-wise, we're finding that Watsonville would be an advantageous location for a permanent facility for Metro. So your zero-emission bus master plan, for example, has all of your electric buses being charged and operating out of Watsonville. By far the majority of your employees are from Watsonville that operate the buses. So this is a strategic location to make it easier for people to be employed with Metro. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So our thought is this is a property in an ideal situation. So let's go lease it and then use it as a staging area because we have a need it needs. But I think over the next year, we're really gonna take a look what other properties are around and then make a very aggressive approach with board direction to acquire property that we could use as a local match in a federal grant which requires some analysis. And then at the end of the day, we want to purchase a property. So I just want to counterbalance Director Dutcher of the thought that a long-term lease may not be as advantageous as we hope because our thought is we would like to purchase property. And this may be an ideal location to purchase it, but we haven't done the analysis. It's pretty rigorous, but this property is ideally situated for a short-term use. Yeah, okay. And I appreciate that. I also want to say thank you for being considerate of the workforce that does live down here in Watsonville. And I do appreciate the fact that we're trying to be a little bit more inclusive. And I do see the vision that you have and this may not be the exact location you're looking for. So on that temporary term, I definitely, I'm supportive of course. And I would like to see the permanent happen down here. I feel too often, and I know that my voice is a lot of sometimes some of the board members don't want to hear, but I feel that Watsonville gets a lot of taken away from them a lot. And one being the property that we had down here that was sold that probably never should have been sold. So moving forward, I do hope that when we do try to find that permanent spot that South County Watsonville, it comes back. And we meet the needs of our drivers because like Michael said, a lot of them do live down here. And we build a facility that I think that will be really moving forward thinking. And I know that the demographics of this community will really put us in a position for grants. When we speak about going out for funding, I know that the demographics of Watsonville really puts us up in a different tier when it comes to getting these grants. And I hope that when we do move forward that the permanent facility is located down here. So with that said, I will support the temporary lease for this property, but I'm hoping that this board and it sounds like Michael is already has the vision of having something permanent down here that this board does move with making sure that a facility does find itself down here in Watsonville. Thank you. Thank you, Director Duque. I'll look to see if there's any public comment on this item. Yeah, I just wanted to bring up another point of us needing a backup facility for operational standpoint, our current Metro base. We only have one way in and one way out. When we were threatened during the fires and we needed to evacuate those facilities, we utilized the downtown metro station to store all of our vehicles and run operations out of it. That will not be an option for us come fall into the winter. So if we are found in that type of situation again where it's not accessible or something happens to that portion of highway nine, we will need somewhere to be able to go. Otherwise we simply will not be able to run and get any of our equipment out. So we also support this temporary lot as pretty much necessity for us to be able to guarantee that operations will run on a daily basis. Thank you. See any hands virtually raised? All second. Director Brown, Director Downing, Director Dutra. Aye. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson, aye. Director Koenig, aye. Director Lin, aye. Director McPherson, Director Newsom, aye. Director Pagler, aye. Director Keros Carter, aye. Director Rocker, aye. And the motion passes. Thank you so much Chuck. Right next we are on item 17, re-imagined metro oral update and we have Planning and Development Director John Ergo. Good morning directors. John Ergo, Planning and Development Director. It's nice to be with you all in physical space the first time in three years in my tenure as your Planning Director. So in a minute I'm gonna introduce Daniel Constantino from Jarrett Walker and Associates who's gonna give a briefing on where we are to date in our re-imagined metro process. This is again, this again is a 15 month planning process that we kicked off in January to evaluate comprehensively all of metro's routes and services, not something that we've done here since 2016. And to develop service scenarios for our current resources and future opportunities to expand the network should additional resources become available. So the team from Jarrett Walker has been here in Santa Cruz this week meeting with our bus operators riding our routes, conducting in-person meetings. We had a Zoom meeting on Tuesday. It was unfortunately interrupted but we had over 40 participants that stayed with us throughout the meeting to share their feedback on where they would like to see a metro go in the future. And what we're hearing is people want more. They want more service, they want more frequency. We heard that in the fall when we did some survey work preparing for this process we heard that over 70% of respondents at that time wanted to see more frequent service. We also heard that over 50% of non-riders would ride Metro more if the bus came more often which was a phenomenal response to get from a survey. And we're hearing the same thing from our current riders. So this initial round of outreach is all about engaging with our current riders and stakeholders in the community and we're hearing a lot of the same things. So without further ado, I'd like to invite Daniel up here from Jarrett Walker and Associates to share our initial results from the first round of outreach. Thanks, John, appreciate it. Hi everyone, my name's Daniel Costantino. I'm a principal with Jarrett Walker and Associates. We're a public transit focused consulting firm. All we do is help plan public transit networks throughout the US and abroad. I am the project manager on the consultant side of the team for the Reimagine Metro project. And I'm gonna give you a little update of kind of what we've done so far, a little bit of what we've found out and then I'm happy to take any questions or give any further context that y'all might be interested in. So let's see if I can click this. Do I have to be pointing in a particular direction? Yep, afraid I'm not. Does not seem to do anything. Oh, there we go. All right, thank you. So first of all, for anyone not familiar, what is Reimagine Metro? So this is a project to re-envision the network. And when we say the network, what that really means is it's a fancy word for where buses should go and how often they should run in those places. And so as part of the key goals of this effort, we're really looking at creating a network that is more relevant to the community's needs, that is more useful, that is more attractive for many people's trips so that you can really shift the conversation from a place where transit is a relatively marginal part of the transportation system in the county to something that is useful and attractive in many people's daily lives. And so that involves a few components. One of the more obvious ones is kind of to adapt to all the various changes that have happened in the last three, four years between natural disasters and COVID and everything else. Another part, quite frankly, is to increase the amount of service provided. And so a lot of the work that we've been scoped for is to see what we would do and what we would do with increased resources, how we could improve service, how that would improve people's lives. So as far as the process goes, it's kind of in three phases. There's a first item that we're calling early wins, which is really about looking at what can we do with the resources that are gonna be available in the next year. And so by resources there, I kind of mean money, but I also mean how many actual drivers you're gonna have, what actual buses you're gonna have, all of the stuff that you've spent a fair amount of time talking about today. So we're gonna look at how we can improve things in the next year, taking into account some of the realities that are coming down the pipes, such as the changes at Pacific Station, for example. Next phase after that is looking at alternatives. And what we mean by that is we're gonna look at what are the different ways that you could change this network if you were to put more service in. And so depending on what your policy priorities are, you may make different choices about how to increase service. You may make choices that are more oriented toward frequency and core corridors. You may make choices that are more oriented towards getting service closer to more houses. There's different ways to look about it. Those are probably the two biggest ends of the spectrum there, but we haven't yet to find exactly what the alternatives are, but we will be working on them. And then we will go out to the community with these alternatives, get their input on that in the next phase of outreach. And based on that input and based on direction that we will be soliciting from yourselves as the board on that input, we will be then developing a plan. What's the plan for change for the future? And we'll present that plan again to the public and to yourselves, and based on that, we'll go from a draft plan to a final plan. So quick reminder about who's working on this. Obviously this is being led by the planning team and John Ergo at Reimagine Metro. On the consultant side, you have a team led by the firm that I work for, Jared Walker and Associates. We're working in association with a local firm from Monterey called Amma Transit Planning. And really we specialize exclusively in public transit. We reimagine public transit networks in a lot of different communities. And we do it in a particular way where we're really interested in responding to community input, making policy trade-offs clear, balancing a lot of different and potentially conflicting goals. And we always want to be really clear about what those different goals are and the ways in which they work together or they conflict. So this is not the first place we have worked as a firm or where I have personally worked even locally. I personally was the project manager working with the Amma team on the COA for Monterey-Salinas Transit, and which resulted in the recently implemented Better Bus Network in Monterey County, California. We've also worked throughout the U.S. and abroad, put in a couple examples here that are relevant locally and more largely. Jared led the next network, Bus Network Redesigned for Santa Clara VTA a few years ago. In recent experience, I've led the Monterey-Salinas project. I also led a similar project in Madison, Wisconsin, which is obviously a big college town, somewhat like yourselves. Possibly the most interesting project that I've had the pleasure and the honor to work on in my time as a consultant has been managing the Bus Network Redesigned Study for Dublin, Ireland called Bus Connects, which also involved a very significant increase in service. We're really looking for a step change in making the bus a more relevant options for all sorts of trips. And of course, our partners, Amma, have worked with us on many different projects throughout California and also somewhat beyond as well. And, okay, so as to what we've been doing, we've been working on this project since January. And in that time, we've really been in a process of learning. We are obviously not from here. We don't know your communities yet. We are in the process of learning. And to do that, we're going through it in several different ways concurrently. John mentioned some of the meetings that we've had with the public. I would say that I'm grateful to Metro, first of all, for having done a general public poll before this study even started, which gives us some understanding of what the public wants, both riders and non-riders. And then in this first phase, when we've been engaging with the public through a series of surveys with riders, and those surveys helped us recruit rider-focused groups that have happened both virtually and in person. And we've had meetings with a whole broad variety of stakeholders representing all sorts of different community organizations, as well as the city and county governments, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. So that's one part of it. Another part has been the desktop exercise of reviewing all the relevant census and local RTC data that may be relevant to transit needs and transit demand. And we've also been reviewing all the data that Metro has been able to provide to us on your existing and recent service, frequencies, schedules, ridership, all sorts of things, as well as having conversations with Metro operations, both at the supervision level. And yesterday, my colleague, Alvaro, was at the operations dispatch talking to drivers. So we've been learning about things. So I just want to give you a quick overview of some of the types of facts that we're interested as we look at this kind of study. So we're really interested in where people are and where they need to go. And so the map that I'm showing you right now is a map of population density kind of throughout your current service area. And so basically, if areas are marked in blue, they're areas where relatively many people live compared to the size of the area. They're relatively densely populated areas. And what's clear from, and you already know this, right, but is that people are very concentrated within the kind of urban and suburban areas in this kind of 30 mile long corridor from Watsonville up to Scotts Valley. And that that's about 80% of your population. And so that's really the areas that transit is able to serve in an effective way for fixed routes. And that's kind of what we're focusing on most. The other thing that's clear, of course, is it's not just where people live, but where they need to go. That you don't have a single dominant center of travel where people need to go. There is not one big downtown CBD that really dominates everything. You have some very large destinations. UCSC probably the largest one for transit right now. But you have others that also generate a really significant number of trips, like downtown Santa Cruz, like around 41st Avenue in Sekelle, like in actually several different parts of Watsonville, downtown being just kind of the biggest one. Or even kind of out here in Scotts Valley, there's relatively significant concentration of jobs. And even saying those, I'm missing a whole lot of other places. So the reason these things matter is because when we look at how to distribute transit service and how much of it to put, the key thing that really determines whether a transit service is gonna be useful to many people is whether it's near many people and near the places they need to go. So we're always looking at density. Where is their higher density? The more people in destinations are near transit, the more people are likely to find it useful. The other thing is that your destinations being kind of distributed through a wide area and with significant gaps between those areas, well, that means that transit is relatively more complicated and expensive to provide because there are a lot of long distance trips and there are a lot of relatively empty sections in terms of bringing more riders on board. Another thing that I wanna point out, I think that there is a clear sense in all the conversations we've had about the importance of travel out of county, particularly up to San Jose. And I wanna say to you, yes, that is true. There is a lot of travel over the hill, but even despite all of that, the majority of commute trips, as is being shown on this map, but probably all trips as well, and perhaps even more so, is really staying within the county. And so there's a real value at looking at how you're gonna serve trips within the county and how you're gonna improve that because that will have ultimately the greatest impact, although we will of course continue to look at regional links. Other thing that's really important is where different people live. And by different I mean the characteristics that are relevant to transit. I'm starting this with a characteristic that's not directly relevant to transit, which is this map of race and ethnicity in your county. So this map shows little dots. Each of those dots represent about 25 people, and the color of those dots represents the race or ethnicity that they have reported to the census. And you can see on this map really clearly how there are some very stark differences between South County, Watsonville, and surrounding areas, and Greater Santa Cruz. And I would say that those differences continue and accentuate as you go north towards Scotts Valley and the San Lorenzo Valley. Now those differences, the fact that Watsonville has 80% of its population speaks a language other than English at home, probably mostly Spanish, those aren't direct things that impact whether people need transit or use it, but they do reflect a whole lot of other factors that are relevant. So some of the factors that are relevant are where there are people who don't own cars. And we see that there are a few really clear concentrations in your core service area, which I'll now focus on more specifically for the rest of these maps. So you can see that there's a high density of households without cars in Santa Cruz itself, particularly on the west side, somewhat on the east side as well. And there are several large concentrations of households without cars in Watsonville, both downtown Watsonville and a little bit of north Watsonville kind of going toward freedom. And there's also a fair number of people without houses in the live-up, but specifically perhaps most towards Pleasure Point and a little bit towards the Dominican Hospital. And so there's all sorts of reasons why people don't own cars. For some people it's simply because they live in an area where it's relatively convenient to walk and so you maybe need it less. I think your housing costs have a certain impact on people's pocket books and what they're able to do. But there's one of the factor that correlates a lot with it is income. And so that's the map of where people don't own cars and this is the map of density of people with low incomes. And so again, the darker colors are showing you the higher densities. And if I flip back and forth, maybe I can. Doesn't seem like I can. In any case, if you were able to see, there's a lot of the areas that showed up dark in the last map show up dark in this map too. But there are also other areas with large low income populations that don't show up on the no car household map. And that's areas where you have a lot of low income people who for whatever reasons, the places they live in and the options for walking, cycling, and taking transit don't match. And so they essentially, despite their limited resources, are being forced to own and maintain vehicles. In some cases, I'm sure many people enjoy owning and maintaining a vehicle, but it is an economic burden on a lot of households. Of course, when we look at a map of low income in a community like yours, we know that that means many different things and many different types of transit needs. So for example, on the west side, a large part of the high density of low income people has to do with students. Whereas in Watsonville, we're looking at a lot of large, relatively low income households. And in the middle, in kind of Capitola and Pleasure Point, we're looking for the most part at larger concentrations of low income seniors on fixed incomes. Those are not absolutes, but those are kind of the big patterns that we see in the data. So here, for example, is a map of density of people under 18. So this is really telling you where there are families with children or families with a lot of children. You can see that the points that stand out the most are in Watsonville. There are some areas that stand out in the Greater Santa Cruz area. But that kind of tells us something about the different types of poverty that are in different communities. Right, so there you can see that. Again, how that goes. And then if you look at the map of seniors, you can see that there are parts of Watsonville that show up too. So again, large multi-generational households. But as well, the kind of Pleasure Point area really pops out on that map. And you can see that there's a lot of low income people. So kind of getting back at what I was saying before. So anyway, these are just various factors that we're looking at when we try to understand both demand and need. But it's not just about who lives in places and who lives in places. It's also about how the built environment facilitates the use of transit. And so that's something that we've also been examining. There's two factors that really matter a lot here. One of them is walkability. And that is partly about how easy it is. Well, it's about two things really. But the basic point here is that if it's difficult, if you're in an area where it's difficult to walk to places, almost certainly this is an area where it's challenging to provide transit that's useful to a lot of people. And that's because if you put a transit stop in a place where it's difficult to walk, fewer people can get to it. And fewer people are willing to make the trade-offs to their safety that may be involved in some cases. Or if you have a street network that simply doesn't allow you to walk very far because there aren't a lot of streets and they don't connect a lot, then you just can't get to the bus stop very easily. Things that look very nearby on a map turn out to actually be rather far away by the paths where you can actually walk. So we've mapped this out in Santa Cruz County. And you can see a really clear difference between areas in the city of Santa Cruz, for example, which show up as having very high street connectivity, and so being relatively walkable, versus, for example, areas in the Live Oak, where if you're right near one of the main streets, perhaps there's a fair amount of places you can go to. But we know that the street networks are very disconnected, lots of cul-de-sacs. Not a lot of paths from one main street to another. And so as a result, there's gonna be this issue where any transit service going through the Live Oak is simply going to be slightly less accessible to the people near it. And that's something that we have to keep in mind. In Watsonville, you can see kind of the same thing. The older parts of Watsonville developed at a time when it was standard to build walkable cities. Very walkable, very easy to get from one place to another on foot. And then some of the newer places in Watsonville that also, however, have high densities of population and population with significant transit needs, not so connective, a lot more challenging from a pedestrian perspective. Other thing that really matters, and this is in terms of designing the services, whether it's possible to connect a lot of places in a straight line. Everyone wants to travel in straight lines. Buses are no exception, and people on buses are no exception. People wanna take the fastest path from A to B. But a bus all has to take that path and has to get close enough that people can actually use it. And so when you have a lot of places that aren't located on straight paths between the beginning and the end of the line, then it's hard to run bus lines that are both efficient and useful. And so that means that we're gonna end up in situations with, and you already do, have these locations where there are tough choices. So one of those, for example, is right here in Scott's Valley where there's a bus line. There's probably gonna continue to be this bus line in any imaginable scenario that goes from Santa Cruz to San Jose. And it's useful to a lot of people. Along the way, you have Scott's Valley and you have a ton of jobs in Scott's Valley, particularly along Scott's Valley Drive. And so there's a natural question about, well, should the bus that goes from Santa Cruz to San Jose stay on the highway? Because that's the fastest way to go there for people going from Santa Cruz to San Jose. Or should it get off the highway for a few minutes and serve Scott's Valley Drive? And a whole bunch of other people might find it useful. Conversely, if you do that, you make it less useful for people going to San Jose. So there's value in choosing either of those two things. And there are a lot of parallel situations throughout your county. But the reality is that a single bus can't do both of those things. So we're gonna have to be looking at those choices. In terms of your network as it stands right now, I wanna kind of give you credit where it's due and maybe talk a little bit about some of the shortcomings of the system as well. First thing here, this is a map of the transit network as it exists right now. The lines within the core area, we also have a regional map that I'll get to. The lines on this map are colored and the color of those maps mean how often the bus comes. And you'll see that there's a few lines in this dark blue color that means it's coming every 30 minutes. And there's a bunch of lines in this light blue color that really means the bus is only coming once an hour on this route. And even a few lines that I actually can't even see from where I'm standing right now, but they're in a light gold color and they just come a few times a day. And that being hard to see is deliberate on this map. We wanna point out that there's service there, but it's so thin that you may not even know it exists or have a way to use it. So a lot of routes are infrequent and why does this matter? Actually, I'll skip this part. It matters because frequency means less waiting. And really, waiting is one of the biggest things that prevents people from using transit. People don't have time to wait, they need to get places. And so when you make a more frequent service, you have to wait less. You also have easier connections. So if you happen to need two buses, you wait less twice. So there's that much more impact of the added frequency. It also means there's less impact from disruptions. So if, for example, for some reason, a bus doesn't show up because perhaps you have a vehicle shortage or a driver shortage, if a bus is supposed to come every 15 minutes and you miss one trip, well, maybe you'll wait 30. If a bus comes every 60 minutes and you miss one trip, they'll have to wait two hours. So as a result of all this, higher frequent service is more convenient and gets a whole lot more ridership, even more ridership per unit of service. And I just wanna leave you with this little tidbit about frequency. If you're not a person who uses transit a lot or you know people who don't and you're talking to them about it, you can just think of that frequency as being how often you can leave your house. So really, you can imagine that there's a gate at the end of your driveway. You don't have any control over that gate and it only opens every once in a while. If it only opens once an hour, well, it's better than not opening it at all. But how useful is that really for getting to where you need to go? To give you credit where it is due, you have regional service right now in a way that has disappeared in many parts of the U.S. It is in fact possible to travel from San Jose to Santa Cruz to Watsonville to Salinas, albeit with MST, but in a way that connects with your service. And that's really great. And you have actually kind of a really nice basic system in that way. So you have those regional services. And I just wanna say that one of the other thing about that is that some of those regional services are doing double duty. I heard Director Dutra earlier talk about the 91X. That was the express service between Watsonville and Santa Cruz. Right now you still have a bunch of service between Watsonville and Santa Cruz, but there are all lines that combine local and regional service. 71 spends a bunch of time on Freedom and Sakel Drive. The 69 spends some time on Sakel Drive coming into town into Santa Cruz. There are good reasons for it to do that, but it does mean that there are certain reliability issues that end up impacting the regional routes. Quick note on things that are happening in specific areas in Watsonville. There may be a perception that there isn't that much service. There's actually kind of a fair number of bus routes in Watsonville. And there are a lot of streets with multiple bus routes, but none of these buses are coming more than once an hour. They're all going different places. It's all really complicated to figure out. And so when we hear some of the feedback that we've heard, for example, that some service changes that happened in Watsonville were particularly confusing, there's all sorts of reasons why people may or may not be confused about service changes. But one of the things that's true is that if you're a transit rider in Watsonville, you're holding a lot of information in your head because of how many routes there are and how they all go different places. And so that is gonna necessarily make using the service more difficult, even if by doing all those complex patterns you can point to a lot of very specific needs that you're pointing out. Another thing to note is that despite all these bus lines, there are certain parts of Watsonville that don't have service. And probably the biggest one I'd note is kind of where you're planning on putting that temporary facility along Beach Street. There are a ton of jobs on Beach Street. And there's no service there. Beach Street, South and West of Watsonville downtown. So those are some of the issues we've noticed here. And Greater Santa Cruz and Capitola, probably the biggest issue that we've noted so far is that despite what it may look like when you look at a pretty map like this, you have two essentially entirely separate networks between the West side and the East side of the San Lorenzo River. Everything in the West goes to UCSC. And a lot of service in the East is really geared at those regional connections. And as I said earlier, doing double duty with regional. So the reason why that matters is that you obviously have significant housing affordability problems on the West side. And you have a lot of people trying to travel between East and West side as a result of those. And they all have to change buses if they're doing that at Metro Center. And there are issues with changing buses. When buses are at very low frequencies, as I've said, it's very complicated. By complicated, I mean you lose a lot of time if you try to change a bus. And so that constrains how many people find the service useful. At UCSC, we obviously have another very complex situation. This is obviously really critical to the success of what you're doing right now. It's about half your ridership. And there have been a lot of overcrowding and reliability issues at UCSC. And I wanna stress that those issues are not related directly to the quantity of bus service being provided on campus. There are a lot of buses on campus. Perhaps not enough of those are Metro buses. There are about eight Metro buses an hour, but when you add all the campus shuttles that are also running on campus, you get to about 20 buses an hour. And when you see that red line there, those are some of the tap shuttles that run on campus. So we have a situation where what we've heard from people who ride on campus is that the Metro buses are overcrowded and but the campus shuttles have spare capacity. We've also heard about slow service, a lot of issues with, there's obviously very constrained narrow roadways. So buses can't pass each other. There's really a situation where you can't just, you don't, students or people in that area are not getting on the first bus that comes by them for a number of reasons. And I think that there's a good argument for looking at how do you make every bus useful enough that people get on the first bus that comes by. There's also certain operational issues like the fact that people are checking fares that really slows buses down. In any case, there's a lot to be looked at up there. In terms of where your ridership is concentrated, I think I heard Dr. McPherson talk earlier about how more than half your ridership was at UCSC and Cabrillo. That is true with UCSC being probably the largest by far there. In terms of where there are a lot of trips that are attracted, the west side, but also Capitol LaMalle shows up a fair bit. And I don't think it's just because of transfers, because of how infrequent the service is, but there's a huge amount of employment and retail in that area. Cabrillo shows up and a few little points in Watsonville and also in Scotts Valley, Covey, our transit center. I think what we're seeing there, and I'm still figuring it out, is basically a whole lot of park and ride and kiss and ride activity for people coming in from the San Lorenzo Valley. So as we've been talking to the public, just a few of the broader concerns we've heard and that we know we need to address reliability, especially in Santa Cruz and by reliability, I mean the ability for buses to be on time and to run when they can run. We've heard a lot about communications, and it's sometimes hard to tell if what we hear is a result of what's happening right now or what's happened historically, but we've heard a lot about people need more ways to get the message from Metro about when things are changing and how they're changing. This is true throughout the county, but it's particularly true in South County and it's particularly true with everything that relates to messages in Spanish. We've also been made conscious of some of the issues around your fleet, around its age, the condition of vehicles, and I think it's excellent that you're looking at getting more buses right now and I think that's gonna be necessary as you go forward. More broadly, there is a sense that in the last 10 or 20 years, service has really degraded, that there used to be really good transit. We've even heard of people who moved to Santa Cruz to be carless and who no longer feel that they were able to do that because transit no longer is doing that and some of that has to do with factors that are beyond your control from the pandemic, right? And it's downstream consequences like all the shortages that we're experiencing now and some of that are perhaps decisions that were made along the way. There is in fact significantly less service now than there was 15 years ago and that was true even pre-pandemic and it's possible to get better service but ultimately what drives service being very useful and a lot of people finding it useful is having enough of it that when people need it, it's there. We also heard about transfers. There's a huge reluctance among your current riders to envision transfers and we think that's very much related to the service pattern as it is right now. Infrequent on-time transfers are simply unattractive. I think there's some transferring that's gonna be inevitable in any version of this system and so we need to find ways to address that. Perhaps be it through making transfers less expensive or free, be it through timing transfers, be it through more frequent service. So in terms of the project, right now we've been learning, upcoming in April with staff, we have kind of a network design workshop where we're gonna be looking at kind of what early wins are, what alternatives are going to look like. In July and August, we're gonna go out to the public with the alternatives to hear more and we're gonna summarize all that we hear back from the public so that we can get direction from the board to develop a draft plan to be ready in November and then over December, January, we'll do outreach on the draft plan and our goal in the end is to have a final plan in March of 2024. So with that, that's all I've got. Thank you very much and if you've got any questions, I'll be delighted to entertain them. Thank you so much for the presentation and the work. Questions from directors? Director Rodkin. My first question is, could you give us a better idea of what is the AMA or AMM, what's the division of labor, the talk of associates and that? In this project, that division of labor is around outreach. So AMA are, they specialize in two things. They specialize in paratransit and they specialize in outreach and so they are our outreach sub-consultant. They are the ones who are organizing the surveys, the public meetings, the stakeholder meetings, all of that. Yeah. My second question, yes, system involved. Director Rodkin, we have had a DPS-based system. Currently we're just, what's happening is we're transferring that system to a new vendor. So we've already been collecting that data for the last two years. As part of this analysis, we also did a ridership automatic passenger counter sample. So we actually have stop level ridership as well. So we're using both of those data sources currently. So the implementation is short of the next project? Yeah, what's happening now is more on the public side, real-time information, the data we've already been collecting and using in our analysis. Thank you. Thank you for the great presentation. You mentioned with the Watsonville roots, how much data someone has to have in their head to effectively navigate the system because of all the different roots. I think that's fairly true county-wide. And one thing that left an impression on me was visiting Boulder a number of years back and they're sort of a poster child for improving bus service. And we hear all the time about how they renamed their system. I think it's the hop, not exactly hop, skip, jump, but it's something. It is. Is it a hop, skip, jump? Okay. And how that was part of their strategy is to make the whole network easier to understand as a new writer or an existing writer for that matter. How much are we looking at, I don't know, either renaming the roots or rebranding the roots, or is it just simplification? How does that approach play into this? So that sort of depends on the time horizon you're looking at. For the early wins, not that any of these decisions have been made yet, but my sense is for the early wins we're really looking at what changes can we make that will improve things and minimize confusion in the short term. So we're probably not gonna radically rename routes. I mean, unless for some reason there's a reason to make it clear that a route is different from what was there before. When we're looking at alternatives for the future, though, we're certainly not gonna start from, we're probably not gonna start from the basis of the route names that are there now. And so something that happens in these processes is while we're doing that planning work and that consulting work, we just come up with entirely new names and usually they're like one, two, three, or A, B, C because we don't want confusion with what's there now and we wanted to make it as easy to understand as possible. And especially if the shape of the network changes a whole lot as a result of that plan. So maybe one of the alternatives is less different and we retain a few of the existing route names and one is very different and they're all new names. It's a little hard to tell right now. In terms of the route names as they come out at the end of the process, I think there is, there's a part of that that comes down to your own marketing and communications and how you think that's gonna go down best, but certainly what we typically advise is if you can make the more important routes have the lower numbers or have letters, that helps. People know route one is important, that's easy to remember. I don't know if Hop Skip and Jump is what works in this community, that's great. I'm not sure, personally I have mixed feelings about that one specifically, but yeah. And what about the, and there's probably more for John, the app that we've been working on for writers. I'm wondering, it seems that would be a way to help the confusion if they can go to an app, not only know they're on time, but maybe be able to negotiate the right, the different routes or the different routes. Yeah, thank you, Director Lin. So on March 16th, for the first time in Metro history, you can actually open up Google Maps or Transit app and see real-time information. We only have about a third of our fleet that's equipped, but that'll just continue to grow as we roll out that program. So customers can currently see on a portion of our buses where it is in space and time, whether it's delayed or on time. And again, that'll, I think by April, we're targeting full deployment of that system. So it's really exciting. And that will also let someone look at the right connecting route if they're, such as a confusion and what's what they may simplify them. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes. I'm trying to understand the time long-term and I'm thinking about development for things. I don't know how you're working with the different cities and the county government to find out what's coming down the pipe like the Aguilo lanes, the bus on shoulder. Is any of this that information that have been incorporated in this study? I'll let Daniel add more if he needs to, but the cost-neutral short-term again is this year, we're looking with current resources. The future growth scenarios, we will be taken into consideration future planned land use changes, although it is mostly based on current use because we're looking about two to four years out for the first blueprint phase, the first growth scenario potentially, and then maybe five to 10 for the second, but the second one would definitely look at future land use, is there anything? Can I add a couple of points to that? So just to add, we have been in communication with the cities and with their planning departments. We've had initial meetings with all four, I believe, cities and county planning staff as well as UCSC to understand what the big projects are coming down the line. And in addition to that, we're also engaging them directly in that alternatives development process and in the planning development process. So at the moment when we are trying to figure out with the bus should turn left or right here, there will be, if the cities are willing to provide that a staff person from the city to participate in those conversations. And so that is happening actively. The other thing that I wanna point out though is that for those longer range needs, and yeah, we are mostly looking at the next two to four years, but the fact is that you're in an extremely constrained situation in terms of land in this community because all of your valleys are like this wide. And so ultimately, I think that there was gonna be continued value in strengthening the land use pattern you have now. And by that I mean, in designing the transit network, I think there's a back and forth between that transit network and where land use should probably intensify in future if you're anticipating future growth. And so we're gonna be looking at that in tandem with the cities as we go along. Director Karis Carter. Thank you, Chair. Daniel, I just wanna say thank you for highlighting some of the issues in Watsonville, particularly the walkability and the infrequency of the routes. I also just wanted to add there's a lack of bus shelters in Watsonville, that's a big issue because people also don't wanna be sitting out in the sun for an hour, so I just wanted to highlight that. And I do have a couple of questions. So my first question is about the frequency from Watsonville to Monterey County. I know you skipped over the slide just in the interest of time, but I was just kind of interested in where that ranked among the popularity of the routes. And then the second question, I was hard to see back here, but I wanted to see the circulator bus. I don't know if that was up there, but that has been a huge improvement in Watsonville and just getting around. I noticed that downtown was a frequent area, but that's because that's where the bus stop is, the bus station. But I was just curious about the patterns of the circulator because I think that was a much needed service in Watsonville. Thank you. Let's see, there's two questions. I'm gonna, can you remind me your first question again? Absolutely. Oh, Monterey, Monterey, you said Salinas, yeah. So there is currently hourly service between Watsonville and Salinas for most of the day, seven days a week that's provided on MST routes 28 and 29. Each of those routes operates every two hours, but they alternate and one of them goes through Castrowville and the other one goes through Perndale. It is the same amount of service that was there before December, but it's been coordinated now so that is happening once an hour. Historically, that service has been provided by MST. I think I'm sure they'd be delighted if Metro wanted to contribute to strengthen that, but that's the decision that's certainly beyond my ability to make. And there are in fact a certain number of, there's a certain amount of travel between Watsonville and Salinas that certainly could get better served, but it is nice that you have that line and it is at Watsonville Transit Center. As regards shelters and bus stop conditions, I think I have to defer to John. I'll plug a second parallel study we're doing right now, which is a, it's called the Silk Hill Rapids Project, but it's looking at line 71, 69 and 91X as it formerly was and we plan to bring it back. And it's looking at bus stop conditions as part of it and they've analyzed the shelter locations, conditions. On those corridors we found that only 39% of stops do have shelters. And so what that study is doing is teeing up our ability to go out for future investments in bus stop improvements in that area. So it's definitely top of mind. We haven't seen the sun in a while, but rain for sure. Shelters were on top of customers minds as Emma and Jared Walker have been doing outreach. It's been coming up in every discussion. So yeah. Thank you both very much. Thank you. I know Director Dutra just made an online had some comments and questions. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Chair for Madam Chairwoman. I wanted to say first of all, thanks Daniel and Director Ergo for your presentation. It was extremely honest and I really, I appreciate that honesty and what it does say is that we do have a lot of work to do in order to increase our ridership again, which has definitely has fallen over the years. Just to kind of repeat a couple of the things. Oh, I also want to say thank you for reiterating that the 91X will come back. This plays into kind of the conversations that I hear in South County is the convenience, right? I mean, the 91X offered convenience from Watsonville to Santa Cruz and also with all the transferring as well. I know that that has also become an issue and that was brought up this today as well. I know I worked with you guys and when we had the elimination of a route in Watsonville and we brought Lincoln Street back into the phase through conversation. So I know people are really, this deters people from riding the bus when they have to have all these transfers. So I guess my question is with ridership decreasing, it has not, I don't think since I've been on the board since 2014, have I seen ridership increase? I've seen it decrease, I've seen routes decrease and I've seen transfers become more happening more often than direct routes from one shot to another. How are we going to fix this with, I guess, the budget that we have already the loss of community buy-in when people have to get from Watsonville to go to Santa Cruz to work and we just took away their 91X, which gets them there on time and now they're having to go back into a car. What do you, how do you think we're gonna be able to turn this around? I'm trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel here. Thanks, Director Dutra. So the fundamental point of this exercise is to answer that question of how we can make Metro more useful for more people. We think a lot of that comes through frequency and some of the things that Daniel has talked about. It's also gonna come through future investment. I mean, there's a direct connection between the amount of service that we can provide on the street, which is completely related to how many, how much operational resources we have to provide that service and how much ridership there is. And we saw a decline in 2016 with the last comprehensive operations analysis that we did because that led to a reduction in service of 10% and pretty much an equal reduction in ridership coming out of that. It was successful in the sense that we didn't lose more ridership than that. But the first, the cost-neutral will just be frank. It's gonna be really hard to grow ridership with our existing resources. But that being said, we think there is a way with all the maps and the way that Daniel portrayed in the slides, their services, it's confusing for a lot of people. And we think there, this early win scenario, which is, we hope to be there by May, late summer and implementation in winter will improve things for a lot of people. And frankly, during the first round of outreach, we've been hearing a lot of positive things about Metro, not that people are giving up, but that people want more. So Dan, if you wanna add anything to that. Thank you, yeah, I'll add a couple of things. First of all, because I anticipate you'll hold me accountable for what I've said in the past and the future. I wanna clarify that I did not explicitly say 91X was coming back. I think we recognize the- Rekha Ergo did. Oh, okay, oh, I'm sorry. Okay, great, great. Then I'll, all right. I will hold you accountable. Although I totally recognize, we've heard about the 91X Pliny, and so that's not to say that I don't recognize that need and the value of that service. In terms of growing ridership with your existing budget, I think I'm just gonna be more brutal than John and tell you that they're not gonna grow ridership a whole lot with your current budget. That's not, you've cut service over the years. You've lost ridership as a result. And that's, those things are correlated. And when we look at the research and when we look at the data from many cities and many places, the single biggest determinant of whether there is high ridership for transit in a community is if there is a high amount of service relative to the population. And so while increasing service on its own is not a sufficient condition to increase ridership, the service has to be useful, as long as you remain at your quite handicapped current level of service, we can make it more efficient, we can help a little bit at the margins if we do things that are smart and that reflect the community's needs, but you're not gonna see a step change in transit's place in the community with the existing level of resources that are allocated to the service. So I just wanna say that, I understand that UCSC has a huge ridership and they're a big portion of this ridership. The problem that I'm kind of noticing down here is that our residents that work up in Santa Cruz, if you're now, you don't have that 91X to get up there, it's adding an hour or so onto your trip to get to work. And so because we may not have the numbers, it's still important to have those routes available to the community, especially to South County. So I don't know if we're gonna be basing our decisions on these future routes off of the finances. How is that gonna, are we gonna be able to add those routes back if we're not, if the ridership down in South County is not producing the numbers or that like something like UCSC is producing, can we still make sure that our people are having those routes? Because this seems kind of grim overall. I'll say two things. One reason I'm a little rosier on my outlook on the current level of service versus Daniel is that within our current budget, we know that we're still down about 20 operators. So we can add service, we're still trying to get back to pre-COVID, but we can maybe even increase beyond pre-COVID, assuming we can hire and train operators in a timely fashion. So that's one reason I'm rosy. In terms of responding to your question, Director Dutra, so we're gonna look at existing ridership. We're also gonna look at ridership potential. And a lot of the analysis that Jared Walker and Associates has done so far within Santa Cruz County and within Watsonville in particular is looking at that ridership potential. He showed a lot of information on where density is, no car households, youth. And so there are things that we're doing today that aren't serving those areas as well as we could. And that's within current resources. In terms of the 91X, I did say it was temporarily suspended. I'm not sure it's gonna come back exactly as the 91X, maybe it'll be called the Route 1, who knows. But we do understand that there is an important need for a faster connection between Watsonville and Santa Cruz that takes advantage of the auxiliary lane project on how we won. MST took surf line from us. I think that's copyright infringement, but we'll call it something that makes sense to people in Santa Cruz. And as soon as we have the operator resources, we'll bring it back. The changes that we put in place currently with the 69A, W, and 71, it's only, I don't wanna say only. It's 20 to 25 minutes longer commute. It's not an hour. And we've actually increased the frequency between Watsonville and Cabrillo College all day to every 30 minutes, every 15 minutes between the four routes, between the three routes. So it's not quite as bad as we're making it seem, but we understand the need. And the 91X has always topped in mind for us, that connection between Watsonville and Santa Cruz. Thank you. Director McPherson had a... Yeah. And then I'll go to you, Dr. Yeah, thank you, Daniel, and John for your candid presentations. A couple, I have a question, and then I have even an opinion at the end, but in general, when we're talking about reduced, time factor stops, it's 30 minutes minimum now. Are we usually talking about 15 minutes as a good target? Or is that a good one? Secondly, you factor in the cost factor. Do you have a cost factor? If we wanna go from 30 to 15, what that's gonna cost, whatever the routes are. And secondly, or thirdly, and this is kind of an opinion of mine, we talked earlier about a valid measure, possibly in November. My thought is, seeing that this is gonna be coming to us a year from now in March, I don't know that it'd be a good idea to put a valid measure on November. If we put something there, and then we see in March, we have to do a lot more to get where we wanna do, where we wanna really be. Maybe we should just put off that thought until March, because I don't wanna be asking people, having been through a lot of campaigns, you wanna ask for somebody, something in November, and then the next June, say, hey, we just really wanted more. What's my opinion? I think we gotta ask once for whatever we wanna do big time. So in March, to answer the last question first, in March, we'll have the fully baked plan that has been vetted by the public and the board for where we see ourselves in 2024 and two to four years beyond that. It's gonna present that future, what we would do if we had more resources. What we're gonna finish this year by May, June with implementation in November, December is what we can do with our current resources. So we'll be done. We'll be done by March, and we'll have already talked to the public through various rounds of outreach on what the future of Metro could look like if we have additional resources. Our target to go back to the first question is certainly 15 minutes as a baseline. It's kind of a minimum level of convenience for people. It's also important for state funding now. A lot of the cities are interested in where we're gonna put these 15 minute corridors because it means it's gonna be easier to develop along those corridors given recent changes in state legislation. So 15 minutes is our target. We're not gonna be able to get there in a lot of places until we have additional resources operationally to do that. Budget-wise, we're gonna be balancing the whole system. So obviously if we have 30 and 60 minute routes currently and we wanna do a 15 minute corridor, it's gonna mean reducing somewhere else given our existing resources. And that's why the future scenarios are much more exciting to talk about because it's adding resources where we can kind of maintain the existing level, make sure that it's the best it can be and then adding on top of it to build these 15 minute corridors in the future that we've heard overwhelmingly from the public that people want to be able to use and rely on Metro within Santa Cruz County. Thank you, Director Rodkin. Yeah, Dan, how to... Yeah, I wanna second everything John just said and I wanna add two things to that. One is just about the cost factor. Just the cost of running a bus on a day to day is basically the cost of having a driver out there and the driver and the bus itself. And when you double the frequency, you double the number of buses you need and so you double the cost. That's just how that works. Sometimes there's some rounding in that but that's basically how that works out. The other one thing I wanna talk about is you asked about the adequate frequency and I think that John's absolutely right, 15 minutes is the general target and it's the state, it's certainly the target that the state of California is encouraging everyone to think about right now. I wanna add another point of context which is that the frequency that becomes useful where you get that kind of next level depends on the distance of the trip. So I think, so if you have very long trips like you could get a lot by increasing, service to Salinas being every 30 minutes versus every 60 minutes I think actually has a fair amount of potential but that obviously wouldn't be a huge improvement for someone trying to get between Live Oak and the city of Santa Cruz is still a long amount of time to wait compared to the amount of time you're on the bus. For your shorter services with very high demand like between downtown Santa Cruz and the university, you could consider, you get that benefit, you get some of it at 15 but you'll get more of it at every 10 if you can afford that. We wanna make sure that we, 12% of the service that's a real hit. And it's a little early to start the camp. Let's face it, we don't pass some kind of a, it's still worth doing some of it and be marginally helpful but it's not gonna be what the public are asking for. It's gonna cost money and we have to go out there and fight for the public to support that and then be able to provide the service that they wanna have. And that was a situation we found ourselves in 1978 and we passed Measure G for the half cent sales tax and it's gonna be our situation again. So again, we shouldn't be fooling ourselves early on the reason really shouldn't be fooling ourselves that we're gonna somehow like improve the system tremendously through a organized planning effort without more funding. It's about more funding. And yeah, if a 15 minute route costs twice what a 30 minute route costs, that's money, and it's simple. And so I think the reason we're doing the, what can we get for our current money? It's part of the, frankly, the political effort to show people, you know, okay, we're not trying to just throw money itself. We wanna study it and it goes on. So this is what you get if we don't raise the funds and people can look at that and realize it's not what they're looking for. And that might be another incentive to get people to come out and actually support a better transit system, both for the people that are gonna ride it, but also the people that don't wanna be stuck in traffic and hope that a lot of other people get hit at their cars. I mean, whatever it is that motivates people to vote for these things, but we do need more money. And I think that's realistic and we're not just asking for money because that's just what government does or something or what agencies do. It's because we really need it. And that 25% cut, that hurt us badly. When we passed that half-send sales tax in 78, one of the first districts in the country to do something like that, but certainly in a small community, big cities were doing that, but it's communities of our size, not so much. And particularly in a community that's got the environmental awareness that ours, we wanna cut back on greenhouse gases. There's fights about this, is it 40% or 60% of the greenhouse gases come from transportation? But it's somewhere in that range and that is not insignificant. So people wanna be more than talk about climate change. They need to think seriously about some money to make this thing work. Just attack what comment on, our surveys in the last fall showed strong support among non-riders for maintaining Metro. And that's kind of your first point there is how do we maintain the system into the future and stop some of the things that we've heard during this initial round of outreach that the system has really started to atrophy over recent years directly related to funding. So that's the first goal, maintain the system in the best state possible. Just a couple of points I think are positives for us. As Director Peckler mentioned, we do have the articulated buses coming in that will certainly help UCSC. We have that extra 20 feet. And the other is the driver recruitment and that's part of the issue is the shortage of drivers. And I know there's been some success in this approach too, looking forward to those new drivers coming in and going into I think it was Academy as a police officer but whatever that term is. There are some positives with these buses coming in from San Diego and the recruitment efforts that at least should help the public see some of these improvements and be more supportive of funding asked too. Thank you. Let's see if there's any members of the public that would like to comment on this for sound of all. Well, first I just want to thank you for the great presentation, Daniel. I just want to share my quick experience of whenever I travel, I try to rely on transportation or at least when I'm there just to see what the experience is like in other places in the US. And specifically in San Francisco, I was relying on the buses and I missed a bus and knowing how our system is designed, I didn't think another one's going to show up for a couple of hours, you know, or how reliable it is. And within 15 minutes another route came by. And that is exactly where we need to be is where you could go to a bus stop or even miss a bus stop or bus and know that you're going to be picked up in 15 minutes to go where you're going to need to go. That's what I'm really hoping we're going to be able to go to. I will emphasize that I'm glad Donald Lynn brought it up. We do have a driver shortage, an extreme driver shortage. We're not even providing a reliable service right now because we are dropping routes. And I encourage everybody in this room are online to sign up for our GOV deliveries. So you could see when we drop routes. And I just really hoping that we could get to a place where we could provide reliable frequent transportation and just emphasize again, too, the pattern for a while now has been that we're losing people. Fasten them, we're bringing them in. And we have a great opportunity coming up with our contract negotiations to reach a deal where we could attract new drivers and retain the ones that we currently have. So thank you. Any other members of the public? See anyone online? Okay, thank you so much for the work and the presentation. We'll move on to item 18, which is CEO Oral Report. I appreciate the opportunity just to chat for just a few minutes before we go into closed session about some of the current undergoings at the agency. But I would have to stop for just a second to regress and talk just a bit about reimagined metro from your CEO perspective. I think director Koenig made a really good point. Transit works in Boulder because it's a hop, skip, and a jump. It is easy to understand. It is frequent, it is fast, and it is real. If you were to ask me looking at what we looked at down in Watsonville, I would call those routes, estimate, study, yes, good luck. I mean, it's gonna take till March to come up with something that is as simple as hop, skip, and a jump to make this work. I think it's problematic. It's not that hard. I think you have a fiscal cliff coming up that we'll be talking more about, which means you're gonna be cutting more service before you get to a ballot if you aren't seriously considering a ballot opportunity in 24. And I think it's gonna be easy to see that the public, the majority of the public that goes into a voting booth doesn't ride your bus system and never will, but they recognize the value of the service that you provide and they recognize that you need an easy to understand, frequent, useful bus system that's improved over what you have today to be able to give people equity and opportunity in Santa Cruz County. So those are my thoughts going out of that conversation. So they are what they're worth. And I'm looking forward to the conversation moving forward. I do wanna say there are some pretty amazing things going on and you've made mention to them and alluded to them throughout the meeting, but your ridership continues to grow. But I thought I'd point out two things. I asked our planning department, is there any service we're providing that is 2019 level in pre-COVID? Interestingly enough, you provide pre-COVID-like service on the weekends. So I asked, what's our ridership on the weekends compared to 2019, knowing that we're providing that level of service? It's up 15.5%. So people are returning to transit. They have a willingness and appetite to and it's growing. Second, the other bullet point I asked was, what's going on with your youth crews for you? We've now been running it for a while. So youth crews free is up 96% in student ridership K through 12. So that's the impact of creating something that's easy to use. And in the reciprocal ridership that comes from it, I think it's a great note and comment and story for Sacramento. And it's a great comment and story for the community and for the school districts. It's a pilot and the whole purpose was to gauge how the students will react. And I think you've seen how they're reacting and we haven't even gone on campus yet to set up booths and to really get them engaged. And so I'm excited to see where that ridership goes with that. I do want to, I know we've been in here for hours but I got like two or three other things. That flood event where in the levee broken Watsonville, I just want you to know I was really proud to be from Metro when that happened. We got a call from the mayor Saturday night. Hey, I've got all kinds of people coming to the fairgrounds. I need some help. And so I called James, oh geez, James Sandoval, sorry about that, James. You know, he's your general chair for the local 23. He called Ignacio Mata, which is your president for SMART with your local 23. Within a couple of hours, our teams were delivering blankets, towels, toiletries that included toothpaste, toothbrushes, diapers for infants, coloring books, crayons for children. I mean, man, did you have that happen on a weekend with just a couple of hours of notice? I just felt like, I was just over the moon with saying I work for Metro and I'm part of that family. So there's lots of other things that happen there. I just want to mention that immediately, or within days, Rina, your manager of customer service, to remember her last name, Solario. She made the fantastic suggestion. Let's get 200 passes over there. Basically a 15 day custom pass made for the people at the fairground so they can actually get out and have some mobility. And so in the end we provided 272 passes that have a value of 15 days of all you can ride on them. And then Margo went to action and customized Route 79 so that it had regular service during the day so that they could actually have access to the bus system from the fairgrounds. So I mean, when you say that Metro does far more than just run in circles with the routes, that even our drivers were at loss in regard to their homes and you saw in the newspaper how our employees reacted to that to get them the resources they needed. I do want to say perhaps just one or two other things. You have five drivers that are just being released and other that are just starting the revenue service that are in the classroom. Eduardo Montesino, you know him as the mayor of Watsonville. I know him as supervisor Montesino with our organization that he and a fellow supervisor, R.S.L.E. Campos put together a game plan to take our classroom training and our behind the wheel training from four classroom cycles to nine. And then we've got ongoing recruitment that's coming up soon. Margo's working day and night trying to figure out how to make good on doing nine classes a year. So the big goal and the one that I'm losing sleep over the most because it's just important and I don't want anything to fall through the cracks is by the end of 23, you're running with full staff. The 20 drivers being short 20 drivers is a thing of the past at the end of the year. I think you're gonna get there perhaps earlier than that. I mean, last Sunday I get a call from one of our operators and we go out and walk the streets on Sunday afternoon basically in the rain talking to people about becoming an operator at Metro and three applications come in Monday just off that operator being out on Sunday in the rain talking to people. So there's just a lot of focus and it's happening. CHP came to town, did their annual inspection. I think it's important for the board to know what the CHP thought of Metro. They come in and do a random inspection meaning they just tell you they're gonna show up on Tuesday and have the buses ready to be looked at. So yesterday they finished up that annual inspection. They gave you the highest rating they could. Sounds kind of lame, but it's a satisfactory. But I want you to know you've had some of the best mechanics at the CHP. Obviously you were concerned about safety. Look at your buses, look at your driver records, look at your training program, so on and give you the highest rating you've got. And then finally, in April, we're gonna start a community logistics. Now we're the mailing list substantial. Senator Laird said the best advice I could ever give you because this is a great agency. You've got to tell them once a month, community newsletter and then us staffs gonna do a once a week kind of internal correspondence to make sure the employees are completely up to speed on what's going on and that we're having a mechanism with your back. With that, you know, I'll be happy to answer any questions. Director McPherson, we met with the CEO with Community Coast Energy, our community, Central Coast Community Energy. And so we're working on a template that they would like to use that will go out to other agencies of how, I'm so right around the corner we should be talking about. With that I'd be happy to. Thank you so much for that report. Comments from directors? I just got a few things. Okay, Director Ducha. Thank you. I just wanna say thank you, Michael, for all your hard work. You definitely have come in and really brought some really positive changes to our organization. And I think that it's gonna really change how we look in the long run for in the positive. So I just wanna say thank you for all your hard work. I also wanna say thank you to all the bus drivers who stepped up during the flooding down here in South County. We really appreciate it. I mean, our shelter is full at the fairgrounds. We have people that have been just lost everything and it's heartbreaking to see these families in the situation that they are. And I was just reading an article today where kids are afraid to even go back to school. And they don't even know if the numbers of kids will return. So I do wanna say, our bus drivers have always stepped up for our community whenever we asked of them. So I wanna say a big thank you to them as well. And I guess my question to you, Michael, and you touched on this a bit is, and I know we've been working on it, is how do we become more appealing to people to apply to be one of our drivers, to join our family? I mean, I feel like we've been having this conversation. We brought some, the starting rate up. And why do you think that we are people just, they don't wanna be a driver and be accosted by other people on the buses. So they choose a different profession or what do you think we could do to get our numbers up so that we can get our routes back so that we can get our frequencies up? You know, you have a good starting industry leading benefits. And interestingly enough, I think the way you make the difference in getting your new operators your recruitment, it's not about blasting out TV ads. It's not about blasting out radio ads. It's about people talking to people. And most of the people that we talked to, for instance, last Sunday in the rain, got this driver's name, last name's Johnny Lopez. The people we talked to said, oh my gosh, there must be a waiting list. It must take you a year to get on board at Metro. And I'm like, are you kidding me, right? Believe it or not, I heard that multiple times during the day. So we got this stuff all over the radio. We got it on social media ads. But when you just go out and you talk to people, what we're really finding is that at the end of the day, people are underemployed. And that's the target market. It's your underemployed. It's the people making 21 bucks an hour with minimal benefits. We would love to make 24 bucks an hour with industry-leading benefits. And we'll continue to mass market that. I'm not saying that we're gonna stop mass marketing it, but I think the most productive way we get operators in is when everybody starts talking about with their friends and with the people that they meet in the grocery store, at the fast food restaurant, wherever you may be, it's just talking to them about how great Metro is and that there's a need right now if they apply and just helping them get the recruitment. And that's the best tool ever is these business cards that have the information because you can have a simple conversation and hand someone a card. And it's an easy application to make. That's been the most productive. That's the target market. It's not necessarily the unemployed. It's the underemployed. Those are the folks that would love to have what our operators have and be a part of an organization that's as tight and family-oriented as Metro. Have you thought of maybe like a refer a friend? You know, if you, when you think of, you know, sometimes you see, I don't know, gyms or banks, you know, and maybe that would give it, and it would incentivize our employees to, you know, go out to their friends and their families and, you know, if the person comes on as full-time then that employee gets that stipend or whatever we give out. I mean, that might be helpful. If that's where we're heading with, with this is to, you know, word of mouth, I think, you know, maybe we do some sort of incentive incentivizing them. I think it all works. Even the mass media works to an extent, but I've really just found that if you really want a transit center to my office during the week, I'm passing a guy in the street I've never seen before. I stop him and I say, where do you work? And he looks at me like I'm an alien. And he said, I work at the library. And I said, well, how come you're not working for Metro? Cause you're obviously walking in the neighborhood where Metro lives, as far as where we keep the buses and where the operators are. And he's like, well, again, I thought there was a long waiting list and I've seen your flyer at the library, by the way, but I just have never really connected the dots. And I, we had a five minute conversation and I would bet that guy's got an application in. Paying more than the library's paying him. I have better benefits and the transit system is right where he lives. So, you know, unless you stop somebody and you say hi to them, you're gonna never gonna make that connection. Thank you. I think the public also needs to know more of nature of the job. I was shocked for them on a discovery that the reason people don't make it through our training program. The vast majority of cases, it's not cause they can't train how to drive a bus. And that's probably most people's fear. Boy, that's a big thing. I don't know if I could drive that. I don't think of myself as a physical person or whatever. But the reason people don't make it through our training program is mainly cause we can't train. It's hard to train people in customer service. And in fact, this is a much safer place to be drive a bus than in large cities. It's not a scary a job, I think that some people think it might be. We also, we don't, of our bus drivers, they do have to interact with the public, but it's not at a level that sort of like, I think is threatening the people. So just making people understand that people, almost anybody, not everybody, almost anybody can be trained to drive a bus. You just need to have a positive attitude towards working with the public. And like you said, there's a short waiting list for it and it pays pretty well and the benefits are fantastic. So that message is not out there yet to a level that it needs to be in the general public. So I do think along with the 101 Contact, just setting stuff out there about what does it mean to be a bus driver? Just saying we're hiring bus drivers, probably intimidating as a job to a lot of people that it shouldn't be in the community. Thank you. I just wanted to, I'm Dawn Kermane, HR director. I wanted to address Jimmy's comment about, refer a friend. We are currently running a referral bonus for the bus operator position. So if anybody, any of our current employees refer somebody, it's a $2,000 or up to $2,000 referral bonus paid out over two years. So it pays out just like the sign on bonus of $4,000 that we're offering right now. I just wanted to make sure everybody knew that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Just curious, do you do an exit interview with anybody who starts the process and then stops the stream to get feedback as to, okay, you started this now, why is it no longer appealing? And getting that sort of, because maybe you're doing it, but you get any sort of feedback from those folks that start and just don't complete it. We do, and you know, Dawn can elaborate, but we're very interested when someone's walking out the door. Do an exit interview each time if the exiting employee will allow us to. Sometimes they don't want to do that. We do gather that information. And if it's something that we can pass on, we do pass on to whichever manager it pertains to, yeah. Just real quick, I know we want to get out of here, but I just wanted to give Michael credit for that call that he made on that weekend to activate Ignacio Amato pretty much. He connected me. And we just wanted to make sure to take care of as many people as we could. And we were able to do that as a team. I also wanted to give Dawn and Michael also credit because we're attacking this recruitment and retention problem. We're meeting twice a week, coming up with a lot of different ideas and strategies on how to address this. And we're working extremely well as a team. And just trying to remember the last point that I was gonna make. Oh, I apologize in advance because I did not send my invitation to you guys. I normally do, but we normally have that quarterly bid change party that you're probably aware of where we provide food for Metro employees. And we just recently had one and we usually ask for donations to kind of make up for the food that we bought. But this time we provided the donations to our Metro employees that were currently affected. I mean, affected when I mean affected like bad, you know, their house is under water. So I will be happy to report that we raised almost $3,000 and we were able to distribute it evenly amongst them. And the amount of gratitude from each and every person was awesome. And it's just validating, improving that Metro is a family. And I just wanted to make sure you guys knew about that, thank you. And thank you and congratulations. That's a lot of milestones and accomplishments in the last month. So thank you for that report. We'll move on to item 19 and that's review of items to be discussed in closed session. Thank you. The board will meet in closed session conference with legal counsel existing litigation as described in the agenda. Now is the time for any public comment if not the board will meet in closed session and then reconvene an open session at it's committee. Thank you. We take public comment now.