 the webinar has started. We're all right. Yes. Okay, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the June 24th, 2021 meeting of the County's Board of Supervisors. The last full day of budget hearings before we go to next Tuesday, the 29th, to approve the final budget, which please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig? Here. Friend? Here. Coonerty? Here. Capit? Despected late. And McPherson? Here. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. And there's, Carlos, you want to announce there's a situation I think in Watsonville and Supervisor Capit will be a few minutes late. So he will get here. Yes, he'll be joining us. He's just stuck in the traffic situation in Watsonville. He'll be joining us in a few minutes. Okay. Are there any late additions or revisions or relations to the agenda? No revisions to the agenda today. Okay. Any opening remarks from you? We're going to be going right into the budget session, I know. Yeah, we'll just be going right into the budget session. Okay. Maybe I should open this up to, I will open this up to any public comment. Does anybody have any public comment on an item that we'd like to speak for two minutes? On an item that's not on the agenda today or they cannot address later in this meeting? It appears that I do have one caller, Chair. And if I can make the public announcement. Announcement, please. Public comment announcement, I apologize. This now is the time for public comment. This announcement will repeat in Spanish. Este anuncio se repitirá en español. If you would like to make a comment in Spanish, we have a translator available to assist. Speakers are limited to two minutes. At the end of this time, your microphone will automatically be muted. Members of the public may speak to any item on the consent agenda. The comment on the regular agenda item, the comment will be heard at the end of the presentation. Ahora es el tiempo que la Junta de Supervisores recibiría a comentario del público. Si gustaría dar su comentario en español, tenemos un tractor disponible para asistir. Los oradores están limitados a dos minutos. Al fin de este tiempo, su micrófono se silenciará automáticamente. Members del público pueden hablar sobre cualquier tema de la agenda de consentimiento. Comentario sobre temas de la agenda regular se recibirá al fin de esa presentación. Thank you, Chair. And we do have two members of the public that would like to speak. Caller 2915, your microphone is available. Thank you. Before the clock begins, this is Becky Steinbrunner. I want to ask, because I just now joined, were there any items pulled from the consent agenda today? No. All right, thank you. Not yet, we haven't gotten to the board, but go ahead. I see, thank you. That makes it tricky for the public to comment, but I'll go ahead anyway and thank you for your hard work this week. As always, my name is Becky Steinbrunner. I live in the rural Aptos Hills area next to Nicene Marks State Park. We are all concerned about this coming season's fire danger. I had hoped that item number 53 could be pulled from the consent agenda today. That is the proposed budget for county fire protection in order to really give it the public consideration and staff report transparency that I think is warranted. I am very concerned about some of the expenditures in the CSA budget. I want to know why county fire, which is the pass-through account for proposition 172, state public safety monies, the money gets transferred to the County Fire Chiefs Association. This year's Prop 172 funds were decreased, decreased for fire protection and increased by millions for others. The county got over $20 million this year in 172 money and that the county is decreasing the use of that for fire protection is not acceptable and is concerning to me showing what priority the county places on rural fire protection. I also question the... Let her continue closer comments. Thank you very much. I can't, I don't have a clock, so I don't know, thank you. So I'm also concerned that last year's CSA special benefit money was used to purchase type one engines for Coralitos and Davenport. I'm happy to... Type one engines are large, they're called Pavement Queens. I'm happy to see on this year's proposed budget for the coming year that type three engines will be purchased. I'm not sure where they'll be, but I'm really glad to see type three engines being brought in onto county fires equipment list. The 10 thermal cameras were not what I had hoped to be spotting fires from remote locations, but rather they are handheld units that help people find bodies inside a car or bodies inside a house. And I hope, but there are applications for wildland protection. Lastly, I just want to beg the county supervisors to spend some 172 money, countywide sales tax measure G monies on fire protection as it should be. I also want to ask that you fund fire safe council which has no money at all, all volunteer. And they are on the boot, on the ground doing the boots work with the communities as are the fire wise communities. And we need the funding for those good groups so that they can help people with the resources they need to really make a difference if a fire comes through our area. Thank you very much for the extra time. Thank you. Thank you, chair. And for the record, Supervisor Caput has joined us. Next caller, 1999, your microphone is available. And as a reminder to star six to unmute from a call. Yes, hello, thank you. My comments relate to this agenda, current, past and future. My name is James Ewing Whitman. Deputy Sheriff Damon Gotswaller was a community member in my life that I engage with at least three times. At his memorial service, I witnessed a beauty power, love, respect and unity unmatched so far in my life of 53 years. Thank you, Sheriff Jim Hart and the over 1500 individuals that day for more hope in law enforcement and emergency responders. I have also witnessed many times very positive magnetobiologic energy, especially with children from Mr. Andy Mills. I will be speaking today, words that should rock our nation to change if not also a worldwide civil war against evil. Evil rampant also in Santa Cruz County. John Locke, 1632 to 1704. Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves in a state of war with the people who are therefore absolved from any further obedience and are left to the common refuge, which God has provided to all men against force and violence, John Locke. So I suppose if I James Ewing Whitman or using the above three examples to enlist in people, I am. Local law enforcement do not make any laws but enforce as individuals their oaths of office to the US Constitution. And though once a county sheriff had the power to arrest even the president of the United States, it is the common community members that can have even more power to insist local law enforcement to uphold the US Constitution. So let's begin as students of all ages to create legacies for the future unborn children. Thank you very much. There are no other speakers, Chair. Thank you. Any comments from the board on items on the consent agenda? Chair, we were going to have the budget manager overview before the consent vote. Oh, excuse me. Okay. Very good. All right. Thank you. Let's have an overview of what we're gonna be discussing today. Thank you. Morning, Chair MacPherson and members of the board, Christina Malier, but county budget manager. I'm just gonna give you a brief overview of the public safety and justice category of the proposed budget. Next slide. So here you can see the public safety and justice represents about 166 million in financing or 18% of the county budget, providing funding for the sheriff corner, district attorney, probation, public defender, office of response, recovery and resilience, county fire protection and contributions to superior court, grand jury, animal services and the 911 regional communications center. Next slide. The financing summary for public safety and justice includes revenues primarily from intergovernmental revenues for probation and the sheriff corner, and other revenues of $73.3 million. $1.4 million of fire protection fund balance and $92 million in the general fund contribution. Overall, the financing is increasing by 2.7% primarily from increased costs for public safety status cooperations offset by the public safety increase in public safety revenue and also the increase established earlier this year for the office of recovery, response and resilience. Next slide. This chart shows the general fund contribution changes for public safety category in the amount of $1.4 million primarily for the new costs related to the establishment of the new department to the office of response, recovery and resilience and other net increases for public safety related to the restoration of the FIT program and the increased costs related to the mental health services for inmates offset by increased public safety revenues. Next slide. This chart shows the increased expenditures for public safety and justice departments of more than $4.4 million and includes three full-time equivalent positions which were added mid-year and the funding for two additional positions. The sheriff corner represents more than 50% of the expenditures and the combined sheriff district attorney and probation budgets represent combined about 80% of the total expenditures. And I will address the public safety question, the decrease in public safety for county fire is relates to the fact that their formula is based on the prior year. So we had a decrease in public safety revenue in 1920 and the fire allocation is two years in rears. So they're receiving a reduction for 2122. The increase that the department is receiving is based on when it actually occurs. So public safety for county fire will increase the following year based on the fact that the revenues are starting to increase again. And that's all. You're on mute chair, chair McPherson. Thank you, thank you. Any other comments, Mr. Palacios? This point before I go to the consent agenda. No, that concludes our presentation. Thank you. Any board member have any comments on the consent agenda? Just a point of clarification. So thank you Ms. Mallory for that clarification on the Prop 172 funds related to fire. So if I understand you correctly, even if our board wanted to increase funding, we couldn't do for county fire, we couldn't do it with Prop 172 funds because that's based on a formula set by the state. It's not a formula set by the state. It's actually a formula set by this board that was negotiated with the fire chiefs. So we agreed to provide a half a percent of the public safety annual revenues based on the prior fiscal year's actual revenues. So this is their allocation for 21-22 is based on the actual revenue from 1920. Okay, and is there a typical time that that contract is negotiated if we wanted to change that formula? Yes, that would be up to the board's discretion. And if you'd like us to bring a report back, we could consider a change in the formula. It's a formula that has been set for decades and that's a zero sum game. So this is an arrangement that was reached among the public safety partners. And so if more money was allocated to fire, it would mean less money to the sheriffs. So that's the difficulty. It's a formula set many, many, many years ago, negotiated at great length and then now going forward to change, it would mean it's a zero sum game. Somebody would be, there would be a winner and a loser. So that's why in the past, basically the board, once that formula was negotiated has left it be, but it could be possible to change if that, if you wanted to, but it's just a very difficult situation. Yeah. Yes, thank you, Mr. Plotches. I remember discussing that several years ago and that was the formula that was set. We can always reconsider, but if you give more to one, you're going to be taken from another. So that's something that would have to be discussed between the public safety services that we have in the county. All right, thank you for the clarification. Any other comments from the board? I have one on number 53 with County Fire. I want to thank Chief Larkin and the entire Cal Fire team for its work to fight the CZU fires along with our terrific local fire districts. I also want to get and thank the property owners and CSA 48 for supporting the increase for County Fire in the special January 2020 ballot that was approved. As mentioned in the budget report, the additional funding allowed County Fire to restore staffing to three people per engine and secure additional equipment, which has been mentioned as well. Then as we are in the midst of another tough fire season, having these additional resources is critical. Just want to over, can't overemphasize how much we appreciate your services and we hope that we do not need them in a serious manner as was happened last year. So thank you very much for your services. Again, anybody from the board would like to have a, I would like to make a comment on anything on the consent agenda. Yes. Yeah, just to add to your comments for our County Fire Department, it's great to see that we are making some new investments in fixed assets, including the two new type three, wildland fire engines, which are, of course, capable of more off-road operations. And to the earlier public comment regarding the thermal imaging cameras, we are pursuing the purpose of more cameras for early detection through PG&E grants, as well as through some private funding. So my office has been working closely with Chief Larkin on that point. And I'll also point out the new wood chipper will be a very welcome addition, which will help residents ultimately prepare their neighborhoods and homes for better fire protection and prevention. I also just want to make a quick note on the grand jury. These jurors get at most $15 per meeting, a maximum of two meetings per week. And with the total cost of just over $50,000 per year, and I think this is probably one of our most prolific bodies in the County per dollar spent. And I just want to thank all the men and women on the grand jury for their good work. Very well said. Thank you. Any other Supervisors who have a comment on the consent agenda? Seeing none, I'll entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions on consent. Second? Second. Second, Koenig. Okay, call the roll please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Supervisor Coonerty. Aye. Thank you. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you. Motion passes unanimously and public comment was taken previous to this. Further recon. Okay, we will now move to the regular agenda and begin our discussions on our public safety criteria that we have in the County of District Attorney, Public Administrator, District Attorney Jeff Rosell, I think we'll be presenting. I don't know if you might be on mute. Can you hear me? Yes. Perfect. So I just want to start off by thanking Chairman McPherson and the other board members for their continued support of public safety and the DA's office. It really is because of all of you that we are able to do our jobs and to protect the public safety of this community. And I just want to make sure, you know, in these times of all these challenges to recognize and thank you for the support that you've provided in the past for us. I also want to recognize the CAO's office, specifically Carlos Palacios, Nicole Coburn, and Sven Stafford who have worked diligently to try to enable us to do our job and fulfill our duties of public safety. And I really want to take this moment to thank all of the staff of the DA's office for their diligent and dedicated service to this community and to this office and to our campus. So with that, I just want to talk a little bit about what I want to go through today and I will try to be brief. I want to go through the background of the DA's office, sort of what our mandates are and what we do, our operational plan and achievements, and then finally the budget proposal emerging issues and then take any questions that the board may have. As you can see on our slide, this is the new logo of a program that we spearheaded and that we are incredibly proud of, which is our new neighborhood court program, which I will discuss later. My way of the background, I want to start off talking a little bit about the California Constitution, Article 13, Section 35 and just remind everybody which I know we all know that public safety is the first responsibility of local government. It's actually a constitutional mandate and I think it's important for us all to remember and to recognize. I wanted to talk a little bit about the responsibilities of the district attorney's office and literally our job is to promote public safety. We have duties and ethical obligations to follow the Constitution of the United States, the state of California, as well as California statutes and rules of professional conduct. We also have duties to prevent the rights of victims and some may be surprised that we have duties and obligations to protect the rights of defendants. Our primary duty is to review and file cases and investigate and prosecute cases. And we are also frankly the only criminal justice partner in the court system that has an actual ethical obligation to seek justice. So we also have an obligation which everyone shares to act ethically. The mission statement of the DA's office that sums up exactly what we are all about is to promote and ensure public safety through ethical and just prosecution. And the referring agencies, I spoke earlier and indicated that it is our job literally to review cases that come in from all of the various police agencies as well as state parks and other investigating agencies. And this diagram really sums up all of the places that refer cases to us. We review from 13 to 14,000 cases a year and go through these, and I have an obligation to go through these and determine whether or not criminal charges are appropriate and whether we should file the criminal charges. And I just think this diagram sort of reminds everybody all of the agencies that refer cases to us. With respect to our operational plans and achievements, one of the things that I spoke about earlier that we have done is the Neighborhood Courts Program. And this Neighborhood Courts Program is implemented in a few counties in the state of California, but not many. And we are very proud to be one of the early sort of users of this program that is implementing the sort of justice principles to resolve low-level miscellaneous. It literally is community members that volunteer to hear cases from other community members who have committed various miscellaneous or low-level fence transgressions and resolvies. And we have done this with tremendous success. We've also leveraged technology and implemented a request for a proposal for a case management system, in combination with the CAO's office. And we're trying to do this with an eye and a goal of helping the new public defender's office that's coming on board. So we are working cooperatively in a partnership with the CAO to try to help all of us by way of getting the system that we can use. I also want to mention briefly the MDIC, the Multidisciplinary Interview Center, which is something that we set up years ago to interview children in an environmentally friendly setting so that children are subjected literally to one interview as opposed to multiples where we get various agencies that made in the old days completely for the interview children were trying to do a one-stop shop. And I'm pleased to say that even during these times of the pandemic, we've been able to conduct about 90 trans-interviews at the center. We're also involved in the blueprint for shared safety. And this is a project where we literally went out, talked to survivors of crime to identify gaps in service and try to figure out where we can do a better job as the DA's office, as law enforcement in general. And as a result of these findings, we have gone out and have sort of spirited some trauma-informed training so that we can all do a better job when it comes to victims of crime. And finally, I just wanted to mention that in terms of consumer protection, we were talking a little bit about the fires, but we have spearheaded out-mention education to the public regarding people who are being scammed by unscrupulous contractors and others in the way of the tragedies that they've already experienced by having their homes burned. I also would like to just briefly go over the budget proposal for 21-22. Here's kind of a dashboard of the comparison between the 21 budget and the 21-22 budget. Without going through all the numbers, I will certainly entertain any questions that anybody may have at the end regarding this. In terms of practical sort of application, what does all this mean to us? The total staffing, it still includes three full-time attorneys that are unfunded. You will notice that when we requested this year, I've always sort of said thank you for what we've got in terms of the finances. And we really have tried to be responsible in these difficult times and asking for what we need. And we really thought that the ask this year is not for those three unfunded attorneys, but for support service analysts to help with increased technical demands, to also talk about a program coordinator and request a program coordinator for a new day-to-day courts program that is diverting cases outside the criminal justice system, saving money for all the people involved, courts down in the DA's office, right in the public defender's office. And finally, we asked for a criminal paralegal. There's been a lot of legislation lately. And what this requires is us to go back through a lot of existing cases, do a lot of analysis that takes a lot of time. And we really did sort of have internal discussions and decide that this could be accomplished by a paralegal rather than ask for frankly a more expensive attorney. And so what we've tried to do here is to request what we actually need to do the job instead of trying to ask for things just to save the asshole or create sort of a large number of attorneys in the office. May at this moment not necessarily be that. And finally, in terms of the emerging issues, the biggest emerging issue for us is going to do an assumption of a normal criminal trial schedule and dealing with a backlog of cases that have sort of taken place. And we have strategies to accomplish that in working with the courts. We have as the pandemic progressed adapted and changed, but make no mistake, there are still a backlog of cases that need to be dealt with. And so that's one of the issues that we need to work on in the coming weeks. And finally, the recommended actions. We're requesting that the board approve the budget for the DA public administrator that was recommended. And with that, I'm happy to field any questions or any comments that the board may have. I just want to take this opportunity again to say thank you. Supervisor Mejia is muted, I think. Keep on the screen, but get muted. Okay, thank you, Mr. Rossell for your excellent work and for your entire team and what you're doing with the resources that you have. We understand the pressure. And this post pandemic too, it's going to be a lot of work that you have to do. And I especially want to recognize your work in the neighborhood courts program. You are at the front of the line in the state for that, which is a great initiative to shepherd folks through our justice system. And a way that's really to be restorative. I think people feel comfortable. And I know you've told us some stories about those who have participated in that. Thank you for the way that you let them accept the public safety, the criminal justice system as being more friendly to them and understandable. It's really very important and I really applaud you and for you getting ahead of the game and really showing the rest of the state how this can be done in a very efficient, effective and compassionate manner. And I'm glad to see the additional staffing provided for that program. I look forward for the future updates as it matures. But you have some good personal stories in that regard, I know, but I just want to thank you for your foresight and what you've been doing for the people of Santa Cruz County. Are there any other comments from the board members? Yeah, if I may. Mr. Cap or Supervisor Caput? Yeah, but thanks. Hi, Jeff, how you doing? Hi, Supervisor Caput, fine, thank you. Yeah, you know, I want to thank you for the neighborhood courts also. Can you explain real quickly? It says low level crimes. What would be the highest level, maybe? So we're talking about vandalism offenses, fact offenses are the typical offenses, some sort of low level assaults depending upon what they are. But in general, these are the crimes that we believe are sort of one-off crimes in many instances and crimes that can be resolved by community members and by sort of getting to the root cause of the problem and discussing it and literally diverting them and keeping them completely out of the criminal justice system. So I can tell you the success so far has been incredible. We have had people who've committed offenses that literally wanted to have contact with police officers who arrested them to thank them for giving them an opportunity to change their lives. So it's a case-by-case analysis. We go through these things and we're very cautious and careful about what offenses are diverted. We don't want to compromise public safety in any way, shape or form. But if there is an opportunity for someone to get their life on track without getting, you know, labeled as convicted misdemeanors or going through the criminal court system and all that entails, we are in favor of that, supported and frankly, that's why we work with a felony member of this program. And I do believe that it is something that can transform our community. And it's really not only about the offender, but it's also about community members. As supervisors, have so many people that come to you with complaints or comments about things. And this is really an opportunity for community members to get involved, to sit as panelists and sort of engage in the community and help somebody get back on track. And also as business owners to explain the impact that offenders may not understand. So I can tell you, thank you for asking the question about it and it has been a tremendously successful program at this point. For sure. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Tarsie, the community resource center are those that are training it and managing this along with us. They are an absolutely invaluable partner in this probation and also has involved in it. So it's a real sort of community collaborative effort. Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk to you later. Thank you. Super question. Mr. Chair, I'll add a few things. Mr. Rizal, thank you for your presentation. And one thing I would like to really credit you with is your leadership on the criminal justice council and ensuring that something that I know that when your predecessor, Bob Lee, it meant a lot to him and ensuring that that voice continued within our community. I would submit that within the last year the criminal justice council has worked more on transparency and accountability issues and it has in its history and has really found a footing and a large part, I think that you've played a large role in that and I appreciate that. And additionally, to the point that supervisor Capit made both on the neighborhood court, but as well as the MDIC which was really at your urging that this community created such a thing, just looking at different ways that we can address criminal justice issues within our community, taking a very holistic and progressive look to it and really trying to be a leader, not just in the state but in the country, I think is admirable. And lastly, just the fact that your team was able to adapt during COVID, a very difficult time, trials still occurred as you know, even remotely and just finding ways to have your team do things remotely but still ensure that justice was ensured throughout our community is very important. I have good relationships with a number of people on your staff. You've done a great job hiring just very top quality people. I mean, we are very fortunate in our community not just have outstanding attorneys but outstanding inspectors and people that really do care about victims and see the totality of circumstances within the community. They are not single-minded in their approach at all. I think that you have a very outstanding team. I think succession planning is gonna be a very easy thing within your team and I appreciate your work as a leader within their organization to do that. And I hope that your team hears how much the board appreciates their work that they do as well. Thank you. I certainly can be that. Thank you for the comments supervisor friend. And I just wanna say we have an incredibly dedicated care and staff and public safety runs through the veins of all of us. So I appreciate your comments and recognition. And I certainly will pass on your comments and the comments of the supervisors to our staff. Any other comments from the board members? Yeah, thank you for that. Just one quick comment on that. Also on the neighborhood court system. I've had the opportunity to participate in some of these restorative justice practices within a private setting within a company and really seen the impact it can have firsthand by bringing together the offenders and victims to actually discuss what led to the transgression or the crime and really help lay a framework for the offender not doing it again because they realized just the personal impact it had on the victim and the entire community. And so it's exciting to see this full-time program coordinator funded and just to clarify. So this, will this directly reduce the number of criminal prosecutions that you would otherwise pursue? The answer to that supervisor is yes. So the participants that they go through this and they go through it successfully, which is what we're seeing. Those cases do not then get filed officially. They don't proceed large part into the misdemeanor reports and sort of clog up those sort of court system. And you raised a great point. It really is an incredible partnership. It's a partnership for the participants and the community of community members who sit as sort of board members or hearing members on this. And it's also an amazing partnership between the conflict resolution center, the DA's office probation and frankly the governmental agencies that have sort of set this up. So yeah, the impact to us in terms of filing cases in the court system, the public defender system who has to defend folks is significant. That's great. So if the program is successful or continues to be successful as we're seeing now, is it possible that we would hire additional staff whether it's another program coordinator or some other type of position instead of filling those in? Sorry, there's attorney roles in the future. Yeah, I think the answer is this. We've been doing it since December and as we go through this, we wanted to start relatively small to just make sure we get our sea legs under us and we're successful. But I think the sky's the limit in terms of where it can go and who we make it up. As big as it gets is still a bit of a question, but as it gets bigger, we're clearly going to need more staff to work on it. So the answer is yes to all of your questions. Great, thank you very much. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Supervisor Coonerty. Sure, Mr. Chair, thank you. D.A. Rizal, I appreciate your efforts around the neighborhood courts and the child interview areas and just your constant efforts to provide accountability in a changing environment around our state. Quick question, I know things were thrown off by COVID, but the Bob Lee PAC program, how do you see that? Still running. It is still there, but it's been a little as I know the supervisors are all aware, COVID through a monkey wrench and a whole lot of the programs that we have, but the Bob Lee PAC program, which was also a program to try to identify certain offenders that repeated over and over and target them services and trying to sort of figure out the underlying issues, that is still alive and well. And I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon, but can play in along with the other programs, COVID and the ability to house people and whatever else have all been there. Great, thank you so much. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Okay, any other comments? Seeing none, I'm going to entertain a motion to approve the budget of the district attorney. I'll move the recommended actions. Oh, second. Second. Please call the roll. Sorry, there are no public speakers to this item. Yeah. Thank you. Supervisor Koenig? Aye. Friend? Aye. Coonerty? Caput? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. We will now go to item 46 on our agenda, the public, excuse me. Okay, we will go to the public defender's budget. Nicole Coburn, Assistant County Administrator, and Sven Stafford, Administrative Analyst will be presenting on this item. Good morning, Chair McPherson and members of the board. Can you hear me? Yes. Hopefully I'm coming through. Thank you. So we are here to present on the public defender's office budget for fiscal years 21-22. I am Nicole Coburn. I'm an Assistant CIO, working on the public defender budget and transition. And I'm joined today by Sven Stafford, a Principal Analyst in my office, who is also working with me on this effort. So this is our agenda. We're going to provide a brief update on our transition plan for Indigent Defense Services and then we'll cover the budget proposal for the new fiscal year. So in terms of our transition plan, as you are well aware, the current Indigent Defense Contract with the main firm, Bigum, Princeton, and Minsloff, or BCM, is going to be ending on June 30th, 2022. At that time, we're going to be transitioning to a new department of Indigent Defense Services that will start officially on July 1st of 2022. The board approved a transition plan for this effort at the March 23rd meeting. And we're going to cover a few aspects of that here. First, I just want to thank the Midget County staff who are working on this effort. The personnel team has several employees who are doing a tremendous amount of work on our recruitments currently. The Information Services Department is also collaborating with us on the case management system. Real property is working with us in DPW on the facilities and general services as well. The firms at the main firm and the conflict firms also continue to be very collaborative. The first element of our transition plan has to do with the personnel in the new department. As written into our agreement with BCM, the staff at BCM have the first right of opportunity for positions within the new office. We've been holding monthly informational sessions with them to keep them up to date on the transition process, create relationships between them and the personnel department, orient them to the county and help them navigate the application process in line with our civil service rules. Following board approval of the attorney classifications, we opened and closed the attorney recruitment in May and applications are in and are under review. We're aiming to start the interviews with the attorneys by July with job offers to follow by September. The personnel team is also finalizing the investigator classifications, which we expect to be brought to the board in August. And then the investigator recruitment would start shortly thereafter. The personnel team is also reviewing the duties of support staff and determining how to proceed with recruiting those staff. Support staff classifications already exist within our county structure. Those include classifications such as paralegal, social worker and other administrative positions. And lastly, any other staff that are going to be needed for the office are gonna be determined once we have our new public defender. This would include any management and executive positions. And while BCM will be receiving job offers and may accept those job offers while we're doing this, they're also eligible to apply for those positions. In terms of our public defender recruitment at the direction of the board, the personnel department and team is working with a recruiter, Wendy Brown on marketing the public defender position. During the month of May, Ms. Brown engaged with key partners across the county to hear about the public defender's role and interactions within the criminal justice system and the qualities of an ideal candidate. We just finalized the brochure for the recruitment and as of today, the recruitment is live on the county's job website as well as the recruiter's job board. So anyone interested can go take a look at the job announcement and possibly apply. So we are now working on the recruitment. It's expected to close on July 21st. The positions being advertised broadly through online and through various public defense organizations and within the local community itself. A screening and selection process will follow in August with the goal of hiring our public defender by October and having them onboarded. Lastly, I'm gonna cover the administrative transition. So we're in the process of working on the case management system. This is in coordination with the district attorney's office. We issued an RFP and the bids came in and the proposals are being reviewed currently. We're also working on the office space for the new office. This is in coordination with county departments as well as the BCM firm. And then we are working on an extension of our conflicts contracts so that we can continue that until we figure out what kind of model we want going forward with the new public defender. Work in each of these areas will continue and we'll provide another update in August. And then once the public defender is hired this fall we're gonna be working on developing a case transition plan in partnership with BCM, the main firm. And the goal is to finalize that plan by January. So we know what will be occurring in the final six months. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Sven who's going to cover the budget proposal. Thanks, Nicole. Good morning, board. So the 2021-22 proposed budget provides for a total increase to about $95,000 or 0.7% over the 2020-21 adopted budget. The recommended increase in expenditures includes a 5% increase across all the public defense contracts. It's offset by a decrease in one-time funds for complex homicide cases. The recommended increase in revenues is about 47,000 and reflects increase in state AB 109 funding which is offset by the elimination of registration fees that's mandated by state assembly bill 1869. The remaining 47,000 is an increase in general fund contribution. As shown here, the total expenditures and appropriations for the public defender is approximately $13 million and continues to support the main contract with BCM, two conflicts firms of Paige and Dudley and Walref and Associates. And the fourth party panel known as the criminal defense conflicts program which is administered by the county council. The budget also provides for ancillary services including investigation costs, expert witness, other related defense services ordered by the court are approved for attorneys serving addition clients in terms of the supplemental budget. The supplemental budget provides for one-time transition costs and so in three main areas, salaries and benefits to support positions necessary for the transition, services and supplies to support technology, professional services, new subscriptions and other related startup costs. And then office space and infrastructure supports for physical plant upgrades and any improvements we need to do to the office space. The funding for the supplemental transition costs is created by current general fund savings in this year's budget. The funding in particular for staffing is adding four-time, 4.0 full-time equivalent positions including the public defender department head position that's open for recruitment now, a business systems analyst to support the implementation of the case management system and then admin services officer and an administrative aid to provide limited administrative support as we get into the second half of this upcoming fiscal year. With that I'll turn it back to Nicole for the recommended actions. Thank you, Sven. So today we're asking that the board approve the proposed budget including any supplemental materials and we've included the page references for your information and we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Okay, thank you for that presentation. And this is another opportunity for us to thank their long-time public defender agency, Bigum, Christensen and Menzloff for the many years of excellent service to our community. As we prepare to transition to spend a lot of work that has gone into this throughout the county administrative office but especially for Nicole Colburn and Sven Stafford who we just heard from and thank you for your efforts. I also wanna thank our budget staff for preparing not only the regular public defender budget but for this year, 2021-22 but also for bringing us a proposal for the startup funding necessary to prepare for the impending transition. This is a big move for us and I think you've really conducted it very well getting us ready to bring them on board the next year. Appreciate it very much. Any other comments from the board before we ask for public comment? Yeah, just a quick question, I've got my hand up. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I wanna thank the public defenders for all the work, hard work they've done over the years and hopefully this transition goes well for them. Can you explain a little bit more? I know we have the current expenses with the transition which is not too much but what about like is there a change in pension expense that will come up later, you know, 20, 10, 20 years from now which might be the difference between now and then? As Supervisor Caput, we're accounting for all salary and benefit costs when we, in our budget projections and what we've included in the supplemental budget. So obviously there might be cost increases over time that we will have to deal with but we are incorporating all of that into our budget projections. Okay, because that'll be the whole problem we have now goes really back to the 1990s when instead of giving pay raises they were giving better pension payments and then now a lot of the people, you know time goes by quickly and then all of a sudden we're faced with more pension obligations and that's a problem we're dealing with today. So are you saying that it'll be nominal in the future or would it be, you know, an added burden that we're gonna have maybe 10 or 20 years from now? You know, I think that, you know we are dealing with cost increases across the county so we're constantly looking at what those are and how we might address them. This is gonna be a new office so some of the costs because these are new staff coming from outside will be lower than we might experience in other departments. So there's an advantage there but we're prepared to look at what those cost increases are going into the future and how we might handle those. Okay, that's something I'd like to see more of in the future maybe in the next year if we have some kind of a, you know how much money it will add to our obligations. Okay, thank you. Another comments from the board? Supervisor Coonerty, you're on mute. Yeah, thanks. And thank you, Ms. Coburn and Mr. Stafford. This is obviously a huge move by our county and represents a real dedication to indigent defense. And I'm just impressed and I wanna applaud you for being able to put together a transition plan that ultimately is gonna cost less than a million dollars. I think that's impressive for such a large and significant move that we're making. So I think as I said, it's going to lead to better indigent defense in the future and a better functioning criminal justice system for our county. So thanks for your good work. Thank you. Any comments from the board? Seeing none, any public comments from the public? There are currently no members to speak to this item chair. Okay, we will return the item to the board and maintain a motion to approve the proposed budget for the public defender's office. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Call the roll please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Very well, we will now move to the probation budget and our chief probation officer, Fernando Geraldo, will be making the presentation. I believe along with Henry Thompson and other members of his staff. I mean, people need to understand that people are looking and waiting and then one discussion on one department ends and then another one immediately begins. So he's probably just getting to. Hello, good morning. Yes, sir. Good morning. Good morning, chair McPherson and supervisors. I hope that my presentation is showing up on screen. Yes, it is. Great, excellent. Fernando Geraldo, chief probation officer. It's my pleasure to leave before you today to represent our fiscal year 2021-22 budget. It's my pleasure to be before you and have the opportunity to highlight our operational plan achievements and emerging issues that began during the COVID-19 pandemic and our current and future state of operations. We have reason to be optimistic and are grateful for our health and well-being. I wanna thank our public health officials, Mimi Hall and Dr. Gail Newell for keeping us safe and ensuring our community has had equitable access to vaccines and all information related to this crisis. I also wanna thank CAO Carlos Palacios and his office staff and particulars Sven Stafford and Nicole Coburn for their continued support of our probation department and allowing us to fill our vision and mission which is driven by my innovative and passionate staff. I wanna thank my dedicated staff for their work each and every day to promote public safety in the most unique and meaningful ways and how they have shifted and adapted new methods to carry out our work to promote public safety, reduce recidivism, support victims and all those impacted by crime and partnership with our community. Okay, I'm making an adjustment here. I realize I'm not sure if you could see me or not. Here you go. I'm sorry, I apologize. All right, here's to you. Thank you. Great, and my presentation's still showing. Great. Our department was fully operational during the pandemic. I'll be with key modifications in several areas. We adapt quickly, kept our offices open, served clients, kept our staff and young people safe and served a critical function with pre-child services and for the courts. For the first time in the history of our department we had to evacuate our entire juvenile hall in our Felton juvenile complex building due to the CZU Lightning Complex fires. We were able to successfully transport and house our youth in Santa Clara for 16 days and we are grateful to have neighbors in the Bay Area ready to assist us. So here's our agenda. I'm going to go over our operational plan achievements, our budget proposal for fiscal year 2021-22 and emerging issues. Okay, developing our proposed budget with a 50% for low restoration, we had to close the gap of $1.7 million, which was our deficit. Additionally, we came into fiscal year 2020-21 with six probation officer positions vacant as well as three support positions vacant for a total of nine staff. I'm pleased to present to you a budget that includes filling two vacant deputy probation officer positions in one accountant position, all of which are vital and essential at this moment. It is critical to note that we continued operations even with being nine positions down and with these furloughs. This was a incredibly difficult and stressful time for our staff. Not fully funding our current nine unfunded vacancies, especially the probation officer positions and the accountant position, which really are essential. We'll continue to put a significant strain our adult and juvenile services and fiscal staff. Go to the next slide here. We can talk about our juvenile hall. This is our juvenile hall budget, which is mostly general fund, as you can see, the total financing is slightly over $5 million. We've had an increase in revenues from our MA, Medical Administrative Activities Claiming, which is new to the juvenile hall, 172 and in COVID relief funding. Go on to the next slide. I'm not sure I moved to the next slide here. Thank you very much. We talk about our adult and juvenile probation budget and this is a little breakdown of that. Our deficit and problem area continues to really be in our adult services and juvenile hall and juvenile division budget, where we rely heavily on state allocations and entitlements and grants. Salaries associated and cost increased by $982,000. And we had a decrease in grant revenues also with expiring grants, such as the supporting male survivors of violence, the RAP program that decreased by $730,000. And that really gives us our $1.7 million gap, which we had to close. We partially closed this gap by bringing in trust funds, which we are depleting, but also we had an increase of nearly $200,000 in SB 678 revenues, as well as slightly over $500,000 in MA revenues. And that was one of our goals that we were explicit about a couple of years ago in our budget hearing about raising revenues through MA. And as you can see, it's worked out well and it's helping us really preserve positions and it's our hope that it can actually help us decrease. So with those increases in revenues through SB 678, MA revenues, we're able to restore or fund on two probation officer positions and an account position. Again, that's still leaving us a gap of five vacancies. We'll go to the next slide here. Thank you. I always like to show pictures of staff during happy moments, particularly during COVID, which is difficult, but this was a virtual swearing in for new staff. And we just couldn't stop celebrating milestones during that time. And many staff joined in to welcome and support and provide guidance and words of wisdom to our staff that hopefully we'll stay here for many years into the future. And these are juvenile hall staff and the approbations that I was able to support. Most of the next slide, please. We'll now review our operational plan achievements for each division. This is for the juvenile hall division. So number 168, you've heard about this one before, the completion of a multi-purpose gymnasium see the table program and significant renovations. So these two projects have been combined in probably the last year and a half with a targeted completion date of the see the table program and renovations is December of 2023. Just received word yesterday that that may be a little bit delayed and it's really about the state being behind six months. So that's gonna further delay that but we're about 70% of the way we're ready to go but the COVID is attributed to further delays. Number 169 is to hands educational opportunities for youth in our hall. We've provided tablets and wifi and youth have all access to education, vocational opportunities and therapeutic programs with these tabs. And we are plan on purchasing more. Next slide, please. Thank you. Across the nation, the use of juvenile hall is dropped considerably but never before have we seen this drop occurring during the pandemic. In 2019, there were 268 youth admitted to the juvenile hall. We already had lower numbers in the juvenile hall and we've been averaging around 15. You can see a significant drop in March through June on the screen here but recently we've seen a slight increase in the population. Today we are 14 youth. Our alternative to detention success rates remain high at 96%. That means youth make it to court and do not reoffend when they're out on these important alternative to detention programs but the stakes have never been higher to keep youth safely out of detention and not compromise public safety through alternatives. And we know during COVID it was very critical to keep youth if we could out of the juvenile hall in the community. And we want to thank our partners for supporting us in all that. Go to the next slide. These are a few pictures that demonstrate first, our staff and youth actually thanking the firefighters during last year's fire. So they made signs, quite a few signs and that's up at the top of Graham Hill Road. And right there, that's one of the first couple of days of photo of our juvenile hall staff in Santa Clara. We took over a unit and they let us borrow that unit for 16 days but all our staff were over there. So we're very grateful for that. Talked about the progress with our state grant which is SB 82, rounds one and two and there will be further delays as I just found out yesterday. We received a grant just before COVID called the Star Grant which is stable transitions after reentry grant. We've had a lot of success and really the primary purpose of the grant is to support youth transitioning from juvenile hall. The Division of Juvenile Justice or DJJ, ranch camps and short-term residential programs. And we've already served 37 youth and families through this program and we're looking to scale it up as a result of SB 823 which I'll talk about quite a bit. Really important to note that we had zero transmission of COVID amongst youth or staff, that was great. It wasn't the case in other institutions across the state. So I'm very proud that we were able to take all the necessary precautions. We did have youth looked in who were COVID positive but we did not have any spread because we took all the measures necessary. We also during COVID installed Wi-Fi and again, we're providing seven tablets for youth to access educational vocational programming. Next slide please. Oh, that's just a nice photo. We'll go to the next slide. So this is the operational achievements for our juvenile division. Number 165, which was decreased the number of youth in short-term residential therapeutic programs which is known as STRTP and that's all referred to it. We have decreased the number of youth and STRTP programs from 10 to five and we've been holding steady about four to five youth. It's really out of home placement. We doing so, we've actually increased the use of child and family team meetings, wraparound program and the Forte program. One of our other goals, number 166 has been to increase school outreach efforts. We've done this through our student success project for the past three years. We've worked closely with the County Office of Education to expand the project and partner with PVUSD to offer more opportunities for youth to succeed in school and that was just so important during COVID with all the challenges that many of our youth have, particularly the youth in South County without access to technology. Next slide please. This photo depicts our South County Luna Evening Center. Some of you may remember this is located where the Watsonville courthouse was located. That's been there probably for the last least decade now but we converted temporarily that area to really a COVID aid station. So you see a lot of products there that include for families that we were distributing their shower, laundry, hygiene, self-care products and so on that were just so important. People were lacking the basic stuff so we were delivering that during our wellness checks to people's door as we'd asked what they needed and also included snacks and art supplies but our partners, behavioral health, community action board, Power Valley Prevention and Student Assistance all work together in this endeavor to support our partners. We also actually are part of one of the only counties in California. We're piloting a CASA project which is a child advocacy project supporting youth who are involved in the justice system which is very unique. It's usually reserved for youth in the foster care system. We've COVID presented some challenges but we've actually restarted that pilot and we're really looking forward to the success it has by providing adult mentors to support system-involved youth. Go to the next slide please. These are operational achievements that are department-wide. I wanna talk about a couple of those. Number 162 was crime survivors and what we wanted to do and we are very close to accomplishing that or have accomplished that goal is to establish three standard practices or protocols that increase levels of support provided for survivors of crime in our district attorney, Jeff Rizal. I'd already mentioned a couple of these. One was really rolling out the blueprint for shared safety which I actually presented to your board last year I believe and it's really putting crime survivors at the center. There's a number of recommendations to enhance services for survivors of crime in that report and our district attorney also really mentioned their wonderful new program which is the neighborhood accountability courts and that's funded through Prop 47 grant funding which is known as locally known as the CAFE's project. We've also expanded contracts on our juvenile side with the conflict resolution center to expand victim awareness program and teen peer mediation. Those are restorative justice programs that we've had for many, many years. Next slide please. Oh, and I missed one other though was impact contracting which is very, very important. That was 167. We continued to increase outcome based services and agreements for the delivery of client services and our goal, we are exceeding our goal of 80% for all our direct service client agreements to be included impact contracting. So this is for our third division which is our adult division, our operational plan achievements. Number 161 probation service center, more than 578 unique individuals have been served through the probation center. Our goal was 165 so we've surpassed that goal easily and now with loosening restrictions around COVID, we are seeing a lot more people in our program. I just wanna note that we briefly closed down last year at the start of COVID during the shutdown, but we reopened, I believe it was May of last year and we're serving clients using all the precautions but people were coming in and getting critical services. Number 163 which is our domestic violence project. In the year one of that pilot is completed we've submitted our report to the state. A little bit challenging because of COVID in terms of as really as you know, turned everything around and year two which the grant report will be not the grant report but our pilot project report will be due and we're gonna be analyzing recidivism data so that's yet to be determined. Number 164, this is a big change across the state. It's related to SB 384 which is sex offender registration, tiering. All our staff who will be part of that have participated in those trainings as have our partners. Okay, next slide, thank you. Wanna just take a brief moment to talk about our probation race equity initiative 2020 to 2022. In 2020, the probation department began laying the groundwork for what has become our probation race equity initiative. I'm proud that our department is embarking on this new initiative which in my opinion is overdue much needingly and most importantly I hope creates equitable outcomes for those we serve. We've all experienced or maybe observed the injustice that continues and has for centuries in the very systems that we occupy. I believe this has divided many of us and actually often forces to take sides on issues where race and equity intersect particularly in probation. We've worked with the Burns Institute for the last two decades and they are providing technical assistance in this endeavor and helping us co-design a staff-led values exploration that will help us prepare for the difficult but exciting work ahead. So these are the three phases of that. We've already completed the first phase which is foundational trainings. We've had over 120 staff here and partners attend these trainings so far. Many of the partners are Connie partners and community-based agencies. And our next step which begins at the end of July is to really start a values exploration that we hope will lead to really help us modify our current vision and mission statement but it will also be embedded in our operational plan for the county for 21 to 23. And next slide please. On June 7th, a delegation from Santa Cruz County that included myself, our assistant chief, our division of juvenile services as well as Judge Deneen Guy, Chief Deputy DA Tara George called Defender Lair Bigum, an assistant CAO and Nicole Coburn visited the Sonoma County Juvenile Hall and Ranch Camps. I'll talk about why we did that in just a moment but these photos were taken at the ranch camp from a vocational program which among other things includes a welding program and a picnic bench building program. Youth there may can sell these to cities, parks and state parks and I've been up there and actually benefited from sitting on those benches and using those fire pits myself. So they're really, really nice and they can be purchased not just by city or parks. Next slide. Want to talk about some of the emerging issues for each of our divisions. I'll start with the juvenile hall. Clearly the closer of DJ J which is related to SB A23 it's gonna have a significant impact with a other option that's a secure option other than DJ J. There is the risk of increased commitments to this new track. It's called Secure Youth Track Program and that could increase our juvenile hall population and average length of stay that those are risk, potential risk that could happen. We expect impacts when the construction does occur obviously just like you're having a remodel at your home we're gonna have to make changes to programming make sure we have all the precautions and are safe when we do that. And I'm really again, want to stress the importance of all the safety measures and the support of the health services our nurses to keep our youth safe during COVID. We've actually have begun in-person meeting a couple of weeks ago for the first time. So for the past since COVID started we haven't been able to have any in-person meeting or any other folks from the outside including schools, partners, attorneys actually need in person it's all been done remotely, which has worked but finally we are starting to allow partners in and they're all taking the necessary precautions. Next slide please. This is a slide I think is a critical importance because it looks different than it would in terms of the needs of the youth we served really as a result of COVID and what's changed for youth regarding their social emotional needs and their isolation and this really informs us of how we address these needs. So the responses captured in this chart indicate that 60% of the assessed needs for youth fall in the social emotional range with the highest single category being isolation and temporary circumstances and really it's indicative of the pandemic. So we've been working with our partners to address these heightened needs which we're gonna be critical particularly through the summer and as we get youth back in-person school. One of our goals is to alignment of staff to evidence-based practices to provide equitable opportunities for youth. So we're gonna continue many more trainings and now I'm gonna briefly talk about realignment. Your board approved our local plan on June 8th and I just wanna review that a little bit with you. So go to the next slide. Talk about SB 28. SB 28, 23, I'm sorry. So here are the critical elements. As you know, SB 823 effectively closes the Division of Juvenile Justice Intake on July 1, 2021 and will close entirely the facility in July of 2023. There is a new state office being developed. It's the Office of Youth and Community Restoration. They're housed within the Health and Human Services and they have the following responsibilities which is develop a report on youth outcomes in the Juvenile Justice System. Identify policy recommendations for approved outcomes and integrated programs and services to best support youth. Identify and disseminate best practices particularly around the most difficult populations that we have to treat those youth who've committed serious sexual offenses and those youths struggling with really serious behavioral health issues. And so eventually our report beginning a local plan will be submitted to this new Office of Youth and Community Restoration. And we're not entirely sure of how much oversight they will have over the counties that's still being discussed at the state level. Go to the next slide, please. I wanna briefly talk about the important role of the Local Juvenile Justice Coordinating Council and the subcommittee that was developed earlier this year. Our counties at a Juvenile Justice Coordinating Council we refer to it as the JJCC that traditionally has met one time a year to approve our multi-agency Juvenile Justice Comprehensive Plan. The new bill, SB 823 is required at development of this new subcommittee with these additional members to develop a local plan to handle DJJ realignment which puts the burden back on counties to serve youth who've committed the 707B offenses which are the most violent and serious offenses. And our county has not sent many youth about two on average to DJJ over the last 10 years but nonetheless we have sent youth and at some point we've had up to nine youth in DJJ. And today we have three youth who are still there and some of them may return to us in the next year or some may be there through the end of the June 2023 upon closure and then we will meet alternative options for those youth who still have time left to serve. So these are the members that helped develop the plan and I wanna name them because they did important work. The Chief Probation Officer is the chair, our Juvenile Court Judge, Audenblut Genine Guy was a member of that. Tara George, our Chief Deputy District Attorney, Larry Bigum, our Public Defender, Robin Luckett, Director of Child Welfare Services, Lisa Gutierrez-Wang, our Senior Behavioral Health Manager as well as Ferris Soba, our Superintendent of the COE, Beverly Brooke, Community Member, Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Commissioner, Edgar Ibarra from MILPA and also a Community Member, Jimmy Cook, Community Member and from CASA as well as Marisol Lopez, Community Member and Monarch Services. This committee has been formed and with the four additional members and we began meeting in March and really our biggest decision was to determine what our county needed to do, whether or not we could serve these youth who were formerly eligible for DDJ in our facility or whether we needed to find a host county. After reviewing commitment data and also analyzing our facility's capacity to house and provide program for youth ages 14 to 25 and in some cases with sentences for five to seven years we found our facility unsuitable. We only have two units in our 54 year old and outdated facility and cannot provide separate programming necessary for youth on this new secure youth track. We cannot keep youth as young as the age of 14 separate from adults in the early 20s. We found this to be a dangerous option. So the role of the local justice plan sort of this new subcommittee was to develop a plan which your board approved. This plan is a new plan. We will need to analyze it updated annually because the DJJ area alignment is new to all counties. And so right now I've been in conversation and discussions with Sonoma County which is currently the only county in the Bay Area that is willing to host and serve youth. Other options may open up as counties understand how to deal with this significant transition. But right now Sonoma County, which we visited is definitely open and we were very pleased with their programming, their juvenile halls of modern juvenile hall, their large campus. And I'll report to you more as that unfolds. And next slide please. Just wanna show you how collaboration is critically critical especially during a pandemic. And this is a photo of our staff at the probation service center partners. We have the mentors program there, county office of education staff, virus and either staff peer mentoring program and encompass staff. And at the bottom you see our probation services center clothing and supply closet. There's suits, shirts, blouses, shoes. You know, many people need clothing for job interviews or just need basic, just need socks. And we have all that thankfully. So if you need, if you have the clothing you wanna donate let us know, we can sure use it. Last our talk about emerging issues and our adult division. We continue to experience new legislation that really has shifted in the way we have to work. And often it's probation's responsibility to either implement it or be the lead in that. There's AB 1950, which has a goal of front loading services and reducing probation supervision time for nonviolent misdemeanor felony convictions to for misdemeanors, it's one year of supervision and for felony, it's two years. And there are exceptions to that but it's a shortened duration of that. SB 384, as you know, is the sex offender tiering bill which begins July one will be a significant work for all of us, all the local justice system partners. Our pre-trial services or custody alternative program, we were hoping for that bail reform, which was SB 10 and then proposition 25, we hope that would pass but it did not in 2020, but we've continued with the high number of youth, excuse me, adults and pre-trial services with limited staffing and an increased use of electronic monitoring which is very, very, very costly. But we had an important role in making sure we kept the jail population low to allow for quarantining and that. And so we're happy to be a partner in that but the use of electronic monitoring has and cost has tripled in the last couple of years. Next slide, please. That just shows you our pre-trial population, how it's grown since 2017 really and you can see it was an average daily population of 100 and just in the first quarter of this year it was 193, so it's grown quite a bit. Our staffing hasn't grown and the demands have grown. That's probably been our busiest unit during the pandemic. Next slide, please. So that concludes my presentation and here are recommended actions, approve the proposed budget for the probation department including any supplemental materials as recommended by the county administrative officer and listed are the reference pages. And so now I will take questions. Thank you. Well, thank you for mentioning Fernando Gerardo and all your staff for a very thorough presentation and really comprehensive overview of what we have to do and your adjustment to what the state has passed and added responsibilities has put on your shoulders to serve both the juveniles that are in our system and the adults in the justice system as well. I think it's important to note that your hard work, you support families of people who are in our justice system as well, as you pointed out. Specifically, I wanna do acknowledge the efforts to be responsive to the immediate needs of young folks in probation and their families. The really their needs that you wouldn't necessarily think that probation is responsible for, such as food insecurity and rental assistance, but use step to the front and really provided a tremendous service that is not only compassionate, but I am sure it contributes to the success of those young people and their families and hopefully exiting the system as soon as possible. I also wanna appreciate, say, and point out the funding for the Youth Action Network with United Way. I look forward to hearing how that program is developing as I'm a representative from the Board of Supervisors at United Way, which says a phenomenal job of service to our community. And I think we also need to acknowledge the challenges around the juvenile hall facility and the need to plan for how we use it more efficiently, which you said has been put back a little now. But I look forward to tackling that issue in the future. But thank you for everything you're doing. This department has always been forward-looking and as an example to follow for many other departments in the throughout the state of California. It's gone on for years and you're continuing that effort and it's very much appreciated. I'd welcome any other comments from members of the Board, Supervisor Koenig, any comments? Yes, thank you, Chair. And thank you, Chief Feraldo. I just wanted to dig into the SBA 23 issue a little bit more. Our board did recently receive a letter from the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Commission expressing their concern about moving the youth that will be coming back from DJJ to Sonoma County, principally because it'll be so much, it will actually be further away from Santa Cruz County and these youths home than the current facility in Stockton. So at first I just want to get clear on what the actual budget we had to work with this. I mean, so I understand in the next fiscal year we'll have $250,000 back from the state. And then after that, the following year, we'll have watching like maybe two years close to a million dollars, $984,000 per year. Right now we have just a three-year sort of forecast. We have, as you mentioned for next fiscal year, 21, 22, 250,000 a third year, it's 500,000 and then third year, 900,000. Obviously that amount has to be sustained. The state has to support this in order for this to work to local counties. And so it's my hope that that does continue. We're currently working with Sonoma County to get estimates on their rates that they will charge for youth. And I think we're going to get good rates that are fair that won't eat up that entire budget. But SBA 23 passed under the condition that the state would support local counties in this. We're not the only county in a similar situation as us where locally there's counties that don't have juvenile halls, for instance, or have juvenile halls that are outdated and really it would be not in the best interests of the youth to house someone in a small facility like we have a small campus. And unfortunately right now, at least at the moment, there are no other counties I've reached locally in the Bay Area I should say that are willing to work with other youth. And so I will continue to explore other options for this. I understand that the intent of the legislation, as he even reads, I think is bring kids closer to home. But that's not a reality at the moment for many counties at this time, but maybe working together with you all or local counties we can make that happen and where youth don't have to, and families have to travel such long distances. But I understand the concerns that some folks have. Well, any of our neighboring counties are experiencing the same problems like San Benito County or Monterey County? Is there any opportunity to partner with them on the creation of a new facility? I contacted all counties in the Bay Area, which are eight that we have. So, you know, include San Mateo, Monterey County, Santa Clara, San Francisco, I don't know if you're aware that in December, their board has asked that their juvenile hall shut down. So now there, San Francisco is looking for options contra costas. Yeah, I've reached out to all the chiefs there and for a variety of reasons at the moment, they are unwilling to serve other youth. I think it's just because of the newness of this, but for everybody, it's really a dramatic change to serve this youth population. And some have capacity, some have built new juvenile halls recently, just like Monterey County did, Sonoma County is a newer juvenile hall. They have unoccupied space, large campuses where youth can actually go out and walk around the large track and things like that. We don't have that here. Well, thank you for exploring all options and continuing to do so. I want to ask a little bit about the electronic monitoring. You kind of mentioned it a number of times throughout your report, saying that we've used it a lot more in the last year. I think you said 96% of just total, I guess participants in probation had successful access with electronic monitoring, but also that it's not cheap. Is it cheaper than the alternative in your estimation? It is when we look at the cost per jail bed day or juvenile hall bed day, which I don't have recent estimates. The last I remember it might have been something like $150 a day or something like that. I forget exactly what I'm sure it's gone up. It's the cost goes up every year. That 96% success rate was for the juvenile alternative to detention programs, but our pre-trial programs has almost close as those high success rates. So, but we have seen an increase particularly during COVID because there was an urgency to really safely release individuals from the jail to keep the inmates safe and obviously staff because of COVID and have space for those quarantining units, which were key, but our budget has, I think, tripled for the use of electronic monitoring equipment because so many individuals have been released with that condition of supervision. So it's getting expensive. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that it has tripled. Does that show up in services and supplies and, you know, roughly? Yes, it does. And I want to say that it's probably about a budget that used to be $60,000 and it's now probably $200,000 a year. Okay, thank you. And then finally, you know, I was glad to hear about the probation race equity initiative and looking forward to hearing some of the concrete recommendations that come out of that. Did you say you're expecting some operational recommendations for year 22, 23? Well, we, as you know, all County departments have to update our operational plans for 21, 23. And so this was timely as we have submitted those, actually our new objectives, which embed race and equity in every one of those. So this will support that, this initiative, I believe, but also we'll look at it eternally at any practices or policies that we need to modify. But particularly as I look at our vision and mission statement, which was developed our strategic plan in 2016, I do want to make modifications to that based on what we find because I, you know, there is no mention of cultural diversity and so on, but there is no mention of equity, which really is a new term. A lot of people are using, it's a buzzword, but many folks don't necessarily understand it. So I want to make sure we all understand it before we start incorporating that. But ultimately I'd like to officially incorporate that language if it's appropriate. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I did notice that the budget mentions 80% of youth sent to DJJ were Latino, so we definitely have some work to do. That's correct. Thank you. That's all my questions. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Friend, comments? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Chief. I noted that there are a couple of positions. I lost you there, Supervisor Friend. Our work has significantly greater burden on your budget, but you'd also noted that the governor's budget very briefly didn't include the funding. Is there something since they're still negotiating the final budget at the state legislature that this board could do that would be helpful in that regard to help advocate on that behalf that could provide from the state side some additional funding for you that maybe would be able to fill the positions? I think I missed the first part, but I think you were acknowledging that we do, we'll have vacancies even with this proposed budget. So I believe that's what you mentioned, which would be four probation officer positions. So the state budget, yes, there is something you can do and I've done it. I've reached out to actually Senator Laird have the conversation with him and this has to do with the governor's proposal of pre-trial funding, which there was I believe over $100 million. I don't know how much would come to the local counties, but that would be distributed. And we would get some of that if that were to actually pass and agreed upon by the entire legislature. The legislature did not in their budget that they have approved did not include those dollars for pre-trial, but this is very important for the governor. He knows how important pre-trial is to the counties, particularly the vulnerable population. So I've submitted letters to our assemblyman Mark Stone as well as our Senator Laird, who I spoke to on Friday and let him know how important this was. So those are the kinds of things that I'm doing at a local level, but so our association is as well. There is, we have hope for increased revenues. We don't know exactly yet. It's not official for realignment dollars in the new fiscal year, but we're still waiting to see. So there are some opportunities with an anticipated funding, which I hope we could use to help fund some of these vacancies. Okay, I appreciate that. And Chairman McPherson serves on our behalf for CSAC and obviously he would know more than any of us about how the state budget process works. But my understanding is the legislature really just passed a shell budget and there's still a major negotiation to still occur. So perhaps Chairman McPherson could work with you through our CSAC delegation and then maybe this board as individual or even at our next board meeting could have a letter on to actually formally request that. I think it's a very reasonable request. It's actually not very much money on the scheme of what they're talking about and the tens of billions of dollars to ask for this amount of money. I think it would make a big difference though at a local level. So I'm happy to help participate in that process. Thank you, Chief. Thank you for your support, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't have any, everyone's brought up the many questions. I want to continue to just appreciate the probation department's commitment to services to this community, but also informed by data. Over the years I've been here, the Chief has been and his team have been great about getting back to us with questions and following up and seeing what the data is telling us about this efforts to look at alternative ways to oversee this population and ensure community safety at the same time. And even in these difficult COVID times, I appreciate that you're continuing to try to find ways to do that work. I am concerned about the understaffing and increased responsibilities that the legislature continues to put on your department. But I appreciate Supervisor Friend's recommendations that we advocate where we need to in order to get you the resources you need. Thank you for recognizing our hard work, particularly around gathering and looking at data and using that to inform best practices. We're not afraid to pivot or shift if something isn't working and then embrace something that will. So we appreciate that acknowledgement. Thank you, Mr. President. You're good. Supervisor Caput. Well, thank you. This is Greg. How are you doing, Fernando? I'm doing pretty well. Thank you. Thank you, thank you for asking. Yes. Well, good to see you virtually. Well, the gymnasium looks like it's gonna finally one day be completed here. I, one doesn't look like the ribbon cutting. Yeah, that's what I love to be able to celebrate that. And based on this new news yesterday of a six month delay, construction beginning, I think it looked like in April. So late, late December of 2022 and maybe in April of 2023. So I hope, I hope, I know in my first budget speech as chief, I think is eight years ago, I had invited all of you to a basketball game at our new gymnasium. And since then I haven't brought it up much because there's been a lot of delays, but we're gonna get there. We'll invite you to that. You bet. Yeah. And how's it been going with, I call it procedural court appearances rather than having the youth have to go down to the main courthouse. They were doing that over at juvenile hall. The judge would go out there. With COVID, I guess the whole thing has become pretty much you haven't been traveling anyway, but how's that been going? So what we saw for the most part, we had to support a lot of families that didn't have access to technology, right? Because remote work still meant you had to have Wi-Fi signal and probably 65% of our youth are in South County. So we did support youth with technology, but what we saw was increased court appearances. So youth who would normally, and families who may have had to travel from the city of Watsonville to Felton, which is a 23-mile distance, there were frequent failures to appear. That has decreased significantly. So that's a good thing. And speaking to the courts, I know they, at least the juvenile court would plans to retain a hybrid model to help with that access to court and or for families, particularly to not have to miss work, drive all those things that they have to do to make it to court, get childcare, find a car, borrow gas. So the hybrid model, much of the, even the things that we do internally, we hope to continually to modify our practices and use that so folks have easier access. Okay, well, thank you very much. You're welcome. Thanks, Hibbe. Thank you. Are there any comments from the public? There are no members of the public wishing to speak to this item. Okay, I would return to the board for action. Presumably for, Mr. Blasio said, there's still time for us to put a letter into the agenda on the Tuesday, the 29th, I think we could coordinate putting something together by today sometime. Yeah, yeah, we could, if we could get it today this afternoon, that'd be best, but we could also get it tomorrow and do it as an addendum. So there's, we can work with your staff to get a letter in. Okay, okay, entertain a motion with that additional directive. I'll move to approve Greg Caput. Second. Any second, friend? Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. Person? Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. We will now move to the budget, the sheriff's budget. Is that correct, Mr. Blasio? That is correct. Okay, yes. All right, as Sheriff Jim Hart will be presenting and here we go. Okay. Thank you. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Board. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, great. Before I get into the budget presentation, I do want to acknowledge a couple of things. 2020 obviously was a really hard year on everybody in our community, in our country. But for my staff, we not only had the COVID, but we had Sergeant Gussler's murder. We had the CZU fire. We've had some pretty severe budget cuts, furlough. And I just want to acknowledge my staff for coming into work every day and doing the best they can with what we have and working hard for this community. And I also want to acknowledge our corrections bureau for not for taking extreme safety precautions so that we didn't have a single outbreak of the virus inside our correctional facilities. And I think that's really commendable work on their part. And then lastly, I want to acknowledge the Board and the CAO for putting together OR3 and really enhancing our emergency preparedness. I've, in my 33 years with the county, I've never seen the county this prepared for the next emergency. And I think that should make the community feel good. I mean, we're more than ready for the next thing. I hope it doesn't happen, but if it does, the county certainly positioned itself well for the next emergency to come up. I also want to thank our CAO analyst, Melody Sereno, for all of her work as well. So we'll go ahead and get into the budget. Excuse me. So we're going to talk a little bit about crime data as I usually do, and then we're going to get into the actual budget proposal. So a little bit about local crime data in unincorporated Santa Cruz County. So not counting the four cities, just the unincorporated area of the county. As you can see on the right hand portion of the slide, our violent crime rate is about half of the state average. Our property crime rate, which is the middle portion there, is about half the state average, and our overall crime rate at 13.5 roughly is about half of the state average. As you can see, this is a chart that just has a couple of markers on it. Prison realignment in 2011 and Prop 47 in 2014, but our crime rate per 1,000 residents was running pretty high. It was about 27 crimes per 1,000 residents in 2011, and that number has gone down over time to about half of the level that we were in 2011, and this is on reported crime data. Unfortunately, homicides across the county, the state, and the country are on the increase, and I'm sure you've been reading about it, but violent crime, even though our numbers are low, we've also seen a pretty significant increase. In fact, we had two separate shootings last night down at Watsonville where people were injured, but you can see from 2013 to 2017, over that five-year period, we only had two homicides, and now in the last three and a half years, we've seen a significant uptick with 15 homicides in the last three and a half years. Our 35-year average runs about four roughly, so this 2020 was a little bit more on the violent side. Fortunately, so far through May of this year, we've only had one homicide in unincorporated Sanford County. Another way of looking at this is in five-year increments, and you can see that late 80s, early 90s was particularly violent time, but in five-year increments, we average about 19 homicides every five years, and we were able to get that number down. As you can see, we were dropped all the way down from 38 to seven in 2012 through 2016, but we're starting to tick back up, unfortunately. So we'll get into the budget a little bit, and this slide is showing our unfunded positions. So positions that we had that have now been unfunded, and you can see during the recession, at the peak of the recession and fiscal year 10 and 11, we were at 30.5 unfunded positions, and that's including correctional officers, deputy sheriffs, and professional staff. We were able to work with your board and the CAO's office to gradually chip away at those numbers so that right around fiscal year 17, 18, we were in pretty good shape for about three years there with only seven or eight unfunded positions. And then going into 2021, county started seeing some budget problems. We unfunded a lot of positions in 2021, and you'll see now in 21-22, we're funding quite a few more positions so that we're actually have more unfunded positions in this proposed budget than we did during the recession. And then looking at this a little bit differently in our total funded positions, you can see during the recession in 10-11, we were at 320 funded positions. Again, we were able to build our office back up after the recession with your help and the CAO's help. We peaked at 368, and now we've dropped down to 333 funded positions. On our budget dashboard, you can see our revenues are up and that's mostly around Prop 172 funding. The general fund contribution is staying pretty stagnant. We're at about the same level as we were last year and compared to this proposed. Our total financing has increased a little bit and you'll see why here in a moment our total financing stands at about 87 million with 333 funded positions. So in this proposed budget, because we had to hit a certain number in order to help pay for the furlough being taken off, we're gonna be unfunding four deputy sheriffs, seven correctional officers of property court and an account technician. The good news is that we're gonna be refunding two of those positions in the fall to get our focused intervention team back, which I know Supervisor Coonerty you've had a real interest in that and then we'll be refunding one correctional officer as well. And then you might recall from last year, but we're in the process of civilianizing our coroner section to have full-time death investigators rather than just deputies who worked that assignment for a couple years. And so we started that process in our current fiscal year and we're gonna complete that process in our proposed budget by unfunding a deputy and a sergeant and funding a full-time corner investigator and a full-time corner investigator supervisor. So the reason why our cost went up a little bit is that health services has been providing mental health services in our correctional facilities for decades and they no longer have the will or the desire to do that. And so we're having to contract those services out. We put out an RFP for that, only one company responded, which is WellPath. So they'll be getting the award and health services will be moving out of our facilities on July 1 and WellPath will be taking that contract over the summertime. We don't have any increase in overtime and then you can see where we've made some reductions in order to hit our number. Our COVID-19 protocols are continuing in the jail. Our staff is required to wear their N95 masks at all time. Inmates were masked at all times. We still are not doing visitation or housing people right when they come into the facility. So we're maintaining a quarantine unit, we're maintaining isolation beds. And then we'll be planning on re-instituting visitation probably later on in the year, but we're gonna work with the health officer on that only about 50% of the inmates choose to take the vaccine. We provide the Johnson vaccine to anybody who wants it, but only about 50% of the incarcerated population is taking that. And then we're making plans for when the health officer and our staff feels like we can reopen to pre-pandemic levels, we will. We were able to get our jail population down total system-wide to about 280. We've been as high as 650 pre-pandemic. So we were at about 280 for quite a while. However, the courts are taking so long because of their processes being slowed down due to COVID that the pretrial detention population is exploded. And so now we're at about 400 people system-wide. Well over 75% of those are pretrial. So we really need to get the courts operating at 100% so we can get through those cases. During COVID, we didn't send any deputy sheriff trainees or correctional officers to the academies. We just started doing that in this month. And then you might recall also that our DNA facility, we were in the third year of a five-year process to get our DNA facility certified and built because of COVID, we had to suspend that. But that was gonna be a real game changer for local law enforcement and the district attorney's office in terms of prosecuting and arresting offenders for primarily sexual assault and homicide cases. And so I'm hoping that when the county's able to pull out of this budget problem and when the budget improves, I'm hoping that the board will consider finding a way to finance that DNA facility. It's gonna be extremely valuable to the criminal justice system. And then we're also, I've been working with Mr. Palacios as well as public works and real property to get our recovery center back up and running. We've had to close the recovery center due to budget problems. And so we're hoping to re-institute that. And then the last thing is that two years ago, we had a power outage in the jail for 24 hours. And we knew that our generator system wasn't very solid. It was pretty antiquated. We brought it to the attention of our general services. They did some work on it, but then we had the power outage and your board in the CAO's office allocated financing for a new generator for the main jail. But that project has been moving at a snail's pace. And so we're still only doing load testing. But we absolutely have to get that generator online and working, especially we're in a dangerous time right now with the summer and fire season and all that. So I just hope that we can put our foot on the gas on that project and get that project moving. So that's a brief overview of our budget. The recommended action is for you, your board to approve the proposed budget for the Sheriff's office, including any supplemental material as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. I'm happy to answer any questions or listening comments. Thank you, Sheriff. Under some very trying times, it's encouraging to, first of all, in your earliest lives to see the criminal, the comparison of our criminal rates here in all categories. And I think a lot of that has to do with the community policing activities that you've taken the same place in the Sheriff's department over the years. I certainly can't be overstated what a challenging year this has been for you in the entire department of sworn officers and civilians. And losing Sergeant Damon Gutsweiler was a heartbreak for his loved ones, but also for this whole family of ours in Santa Cruz County. And yet, you really just stand out amid that grief, the Sheriff's office did a phenomenal job in leading the evacuation of 77,000 people after the CZU fire zone to safety and without a fender bender. It was a huge effort and I hope we never have to repeat it again. But in the debris flow concerns that we've had, but we're not threatened by any rain at this point. So that's encouraging in that aspect. But I wanna thank you, Sheriff Hart, for your leadership and also your top leadership team and putting Chief Deputy Chris Clark, who was particularly helpful in the community, helping our community be informed of many of the virtual town halls that we had to reassure people after the fire. It was very, very important. And I think it really made, it gave people a lot of confidence in the Sheriff's department and realized how valuable it is. And as all this was going on and there were many changes that had to be made to take the people out of our jails and comply with the health and safety requirements, that was a huge undertaking. And lastly, there's some really notable changes in your budget for the coming year, including the transitioning from sworn to civilian staffing in the corner division and anticipating having to pick up the experience, the expertise of providing mental health in the jail services there. And I just wanna thank you for managing all of that. It's been a really changing system. And I think the point was made earlier with District Attorney Jeff Rosell that our California constitution says, quote, public safety is our first responsibility of local government. We can't forget that. Public safety is absolutely critical. When we have that, people are comfortable and they can live more normal lives. And when it's not there, people are scared and they might even react to some unforeseen issues. But thank you for everything that you have done in your department. It can be overstated and especially with the limited employee resources that you've had. And we'll hope to get back to those so we can have a full staff in your sheriff's department. Thank you very much for everything that you've done. Really, you're at the top of the list in this state about how you serve our community and the community policing that you provide to people of Santa Cruz County. Thank you very much. Any other comments from board members? Supervisor, I'll start with friend, if you might have comments. Thank you, Mr. Chair. As always, thank you, Sheriff Hart. I'd mentioned to the District Attorney about his partnership on the Criminal Justice Council and you as well. I mean, both you and Mitch have been just outstanding in your leadership and the transparency that you've provided on policies and procedures in regards to local law enforcement, helping explain to the greater community and also taking a lead with other local law enforcement agencies on the proper way to provide information. I think it's safe to say, given all of the heightened awareness, understandably so of our law enforcement policies and procedures over the last year that agencies within our county with the leadership in particular, the Sheriff's Office, we have a lot to be proud of here in this community and your team is outstanding, both in training and outreach. During the pandemic, I didn't find any drop-off in communication from either you or your staff and as all of us have the privilege of working with a Sergeant that works within our districts to really take leadership in there. I think Sergeant Brownlee in my district, I'm sure I'm biased because he works in my district but he really is just an outstanding individual. His compassion for the needs of the constituents for understanding not just victims' needs but really just having the foresight to understand emerging trends within the district is really commendable. I appreciate that process that you really empower these district sergeants to really take care of issues within our districts. Obviously, I think the board is gonna share the concern in the number of unfunded positions and I think that we'd like to see a process by which we can, I feel like we're finally digging out of that when Supervisor McPherson and I first got on the board, we inherited this over 30 positions and one of the things that we had said at the time, previous CAO, a completely different world then but that we wanted to start a process of every year chipping away and we were doing that, adding about five positions here and there. And while some of it's outside of our hands about how hard it is to recruit people, we lost you there, and incentives, et cetera, some things are within our hands and I think that this board should probably look to exactly that again, trying to find a way that we can build out of this even if it's just a few positions at a time and I'd like to meet with you to get a better understanding of the ways I can work on that. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Cronardy. Supervisor Cronardy. Yeah, thank you, Sheriff Hart. I just wanna recognize, as you mentioned, the difficult year that you and your team have had and frankly continue to have and I appreciate the professionalism and the work that was especially done in the third district to keep people safe during fires and COVID and the many events that we faced. And I wanna appreciate the opportunity that we have in the supplemental, the FIT team standing back up in September. It's an incredibly important effort to reduce some of the high impact offenders here in our community and I'm excited to get that program back up and going and I appreciate your leadership to not just the unincorporated areas, but frankly to the whole county through that program. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thank you, Chairman. Yeah, this is Greg. How are you doing, Jim? Good, thank you. Oh, okay. Yeah, we've all gone through a very tough year, a year and a half actually. And I think especially it's been very difficult for the Sheriff's Department and all the sheriffs, the loss of Deputy Gutweiler and everything that's been going on. Something happens with a department in Minnesota or something happens in a department in New York or whatever and people tend to look at and blame local public safety officials. Public relations is what I'm getting at and that's, you've done a very good job. What kind of training do the deputies do as far as getting out into the neighborhood, knowing the people as much as they can? I know in Watsonville with the police department, a lot of the police officers are known by their first name and people wave to them. And especially with young adults, kids, rather than a kid seeing someone in uniform, instead of running away, they might run up to them and say hi. Yeah. Yeah, so we've really, I've really emphasized a lot of school checks, park checks so that we get our people out of their cars. Talking to business owners, getting in the parks, talking to kids, making sure the parks are safe, checking in with the school administration to make sure that they're known by the schools and their district. And then we also have our Sheriff's Activity League that serves about 800 children in a variety of sports. And so we try to get our deputies out as much as possible. A lot of them are going call to call to call so they don't have a lot of time for that and that's where we rely on our district sergeants to really make a lot of the community contacts as well. But it is a point of emphasis for me and when time allows, I really encourage our guys to get out, get on the beaches, get in the parks, make sure they're talking to people. You bet. And with the Sheriff's and police academies, were they completely almost shut down last year? There was a few academies that were open, but prior to the vaccine being released, I didn't feel comfortable hiring somebody and putting them in that kind of environment. And so we just didn't hire deputy Sheriff trainees. We hired a number of police officers from other agencies based on the incentive program that your board approved. And that was very helpful to get us through this pandemic period where we weren't getting people out of the police academy. And then future, which might be a big problem in the future is with the jail facility in Santa Cruz. I know there's gonna be some major upgrades at the jail. Will it be enough? Or are we looking at it maybe in a few years having to do a lot more? Well, I've been talking to Mr. Palacios about this as well, some of the board. And it's an antiquated jail facility. It needs replacement. But even if the money fell out of the sky today, just the design and building process is gonna be a five-year process. So we know that we're gonna be using that facility for quite a while. So we are doing some upgrades around safety and security, control panels and alarm systems right now. And the county's investing quite a bit of money in that. Yeah, a couple of years ago, there was a problem with the heating and the cooling. I guess, system and there was a problem. I guess, is that being addressed adequately? Yeah, the heating, the HVAC system is working just fine in there. It's really the generator system was what I'm really concerned about. We need to get that managed. We've got to get that system installed. It's been too long and we need to get that project done. Okay. And then the last question I have is with the ducts and the, are they gonna be completely cleaned out or are they gonna be, parts are gonna be replaced? I think that's gonna be a major thing. Yeah, that's gonna be a significant project and they will be completely cleaned out and anything that needs replacing will be replaced. Okay. Hey, thanks. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Cronin. Thank you, Chair and thank you, Sheriff Hart. Obviously you and your team have weathered incredibly difficult year and done so with admirable skill. It's clearly a year for rebuilding in a lot of ways. You know, just getting the recovery center back up and running, getting the fit team back in place. You know, it's great that we'll have more SART services in the county this year. And of course, hopefully we can get these generators working for you in the jail as soon as possible. The new DNA facility or starting to make some progress on that, but obviously having that facility locally will be a huge help. And I also have to add that and thank you for assigning school officers to the beaches this year, especially additional eyes and ears on the beaches has been much appreciated by many of my constituents for doing some of those communications. And there's many more that I could just expressing the great thanks for your team on that. You know, I share Supervisor Friend's concern that, you know, there's seven full-time positions and corrections that are going unfunded. You know, what will the real impact of that be? I mean, it's one thing to kind of talk about as far as a number on a spreadsheet, but what is that going to look like? Yeah, and that was only telling half the story because we currently have somewhere around 12 or 13 correctional officers off with injury or off on long-term family leave. And then we're carrying seven vacancies that we have six people in backgrounds right now, but it takes a long time to get them trained up as well. So when you count the seven positions lost or unfunded this year, and then the injuries, and then the vacancies, we're only operating at about 70% of staff. And so what we have to do is we rely on mandatory overtime. Our staff works 14, 12-hour shifts a month and they're having to work in addition to that, they're having to work four to six mandatory overtime shifts a month as well. And so when we've run into this problem before, what we see is that people can manage that kind of schedule for a while, but then it takes its toll on them. And so we had a number of people when we were in mandatory overtime a couple of years ago, they went to lower paying counties just so that they can reduce their workload. And then a lot of them went to Santa Clara shares where they were a little bit higher pay. But what happens is the wear and tear on staff, you wind up losing really good people, people that are hard to find, because there's not a lot of people that wanna work in correctional facilities. And we run tests all the time and there's maybe 10 or 15 people apply out of that, maybe two or three or we can hire. So I'm hoping that we can get those positions restored quickly. If we get cut any deeper in corrections, I'm gonna have to close the facility and we're gonna start at Blaine Street and then we'll work our way down to Roundtree. We have to keep the main jail running at full capacity because that's our maximum security. We currently have over 60 people pending homicide trials in that facility. So we have to keep that facility running so we'd have to start closing some of the smaller facilities. So this is a labor intensive job and it turns out we need people in order to get the job done. Right, so really a negative feedback loop and the less staff we have, the harder the job is and the harder it is to keep people in the job. And then that was my follow up question you kind of mentioned is the less folks we actually have, the harder it is to actually get the best use of the facilities we have. I mean, I know in 2018, we recently opened the Rehabilitation and Reentry Center at Roundtree and that there's a lot of hope around that new facility. Are we under utilizing it today because of the shortage of staff? No, we're utilizing, I believe there's 40 men in there today. It's a 64 bed facility. We're trying to keep the numbers down in all facilities because of COVID, but prior to COVID, we were running at full capacity between 60 and 64 men there. There's a lot of vocational training and programming going on there. So yeah, it's an outstanding, in terms of a jail facility, it's an outstanding jail facility. And once we get through this pandemic, we'll continue to use that. But what I would probably wind up doing is we would, if we lose any more staff to injury or budget, that would be the second facility that would have to get closed down behind Blaine Street. Got it. Well, it's good that we're making good use of it today. And I just want to make sure I understand correctly with the new well path contract. So I mean, previously with behavioral health managing those services in our jail, that we were not paying ourselves, in this case, behavioral health at all that. So this represents an entirely new cost, the well path contract. It's a new cost for my budget. I'm not sure where in health services agency where that money came from, whether it was general fund or if it came from the federal government, I'm not sure. But it's a new add to my budget at 1.7 million. Okay. Thanks for that clarification. And then a final question, just with your crime stats that you shared in the beginning and I mean, obviously decreasing crime sounds like a great thing. Is there actually been a decrease of crime? Is that because of some improvement in the community or operations, or is it just because we've redefined what constitutes a crime? Well, you know, part 47 reconstituted felonies to misdemeanors essentially, but it's still counted as crime. I thought our misdemeanor crime level would rise because so many felonies were reduced to misdemeanors but that didn't happen. And there's always that question of reported crime. We never know what the actual crime rate is because not everybody reports when their car gets broken into or if somebody shop lives. Of course, violent crime is generally always reported, but the lower level crimes, we just don't know what that number is. So all we can do is go off of what's reported to us. That's what we've always done. That's what we report to the FBI for the Uniform Crime Report. It's not just a local trend across the country up until this year. We saw crime declining just about everywhere. And now it's ticking back up, particularly around gun violence. Very interesting. Well, something like in general, the right trend. So that's good. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any comments from the public? There are no members of the public wishing to speak to this item. Okay. I will turn it to the board for a motion. I'll move to approve Greg Caput. Okay, Coonerty. Thanks for calling the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Thank you. And now we will move to the last budget item to be discussed, the Office of Response Recovery and Resiliency. I think that Lisa Benson, or is it Mark Bitsby going to be presenting or Lisa Benson? I think Lisa Benson is going to introduce Mark. Correct. Good morning, everyone. Lisa Benson, Assistant CAO. It's my pleasure to introduce our presenters of the OR3 budget this morning. Mark Bitsby and David Reed. But before that, I wanted to provide a quick, shall I say, origin story for OR3. Not so much for our board members, but for our members of the public, since there seems to be some confusion around emergency services in OR3. So very quickly, the quick synopsis is last August your board approved our recommendation to move our Office of Emergency Services functions from our general services department to the CAO budget as part of our final 2019-20 budget. Literally the same day, as you all will remember, on August 18th was the night we activated for the CZU fire and started the massive evacuation process that was talked about several times today. So on the other side of the fire, in October, the board asked the CAO to develop a recommendation to establish an office focused on recovery and resilience in the wake of the fire. And that direction is really what led to the creation of OR3, the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. And that's where we combined that Office of Emergency Service responsibility with an expanded scope and prioritization of recovery and resilience and expansion of the staff of two to a staff of four. So I just wanted to give that very quick overview of how did we get to OR3 since, as I mentioned, we've gotten some questions about it. Prior to passing the mic to Chief Bisbee and Mr. Reed, I do want to just express my personal and the whole CAO team's gratitude and appreciation for all of the county staff that have been part of the county's recovery team. It's not just OR3. And I want to just reference a few names. David, our resilience and recovery analyst by far, but also Matt Machado, Marilyn Underwood, Pia Levine, Emily Bally, Marcus Pimentel, Melody Serino, Michael Beaton, so many more staff who since the fire have been part of recovery and all our community partners in us trying to really support our survivors and our communities coming back. So I just wanted to express that. And of course, my thanks and appreciation to the newly formed OR3 team and everything they're doing to have us be ready for the next activation. But with that, I want to pass it to Chief Bisbee, our interim OR3 director, who will be presenting our integrated OES and OR3 budget for the first time. Thank you. Good morning, Chairman Furson and board members. Can you see the slides up? Yes, we can. OK, good. I'm pleased to present this to you. And in terms of our agenda, we don't really have operational plan agendas because we're a new office. But we do have some achievements we'd like to share with you along with our budget and emerging issues. The mission of OR3 is emergency planning and readiness, response, recovery, and mitigation to build the county's resilience to climate change and future disasters. And in terms of achievements to echo what the assistant just shared, I believe that the creation of OR3 itself was a really smart move. There's more and more evidence that increased wildfire activity is directly linked to climate change. And there's a clear nexus between climate change and the increased frequency and severity of disasters. So in terms of response. Is there a, are you rolling with the presentation? See the agenda, achievements, budget, proposal? I don't know if you're advancing. Yeah, I don't have that screen, so I don't. Let's see. Is that my correct? Is that? There we go. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. OK. In terms of, yeah, so then the creation of OR3 itself. And then in terms of response readiness, we've been increasing our readiness through some reorganization efforts and some process improvements. And this follows on the heels of what Senior Analyst Dave Brown in his conducting of many after action reports from the CZU Lightning Complex fire and gathering over 200 recommendations of things that we want to continue doing because they really worked well and then some other things that we want to just continue doing because they weren't as effective as they could be. We've also developed a baseline emergency operations training database so that we're collecting the current training levels of EOC staff. And then we're doing a gap analysis to compare what they have with what they should have in comparison to the positions that they're filling within the EOC. And everybody did a great job during the CZU complex of standing up and just jumping into positions and making it work. But we would like to follow that up with some formalized training to make sure everybody has the tools they need to do to be the most effective they can be. This includes even some baseline training for disaster service workers who are interfacing with the EOC. We've also up monthly coordination meetings with law and fire. We've talked about evacuations, the zone haven software in the evacuation zones and how we're coordinating those efforts. And we're also managing about $1.8 million in grants. In terms of recovery and resilience, it's really a continuum when we go from recovery into resilience. So so far, OR3 analyst Dave Reed is engaged with hundreds of fire survivors in numerous communities and accurate meetings to identify and address obstacles to rebuild. And we've supported planning and have been heavily engaged with planning department in the RBC and recovery process and in policy development. Another thing that Dave Reed has been able to do is to get about $138,000 from the Community Foundation to fund a debris flow hazard study more to more articulate the risk of debris flow within the burn scar and to support the fire survivors in their building efforts moving forward. He's also facilitated the protection of various resilient redwoods from the debris removal process that would otherwise cut them down and have them removed. And we've also been engaged heavily in the support as a partner and a coordinator for the Santa Cruz County long-term recovery group. And it's really important that this group, which will sow the seeds for the future moving forward as part of an ongoing overall foundational piece of our community resilience. We've also applied for over $2.5 million in emergency management performance grants, really focused on mitigating hazards. And we're trying to build resilience in engaging with key fire agency stakeholders and property owners in a countywide effort to support resilience efforts and hazardous fuel reduction, community outreach and public education, and in identifying what the hazards are. And then speaking to some of the public comments this morning, OR3 will be applying for a grant from the California Fire Safety Council in August, which could provide potentially, if awarded, $175,000 over an 18-month period to help continue the fuel reduction efforts to support fuel management programs going after further grants and for public education. So for the budget dashboard, I'd like to thank Trish Daniels for helping us out with this. This is really, if you look at last year's physical year 2021, it was really a hybrid budget between the Office of Emergency Services and then rolling into the newly created OR3. And so for the first half was pretty much devoted to the OES function and then the second half more towards OR3. 2021-22 fiscal year will be the real full budget for OR3. The revenues reflect emergency management performance grants and Homeland Security grant program funds. And the supplemental budget includes $150,000 in operating funds, $50,000 for the Boulder Creek Recreation District to coordinate long-term recovery programs for Valley residents, Boneydune, and Davenport. We have also 50 grand for extra help and then potentially another 50 grand last day budget rounds from Supervisor Koenig to fund resilience activities for the Fire Safety Council, including part-time coordinator support to develop fire-wise communities, fire-safe community, public education outreach, grant administration and coordination, and then a program to do community risk assessments with hiring of part-time retired firefighters to conduct those throughout the county. In terms of emerging issues, there's really two important key points. One is that we need to increase our readiness in response to climate change. Our 2012 climate action strategies, wildfires were mentioned in passing, but knowing what we know now, we know that longer, more active, and potentially dangerous fire conditions are being driven by climate change. And for the environmental conditions that exist now today, we know that we're an extreme drought. We have more burned acres at this time this year than we did last year. And we know that last year was a very bad fire season. And we also know that our fuel conditions, in terms of dryness, which creates more rapid rate of spread and ease of ignition, we know that those drying rates are four to six weeks ahead of what they normally would be. So we're looking at mid August in that range where our fuel drying is. And I just read in the news last night that they're expecting temperatures up to 110 degrees important in the next few days. And that's just really unprecedented. So I think we need to do a really good job to increase our readiness to deal with these ongoing climate change issues. And then for the climate adaptation and building community resilience, I really want to turn it over to our senior analyst and of our three, Dave Reed, who is our analyst specializing in recovery and resilience. So Dave. Thanks, Mark. Good morning, board. I just a few short comments. Just a few short years ago, climate change adaptation, conversation was primarily centered around sea level rise in the built environment and adaptation to that risk. What we've all learned firsthand from the COVID-19 pandemic and the CZU fires is that we must expand the conversation of what it means to build equitable community resilience to climate change. It's our goal in the OR3 to look critically and identify diverse strategies to build the needed resilience to the many manifestations of climate change that we're already experiencing, as Mark said. Our focus will be to look comprehensively countywide beyond just the traditional urban infrastructure and built environment, which is critical into our rural communities and infrastructure and to those most vulnerable to climate change. We must learn from the COVID-19 pandemic as it did not impact our community equitably. The amazingly considered and strategic response of Dr. Biel Newell and Mamie Hall and their teams demonstrated that when you take a strategic and data informed approach, you can more effectively meet the needs of all county residents. We will endeavor to emulate that amazing leadership as we seek to rebuild and build resilience to climate change in Santa Cruz County equitably. I'm inspired by this work and I look forward to working with all of you and the engaging with our community as we build strategies to address climate change. Thanks, I'll send it back to you Mark. Yeah, so in summary, OR3 is very heavily involved and dedicated to increasing our readiness and having an effective response during a disaster, leading recovery efforts and engaging with multiple departments in that endeavor. And then ultimately to build community resilience so that these disasters, which are becoming more frequent as a result of climate change. What we wanna do is we wanna decrease the disruptiveness of those events and really prepare our community to be more resilient. If I look at the redwood trees, they are climate, they are fire-adapted species. They have learned how to live with fire and if we just use them as an example to follow, we can see that even though their roots are shallow, they have created vast networks within the root system to give them community strength. And I believe that as the Native Americans were here for 10,000 to 12,000 years and really learned how to use fire to increase grazing and increase the benefit, we have lost kind of lost that within the last 200 years. So our roots are a little bit shallow, but we can make up for it by being interconnected and by becoming fire-adapted just like the redwoods. So for recommended actions, I would recommend that you approve the budget for OR3, including the supplementals as recommended by the County Administrative Officer and we are open to questions and comments. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation. And I just wanna thank everybody in the staff for this meeting, Mr. Reed, Lisa Benson and others, so many others. This is a reaction and there has been a lot of action to see how we can help prevent these issues, these disasters from happening again, but starting with the realization that things are changing virtually, that climate change around us, as was mentioned. I can't thank enough for our community efforts, the Community Foundation, the Boulder Creek Recreation District, the Firesafe Councils for what they have done and we as property owners, each can help and this is by clearing some of the debris around our individual homes, doing what we can. There's a lot to be done and we're anxious to get it done, but what we've presented with less than a year ago now and how we've reacted, we've come a long way, we have a long way to go and we can all chip in and make this a better situation for protecting our homes and our businesses and our communities in Santa Cruz County. So we have a plan of attack and I really appreciate those who have been very active in implementing that, helping us implement that. I can't overstate the importance of what David Reed has been to us in coordinating this effort along with this surface. It's just been terrific and we're getting to it as quickly as we can. I know there's some anxious people ready to rebuild and get back on track. We are going to get you there as soon as we can and I really appreciate your dedicated efforts to get us there. Any other comments from the board members? Mr. Coonerty? Yeah. Yeah, so I too want to add my voice. I mean, I think this came as a recommendation from Sonoma County who had seen similar experiences and unfortunately continues to see the impacts of climate change in fires and floods and beyond. I think it's going to be a required office for most counties and communities going forward as we all see these impacts of climate change. And I'm glad that Santa Cruz County is out on the front lines and that we have a talented staff who's been incredibly responsive and not only good with sort of the policy work but also good with the people work. I've over the last two weeks as Supervisor McPherson has also done, been involved in community gatherings of fire victims and to see our staff and team out there working really effectively and compassionately with people as they work through the rebuilding process has made me proud to be a member part of Santa Cruz County and proud to be a part of OR3 creation. So I just want to thank you all. It's incredibly important work. And I think we knew the response and the recovery is important moving towards more resilient infrastructure, systems and sort of social capital frankly will be key going forward. So thank you very much. Thank you. Supervisor Caput, you have any comments? You bet. Thank you Chairman. Hi Dave, hi Mark, good to see you. Been a while. Anyway, yeah, I think with climate change, one of the biggest protections against drastic changes all the redwood trees that we have in Santa Cruz County like the one in the background of Chairman McPherson's screen. They have more carbon banking in their trees than any other trees in the world. And any of them that are over a hundred years old are really fire resistant. The other trees, if they start burning or the brush gets too hot, the younger redwood trees will burn out. But the older ones are very resistant. Are you working at all with the Save the Redwoods League or the Sempervirons Foundation? I know with the Save the Redwoods League, they have, they do scientific studies and they do a lot to preserve especially old growth redwoods. And even though they might appear some of the older growth ones might appear to be burned out and I noticed that you're watching that very close. We don't wanna cut down a tree that's actually gonna come back in a year or two and be all right. Do you have any comment on that? I could go ahead, Mark, if you like. Go ahead. We did, Greg, we did work with Cal OES closely for a property owner that has a property with over 300 trees in conservation easement with Save the Redwoods League. And that property owner was able to retain those trees rather than have them cut down by Cal OES. So certainly giving these resilient trees an opportunity to re-sprout and regrow after the fire has been something we've tried to work with Cal OES and individual property owners on. Are you talking at all with the Save the Redwoods League or the Sempervirons Foundation? Because they have a lot of resources. Maybe make a note of that. Okay, yeah, because they are fire resistant. If you had just redwood trees in a certain area, they would not burn very well. Let's see, is the other trees and the brush that cause the hot heat and everything. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Coney. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Bisbee and Senior Analyst Reed. Great presentation. The Redwoods do indeed give us hope. I had a chance to tour Last Chance Road and really the heart of the burn area just about a month ago. And seeing all the epic formic sprouting up the side of the Redwood trees is really inspiring. And they all just sort of look like green chia pets and it's good to see them coming back. I just wanna emphasize what an investment your office represents for our County, not only the increased spending and your talents and focus on this problem but also our commitment to leverage those resources to get more resources. I mean, I think you mentioned you're applying for over 2.5 million in hazard mitigation grants. I either received or I think already the 138,000 from the Community Foundation to study debris flows. So, we're leveraging this investment of general fund monies to ultimately access a lot more resources out there, which is great. And thank you Director Bisbee also for mentioning the 500,000 or sorry, 50,000 proposed to fund the FireSafe Council and the Firewise Community Risk Assessments. We've seen a huge amount of demand from that from constituents. Again, I think this is also a way to leverage limited resources because to your point about creating communities, these risk assessments help neighbors talk to neighbors and develop really a community that understands its risk is mitigating those risks and is prepared if disaster strikes. So, ultimately it's a way to help communities help themselves. And I think a small investment in this is gonna go a long way. So thank you for all your work. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. I thank you, Mr. Chair. Chief Bisbee, good to see you. And well, although my internet connection isn't stable enough for you to see me, I apologize about that. I'm good to see you, Mr. Reed as well and Ms. Benson for your work on this. I agree with Supervisor Coonerty's point that really the creation of such an office is gonna be kind of where it already is and necessity across our state. CSAC is making additional investments in exactly this. And I think that if nothing else, I would expect to see other resources provided to your office continue to grow over time. There was a point that was raised earlier, Supervisor Koenig had briefly mentioned it, but I would like to see greater investments, not just the PG&E grant, but greater investments in AI-based technology for fire-based prevention, camera-based prevention. It's a very inexpensive, in my opinion, way to really maximize the number of people on the ground in essence by having some of these new technological advancements out there help us with early detection-based situations. I know there's gonna be a lot of landowners that would be willing to even offer up their location for some of these to go. Additionally to that, while we are definitely rebuilding from the most devastating fire in our county's history, I've had excellent conversations with Mr. Reed about ensuring that all the districts are able to participate in the process. And so I would like to work with you to set up some community meetings for both me and Supervisor Koenig as well, just to ensure that all the districts can get to know the purpose of what the organization is, that it's much broader than just a CZU rebuild. I mean, I really view this as a consolidation of all climate resilience adaptation, hazard mitigation work that this county does. It's currently housed in a lot of different worlds and it should be touched by all the different departments, but having a centralized place and having you be the face of that centralized place is very important so that I can ensure that my constituents understand how progressive this county is in doing this resilience work, but if we could work together to make sure that we get that information in your face out there more than our other districts, that would be much appreciated. I appreciate what you're doing. Thank you. Very good, thank you, Supervisor. Are there any comments from the public? There are no members of the public wishing to speak to this item. Okay, we will return it to the board for recommended action or motion on recommended actions. I'll move the recommended action. Second. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay, I think that unless we... Mr. Plosios, is there any other issues before I recess this to next Tuesday? No, that concludes staff presentations for today's budget hearings. Okay, all right. We've completed the initial go round of our budget hearings. We will recess this for our budget hearings at Tuesday, presumably at 1.30. And we will have a regular board meeting that will come to, will open on June 29th, Tuesday, June 29th at nine o'clock. And then presumably we will get to the final approval of the budget at 1.30 on June 29th. There any other... No, that's nine o'clock, right? Nine o'clock. Regular meeting starts at nine, and then we will go into the budget session. Presumably we can get there at the afternoon at 1.30. That's the schedule. Is there any other comments from the board? Okay, then we will recess this budget hearing to June 29th, Tuesday, June 29th at 1.30. We will see you then, and everyone have a nice day and a good weekend.